Read Online The Plains of Laramie by Lauran Paine - Free Book Online Page A

Dodge tol’ Les, if he didn’t keep his word on the note, they’d have some trouble.”
    “How long was that before Dodge got killed?”
    “Oh, hell, I don’t rightly know. Six months maybe, maybe eight months.” The old cowboy screwed up his face. “Say, you don’t think Les Tallant killed the old man, do you? Hell, from what I heard around town, they was more’n one man in at the shootin’.”
    The Kid reached into his pocket and shrugged at the same time. He passed the hostler a gold piece and watched the avaricious glitter come into the whiskey-rheumy eyes. “No. I don’t allow Tallant did the killin’ by himself. ¿Quién sabe? Who knows who did it, or how many there were?” He thanked the hostler, and ducked back out of town.
    The Kid had the thing pretty well worked out in his mind before he moved out of his lair among the juniper hills. It wasn’t exactly clear to him, yet, what it was all about, but somehow he felt that he’d stumbled onto a short-cut to the killers. He leisurely saddled up the big black, hummed in the late afternoon, checked his gun and belt loops, swung aboard, and rode carefully out over the moonlit range. Thenight was balmy, like there might be summer rain in the offing, and the full, mellow light of the heavens covered the land with its mantle of eerie, soft, and mysterious light.
    The Kid rode for several hours before he came to the knoll where he’d watched the D-Back-To-Back ranch yard the day of his gunfight with Dugan and Beale. Like a ghostly silhouette, the Kid sat in a pensive mood, overlooking the ranch below. The buildings were dark. The Kid dismounted, shucked his spurs, hobbled his horse, and began the descent to the ranch yard below. He knew the way, this time, and, by the time the back of the house loomed up before him, he had taken only a fraction of the time he had used on his first abortive visit to Toma Dodge.
    The Kid tried the window, found it not only unlocked, but easier to slide up than it had been before. A tiny tinkling of warning rang far back in the dim recesses of his mind but he shrugged them away. He was inside the room, flattened against the wall, hand hovering over his .45, listening, when the little warning buzzed again. This time, concentrating on the darkness as he was, the warning was limned sharply in his mind. He stood motionlessly and listened. Somewhere in the house he could hear voices. Men’s voices. A full awareness of his position swept over him in an instant and he hesitated briefly, looking wonderingly at the opened window. The voices came again, dim and distant and incomprehensible, but unmistakable. He turned his back on the route of escape and began a sidling, stealthy advance across the room.
    The Kid’s eyes were accustomed to the gloom by the time he had been in the Dodge house for ten minutes. Still, he felt his way along the wall, carefulnot to bump into anything. He found a long, cool corridor and went down it. The voices were clearer now and suddenly he heard the voice of Toma Dodge. The words weren’t hard to understand and they sent a chill over the Kid.
    “No. You’re both wrong. He told me about the two bullet holes, and I saw them for myself.”
    A masculine voice interrupted. “I told you we should’ve finished off the damned horse.”
    Another voice, garrulous and sullen, answered: “All right, I was wrong. As soon as she signs the deed, we’ll go back an’ kill the damn’ critter.”
    The first voice answered swiftly and there was the sound of a man rising from his chair. “Come on, Toma, we ain’t got all night. Sign it an’ nothin’ll happen to you.”
    “And if I don’t?”
    There was an unpleasant silence that the Kid felt and understood. He let his hand rest caressingly on his gun butt. “An’ if you don’t, you’ll get what your old man got.”
    “You’d do that to a woman?” Her voice was high and incredulous.
    Apparently the man nodded because Toma’s voice came again, softly, as