Novel 1966 - Kilrone (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Page B

notice something. They’d rather have action than inaction, any time. It may not always be that way, but that’s the way it is now. If you’re in doubt, plunge in. Believe me, if I’d stayed in I might have been shifted around a while until the political boys forgot me, and then I’d have been in the running again…maybe. Only I was always a rebel, and I wanted Sproul’s scalp. In the army I’d have had to leave him alone.”
    “Now that he knows you’re here,” Teale said, “you watch your step.” He was about to go inside, then he paused. “Cap, if there’s any way I can help…watch your back or anything…you count me in. Believe me, you can count on any of the boys in this fight. You’ll see.”
    “Thanks…thanks, Teale.”
    Kilrone stood alone in the darkness and the rain. He was going to need them…he was going to need them all, not against Sproul, but against Medicine Dog. That was why he had talked as much as he had. They needed to know something about him, they needed to know who they were taking orders from.
    The enemy would be out there by now…Medicine Dog, his Bannocks, and his renegades. They would be out there, waiting.

 
     
    Chapter 9
----
     
    D ENISE PADDOCK STEPPED from the dark doorway and stood beside him. “Barnes…will he be all right?”
    “Of course.”
    “But he hasn’t ridden a patrol in months, and he’s been drinking.”
    “He’s a good soldier, Denise, and a brave man. This may be just what he needs.”
    Barney Kilrone spoke the words and he made them sound sincere. Actually, he felt that Frank Bell Paddock had made a ghastly mistake. His long ride would come to nothing. He would effect his junction with Mellett and they would then return to the post…to what?
    Denise stood silent, and all the past stood between them. How far, he thought, from the night they danced together for the first time at Combourg!
    “I wish it were spring,” she said suddenly. “I dread the thought of winter.”
    “I don’t blame you. This is one of the coldest places in the country.” He was listening as he spoke, but the soft drizzle of rain deadened any sound. Yet he had the feeling…he knew they were out there.
    How long before Mellett and Paddock could return, he was thinking. Three days? Four?
    “Remember Brittany in the spring?” Denise said. “I liked it better than in Paris, I think.”
    “It was a time of innocence,” he said. “That spring, I mean. By the time autumn came around, everything had changed.”
    “Have you ever thought of what might have happened?” She looked at him curiously.
    “Of course…but nobody can say when the turning point comes. Suppose instead of coming to Combourg that night I had decided—which I almost did—to go on? There’s no use thinking about it. If one thing changes, everything is changed. At Combourg I met you…we had stopped there only by chance. That began it, you might say. And then we met again…It was three weeks before I returned to Paris.”
    “And after that when we met again I was married to Frank Bell Paddock.”
    “And happily so.”
    The trouble was, Frank Paddock had known about them, but what he did not seem to realize was that for Denise, Frank Paddock was the only man with whom she could have been happy. Certainly, Kilrone admitted, she could not have been happy with him. He knew that and Denise knew it, and neither had regrets. The trouble was, Frank had never believed it.
    “He’s out there now because of us,” Kilrone said bitterly.
    “No, he’s not.” Denise spoke firmly. “I love Frank, but what he has become is his own fault. And whatever he does in the future will be up to him.”
    The sensible view, but was it the true one? “All that was long ago and far away…another world than this.”
    “What are you going to do, Barnes?”
    He shrugged. “If I get out of this? I don’t know. Settle somewhere in the West, I expect. This country grows on me, and I doubt if I’d be content anywhere