Louis L'Amour by Hanging Woman Creek Page B

was a real feeling of death and danger in the air. I was never the contemplative type. I knew how to ride, rope, and shoot a rifle, and a few other things a man has to know to get along, but of course any man out alone in the world—a rider, a seaman, a fisherman, folks of that sort—any one of them is likely to become thoughtful. And sometimes I’ve wondered if danger doesn’t actually have an almost physical effect on the atmosphere.
    I’ve little to explain such an idea. I’m a man with few words, and most of those picked up in reading whatever came to hand, but it seems to me it is true. There’s times when the air seems to fairly prickle with danger. This here was one of those times.
    The ridges around were thick with pines, but only a few dotted the long slope toward the bottom of the valley. The descent was gradual, and only a couple of hundred feet in all.
    The pines were black now except on the far side where the last of the sun was tipping them with fire.The valley grass was taller, moving a mite in the wind, but everything else was still, and we rode in silence.
    We could hear the swish of our horses’ hoofs as they moved through the grass, the creak of saddles, and somewhere a night bird called. Every second we looked for a rifle shot, but we heard nothing, saw no one. Only the grass moving in the wind, only the sky darkening overhead.
    And then we saw a horse standing, head down, cropping grass on a flat at the head of Prairie Dog Creek.
    The dead man lay close by. The wind ruffled his shirt and touched the edge of his silk handkerchief. There was no need to get down, for I knew him at once. Johnny Ward had been a good hand … repping for an outfit from over toward Ekalaka when I’d last seen him.
    The bullet had gone in under his left shoulder blade and ripped out the pocket of his shirt. From the angle of the shot and the place it hit, I judged he had been shot from fairly close up.
    He had been a nice-looking boy, and he still was, lying there with the dark curls ruffling in the wind. He had folks somewhere back east, I recalled.

CHAPTER 7

    W E WEREN’T TALKING much when we got back to the cabin, and we didn’t ride up to the door until it was nigh on to noontime.
    Nobody in his right mind takes a man’s death lightly, and Johnny Ward had been young and full of living. It worried me, seeing him lie like that, but it worried me more when I scouted around, for I found the tracks of that horse with the leather-shod hoofs.
    Johnny had been shot in the back whilst walking away from somebody or something, and my guess he was shot at a range of no more than seventy feet or so. Studying out what sign I could find, it was plain enough that Johnny was in no hurry, wherever he figured to go or whatever he was walking away from.
    After a lifetime of reading sign a man can see a lot more than appears on the ground, and although I hadn’t much to go on, it was my feeling that the last thing Johnny Ward expected was to get shot. He had stopped once as he walked away, maybe to say something or to wave, and then he had walked on four or five steps further.
    Whoever had fired that shot had pulled off about as cold-blooded a killing as I ever did see, nailing him with the first carefully aimed shot, and killing him dead.
    There was nobody at the cabin when we got back,and no sign that anybody had been there. Neither of us felt much like talking, or even making up a meal. Eddie put together some baking powder biscuits, and we had some baked beans. We made a meal of those, and then I went to the ford and studied to see if anybody had crossed, but there were no tracks.
    Standing there beside the Hanging Woman, listening to the water ripple along the banks, I suddenly realized that Eddie and me were fairly up against it. This was no scare. This was the real thing, and we were facing up to trouble, sure enough.
    It gave a man something to ponder, realizing of a sudden that he might go the way Johnny Ward had. There