Louis L'Amour Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a trail—just two faintly marked wheel tracks—I puttered around, cleaning the grease from the rifles and loading themup. Then I did the same with the pistols. Come dark, we pulled off the road under some trees where there was a little branch that trickled down toward the Tongue River.
    “No fire,” I said, as Eddie started to gathering sticks. “Cold camp.”
    We split a can of beans and a loaf of bread, and afterwards we had a can of peaches. They tasted almighty good.
    Where we’d stopped there was a small patch of grass among the scattered trees, and we picketed our horses, then moved back under the trees and rolled out our beds.
    If anybody was hunting us, they could follow those wagon tracks with no trouble. Only they weren’t close behind us, or I’d have seen them. So if they didn’t know exactly where we stopped, they might overlook us.
    There’d been no chance to sight in that rifle, but I put it down beside me. I didn’t know whether I could hit anything with the six-shooter or not. Most of the hands I knew packed one around, and if they didn’t wear it on their belt they had one tucked away in their bedroll. Me, I’d never even owned one. Even cheap as they were, if a body wanted to buy one secondhand, they were too expensive for me. Usually I’d owned a Winchester, but that was a meat gun, and a man never knew when he might have to brush off a bunch of scalp-hunting Sioux. Though that sort of thing had about come to an end, everybody was wary.
    Once I was stretched out under the trees, I started trying to figure out what Bill Justin had in mind. It seemed to me he was hoping we’d get to the line campof the Hanging Woman without anybody knowing we were there, and he wanted us fixed for a fight when they did find out.
    If the rustlers were that bad, Eddie and me could look for trouble. Real trouble.
    Time enough to cross that creek when we came to it, so I stretched my muscles a mite, and then sort of let myself relax whilst looking at the stars through the leaves.
    Those earlier remarks of Eddie’s were beginning to nag at me. Come to think of it, I didn’t amount to much. Top hand in anybody’s outfit, but what did that mean? Forty a month if I was lucky, thirty if I wasn’t, and ridin’ the grub line a third of the time, seemed like. And when I got to be an old man, swamping somebody’s saloon, or wranglin’ saddle stock around a ranch, or rustlin’ wood for the cook. It didn’t give a man a lot to look forward to.
    Somewhere along there I dropped off, and it was coming on toward morning when my eyes flipped open. Just like that, and I was wide awake, and my hand on the action of that Winchester.
    “That there’s a wagon track,” I heard somebody whisper, “sure as shootin’.”
    “Hell,” another voice said, “old Justin’s been over this here trail a half a dozen times with a wagon.”
    “This here track’s fresh!”
    “I got to see it.”
    “You think I’m crazy? I’d have to light a match, and if it is that damn fool Pike, he’d be likely to blow my head off. He never did have no more brains than a cougar.”
    Me, I half raised the Winchester. I’d a mind to dust ‘em a mite to teach them their manners.
    “They don’t call him Pronto for nothin’.”
    There was a moment of quiet, then the second voice said, disgusted-like, “Aw, come on! You goin’ to crawl around there all night? So there’s wagon tracks! I can show you wagon tracks in this country been there twenty years!”
    There was a creak of leather, then the sound of horses moving off through the grass. I lay back and picked out the one bright star that seemed left and tried to remember where I’d heard those voices before.
    After a while I heard a faint stir from where Eddie lay, and thinks I, he’s been awake, too. He was layin’ for them. It gave a man a good feeling to know he wasn’t alone out there. Just the same, as I stretched out to collect interest on a night’s sleep, I couldn’t