Milo Talon by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online

swallow of my beer. The vaquero looked up and caught my eyes on them. I lifted my glass. “Luck!” I said.
    He looked into his empty glass and shrugged.
    Motioning to the bartender, I said, “Beers for the gentlemen.” To them I said, “I have had good luck. An old debt … sixty dollars paid me. Two months’ wages!”
    Reluctantly, the bartender withdrew his face from the sandwich and served the beers. I took mine and joined them. “For three days I shall sleep, I shall eat, and I shall watch the trains come and go. After that I’ll look for a job. Or maybe I’ll drift.”
    “It is good to loaf sometimes, but you will find no work here. The cattle are gone, but for a few. It is sheep,” one of them said with disgust.
    “There is money in sheep,” the quiet one commented. “You butcher a steer, he is gone. You clip the wool from a sheep and he is still there. Do not speak lightly of the sheep.”
    “The one who had the car? Was he sheep or cattle?”
    The vaquero shrugged. “I thought he was with the steam cars, but I do not know. He bought no stock, and from over the hill where I was holding some horses on the grass I could see him well.”
    “I hear he had no visitors.”
    “Hah! So you think!” The vaquero leaned across the table. “
I
know! Two! Two visitors he had and both by night. They did not come together, but each rode up in darkness, very quietly. When each came to the door there was a moment of light when the door opened, that was all.
    “Each rode alone. Each rode in the night. It was four days after the first came before the second arrived.”
    “It has an odor,” the quiet one said. “Why only in the night? Is the man in the car a thief?”
    “There were no others? Only two?” I asked.
    The vaquero shrugged, then hesitatingly, he added, “There was another night when I heard something. My dog was with the horses and he was restless. When something worries him, I know it. I suspected wolves, but I saw none. I saw nothing. But the dog … the dog was worried.
    “I went back to lie down. All was still. Then I heard it in my ear. A man running.”
    “A rider?”
    “No rider. A man running. Running very fast, very frighten.”
    “Running? Where would a man run
to
, Pablo? There is no place. It is all wide open.”
    “It was a man running,” Pablo insisted. “I know what is a man running. It is not a horse. It is not a sheep or a cow. It is a man … running hard.”
    “Where did he go?” I asked.
    The scoffer shrugged. “That’s a question! A man could run for a day and come to nothing. Bah! You were dreaming!”
    “The scream was not a dream,” Pablo said.
    We all stared at him.
    He stared back. “That was later. There was a scream. A single scream. I heard it.”
    “An animal,” one said, “a mountain lion, perhaps.”
    “Another beer?” I suggested. “Soon the money will be gone but while it is here … drink!”
    We drank solemnly and were friends. Nor did they speak again of the car or of the man running. We talked of cattle and horses, of saddles, ropes and spurs, and two of us had ridden in brush country, andwe spoke of that, making the stories greater for the benefit of the two who knew no better.
    After awhile I arose and left them. Later, on the street, I saw Pablo, the vaquero. “A strange thing,” I said, “a man running out there, and the scream.”
    He was rolling a cigarette. “The scream was a man,” he said. Delicately, he touched his tongue to the cigarette paper. “It was a man in pain, very much pain.” He glanced at me. “Once, during the revolution, I have heard such a scream.”
    He lit the cigarette. “The scream. I think it comes from the man who was in the cars.”
    “Cars?”
    “There were two.
His
car and another, a boxcar, always locked.”
    This Mexican, he was not simply talking now. He was talking to me. Very quietly, I said, “Pablo, we need to talk, you and I, but not here.”
    “I am with the horses, perhaps one