Hanging Woman Creek by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-03-29T07:17:23.739455+00:00

Chapter 11

Whatever their urge for trouble when they rode into the valley, it was gone by now. They would need time to figure out whether I was lying about Ann Farley, and also they would want to ask Bohlen about Philo himself.

These were not outlaws. They were cowhands, a bit tougher than average, or perhaps only more callous, and to their way of thinking they had been doing the right thing. They rode for their outfit, and the big outfits all hated nesters, and some nesters stole cattle. At least, they lived off the beef of the big cattlemen—or so it was generally believed.

And to the cattleman's way of thinking, it was even worse that they squatted on good grassland close to rivers, springs, or water holes. They planted crops, they put up fences. And to the cattlemen water and grass were their very life blood.

It was a war for the land, with the initial odds all on the side of the big outfits, but as time went on the numbers were on the side of the nesters. It was not that they were organized, but simply that they kept coming. They were murdered, starved out, or driven out, or they simply couldn't take the hard work, the cold winters, and the endless struggle to make a living that was necessary to homestead in Montana and the Dakotas, and therefore many of them left. But others came, and continued to come.

Some, like Philo Farley, started small cow ranches of their own, and some—and this was also true in his case—came because they liked the wild, free riding country and the rugged life out at the end of creation. The average cattleman was contemptuous of the nester, but in that he was often wrong. Many of those who came west to homestead were just as tough, just as enduring, and just as able to fight for their rights as any cattleman.

Philo Farley was born to the wild lands, and when he got a taste of it on the Northwest Frontier of India, he knew he could never settle for anything less. I had a feeling that Ann was the same sort... or maybe I was just telling myself what I wanted to believe.

Not many of the riders for the big outfits knew Farley, although he was well known among business people in Miles City and Cheyenne, and he had friends among the backers of the big cattle outfits, and among those ranchers from England who had themselves settled in Wyoming.

Actually, I was one of the few who knew him well. Most of the boys thought him too British and stand-offish, but I knew better. He was a strong, rugged man, a dead shot with any kind of weapon, a fine horseman, and a good stockman. He'd had a lot to learn when he came west, but he learned it fast.

Roman Bohlen, who had the largest outfit of any of Farley's neighbors, simply did not like him. He didn't know him, but to a man of Bohlen's temperament that was not at all necessary.

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