The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 1 by Louis L’Amour

sullen gray sky. There was still time.
    It started over a horse. We Tremaynes always found ourselves good horse flesh. Johnny, he ketched this black colt in the hills near Durango. Little beauty, he was, and Johnny learned him well and entered him in a race we always had down around there.
    Dick Watson, him and his brothers, they fancied horses too and one of Dick’s horses had won that race four years running. We all bet a sight of money. Not so much, when you figure it, but a mighty lot for us, who never had much cash in hand. Johnny’s black just ran off and left Watson’s horse, and Watson was mighty put out.
    He said no horse like that ever run wild, and that Johnny must of stole him somewheres. Johnny said no he never and that Watson’s horse just wasn’t all that fast. Watson said that if Johnny wasn’t such a boy, him being just sixteen, he’d whup him good. Then our brother Burt, he stepped up. Burt was a mighty big, fine figure of a man. He stepped up and said he wasn’t no boy, if it was a fight Watson wanted.
    Well, Burt, he beat the tar out of Dick Watson. There was hard words said, and Ma, she reckoned we all better git for home. We did, an’ everything went along for a time. Until that black was found dead. Somebody shot her down in the pasture. Shot her from clost up.
    Johnny, he was all for going to town and gitting him a man, but Ma, she said no and Burt and Lisha, they sided with her. But Johnny … well, it was some days for he tuned up that mouth organ of his. And when he done it, it was all sad music.
    We wasn’t cattlemen, Son, not like other folks around. We was farmers and trappers, or bee hunters, anything there was to git the coon. Mostly, them days, we farmed and between crops we went back in the high meadows and rounded us up wild horses.
    They was thousands of them, Son. Land sakes, I wished you could of seen them run! It were a sight too beautiful for man to look upon. We rounded up a sight of them, but we never kept but a few.
    We’d pick the youngest and prettiest. We’d gentle them down with kindness and good grass and carrots, then we’d break them. My Pap, he broke horses for a gent in Kentucky, a long time ago and he knew a goer and a stayer. I guess none of us ever did forgit that little black mare.
    Now that horse was shot clost up. It was no accident. And no man would kill a good horse like that. Except for if he done it in pure meanness. And who had him a reason? Dick Watson. That black mare beat Watson’s horse once and he would do it again.
    Johnny, he never said much, but from that day on he packed him a gun, and he never had afore.
    Them boys down in the bresh is fixing to move. Gitting cold I reckon.
    Boone Tremayne’s head throbbed with fever and he stared through the chinks in the flaked rock. The man under the ledge stirred cautiously and Boone put a shot down there to keep him from stretching out too much. He rubbed his hands and blew upon the fingers. A man moved in the brush and Boone laid a bullet in close to the ground.
    Bullets hailed around his shelter, most of them glancing off the rocks, but one got inside and ricocheted past his head. A hair closer and he would have been dead.
    Flat on his belly he stuffed the tablet and pencil in his pocket and crawled along the bottom of the shallow cave. Painfully, he wormed his way along the cave for thirty yards and found a place where it was a few inches deeper and where some animal or bird had long since gathered sticks for a nest or home. Gathering some of the dead sticks together, Boone built a fire.
    The long-dead wood made little smoke and the tiny flame was comforting. Later, when it was dark the reflection would give him away so he tried to shield it with rocks as much as he could. He held his blue and shaking fingers almost in the flame, but it was a long time before any warmth reached him.
    They were waiting now, waiting for darkness. He must finish his