Talon & Chantry 07 - North To The Rails (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF Page B

These were big, rangy steers, older than most of Williams’ stuff, and in not as good shape.
    During the following days while the cattle were being brought together for the drive to the railhead, he worked hard, harder than he had ever worked before. He was up before the first streak of light in the morning sky, and tumbled into his bedroll when supper was over. With the others he stood night guard, and in many ways that came to be the best time.
    Only three men rode night guard at a time, and they were scattered, meeting only at intervals as they rode around the sleeping herd. It was a time for thinking, a time for remembering. Yet, oddly, he rarely thought of Doris, and rarely of his home in the East. His thoughts kept reaching back into his boyhood, before his father was killed.
    He remembered the hot, still hours in the town, walking barefooted up the dusty street, seeing the tall, still-faced men in boots and spurs sitting along the boardwalk in front of the hotel, or seeing them leaning on the corral bars, watching the horses.
    The parched brown prairie, long without rain, the tumbleweeds rolling before the wind under dark, rain-filled clouds, the blue streaks of a distant rainstorm viewed from far off…the call of quail at sundown…his father washing his face and hands in the tin basin outside the kitchen door, sleeves rolled up, showing the white of his arms where the sun never reached.
    He remembered the Indians who came to the ranch, squatting around near the corral, and his father feeding them, carrying the food to them himself…and the night the wounded brave had ridden up to the house, clinging one-handed to his horse’s mane. That was on the old ranch, before Pa lost it in the big freeze…where had that ranch been, anyway? His memories were mostly from the later period when Pa was marshal.
    They had gone back to the ranch once, all of them, driving in a buckboard. “There it is, Helen,” Pa had said, “fifteen years of brutal hard work and a lot of dreams, all gone in one freeze.”
    Tom Chantry remembered the tall old cotton-woods around the house, the log cabin his father had built, then added to…the cold water from the hand-dug well. “I planned all this for you, Tom,” his father had said, “but I reckoned without the snow and the cold.”
    The old ranch had been somewhere east of here, he believed. A boy doesn’t have much sense of location when he is six.
    Suddenly, he remembered The Hole. At least, that was what he called it.
    There had been a small spring about a mile from the ranch, and he had ridden over there once when he was about six. The spring came down from under an overhang of rock, about two feet off the ground, and the water fell into a rock basin, trickled over its lip and down into the meadow below, where it was again swallowed up.
    Some dirt had fallen into the spring from one of the overhanging banks, and he was scooping it out with his hands when at the back of the spring where the water ran down from the darkness under the rock, he saw The Hole.
    Actually, it was where the water came from, but the opening was much bigger than the space taken up by the trickle of water. Peering back into the deepest shadow, he could see the hole was about three feet across and almost that in height. He stood barefooted in the cold water, and could look back into the hole, but could make out nothing. Looking down at his feet, he could just see the light across the water.
    Evidently spring rains had shot out of the hole with some force and had gradually worn the rock back until there was space enough for a boy to stand. With a long stick he poked into the darkness. There was a pool of water where it trickled over the edge, but his stick could not reach either wall or roof. Later, with a longer stick he probed the darkness and succeeded in touching rock on the right side of the stream. Overhead he could find nothing, but there was a rock floor on the left of the stream.
    From outside there was