Novel 1968 - Brionne (v5.0) Read Free Page B

Brionne paused and the man got up quickly, folded his paper as he moved, and crossed the lobby toward the street.
    Brionne hesitated. An old soldier friend? No…He looked again, and saw that the man had paused in the doorway and was looking back at him. This time when their eyes met the man paused no longer, but went out and closed the door behind him.
    Of course, people would be curious. Brionne had come to expect that, but in this man’s eyes there had been such livid hatred mingled with what seemed to be fear that he was curious. But Colonel Devine was probably right. His training and his instinct had made him suspicious of everybody.
    “Pa, come on!” Mat was saying.
    That man’s attitude disturbed Brionne, nagged at his consciousness. Yet the more he considered it, the more positive he became that he had never seen the man before.
    He went up the stairs, and down the carpeted hall to the General’s suite. Two stocky, powerful men stood guard outside. Both knew him from Washington. “Evenin’, Major,” one of them said. “The General’s waitin’ for you.”
    Grant sat behind a desk, the stub of a cigar in his teeth. His coat was unbuttoned, his tie somewhat askew.
    He nodded shortly. “How are you, Brionne?Pull up a chair.”
    Chapter 3
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    T HE TRAIN RUMBLED into the night. Outside, on the vast and empty plains, there was no light to be seen. Beside Brionne, on the seat next to the window, Mat slept soundly.
    The car was almost empty. Two seats ahead a young man lay on the seat with his legs in the aisle; his boots were down-at-heel, his spurs carrying the big rowels used by Mexicans or the Californios.
    James Brionne had seen the man when he got on the train at some small station west of Omaha. He was a tall, loose-jointed young man with a shock of yellow-white hair and a look of dry amusement about him. He had winked at Mat, bobbed his head at Brionne, and promptly lighted a cigarette, which marked him as from the border country of Texas, where the habit had been picked up from the Mexicans.
    The young man carried a beat-up Henry rifle; but with the practiced eye of the Army veteran, Brionne noticed the rifle was clean and well cared for. The belt gun was one of the heavy Walker Colts, a kind rarely seen.
    There were half a dozen other persons in the car, including one young woman. Her clothes showed both style and quality, but they were a little worn. She was dark-eyed, and strikingly attractive in a well-poised sort of way. He wondered about her, and he tried to think of who she might be and why she might be going west.
    Grant had been right, of course. He was running away, trying to escape not only the horror of his wife’s death but everything that tied him to it. He was leaving Washington, his friends, the countryside he knew well. He was going toward…what?
    And he could not say he was doing this only for Mat. He himself wanted to escape. He was going to a country he had seen only once, years ago, but it was a country that had never left his thoughts. He could still remember the stark loneliness of those towering pinnacles of rock, the brilliance of the stars, the expanse of the sky.
    No land had ever touched him as had that wild and desolate desert, with its vastness and loneliness, the strange canyons, the stark ridges, the ruined ranges with their cascades of broken stone toppling into the valleys below. Deep within him something had always reached out with longing for that country.
    He remembered an evening when he had led a patrol, scouting for a band of Indians that had stolen some horses. They came suddenly to the crest of a small saddle offering a fine view of the country beyond. He drew rein, astonished, and his men came up slowly around him, speechless with awe.
    Before them lay a valley, a narrow corridor of green, deep in shadow now, a corridor between two rows of towering gargoyles, weird monsters shaped by wind, rain, and blown sand, carved from the native rock into these fantastic