Louis L'Amour Read Online Free PDF Page A

began to wonder where this cowpuncher got the money for that outfit. They taken him out and hung him on the bridge, just on general principles.”
    “Didn’t he give ‘em any argument?”
    “No use. He just looked down at the water and told ‘em to for God’s sake tie the knot tight, because he couldn’t swim.”
    I found that Granville Stuart, who owned one of the biggest outfits in Montana, was in town. He stopped me on the street and offered me a job, but the joker was that I’d be holed up all winter in a line camp with Powell Landusky … they called him Pike, too.
    There wasn’t a better man on the frontier. He was a cowman, trapper, hunter, woodcutter for the steamboats, and one of the best rough-and-tumble fighters you ever saw. Only he had a mean temper, and was quick to fly off the handle. We’d wind up killing each other.
    There were a hundred stories about him. One time he tackled a camp full of Indians with a clubbed rifle. They figured nobody but a crazy man would do that, and afterwards they left him alone. Another time an Indian bullet hit him in the face. He rode for a doctor, but his jaw was broken up and it pained him so much he just reached in and tore out a chunk of jawbone so big it had two teeth in it. Marked him for life. I never did hear whether tearing that piece of jawbone out made the pain any better.

    M E AND EDDIE finally went back to Charley Brown’s and hit that stewpot again. We got there early and Charley looked over at us and said, “You broke again, Pronto?”
    “You ever seen me when I wasn’t?”
    “You always paid up.” Charley put his hands onthe bar. “Pronto, do you need some cash? I can let you have some.”
    “We can sleep over to the livery,” I said, “an’ eat here until you throw us out. Soon as we find a job, we’ll ride out.”
    He stood there quiet for a minute, and then he said, “Pronto, I’m going to put you onto something you may not thank me for. Bill Justin needs two men for his line camp on the Hanging Woman.”
    “What’s wrong with that?”
    He just looked at me, and didn’t answer. Only after a minute or so had passed he said, “You boys step up to the bar.”
    We were alone in the place, but I guess he didn’t want to talk too loud. He filled a couple of cups with coffee and shoved them toward us.
    He leaned his forearms on the bar. “Pronto, this here country is walking wide open into trouble, and you’d be a fool not to see it. And that trouble may bust loose right on the Hanging Woman … that’s why that job’s open.”
    Well, I looked around at Eddie. “What do you say, boy? It’s going to be a cold winter, and a man doesn’t have to hunt far for wood up there.”
    “I been in trouble most of my life,” Eddie said, “on’y this time I’d not be alone.”
    “Charley, you tell Bill Justin he’s caught himself a couple of live ones. We’ll go.”
    We finished our coffee and started for the door.
    Just then it opened up wide, and a man filled the open space with his shoulders. It was Butch Hogan. Hogan was a bull-whacker for the Diamond R freight outfit, and a fighter from who-flung-the-chunk.
    “Howdy, there!” he said, grinning. “If it ain’t the little man who likes to fight!”
    Now I’m no little man, being five-ten and weighing an easy one-seventy; but alongside his two hundred and forty pounds and his six feet four inches, I might be considered small.
    The room was filling up, and I could see they’d been egging him on, anxious for a fight. Well, I hadn’t had no fun since the night they pitched me out of that honky-tonk back in Chicago, and maybe tomorrow I’d be headed for the breaks along Hanging Woman Creek.
    “Butch,” I said, “how tall are you?”
    “Six feet four in my socks,” he said.
    “I didn’t know they piled it that high,” I said, and hit him.

CHAPTER 4

    W HEN MY EYES opened, the sun struck right into them, but it was that spring wagon jouncing over rocks and rough road that