Read Online Louis L'Amour by Hanging Woman Creek - Free Book Online Page B

as I know how, but I’m not a manhunter.”
    After that they left me. I finished up my meal and ordered more coffee. Compared to what we made at the line camp it was mighty weak stuff, but it was still coffee.
    I was paying no attention to anything around me when suddenly a girl spoke to me.
    Well, I’d been so taken up with listening to Stuart and Justin that I hadn’t noticed that girl before. She had come in after I had and was sitting at the next table. Now I saw that she was a right pretty girl.
    “I beg your pardon, sir. Could you tell me how to reach Otter Creek?”
    “Where on Otter? That’s a long stretch of creek, ma’am.” And then I added, “And nothing out there a lady could go to.”
    “I want to go to Philo Farley’s place.”
    She was slender, and got up mighty stylish, and she had the look of a thoroughbred.
    “Are you kin?” I asked.
    “Kin?” She looked puzzled, but then her face cleared. “Oh, yes! He is my brother.”
    Turning around in my chair, I said, carefully as I could, “That ain’t much of a place, ma’am. I mean Farley’s doing all right … or was last I saw him, maybe a year ago, but he built that cabin himself and he wasn’t much of a builder.
    “He’s got him a few cows, and some good horses, and given time he’ll make out, but I wouldn’t say it was any place for a city woman.”
    “He needs help.” The way she said it was matter-of-fact, no nonsense about it. “If I can help him, I shall.” And then she added, “There is no one else.”
    “Is he expectin’ you?”
    “No. I knew he would tell me not to come, so I just came anyway.”
    “I’m going that way, ma’am,” I said. “I work for Justin, and he has a line camp out on the Hanging Woman. I can take you out there, but I’d suggest you stay here in town instead, and let me ride over and tell him.”
    “That’s rather silly, isn’t it? Why should he make a trip in here for me? If he needs help, that would be time lost, and I am sure time is important to him.”
    Now, when a woman gets that look on her face there’s not much point in arguing with her, but I made one last attempt to get the straight of things. “Did he tell you he was in trouble?”
    “No … but from the tone of his last letters, I knew he needed help.”
    She did not have to convince me of that. Philo Farley was a slim young Irishman from the old country, a good man, too. He had been a soldier on the Northwest Frontier of India. He had come to Montana four or five years ago and, after looking around, had picked that site near Otter Creek and homesteaded it. And he’d had trouble.
    There were a couple of ranchers over that way that didn’t take favorably to nesters of any kind; and then there’d been a passing war party of young bucks who had decided he was fair game.
    The Khyber Pass apparently had taught him a few things, and the Sioux lost a warrior and two horses, with another buck wounded, before they decided to let him alone.
    As for the ranchers, they had done nothing, but I knew they weren’t taking kindly to his homesteading there, and they had made the usual comments about losing stock. Such comments were occasionally based on fact, but often as not they were just preliminary to some action against the nester. What had followed I had no idea, for I’d been gone from the country for some time.
    I left the girl in the restaurant and went out on the walk.
    Bill Justin was there, talking to Roman Bohlen.
    Bohlen was a big rancher, a rough, hard man, tooautocratic for me to work for, although I’d worked beside him on round-up crews. He was a good hand, fed his outfit well, paid top wages, but he was a brusque, short-spoken man whom I never cottoned to. However, he was probably the most successful rancher around, and he carried a lot of weight.
    He looked at me, a straight, hard look. “Didn’t know you were a ladies’ man, Pike,” he said. “Who is she?”
    Sort of reluctantly, I told him. “She wants to go