Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

gun.
    Something happened back yonder in his younger years that had brought him to grief. That something was tied in with the reason Felix Yant would come riding after me. Oh, I never doubted he’d come! And deep inside me I was sure it was he, and nobody else, who killed pa.
    What bothered me was I felt an uneasy kinship with the man. Maybe we were related, but it was more than that. Sometimes when he spoke, I knew what he would say before he said it, and that was strange, too, for he was a different kind of man than I’d ever known.
    Some things about me bothered him, too. He didn’t like the language I used most of the time. What he hadn’t yet realized was that it was a sort of a vernacular most western men slipped into, no matter how well they could talk or how much they knew of the language. Part of it was that the educated ones didn’t want to seem to be putting on airs, as the saying was, but it was more than that. It was almost as if it was a dialect. We used a lot of contractions and Indian or Spanish words that came into our speaking natural-like.
    Sometimes Yant, who was obviously new to the West, would stop and look at me to guess the meaning of what I’d said. I had an idea the words we used would in a short time become so much a part of the language nobody would even hesitate over them.
    We used lariat, which was short for the Spanish la reata, and hombre was used almost as much as man. There were dozens of other words and expressions that sort of filtered into the everyday talk from the Indians, the Spanish, and the country itself.
    Me an’ that roan, we just taken off into the desertlike country toward the west. Not that it was desert, but it was dry—least you knew where the water lay. And all the advantage lays with a man who is making the trail. He can go where he wishes, stop when he likes, and I was of no mind to make it easy.
    At first I didn’t attempt to make myself hard to find. What I wanted most was distance, and I hit a fair pace and held to it. That roan could go all day at a kind of shambling trot.
    I had no illusions about what I was getting into. Yant, if he had killed pa, was as cold-blooded as they come. He’d shot pa at point-blank range and in the back of the head, and he’d do the same for me if the chance allowed. Maybe I was better in wild country and maybe I wasn’t. In any event, the man was a good rider and a tough, dangerous man, not to be held lightly.
    If I could shake him loose, I’d strike out for Georgetown and hope that pa had left something there. If not, I’d have to rethink the situation and go over pa’s back trail.
    Wacker and the judge and them seemed far away and in another world. I was staking my life on outguessing Felix Yant.
    There was nobody I could go to for help. Anyway, it wasn’t the way things were done in the West. A man saddled his own broncs and he fought his own battles. He stood alone, on his own two feet. A gang was a place for cowards to hide, because they were afraid to stand out in the open. They wanted others to fight their battles for them and to shield them from attack.
    The wind was cold, right off the snow-covered flanks of the mountains, which lay behind me now. How far I was going west I had no idea, only that somehow I had to shake Yant from my trail and then turn east once more.
    There was ice on the edges of Cherry Creek when I crossed it. Then, deciding here was where I should start, I turned downstream, keeping my horse in the water for a couple of miles, then out on the east bank again, and by high noon I was skirting the La Plata on the west side, hunting for an arroyo I dimly remembered that ran off to the northwest. Sometime about an hour later, I saw it off to the west and cut across-country. There was a trail but I chose to avoid it, crossing to the arroyo itself. There had been recent rains, but cattle had gone up and down the canyon leaving a maze of tracks that in the soft sand had no distinction, one from the other.