Over on the Dry Side Read Free Page A

brother.”
    Well, we just looked at him. Pa was surprised, and maybe I was, too, a little. I’d had a funny feelin’ all along, only mostly I was afraid he was one of
them
.
    â€œEven so,” Pa said, “what about his daughter? An’ his wife or whoever she was? Don’t she have first claim?”
    â€œThat’s just it,” Chantry said quietly, “my brother was a widower, with neither wife nor child. He was a lot older than me. If there was a woman, then I have no idea who she was or what she was doing here.”
    Chapter 2
----
    P A CUT HIMSELF a piece of work when he decided to farm that place, and it taken some doing for the two of us. And from time to time I headed for them hills, Pa liking fresh meat and there being no game close by ’cept an occasional deer in the meadow.
    Come daybreak, it bein’ Sunday, I taken Pa’s old rifle and saddled up the dapple. Saying nothing to Pa or Chantry, I just taken off.
    They were low, rolling hills that broke into sharp bluffs, kind of a bench, and then the high-up mountains lyin’ behind ’em. So far, I’d never been so far as the mountains, but there they lay, a-waitin’ for me. They knew and I knew that one day I’d ride those trails.
    Right now I had me an idea, and huntin’ meat was second to that. Because that girl or woman, or whichever she was, headed right into them hills like she knew where she was going, and neither me nor them other folks found her. Least, I didn’t believe they had. For certain, they never found her that first day.
    If she knew where she was goin’, it stood to reason she’d rode the hills before, many times maybe, and if there was any kind of a hideout, she’d know where it was.
    It wasn’t worryin’ me much who she was. She’d either been close by when the killin’ took place, or she knew somethin’ about it. She surely didn’t waste any time askin’ questions when the shootin’ started.
    By now any sign she left would be washed away, ’less she was still back yonder and had cut fresh sign for somebody to follow. Any way you looked at it, she was headin’ for some place and I wanted to find out where. Whatever it was, or wherever she was, she figured she’d be safe when she got there. Or that’s how it looked to me.
    It was cool an’ pleasant. My horse had a liking for far-flung trails as well as me, and he pointed for the hills like he already known where he was going. The grass was bound to be thick up yonder, and the water cold and fresh.
    I never had but just the rifle. I’d always wanted me one of them pistols, but we never had the money for it. I had me a rifle and it was a good one too—a Henry. I also carried me a bowie a man could shave with, it was that sharp.
    The dapple pointed us into a fold of the hills, climbed a little bit, and we topped out on a grass knoll with the wind stirring his mane and all the world spread out before and behind.
    The ranch land lay spread behind me, but I wasn’t looking back. I was sixteen year old, and somewhere in the mountains there was a girl. Now in all my sixteen years I never stood up right close to not more than three or four girls of her age, and ever’ single time I was skeered. They just look like they knowed it all, and I didn’t know nothin’.
    That woman who rode off on that horse might be fourteen, forty, or ninety-three for all I knew, but in my mind’s eye she was young, gold-haired, and pretty. She was every princess I’d ever heard stories about, and I was goin’ to meet her.
    For three, four years now I’d been rescuing beautiful girls from Indians, bears, and buffaloes. In my dreams. But it never got down to where I had to talk to ’em. I kind of fought shy of that, even in my dreams, for I had no notion what you said to a girl.
    Settin’ there lookin’ at the mountains I kind of sized ’em up.