Hanging Woman Creek (1964) Page 5

  It was long after dark when we got back to the cabin, and we came up on it mighty slow and careful, but everything was as we’d left it. After I’d fed the stock in the corrals, I scouted around a bit.

  Not that I was looking for anything special. I just wanted to get the feel of the place after nightfall. Everything has a way of looking different at night, so I walked around sizing up the layout from all angles, studying the outlines of things against the sky, testing the night smells.

  Something about those smells worried me. There was the smell of the pines, of the creek down below, of the horses in the corral, of smoke from the house, of fresh-cut wood … but there was another faint, hardly noticeable smell. Whatever it was brought a feeling of loneliness almost of homesickness, and that I couldn’t figure. I’d had no home in so many years that I—

  Eddie stuck his head out of the door. “Come and get it,” he said, “before I throw it away.”

  Whatever that smell was, it was like a flower, like some sort of flower had just opened up. And that didn’t make sense at this time of year.

  For the next five days we had no time to think of anything or anybody. We worked the country west toward the Rosebud, and north as far as the Muddy and Skully Creek, most of the time just starting cattle drifting back to the south and our line camp. It was early for snow, but in Montana a man never could be sure, so we made a quick, scattering sweep across the country to begin, with a view to making a more careful search later if time allowed.

  Eddie Holt was a rider, no question about that, and he was a fair hand with a rope, so it took him no time at all to get the hang of it. Of course, knowing cattle comes with experience, and no man is going to get that overnight, but I told him what I could, and the rest he’d have to learn.

  The stock was in good shape, although it could stand culling. Some of the young stuff and cows carrying calves we started back toward the Hanging Woman, but we found no tracks that day except the tracks of cattle or wild life.

  Along in the late afternoon we pulled up on a ridge near the head of Wolf-Creek, and looked down the valley of the Tongue.

  “It’s a fair land,” Eddie said softly, “a fair, wild land.”

  “It is that,” I agreed.

  The bright glare was gone, the shadows softening the distance, and the coolness of evening was coming on. Far off an eagle soared against the sky … soon he’d be going in, leaving the sky to the owls and the bats. I saw a gray wolf sloping along through the trees, head down, nose reaching out for the scent of game.

  We sat motionless and not talking, just taking in the peace of eveningtime. Finally Eddie said, “It was no wonder they fought for it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and they fought, too. Not 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 knew 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, and I 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, 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 Seven.

  We 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 was a good boy, a good rider, and a good hand, and if ever there was an honest man he was one. And surely that was why he was dead, because he had been honest when somebody wanted him to be otherwise. Or that was how it shaped up.

  If it so happened that I was to go like Johnny, there was nobody to mind, nobody that would give it a thought after a few days had passed. It made a man wonder what he had done with his life.

  When I went back to the cabin Eddie was reading an old newspaper. He looked up at me. “You think the one who killed that man was the same one who’s been shooting at the door?”

  “No, there ain’t a chance of it. The person who killed Johnny wouldn’t have wasted lead. He would’ve laid out and waited for that one perfect shot, and at fairly close-up range.

  “Eddie, we got to face it. We’re up against a sure-enough killer. You see anybody riding a horse with leather-shod hoofs, don’t you turn your back—no matter who.”

  He sat quiet for a spell, and then he said, “You going to take the body in?”

  “Uh-huh. And I may have to stay for an inquest. Looks to me you’re going to be maybe a week or more on your own.”

  “Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “You just ride along about your business.”

  There were folks standing along Main Street when I rode in with Johnny. One of the first men I saw was Granville Stuart; another was Bill Justin.

  Justin was surprised when I named the dead man. “Johnny Ward? The last I heard of Johnny he was punching cows up on Cherry Creek.”

  Briefly, I told what I knew, and as I talked several men gathered around, listening. Standing on the walk some distance off, but within earshot, was a man who looked familiar, but I couldn’t make out who he was. Stuart asked me a question, and after I answered him I looked around, but the man was gone.

  Suddenly it came to me who he looked like. There’d been something about him that made me think of Van Bokkelen, whom I’d last seen back to Dakota.

  Next day they had the inquest and I gave my evidence—or as much of it as I felt should be given. In my own mind I was sure whoever rode that leather-shod horse was the guilty party, but to most people that would mean an Indian, and I wasn’t about to start an Indian scare.

  There’d be loose talk, and then somebody would organize a raid and the Indians would fight back, and we’d have a first-class war on our hands. I was sure in my mind that whoever rode that horse was no Indian, so I kept still and testified to what I had found, adding the fact that Johnny Ward was obviously shot by somebody he knew and had talked with … that he was shot down without, warning, at fairly close range.

  One thing I did say that I was immediately sorry for. They asked me could I identify the track of the killer if I saw it again, and I said I believed I could.

  And with those words I stood myself up right in the target rack of a shooting gallery.

  There were two or three strangers at the back of the room where the inquest was held, and I didn’t get a good look at them. And there was somebody else in the room who was no stranger. Jim Fargo was there.

  The place I’d got for myself was across from the livery stable, where they had a few rooms for rent. That night, on a hunch, I shifted the bed as quietly as I could, moving it to the opposite side of the room. No more than a cot it was, and it was no trick to just pick it up and move it. I had pulled off my boots and was getting undressed when I thought of those strangers at the inquest, and it came to me that one of them was Duster Wyman, who’d loaned me ten dollars back in Jimtown—the man who was supposed to be Tom Gatty’s representative in the Dakota town.

  If I hadn’t been so dogtired I’d have saddled up and lit out for the hills right then.

  Like I said, I was never any hand with a six-gun, but since Justin supplied them, I’d been carrying both a six-shooter and a Winchester. When I finally stretched out on the cot I had both of them to hand.

  The night noises slowly died away. Boots sounded on the boardwalk, a door down the street slammed, then somebody tripped over a board and swore. At last all was quiet, and I dropped off to sleep.

  Suddenly the night exploded with gunfire and I jerked up to a sitting position, six-shooter in hand. Even as I sat up I heard the ugly smash of another bullet that came through the wall, and promptly I fired through the wall in return.

  Then there was a moment of stillness, followed by a sudden uproar of voices. In the hall angry questions were called out, followed by a pounding on my door. I swung my feet to the floor and went over and opened up. The proprietor was there, and the night policeman; behind them crowded half a dozen people.

  “What happened?” the night policeman asked.

  “Somebody shot at me,” I said, “an’ I jerked up out of a sleep and fired back.”

  They walked across the room, holding a lamp high. Two bullet holes had come through the thin wall, and if I hadn’t moved the bed both of them would have hit me.

  “You moved the bed,” the proprietor said. “Did you figure on this?”

  “Man on the other side of that partition snores,” I said, “so I moved over here.”

  Funny thing was, they believed me. Most of those men knew me and they couldn’t figure any good reason for somebody wanting to kill a harmless gent like myself. For that matter, neither could I … unless I was getting in somebody’s way.

  After they left I moved the bed back across the room and went to sleep, but before I dozed off I lay there thinking that maybe this was my time to see California. Somehow I’d always wanted to go there, and they say it can be right pleasant in the winter. Only thing
was, I’d left Eddie Holt out there at the line camp, and he would need help to get through the winter.

  The more I thought of it the madder I got, and I’d never been one to back up from trouble. Maybe I would have been better off if I had.

  Come daybreak, I went up the street to the Macqueen House and treated myself to a first-rate breakfast, with all the trimmings. It was true I hadn’t much cash, but there was enough for that.

  I was still sitting there when Bill Justin came in and sat down with me.

  “How’re things?” he asked.

  “You saw Johnny Ward,” I answered.

  “I mean how’re the cattle?”

  “Good shape, mostly. I’d say they needed culling. Mr. Justin, you’re carrying a lot of dead weight out there. You could round up and ship a good herd of culls.”

  We talked cow business for a few minutes, and then Granville Stuart came in and walked over to the table. He said good morning to us and sat down.

  “Pike,” he said, “there are some of us believe it is about time to make a clean-up of eastern Montana— maybe even western Dakota.”

  Me, I just looked at him, although I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.

  “You’ve got the reputation of being a fighter.”

  “With my fist … maybe.”

  “A fighter is a fighter. I want a few good men, Pike, and we’ve got a few.” He named a couple, and when he did I looked at him and shook my head. Granville Stuart was a fine man and a good cattleman, and he was making his mark in Montana, but I’d never put much stock in vigilantes.

  “I’m no hand with a gun,” I said, “and when it comes to the law, I leave it to the law. If they can’t handle it, you’d best get somebody new.”

  “They aren’t equipped to handle it,” Stuart said. “It’s the same situation as they had at Virginia City.”

  Well, maybe it was. “No, sir,” I said. “I’ll stick to punching cows.”