Hard Trail to Follow by Elmer Kelton

Author:Elmer Kelton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER

9

The horse was wearying. Even at a walk, it labored to keep moving. Cordell had put many miles behind him in the days since Buster had died. They had been melancholy miles, for his burden of guilt had lost little of its weight. Again and again, memory punished him by bringing him the face of the dying kid.

Cordell was aware that carrying Buster to a doctor had exposed his whereabouts, giving the law a fresh start in its search for him. He had traveled hard to put several county lines between him and that town, pushing his mount to the edge of its endurance. Now he had to find a place to lay up, or he had to make a trade. Under the circumstances he disliked having to steal a fresh horse. It was not that he had moral objections, but he knew it would put the locals on his trail as well as possibly alerting the Rangers. Not even bank robbery stirred people’s dander as violently as horse theft.

He had carefully avoided towns, so he did not know exactly where he was. He knew only that he had reached the central part of Texas. The landscape of chalky hills suggested that he was probably somewhere north of Austin. A cousin named Jedediah Fergus lived near Lampasas. Jedediah had his faults, but surely he would be willing to hide his kin a week or two while Cordell and his mount rested.

Lampasas had a rough reputation. The Rangers had been called in more than once to put down a savage feud between families and to break up gangs that made life precarious for people caught in the middle. It had been Cordell’s kind of place. A man who knew his way around could profit from that sort of situation without actually being drawn up in the funnel of the cyclone. During the feud, he and Jedediah had sold horses to one side, then taken them back under cover of darkness and resold them to the other. The cousin had then branched out on his own, succumbing to an ambition that outmatched his abilities. Caught, he had served a couple of years of involuntary employment with the state down at Huntsville.

Cordell, on the other hand, had sensed that the risk had begun to outweigh the potential profit and had sought his fortune elsewhere. Though willing to take a gamble, he always made it a point to hold back some chips.

Jedediah had married a farm, the only way he would ever have acquired one. He had survived an attempted assassination only because his father-in-law was a poor shot. He had the good fortune to see the enraged old man die of a massive heart seizure immediately afterward. Sometimes, Cordell thought, it was more profitable to be lucky than to be smart.

Following a deeply rutted wagon trail, he came to a fork and was stymied. He did not know which direction to take. A farmhouse stood on a hill a quarter mile away, but he was wary about going up and asking directions.

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