Louis L'Amour Read Online Free PDF Page A

child.”
    â€œThis knowledge of herbs? She had it from Indians?”
    He hesitated ever so slightly, and I wondered why. “She learned it in England, and more from a woman here, and some from the Indians, also.”
    â€œShe spoke their tongue?”
    â€œShe did. She had a gift for languages.”
    Surely an unusual girl and one who, if she kept her wits about her, might make a place for herself even among Indians and could protect herself and Carrie.
    The big man was Max Bauer, and he was both wide and thick. There was about him an air of command that surprised me. He did not appear to be a man who would be second to Joseph Pittingel, which had me wondering if I had not underestimated Pittingel himself.
    â€œHo!” Bauer thrust out a huge hand. “So this is the woodsman!”
    The instant our hands met I knew he meant to crush mine to show me who was master, so I met him grip for grip and saw his confidence fade to irritation, then to anger.
    â€œYou have come far? From Virginia, mayhap?”
    â€œFar,” I said.
    â€œYou will find nothing! The earth has been trampled so that no tracks are left!”
    â€œNot even on the first day?”
    He brushed off the suggestion. “I was not here the first day. When my boat came in, I went to study the ground. It was hopeless.”
    The hollow where the girls had come to gather herbs was a pleasant little place, a meadow beside a small pool with reeds all about the pool’s edge and forest encircling the hollow itself. There was a wide variety of plant life and a well-chosen place in which to look for herbs.
    The earth had been badly trampled, the grass pressed down, reeds parted where men had gone to the water’s edge. Any sign one might have found had long since been destroyed.
    â€œThere’s nothing here,” I said.
    â€œAgreed!” Bauer spoke loudly. “It is a waste of time! In any event, by now the Pequots are far from here.”
    â€œPequots? You saw them?”
    â€œI did not. But they were here. I have a feel for them. They were here.”
    We had seen nothing of Yance, nor did I expect him, but I knew he was out there, watching and listening. We had been so much together that each knew the other and his thinking, and right now he was beginning to do what I would have done in his place. He was casting about in a wide circle to pick up sign farther out, where the grass had not been trampled.
    Now we had to place ourselves in the minds of the maids or their captors and try to decide what they must have done. The search would not have progressed far on that first attempt, for undoubtedly few of them were armed; fewer still would know anything about tracking.
    These people were city folk or from good-sized towns. In England they had been craftsmen for the most part, gentry some of them, and the parks or woodlands of England were vastly different from theseprimeval forests, or so I heard from my father, Jeremy Ring, and the others at our settlement on Shooting Creek.
    We went back to the settlement. The man with Max Bauer was a small, quick-moving man with sandy, tufted eyebrows and a quick, ratlike way about him. His name was not mentioned, and I deemed him judged of no consequence, yet I did not feel so myself. It is such men of whom one must be forever wary, for they live in the shadow of greater or seemingly greater men, often eaten by jealousy or hatred, not necessarily of those whom they serve.
    We stopped at the Penney’s, and the rest went on, but Macklin and I went in and sat down to a glass of cider, cold from hanging in the well.
    Anna Penney was filled with questions about Temperance, so I told her much of our life at Shooting Creek. “Our settlement is at the foot of the mountains. The water is very clear, cold, and good there. We have a dozen cabins, a stockade, and several of us are good farmers. So far the crops have been good, and there are berries in the forest and many roots. All of