Hanging Woman Creek (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  “Clothes, that’s what. Get yourself some new boots, keep them polished up, get yourself a new hat. Maybe a suit. You look like money, money will come to you.”

  “Man I knew once, Eddie, he figured like that He got himself all that outfit you’re speakin’ of, and a new horse and saddle along with it. So they hung him.”

  “Hung him?”

  “Sure. There was stock missin’, and everybody began to wonder where this cowpuncher got the money for that outfit. They taken him out and hung him on the bridge, just on general principles.”

  “Didn’t he give ‘em any argument?”

  “No use. He just looked down at the water and told ‘em to for God’s sake tie the knot tight, because he couldn’t swim.”

  I found that Granville Stuart, who owned one of the biggest outfits in Montana, was in town. He stopped me on the street and offered me a job, but the joker was that I’d be holed up all winter in a line camp with Powell Landusky … they called him Pike, too.

  There wasn’t a better man on the frontier. He was a cowman, trapper, hunter, woodcutter for the steamboats, and one of the best rough-and-tumble fighters you ever saw. Only he had a mean temper, and was quick to fly off the handle. We’d wind up killing each other.

  There were a hundred stories about him. One time he tackled a camp full of Indians with a clubbed rifle. They figured nobody but a crazy man would do that, and afterwards they left him alone. Another time an Indian bullet hit him in the face. He rode for a doctor, but his jaw was broken up and it pained him so much he just reached in and tore out a chunk of jawbone so big it had two teeth in it. Marked him for life. I never did hear whether tearing that piece of jawbone out made the pain any better.

  Me and Eddie finally went back to Charley Brown’s and hit that stewpot again. We got there early and Charley looked over at us and said, “You broke again, Pronto?”

  “You ever seen me when I wasn’t?”

  “You always paid up.” Charley put his hands on the bar. “Pronto, do you need some cash? I can let you have some.”

  “We can sleep over to the livery,” I said, “an’ eat here until you throw us out. Soon as we find a job, we’ll ride out.”

  He stood there quiet for a minute, and then he said, “Pronto, I’m going to put you onto something you may not thank me for. Bill Justin needs two men for his line camp on the Hanging Woman.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  He just looked at me, and didn’t answer. Only after a minute or so had passed he said, “You boys step up to the bar.”

  We were alone in the place, but I guess he didn’t want to talk too loud. He filled a couple of cups with coffee and shoved them toward us.

  He leaned his forearms on the bar. “Pronto, this here country is walking wide open into trouble, and you’d be a fool not to see it. And that trouble may bust loose right on the Hanging Woman … that’s why that job’s open.”

  Well, I looked around at Eddie. “What do you say, boy? It’s going to be a cold winter, and a man doesn’t have to hunt far for wood up there.”

  “I been in trouble most of my life,” Eddie said, “on’y this time I’d not be alone.”

  “Charley, you tell Bill Justin he’s caught himself a couple of live ones. We’ll go.”

  We finished our coffee and started for the door.

  Just then it opened up wide, and a man filled the open space with his shoulders. It was Butch Hogan. Hogan was a bull-whacker for the Diamond R freight outfit, and a fighter from who-flung-the-chunk.

  “Howdy, there!” he said, grinning. “If it ain’t the little man who likes to fight!”

  Now I’m no little man, being five-ten and weighing an easy one-seventy; but alongside his two hundred and forty pounds and his six feet four inches, I might be considered small.

  The room was filling up, and I could see they’d been egging him on, anxious for a fight. Well, I hadn’t had no fun since the night they pitched me out of that honky-tonk back in Chicago, and maybe tomorrow I’d be headed for the breaks along Hanging Woman Creek.

  “Butch,” I said, “how tall are you?”

  “Six feet four in my socks,” he said.

  “I didn’t know they piled it that high,” I said, and hit him.

  Chapter Four.

  When my eyes opened, the sun struck right into them, but it was that spring wagon bouncing over rocks and rough road that woke me up.

  It took me a minute or two to realize where I was, and when I did, I didn’t like it. There I was, lying on my back on the floor of a wagon with boxes and sacks all around me, and my head felt like it had been kicked by a mule.

  There’s nothing like lying on the bottom of a wagon whilst the horses are trotting downhill over a rough slope to shake a man up, but when I started to rise I wished I’d had another idea. A shot of pain took me in the side, and when I grabbed my hand to it I fell back on the wagonbed.

  Eddie was settin’ up on the driver’s seat and he looked around at me. “Well, he didn’t kill you, anyway.”

  “Who? Who didn’t kill me?”

  “That Hogan, from the Diamond R. He sure enough did a fair country job of dressin’ you down, boy. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “I do anything to him?”

  “Whatever you done was a mistake. You knocked him down, and up to that time he’d only been funnin’. After that he set out to take you apart.”

  Eddie drew up the team in the shade of a cottonwood. “I was about to wake you up,” he said. “I don’t know this here country, an’ maybe I’m lost. That Mr. Justin, he just pointed me this way and said to follow the wheel tracks until you woke up.”

  There was a canteen in the wagon and I sloshed some water around in my mouth, then dumped some over my head and the back of my neck. The water was still cold, for it was early morning, and it felt good.

  “I’ll say one thing,” Eddie commented. “For a man who does everything wrong, you ain’t bad. You troubled him. A time or two there, I’d say you troubled him.”

  Looking around to see where we were, I said to him, “You must’ve started before daylight.”

  “Yes, suh! I surely did. That Mr. Justin he came to me in the livery where we were sleepin’ and he said he wanted me to take you to the edge of town. The wagon would be waitin’ there … and he didn’t want anybody to know where you was goin’.”

  That didn’t sound like Bill Justin, but a lot of things had happened since I’d been away.

  “Eddie,” I said, “you make us up a batch of coffee. I got to study this out.”

  He started digging around in the wagon, hunting for coffee and a pot, but all of a sudden he pulled up short and stood quiet. Then he said, “Pronto, you come see this here.”

  What he was showing me were two brand-new Winchester 73’s, and boxes with about five hundred rounds of ammunition. Alongside the rifles lay two .44-calibre Colts, both new. And with them was a note, scrawled on a paper greasy with gun oil.

  I been missing stock.

  That was all, with just his initials signed to it, but, with all the guns, and coming from a sober man like Bill Justin, it seemed he must figure he was sending us into the middle of something.

  “You want to quit?” I said.

  Eddie chuckled. “Where we goin’ to go? Mighty soon there’ll be snow fallin’, and I never did like riding the grub line in snow country.”

  We drank up our coffee and Eddie smoked a cigarette, and I dug around in my pocket for the butt end of that cigar. When I found it, it was all mashed to nothing. But no use to throw it away, so I put the tobacco in my mouth and chewed it, although I’d never been a hand to chew.

  From what Charley Brown had said in his saloon, and now Bill Justin, they must believe that the Hanging Woman country was where the trouble lay, or some of it.

  Everybody knew Bill Justin’s stock. He had good stuff—mighty few longhorns, mostly shorthorn stock brought over the trail from Oregon, and bred up with a couple of bulls brought back from
the East. Justin was a shrewd man, and he took account of range conditions. He grazed less stock than most, but on account of that it carried more beef, and better beef. He got premium prices wherever he sold.

  Now, such stock was hard to hide, and harder to ship. If he was missing stock, somebody was playing a mighty tight game.

  While we rolled along what passed for a trail—just two faintly marked wheel tracks—I puttered around, cleaning the grease from the rifles and loading them up. Then I did the same with the pistols. Come dark, we pulled off the road under some trees where there was a little branch that trickled down toward the Tongue River.

  “No fire,” I said, as Eddie started to gathering sticks. “Cold camp.”

  We split a can of beans and a loaf of bread, and afterwards we had a can of peaches. They tasted almighty good.

  Where we’d stopped there was a small patch of grass among the scattered trees, and we picketed our horses, then moved back under the trees and rolled out our beds. If anybody was hunting us, they could follow those wagon tracks with no trouble. Only they weren’t close behind us, or I’d have seen them. So if they didn’t know exactly where we stopped, they might overlook us.

  There’d been no chance to sight in that rifle, but I put it down beside me. I didn’t know whether I could hit anything with the six-shooter or not. Most of the hands I knew packed one around, and if they didn’t wear it on their belt they had one tucked away in their bedroll. Me, I’d never even owned one. Even cheap as they were, if a body wanted to buy one secondhand, they were too expensive for me. Usually I’d owned a Winchester, but that was a meat gun, and a man never knew when he might have to brush off a bunch of scalp-hunting Sioux. Though that sort of thing had about come to an end, everybody was wary.

  Once I was stretched out under the trees, I started trying to figure out what Bill Justin had in mind. It seemed to me he was hoping we’d get to the line camp of the Hanging Woman without anybody knowing we were there, and he wanted us fixed for a fight when they did find out.

  If the rustlers were that bad, Eddie and me could look for trouble. Real trouble.

  Time enough to cross that creek when we came to it, so I stretched my muscles a mite, and then sort of let myself relax whilst looking at the stars through the leaves.

  Those earlier remarks of Eddie’s were beginning to nag at me. Come to think of it, I didn’t amount to much. Top hand in anybody’s outfit, but what did that mean? Forty a month if I was lucky, thirty if I wasn’t, and ridin’ the grub line a third of the time, seemed like. And when I got to be an old man, swamping somebody’s saloon, or wranglin’ saddle stock around a ranch, or rustlin’ wood for the cook. It didn’t give a man a lot to look forward to.

  Somewhere along there I dropped off, and it was coming on toward morning when my eyes flipped open. Just like that, and I was wide awake, and my hand on the action of that Winchester.

  “That there’s a wagon track,” I heard somebody whisper, “sure as shootin’.”

  “Hell,” another voice said, “old Justin’s been over this here trail a half a dozen times with a wagon.”

  “This here track’s fresh!”

  “I got to see it.”

  “You think I’m crazy? I’d have to light a match, and if it is that damn fool Pike, he’d be likely to blow my head off. He never did have no more brains than a cougar.”

  Me, I half raised the Winchester. I’d a mind to dust ‘em a mite to teach them their manners.

  “They don’t call him Pronto for nothin’.”

  There, was a moment of quiet, then the second voice said, disgusted-like, “Aw, come on! You goin’ to crawl around there all night? So there’s wagon tracks! I can show you wagon tracks in this country been there twenty years!”

  There was a creak of leather, then the sound of horses moving off through the grass. I lay back and picked out the one bright star that seemed left and tried to remember where I’d heard those voices before.

  After a while I heard a faint stir from where Eddie lay, and thinks I, he’s been awake, too. He was layin’ for them. It gave a man a good feeling to know he wasn’t alone out there. Just the same, as I stretched out to collect interest on a night’s sleep, I couldn’t help but wonder what all I’d gotten myself into.

  Only I couldn’t see any other way. Winter was coming on and I had no money, nor any place I could call home. When snow started to fall that line shack was going to look almighty good. It was loaded up with grub, and all we had to do was sit tight and keep an eye on that stock.

  But it kept bothering my mind. What would those two have done if they had found us? And we still had more nights to go before we got to that line camp.

  The truth was that I didn’t know this country very well myself. I’d punched cows on the Milk and the Musselshell, and one spring I’d worked a roundup over on the Little Missouri, but I’d crossed this part of the country only a time or two, stopping over at Bill Justin’s line camp on the Hanging Woman a couple of times.

  A long time back I’d helped trail a herd of steers clean from the Brazos down in Texas to the Boxelder Ranch near Ekalaka, which took me to this neck of the woods, so I did know a mite about the country, without laying myself out to be an expert. Another time I’d stopped over at the line camp when we were riding back from the Hole-in-the-Wall, down in Wyoming.

  That was the year I was nineteen, and I was full of ginger. They needed a posse to run down some outlaws who’d stolen horses, so I joined up and we gave them a run for their money right up to the opening in that big red wall. Then we fetched up short. A man with a good rifle could lie up in those rocks and raise hob with anybody trying to ride through the Hole.

  Well, we just backed up and decided we weren’t going to catch any horse thieves, so we turned around and rode back up country and went into camp on Clear Creek. The outfit broke up there.

  The line camp stood on a low bench just back of Hanging Woman Creek, setting in nice among the trees. There was a log cabin with two windows and a door, with a corral close by, and from the door of the cabin a man could see the ford a short distance off, where folks usually crossed the creek.

  When me and Eddie drove up, Bud Oliver was standing in the doorway, and he had him a saddled horse right there.

  “You taken your time,” he said irritably. Then he gave a look around and gathered up his reins. “She’s all yourn,” he said, and stepped into the leather.

  “You ain’t going to drive the wagon back?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. You tell Justin if he wants that wagon he can drive it himself. I want to get shut of this country, and that wagon’s too slow.”

  Now Bud was a long, lean drink of water with a hawk face on him, and he was stubborn as a hammer-headed bronc, but I had never known him to be so downright skittish before.

  “You look like your tail was afire,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “I’m leavin’ out of here,” he said, “and if I was you, I would too. This is the least healthy country I know of.” And he dusted out of there.

  Eddie, he taken holt of a sack of spuds. “You fixin’ to stay?” he asked.

  “Hell, that’s what I come for,” I said. Then I said, “Eddie, if you want to leave I’ll not hold it against you. Me, I never did have no brains when it came to trouble.”

  So we unloaded the wagon and moved in. By the time I’d unharnessed and turned the team into the corral I’d done some thinking. Bud Oliver was a good hand, and a nervy man. I’d known him too long to think he’d scare easy, and I thought that if he was so all-fired anxious to ride out of here there was real trouble making up, and not just talk.

  This was wild country. It was also wild horse country, and until just a few years ago it had been the heart of the Indian country. Across the river and not many miles off was where General Crook fought the Sioux in the Battle of the Rosebud. It was only fifty or sixty miles to where Custer was wiped out. Not many white men had moved into this country.

  There was goo
d grass and there was plenty of water, and most years it was as fine a place to graze stock as a man could want. Cattle fattened on this grass, filled out like grain-fed stock, and if Bill Justin could stick it out he could be a rich man.

  The cabin was all swept up and clean as a man could wish. There was an iron cooking range, a mess of pots and kettles, bunks for six men, some benches, a couple of chairs, and a table. A few books and some old magazines were lying around, and everything looked snug and ready for a hard winter. There was even a stack of logs near the corral, and a lot of cut firewood in the lean-to behind the cabin.

  One thing I didn’t like the look of. Somebody had worked loose an upright split log in the back of the lean-to so it was a place that could be used to go or come from the cabin. On a sudden hunch I went out the front door and, turning around, studied the door jamb and the heavy door itself.

  Eddie watched me for a moment and then he said, “Something: out of kilter, Pronto?”

  Me, I slipped out my belt knife and dug into the logs near the door. Took me a minute or two, but when I’d dug around enough I forked out a chunk of lead. Hefting it in my hand, I noticed four or five more holes in the logs, and I showed Eddie the bullet in my hand.

  Somebody had been shooting at that door with a mighty big gun.

  Chapter Five.

  Eddie went over to the stove and lifted the lid. After a glance inside, he picked up a handful of chips and twigs from the woodbox and started to kindle a fire.

  “You want to look around,” he said, “hop to it. I’ll make out to cook.”

  There was some saddle stock in the corral, and I taken my rope and walked out there. One was a line-back dun, a quick-moving horse I liked the looks of, so I crawled through the fence and dabbed a loop on him.

  When I’d saddled up I led him to the door. “Hand me out one of those Winchesters,” I said to Eddie, and stepped into the saddle.

  The horse crow-hopped a couple of times to give me confidence, and then of a sudden he really doubled up and went to bucking. He did a fair country job of it, too, I was no contest hand, so I rode him straight up and to a finish, and when he had it out of his system we understood each other.