The Searchers by Alan LeMay Page A

couldn’t answer it.He had his saddle and his gun, because Henry had given him those; but the loads in the gun were Amos’, he supposed.
     Mart realized now that a man can be free as a wolf, yet unable to do what he wants at all.
    They went on to bed in silence. Amos spoke out of the dark. “You don’t give a man a chance to tell you nothing,” he complained.
     “I want you to know something, Mart—”
    “Yeah—you want me to know I got no kin. You told me already. Now shut your God damned head!”
    One thing about being in the saddle all day, and every day, you don’t get a chance to worry as much as other men do once you
     lie down at night. You fret, and you fret, and you try to think your way through—for about a minute and a half. Then
     you go to sleep.

Chapter Thirteen
    Mart woke up in the blackness before the winter dawn. He pulled on his pants, and started up the fire in the wood range before
     he finished dressing. As he took down his ragged laundry from behind the stove, he was of a mind to leave Amos’ stuff hanging
     there, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to it. He made a bundle of Amos’ things, and tossed it into their room. By the
     time he had wolfed a chunk of bread and some leavings of cold meat, Tobe and Abner were up.
    “I got to fetch that stuff Amos wants,” he said, “from over—over at his house. You want to show me what team?”
    “Better wait while we hot up some breakfast, hadn’t you?”
    “I et already.”
    They didn’t question it. “Take them little fat bays, there, in the nigh corral—the one with the shelter shed.”
    “I want you take notice of what a pretty match they be,” said Tobe with shining pride. “We call ’em Sis and Bud. And pull?
     They’ll outlug teams twice their heft.”
    “Sis is about the only filly we ever did bust around here,” Abner said. “But they balanced so nice, we just couldn’t
     pass her by. Oh, she might cow-kick a little—”
    “A little? She hung Ab on the top bar so clean he just lay there flappin’.”
    “Feller doesn’t mind a bust in the pants from Sis, once he knows her.”
    “I won’t leave nothing happen to ’em,” Mart promised.
    He took the team shelled corn, and brushed them down while they fed. He limbered the frosty straps of the harness with his
     gloved hands, and managed to be hooked and out of there before Amos was up.
    Even from a distance the Edwards place looked strangely barren. Hard to think why, at first, until you remembered that the
     house now stood alone, without its barn, sheds, and haystacks. The snow hid the black char and the ash of the burned stuff,
     as if it never had been. Up on the hill, where Martha, and Henry, and the boys were, the snow had covered even the crosses
     he had carved.
    Up close, as Mart neared the back gallery, the effect of desolation was even worse. You wouldn’t think much could happen
     to a sturdy house like that in just a few months, but it already looked as if it had been unlived in for a hundred years.
     Snow was drifted on the porch, and slanted deep against the door itself, unbroken by any tracks. In the dust-glazed windows
     Laurie’s wreaths were ghostly against empty black.
    When he had forced the door free of the iced sill, he found a still cold inside, more chilling in its way than the searing
     wind of the prairie. A thin high music that went on forever in the empty house was the keening of the wind in the chimneys.
     Almost everything he remembered was repaired and in place, but a gray film of dust lay evenly, in spite of Laurie’s Christmas
     dusting. Her cake plate was crum-bless, centering a pattern of innumerable pocket-mouse tracks in the dust upon the
     table.
    He remembered something about that homemadetable. Underneath it, an inch or so below the top, a random structural member made a little hidden shelf. Once when
     he and Laurie had been five or six, the Mathisons had come over for a taffy pull. He showed Laurie the secret shelf