Hanging Woman Creek (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  I woke in the night to cold and a raging thirst. Reaching out, I got a handful of half-frozen snow and thrust it at my mouth. I felt the tearing of partly closed cuts, and my jaw creaked with pain at the effort to open my mouth, but some of the snow got through. It melted, and a slow, delicious trickle started down my throat.

  My body ached, but again I got to my knees and started forward. After a few minutes I came abreast of a rock and, catching hold of it, pulled myself up, clinging to it until my legs stopped trembling.

  Staggering, I started forward. Somehow I would get to Miles City, and when I got there I would find Roman Bohlen. Somehow, some way, I would find him. It was that thought which saved me, which drove me on through a terrible, agony-filled night, when I staggered, fell, climbed up, and fell again. Twice I spilled over creek banks to the ice below but each time I managed to get up, and struggled on.

  The coming of a sickly gray dawn found me still walking and falling, still getting up again. My hands were bloody, my body ached, every step wrenched a groan from me, but I kept on. Somewhere up ahead was whatever remained of my friends, for the shots I had heard could only have meant that Bohlen and his outfit had closed in around them.

  There is something to be said for hatred under such circumstances. Certainly, without it I could never have gotten myself off the ground, not as much as ten feet from where I started.

  The distance was measured at first in feet, but finally I came to measuring it merely in paces. To look ahead, to try to imagine covering the bitter miles would have been impossible. If I could manage just the next step, I was satisfied.

  One of my hands—I had no memory of this—had been stomped on. It was lacerated and terribly swollen, but the fingers could move, though with so much pain that I had no intention of trying to use that hand.

  One or more of my ribs might be broken … they felt like it. I was cut, bruised, and battered, and that, coupled with the exhaustion of the days before, had left me with almighty little to travel on but nerve. And hatred.

  I wanted most of all to kill Roman Bohlen. Sometimes I was out of my head. Sometimes the horizon seemed to dip and waver around me. Walking and falling, I doubt if I made a mile that first day.

  Toward nightfall something moved off to my right. Later, I glimpsed it again. It was a wolf. No coyote, but a big old gray lobo, and he was stalking me.

  They’d taken my guns and my knife, and I couldn’t even find anything for a club. I had no defense against him.

  A wolf will not tackle a man. I’d been told that since I was a youngster, and I believed it … up to a point. That old lobo out there knew I was all in. He knew his time would come; and a wolf, like a buzzard, has a vast patience at such times. Sometimes I think only man is in a rush about things. Most wild animals, with no sense of time to speak of, they can wait. They know how to wait. He might get me tonight. It might be tomorrow or tomorrow night—he wasn’t in a rush about it.

  Once, when I fell down, I lay for several minutes without moving. I seemed only half conscious. When I moved to get up, there was the wolf, sitting there, not fifty yards away, tongue lolling out, watching me.

  Chapter Seventeen.

  He made me mad, sitting there, just waiting for me to give up, and so damned sure he was going to have me when I couldn’t go any further. So I got up and started on, and I had a sort of notion, that I might move briskly enough to persuade him the wait would be too long. But I saw at once that he wasn’t being fooled. Nevertheless I kept going. Several times I stopped for a handful of snow, but I kept on going until it was too dark to make out landmarks, and with no stars to be seen, I was afraid to travel on for fear of going out of my way in the wrong direction.

  About that time I struck my first streak of pay dirt. It wasn’t much—just a thick clump of willow and chokecherry with a couple of cottonwoods on the bank of a small frozen stream, but the thing was, there was a lot of debris around, so I searched my pockets again and found a couple of matches. On the under side of an old dead tree I found some bark which I frayed in my fingers. I broke off some tiny twigs and found some dry moss, and then struck my match. The first one took flame, and soon I had a good fire going.

  They’d left me for dead, and by this time were far away, so I had no worry about having a fire, and it was something badly needed, both for warmth and for bracing up my morale, or whatever they call it.

  No searching of my pockets yielded anything to eat; not a crumb could I find. But the warmth of the fire was making me sleepy, and I hovered close to it.

  And then I heard a horse walking.

  It was close on to midnight now, and I had been dozing and waking, feeding the fire and dozing again. The clouds had broken a little, and I could see the stars. There was no use my trying to run, but I did reach over and lay my hand on a good-sized club I’d found while gathering fuel.

  The horse walked steadily toward me, hesitated, and then came on, more slowly, stopping from time to time. I stood up. If that horse had a rider it wasn’t acting like it; and if rider there was, he was either dead or helpless.

  The horse stopped just outside the rim of the firelight. It was a saddled, bridled horse, and it was looking toward me, ears pricked. When I stepped away from the glare of the fire I saw it was Ann’s horse, one of those fine Morgans Philo had shipped west to breed.

  He was off-color, a blue roan, but a fine, beautifully built horse, one of the best Parley had. He called him Blue Boy.

  “Hello, Boy,” I said gently. “Where’s Ann?”

  The horse came another tentative step forward and stood uncertainly, rolling his eyes at me and spreading his nostrils. So I walked over to him, moving very slowly. He was probably drawn to the fire because it promised what he had become accustomed to, the companionship of man. And that horse meant life itself to me.

  “Where’s Ann, Boy?” I said again, and kept on talking quietly to him. “I’m glad you showed up. Maybe we can go back there and see what happened. Just you and me. What d’you say?”

  For an instant, as I neared him, I was afraid he would shy away. But he stood fast, and then, as I put a hand on his neck, he turned his head and stretched his nose at me, and I gathered up the reins.

  My heart was pounding enough to jump out of my chest from the fear I’d had that the horse might jerk away and trot off. For if once he started going, I might have chased him halfway to Miles City and never got that close again. So now I led him over to the fire and tied him carefully while I checked the saddlebags.

  In the first bag I found several cartridges, there was no gun in the saddle scabbard, but a brush, comb, and some other trifles. In the other bag—I could hardly believe my luck—there was a sandwich of two thick slices of bread and a wedge of beef. It was a couple of days old, but when I started to eat it I savored every bite, taking as much time chewing as I possibly could.

  It is a mistake to think that a hungry man bolts his food. He does nothing of the kind. His stomach has shrunk; and anyway, he wants to chew, to taste, to savor every bite. He eats slowly, and that first time after he’s been a long time hungry, he can eat very little. This time I hadn’t been hungry really long, but it had been too long.

  When I had eaten the sandwich I rustled around and found a small patch of snow-free grass and led the horse to it. He ate so eagerly that I knew he had found mighty little grazing.

  Right then was when I wanted to start for Miles City, but I knew that first I had to back-track that horse and find out what had happened to the Parleys and Eddie. Tired as I was, I slept little, waiting for morning to come so I could see to pick up Blue Boy’s trail.

  It was mid-morning when I found them in a small patch of wooded hills half surrounded by Ash and Haddow creeks. They were in a narrow ravine where a branch of Ash Creek flowed down out of the hills. It was a lonely, out-of-the-way place and not bad for defense, only from the way the ground was torn up the Bohlen men must have come on them as a complete surprise.

  There was a dead horse on
the ground, and further over, a dead man. It was a man named Cruickshank, I think—I’d seen him around. He had been shot in the chest, killed instantly.

  At first I saw no other bodies, and my hopes began to rise. Maybe they had gotten away, maybe … And then I saw the torn earth at the creek’s edge. It was a place where somebody without tools had tried breaking off the earth with sticks and tumbling it down to cover up what lay below.

  Running my horse up there, I jumped off, tying the horse to make doubly sure of him, and then I went over the bank, my pulse jumping like a crazy man’s.

  The three bodies lay together, only half covered, so they must have tried to cover them at night, maybe figuring on coming back later to finish the job.

  Philo was dead, shot to doll rags. Eddie had a bullet in his leg, and when I pulled him from under the dirt, I saw he had taken two more through the chest. His shirt had pulled up, and for the first time I saw the earlier wound in the side from which he’d lost blood. He had told me it was nothing, but now I could see the bullet had torn a frightful gash in his side, and he must have been almost bled dry. He had stuffed the wound with the tail of his shirt and belted it in place with an extra belt, but it had obviously begun to infect almost from the start.

  Purposely, I’d hesitated to look at Ann, for I didn’t want to admit to myself that she was dead. She was the furthest from me, and when I did turn to look, I got the shock of my life. There were faint furrows behind her toes!

  She had not been dead when she was thrown into the gully, and after they had tumbled dirt upon her, she had pulled herself free of it. Dropping beside her, I turned her over, and when I did this, her mouth fell open and I saw her tongue move.

  I had no canteen or cup, but I grabbed up a busted rifle and smashed the ice with the butt. Then dipping a spare handkerchief I’d found with her things in the saddlebag, I took it to her and squeezed a few drops into her mouth.

  Then I stretched her out on my bloody sheepskin coat. She’d been shot through the shoulder, and her clothing was soaked with blood. Only the cold had saved her, as it had Shorty, by coagulating the blood to stop the bleeding. It looked as if she had a broken leg, too, and she must be half frozen.

  Quickly I dragged some sticks into a pile near her, scrounged for some dried leaves, then pulled out my one match and tried to strike it. It broke off short.

  I went through her pockets frantically. No matches. There were none in Eddie’s pockets, either, and most of the dirt from the bank lay over the lower half of Philo’s body, covering it up to his waist. Rather than take the time to uncover him and risk the possible cave-in that might follow, I scrambled back up the bank and ran to the body of Cruickshank.

  In his shirt pocket was an old brass cartridge shell with several matches, and a packet of tobacco, with papers. Using the papers as tinder, I struck a light and had me a fire. When it was going well, I stretched it out to parallel her body, with the wind blowing the flames away from her. Then I went to the dead horse.

  It was Philo’s own horse, and in the saddlebags was what remained of his gear, for we’d abandoned some of it when we left the sled. In that pocket was a small packet of tea.

  Digging around in the dirt and debris that had been pushed down or thrown over the edge, I found a cup and the battered coffeepot we had been using. Obviously Bohlen’s men had been in a big hurry to get away, for they had just dumped everything over, bodies and gear, and then had hurried off, probably wanting to arrive in Miles City and be seen there.

  At this time of year, in that remote place, there was small chance of any discovery. It was off the trails, and in a place where I doubted anyone had been in years.

  Ann’s leg was broken, so, as carefully as I could, I put splints on it and tied them up with strips cut from a bridle with Cruickshank’s knife. It was just a jack-knife, the kind we used to call a toad-stabber back in school when I was a kid. But Cruickshank had kept it good and sharp, for which I owed him thanks.

  The water had just started to boil in the bent-up old pot when Ann opened her eyes. There was mud and blood in her hair and her clothes were badly torn, her face was drawn and so white she looked like a corpse.

  “You lie quiet,” I said before she could speak. “You’ve been shot and you’ve got a broken leg.”

  “I know,” she said faintly.

  She said nothing at all about the others, so I think she knew very well they were dead, but she kept looking at my face with such a shocked expression that I put my hand up to it, and for the first time in hours I remembered what they had done to me.

  “Well,” 1 said, “I was never what you’d call a handsome man, anyway. Nobody will be surprised.”

  What tea there was I dumped into the pot, and set it to one side to steep a mite. Then I rinsed out the cup in the creek, heated it over the fire to take the chill off so’s it wouldn’t ruin the effect of the hot tea, and then I filled the cup and held it for her to drink.

  While she worked on the tea, I told her about being left for dead, being found by her horse, evidently attracted by my .fire, and coming on to hunt for her.

  “My guess is that Bohlen and his men will ride around and come into Miles City from the north or east. They’ll give out they were off in that direction, toward the Badlands. They’ll come out here the first chance they get to bury what’s left, but first they’ll get everybody used to the idea that they’re in town.

  “The folks in Miles City are good people. Some of them, like Stuart, are sympathetic to the vigilante way as long as it’s handled with care, but nobody would have wanted anything like this to happen. My feeling is that when this story gets out, Bohlen is through. They’ll run him out of the country… or I will.”

  “Barney, you can’t. You’re all I have left.”

  “I’ve got it to do.”

  “You can’t, Barney. If I lost you—”

  She didn’t know what she was saying. “You’ve got a brother back in England, a fine home. You’ve got everything back there.”

  “I’ve nothing back there, nothing at all. I was always closest to Philo, and he knew how I felt. I always envied him his Army career in India, and I wanted to come with him when he first came here.”

  Dragging up a dead branch, I broke off twigs and thrust them into the flames. “You got nerve enough to try riding thirty miles?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  She had it, too.

  “They’ll never let us get into town if they see me coming,” I said. “I’ve got to have a gun.”

  She turned her head suddenly, reaching out the cup to me. “Is there more?”

  Then she went on. “Back about a mile, where the creek comes down from the west, Eddie shot a man. He fell from his horse, and when he was hit I saw him throw his rifle wide. It may not have been found.”

  It was nearly noon now, and with two of us riding one horse we weren’t going to make it to Miles City before the next day. The best thing would be to come in after dark so I could get Ann to a doctor before anybody saw me. The thing I had to do now was to get that gun.

  She made me drink a cup of the tea before I left, and it surely did me good. I’d never thought much of tea as a man’s drink, although Philo had tried to convince me it was a good thing when a man was cold or suffering from shock. So they’d found it, he said, in the British Army, and in mountain climbing.

  Feeling the way I did, that was a long hike, and I was glad to stop when I got there. I’d left our horse witk Ann. That horse was our life, and he had been badly used during the past few days, and I wanted to take him no step that wasn’t toward Miles City and safety.

  Finding the rifle was no trick. When I saw the tracks and found where the horse had thrown its rider, I scouted out in an arc from the body and found it, half buried in snow but in good working condition.

  What had become of the horse? I looked around, but there was no luck.

  So I started back, but I was feeling better. In the pockets of the dead man I had found six
more cartridges, and there were six in the rifle. I could do a lot with twelve shots. Especially if I could get my man in the street.

  Roman Bohlen had tackled the wrong outfit. With his hired killers and his tough hands he had started out to kill three men and a girl. He’d had nine men in all, and four of them were dead—four of them, and two of us.

  But the two men he had killed were good men, and Eddie Holt had been my partner. It would be a long time before I’d run into another like Eddie.

  Right now I wanted most to get Ann in a doctor’s hands, and then I only wanted one thing. I wanted to look down that rifle barrel at Roman Bohlen—just once.

  Chapter Eighteen.

  Miles City wasn’t just a cowtown, for Fort Keogh was close by with around a thousand men—soldiers and civilian employees. Then the Diamond R bull-whackers numbered quite a few, and when not slugging it out in some street brawl with the swaddies, as they called the soldiers from Fort Keogh, they could be counted on to voice opinions that carried weight in any gathering. And I was counting on them, if it came to that.

  If we could ride into town after nightfall, I could take Ann to the Inter-Ocean Hotel—the one they now were calling the Macqueen House. The hotel was right on the road into town, and with a little luck I could get Ann into it and safe before the Bohlen crowd even knew we were alive.

  We started off that night, and rode about ten miles before we settled down for the night. I’d taken the blanket off the dead horse, so we had that, and there was my sheepskin coat.

  Before daybreak we rode for some distance, and then after a short rest we went on a little further, keeping to low ground. By late afternoon we were within a few miles of town.