Novel 1962 - High Lonesome (v5.0) Read Free

filed for the sheriff’s office and was elected…and he married the girl.
    Two nights later, Considine was waiting at a water tower for the Denver & Rio Grande train. He swung aboard, walked through the two passenger cars collecting from the passengers, and dropped off the train where a horse was waiting. A week later he got the same train on the way back.
    South of the border he killed a man in a fight over a poker game and joined the Kiowa and Dutch. Four months later, Hardy joined them.
    There was a bank in the town of Obaro that was usually well supplied with gold, and it was the boast of the townspeople that it had never been robbed. Robbery had been attempted on three different occasions, and they had created a special Boot Hill graveyard for the robbers. Seven men were buried there, and Considine knew all about that Boot Hill, for he had helped to bury the first man himself.
    Every store and office in the town had its rifle or shotgun at hand, and any stranger was under suspicion if he approached the bank. It was the town’s bank, and the people of the town intended to protect it. Anyone attempting to rob the Bank of Obaro must run a gauntlet of rifle fire…in a town notorious for its marksmanship.

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    T HE FOUR RODE steadily. Dutch was doing his own thinking. There was one thing in particular he liked about working with Considine. You always made a smooth getaway. No breakneck rides. Somehow he always managed to outguess the pursuit, and most of it was due to careful preparation beforehand.
    Considine always made the beginning of the pursuit so tough that it broke the horses of the posses. Pursuit rarely lasted beyond the point where Considine would have the spare horses waiting.
    The ride up that sandy draw, for example, and then up the rocky slide—that was enough to take the starch out of any horse. Nor could they ever be traced by their horses, for the horses used in the holdups were never their own mounts.
    “Where to now?” Hardy asked.
    “Honey’s,” Considine answered.
    The Kiowa tilted his hat brim lower. Honey’s place was not far from Obaro, and the Kiowa did not like Obaro. It was Pete Runyon’s town, and Pete was a smart, tough sheriff. All the tougher because he had been an outlaw himself, and all the town knew it.
    “Are you thinking of Obaro?” Hardy asked.
    “Why not?”
    Hardy grinned at the thought. “‘Never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, an’ there never was a rider who couldn’t be throwed.’”
    Dutch squinted his eyes into the heat waves. The horse that couldn’t be ridden might throw a lot of riders before the last one rode it. The trick was to be the one who made the ride…only how did a man know?
    And the town of Obaro, with Runyon for sheriff…it was a tough horse for any rider to top off.
    Chapter 2
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    I N THE SAND Tank Mountains there was a lonely corner unknown to the casual traveler. When Table Top Peak showed through a certain notch, the knowing rider would turn off the trail into the barren-looking hills.
    Picking his way through the rocks and cacti, a rider could enter a box canyon and climb a trail that led out of it and up along the canyon’s rim to a cirque, or hanging valley.
    This was no more than a pocket, but here was usually good grass, and a dripping spring hidden behind a gnarled and ancient cedar. It was a place where several men might remain concealed, unseen even by a rider passing close by…although in the memory of those who knew of the place, no rider had ever come that close.
    Three dim trails led from the pocket into the rough country of the Sand Tanks, trails by which a man on the dodge might swiftly lose himself.
    When the War between the States came and the few men who knew of the spring were killed or died off, the spring was forgotten, except by an occasional Apache or Pima.
    But Dave Spanyer remembered it. There had been a time when he had visited the spring often, a time when he had been glad of its seclusion. He was a