Louis L'Amour by Hanging Woman Creek Page A

many could beat a Sioux or a Cheyenne when it came right down to fighting.”
    We turned our horses off the rise and headed back toward home.
    “Out here,” Eddie said, “a man gets away from it all. I mean, out here he’s really free.”
    “Fewer things to bother,” I said, “and fewer folks to bother you with them. But a man can’t get away.You can run away, but you can’t hide. Things catch up with a man.”
    Yet what he said worried at my mind. Was that why I was here? Was I running from something? But I’d nothing to run from. I wasn’t sore at anybody … even when I fought, I fought just for the hell of it, the way some men watch horse races or prize fights, or maybe pitch horseshoes. I just plain liked to fight, with no angry thoughts toward anybody … unless a man tried to use me mean. Funny thing … I had a whale of a temper, but I couldn’t remember when I’d been mad during a fight. They just didn’t affect me that way.
    Maybe what I was avoiding was the need to try and better myself. That had never seemed so all-fired important. I’d heard a lot of talk about success, but I’d never seen a successful man—what folks called successful—who was happier than me, if as happy.
    Eddie had a way of starting me to thinking. Like when he said I should have a place of my own. Well, he was right. I should have such a place.
    I had cow savvy. I new range conditions, and had learned a lot from the men I worked for … and some of them could have learned a lot from me.
    Bulls, now. A man in the cow business needed good bulls, and they would be finding it out soon. If a man had good bulls he had no cause to worry about his stock. It was time, these days, to start breeding for beef, not to think so much of owning so many head, but of owning good fat stock and good breeding stock. The old days on the range were gone, a man needed less range now, but he needed to care for it, needed to balance his grazing.
    But where would I get the money for my own place? Or get the kind of bulls I knew were needed? A man could homestead, but that didn’t provide enough range to graze stock. He could homestead a good creek or water hole, and use public range—until folks crowded too close.
    It was thoughts like these that were in my mind as we rode back, but a rifle shot broke in upon them.
    There’s a lonesome sound to a rifle shot in the evening. It sounds, then sort of echoes away, and dies off somewhere against the hills.
    We both drew up and sat there, listening to it dying out.
    “That was close by,” Eddie said.
    “They weren’t shooting at us, neither,” I said.
    No answering shot came.
    We sat listening for a minute or two, and then we started down the hills, riding slowly, for we didn’t know what might lay before us.
    It might have been some Indian hunter killing a deer. I said that, and Eddie agreed, but neither of us believed it. From that moment I think we were sure of what had happened. Somebody, though we didn’t know who, had been killed.
    And that somebody had been shot from ambush.
    Reaching down, I slicked my Winchester from its scabbard; and Eddie, after a moment, did the same. We spread out a little, too, riding carefully down the slope among the trees, ready for what might await us.
    During the last few days I’d felt a change taking place within myself. Not that it was unfamiliar, for I’d experienced it once before, a long time ago, andI knew it was something that happens to men—perhaps not to all men—when danger impends.
    My whole make-up, all my senses, every part of me was becoming more alert, more watchful … and more careful. Where before I might have hurried, might have brushed by a lot of things, now I was listening, I was watching, and every bit of me was wary of danger.
    Part of it was the warnings from Justin, from Charley Brown back in Miles City, and from Chin Baker at the line camp. But it was more than that.
    What alerted me, what changed me, and well I knew it,