Read Online Guns of the Canyonlands by Ralph Compton - Free Book Online

was sent to prison. I guess he still is, but in the dark a Sharps sometimes can’t tell the difference between friend and foe, so I plan on making sure he knows it’s me that’s a-coming at him.”
    “What’s he do, this Luke Boyd with the Sharps ranged at a hundred yards?”
    “He runs a one-loop spread a couple of miles east of the Colorado. He also does some gold prospecting around here from time to time. Between one thing and another, he’s always gotten by. Has himself a right lovely daughter called Lorena. I guess she must be about twenty-five by now. Luke says she was the child of his old age.” An edge of bitterness crept into Fowler’s voice. “Quirt Laytham is sweet on her. He says he wants to marry her, and last I heard, Lorena hasn’t said yes, but she hasn’t said no.”
    As the moon swung into the sky, Fowler urged the buckskin up a steep rise crested by jumbled rocks of all sizes, dark clumps of mesquite and juniper growing among them. Once there he reined in the horse and pointed to a narrow valley below them.
    “See the light beyond the creek? That’s Luke’s cabin. I’d say we’re in good time for supper.”
    Tyree looked over Fowler’s shoulder. The bright moonlight reflected on the creek, turning it into a ribbon of silver flanked on both sides by grass and cottonwoods, and farther out, scattered stands of piñon pine and spruce. The cabin was built on the far side of the creek, backing up to the massive rampart of a flat-topped mesa that rose in a series of pink-and-yellow ledges to a height of more than six thousand feet. A ribbon of gray smoke tying bow-knots in the still air, lifted from the cabin’s chimney, and even at a distance Tyree smelled burning cedar.
    The dark bulk of a barn loomed a distance to the left of the cabin, beside it a pole corral and a windmill. A small bunkhouse, its single window darkened, stood off a ways, closer to the creek.
    It was a wild, beautiful place, but one that echoed of isolation and aching loneliness, located as it was between earth and sky in the midst of a hard land where life was a daily struggle and everything came at a price, paid in sweat or blood—or both.
    It was, Tyree decided, no place for a lovely woman. The thought surprised him. He only had Fowler’s word for it that Lorena was lovely . . . but somehow he knew, perhaps from the music of her name, that she was.
    “Once we get onto the flat, I’ll hail the cabin,” Fowler said. “Let me do the talking and show as little of that Winchester as you can. Then we ride in real slow and easy, and do nothing sudden. Luke Boyd isn’t a trusting man.”
    “You’re the boss,” Tyree said. “I’m willing to risk the Sharps to get off of this buckskin for a spell.”
    Fowler urged the horse down the slope, then crossed the flat to the near bank of the creek. There he reined up and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hello the cabin!”
    Immediately a lamp inside was doused, the door opened a crack and a man’s harsh voice yelled, “What do you want? I got me a Sharps big fifty here and I ain’t a-settin’ on my gun hand.”
    “Luke, it’s me. It’s Owen Fowler.”
    A few moments of silence, then, “Owen, it’s you? Why in tarnation didn’t you say so in the first place instead of settin’ out there gabbing? Come on in.”
    Fowler kicked the buckskin into motion and splashed across the creek. The cabin door opened wider and a squat, heavily bearded man who was somewhere in his midsixties stepped into the yard, a rifle in his hands.
    Smiling to himself, Tyree decided that Fowler had been right—Luke Boyd wasn’t a trusting man.
    Fowler reined up when he was close to Boyd and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Got me a friend with me. He’s been half-hung and shot up pretty bad.”
    “Then light, Owen, and bring both of you inside.”
    Tyree climbed off the buckskin, staggered a little, then glanced beyond Boyd to the cabin where a shadow was standing in the doorway. He