Free The Desperado by Clifton Adams Page B

I just pulled
Red around and rode west.

Chapter 4
    around the second day, on the trail back to John's City, I began to
think straight again. I began to wonder if maybe Pappy hadn't been
right again and I was acting like a damn fool by going back and asking
for more trouble from the police. Maybe—but I had a feeling that
wouldn't be wiped away by straight thinking. It was a feeling of
something stretching and snapping my nerves like too-tight banjo
strings. I couldn't place it then, but I found out later what the
feeling was. It was fear.
    Up until now it was just a word that people talked about sometimes. I
always thought it was something a man felt when a gun was pointed at
him and the hammer was falling forward, of when a condemned man stood
on the gallows scaffold waiting for the trap to spring. But then I
remembered that I hadn't felt it when Paul Creyton had taken a shot at
me a few nights back. This was something new. And I couldn't explain
it. When I felt it, I just pushed Red a little harder in the direction
of John's City.
    We made the return trip in three days, because I wasn't as careful as
Pappy had been about covering my trail. We came onto the John's City
range from the north, and I made for the Bannerman ranch first because
it was closer than our own place, and I wanted to see if Laurin was all
right. I remember riding across the flat in the brilliant afternoon,
wondering what I would do if the cavalry or police happened to be
waiting for me there at the Bannermans'. I had been around Ray Novak
and his pa enough to be familiar with the law man's saying: “If you
want to catch a fugitive, watch his woman.”
    But I didn't see anything. I raised the chimney of the Bannerman
ranch house first, sticking clear-cut against the ice-blue sky. And
pretty soon I could make out the whole house and the corrals and
outbuildings, and that feeling in my stomach came back again and told
me that something was wrong.
    It was too quiet, for one thing. There are sounds peculiar to cattle
outfits—the sound of blacksmith hammers, the rattle of wagons, or clop
of horses—sounds you don't notice particularly until they are missing.
There were none of those sounds as I rode into the ranch yard.
    And there were other things. There were no horses in the holding
corrals, and the barn doors flapped forlornly in the prairie wind, and
the bunkhouse, where the ranch hands were supposed to be, was empty.
The well-tended outfit I had seen a few days before looked like a ghost
ranch now. And, somehow, I knew it all tied up with that feeling I had
been carrying.
    I rode Red right up to the back door and yelled in.
    “Laurin! Joe! Is anybody home?”
    It was like shouting into a well just to hear your voice go round and
round the naked walls, knowing that nobody was going to answer.
    “Laurin, are you in there?”
    Joe, the old man, the ranch hands, they didn't mean a damn to me. But
Laurin...
    I didn't dare think any further than that. She was all right. She had
gone away somewhere, visiting maybe. She had to be all right.
    I dropped down from the saddle, took the back steps in one jump, and
rattled the back door.
    “Laurin!”
    I hadn't expected anything to happen. It was just that I didn't know
what else to do. I was about to turn away and ride as fast as I could
to some place where somebody would tell me what was going on here.
Something was crazy. Something was all wrong. I could sense it the way
a horse senses that he's about to step on a snake, and I wanted to shy
away, just the way a horse would do. I took the first step back from
the door, when I heard something inside the house.
    It moved slowly, whatever it was. Not with stealth, not as if it was
trying to creep up on something. More as if it was being dragged, or as
if it was dragging itself. Whatever it was, it was coming into the
kitchen, toward the back door where I still stood. Then I saw what it
was.
    “Joe,” I heard