Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) Read Online Free

lips, “you’ll be snowed in, the pass closed for maybe six, eight weeks. An’ don’t think about game. There’s none up this high, this time of year.”
    “And by morning,” Judge Blazer added, “we will either have the money or you will be hammered to a pulp. We’ve only begun, you know. If you wish to survive at all, you will tell us.”
    I looked down at my hands. My eyes were swollen almost shut, my head was thick with pain, and the hands I saw through the slits left to me were mangled beyond belief. Yet I would not talk. If I told them, I would die. As long as I did not tell them, I had a chance.
    Suddenly, without warning, Wacker kicked me in the kidney. Agony shot through me and I gasped. Blazer struck me again across the face.
    “And now you’ll die.” I formed the words, made the sounds, clumsy as they were. “The passes will be closed soon, and there will be no getting out.”
    “Suppose he’s right?” one of the other men said suddenly. “I don’t like it, Blazer. Those passes are almighty narrow, and the snow’s a-fallin’ fast out there.”
    Wacker walked to the window and peered out. For the first time he seemed uneasy. “Aw, that’s a lot of crap!” he said irritably. He walked back to the bunk and sat down. The wind moaned around the eaves, and suddenly he got up and went again to the window. He could see nothing, I knew. It was all dark and still.
    I had seen the flakes that had blown into the room. They were thick and white now, and that kind of snow would pile up fast. They wouldn’t get out, but neither would I. Except…except that I had an idea of another way out.
    Maybe. I’d never tried it. An old Indian had come up that way and told me about it over the meal I’d fixed for him.
    Could I find it in the dark and the snow? Could I find it even without them? He had not been very explicit, but Indians rarely were.
    Blazer got up and went to the door. He peered out, then shouldered into his coat and went outside. When he came back, his manner had changed. “Dick,” he said, glancing over at the man who’d made the coffee, “go saddle up. We’re riding out.”
    “What about him?” Wacker asked.
    “He’ll tell us before we go. We’re through fooling around.”
    Dick went out the door. Three of them left. I tried to grin with my bloody, broken lips. “He’ll lose them horses in the snow. You’ll die here.”
    He picked me up and I struck at him. My fist caught his cheekbone and it must have hurt because he kneed me in the groin, then began that ponderous slapping of my face, each blow jarring my skull. The man was strong. Very strong.
    He began hitting me, slowly, methodically, steadily. I made no effort to fight back. I had strength. I had some reserve, and I’d been waiting. My time would come.
    I took the blows. He smashed a fist into my belly, struck me on the ear, slapped me until my head rang.
    “Let me have him,” Wacker said. “I can make him talk.” Across the room my eyes caught a bloody image in the cracked mirror over the washbasin, a bloody caricature of something that had been human. That was me.
    “Do what you’re of a mind to,” Blazer said, arm-weary from beating on me. “Just keep him alive until he talks. He’s got that money.”
    “Suppose his story is straight?” the other man said. “He just might have been robbed. Somebody might have known where that money was. Sure it is that nigh ever’body knew his old man won it.”
    Blazer wouldn’t buy that. Without his belief that I had the money, he had nothing. He was wasting his time and he did not want that at all.
    I heard a crunch from the doorway. Dick was coming back. Blazer had dropped into a chair near the fire. Wacker pushed me off at arm’s length. He was a cruel man and much stronger than Blazer. He’d kill me. Dick fumbled with the latch, and suddenly I lunged.
    Only a quick step forward, my left palm came up under Wacker’s elbow, my right came down hard on his wrist. There