The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

waited. The very place of concealment was obvious enough. It was not a hundred yards away, in a cluster of boulders and rock cedar, not unlike his own resting place. That the murderer had waited there was undoubted, but why?
    Clip Haynes pushed his hat back on his head and rolled a smoke.
    First, what were the facts? McCarty, Greenley, and Manning, three of Basin City’s most reputable business men, had hired him as marshal. But Rafe Landon, owner of the biggest mine, and the most popular saloon and dance hall, had not come along. Why?
    Secondly, someone had killed and robbed Tommy McCarty. Obviously, the killer had not robbed him, for both Clip and Ruth Manning had been too close. Then, the obvious conclusion was that Tommy had been robbed before he was killed!
    Clip sat up suddenly, his eyes narrowed. He was remembering the chafed spot on Tommy’s wrist, dimly seen in the light from the High-Stake Palace. Chafed from what? The answer hit him like a blow. Tommy McCarty had not only been robbed, but had been bound hand and foot! He had escaped, and then had been shot.
    But why shoot him afterward? That didn’t make sense. He already had lost the money, and if the thief had any doubts, he would have killed him the first time. The only answer was that Tommy McCarty had been mistaken for somebody else!
    But who? Obviously, whoever had waited on the hillside the previous night had been expecting someone to come along. So far, Clip knew of only three people besides McCarty who might have come along. Wade Manning, Ruth Manning, and himself. But wait! What was Wade doing on the road so late? And why was Ruth traveling alone on that lonely trail?
    There was always the possibility that Wade Manning, knowing Perry actually was Clip Haynes, had planned to kill him for the reward offered in Arizona. However, Manning didn’t look like a cowardly killer, and the theory didn’t, somehow, fit the facts.
    Clip Haynes shook his head with disgust. If it was just a matter of shooting it out with some tough gunman, he was all right, but figuring out a problem like this was something he had not bargained for. It was unlikely, however, that anyone would want to shoot Ruth, or that anyone guessed she was on the road that night. That left Wade and himself as the prospective victims of the killer, for by now he would know his mistake.
    Three men had known that he was taking the canyon trail to town—Doc Greenley, Wade Manning, and Buff McCarty. Clip’s eyes narrowed. Why, since he had been riding slowly, and Tommy McCarty probably at a breakneck speed, hadn’t Tommy passed him? Obviously because Tommy had come out on the trail at some point between where Clip had first heard his running horse and the point where he had seen the boy killed.
    Mounting, Clip turned the big black down the mountainside to the trail. As he rode along he scanned the edges carefully. Suddenly, he reined in.
    The hoof-prints of the big black were plainly seen, but suddenly a new trail had appeared, and Clip could see where a horse had been jumped from the embankment into the trail. Dismounting, and leading the black, he climbed the embankment and followed the trail. As soon as he saw it was plainly discernible, he swung into the saddle again and followed it rapidly.
    Two miles from the canyon trail, at the end of a bottleneck canyon, he found a half-ruined adobe house. Here the trail ended.
    Dismounting cautiously, Clip walked up to the ’dobe. The place was empty. Gun in hand, he knelt, examining the hardpacked earth of the floor.
    The earth was scuffed and kicked as though by a pair of heels, such marks as a man might make in a struggle to free himself. But there were no ropes in sight, nothing.…
    He froze. A shadow had fallen across him. He knew a man was crouching at the window behind him. His own gun was concealed from the watcher by his body. Apparently studying the earth, he waited for the first movement of the man behind him.
    It