Louis L'Amour (14 page)

So I made coffee and kept the fire going. And I dug out a bottle I had stashed away. Neither Eddie nor me was much on the liquor, and whiskey can be death to a man who’s out on a cold night. A man full of whiskey will freeze to death faster than a sober man, for the liquor brings a temporary warmth, brings the heat to the surface of the skin, where it disappears into the cold air, leaving him colder than before. On the other hand, a man who has come in out of the cold can take a drink to warm himself up—if he isn’t going out again.

After a few minutes Shorty began to mutter, and then his eyes opened. He looked up at Eddie, stared at him for several minutes, then turned his head and looked at me.

“Hello, Shorty,” I said. “You just lie quiet. I’m making some coffee.”

He seemed to relax, staring up into the darkness near the cave’s roof where the firelight flickered, then his eyes closed.

After a moment, they opened again. “You find my horse?” he asked, speaking with surprising loudness.

“No. I’ll go look.” I tugged my boots on over my wet socks. “Shorty … who shot you?”

He looked puzzled. “
Shot?
I’m
shot?
” His brow puckered in a frown and his lips seemed to feel of the words before he spoke them. “I thought … something hit me … something … I don’t know.”

Eddie took up the bottle and touched it to Shorty’s lips. “This here’s whiskey.”

I stood up, stamping my feet solid into my boots, and shrugging into my coat.

It was bitterly cold out there, and now the wind was blowing hard. In a way I was glad of it, for any tracks we or Shorty had left would be covered. No chance for Roman Bohlen, or anybody else, to find us.

Not fifty yards from where I’d found Shorty, his horse was standing with reins trailing. Evidently he had fallen from the saddle, or had fallen after he dismounted to find the cave. For it seemed obvious that he had known of it. It began to seem as if almost everybody knew of this cave.

Gathering up the reins, I led the horse to the cave mouth, then brushed off the snow.

Shorty had his eyes closed when I came in, packing his saddle. Eddie looked up at me.

“He talks wild now. Said something about meeting
somebody … then about some shooting at the Tower.”

“He must mean Devil’s Tower. It’s down in the Bear Lodge Mountains or near them.” Had Bohlen been down there, I wondered.

Leaning over him, I said, “Shorty, was Bohlen down there?”

“No,” came the answer.

His eyes opened, and there for a minute or two he looked right into mine, as sane as I was myself. Then he turned his head and looked around, wonderingly.

“Pike,” he said, “I made it, didn’t I? I made the cave.”

“Did you stock this place? With grub and firewood?”

“Hell, no!” He looked at me oddly. “How’d you know of this place? This is old Clyde Orum’s hideout.”

Clyde Orum! Why, I hadn’t heard the name in years, or thought about him.

“Did you know him?” I said.

“Chin Baker did … and he’s got family around. Chin knew something about them. We hid out here once … so when I had to run … I came for this place.”

He seemed to be finding it hard to talk.

“Why did you run?” I asked.

He didn’t answer for a moment, then he said, “Hell, Pike, the lot of us … they wiped us out. Just came out of nowhere and wiped us out … never seen any of them before.”

Eddie came up, shaking his head at me. “I got you some soup, boy.”

“Did they shoot you?”

“I’m shot?” he said again in that puzzled way. “I thought somebody hit me from behind, but there was nobody around except—”

But he didn’t finish. Shorty wasn’t going to need that soup.

Eddie slowly turned around and went back to the fire and put the bowl of soup down. Shorty Cones had died right while we talked to him, right in the middle of a sentence.

Nobody around except … 
who
?

Somebody had shot Shorty Cones in the back, shot him at close range, somebody he knew but did not fear. It had been just the same with Johnny Ward.

And the Gatty outfit had been wiped out. Did that mean they had killed Tom too? And who were
they?

Discouragement and depression settled on me. Suddenly all I wanted in the world was to be out of here. Right then if I had been close to a railroad I would have caught me an armful of boxcars and left out of there. I’d have headed south to get away from the snow, and punched cows along the Mexican border the rest of my days.

I’d come here to spend a quiet winter caring for Justin cows, and I’d wound up getting fired from my job, accused of rustling cattle I’d ridden miles to save; and now a man I’d tried to help was dead, and the whole Gatty gang gone. Strangers were riding over the country killing folks without anybody knowing who they were, or even that it had happened.

That was the thing that troubled me. It was all pretty sly … if we hadn’t come upon Shorty Cones before he died it might have been months, even years, before anybody knew anything at all about the Gatty gang being wiped out.

So what happened to that herd of cattle they had hid back in the hills? Right then I made a wild guess, and as soon as I made it I told myself it was true, even though a damned fool idea it was.

Eddie handed me a bowl of soup, and he ate the bowl he’d poured for Shorty. Neither of us looked at him.

“Eddie, we’re going to leave out of here,” I said. “We’ll ride into Miles City or somewhere and catch us a train.”

“All right.”

When I finished my soup I put the bowl aside and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Eddie he was looking at me.

“What’s eatin’ you?” I asked.

“What about that Ann Farley? You going to leave it this way?”

Well, that did it. That put it right on the line, and he knew just as well as I did that in spite of all my talk I wasn’t going any place without knowing what had happened to Ann Farley.

“Come daylight,” I said, “we’ll look around.”

“Mr. Pike,” Eddie said gently, “it’s daylight now. It’s been daylight for a spell.”

It was true, and with the realization of it I got to my feet and we packed our little gear and stuffed in our packs what we could of the supplies that
remained, leaving a-plenty for whoever might come after.

In Shorty’s pockets we found about thirty dollars, which I put into a worn envelope that contained a letter from his sister in Missouri. She would get the letter and what else there was. We took his horse for a pack animal, and left Shorty there.

“We haven’t got a shovel, and the ground is frozen,” Eddie said.

Suddenly my mind went to the note I’d left when I’d first visited the cave. Turning quickly, I caught Eddie by the arm.

“Did you see a bit of paper back there? A note?”

“Something fell to the floor … I don’t know what it was.”

Stepping past him, I went over to where I’d left my note and picked up the piece of paper lying there. It was my own note, but written across the bottom of it was something else:

The cabin of Kilworth
.

Only that, but it was signed
Pedlar Brown
, and I needed no more.

When we had come riding up from Miles City and had left the Tongue, we had taken an old trail over Poker Jim Butte, and we’d seen a tumbled-down cabin. Ann had said it reminded her of some she’d seen in Ireland, in the Kilworth Mountains.

And it was the Kilworth Mountains from which Bold Brennan of the song had come, and Pedlar Brown had been a man he’d robbed, who robbed him back, and they became partners.

So they had been here after all, but seeing the supplies, they had left, fearing to be found.

Ann had been here! Suddenly there was a singing inside me, and I went outside quickly.

“Mount up, Eddie,” I said. “We’ve a ride to make!”

It was only five or six miles, but they would be long, long miles until I saw Ann Farley again, and knew that she was safe and well.

A
S WE TOOK the trail toward Poker Jim, I tried to study out what Shorty Cones had said. Their outfit had been wiped out by a bunch of strange riders who came on them so suddenly there was no chance to put up much of a fight.

Cones himself had not even realized he was shot, and he must not have realized how badly he was hurt.

And that last thing he had said? There was no one there except …

Except
who?
Somebody he had not expected to be dangerous to him. Somebody he had considered harmless, or somebody who was a friend.

“That cave, Eddie. I figured Farley had stocked that cave, but he didn’t. That means somebody else did. And not Shorty, either.”

“How about Baker? He knew of it.”

Chin Baker was an old outlaw, and he had operated in this country for years. He was said to have run with Clyde Orum’s gang, and he had known of the cave.

When we came upon the cabin on Poker Jim, it was half buried in snow. It sat back among the rocks, under some pines, not easily seen under normal circumstances, and under a fresh fall of snow almost perfectly hidden.

Our horses buck-jumped through the deep snow
and into the trees, and when we reached the cabin we could see a few tracks around the door and out to the dug-out stable. Eddie took our horses, and I went up to the door and rapped.

Ann Farley opened it. She had a gun in her hand, and from the look in her eyes she wouldn’t have hesitated to use it.

When she saw me the gun muzzle lowered. “You found us! I knew you would!”

She stepped aside and I bent my head to enter the low doorway. Many mountain cabins were built in a hurry by men short of materials, and sometimes the doorways were low like this one. But inside you stepped down several inches to the floor and there was standing room.

Across the room lay Philo Farley, stretched out on a bunk, and he looked bad, very bad.

He lifted a hand. “Pronto, I am glad you’re here. Take care of her, will you?”

“I’ll take care of you both,” I said. “Eddie’s out there, and Eddie’s a hand with a wounded man. You wait, we’ll have you up and about in no time.”

“Take care of her—that’s all I ask.”

“Was it Roman Bohlen?”

He looked at me, and the expression in his eyes changed. “It was, … in person. He shot me when I was unarmed. He would have hung me if we hadn’t escaped.”

He gestured to indicate Ann. “She got me back into the house, just reached out and grabbed my collar and hauled me back inside. But then she proved to be smarter than I would have been, for she hurried me right across the room and out of the back window.”

“We had our horses hidden back in the woods,” Ann explained, “for we were all saddled and ready to ride to Miles City. I knew if they would shoot him down like that, they would continue the attack, and wouldn’t hesitate to burn the house.”

“Did they know you were a woman?”

“They may not have even seen me. No, I don’t believe they knew.”

Just then Eddie ducked through the low door, so I stepped back and waved him to Farley.

“What happened?” I asked Ann.

“By the time the house was burning, we were riding away. It was only a few feet from that rear window to the bushes.”

Now, all my life I’d had a temper. Not that I ever got mad when I was fighting, but it could explode into real trouble from time to time, which was the reason I kept a tight rein on it. In a fight there was no reason for being mad, and usually I fought only for fun. But now something curious was happening to me, and it scared me.

Turning away from Ann, I went outside into the day. There was a heavy overcast of gray cloud, but the snow made everything bright. I stood there, looking across the narrow canyon at the black trees, tufted with snow. For the first time in my life I was mad, with a cold, ugly anger that shocked me.

These people, and good people they were, had been shot at and hunted like wild animals. Their home had been burned, their belongings destroyed; and if they were found now they would be killed. And I, because I was with them and because I was myself suspected, would be killed too.

My hands were shaking, my whole body was quivering with fury, and I fought myself into calmness. At the same time that my fury gripped me, another part of me seemed to be standing by in surprise that this could be happening to me.

Suddenly I did not want to run. I did not want to get away. I wanted to hunt
them
, smash them, break them, show them what hatred could be. They had begun it; now they must accept the consequences.

A saner part of me kept warning me that nothing was to be gained by such tactics; but another part of me was telling me that violence breeds violence, and that those men would not be content with what they had already done, but would strive to do more, to do worse. And I knew that when such men turn to violence they seem to seek out the weak and the helpless. Many a mob has been turned back by an armed and determined man, though that same man, unarmed, would have been destroyed without a thought.

When evil takes up violence, the good have no choice but to defend themselves.

Presently Ann came out and stood beside me.