Novel 1968 - Down The Long Hills (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

vanished as if caught up by the wind.
    Scattered out, the three men rode on. They had seen trails peter out before, and had found them again, so they were not too discouraged. There was still good grass, and the streams running off the mountain were clear and bright, but they found no place where a horse had fed, and no horse tracks along the streams where they searched.
    “I got to be pullin’ out soon.” Frank Darrow spoke reluctantly. A gruff, hard-bitten man, he held few illusions and only one loyalty…that was to his friends. “I got to think of my stock, with winter comin’ on.” He glanced at Scott. “Ain’t like I want to leave you in the lurch.”
    “I know it, Frank. You go along when you’re ready.”
    Their camp was somber that night, and there was no talk around the fire. All three were now feeling depressed by losing the trail and not finding it again as they had expected.
    “They turned off,” Darrow said. “I figure they turned off somewheres, the whole kit an’ kaboodle of ’em.”
    They discussed the possibilities, weighing each one. They had to put themselves in the minds of the children, had to imagine what they would do.
    “I doubt they’d tackle the mountain,” Squires said. “It looks almighty hard.”
    “Hardy might,” Scott said after a moment. “He always liked to climb, and he might try to go where they’d not expect him to go. And he’d try his best to point toward Bridger.”
    None of them wanted to turn back now, but all of them felt they had come too far, and so at last they turned away from the camp. With every step Scott worried for fear they were abandoning his son and the child of his friend. He knew, as they all did, that the time for searching with any hope was almost at an end. It was time for the winter storms to sweep through the valley, to cloak the mountains with snow; and then no lightly clad child could be expected to live.
    There was no question of hurrying, for to hurry now meant losing the trail completely, a trail more difficult to find with every passing hour.
    Scott Collins knew this land, and loved it, but he knew every danger it offered. He knew, too, the ways to avoid trouble and the ways to survive. You could not war against the wilderness; to live in it one must become a part of it, make oneself one with the trees and the wind, the streams and the plants, the cold and the heat, yielding a little always, but never too much.
    Now, for the first time, he really appreciated the hard struggle he and Hardy had had to live at all. Nothing had been easy on the farm where Hardy had begun growing up. One survived only through work and because of work. At night when cold winter winds howled about their cabin, it had been warm and snug inside, but only because of the care with which he had built it. He had done nothing slip-shod, everything had been done with as meticulous care as possible.
    He had shaped each beam, notched each log, placed each stone of the fireplace with his own hands, and he had fitted them tightly, knowing the icy fingers of the cold would find every crack, every crevice.
    He had always been a careful workman, and he had tried to give Hardy the one thing that is needed above all, a sense of responsibility. He had sometimes wished that Hardy need not come to the forest with him when it was cold, or when it was too hot. He had wished the boy might have had it a bit easier, but now he was glad he had not.
    Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.

    T HE MEN RODE into a basin where a large lake lay at the bottom of a depression north of the Sweetwater. Scott put a fire together, while Squires set about rustling some grub. Scott had killed a deer that morning, so they did not lack for meat.
    Frank Darrow rode out from camp. Two