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

time, and peered out. I could see nothing. That we were back from the faint trail we had followed, I knew, but how far back? And when the storm ended, would we be visible?
    Again I checked the guns.
    From the pile of wood I took a fair-sized log and added it to the fire. It was almost warm in the cave now. At least we would not freeze.
    What would happen back there? Would they try to get out? Or would they be trapped in the old cabin? There was a little food left, how much I did not know, but a little. There was not enough to last one man even a week, let alone several men, and some of them would die.
    Between the cave wall and the fire, I made my bed and lay down upon it, my guns beside me. Hands clasped behind my head, I returned again to the thoughts of my father. I hadn’t spent much time with him, not as much as I could have. There’d been a couple of times when he seemed to want to talk, but I was in no mood for listening. I’d been rude at times, and it shamed me to recall it. He had wanted to tell me something, I think, but I’d been only a youngster and full of myself and not anxious to hear a lot of talk about the past or his boyhood. Because of that I’d missed learning what he might have told me.
    Dozing on the bed, I suddenly recalled ma’s voice saying, “Why don’t you go back? Or is there some reason why you cannot?”
    If he made a reply to that, I did not hear it. Only her words, “I am not thinking of us, only of you.”
    “It is too late,” he said then. “It would not be the same.” And then, after a minute or two, “I dare not…I must not start that all over again. It is better that they never know.”
    I was very young then, and the words meant nothing. Just grown-up talk. But why did I not forget the words? Why did I remember them now?
    Pa was gone now. He was dead.
    Yet he had not killed himself. For one thing I knew about pa—he wasn’t a quitter. Until the end, fail as he might, he would be in there trying.
    That started me thinking about his gambling. When ma was alive, he had never gambled. Come to think of it, he had not gambled until just the last two or three years.
    One night I’d seen him throw down a deck of cards in disgust. “I’d just as soon never see a card again!” he said suddenly.
    “Why don’t you quit playing if you don’t like it?” I asked him.
    He stood there for a minute looking at nothing and then he said, “It’s the only way. It’s the only chance now. Just one good winning! That’s all I ask!”
    At the time I did not believe him. Now I began to wonder. Little bits and pieces of things began to come back to me as I lay there in the half-warmth of the cave.
    Ma was gone. Pa never seemed to want anything. I mean he was not much for spending money, even when we had it. All of a sudden the answer was there. He wanted it for me.
    I sat up on my bed and put a stick into the fire, and then another. Of course! Why else did he want it? I remembered a couple of times when he looked at me wearing that old blanket-poncho of mine, and my boots with the heels almost wore off, and my beat-up old hat.
    “Damn it,” he said once, “I wish—”
    He never finished what he was going to say. He just taken his hat and left, and that night he lost the thirty-odd dollars we had between us.
    Next morning I made six dollars breaking horses at fifty cents a head. I got tossed a couple of times, but I rode them. When you don’t eat unless you ride, you ride. It’s simple as that.
    One time when I was sick, he stayed up night after night caring for me. I was eleven then, or twelve. I just taken it for granted, and never really thought of his health. Only time I thought much of that was when I come in the room one time and pa was washing. It was the first time in all the years I saw him with his shirt off, and I saw those two bullet wounds low down on his left side.
    I made some comment, but he brushed it off and changed the subject. I kept after him, so he finally