Crazy Woman Creek by Virginia Welch Read Free Book Online

James Rose’s last minutes on earth. With difficulty he tried to conjure a picture of Rose slipping and falling from the bank into the dark and frigid water, but he couldn’t. It was only a two-foot drop, hardly menacing by daylight or moonlight. The creek was fast and mercilessly cold, but Rose was young and strong, a man who performed by himself all the demanding physical chores of a small but thriving cattle ranch. Something wasn’t right. Luke stood up.
    “I’m going to take a look around,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
    Luke banged his hat on his thigh to smack excess water from it and then placed it on his head and approached the creek. He walked slowly up and down the flat bank, stepping on patches of snow interspersed among thickly packed, dry grasses blown nearly supine by unrelenting winter winds. He searched for anything that would put to bed his unease regarding James Rose’s accident. If his death had been anything other than accidental, surely some bit of evidence to indicate foul play would be here, where he died. Another set of footprints. A second set of horse tracks. A personal item dropped and left behind, unbeknownst to the owner. In particular he looked for any sign of struggle. He looked for blood.
    For a quarter of an hour Luke walked up and down the bank on the side of the creek where they found Beauty, about three hundred feet in both directions, canvassing the ground as he went. Finding nothing, he returned to the others, who were mounted and waiting. Beauty’s lead line was tied to Sheriff Morris’ saddle horn.
    “Seen enough?” said Sheriff Morris as Luke walked up to his horse to untie it.
    “Enough,” lied Luke. “The Rose Ranch is that way,” he said, pointing west.
    As the five horses and four riders turned toward the Rose ranch, Luke couldn’t shake an unsettling feeling that he had unfinished business here. Could someone have pushed James Rose into the water? Luke had not found a scrap of physical evidence around the death site to indicate homicide. But to voice his unfounded suspicion aloud to Cyrus, who evidently had already decided from the circumstances that James had slipped and fallen to his death, would make Luke look like an amateur. Luke’s suspicion was mostly a feeling, and how could he explain a feeling, especially to someone as cynical as Cyrus? To convince him, Luke could only put forth hard evidence, and he certainly had none of that.
    But like the scratching of a hairy burdock leaf that has burrowed into his sock, a niggling thought scratched at Luke’s mind: Could Mrs. Rose have pushed her husband to his death?

Chapter Five
     
     
    Ulysses was the first to hear the sad procession, an elegy of four horsemen and a riderless horse. Perhaps it was the scent and not the sound of his master’s prized Morgan that the alert pet discerned on the late afternoon breeze, but whatever it was that aroused his canine senses, it triggered a predictable response in the most prominent part of his anatomy. His agitated barking sent Lenora scurrying from the kitchen to the front door to see what so disturbed her dog.
    But before she left the house, she surreptitiously peeped through white lace curtains at the front room window into the yard. She saw nothing out of order, no four-legged critters hissing or pawing at Ulysses, no two-legged visitors either, but Ulysses’ barking was not to be ignored. Of one thing Lenora was certain: she had not imagined the stealthy steps of an intruder outside her bedroom window the last two nights. Ulysses hadn’t imagined them either, and she was grateful that his barking had scared him off.
    Had he returned?
    With the ominous sound of the trespasser’s boots uppermost in her mind, Lenora was taking no chances. She wiped the bits of floury biscuit dough still clinging to her fingers onto her calico apron and then reached above the front door for James’ Sharps rifle, where it was always stored, ready for use. But now,