Louis L'Amour by The Warrior's Path Page A

“Gone!” Somebody shouted the word. “Gone, you fools! Who was on watch?”
    There was a murmur of talk. “Get after them, then!” The voice was strident and angry. “They cannot have gone far! Get them, or by the Lord Harry, I’ll-!”
    â€œThey’ve gotten away,” Yance said complacently. “Ah, she’s a broth of a lass, that one! She’ll be backing up for no man.”
    â€œHow far will they get? A lass and a child, and in skirts, yet? In the forest?”
    â€œThey’ll get far enough, I’m thinking, and there will be us to help.”
    â€œTo help, I’m willing,” I said, “but
how?
They will be off into the woods, and those men will go trampingafter, breaking down the brush, trampling the tracks. Ah, they be a pack of fools, then, and they’ll see what they have done when morning comes. Far better they’d be to sit tight by the fire until day breaks. How far can two girls go?”
    Standing up, I listened for small sounds, for the great oafs down there were crashing about like so many cows drunk from corn squeezings.
    A soft wind stirred the leaves, and I tried to set myself in her shoes to figure what she might do, but nothing came to me. She was a canny one, they said, and that might help, but she’d not travel so far with a youngster to hand.
    Away from the sea. That was as much as I could guess. Along the shore they’d be seen from the ship and would be out in the open too much. Inland there were Indians to fear, and these girls had been raised up with Indians always a threat.
    We moved back, deeper into the woods, holding to a fairly straight line away from the sea.
    For an hour or two we heard them threshing about in the woods, frightening the game, causing the birds to fly up, and never a thing did they find. We kept our weapons convenient lest they come upon us, but somehow they did not, and with morning we had a problem.
    Where would they go now? The girls had fled, but to where?
    We moved away from our camp at first light, and keeping a short distance apart, we began hunting sign. Nobody needed to tell us we were in trouble, for there was no telling where those girls would go.
    â€œLook,” Yance said, squatting nigh a tree, “we got to give them credit for brains. They ain’t simply going to run wild in the woods. That Macklin girl is smart, real smart. She’ll head inland.”
    â€œIt’s closer to help if they go south,” I suggested, but I agreed with Yance.
    â€œCloser to help but surely the way they’ll be expected to go. The way I see it, they’ll head north, hopingnot to meet Indians, and when they are well back from shore, they’ll circle around.”
    â€œSo what do we do?”
    Yance shrugged. “We can try to pick up their trail, but that way we might lead those who are following right to them. I say we strike inland. We go due west, and after the first day we start working north.”
    It was what I had been thinking, and it offered our best chance. I had no wish to get into a shooting fight if I could avoid it even though the people who had been holding those girls supposedly knew nothing about us.
    We started fast, hitting a dim trail and taking it at a dog trot. We’d been hunting the woods our lives long; like the Indians, we could run all day if need be and often had.
    As we ran, I was doing some thinking. The girls must have escaped some time after midnight. Say one or two in the morning. That meant they had been gone anywhere from a few minutes to an hour when their escape was discovered.
    They would have fled straightaway, then hidden until the immediate search was over. Then they would have taken off again. Traveling in the woods by night would not be easy, but having much at stake, they’d try to keep going.
    Give them, to use a figure, two miles before discovery of their escape, maybe four since then. I slowed down.
    â€œYance? We