Rivers West by Louis L’Amour

through the forest.
    Macaire took the lead, and Butlin dropped back and rearranged the disturbed branches at our entry point. Then he brushed out our tracks and sifted leaves over them.
    â€œThey’ll find it if they look,” Butlin said, “but not unless they go back down the trail and track us to where we stepped off. We’ll have us a good lead before they realize, I’m thinkin’.”
    It was a dim, shadowed place, and very still. We rode at a trot, then a walk, then a trot again. Twice we forded small streams.
    By the time the sun was high, we were still within the forest, and we stopped briefly to spell the horses, gathering on the banks of a small pond. Nobody talked.
    The stillness was marvelous. Only a few birds in the branches nearby.
    At midafternoon we crossed a wide meadow and came down into a country lane. Briskly then, we rode.
    We skirted a small village, and went back into the forest again. By sundown we had forty miles behind us, and we stopped at a large, comfortable-looking farm. The women slept in the house, the rest of us outside in the barn. I awakened to the smell of fresh hay and the cackling of a hen who had just laid an egg and was informing the world.
    A quick check of the trail showed no signs of travel, and by an hour after sun-up we were dusting our tracks down the trail.
    Albany was a small town that had once been Dutch. We came up to it along a very dusty road over a plain dotted with pines. The houses on the way to the town were few and poor. Albany had first been called Beverwyck, then changed to Fort Orange, and after that to Williamstadt and finally Albany. A few of the houses were still of the Dutch fashion, with high, sharp roofs, small windows, and low ceilings. Most of the streets were at right angles to the river, and there were some new, fine-looking houses. One that I noticed, at the head of Market Street, was said to be the home of a family named Van Rensselaer.
    We ate one meal in the town, bought supplies, and rode out at once toward the west.
    Now we followed no set route, but took bypaths and lanes or Indian trails, many long abandoned, across the country and generally down the course of the Allegheny River. Nor had we any nighttime visitors or travelers upon the trail before or behind, beyond occasional country folks, until we rode into the town of Pittsburgh at the meeting of the rivers.

Chapter 9
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    M ACAIRE DREW UP at a corner of Grant Street. He turned in his saddle. “You are stopping now?”
    â€œI am. I’ll be searching out a job of boat building here.”
    â€œLuck be with you. ’Tis a far piece we’ve come together, and I’d wish it were all the way. You be good men and true,” he said, “and I’ve slept easy these nights with the thought of you by.”
    Even Miss Majoribanks turned in her saddle, and I thought her features softened a little as she looked toward me. “I do not like saying goodbye,” she said, “so I shall not.”
    â€œNor I,” I said quietly, “nor do I envy you the trail you go. Please be careful, for I think there are those who know why and where you go and who want no one so near to them as can see what they do.”
    â€œI shall manage,” she replied.
    They turned aside then, riding toward Penn Street where Miss Majoribanks had friends with whom to stay. As for Jambe-de-Bois, Butlin, and myself, we had no friends and no place to stay except what our money would buy.
    Pittsburgh lay neatly between the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers, which joined at this point to form the Ohio. Fort Pitt, originally founded here many years before, had been a point of much warfare between Indians and whites, between French and English, and the site was important.
    We found a hotel close by the riverfront, and we stabled our horses nearby. It was the room for me, and a hot bath, but Jambe-de-Bois went along to the common room for a noggin of rum.
    Calgary Butlin