The Mountain Valley War by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553899511
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

THEY LOADED FOUR kegs of water on the wagon and they each took a canteen. They took shovels, rope, and a long pole for a lever. With Bartram on the driver's seat, they started out.

Kilkenny, riding the buckskin again, led the way through the newly cut gap in the trees and down the steep slope. They tied a heavy log to the back of the wagon to keep it from running up on the heels of the mules. Cautiously they started down.

It was slow, painstaking travel. A dozen times Kilkenny dismounted to roll a stone from the road, yet at last they came to the bottom. Quince cut loose the log they had dragged for a brake.

The air was still and hot. It was a bleak, broken land with little vegetation. “Let's roll 'em!” Kilkenny said.

Before leaving the cliff he had taken a sight on a distant peak that he knew to be in the area of Blazer, but knowing the dust storms to be bad, he had brought along a compass. He had taken a sight on the distant peak and now he rechecked. The smoky haze that often hung over the area made outlines vague, but the trail they were following led roughly westward. How closely the trail would hold to the course he had set, he did not know, or even how long the road would be visible.

The slightest touch of wind stirred the fine dust into the air, and their horses' hooves and the wagon added to it. Slowly they moved westward. Twice they had to turn aside from great drifts of dust that reached across their path. Here and there Kilkenny found it easier to walk along and lead the buckskin, as there were obstacles to be moved from the trail. There was very little growth.

When they had been traveling what his watch told him was an hour, he held up a hand. They stopped and bunched around the wagon. With a damp piece of sacking brought for the purpose, the men sponged out the nostrils of the horses.

Jack Moffit had insisted on coming along with the wagon. He stood up on the seat, looking all about. “Where are we now?” he asked.

Nobody replied, and after a minute he said, “How far have we come?”

“Maybe three miles,” Quince said. “Might be less.”

Even though they carried no load but the kegs of water and the tools, the wagon was heavy, for the dust was rarely less than six inches deep and often they pulled through drifts that were as much as two feet in depth.

After a few minutes Kilkenny mounted again, and once more they pushed on. Before them, something large and dark loomed through the dust. It was a long, low, basaltic cliff that might have been a flow of lava. Kilkenny knew little of such things, except a few words picked up here and there from surveyors or when working in the mines.

The trail turned south, and after something over a half-mile it rounded the end of the obstruction and headed back north again, but northwest, actually.

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