"THE TRAIL TO SEVEN PINES" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

know it's there! I helped stretch her myself!
"They unrolled three strands of wire for a hundred miles. Unbroken stretch of it.
Then we hitched an ox team to each end of it, and stretched her tight. We worked
by smoke signals, and we stretched that wire so tight that it wasn't until four years
after that we had to put the posts up!
"Fact is," he continued, "I don't think we needed 'em then, but the boss figured
it would look better to have more than the two anchor posts at each end."
"Drink your coffee," Ruyters said disgustedly, "and shut up!"
Hopalong grinned and tried his own coffee. He wrinkled his nose at the flavor. Whether
there was gold in it he did not know, but it tasted strongly of alkali. He grinned.
If he had all the sand and dust that he had drunk in camp coffee stretched out in
one layer, he would have had enough for a ranch of his own.
Ruyters turned to Cassidy. "Hoppy," he said, "I've worked with this cap-rock turkey
for a couple of years now. Can't you let
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me work with the kid or somebody else? Those stories of his would drive a man to
drink."
"Say," Newton said suddenly, glancing up from the fire, "I hear that feller Jacks
has staked him a claim over on Ghost Mountain east of Corn Patch!"
"Jacks?" Ruyters puckered his brow. "Didn't know he was a miner."
"Ghost Mountain?" Hopalong asked, looking over at Kid Newton. "Why the ghost part?"
"Supposed to be haunted. Used to be a minin' town over there by the name of Star
City. She died out about 1868, but there were a couple of fellers who feU into a
shaft up there on the mountain and starved to death before they were found. Folks
say their ghosts have been seen. Me, I figure it's just a story some of that Corn
Patch outfit put out."
"I hear that's a tough place," Cassidy said.
Frenchy Ruyters nodded agreement. "It is at any time. Poker Harris runs a sort of
store, saloon, and gamblin' joint there. Hangout for outlaws. He's poison-mean himself
and he carries a sawed-off shotgun most of the time. Plays a good hand of draw, they
say.
"Four, five outlaws hang out there all the time, but right now there's better than
twenty. Tough galoots, too."
"Lefty Hale's down there," Milligan offered. "From the Big Bend country."
"I know him," Hoppy said. "He was one of that outfit from Talley Mountain."
Tex Milligan's eyes brightened. "You know that country? I was born below Shafter,
at a place called Burnt Camp."
"I know the place," Hopalong said, smiling. "It's near Fresno Canyon."
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"That's right." Milligan grinned. "Well, what do you know?"
Hopalong rinsed out his cup and got to his feet. "We'd better slope it. You patrollin'
this line, Kid?"
"Yeah." The boy's eyes went to the other hands, who were busy tightening girths and
some distance away. "Hoppy," he said suddenly, "I maybe shouldn't tell this, but
I figure I ought to. I thought about tellin' the boss, but I was afraid I'd start
trouble. Miss Lenny has been meetin' an hombre in Majuba Canyon."