Deadman Canyon by Louis Trimble Read Free Book Online Page A

the high country to see how many of the judge’s cattle he could spot easily. The judge had told him a hundred head were driven up in early summer. Checking the largest of the meadows, Clay counted only forty beeves. That meant the rest would be scattered, in the brush and higher up the mountains.
    Clay squinted at the sky. It was bright blue and the sun still held a certain warmth. But he could feel the chill of coming winter whenever he stepped into the shade, and he knew he had no time to waste if he was to find all the cows and get them safely into the valley before the first snow came up here.
    He spent the first days moving down those cattle grazing in the meadows. They were ornery and stubborn after a summer spent in the mountains, and none of them wanted to leave. Clay found that working alone he could only shag a few head at a time down the steep trails to the bench, and he spent the better part of three days before he had forty head corralled in Deadman Canyon.
    While he worked, he kept his eyes open to see if the country was as he remembered it, and if it would fit into his idea of turning this mountainside into a paying spread. His plan was to run a small herd of his own in these meadows during the summer and keep them in feed lots during the winter. The problem that had always stopped him whenever he’d considered this before was how to get the large amounts of hay he would need for winter feed.
    Then a few years back he had found the answer while helping on a fall roundup in Colorado. There, a large swampy area had been drained and made into hay meadow. Clay’s own hundred acres of swamp had never been anything but a nuisance — all cattails and bogland. Now he realized that if he cut his ditches right, he could not only drain the area, but he could catch all the water from the springs that caused the swamp.
    The one flaw in the plan was the fact that by taking over the meadows for himself, he would hurt the Winged L. Clay knew the judge had put a lot of money into extra beef and haying machinery so he could take advantage of Clay’s offer to use his mountain grazing land. In Helena he and the judge had talked about what could be done with the extra stock Winged L would have once there was no longer any place to graze it.
    The judge had suggested that he sell the beeves even though it would mean taking a heavy loss on them. But if he did that, he would still have a lot of extra hay and haying machinery on his hands. Clay pointed this out, but the judge waved the objection aside. If the judge believed in a man, he had always been ready to make personal sacrifices to help that man out.
    Now, as Clay stared down into the valley, he saw the solution to this final problem. The slope of the land was just right for him to channel his swamp drainage over to the judge’s dry south section. Under irrigation, it would provide all the graze the judge needed to keep his extra cattle.
    Excitement ran through Clay as he studied this new plan carefully. He even took time to ride into the valley and trace a possible channel from the swamp to the judge’s dry section. It would work! He curbed an impulse to ride to town and tell the judge about it. After he got the stock all rounded up would be time enough since nothing could be done until spring anyway.
    That problem taken care of, Clay turned his attention back to his own meadows. He saw that they were even better than he remembered. In a few places the trails between one meadow and another were little more than animal tracks snaking up steep mountainsides or edging along the lips of canyons. But in every case, Clay noted, he could blast out fair trails with a few sticks of dynamite.
    Finally he. worked his way to the high grasslands, a sprawled prairie, boggy right up to the end of the summer when it usually dried up just in time to catch the first heavy frosts. He found a dozen head of Winged L beef grazing on the browning grass, and he started them down to the lower