Louis L'Amour Read Online Free PDF

woke me up.
    It took me a minute or two to realize where I was, and when I did, I didn’t like it. There I was, lying on my back on the floor of a wagon with boxes and sacks all around me, and my head felt like it had been kicked by a mule.
    There’s nothing like lying on the bottom of a wagon whilst the horses are trotting downhill over a rough slope to shake a man up, but when I started to rise I wished I’d had another idea. A shot of pain took me in the side, and when I grabbed my hand to it I fell back on the wagon-bed.
    Eddie was settin’ up on the driver’s seat and he looked around at me. “Well, he didn’t kill you, anyway.”
    “Who? Who didn’t kill me?”
    “That Hogan, from the Diamond R. He sure enough did a fair country job of dressin’ you down, boy. You’re lucky to be alive.”
    “I do anything to him?”
    “Whatever you done was a mistake. You knocked him down, and up to that time he’d only been funnin’. After that he set out to take you apart.”
    Eddie drew up the team in the shade of a cottonwood.“I was about to wake you up,” he said. “I don’t know this here country, an’ maybe I’m lost. That Mr. Justin, he just pointed me this way and said to follow the wheel tracks until you woke up.”
    There was a canteen in the wagon and I sloshed some water around in my mouth, then dumped some over my head and the back of my neck. The water was still cold, for it was early morning, and it felt good.
    “I’ll say one thing,” Eddie commented. “For a man who does everything wrong, you ain’t bad. You troubled him. A time or two there, I’d say you troubled him.”
    Looking around to see where we were, I said to him, “You must’ve started before daylight.”
    “Yes,
suh!
I surely did. That Mr. Justin he came to me in the livery where we were sleepin’ and he said he wanted me to take you to the edge of town. The wagon would be waitin’ there … and he didn’t want anybody to know where you was goin’.”
    That didn’t sound like Bill Justin, but a lot of things had happened since I’d been away.
    “Eddie,” I said, “you make us up a batch of coffee. I got to study this out.”
    He started digging around in the wagon, hunting for coffee and a pot, but all of a sudden he pulled up short and stood quiet. Then he said, “Pronto, you come see this here.”
    What he was showing me were two brand-new Winchester 73’s, and boxes with about five hundred rounds of ammunition. Alongside the rifles lay two .44-calibre Colts, both new. And with them was a note, scrawled on a paper greasy with gun oil.
    I been missing stock
.
    That was all, with just his initials signed to it, but, with all the guns, and coming from a sober man like Bill Justin, it seemed he must figure he was sending us into the middle of something.
    “You want to quit?” I said.
    Eddie chuckled. “Where we goin’ to go? Mighty soon there’ll be snow fallin’, and I never did like riding the grub line in snow country.”
    We drank up our coffee and Eddie smoked a cigarette, and I dug around in my pocket for the butt end of that cigar. When I found it, it was all mashed to nothing. But no use to throw it away, so I put the tobacco in my mouth and chewed it, although I’d never been a hand to chew.
    From what Charley Brown had said in his saloon, and now Bill Justin, they must believe that the Hanging Woman country was where the trouble lay, or some of it.
    Everybody knew Bill Justin’s stock. He had good stuff—mighty few longhorns, mostly shorthorn stock brought over the trail from Oregon, and bred up with a couple of bulls brought back from the East. Justin was a shrewd man, and he took account of range conditions. He grazed less stock than most, but on account of that it carried more beef, and better beef. He got premium prices wherever he sold.
    Now, such stock was hard to hide, and harder to ship. If he was missing stock, somebody was playing a mighty tight game.
    While we rolled along what passed