Rex Stout - 1939 - The Mountain Cat Murders by Rex Stout

Author:Rex Stout [Stout, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76821-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Wynne Cowles, with a heavy automatic pistol in her hand, sat on a rock, peering intently around the edge of an enormous boulder which was perched on the rim of a narrow canyon. The pistol, rock, boulder and canyon were all her property, all being within the confines of Broken Circle Ranch which she owned. It had been a dude ranch at the time of her first arrival at Cody two years ago and, taking a fancy to it, she had bought it. The energy, acumen, time and money Wynne Cowles had expended on whims might have built a railroad.

Impatience stirred within her. Leaving her ambush behind the boulder, she crept to the edge of the precipice to see if the sheep’s carcass was in fact there; and saw it, unmistakably, a grayish blur at the bottom of the canyon. The bait was all right; why didn’t they come? She returned to the ambush and resumed her vigil, glancing at her wrist watch and noting that it was nearly five o’clock. She would give them thirty minutes more. But not half that allowance had gone when her keen eyes detected a group of black dots moving far up against the blue sky. She watched them, releasing the safety on the pistol and hugging the boulder. The black dots descended moving in wide graceful circles, then narrowing into spirals of shorter radius, becoming not dots but things with wings—wings that did not flap but only banked and steered. They came lower, centering on a point in the canyon directly beneath her, and now they were huge and she could see the nakedness of their necks and almost the greediness of their sharp glittering eyes. Her own eyes gleamed with distaste; she disliked vultures because they disgusted her. She waited until they got almost to her level, circling into the canyon’s mouth, then drew a deep breath, leveled the pistol with nerveless aim and fired. Nothing stopped the bullet. She fired again and one of the vultures, at least a hundred yards away, keeled over, seemed to hang suspended for an instant and then fluttered into the canyon like an enormous black leaf. The wings of the six or eight others were flapping now and they were moving off. She fired four more shots, but the distance was so great that only luck could have guided the pistol bullet to its moving mark. She stepped to the edge of the canyon and saw that one down there, not twenty feet from the carrion, flopping on the rocks like a decapitated chicken.

A voice sounded behind her. “That’s too bad, boss. Honest it is. Them turkey buzzards keep a place clean.”

She turned and saw a wiry little man with good-humored eyes. “I only got one, Joe. Did you see it go? Riding the air like an eagle and then suddenly losing it, turning loose of its grip on the air. I’m sick of popping gophers because I never miss any more. What are you doing out here?”

“Got a message.

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