Lynch-Rope Law by Brett Halliday

Author:Brett Halliday
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504025362
Publisher: Open Road Media

13

The Circle Dot ranch house appeared deserted as Twister and Chuckaluck approached from the south. The only living thing in sight was the widow’s sway-backed nag in the corral sniffing about hungrily for any stray wisps of hay left over from the feeding the night before.

“Looks like she ain’t got company yet,” Twister muttered aloud as they neared the low log structure. “Not even no smoke comin’ out of thuh chimney.”

“Reckon she didn’t make no fire this mawnin’ because she didn’t have no chuck to cook,” Chuckaluck guessed uncomfortably. “Fed it all to us las’ night.”

When they reached the corral, Twister suggested, “You carry the grub in an’ s’prise the widder with it. I’ll unsaddle an’ put the hawses in this here ol’ barn where they’ll be out of sight if any curious riders come aroun’.”

A look of fright spread over Chuckaluck’s broad face at the suggestion that he should make the gift presentation to the widow with no backing up from his partner, but he squared his shoulders manfully and slid to the ground, lifting the heavy saddlebags from behind the cantle. “Awright,” he grunted, “but don’t you tarry none stablin’ thuh hawses. Might be I’ll need he’p quick.”

Twister laughed and led the horses inside the sagging old barn that looked as though it hadn’t been used for years. A gray rat scurried away as he entered, and the dim interior of the old barn was musty with the smell of dry manure and long-decayed feed stuff.

He loosed the cinches and swung heavy saddles off with expert ease, tossing them up on braced two-by-fours provided for that purpose, knotted tie ropes around the horses’ necks and slid off bridles, led them into long unused stalls with feed racks that were splintered and decaying.

He gave his roan a friendly slap on the sweaty rump as he emerged from the stall, and his voice was echoed back hollowly from the high-peaked roof when he said, “Don’t worry, Old-timer, we’ll rustle you up some feed if we stay here long.”

He glanced upward quickly, as though suspecting there was some person concealed in the hay mow throwing his words back at him, and he stood very still and stared upward with a twisted frown at a two-foot length of rope dangling from a rafter at least fifteen feet above the ground.

The end of the rope was frayed, showing that it had been sawed off with a knife, and for a brief instant Twister’s vivid imagination gave the visual hallucination of a body dangling there beneath the rope in the shadows of the old barn. He blinked his eyes shut and opened them—and the queer vision was gone. There was only a short length of rope knotted around the high rafter.

The old piece of rope might be hanging there for a thousand different reasons, he told himself as he hurried out of the old barn, but the queer chill inside his belly was not so easily dissipated. He was superstitious enough to believe in

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