The Proving Trail by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour [L'Amour, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Amazon.com, Usenet, C429, Kat, Exratorrents
Amazon: 0553253042
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1978-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

* * *

SCARCELY WAS I back in my room with the gaslight lit than Louis appeared. I sat down on the bed.

“Are you all right?” he asked sharply. “How did she come to be with you?”

When I explained, he shook his head irritably. “She must have come in while I was in the garden. Damn the luck! Kearney, you must avoid her! She is the one, I am sure, whom your father warned me against.”

Moving my boot, something rattled on the floor and I looked down. A carpet tack. It must have been that which I shook from my boot…but how would such a thing get into my boot in the first place?

“What’s the matter?” Louis demanded.

Reaching down, I picked up the tack. It was an ordinary carpet tack except that the point was covered with a hard, shiny substance of a yellowish brown color. “This,” I said. “It fell out of my boot.”

He took it from me, very carefully, and studied the point under the light. Briefly, I explained how I shook out my boots as I always did and the tack fell to the floor, and that it must have been that I had stepped on when I stood up.

“Get your sock off!” he said. “Let’s see that foot.”

“I must have stepped on the side of it,” I said. “It would have hurt much more had I stepped on the point.”

There was no puncture or scratch on my foot. Louis examined the point again. “You’ve been very lucky,” he commented grimly. “I am sure this is a poison, and I am sure it was meant to kill you. She must have placed it in your boot while you were asleep, never imagining you’d shake out your boots.”

“We all do it,” I said. “You learn quickly out here.”

“She must have believed you stepped on it when you stood up. She believes you are poisoned.”

He was still examining the tack. “I know something of this sort of thing,” he commented. “When I was studying at the seminary in France, there was a professor there who was making a study of plant poisons—arrow poison and the like which had been used by primitive peoples. It resembles pakuru, a poison made from a tree of that name. If my memory serves me correctly one staggers, becomes clumsy, is apt to lose control of some muscles, then one dies. Depending on whether one gets a little of it or much, it can kill in anywhere from fifteen minutes to several hours, but usually the quicker time.”

“When I started to rise, I almost fell,” I said. “It was pure clumsiness, but—”

“Of course, she believed her poison was working. Very well, the thing for you to do is be gone before morning. Be out of here and away into the mountains.”

“I came to see the papers my father left,” I protested.

“And so you shall. How long will it take? An hour…less, surely. In the meanwhile I shall see your horses are made ready.”

He took up the tack.

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