Louis L'Amour Read Online Free Page B

the rough stone at my back, I listened.
    There was a pile of cut wood stacked in cords nearby; beyond it was a lean-to. Crossing swiftly to the stack of cordwood, I waited an instant, then moved to the lean-to and around it. Nothing.
    In a moment I was at the edge of the woods, and there I waited, listening. Whoever was watching, and I was sure someone had been, was back along the path to the woods down which I’d come. Somebody had laid out in the woods, watching for me.
    The night would be none too long, and I was wearied with travel, so I made out to pass through the woods, stepping light and easy. We boys had played so much in the woods and hunted with Indians back yonder that we’d become like ghosts when in the forest.
    It had taken an hour, but I was back in the woods, and Yance came out from nowhere.
    â€œTenaco’s gone.”
    â€œGone?”
    â€œI was rustling cooking wood, and next thing I knew he had disappeared.”
    â€œHe’d done his job. He found us, brought us here. It’s no fight of his.”
    We moved off together to where the horses were. The moment Tenaco was gone, Yance had shifted camp. Not far, but far enough for safety, or whateversafety there was in a hostile land where even the white people would be against us.
    We slept, trusting to our horses to warn us and to our own senses. At dawn we ate some of the meat I’d brought from the Penneys’ and drank some of their cider. Then we moved the horses to a hidden meadow, a small place cozied down among the oaks; then I went back to watch for Penney.
    When they came, Penney and Macklin, there were two other men with them. I looked to my priming.
    One of them was a powerful big man, and it was not a thing that pleased me, for I’d expected them to come alone.
    The night before there had been much talk while I was at table, and taking no part in it, I listened nonetheless, for a trail is followed not only upon the earth but in the minds of those one pursues or the minds of those whose thinking is similar.
    It had been talk of local affairs and happenings, events or persons of which I had no knowledge. There was much talk of sermons, also, and I gathered from this, as well as what Yance had told me, that sermons had much to do with shaping of thinking. These were a stiff-necked, proud folk, not easily persuaded to any course not dictated by conscience, yet conscience could be a poor guide if accompanied by lack of knowledge.
    Yet now I thought of what must be done. Lack of knowledge of the Pequots was my greatest problem, for little as I knew of Indians, I had learned from dealings with those I knew that there were great differences in them, and to speak of a redskin as being Indian was like speaking of a Frenchman or an Italian as a European.
    If I knew little, I at least knew that I knew little. My experience had been largely with the Eno, Catawba, Occaneechi, Seneca, and Cherokee. There were differences, and the differences were important.
    They came up the path together, Penney and Macklin in the lead.
    The house Tom Penney built indicated much of his character: solid, built for security and comfort, not ahasty habitation thrown together for mere shelter. It had two rooms, the large kitchen–living room and a bedroom adjoining. There was a loft where the girls slept, warmer because of the rising heat. Everything in the house showed the hand of a man with a love for work and for his materials.
    Diana Macklin, seventeen and unmarried, was obviously a maid of independent mind, accustomed to the woods and the search for herbs. Not likely that she would wander off with a child and become lost, although even woods-wise men occasionally did.
    When they were near, I stepped into their path. “You can take me to where they were last seen?”
    â€œI can.” Penney pointed. “It is ten minutes. No farther.”
    Macklin said, “Diana would not become lost. She had played in the forest as a