Riding For The Brand by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour [L'Amour, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Usenet, C429, Kat, Exratorrents
ISBN: 9780553899672
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2005-08-30T07:00:00+00:00

_______ ALL THE WAY back to the ranch he was thinking how nice that name sounded from her lips.

The Bar W lay like an ugly sore in the bottom of the flat. There were three adjoining pole corrals, an un-painted frame bunkhouse, and a ranch house of adobe. The cookshack was also adobe, and there was smoke coming from the chimney when he rode in with his shirts.

It was still quite early, for the ranch was only a short piece from town. He unsaddled the roan and walked back toward the cookshack for coffee. They were all there. Nobody said anything when he came in, but Cholly threw him a warning glance. The Kid got a cup and filled it with coffee. Then he sat down.

“What happened to yuh last night?” Wald demanded, glaring at him across the table.

“Me? I had me a run-in with that Old Stob horned ladino. Lost my rope.”

“You still got that rock?”

“That?” The Sandy Kid shrugged carelessly. “No. I throwed it away. Reckon it was just iron pyrites or somethin’.”

Nothing more was said, but he felt uncomfortable. He had found Jasper Wald an unpleasant man to work for, and the sooner he got himself another job the better off he would be. There was something in Wald’s baleful glance that disturbed him.

“In the mornin’,” Wald said after a few minutes, “you work that Thumb Butte country.”

The Kid nodded, but made no comment. The Thumb Butte area was six miles across the valley from the badlands where he’d had the run-in with Old Stob, that red-eyed mossyhorn. Was it accident or design that had caused Wald to send him to the other side of the ranch?

Yet the next day he realized that his new working ground had advantages of its own. He worked hard all morning and rounded up and turned into a mountain corral forty head of cattle that he had combed out of the piñons.

Switching his saddle to a bay pony, he took off into the draws that led south and west, away from the ranch. An hour’s riding brought him to the Argo trail, and he cantered along to the little town at Argo Springs. Here was the only land office within two hundred miles or more where a mining claim could be registered.

A quick check of the books, offered him by an obliging justice of the peace who also served in five or six other capacities, showed him that no mining claim had been located in the vicinity of the badlands. Hence, if the killer of Jim Kurland had found the claim, he was working it on the sly. He did some further checking, but the discovery he made was by accident. It came out of a blue sky when Pete Mallinger, at the Wells Fargo office, noticed his brand.

“Bar W, eh? You bring one of them boxes over here? The ones Wald’s been shippin’ to El Paso?”

“Me? No, I just rode over to get myself some smokin’.” He grinned confidentially. “The boss doesn’t even know I’m gone.

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