Hanging Woman Creek (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  “Like hell!”

  “Figure it for yourself. You’ve got nobody at the ranch. They’ll clean you from hell to breakfast!”

  A shot smashed into the logs not far from where I was, so I shot back, then yelled: “You talk to yourself, d’you hear? I’m through talkin’ … but I’ll laugh at you when you can’t even hire a lawyer to keep you from hanging!”

  Ducking back into the cave, I ran to the back and scrambled swiftly and silently down the deep, narrow crevice in the rock.

  The others had made good time. I had to run and walk almost two miles before I caught up with them. Parley looked like a ghost, sitting up there on that horse, but he was game. He gave me a feeble grin and said, “I knew you’d make it, Pike. What happened?”

  Glancing ahead to where Ann rode, I lowered my voice. “We’ve two less to worry about.”

  We had only three horses now, and one of us had to travel afoot, which was what I was doing. Not that I liked it. Me, I was a cowhand, and no cowhand will walk across a street if he can ride. Not that I hadn’t done a sight of walking, time to time. Still, we made good time. The country was not so rough now, and though avoiding the regular trail we could still keep to pretty good going.

  It was long after dark before I led them into a hollow in the mountains to camp. After it was dark I’d turned at right angles and gone due east into rough country by a little-known route that I’d followed a time or two. From here on I knew the country somewhat better, and the hollow in which we camped was not likely to be found, unless in the daylight.

  All of us were all in, so we took a chance and built a small fire in the hollow among some boulders and fixed us a hot meal, although we were running short on everything but coffee. When we had eaten I smothered the fire and crawled back under the brush to rest. Eddie needed rest as much as I did, and this time we left to our broncs the job of keeping guard. They were not long from the wilds, and they would be apt to warn us of trouble. Nevertheless, I woke up twice, during the night and prowled around, talking quietly to the horses and listening into the night, but I heard nothing.

  By the time the sun was topping out on the Black Hills over east beyond the Powder, I was high up on a ridge of the mountain studying the country behind us.

  The air was clear and sharp, and I saw them at almost the first glance. They were miles off, north of Beaver Creek, and raising angry dust at us. They must have missed our right-angle turn, and were hunting tracks where we hadn’t made any.

  By the time I came down off the mountain everybody was packed and ready to go.

  Parley reached into a saddlebag. “Did you ever wear moccasins, Pike? They’ll beat those boots for hiking or running.”

  They were almost a perfect fit, and they surely felt good. Parley wasn’t the first rider I’d known who packed a pair of moccasins for wear around camp, though it wasn’t the usual thing. I’d seen him wearing moccasins around his cabin a time or two.

  Ann rode alongside me, and I let her carry my rifle, making that much less weight for me. We nooned in a shallow place among low grass hills, with no trees around and no water but what we carried in our one canteen. There was a trickle of water in a creek bed and Eddie led the horses there to water, a good hundred yards off, while we brewed coffee on a buffalo-chip fire.

  Nobody was talking. I still was dead beat, and so were the others. We drank our coffee and dowsed our fire, and when Eddie came back Parley was asleep or passed out, I couldn’t tell which. Ann sat close to him, still sipping her coffee.

  “We ain’t going to make it this way,” I said. “I’m about beat up from hiking and running.” I took a swallow of coffee. “Eddie, you got to take Parley and Ann on into Miles City.”

  They just looked at me, too tired to ask the obvious question. “I’m going to get me a horse,” I said. “I’m through walking. I’m going to get it from them, and I’m going to make a try at setting them afoot.”

  “You’ll get killed,” Ann said. “And you’d not be in this at all, neither of you would, if it hadn’t been ior us.”

  Me, I wasn’t paying any attention. All the time I’d been running along on sore feet I’d been getting madder by the minute, and now I was really ready for trouble, and I wasn’t about to wait for it. I’d been chased about as far as I was going to run, and if they wanted fight they were going to get it.

  If I had to take on that whole crowd to get me a horse, then I’d take them on.

  The sky was gray again, and it looked like more snow, and we were still a good distance from Miles City. “You go along,” I said. “I’m going to make me a fight.”

  Eddie looked at me without speaking. He wanted to be with me, I knew that, but somebody had to care for Philo, and somebody had to keep them moving.

  So I took a stick and laid it out for them. “You keep going due north,” I said, “and you can’t miss it. Over east is Pumpkin Creek, but she bends kind of wide toward the east, so don’t waste around trying to follow it. You just keep north. Somewhere up yonder you’ll have to cross the Pumpkin or the Tongue, but there’s a crossing near where they join up. Try for that and cross over and go on into Miles City.”

  Eddie went to get the horses and I checked my rifle. Ann stood there, looking big-eyed at me, almost as if maybe she wasn’t going to see me any more—and maybe she wasn’t.

  Right then my muscles were sore, my feet were blistered, and my mind was all in a bind with stubbornness. It was the meanness in me that made me want to wait, just as much as it was wanting to give them a running start toward Miles City. If I could get at Bohlen’s horses, or even hold his men up for a few hours, the others might make it on in. Otherwise it was going to be a fight all the way into town.

  “Ann,” I said, “Philo’s got a chance. It’s up to you and Eddie to get him there. I’m going to hang back and stir up trouble. You go along now.”

  She stood there, a serious smile on her face. “Barney,” she said, “I think you’re the finest, most genuine man I ever knew!”

  That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man. I felt my neck getting red and hunted around for words. But I couldn’t find any that wouldn’t make me sound more of a fool than I was.

  “You better get goin’,” I said. “Get your brother ready to start.”

  “If we come out of this, Barney, I’m going to stay in Montana.”

  “This is no place for an English lady.”

  “But I’m Irish, Barney, and you’ll find the Irish all over the world, the men and the women too. I’m one of a family who have had cousins who fought in the French Army, in the Spanish Army, and in India. I had a second cousin who was killed with Custer—that’s not very far from here, you said.”

  “There’s nothing here for you,” I said. “This is a rough country.”

  “Nothing for me? I think there is.”

  Me, I pulled my beat-up old hat down over my eyes and looked at my Winchester.

  “You get to Miles City,” I said, “and you tell them what happened out here. Tell them about those other killings too. And Ann—”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you turn your back to anybody. Anybody at all. You hear?”

  Eddie came up with the horses and I helped her get Philo into the saddle. He was drawn finer than any man I ever saw who was still alive and able to move.

  “Luck, Pike,” he said in a low voice, “the best of luck, man.”

  When Ann’s horse started to turn away, she suddenly reached over and touched my cheek. Eddie hesitated a moment longer. “I’ll do the best I can,” he said quietly. “You keep your hands up, boy. Don’t you let them feint you out of position.”

  He rode off and I stood there, looking after them, and now that I felt I was seeing her for the last time, I finally admitted that I was in love with Ann Parley.

  But there was no way it could do me a bit of good.

  Chapter Sixteen.

  A man has to face up to himself sometime or other. You can go on being satisfied or ducking t
he issue only so long, and then there comes a time when you start asking yourself, not what you’ve done with your summer’s wages, but with your whole life up to that minute. And more often than not the answer you have to give yourself isn’t a happy one.

  The thing a man has to realize is that it is never too late. I’ve known of many a man who has braced up aad made something of himself after he was forty, with nothing to show for the years before that but scars and the cluttering up of dead wishes. About the worst thing a man can do is to let a dream die.

  A while back, when I wasn’t much more than a youngster, I used to think often of having my own place, and of just how I’d handle it An idea like that in your mind doesn’t just lie fallow; it builds up and gathers background, trying to fit itself for realization. Here and there you pick up a thought or an idea, you work for somebody else who does things well or badly, and you add to your little stock of information, and you do it mostly without thinking.

  You get to studying range conditions, and the effects of different kinds of grass or forage, and all the while you are learning. Every idea is a seed and, like a seed, it germinates. Only you have to feed it to make it grow properly. My trouble was that after a lot of years of thinking, I’d sort of fallen into the rut of working for the other guy, of riding into town, having myself a time, fighting somebody who was supposed to be tough, and riding back home to do the same thing. The idea was still there, but it was growing in a mighty spindly fashion.

  A man never starts to get old until he starts to forget his dream. Somebody said once that nature abhors a vacuum; well, from all I’d seen, I would say that nature dislikes anything that doesn’t produce. And me? Maybe this was my time to die, because so far as I could recall I’d produced nothing but a day’s work for a day’s pay, I’d been honest, hard-working; I’d paid no attention to rain, snow or hail, I’d done my job, breaking the rough ones, pulling ornery steers out of bogs, eating the dust of roundups and the bawling sounds of roundup cattle on drives.

  Only my dream wasn’t dead. Until a few days ago it had just been lying there, starving for lack of hope. In a sort of way Ann made it come alive. There was never a thought in my mind that she was for me. She had breeding, education, a background suited to a woman like her. Philo was a tough, strong man who had to be somewhere to use his toughness and his strength, but Ann … ?

  I was thinking about these things, but at the same time I was realizing that they would have picked up our trail by now and they would be coming on. They would make pretty good time, in spite of the fact that their horses would be showing the wear and tear of hard riding, too.

  The place I’d picked for a stand wasn’t much, just a buffalo wallow without much shelter, and they could ride around me and leave me sitting without ever knowing I was there unless I opened fire. Yet I had a hunch they would hold to what trail we had left and would come up to the stream right near by, and they would stop there for the night, or at least for a rest. It was an easy camp, a far more likely place than where we had stopped, for we’d had to think of hiding our fire.

  Not that I didn’t still have a chance if they continued on, for I could still walk. And in fact, over many miles, a man can walk down a horse—it has been done. But I felt sure they would stop. Their horses must be badly beat, their grazing had been poor, and they had been ridden hard even before Bohlen started after us. And if they did stop, I would have one of their horses.

  All my life I’d been fighting one way or other, and here and there I’d used my brains, such as they were. Mostly I’d just waded in swinging, and the thing that kept me winning—for I’d won ninety per cent of my fights—was simply that I’d never been willing to realize when I was licked. A time or two it had seemed like it, only something kept me swinging and I’d finally won.

  It wouldn’t be that way this time. This was a shooting matter. These men wanted to kill me … or some of them did … and they had to kill me.

  So I waited, sitting there in. my dusty clothes, needing a wash and a bite of food. And I figured my chances were down to nothing.

  The sun was warm, there was a dark edging of wet earth around the patches of snow, but the melting had about let up for the time being. Evening wasn’t far off, but it was still clear in the west where the sun was setting. All of a sudden, sitting there alone in the stillness, all the tiredness that had been piling up for days swept over me.

  My eyelids grew heavy, and my muscles sagged. It felt comfortable, sitting there in the waning sun. The slight breeze was cool, but not unpleasant. I stood up and looked all around, but there was nothing in sight. Sitting down again, I made myself comfortable against the side of the wallow.

  How long had we been running? How long since I’d had a full night of sleep? When all of this was over, if I was still alive, I was going to sleep for a week. But I had to stay awake now, for they would be coming at any time.

  Again I stood up and looked carefully around. Nothing … nothing in sight, anywhere. Soon it would be getting dark. I sat down, and dug through my pockets, hunting for the stub of an old cigar, but I didn’t find one. Hunching deeper into my coat, I waited.

  Suppose they did not follow our tracks, but went on and laid an ambush somewhere up the trail? It was possible, but not probable, I thought.

  My eyes were tired … I’d close them for just an instant.

  I was half asleep when the rush of hoofs brought me up with a start and I lunged to my feet. A loop sailed out of nowhere and whipped around me, jerking taut as the horse sat back hard on his haunches. A second rope slapped me in the face as it circled my throat.

  “Hold him like that.” Roman Bohlen swung down from his saddle, drawing on a pair of heavy gauntlets. He was smiling as he walked toward me.

  The others sat their horses, their faces expressionless. I’d worked with several of them, and one of the men who had a rope on me was Red Hardeman, a tough cowpuncher whom I’d whipped in a brutal fight at a dance a couple of years back. He had no reason to like me.

  “I was expecting you to lay back and wait for us, Pike, because you’re a damned fool. Now I’m going to give you something you’ve needed for a long time, and then we’re going to catch up with the rest of that crowd and make an end of this.”

  The ropes held me tight. I was wearing my sheepskin coat, which impeded movement anyway, and the ropes had pinned my arms to my side and had a strangle on my neck.

  Roman Bohlen was a big man, and strong. As he walked up to me he had the nastiest expression I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. He drew back his gauntleted fist, and then he drove it at my face, but Eddie Holt’s training had been good. Without even thinking about it, I pulled my head aside and the punch skimmed by.

  Bohlen fell against me, and then he jerked back as if he’d gone crazy mad and started slamming me with both hands. He hit me once and my head rocked, then he hit me again. Deliberately, I braced my feet and stood there, determined not to go down. He struck me once more, then he tripped me, and when I fell he kicked me in the ribs again and again. Only that heavy coat kept him from smashing my side in.

  How long he kept it up I had no idea. At first the blows stunned and hurt, then I became half sick with pain, and after that I was almost numb to the blows that followed. Yet I kept my senses. Finally, arm-weary, he stopped and stepped back, his hands hanging.

  “All right, take your ropes off!” he said, and kicked me again in the side.

  “Pike!” he yelled at me, and when I fought to reply, I couldn’t, for my lips were smashed and my jaw swollen.

  But he had turned away. “The hell with him!” he said. “Let’s get out of here. This one isn’t important, anyway.”

  The saddle creaked as he mounted. “Red, you’ve hated his guts for a long time. I leave it to you. Kill him!”

  Vaguely, I heard the pound of the hoofs as they rode off, and I forced my eyes open and looked up. Red Hardeman sat his horse not fifteen feet away, and he held his Colt in his hand. I know he was thinking of the
beating I’d given him, and of how we had never had any use for each other. And now he had me cold-turkey, and helpless.

  “I’ll say this for you,” he said, “you got guts.”

  He lifted his pistol and laid the sights on my head, and he held them there. I didn’t have strength enough to move, and no place to move to if I had.

  The muzzle of that pistol looked bigger and bigger. Then deliberately he shifted his aim about six inches and fired.

  The muzzle flowered with flame, the slug smashed into the earth beside my head. He re-cocked his pistol, took dead aim, holding on a spot right between my eyes, and then again he shifted his aim and fired. The concussion was terrific, but when I opened my eyes he was sitting there looking down at me from those utterly cold gray eyes. Coolly, he blew the smoke from the muzzle of his gun and, turning his horse, rode off after the others.

  The drum of his horse’s hoofs faded, but I could not move. I lay staring up at the low gray clouds that now covered even that far-off place where the sun had gone down, but at last something stirred inside me, some some strange, crying need to struggle back, to survive. So I rolled over on my face.

  My body ached with the dull throb of bruised and battered muscle and bone. Yet somehow I got my hands under me and pushed myself up to my knees. One eye was closed, the other a mere slit, and when I lifted my fumbling, bloody hands to my face they recoiled in horror. It was swollen out of shape and torn into what must be an awful mask.

  Grasping the edge of the wallow, I pulled myself up. But my legs gave way and I fell, my chin hitting the ground so heavily that a thousand new pains started in my skull. After a minute I tried again, this time digging my fingers into the half-frozen soil and pulling myself up out of the wallow.

  It took all the strength I had, and I lay there on the ground. Far off I seemed to hear shooting … So then it was no use—they had caught up with my friends and were murdering them.

  The cold of the earth seeped into my bones, and I shook with a chill. One hand reached out and grasped a tuft of grass and pulled my body toward it. A drop of blood fell from my face and made a bright crimson spot on my sleeve. I stared at it dully for a moment, then I got my hands under me and began to crawl forward. This time I must have crawled several feet before I collapsed again, and then I passed but from weakness.