The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four Read Online Free

seemed the merest thread…a thin line for which the eye must seek and seek again.
    Scarcely four feet wide, the bridge was built of their handmade rope, of slats cut from pine forests, and of thin planks laid across the slats. With every gust of wind the bridge swayed, but those who had built it hoped that it would be their lifeline to the outside world.
    Tohkta’s people were of the mountains, yet once each year they had descended to the oasis towns at the desert’s edge, taking the furs, the wool and hides, for which they were known. The gold they sometimes took was a secret thing. In the timeless kingdom of their mountain valleys the bridge was their link to the future.
    Only once in all the years their tribal memory encompassed had the bridge not been there, hanging five hundred feet above the tumbling white water. And for too long had Tohkta’s people been isolated by its loss.
    Four…almost five years before there had come a great shaking of the earth when the mountains raised higher, and steam and hot water gushed from newly made cracks. There had been a grinding of rock when the teeth of the earth were gnashed together. In the midst of it, the pinnacle that supported their bridge had toppled from the far side of the Yurung-kash into the gorge below.
    There followed years of struggle against the high rocks and the torrent, years of terrible work to replace their bridge. Fields still had to be tilled and flocks tended, but two men had been dashed to death on the jagged rocks below when they fell from their ropes. Yet now the bridge was done.
    The Kunlun Mountains rim the northern edge of Tibet, hanging above the deserts of Sinkiang, and are among the loneliest of the world’s mountain ranges. Long, long ago when Tohkta’s grandfather was a boy, a rare caravan still ventured along the ancient track that led from Sinkiang across Tibet and through the Himalayas to India itself, passing close to Mount Kailas, sacred to Buddhists.
    For centuries that ancient track had been almost abandoned. Only yak hunters, as wild and strange as the creatures they hunted, used it now, or an occasional herdsman taking his flock to secret pasturage in the high mountain valleys.
    Tohkta sat his horse beside his grandfather, Batai Khan, chieftain of their small tribe of fifty-six tents. This was a proud day, for today Tohkta rode to claim his bride from her father, Yakub, a wealthy Moslem trader. He glanced at his grandfather with pride, for the old man sat his horse like a boy despite his almost one hundred years. Fierce and fiery as always, the Khan was the oldest among a people known for their great age and their great strength.
    Few outsiders ever came to know the mountain Tochari, remnants of a proud, warlike race that had ruled most of eastern Turkestan and much of western China. In ages past they had carried their banners against Mongol and Chinese, against Tungan and Turk, against the Tatar and Hun.
    Slowly the column of twenty riders and their pack animals crossed the swinging bridge, and Batai Khan did not start up the trail until all were safely across.
    “Yol Bolsun!”
he called out, waving to the people of the village who lined the switchback trail on the other side of the gorge. It was an old greeting to those who rode the mountain trails: “May There Be a Road!”
    And now, for the first time in four long years, there
was
a road. The home of the Tochari was an island in mountains, cut off by the deep gorges of the Yurung-kash and the Keriya, and at its ends by impassable slopes. Within there lay more than one hundred square miles of grassy valleys, forest glades, waterfalls, and grass-covered mountain pastures. It was an isolated paradise among the snow-covered peaks, but now it was isolated no longer.
             
    T OHKTA WAS IMPATIENT . Kushla awaited in the ancient oasis town of Kargalik, and how many were the nights he had remained awake to dream of her? Batai Khan and Yakub had arranged the match, but since