the Burning Hills (1956) by L'amour Louis

Author:L'amour, Louis [L'amour, Louis]
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-12T06:26:27.906000+00:00

Chapter Four

The night was cool. Jack Sutton stood very still, hearing the slow heavy beat of his heart. He wished he could see Trace Jordan. This shadowy figure worried him. There was no personality there, only something dark, indefinite, indistinct.

Never, since the beginning, had he seen this man. His partner he had killed and he had helped to pursue him and bring him to this moment but never once in all that time had he actually seen Trace Jordan.

You could not look into his eyes; you could not measure the man. It disturbed Sutton but did not make him less confident.

"I figure you're one of those who murdered my partner," Jordan said.

Sutton wondered if Jordan could see his gun hand. It was dangling at his side but he began to inch it higher. "Sure." His voice was taunting. "I'm one of them. Fact is, it was my idea."

His hand was at the bottom of the holster as he spoke. He had only to bend his elbow to grasp the butt. He bent his elbow suddenly. His hand grasped his gun butt and suddenly he was choking with the lust to kill. He drew --

The bullets smashed him in the belly like two fists, a hard one-two that set him back on his heels. He put his left foot back to steady himself and started to lift his gun but when he got his hand up he found it was empty.

Confused, he stared blindly at his hand and then his knees buckled and he fell. His body from the waist down was numb, yet his brain was alive and clear. He tried to speak, to see the face of the man who stood there, watching him. He tried to frame words but then the notion faded ... this then was how it felt to die.

The last thing he remembered was the wet grass on his face.

Trace Jordan walked forward, circling a little, knowing his bullets had gone true, yet wary as always, taking no chances, estimating the danger of the man who lay there.

"Maria Cristina?" Then she was coming toward him. "We must ride now. They'll be coming." He gestured. "Take his horse. He hasn't covered the ground yours has."

Into the desert they rode. Sand and more sand. Rock, Spanish dagger, yucca, ocotiflo and broken lava. It was a brutal heat-baked corner of hell.

The cacti cast weird shadows in the moonlit night and a low wind moaned in the scattered clumps of brush. They rode in silence, knowing there was no returning now. Another Sutton had died and made another mark against them.

The Sierra de San Luis pointed a rocky finger into the wastelands south of the border. It was Apache country and it was the desert and the desert can kill. This was the land that time and again had defeated armies of the United States. This was the land of the peccary and coyote, the land of the rattler and the scorpion, of the prickly pear and the cholla.

In the moonlight even more than by day the desert is a place of weird and strange beauty.

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