Dark Canyon (1963) Read online

  He got to his feet then, took two long strides, and smashed into the wall. He fell face down and rolled over and was dead.

  Marie rushed to Riley and they clung to each other until a groan from the kitchen startled them. Riley attempted a step, but his leg buckled under him, and then the shock was gone and for the first time he felt weakness and pain.

  Much later, when he was stretched on a bed, and Doc Beaman had come and gone, she asked him, "What did he mean .. about a two-by-four kid from the Brazos?"

  "That's where I grew up. All of a sudden he must have remembered me from there. Seems a long time ago."

  If you should come, after the passing of years, across the sagebrush levels where the lupine grows, and if by winding trails you should come to the slopes of aspen and pine, you might draw rein for a while among the columbine and mariposa lilies, and listen to the wind.

  Do not look there, at the foot of the Sweet Alice Hills, for the house of Riley, for it is gone. Over the changing seasons only the hills remain the same. Yet if you should ride across the broken red lands to where the Colorado rolls, beyond Dandy Crossing you will find the trail they followed from Spanish Fork no easier.

  Rimrock is gone. After the flash floods that destroyed it, only the foundations and a couple of old frame buildings remain, but higher up the hillside Ira Weaver is buried beside Dan Shattuck, who lived to see his second grandchild . . . and Sheriff Larsen, who died at ninety-two.

  Kehoe married Peg Oliver, and one of their four great-grandchildren was killed in Korea on a bleak November day when, wounded and cut off from his detachment of the 27th Regiment, he settled down to show the Reds what the old breed was made of. He had eight grenades and a BAR, and twenty-three dead Chinese when he ran out of ammo.

  Kehoe had been elected sheriff after Larsen retired, and Parrish had become his deputy. Parrish was killed when he interrupted a bank holdup and shot it out with two eastern gangsters. He took both of them with him when he went down shooting, and when Sampson McCarty bent over to hear his last words, Parrish said, "Jim Colburn planned 'em better!"

  Colburn stayed on at the ranch as long as it operated, and then moved to Arizona. From time to time people looked him up to ask if the bad old days were really that bad, but few thought to ask about his own life. He was such a quiet-seeming man, with a shock of unruly white hair and mild blue eyes.

  Gaylord Riley and Marie moved to California when the children were old enough to attend school, but the years they spent on the ranch were happy, prosperous ones.

  When Senator James Colburn Riley married Blanche Kehoe they spent their honeymoon camping at the foot of the Sweet Alice Hills.

  On their first night in camp their guide and packer brought a flat stone to the fireside, and Riley commented, "Looks like an old foundation stone." "Indian, maybe," the guide said. "Nobody else in this country until around 1900. Why, outlaws didn't start usin' the Roost until about '85!"

  Riley glanced at Blanche, but neither made any comment. Later, when Riley accidentally kicked an old cartridge shell out of the earth near the fire, the guide glanced at it.

  "Better keep that," he said, "they don't make that kind any more."