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

Keeping to the arroyo for another hour, I reached the old Ute Trail, which would take me west to the Mancos River.
    Leaving the roan to graze on whatever he could find, I climbed a high shoulder near the trail and sat there for a good half hour, watching my back trail. I saw nothing, not even dust. Instead of making me feel good, it left me worried.
    Suppose I was all wrong and he had not followed me? Suppose he had outsmarted me and guessed my intention and was waiting until I started east again? He was a shrewd man, and I returned to my horse feeling none too good.
    The land through which I rode was lonely, desolate, offering nothing. Here and there great mesas thrust up from the land about, towering like islands from a vanished sea. Off to the west was the tableland of Mesa Verde, its great promontory like the bow of a ship outlined sharply against the sky.
    Everywhere there was a thick stand of cedar, and wherever there was an open space, it was grown up to sagebrush. From time to time up some branch canyon, there was a glimpse of spruce trees along the flanks or in the ends of the canyons. It was rough, broken country with many fallen slabs of rock and talus slopes. I needed a place to hole up. If Yant lost my trail, he might give up on me.
    At the head of a canyon a trail branched off to the northwest. No Indian tracks, although this was Ute country, only a scattering of deer and other animal tracks. I was catching a sense of the country now, remembering it from a time long since, when pa and me had holed up here for a spell.
    Red Horse Gulch was somewhere off to the south, and if I wasn’t guessing wrong, this trail led to a spring. I turned the roan along that trail, and from the way he quickened his step I had an idea there was water ahead.
    Believe me, I was mighty uneasy. Felix Yant might be green to this country, but he’d ridden and hunted a lot and it would take some doing to fool him. I was banking that he’d sight-hunted mostly, or trailed game with dogs, and that he wasn’t much of a tracker. Yet to underestimate an enemy is always dangerous.
    About a half mile or so from where I left the Ute Trail, I found the spring. First off I let my horse have what he wanted, drank myself, and filled my canteen. Plenty of game tracks but no horse tracks.
    Squatting beside the spring, I considered what lay before me and behind me. Odd part of it was, I was kind of enjoying this cat-and-mouse game. The trouble was—and this I had to keep in mind—that it was no game. It was being played for keeps, and all a man needed was one mistake.
    Right now a man was on my back trail who was deadly as a rattler. He’d shot pa in the back, so it showed he didn’t have any mercy in him. It may have shown something else…that when it came right down to it, he was scared of pa.
    Seemed strange that anybody could be afraid of pa, who had always seemed the gentlest of men, yet Yant had taken no chances with him.
    The spring was in a small branch canyon, and I didn’t much like staying there for fear Yant would come down the draw and catch me there, so I straddled the roan and started down canyon. Here and yonder the trail went up the flank of the canyon to get away from great blocks of rock that had broken off the wall and tumbled to the bottom, blocking any trail there might have been.
    Here and there I saw broken pieces of pottery, so Indians had lived here before. Pa had told me of some cliff dwellings along this canyon and another branch that ran back toward the east and north.
    Where the canyon forked, I turned right and found myself looking up into the high arch of one of those shallow, wind-hollowed caves where the old cliff dwellers liked to build. There was a cliff dwelling there, too, but it was different.
    There was a ledge crossed that cave some sixty feet from the bottom of the arch, and on that ledge was built a house. Only ruins were left, yet pretty substantial ruins. How a body could get up there was more than I