Chapter 1

WHEN I RODE up to the buffalo wallow pa was lying there with his leg broke and his horse gone.

It was mid-afternoon of a mighty hot day and pa had been lying there three, four hours. His canteen was on his horse, so he had nothing to drink in all that time. I got down and fetched him water with my canteen.

"Thanks, boy. Looks like I played hob."

"Well," I said, "you got you a busted leg, but your jaw's in good shape. You been arguin' at me for months, now, so you just set back an' argue some more whilst I fix up your leg."

"You got to saddle and ride, boy." A body could see he was fighting pain. "Everything we own and most of what our neighbors own is in those saddlebags. You just forget about me and hunt down that horse."

If I'd been older in years instead of being just man-size I might have thought about the money first, but likely not. There was twenty thousand dollars in those saddlebags, and less than a third of it was ours. It was the sale money for a steer herd we'd driven up the trail from Texas, and folks back home was a-sweating until we got back with that money.

"We'll take care of your busted leg first," I said.

There was mighty little to do with out there on the prairie, but I broke some mesquite and trimmed it with my knife, shaping some splints for pa's leg.

We'd never been much on gettin' along together, pa an' me, and we wrangled most of the time on something or other. Here I was, seventeen and feeling uppity with the growing strength in me and the need to make folks see me as a man. About all I could do, come to think about it, was ride a horse and shoot a gun.

Pa objected to the company I kept, and down deep inside I more'n half agreed with him, but stubborn-like, I wasn't going to be told. Pa objected to me spending time out in the gully practicing gun-slinging. He was forever telling me that no gunman he'd ever heard tell of ever had anything but a bad reputation with folks who mattered.

"Time of trouble," I objected, "a man who can handle a gun is good to have around, and on your side."

"Sure," pa would say, "but when trouble is over folks can't get shut of him fast enough."

Well, I'd always told myself I could make as big tracks as any man, but now I was faced up with it and had no idea what to do.

One thing I knew. I needed a water hole and some shade for pa. Once he was bedded down I could hightail it after that horse. The quickest way to water might be to trail pa's horse, anyway, so I hoisted him into the saddle with some help from him, and we'd taken after pa's gelding.

That fool horse ran straightaway, then slowed to a walk. From time to time we could see where the horse stopped to look back, or to nibble on some mesquite or such. When the tracks began to edge off toward the southwest I was hopeful he was headed for water.

Pa sat up in the saddle and he didn't say aye, yes, or no. This was up to me now, and we both knew it, and he held his jaw. It had me feeling guilty and responsible all at the same time. And then an hour short of sundown we fetched up to some other tracks.

They came in from the northwest and they were shod horses. Three in the bunch…and they'd caught pa's horse.

Half the outlaws in the country lived in that part of the territory, and the chances were that anybody riding across here was an outlaw, or kin to them. Not to say that many a man who passes for honest wouldn't help himself to twenty thousand dollars and a lost horse.

"Don't you take notions, son. You ain't about to go up against three men. Not with me in this condition."

It was shy of sundown when we came to the creek. It wasn't much. Two, three feet wide and a few inches deep, running through a sparse meadow between low-growing willows, with here and there a clump of cottonwood. When I had pa off his horse and bedded down, I unslung my canteen and filled it at the creek.

"You set quiet, pa. I'll go fetch that horse."

Copyright © 1971 by Louis & Katherine L'Amour Trust