Louis L'Amour (11 page)

Nobody said a word. Eddie rounded up their horses, and we loosened the knot on one man’s ropes. Then we started our cattle back across the river and toward home.

“You may be sorry for that,” Eddie commented mildly. “That Cones … he don’t like you none at all.”

“They have their chance.”

If they were smart, they’d ride out of the country, and they’d start right away; but knowing something of people’s unwillingness to believe, until too late, that anything could happen to them, I doubted if they would go. Nonetheless, I wanted nothing to do with hanging any man.

We kept close check on our back trail, but nobody followed us.

“You’re a kindly man, Pronto,” Eddie said, “but you can only be kindly up to a point, when you live in a world where evil men go armed.”

He was right, of course, and I was realist enough to know it. And I knew myself well enough to know that I’d go along with being kindly just so far, and then I was going to spread my feet and start swinging. Last thing I wanted was trouble, but I’d had it before, a-plenty, and met it.

During the night there was a light fall of snow, but it was gone by noon the next day. There was good grass, and we grazed the stock as we went back.

Two nights later we were sitting in the cabin by the fire. Eddie was reading an old copy of the
Police Gazette
, and I was studying through a beat-up old
History of England
that somebody had left there. It had been there all the while, but I hadn’t thought of opening it up until I’d talked with Ann Farley.

I’d scarcely got started reading when there came a call outside. “Halloo, the house!” And after a minute or two, “Pike? Can we talk?”

Eddie reached for his rifle, and I got up, dowsing the lamp. I had known that voice.

I opened the door and called out, “Tom? Tom Gatty?”

“Sure as shootin’!” came the answer. “You old Souwegian, you! It’s good to see you!” He came riding up, but walking his horse easy so there wouldn’t be any mistake.

“You alone?” he asked. He tried to peer past me into the blackness of the cabin, but I knew he could see nothing. There was a red glow of fire on the hearth, but Eddie was out of sight near the window.

“I owe you ten dollars, Tom,” I said. “I’ll pay you when I draw down my first pay.”

“Aw, forget it! What’s ten dollars?” He was riding a fine black horse with a new saddle and bridle. He looked prosperous, all right.

He hooked one leg around the pommel of his saddle and started to build a cigarette. “You were kind of rough on my boys,” he said. “You set them afoot.”

“They didn’t have to walk as far as they made us ride after them.”

He threw me a sharp look. “How’d you figure that?”

“Tom, you forget who you’re talkin’ to. I’ve known you too long, and right away I pegged it. The way they pushed their stock I knew they’d have to have horses stashed and waiting for them somewhere. Knowing you, I knew where that would be—just where we camped one time a few years back. I recall you made some comment at the time, how hard the place would be to find unless somebody knew about it. You had horses waiting in that notch back of Dead Horse Creek.”

He chuckled, but there was no humor in it. He was
sore to think I’d remembered that place. Maybe he’d forgotten how he found it with me along.

“Pronto, why don’t you two throw in with us? We’re going to get rich, believe me.”

“You know Roman Bohlen?”

“You wouldn’t even have to rustle,” he continued. “You could handle one of our camps.”

“Roman Bohlen,” I said, “is going to sweep this country, and he’ll be carryin’ extra ropes. If I was you I’d light out, Tom. No, I’ll be damned if I throw in with you. You know me. I always rode for the outfit, and I always will.”

He was irritated, but I thought he was worried, too, but not about Bohlen. “Pike, there are some of the boys who didn’t favor me coming here tonight. They were for burning you out, and either running you off or leaving you dead. If you don’t come with us, get out … I won’t tell you again.”

“Tom,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “you know better than to try scarin’ me. I don’t scare.”

He swung his horse. “The hell with you!”

He started to ride off, then he stopped. “Pronto, who rides a horse with leather-shod hoofs?”

“Whoever rides that horse,” I said, “killed Johnny Ward. There will be deputies down here hunting around.”

Then he rode away, but it left me thoughtful. Tom Gatty didn’t know who rode that horse any more than I did, which meant it was hardly likely the rider was a rustler—at least, not one of his outfit, anyway.

Actually, few rustlers were killers. They stole cattle, and if they killed a man it would be while running
off the cattle or during a capture; it would be during a fight, and not by intention.

Ice froze on the creek that night, and with daylight I was out showing Eddie how to chop a proper drinking hole for stock.

T
HERE FOLLOWED A week of as pleasant a time as any working cowhand is likely to have. On the second day Eddie stayed in and made a washtub full of bear sign, and whenever we went out a-horseback we taken a saddlebag stuffed with those doughnuts.

It was clear, cold, and still most of the time. We kept the holes in the ice open for the cattle, checked the tracks in the snow, and snaked one big old steer out of a brushy bottom where he got himself tangled up. Toward the end of the week, Eddie killed a mountain lion that was stalking a calf. Two days later I rode into a pack of wolves and killed two of them.

Because of the hard work we had done in the weeks before the first snow we had most of the Justin stock in an area not over five miles square. There was shelter from the wind if they wanted to seek it, there was a plenty of feed, and there was water. That same stock had been scattered over thirty miles of country before we went to work.

Nobody came by our way, and we saw no more horse tracks of any kind.

Eddie was as good a hand as a man could wish, and he learned fast and stayed with it.

Had this spell in my life come to me before Eddie
put that idea in my mind, I’d have enjoyed it more. Maybe it wasn’t Eddie alone, for from time to time, and more often of late, I’d been somehow discontented. Now the idea of going back into town and whipping Butch Hogan didn’t seem the way it had. Nor did the thought of just being holed up warm and snug for the winter please me as much as I’d expected. I kept thinking of next spring, when I’d be no further along except for my winter’s wages—little enough in cash, when a man came to think of it.

Maybe the realization that Ann Farley was just over the rise in the mountain worried me, too. Supposing I met a girl like that, supposing I wanted to ask her to have me, what could I offer her? Life on a cowhand’s wages?

So all the time I rode the range my mind kept worrying with the idea of what to do. From time to time I’d recall what Tom Gatty had said about getting rich, but that idea didn’t take any hold in my mind, and I’d no sooner think of it than I’d throw it out and turn to thinking of something else. But how was a cowpoke to get ahead?

Late one afternoon who should come riding in but Tom Gatty again.

“Pronto,” he said, “I hadn’t figured to come back no-how, and now that I’ve come, it’s to ask a favor.”

“Go right ahead and ask. You’ve favored me a time or two.”

“Well,” he said, “it ain’t good for me in Miles City right now. Folks take notions, like you advised when I was here last. I can’t go into town, and I’m fresh out of Vegetable Balsam, and if I don’t get some I’m likely to die.”

“We’ve got some Gardner’s Horse Liniment,” I suggested. “Have you tried that? Good for man or beast.”

“I got to have the Balsam. And don’t take nothing else, Pronto. Don’t let them talk you into no cheap, untried medicines. I don’t want nothing but Dr. Godbold’s Vegetable Balsam of Life.”

“We’ve got some Dr. Robertson’s Stomach Elixir,” Eddie commented. “My mama swore by it.”

Tom Gatty eyed him suspiciously. “I don’t know. That there Balsam is the best I ever did see, and nobody has tried more patent medicines than me. Ain’t that right, Pronto?”

“Oh, sure! Back in the bunkhouse, days when we punched cows together, Tom had his own shelf right over his bunk. You never did see such a pile of medicines.”

“Hell, Pronto, I’m a sick man! You know that. I’ve always been ailin’ and might have died years ago if it hadn’t been for that
Home Medical Adviser
I found in the line cabin that winter. Why, I was coastin’ right down the slope into the grave until I learned what all was wrong with me.”

“That’s right, Eddie.” I spoke seriously. “You’d have thought him the picture of health, never had a sick day in his life, eat enough for two men and work as hard as any man—or half as hard, we might say. And then he found that book.”

“Deceiving, that’s what it is. I could have been dead right now. Thing that saved me was Peter’s Pills, that and Dr. Fahnestock’s Celebrated Vermifuge. Even so, I like not to made it until spring.”

He accepted a cup of coffee. “I tell you nobody ever had more symptoms than me. I used to set up half the night studyin’ that there
Adviser
, until I near wore it out. I hadn’t nothin’ to read but that and a mail-order catalogue, but the catalogue couldn’t hold a candle to that
Adviser
. Why, I’ve heard folks talk of Shakespeare, but for sheer writin’ the man who wrote the Adviser had it all over him. When he got to describin’ a disease he was somethin’ fierce! And he had him a list of operations that would curl your hair.”

Gatty took a gulp of coffee. “That Shakespeare, now. I think he
borrowed
a lot here and there. Why, ever’ once in a while I’d come on things in his plays that I’d heard folks sayin’ for years. All he did was write them down.

“And for blood and thunder! Why, he killed more folks in one story than was killed in the Newton massacree, the time those Texicans shot it out with the town marshal and Jim Riley come in at the end and summed it up for ‘em with his six-shooter.”

Gatty glanced over at the table. “What’s that I see? Don’t tell me you’ve got bear sign? Why, I could eat my weight—”

“Think you should?” I interrupted mildly. “You’re fresh out of Balsam, and I’ve heard it said doughnuts are hard to digest.”

Tom Gatty’s hand hesitated while his will poised above his appetite and lost. The hand descended and came up with a doughnut. “I ain’t had one of these in years,” he said.

Later, when Gatty had ridden off into the night carrying with him a sack of doughnuts, he was also
carrying the bottle of Dr. Robertson’s Stomach Elixir, dusty from years of standing on the shelf.

Eddie, he listened to the beat of the horse’s hoofs until they died out. “That man tried to steal our cattle,” he said.

“It wouldn’t have been polite to mention it,” I said, “on a social occasion.”

However, while Tom was tightening his cinch, I had mentioned it in a way.

“Tom,” I said, “we welcome your comp’ny, but if you know any rustlers who might still be thinking of Justin cows, you tell them to stay clean away.

“The first time I taken that as good fun … the second time I’ll come a-shootin’. I ain’t no gunfighter, an’ you know it, but you’ve seen me lay out a runnin’ antelope, and if I have to come again, this here and our previous ride are all the warning we’ll give. We’ll shoot—like we’ve been shot at—wherever we see anybody near a Justin cow.”

Tom, he just grinned at me … and then he belched.

“Sorry,” he said, and he added, “About them cows—if I come across any rustlers, my advice will be to lay off.” He gave me another grin. “I wouldn’t want to cut off the supply of bear sign.”

Just before I went inside, I felt something wet and kind of light and cold touch my cheek. I turned my head and saw snowflakes on my shoulder and sleeve.

It was cold when morning came. The inside of that cabin, even with a banked fire, was like ice. Me, I huddled under blankets and a buffalo coat, looking across the room at the fireplace and cussing myself for being the first one awake. I lay there trying to
decide how many steps it would take to cross that cold floor, how long to get a fire going, and how many steps back to the warmth of my bunk, where I’d stay until the fire was going good.

No use to lay there and wish that fire going. Long ago I learned nothing gets done just by wishing. You have to do it.

In two long steps I was across the room and grabbed up a small handful of pitch-pine slivers, slim, dark red shavings heavy with pitch. Stirring up a feeble glow among the gray of the ashes, I placed the slivers across coals and huffed and puffed until a blaze sprang up. As the fire reached the pitch and discovered what it had to burn, flames leaped up, then I piled on heavy pieces of bark and dry wood and ducked back into bed.

When I looked across the room, Eddie grinned at me. “I was hoping you’d do that,” he said, and I swore at him.

Whilst he worked up some batter for hot-cakes I went outside. It was cold … the snow lay six inches deep all over the place, and the air was still filled with heavy, slow-falling flakes.