Deadman Canyon by Louis Trimble Read Free Book Online

say, you’re just postponing the inevitable.”
    Clay studied Marnie silently. He figured there wasn’t much to Ben Pike but blubber, but Abe Marnie was a different story. The way Clay read Marnie was grim. With someone to lead him, Marnie was a man who could cause serious trouble.
    Clay turned the horses in the direction of town and lashed his reins across their rumps. Pike yelled in dismay as both animals kicked up their heels and galloped down the road.
    Clay said, “Now start walking.”
    Marnie stepped toward his gun and then away as Clay waggled his rifle. Marnie said, “You’ve had all the warnings you’re going to get, Belden.”
    “So has Damson,” Clay said quietly. “Now move.”

VI
    T HE SHADOWS were growing long and the air was turning cool with the threat of coming night when Clay rode up the meadow trail to the spot where he had been ambushed the night before.
    He wasted little time looking for signs the sniper had left. A few quick looks showed him that the man had been back and brushed out his tracks.
    In making his final check, he walked to the edge of the drop-off where he had shot at the sniper. He glanced around, expecting to find nothing. Suddenly he bent down and studied the ground with close attention. The sniper had overlooked one clear heelprint. The print showed a heel that had been worn away on the inside so that the outer edge made the deeper impression. In the center of the print there was a small puncture, as if a nail was working loose in the heel itself.
    Clay straightened up with a grunt. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was tangible. It was something he could show Roy Ponders if he ever had the chance.
    He glanced toward the west and saw that the last of the sun was sliding over the distant Bitterroots. He hurried back to the dun and rode it down to the big bench that fronted the mouth of Deadman Canyon. He made his camp where a high shoulder of rock jutted from the steep hillside marking the north edge of the bench. He built his fire in front of a shallow overhang formed where the shoulder of rock met the hillside. Here he was protected on three sides, so that the sniper could approach only across the open bench.
    Clay half expected an attack, but the night remained quiet. In the morning, work pushed the problem of the sniper to the back of his mind. Clay’s plan was to avoid wasting time by driving the judge’s stock down to the valley day by day. Instead, he decided to corral them until he had a fair-sized gather and then move them onto Winged L graze in a bunch.
    With this in mind, he threw a brush fence across the small opening leading into Deadman Canyon. The canyon itself was long and narrow, well grassed and well watered, and enclosed by barren rock walls that rose sheer from the floor higher than a man could look without cricking his neck.
    The canyon had not been a place Clay liked to come as a boy. The towering rock walls kept out the sun most of the day, making it gloomy. And he had never ridden near it without remembering how the canyon had got its name. In the early days a silver propsector had died there when a snowslide caught him at the back of the canyon and buried him alive.
    Clay glanced toward the far end of the draw now as he worked to set up his brush fence. A great scar on the cliff face and a tumble of boulders at the end of the grass floor told him that flood and storm had been at work here since his last visit some seven or eight years before.
    He reminded himself to ride to the end of the canyon soon and see if the rockslide might not have uncovered one of the old watercourses that honeycombed these mountains. He had found a number of them not far away when he was a boy — long smooth tunnels burrowed out of the rocky cliffs by long departed rivers. They had fascinated him then, but he had never ventured far into them because the air inside always had the rank smell of bears clinging to it.
    The brush fence finished to his satisfaction, Clay rode into