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

from the saddle, from the roan’s back.
    I must move and keep moving. My eyes slowly were adjusting to the darkness, and I could see I was in a room no more than twenty feet in diameter, off which seemed to run at least two dark passages. There was scattered wood on the floor, left from campfires of the past. Overhead there was an opening, a sort of crack through which smoke could find a way out.
    When I stamped my feet, it was like they were made of wood, yet stamp them I did. Working very slowly, I got a few sticks together, but my hands were too clumsy to hold a match. What I needed was simply to keep moving, and here, out of the chilling wind, I might slowly recover the warmth my body needed.
    Fumbling with the cinch, I succeeded in loosening it and swinging the saddle off the roan. With a quick smash of the saddle blanket against the rock wall, I cleared it of most of the accumulated snow and ice, and began to wipe the roan, rubbing warmth back into it, and at the same time into myself.
    It was a long time, for my movements were clumsy from the cold, but slowly my own blood began to flow more freely. Kneeling down, I gathered some slivers together, a few pine cones and some sticks from a pack rat’s nest. With infinite care I put together some dried leaves and part of the stuff of the nest itself. Then I struck a match. It had long been a matter of boyish pride that I could start a fire with but one match. Fortunately, it worked for me now.
    The flame caught, blazed up, licked hungrily at the long dry sticks. I added fuel, extending my still-cold hands to the warmth.
    As the light grew, I peered around to see what kind of place I had come to. There was a considerable pile of fuel stacked against the walls, and an old tin bucket, several Indian pots, a gourd dipper, and some odds and ends of rope harness. Somebody, Indians no doubt, had been using this cave.
    At the door I scooped up a bucket of snow and put it near the fire to melt and warm up. When the water was warm, I took it to the roan, who drank long and gratefully. With my coffeepot, which I had in my gear, I made coffee.
    While the water was coming to a boil, I wiped my Winchester dry, and my pistols also.
    Thoughtfully I looked at the twin six-shooters. They were expensive, but hard up as he had often been, pa had never parted with them. For the first time I found myself curious about that.
    Why? Why would pa, the least violent of men, have carried two guns? He never wore them both in public, and I had never seen him draw a gun except to clean it.
    It dawned on me then that I actually knew very little about my father. Little? Did I actually know anything?
    In the dark and lonely cave, with the storm howling outside and the bitter cold, I crouched by my fire with its light flickering on the walls and thought of my father, that strange and lonely man.
    For I knew now that he had been lonely. Only now did little things come back to be remembered—the clumsy ways he had tried to show affection, and the lost man he had become when ma died.
    We never talked of her. Whenever I mentioned her, he got up, left the room, or turned from me. I know now it was because he liked to think she was not dead, that she was just out somewhere and would soon be back.
    I remembered him as he was, in his threadbare frock coat with its worn velvet collar. Even when shabby, he had something of elegance about him. Yet why did I know so little? Was there some reason for being secretive? Or was he just not given to talk of his family? If there was a family.
    Where he was born, why he had come west, or where he met ma, I never knew, nor had I given thought to it until now.
    Once, sitting in our room at the hotel, he had read something in the paper that irritated him. He slammed it down and with a sudden anger that was so unlike him he said, “Son, get an education! Whatever you do, get an education!”
    It was cold. I went to the door of the cave, into which the wind whipped from time to