Free The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

them with their toes.” He looked down at his drink. “They didn’t tie their legs,” he said, “just their arms.”
    After a minute he said, “That was an official posse though, sheriff and all. All the same …” He started his third drink, but slowly, like he didn’t want it much.
    “Rustlers?” I asked him.
    “Held up a stagecoach,” he told me. “The driver was shot.”
    “Well, they had it coming,” I said.
    “One of them was a boy,” he said, “just a kid. He was scared to death and kept crying, and telling them he hadn’t done it. When they put the rope around his neck his knees gave out. He fell off the barrel and nearly choked.”
    I could see how Gil felt. It wasn’t a nice thing to remember with a job of this kind in front of you. But I couldtell Davies was listening to Gil. He wasn’t looking at us, but he was just sipping his drink, and being too quiet.
    “We got to watch ourselves, Gil,” I told him, very low, and looking up at the woman with the parrot.
    “To hell with them,” he said. But he didn’t say it loudly.
    “Greene was all mixed up,” I said, still muttering over my chin. “He wasn’t sure of anything except Kinkaid was shot in the head. But he thought it was about noon.”
    “I know,” Gil said.
    Then he said, “They’re gettin’ back already. Hot for it, ain’t they?” It sounded like remembering that Montana job had changed his whole way of looking at things.
    I could tell without turning who was coming. There wasn’t a big, flat-footed clop-clop like horses make on hard-pack, but a kind of edgy clip-clip-clip. There was only one man around here would ride a mule, at least on this kind of business. That was Bill Winder, who drove the stage between Reno and Bridger’s Wells. A mule is tough all right; a good mule can work two horses into the ground and not know it. But there’s something about a mule a man can’t get fond of. Maybe it’s just the way a mule is, just as you feel it’s the end with a man who’s that way. But you can’t make a mule part of the way you live, like your horse is; it’s like he had no insides, no soul. Instead of a partner you’ve just got something else to work on along with steers. Winder didn’t like mules either, but that’s why he rode them. It was against his religion to get on a horse; horses were for driving.
    “It’s Winder,” Gil said, and looked at Davies and grinned. “The news gets around, don’t it?”
    I looked at Davies too, in the glass, but he wasn’t showing anything, just staring at his drink and minding his own thoughts.
    Winder wouldn’t help Davies any; we knew that. He was edgy the same way Gil was, but angry, not funning, and you couldn’t get at him with an idea.
    We saw him stop beside Farnley and say something and,when he got his answer, shake his head angrily and spit, and pull his mule into the tie rail with a jerk. Waiting wasn’t part of Winder’s plan of life either. He believed in action first and make your explanation to fit.
    Gabe Hart was with him, on another mule. Gabe was his hostler, a big, ape-built man, stronger than was natural, but weak-minded; not crazy, but childish, like his mind had never grown up. He was dirty too; he slept in the stables with his horses, and his knees and elbows were always out of his clothes, and his long hair and beard always had bits of hay and a powder of grain chaff in them. Gabe was gentle, though; not a mean streak in him, like there generally is in stupid, very strong men. Gabe was the only man I ever knew could really love a mule, and with horses he was one of them. That’s why Winder kept him. Gabe was no use for anything else, but he could do everything with horses, making clucking, senseless talk in his little, high voice and just letting them feel his hands, which were huge even for a man his size. And Winder liked his horses hard to handle. Outside of horses there were only two things in Gabe’s life, Winder and sitting. Winder was