Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF Page B

silver now and again. The fire made a good homely sound, too, and the water boiling in the pot. I was a man unused to such sounds, knowing the crackling of a fire from my own lonely camps and not from a hearth.
    Aunt Flo was napping somewhere in the house while Katy got supper, and it was a rare surprise to me to see how sure she was about it, with no finagling and nonsense, but with deft hands and of one mind about what to do. I’d never thought to see a Thorne preparing her own meal, least of all a meal for me.
    She put the dishes on a small table in a corner of a room, a friendly sort of table, and not like the long one in the dining room, which scared me to look at, it was so far from end to end. There she lighted the candles, and a soft glow they made, which was as well, for I’d had no chance to shave the day, and my clothes were shabby and worn from riding in all kinds of weather. I was shy about them, the big hulking fool that I was, and no man to be eating supper with such a girl.
    Yet she was easy to be with, easier than any girl I’d met, and here and there I’d known a few, although not always of the nicest. The sort you tumble in the hay with, or take a walk with out in the grass away from the wagons. Yes, I’d known them, but some of them were good girls, too. Maybe it was wrong of me to walk out with them that way, but when the urge is on a man his conscience is often forgot.
    “Tell me about the West,” Katy asked me over coffee. “It has always fascinated me. If I had been a man, I should have gone West.”
    Tell her of the West? Where could a man begin? Where could he find words to put the pictures before her that he saw when she asked about the West? How could he tell her of fifty-mile drives without water and the cattle dying and looking wild-eyed into the sun? How could he tell her about the sweat, the dust, the alkali? Or the hard camps of hard men where a word was a gun and a gun was a death? And plugging the wound with a dirty handkerchief and hoping it didn’t poison? What could a man tell a woman of the West? How could he find words for the swift-running streams, chuckling over rocks, for the mountains that reached to heaven and the clouds that choked the valleys among the high peaks? What words did he have to talk of that?
    “There’s a wonder of land out there, Mrs. Thorne,” I said, “a wide wonder of it, with distances that reached out beyond your seeing where a man can ride six days and get nowhere at all. There are canyons where no white man has walked, canyons among the unfleshed bones of the mountains, with the soil long gone if ever there was any, like old buffalo bones where the buzzards and coyotes had been at them. There’s campfires, ma’am, where you sit over a tiny fire with a million tiny fires in the sky above you like the fires of a million lonely men. You hover over your fire and hear the coyotes speaking their plaintive words at the moon, and you smell the acrid smoke and you wonder where you are and if there’s Comanches out there, and your horse comes close to the fire for company and looks out into the dark with pricked-up ears. Chances are the night is empty, of living things, anyway, for who can say what ghosts may haunt a country the like of that?
    “Sometimes I’d be lazy in the morning and lie in my blankets after sunup, and I’d see deer coming down to the waterhole to drink. Those days a man didn’t often camp right up against a waterhole. It wasn’t safe, but that wasn’t the reason. There’s other creatures need water besides a man, and they won’t come nigh it if a man is close by, so it’s best to get your water and then sleep back so the deer, the quail, and maybe a cougar can come for water, too.
    “Times like that a man sees some strange sights. One morning I watched seven bighorn sheep come down to the water. No creature alive, man or animal, has the stately dignity of a bighorn. They came down to water there and stood around, taking