The Ferguson Rifle by Louis L’Amour Page A

were red, with no tendril of flame remaining. I was awake, and wide awake, listening to I knew not what.
    Tonight we had posted no guard, trusting to our Indian friends and their dogs. Lucinda Falvey slept near me, and beyond her, the boy, Jorge Ulibarri. Davy Shanagan lay just beyond the boy, and Degory Kemble on the other side of me.
    My hand closed on a pistol butt, and I waited. What had awakened me? Suddenly, I knew. For as if a ghost, I glimpsed the faint outline of a man standing on the very edge of our camp, just beyond Davy Shanagan, and he was looking at Lucinda.
    He was a tall man, and I could see his face, which was extraordinarily pale, like the face of a dead man, yet his eyes were black, and he wore a black hat, the brim turned up leaving his features clear and sharp against the night.
    He did not see me, for where I lay there was shadow, and if he saw anything of me at all, it was merely a form half outlined in the darkness. He was looking at Lucinda, and he held a knife in his hand. He started to move, then hesitated. He must step past Shanagan as well as the boy, and he did not like it. The slightest wrong move or sound and those around her would awaken, and he would be caught.
    He did not like the odds. I could see the hesitation, the debate in his mind. One of them and he might have chanced it, but two he dared not chance, and with both Kemble and myself close by as well.
    The dogs had quieted. There was no sound but that brief spatter of rain. For a moment I was tempted to shoot, yet I did not know the stranger, and he might well be a friend, although not for a moment did I believe that.
    Who
was he?
    He was no man I had ever seen before. Certainly he was not Fernandez or any of his men. He was a stranger, but that he was a man of evil I had no doubt. Nor had I any doubt that he wished to either kill or capture Lucinda.
    Gently I eased back the edge of my buffalo robe and thrust out the muzzle of my pistol. Yet even as I did so the tall man turned slightly and I saw his other hand held a pistol. He lifted it and aimed it not at me, but at Lucinda. His eyes were boring into the darkness as if he could actually see me.
    â€œYou might kill me”—he spoke very softly—“but I would certainly kill her.”
    My pistol still covering him, I stood suddenly to my feet.
    But he was gone….
    Swiftly I stepped over the others to the edge of the woods, and there was no one there, nor was there any sound. At that moment the rain began to fall harder and I stepped into the woods. There was no one there.
    Davy Shanagan was sitting up. “What is it?”
    â€œThere was someone here,” I said. “Keep an eye out.”
    A swift search of the small patch of woods brought me nothing. Wherever he had gone, he had done so swiftly and with no nonsense about it. Beyond the patch of woods, there was open prairie and there seemed no place where a man could hide.
    Skirting the woods, I returned.
    â€œSure you weren’t dreamin’ then?” Davy asked.
    â€œHe was a tall man, very pale … with black eyes.”
    â€œMaybe it was a ghost you saw,” Davy said. “What man could come to this camp without arousing the dogs? And never a yelp from them, not a yelp. Not from the horses, either.”
    Had I been dreaming?
    â€œIt was no ghost,” I declared, “and he spoke to me.”
    â€œI heard nothing,” Davy said, “and I’m sure I would have.”
    Both of us lay down again, but I slept fitfully from then on, disturbed that any man could approach our camp so easily. When morning came, I scouted around but found no tracks, nor did Davy. I began to doubt my own senses, and when I opened the subject at breakfast with Lucinda, she shook her head.
    Yet when I described the man, she turned very pale. “Why! Why, that’s what my father looked like!”
    â€œBut your father’s dead?”
    â€œOf course, he is! At least I was told so, and