Louis L'Amour (10 page)

A
MOON WAS hanging low and a coyote was singing when I splashed through the ford and came up to the bench above the Hanging Woman. There was no light in the cabin and I drew up, suddenly scared.

“Eddie?” I called it low. “Eddie Holt?”

His voice came out of the darkness near the woodpile, close by but so soft I could hardly believe he was there.

“Man, am I glad to see you!” I could sure hear
the relief in his voice. “There’s been trouble, trouble enough.”

“I’ll eat,” I said, “and you can tell me.”

When I’d stripped the gear from my horse I went into the cabin, where Eddie was laying things out, using a candle hooded by a tomato can.

“I can trip the propper from under it,” he explained, “and it snuffs the candle. Mostly I been eating before dark, then laying out until late. I sure enough know why that Oliver had him a back door rigged.”

Eddie had baked a mess of beans and pork, and while we ate he told me there had been several shots at the door. They had broken the globe to our coal-oil lamp, and they had almost set the cabin afire.

And then a few nights ago there had been night riders.

“Night riders?”

“Uh-huh … wearing sheets like them Kluxers from down south. I guess they figured I’d scare.” He chuckled. “I ain’t been afraid of ha’nts since I was a boy an’ was scared by an owl.”

They had come the first night and ridden circles around the cabin, crying eerily into the night. When Eddie grew tired of it, he called out that when their throats got dry they could drink at the creek. At that they’d really got mad, and warned him to leave before I got back, or they’d hang both of us.

That didn’t sound like Chin Baker or Shorty Cones. Baker could have gone to shooting right off. It sounded more like some of Bohlen’s hands.

For the next few days we worked hard, staying
together most of the time, separating only when necessary, and never for long.

Day by day the weather grew colder. Frost came, and the leaves turned red and gold. Overnight it seemed the cottonwoods turned from green to slim golden candles, shimmering in the slightest breeze. There was white frost on the meadows, and the tracks of a horse left a dark line across the meadows until the sun took the frost away.

We drove more cattle in, working dark to dark, up before the sun and no sleep until after the sun was down; and all the time we rode loose in the saddle with our rifles to hand. We saw nobody, strangers or anyone else.

Then, after we’d had a few warm days, we took some time off and sharpened up the scythes and cut hay in the meadows. We put the rack on the wagon, and hauled the hay up to the corral and stacked it. I’d cut hay as a boy, but was no hand like Eddie, who swung that scythe with long, easy strokes and laid the hay in neat swathes.

And then one night there was a skimming of ice in the barrel at the corner of the cabin.

Two or three times when we quit early, Eddie began showing me something about boxing. He had done like he said, and had rustled up some boxing gloves before leaving Miles City—got them from Charley Brown, in fact. There was a flat place under three trees, and we boxed there. We filled a bag with sawdust from where we’d been using the cross-cut saw cutting up logs for the winter.

He started showing me how to punch straight, to jab, and to cross, how to work in a clinch, how to tie
the other man up. And he added a few wrestling tricks, no good in a boxing ring but very good in a street fight.

That Eddie was as smooth as you ever saw. He never seemed to hurry or take any pains, yet I couldn’t have hit him with a handful of seed corn.

But I took to it right from the start. Fighting was something I had always liked, and Eddie knew how to teach.

“All scientific boxing is,” Eddie said, “is just a lot of things men have learned over the years. A straight punch is faster than a swing, because it’s the straightest line to what you’re aiming at. And you don’t punch at something, you punch
through
it.”

During all that time we had no trouble. Our work was hard, rough, and cold, but we stayed with it. Once in a while we’d take a day off, and sometimes we’d box or practice for an extra hour or so. But all the time I had an uneasy feeling that we were living in a fool’s paradise.

There was an itch in me to ride over to Farley’s outfit, but I held back. I had sense enough to know why I wanted to go, but sense enough, too, to know that such a girl as Ann Farley would never be interested in a forty-a-month cowhand, even if he spoke decent English, which I didn’t.

Nobody had shot at the cabin since I’d got back, nor had we found any of those leather-shoe tracks around.

Everything stayed quiet, until one morning we rode out and found that during the night somebody had made a gather of the cattle we’d been driving in.
Sixty or seventy head had been rounded up and driven south.

“We’d better pack some grub,” I said to Eddie. “This may take a few days.”

“We going after them?”

“You ain’t just a-woofin’,” I said.

The sun wasn’t an hour older when we rode out of there and headed south, following a broad trail up the valley of the Hanging Woman.

R
IDING SOUTH ALONG that trail gave me time to do some thinking. The trail was wide enough and plain enough, and it was obvious the rustlers were either not worried about being followed, or else they felt strong enough to take care of themselves. In either case, Eddie and me were likely to find ourselves in all kinds of trouble.

Yet that was not what kept me studying. I was trying to pull together all the loose threads, some of which were plain enough.

The starting point had to be Jim Fargo. If he was a Pinkerton man, that would account for Ann Farley’s lawyer knowing about him. He had been hunting Van Bokkelen, but the last we’d seen of Van Bokkelen was back in Dakota—unless that was him I’d glimpsed on the street in Miles City.

That accounted for Fargo, anyway.

And if he was a Pink, he might have been taken off that case and shunted out here to handle the rustling investigation. The Pinks usually only worked on train holdups and the like, but they had worked at times on rustling too.

There in Jimtown I had come across Duster Wyman, and he was working for my old friend Tom Gatty. He had money; and Gatty, according to what
I’d heard, had money. And it had come from somewhere.

Thinking back over what I knew of Gatty, I decided it wouldn’t surprise me none if he took to rustling, and he would know the best trails out of Montana and Wyoming into the Dakotas.

No thief ever knows when he’s well off, and every one of them thinks he is going to be the one who gets away with it. To be a thief at all, a man has to be either a damned fool or mighty egotistical, and it could amount to the same thing.

These fellows had been stealing cattle and they were getting self-confident, and when a man gets over-confident he invites trouble. They always make light of honest men, but what they never seem to realize is that honest men can get mad. And from the way Stuart, Justin, and Bohlen were talking, I surmised the time had come.

But none of my thinking explained the leather-shod horse, although it was a cinch that horse was somehow involved. Of that I was sure.

“Pronto,” Eddie asked, “if we find those cattle, what do you figure to do?”

“Ain’t decided. Maybe we’ll hike back and round up some help; or I may just go bulling in there and bring them out my ownself.”

He looked at me, but he didn’t say anything.

This was some of the finest grazing land in the world when the season was right. If you had rain, or good winter snows that could melt and sink in, you had grass, and a lot of it. And these rustlers were driving the cattle right up the Hanging Woman. I began to ride a first-rate hunch.

“They’re headed for Squaw Butte,” I said to Eddie, “and from there they’ll drive across to the Bear Lodge Mountains.”

“How many do you think there is?”

“I’ve seen the tracks of four, maybe five riders, and by the time we get to Squaw Butte we won’t be more than an hour behind them, probably less. The way I figure it, they’ll hustle those steers right along.”

We camped under a shoulder of rock on Trail Creek, where there was a small space of hard-packed sand and a trickle of water from a spring. There were no trees, just some low-growing willow and chokecherry, but there was some grass further down the hollow where we staked our horses.

Our coffee we fixed over a fire you could cover with your hand, that let the smoke rise through the willows so it would be dissipated by the branches, how mighty little of it there was.

Bedded down there, I lay with my hands clasped behind my head and stared up at the stars. What worried me most was those tracks I’d seen around Philo Farley’s place, the tracks of the man who killed Johnny Ward. And with this worry, Ann Farley’s face stayed with me … some man was going to be mighty lucky to get her. Thinking about that, I fell asleep.

We cut out before sunup, riding fast toward Squaw Butte. It was in my mind that they would hole up there overnight, and be in no hurry to start out at dawn. They would have reached the Powder River too late to cross last night, and they wouldn’t attempt a crossing until full daylight. The Powder wasn’t
deep, but there was quicksand in some places and cattle could get mired down and have to be hauled out.

An hour later, as the sun was just topping out on the far-off hills, we reached the shadows west of the Squaw Butte. If they were smart they would have had somebody up there on the butte watching their back trail, but by now they must feel pretty sure of themselves. And even if they had somebody up there, I had an idea we’d made it into the deeper shadows before it was light enough to see movement out on the open plain.

We worked our way up the side of the butte, keeping under cover of the pines as much as we could, although in places the cover was sparse. When we topped out on the ridge we were under cover of the trees, and we could see the herd down there below us, a couple of miles off. It was right close to Cabin Creek, and we could look across the herd toward Spotted Horse Creek.

We worked our way south along the crest of the butte, keeping under cover, and presently I saw a trickle of smoke coming up, and then I could see the dust where one of the rustlers was working out one of his rough string. The horse was giving him trouble, but he stayed with him. The man himself I couldn’t make out.

Studying the country below, I spotted a draw through which a man might work his way close while still under cover. Pointing it out to Eddie, I led off along the hill.

When we were closer, I took another look. Near as
I could make out, there were four riders down there, but I couldn’t tell who they might be—and that might make all the difference. There’s some men will fight, no matter what; and there’s others who simply won’t. Neither kind worried me much. It was the in-between ones that bothered me, the ones who might do any fool thing.

We swung around and crossed the river upstream of the herd and cut back into the Powder River breaks to the banks of the Spotted Horse. As I’d guessed, only one rider had crossed with the cattle, the others were behind them, pushing them on. And that one man was Shorty Cones.

He came up out of the willows, trying to keep the cattle bunched, and was within thirty feet of me before he saw me. And when he laid his eyes on me he was looking right into the barrel of a Winchester.

Now, Shorty was a cocky, belligerent man, but he was no damned fool. He drew up quickly and reached for the sky with both hands.

“Eddie,” I said, “put a loop over that one, and get his guns.”

Like I’ve said, Eddie was a hand with a rope. He’d learned from the trick ropers on the Buffalo Bill show, and he flipped a noose over Shorty’s shoulders, snaked it tight, flipped a loop of the rope over him, and moved in to get his guns. He did a quick, expert frisk for hide-out guns, and then we took Shorty off his horse and rolled him into a neat bundle. We stuffed a gag into his mouth and left him there. Then we rode out after the others.

It was simple as a ‘coon pickin’ persimmons. They just rode out of the Powder and right into our hands.

We disarmed them and tied them up, bunched together, and then I said, “Where you takin’ these cows?”

Actually, none of them were cows, but we used the term loosely in those days.

Nobody answered, and I hadn’t expected it, really.

“Now, look,” I said, “I got nothing against you boys but a long ride and a lot of trouble, none of which pleases me. We’ve got the rope and we’ve got the tree, and there’s nothing to stop us from stringin’ you up.

“In fact,” I added, “they’re settin’ up an order of vigilantes to do just that. If you boys were wise you’d light a shuck for Texas. And I’m going to give you a chance.”

None of the lot were known to me but Shorty Cones, although one of the others I’d seen somewhere. They were a low-down outfit, all told, but it wasn’t in me to see a man hang without he had a chance. Although Roman Bohlen wouldn’t be apt to give them any show at all.

“I’m taking your horses, and your guns, but I’m going to turn you loose. My advice to you boys is to get out of here like you was a bronc with a fire under his tail. You come around again and I won’t be so easy on you.”