Halliday 8 by Adam Brady

Author:Adam Brady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: william w johnstone, piccadilly publishing, wild west pulp fiction, contemporary western fiction, land barons, best western books, buck halliday westerns
Publisher: Piccadilly

Chapter Five – Just Plain Drifting

Buck Halliday awoke with his decision made. For the last few minutes, he’d been watching a lizard creeping warily in the shadow of a deadfall log. The pulsing heart of the lizard made its whole body quiver. The creature stopped and didn’t move. It was biding its time. Halliday couldn’t see its prey, but he felt sure it would be a thing of beauty. To him it seemed that beauty was always being hunted.

He rolled up his blanket and remembered how beautiful Hope Clayton had appeared in the soft light of the pass.

Was he like the lizard, biding his time until he could claim his beautiful prey?

He smiled and brushed a hand through his hair before he picked up his hat. He raked up the coals of last night’s fire with his boot and fanned the coals into flame with his hat. He added sticks of dead wood and set the coffeepot on a rock. Sitting there with the cool air of morning washing over him, he felt relaxed, knowing there were thousands of trails he could follow to their end. He didn’t really care which trail he took or what the future held for him, because inside him was a spirit that never allowed him to stay in one place too long.

After drinking three mugs of coffee, he was still reluctant to leave this peaceful place. His canteen was full, his sorrel was well rested. He sat back and watched the lizard strike, its beak open to receive its first mouthful of the day. He picked up a rock and hurled it at the lizard, sending it scurrying away.

That done, he packed his bedroll behind the saddle and drop his washed coffeepot and mug into the saddlebag. He swung up and the sorrel moved off, instinctively taking the direction it had been following the previous day. Halliday grinned. The horse often did the choosing for them and he saw no reason why he should deny him the choice on such a glorious morning.

He followed a brush trail down to the flat country and left the desert behind him. The day’s silence was a somehow comforting thing, and he felt no loneliness. He rode slowly, not thinking about anything but what was around him. This was the life he craved—a man unharnessed and on the drift, with no one to complicate it.

He stopped on a rise thirty minutes later after seeing a cloud of dust behind a small hill. The dust seemed to cling to the brush growing out of the rocky walls. His stare thinned as he sat there motionless, waiting for the dust to settle.

Ten minutes of waiting told him that somebody had passed that way. He checked his gun and heeled the sorrel on. Down here in the flat country, he had room to move, and plenty of cover if necessity arose.

Likely Rees Mann, Zac Whelan and their two buddies had come this way, he decided. Perhaps, like himself, they had rested for the night after the hard desert crossing.

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