Free Collection 1986 - The Trail To Crazy Man (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Page A

squeak!”
    “Well, I’ll be hanged!” Rafe looked at the grease on the hubs. “Where’d you get the grease?”
    “Sort of a spring back over in the hills. I brung back a bucket of it.”
    Rafe Caradec looked up sharply. “Johnny, where’d you find that spring?”
    “Why”—Gill looked puzzled—“it’s just a sort of hole like, back over next to that mound. You know, in that bad range. Ain’t much account down there, but I was down there once and found this here spring. This stuff works as well as the grease you buy.”
    “It should,” Rafe said dryly. “It’s the same stuff!”
    He caught up the black and threw a saddle on it. Within an hour he was riding down toward the barren knoll Gill had mentioned. What he found was not a spring, but a hole among some sparse rushes, dead and sick looking. It was an oil seepage.
    Oil!
    Swiftly his mind leaped ahead. This, then, could be the reason why Barkow and Shute were so anxious to acquire title to this piece of land, so anxious that they would have a man shanghaied and killed. Caradec recalled that Bonneville had reported oil seepages on his trip through the state some forty years or so before, and there had been a well drilled in the previous decade.
    One of the largest markets for oil was the patent medicine business, for it was the main ingredient in so-called British Oil.
    The hole in which the oil was seeping in a thick stream, might be shallow, but sounding with a six-foot stick found no bottom. Rafe doubted if it was much deeper. Still, there would be several barrels here, and he seemed to recall some talk of selling oil for twenty dollars the barrel.
    Swinging into the saddle, he turned the big black down the draw and rode rapidly toward the hills. This could be the reason, for certainly it was reason enough. The medicine business was only one possible market, for machinery of all kinds needed lubricants. There was every chance that the oil industry might really mean something in time.
    If the hole was emptied, how fast would it refill? And how constant was the supply? On one point he could soon find out.
    He swung the horse up out of the draw, forded the Crazy Man, and cantered up the hill to the cabin. As he reined in and swung down at the door he noticed two strange horses.
    Tex Brisco stepped to the door, his face hard.
    “Watch it, Boss!” he said sharply.
    Pod Gomer’s thickset body thrust into the doorway.
    “Caradec,” he said calmly, “you’re under arrest.”
    Rafe swung down, facing him. Two horses. Who had ridden the other one?
    “For what?” he demanded.
    His mind was racing. The mutiny? Had they found out about that?
    “For killin’. Shootin’ Bonaro.”
    “Bonaro?”
Rafe laughed. “You mean for defendin’ myself? Bonaro had a rifle in that window. He was all set to shoot me!”
    Gomer nodded coolly. “That was most folks’ opinion, but it seems nobody
saw
him aim any gun at you. We’ve only got your say-so. When we got to askin’ around, it begun to look sort of funny like. It appears to a lot of folks that you just took that chance to shoot him and get away with it. Anyway, you’d be better off to stand trial.”
    “Don’t go, Boss,” Brisco said. “They don’t ever aim to have a trial.”
    “You’d better not resist,” Gomer replied calmly. “I’ve got twenty Shute riders down the valley. I made ’em stay back. The minute any shootin’ starts, they’ll come a-runnin’, and you all know what that would mean.”
    ____________
    R AFE KNEW. IT would mean the death of all four of them and the end to any opposition to Barkow’s plans. Probably, that was what the rancher hoped would happen.
    “Why, sure, Gomer,” Caradec said calmly. “I’ll go.”
    Tex started to protest, and Rafe saw Gill hurl his hat into the, dust.
    “Give me your guns then,” Gomer said, “and mount up.”
    “No.” Rafe’s voice was flat. “I keep my guns till I get to town. If that bunch of Shute’s starts anything, the first