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The Tall Stranger
by
Louis L'Amour


Chapter I
With slow, ponderously rhythmical steps the oxen moved, each step a pause and an
effort, each movement a deadening drag. Fine white dust hung in a sifting cloud
above the wagon train, caking the nostrils of animals and men, blanketing the
sides of oxen and horses, dusting a thin film over men and women. And the miles
stretched on before them, endless and timeless.
Red-rimmed and bloodshot eyes stared with dazed weariness into that limitless
distance before them, seeing nothing to grip the eye or hold the attention. Long
since all had been forgotten but the heat, the dust and the aching muscles. Each
step lifted a powdery dust, stifling and irritating. It lay a foot deep on the
plain, drowning the sparse grass and sage.
Rock Bannon, riding away from the train alone, drew in his steel-dust stallion
and turned in the saddle, glancing back at the covered wagons, sixteen of them
in the long line with some led horses and a few outriders, yet none who rode so
far out as himself, and none who appreciated their problems as thoroughly as he
did himself.
From where he sat he could not see their faces, but in the days just past he had
seen them many times, and the expression of each was engraved in his mind.
Haggard, worn, hungry for rest and cool water, he knew that in the heart of each
there was a longing to stop.
The vision was in them yet, the golden promise of the distant hills, offering a
land of milk and honey, the fair and flowering land sought by all wandering
peoples of whatever time or place. No hardship could seem too great, no trail
too long, no mountain impassable when the vision was upon them.
It was always and forever the same when men saw the future opening beyond the
hills where the sun slept, yet this time the vision must hold meaning; this time
the end of the trail must bring realizationЧfor they had brought their women and
children along.
All but Rock Bannon. He had neither woman nor child, nor anyone anywhere. He had
a horse and a saddle, a ready gun and a mind filled with lore of the trail, and
eyes ever fixed on something he wanted, something faint and indistinct in
outline, ever distant, yet ever real. Only of late, as he rode alone on the far
flank of the wagon train, had that something begun to take shape and outline,
and the shape was that of Sharon Crockett.
His somber green eyes slanted back now to the last wagon but one, where the
red-gold hair of Sharon on the driver's seat was a flame no dust could dim. In
the back of that heavily loaded wagon was Tom Crockett, her father, restless
with fever and hurt, nursing a bullet wound in his thigh, a memento of the
battle with Buffalo Hide's warriors.
From the head of the train came a long, melodious halloo. Cap Mulholland swung
his arm in a great circle, and the lead oxen turned ponderously to swing in the
beginning of the circle. Rock touched the gray with his heels and rode slowly
toward the wagon train. He was never sure these days as to his reception.
Cap's beard was white with dust as he looked up. Weariness and worry showed in
his face. "Rock," he said, "we could sure use a little fresh meat. We're all a