Hanging Woman Creek (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  But there was something troubling me, and I could not ride easy without trying to learn what I could.

  “Too bad,” I said, “about Johnny Ward.”

  He was looking right at me when I said it, and there wasn’t so much as a flicker in his eyes. “Johnny Ward? Who was he?”

  “Cowpoke,” I said. “Nice kid.” I sipped my coffee. “Somebody shot him. Somebody he knew well enough not to be scared. Shot him in the back at close range.”

  “That’s rotten,” he said. “It’s a miserable way to go.”

  He tried to stretch out a little more and a spasm of pain crossed his face.

  “Shorty Cones is dead, too. He got to us before he died. He was shot the same way.”

  “Cones? Wasn’t he a kind of bad one? I believe he used to be around John Chinnick’s place with that outfit.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  If Philo Parley knew anything at all about the death of either man, he was better at hiding it than I would have believed. It worried me, for of one thing I was very sure. Philo Parley knew the murderer, and Philo must have been friendly to him or those tracks would not have been seen at his place—not so many, from so many different occasions. And whoever the murderer was, he was dangerous to know.

  Who could it be who had known all three—Johnny Ward, Cones, and Parley? Who was accepted on familiar terms by all of them?

  “Had many visitors lately?” I asked.

  Parley had closed his eyes. “No … very few.”

  He looked bad, so I stopped bothering him.

  We mounted up again and I led off. The trail along Otter Creek was good, for some cattle had used it, and at least one rider—I could not make out the tracks.

  “Will they follow us?” Ann asked. “Bohlen, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if they catch us they will kill you too?”

  “They’ll try.”

  Both Eddie and me kept our heads turning, not only to look back, but around us and ahead too. That mysterious killer was worrying both of us, for nothing about it fitted in, anywhere.

  “It’s got to be somebody we don’t know,” I had told him during a moment together, “somebody we don’t even suspect.”

  “Somebody nobody suspected,” he said, “looking at the way they were killed.”

  The day was cold, but it had cleared off and the sky was bright, the snow sparkled in the sunlight, the pines even seemed green instead of black. The going was hard on Parley, but there was no help for it. Part of the time, when the trail was good, we moved at a trot. Actually, there were fewer bumps than one would have expected, and he rode well.

  As we rode, I tried to figure out the trail ahead. By this time they were following us, or else we had no reason to worry that they ever would. If they followed us they would have an easy trail for part of the way, but the sun was warming the air a little, and that little would help us. It would not be warm enough to melt the snow much, but it would melt the tracks a little around the edges and make them impossible to identify. And that would be enough to make it harder to find us.

  We made a rough, quick camp on Three Mile Creek and I went out to smear as much of our trail as I could before the melting stopped and it started to freeze, which would be before long.

  The wind had started to rise, and the air was already colder.

  South of Three Mile Creek there was a ridge that pointed toward the meeting of Three Mile with Otter. King Mountain was off to the west. I rode up on the ridge and drew rein in a sort of notch where my horse would not offer an outline against the sky. The sun was in my eyes when I first topped out on the ridge, but I waited there, turning my collar up against the wind and watching up the stream and across it.

  We had left the trail that followed the Otter some distance back, crossing to the east side of the creek. Now, plain as the Big Horns against a far-off sky, I saw the riders come, single file. There were nine of them by count. They rode on down the creek, past the mouth of Three Mile, and far below they seemed to veer east, and then I lost them from sight. But I was sure they were Bohlen’s men.

  Turning my horse, I started back. My horse made almost no sound on the snow, and when the rider came out of the gulch below me, not more than fifty yards off, I wasn’t seen. It was a woman in a man’s rough clothes, riding a mule!

  She wore old overalls of the bib kind that you see mighty rarely in cow country, and she had on a beat-up old sheepskin coat and a battered hat. At first glimpse I thought it was Calamity Jane, who was one of the least attractive women I ever saw, and who dressed like that when she was freighting. But this woman was bigger. Only thing that made me sure she was a woman at that distance was her hair. It was nearly the color of Ann Parley’s, a kind of auburn, and it was done in two thick braids.

  All of a sudden she turned her head and looked right at me, and I said, “Howdy, ma’am!”

  She just went on looking at me, no more expression on her face than on a ewe sheep, but her eyes flicked back of me once to see if I was alone.

  “You seen a party of folks? Four, five of them?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I just saw them over yonder. Across the creek.”

  There was a flicker of impatience in her eyes. “Not them. This lot would have a woman with them … a young woman.”

  Something in the way she said young woman that detided me against telling, though I was not of a mind to tell anybody anything, the way things were.

  When I said nothing, she went on, “How would somebody get across the mountain up ahead … Cook Mountain, ain’t it?”

  “You foller down Otter to the East Fork,” I said. “It’s the third creek on the east bank. The trail runs right alongside. You cross the east end of the mountain and hit the trail along Pumpkin Creek.”

  She looked at me a minute without saying a word, and then she rode off down the mountain. Glancing down at her mule’s tracks, I saw them clear and neat. Small, neat hoofs had made a clearly defined track. She was nobody I had ever seen before, but she spooked me, with her coming out of nowhere like that, and the odd way she had.

  For a while I’d watched her ride down the mountain, and then I went over and headed down toward Otter Creek and the trail Bohlen’s men had followed. I was taking a roundabout route, but I realized that the sooner I got back the better, for they might have passed close enough to camp to smell smoke, though I thought they seemed well beyond it.

  After I reached the trail I saw the strange woman’s mule’s tracks proceeding right along the trail, so I cut across and went to our camp on Three Mile. It was shading into dark when I got back.

  Ann was drawn-looking as she sat beside her brother, who was unconscious or asleep. Eddie, his eyes heavy from lack of sleep, came over to me as I stripped the saddle from my horse.

  “He’s in bad shape,” he said. “I don’t know whether he’ll last or not.”

  I stood there with my hands resting on the horse, feeling as low as ever I had in my born days. This was a man I had liked. We’d never talked much. We’d never spent a lot of time together, but there’d been some nameless kind of sympathy between us. He was the sort of man who, if you were caught in a tight spot, you’d never think to look around at—you’d just know he was there, doing what ought to be done.

  Eddie handed me a cup when we moved over to the fire and I burned my mouth and throat gulping the hot coffee. But after the coffee and some boiled beef, I felt better, and I told them about seeing that party of Bohlen’s men.

  “Won’t be long,” I said, “until they realize they’re ahead of us. Then they’ll sit down and wait.”

  “It’s a big country,” was Eddie’s only comment.

  It wasn’t that big. Unless we took a long sweep around the Cook Mountains, there were only two trails across that I knew of, and one of them I’d just advised that strange woman to take. That was the trail most used, and more than likely that was where Bohlen and his men would wait for us.

  Another, shorter trail, and a much
tougher one, went over a saddle at the west end of the mountains, and then down Bridegroom Creek. I decided that was the one we’d best take.

  “Get some sleep, Eddie,” I said. “I’ll wake you up at midnight.”

  Ann came to the fire after he’d curled up in his blankets. When I described to her the woman I’d met on the trail, she exclaimed, “Why, that’s the woman who threw away the beans!”

  She explained that. “It was the day after you left me at Philo’s. He was asleep inside the cabin. I heard someone coming, and when I looked out, this woman was riding into the yard carrying a covered pot. I stepped outside the door to say hello, and she took one look at me and threw the pot on the ground. Then she turned around and rode away. I called after her, but she didn’t stop. When I went out there, I found it was a crock of baked beans. She had thrown them out on the ground.”

  I chuckled, and Ann glanced at me kind of sharp. “Is that amusing?”

  “Sure. She’s just some woman who dotes on your brother. Plain as the horn on a saddle.”

  “You mean that when she saw me she thought I was some other woman of Philo’s?”

  “What else?”

  When at last I got a chance to sleep, I slept like the dead, and Eddie had to shake me several times before he got me awake. It was the first time I could remember that I’d slept like that, for I’m by nature a light sleeper and an early riser.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  Eddie shrugged. “He’s awake. He looks better. He talks better. Pronto, if we could get that man to a doctor we could save him yet. I just know we could.”

  “We’ll do it.”

  “Somebody was prowlin’ about last night. Somebody who spooked the horses a time or two.”

  I pulled on my boots and stamped into them, and then reached for my coat. I checked my pistol and my rifle, and on a sudden hunch, stuffed my pockets with rifle cartridges.

  “We’ve got to figure on trouble, Ann,” I said as she came up. “We’ve got three days to go, traveling the way we are, and somewhere in those three days they will be wanting to kill us all. For if we reach Miles City and tell about the attack on your brother and you, Roman Bohlen won’t have a friend from here to Cheyenne.”

  Our horses were in bad shape, for the feed had been poor. We had left with a little corn, but that was gone now, and if they lasted to Miles City we’d be lucky.

  By high noon we were atop the pass that crossed the saddle to the head of Bridegroom Creek, and we paused there for a breather. The air was crisp and cold, but pleasant. The horses were steaming from the tough climb. Ann came up beside me and we sat our horses looking out over the broken, half-forested country, crossed by several creeks.

  “I still say it’s a lovely land,” Ann said. “I could live here forever!”

  “They have a saying that it’s hell on horses and women.”

  “It may be that, but I’ve a fondness for it, and as for Philo, he’s actually thriving on it. He’s getting better. Now he wants to ride a horse—he says we could go that much the faster.”

  Just then snow fell from a pine branch some distance up the slope. “Look out!” I yelled, and grabbed Ann around the waist and leaped my horse into the rocks and brush.

  A blast of rifle fire raked the spot where we’d been, and up the slope I heard Bohlen’s voice. “Get them! Get every damned one of them!”

  I dropped Ann as I left the saddle, and when I hit the ground I lit running, rifle in hand. I turned and, crouching, ran to get hold of the trace-chains we’d hooked to the sled.

  Philo was lying there, his face white but his eyes lit with a hard fire. “Hand me down a rifle,” he said. “I’ll not be done out of this.”

  Eddie was nowhere in sight; one horse was down and dying. They had trapped us for fair.

  Chapter Fifteen.

  Philo lay in the trail, his sled hitched to a dying horse. Unhooking the trace chains, I dug in my heels and dragged the sled back under the brush.

  On our west a peak some two to three hundred feet high lifted above the trail, while on the east side it broke back more gradually, and there was a tumble of boulders, brush, and fallen trees, the latter a leftover from some by-gone landslip. It was among these we had taken refuge.

  “Ann, get him off that sled and down in there.” I indicated a dark hole where logs had fallen across some boulders and brush had grown up around. “And get all the blankets and grub.”

  Working my way into a crack among the rocks that gave me a view of the slope above, I waited. Though I was never a fast hand with a six-shooter, I’d stack up with anybody I ever saw with a rifle. But I’d never had to shoot at a man to kill, except some Indians, long ago.

  Common sense told me we were finished. We just weren’t going to get out of this. At the same time my own stubborn nature wouldn’t let me do anything but bow my neck and try. I could no more quit than I could spread wings and fly out of there.

  Suddenly, on the slope far above, a rider appeared. He was working his way down toward us, sliding his horse, and he was in sight just for the time it takes for a good long breath. Only I had been expecting him. The rifle came up in one easy movement, and I squeezed off my shot as my sights registered on him.

  He was a good four hundred yards off, but he jerked, kind of twisted in the saddle, and fell, his head toward the horse’s heels, his foot caught in the stirrup. It seemed like they all shot at once then, and well they did, for it gave me a chance to locate my trouble; and believe me, it was all around.

  Of a sudden there was a rush of boots on gravel, and when I turned to shoot there was Eddie. He had a raw furrow across the side of his cheekbone where a bullet had bled him, and there was blood on the side of his shirt.

  “You hit bad?’

  “Not so bad as I’ll hurt walkin’ all the way to Miles City. My horse took off a-runnin’.”

  Up the slope there was an occasional sound. Obviously they were working in around us to cut off any retreat; if we figured to try to get out, now was the time. If they got us pinned in here, they could keep us until hell froze over and the devil had icicles in his beard.

  Behind us was a slanting wall of rock that sloped back steeply for thirty or forty feet to level ground above. On our left the trail dipped down, winding down the mountain toward the head of Bridegroom Creek. In front of us were huge slab-like boulders, and the space between them and the wall behind us varied from three to maybe twelve feet, much of it covered over by logs and debris. At the far end, away from the trail, where Ann and Philo had gone, was that sort of cave under the logs and fallen rock.

  Eddie and me went in, and found Philo lying on the ground, several feet back, but Ann was gone.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “All right?” He smiled at me. “How could I be all right? Ann’s gone to look for a way out.” He indicated an opening toward the back, on the downhill side, and when I went back and looked down I could see a crevice in the rocks down which water had run at some time or other.

  It opened into a deep canyon, if you could call it that, not over six or eight feet wide, and a wild, unholy-looking place it was. Along the edge there was a sort of trail made by deer or elk, barely wide enough for them to set their feet. The gorge was partly shielded from above by trees and brush growing out of the walls and along the top.

  Just as I was about to start down looking for Ann, she came climbing back up. “It’s a way out,” she said. “There’s a brook down there … or a creek, as you call it, running due north.”

  “Eddie, you help Ann get Philo on a horse,” I said. “He’s in no shape to ride, but if he stays here he won’t be in any shape to walk or even crawl, so he’d better try it. Then you start down the creek, but keep a lookout.”

  “What about you?” Ann asked.

  “I’ll hang back for a bit. Make ‘em think we’re dug in to fight it out.”

  It was almighty quiet there after they’d left. The only sound was the wind in the pines. The a
ir was all vibrant and dancing, the way it is sometimes when the snow is melting. Once, back up the slope, I heard a pine cone fall. But there was no other sound for a long time. Just when I was getting worried about the others, I heard the sound of a man sliding in gravel, and the next minute a head and shoulders stuck over the sloping rock behind me. I was squatting down against the boulders on the other side and when his head came over, my rifle came up and his eyes found me a split second before the bullet took the top of his head off.

  He let go of everything and spilled over the rock, then slowly came full into sight, his rifle still gripped in his hand. He slid to the bottom of the slope and I walked over and picked up his rifle, then peeled off his gunbelt and hand gun. He had another cartridge belt looped over one shoulder and under the other arm, so I took that loo. Before this shindig was over I might need all the ammunition I could get.

  After a minute a voice called, “Al?”

  “You want him,” I called back, “you come an’ get him.”

  Somebody swore, and then I heard Bohlen. “Pike, you’re a damned fool! Why fight us? You’ll never work another day in this country, and you know it. Now, you come on up here and I’ll give you fifty dollars and you can ride out of the country, nobody the wiser.”

  “Don’t you miss any meals waitin’ for me, Roman,” I said cheerfully. “You may get me, but it’s going to cost you. Why, we’ve got two of your men now. Leaves seven, doesn’t it?”

  Shifting my position a little, I backed toward the cave. It was time to give Bohlen something to worry about, something other than what would result if any of us got away.

  “Hear about Gatty?” I called out conversationally. “We found Shorty Cones all shot up. Some big rustler outfit came and cleaned them out, lock, stock, an’ barrel.”

  “Serves ‘em right!” Bohlen was closer now.

  “You mean you want an outfit that tough for neighbors? Listen, Roman, that Tom Gatty was no pilgrim. If that outfit wiped them out, what will they do to your stock? Why, I’d lay a bet they’re sweeping your range right now! You won’t have enough beef left to buy a cigar.”