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

try."
"You think."
Boots scraped on the gravel outside and Adam Stark came in the door, smiling. "It
was a good day," he said, "the best yet." "Supper's ready."
He stood for a moment in the door looking around the room. It was unbelievable to
him that so bare a place could have been made to look so much like a home, and with
so little to do with. And it was home. Sometimes he was afraid he would never know
any home but something such as this, and he wanted the good things of life for Connie
and for himself.
14
10 LOUIS L'AMOUR
Considering it, he realized that somehow he never worried about Miriam, and that
was wrong. He did not worry about her because she seemed so self-sufficient, so strong.
She was like their mother had been, only more so, much more so. But he felt it was
wrong to think of a girl that way ... it was wrong for any man to consider a girl
self-sufficient, for men wanted to do something for a woman and when there was nothing
they could do, there was no place for love.
Love was, he suspected, much a matter of service. One loved and was loved, as one
needed and was needed. Or so it seemed to him.
Shadows were filling the canyon, and only the sky was bright. The canyon in which
they lived was from thirty to sixty feet wide through much of its length. Only where
the buildings stood was it a bit wider, but even there it seemed no wider, for the
buildings were partly protected from above by the overhang of the cliffs.
Except from that one point at the top of Rockinstraw, there was no way of seeing
into the canyon, and the edges of the canyon were concealed by a scattered growth
of prickly pear, ocotillo, and juniper, with here and there some scattered pin oaks.
"Stay home tomorrow," Consuelo suggested suddenly. "No." Adam Stark drew back a home-made
chair. "There's work to do. Every day I don't dig makes it a day more we have to
stay ... so I'd rather work."
"Aren't you thinner?" Miriam asked. There were hollows in Adam's cheeks she had never
seen before.
He smiled. "A man with two women . . . they fuss too much. Sure, I may be thinner.
This is a hot country, and swinging a pick isn't the way to put on beef."
"Did you see anything from the mountain?"
Adam finished the mouthful of food he had taken and filled his cup before replying.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I thought once I saw a flash over north of here ... like
sunlight on a rifle barrel, but nobody would be up in that country."
"You've been there?"
15
TAGGART 11
"Hunting . . . there's nothing over there." "Did you see it again? That flash, I
mean?" "No. "
"But you think it was somebody? You think someone was over there?"
"Maybe ... it was sudden, then gone. Might have been the sunlight on a sliding rock,
or something."
"You don't believe that?"
"No," he replied honestly, "I don't."
"I am not afraid," Consuelo said, and seated herself at the table. "I can shoot."
16
S wante Taggart was still alive. Under a copper sky he rode his horse through a