"TAGGART" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

He had left it at that, and so had they. The actual fact of the matter was something
quite different.
In his quest for the gold, Adam Stark had followed the alluvial fan up the side of
the mountain. The fan was merely a cascade of rocky debris tumbled down the steep
slope as a result of thousands of years of weathering on the heights above.
Struggling upward, compelled to use his hands in places because of the steepness
of the slope, he had come at last to the source of the gold in a band of rotten quartz
all of six feet wide and cobwebbed with gold.
At a glance he knew the discovery was almost unbelievable, and if it was from broken-off
bits of this rock that the padres had taken their gold, he could appreciate what
excitement they must have felt.
Yet even in his moment of success some warning in the beetling brow of cliff kept
him from going forward. His innate caution gripped him, and he drew back a little
to examine the situation more carefully. Wary of what he saw, he circled the granitic
upthrust and then climbed to the ridge behind it where he could look down upon the
roof. What he saw left him dry-mouthed and jittery.
Obviously the upthrust was part of a much older range, one long weathered and worn,
suffering from shock and twisting,
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34 Louis L'AMOUR
until finally this tower of rock had been violently upthrust to leave it standing
in shaky ruin among younger and sturdier peaks. In the processes of the past the
rock had been shattered and riven by mighty forces until it had become a miner's
nightmare.
With enormous wealth here for the taking, every single ounce must be taken at the
risk of death. One stick of powder might bring the whole crumbling mass down in a
heap, and it towered three hundred feet or more above its base. The roof of the mass
was riven with cracks, seamed with breaks like the wall of an ancient building left
standing after heavy shelling.
Walking back to the vein, Adam Stark found he could actually break off pieces with
his fingers, and this vein itself lay on the downhill side and at the very base of
the tower of rock. The upthrust leaned at such an angle that a man working at the
vein would be cutting his way into the very foundation of the tower, and a single
blow might bring the whole mass down upon him.
Furthermore, if the towering mass should fall, even if he were not under it, the
vein would be hopelessly buried under thousands of tons of rock and beyond his power
to recover.
Adam Stark had backed off from the pinnacle and, seating himself on a rock, had lighted
his pipe. A man might, he reflected, take tons out of there without it collapsing
upon him ... or it might come down with the first blow. Yet he knew that, wanting
that gold as he did, he had no choice.
In his own mind he was sure Connie loved him as he did her, and he believed that
once she had her chance to see something of the world outside, she would return to
what she knew, content to settle down. She was, after all, a Mexican woman, and a
Mexican woman without a husband is nobody among her people. She becomes an object
of sympathy from some and comtempt from others, and is nothing to herself. If she
does not have a husband she has failed in woman's main objective. He knew that Consuelo
believed that, and believed it deeply, but hers had been a life of struggle since
the beginning, and what she wanted was her moment of glamor.
Maybe he was a fool, but he knew that without Consuelo