Ride the Dark Trail (1972) Read Online Free PDF

not movin' a step until the weather shapes up. If you're worried about those folks out there, you just forget it. I can handle them, one at a time or all to onct."
    "It ain't that, it's just that - "
    "All right then, it's settled. I'll get you some blankets."
    Looked to me like I wasn't going to see Californy for some time yet. That old lady just wasn't easy to talk to. She had her own mind and it was well made up ahead of time. Anyway, I was kind of curious to see what that outfit out front looked like.
    "If I'm going to stay," I said, "I'll keep watch. You two go yonder and sleep."
    When they had gone I got me a mattress off a bed in one of the rooms and laid it out on the floor, then I fetched blankets and settled in for the night.
    Outside the ram beat down on the roof and walls of the old house, and the lightning flashed and flared, giving a man a good view of what was happening at the gate and beyond. And that was just nothing.
    The lamp was in the kitchen and I left it there, wanting no light behind me when I looked out. After watching for a while, I decided nobody was likely to make a move for a time, so I went back and stoked up the fire in the kitchen range and added a mite of water to the coffee so's there'd be a-plenty.
    Off the living room there was a door opened into what must have been old Reed Talon's office. There were more books in there than I'd ever seen at one time in my life, and there were some sketches like of buildings and bridges, all with figures showing measurements written in. I couldn't make much of some of them, although others were plain enough. Studying those sketches made me wonder how a man would feel who built something like a bridge or a boat or a church or the like. It would be something to just stand back and look up at it and think he'd done it. Made a sight more sense than wandering around the country settin' up in the middle of a horse.
    Time to time I catnapped. Sometimes I'd prowl a mite, and a couple of times I put on that slicker and went outside.
    There was a wide porch on the house, roofed over, but with a good long parapet or wall that was four feet high. Talon had put loopholes in that wall a man could shoot from, and he'd built wisely and well.
    When I came in I sat down with coffee, and then I heard those old shoes a-scufflin' and here come Em Talon.
    "Well, Logan, it's good to see a Sackett again. It's been a good many years."
    "I hear tell some of them have moved up around Shalako, out in western Colorado," I suggested. "Fact is, I know there's several out there. Cumberland Sacketts," I added, "good folks, too."
    "The man who helped pa had some boys back in Tennessee. I often wonder what became of him." She filled her cup. "His oldest boy was named for William Tell."
    "Met him. He's a good man, and he's sure enough hell on wheels with a six-shooter. No back-up to him."
    "Never was back-up in no Sackett I can call to mind. I reckon there were some who lacked sand, but there's a rotten apple in every barrel."
    She was a canny old woman, and we set there over coffee, with once in a while a look out to see if anybody was coming in on us. We talked of the Clinch Mountains, the Cumberland Gap country, and folks who'd moved west to hunt for land.
    "Talon was a good man," she said. "I married well, if I do say it. When he first rode up to my gate I knowed he was the man for me, or none.
    "All the Talons had a gift for working with their hands, they had the love of good wood in their fingers, an' when a Talon taken wood into his hands he felt of it like he loved it"
    She looked over at me. "It's like you Sacketts with your guns."
    "From what they tell me you're pretty good your own self."
    "Had to be. Pa wasn't always home, and there were Injuns. I was never like some. Lots of folks lost relatives to Injuns, and hated 'em because. Me, I never did. They was just something else to contend against, like the storms, the stampedes, the drought, and the grasshoppers. A time or two I seen