"THE BROKEN GUN" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

on by discreet questions, I soon had a fairly clear idea of the Wells outfit, the
cattle they ran, and conditions generally. And I managed to do this without revealing
my own background.
"You ought to get out on the range and get the feel of it. We've got a right nice
little place out there, and a pool if you like to swim. You come any time you're
of a mind to, and stay as long as you like."
"Where is your place?"
"Over on the Verde ... that's a river." He paused. "My foreman's in town with the
station wagon. Drive you right out there if you want to go."
John Toomey had mentioned the Verde. It was to the valley of the Verde that he had
come after that long, dusty drive from Texas.
It was a heaven-sent opportunity to look over the terrain where the Toomeys had settled,
and there might even be some clue as to what took place after their arrival, although
I knew that after ninety years the chance of that was slight.
But it would get me out of town and away from any further developments in the Alvarez
killing. I had nothing to do with it-and I wanted nothing to do with it.
With luck I could look over the terrain, revive my knowledge of that area, and return
to town, catch a plane and be in Los Angeles within a matter of fortyeight hours
or so.
It looked like a good plan, and if the fat lad over there at the other table wanted
to follow me into the mountains, he was welcome to do so.
A good plan ... only as with so many such plans, there was a joker in the deck.
9
When the station wagon reached the top of the pass the driver pulled off the road.
He was a tall, loosejointed man with a lantern jaw and piercing eyes of cold gray.
He wore badly scuffed boots, blue jeans, and a shirt of a nondescript grayish color.
Pushing his hat back on his narrow skull, he indicated the broad sweep of land that
lay before us.
"There lies the Strawbr'y- Runs clean to the river."
From my study of aerial photographs, I recognized the two peaks off to the northeast
as Squaw Peak and Cedar Bench, neither nearly so imposing as the Four Peaks of the
Mazatzals off to the southeast.
"It's big, all right. There must be a hundred thousand acres in there."
"For a greenhorn," the driver admitted grudgingly, "you're a fair judge of country.
She'll run a hundred and twenty thousand, and Bent Seward's place is almost as big."
I pointed to a far-off cluster of roofs, glinting in the sunlight. "What's that?"
"The Bar-Bell-Seward's place. They're kinfolk."
To a man pushing a trail herd with more than fifteen hundred miles behind it, this
country must have looked like paradise itself.
Such a drive needed men with hair on their chests, men willing to gamble life and
limb against thirst, distance, and wandering war parties of Apaches. Only
unseasonal rains could have gotten them through, but I had the few pages in John
Toomey's own hand to prove that they did get through.
And beyond that... nothing.
"Always like to show the place," the driver commented as he swung the car back into
the road. "She's a fair piece of country."
We had started down the long, winding hill road before I asked my question. "Where's
Lost River from here?"
The driver's head turned sharply. "Lost River? Where'd you ever hear of that?"
"Down around Phoenix, I think. Yes, it was Phoenix. Some old fellow in the hotel