The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Author:Walter Van Tilburg Clark [Clark, Walter Van Tilburg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80740-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

4

Winder and his outfit started off, working single file into the woods. In a moment you couldn’t tell which was riders and which trees. The snow blurred everything, and blotted up sound too, into a thick, velvety quiet. Ma Grier and Bartlett led off at an angle toward the valley. They were heading for the shallows of the creek, where there weren’t any banks but an easy incline, a cross gully worn by sheep and cattle going down to drink. I’d seen deer drinking there too, but only in the early spring, and then warily. It would take time to find that crossing in this kind of a night.

Gil came alongside me.

“How you feeling now, fellow?” he asked.

“Good,” I said.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. “This still don’t have to be our picnic.”

“It looks like it was,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but it ain’t.”

He went away from me, stepping his pinto a little long to catch up with his gang.

The rest of us, in Tetley’s outfit, didn’t talk much. There was nothing to do but wait, and none of the arguing ones were left with us. Only Mapes tried a little of his cottoning-up, he-man talk on Tetley, but since Tetley didn’t want to talk, that stopped too. We weren’t a friendly gang anyway; no real friends in the lot. Tetley, I thought, was short with Mapes because he was trying to count in his mind, or some such system, to keep track of the time. Through the trees we watched the fire out by the cabin. Once it began to die down, and then a shadow went across it, and back across, and the fire darkened and flattened completely. At first we thought they had wind of us, but the fire gradually grew up again, brighter than ever. It was just somebody throwing more wood on.

The snowing relaxed for a spell, then started again with a fresh wind that whirled it around us for a minute or two, even in the woods, and veiled the fire, probably with snow scudding up from the open meadow. Then the wind died off and the snow was steady and slanting again, but thinner. It didn’t feel any longer as if it might be a real blizzard. The branches rattled around us when the wind blew. Being in the marshy end of the valley they weren’t pines, but aspens, and willow grown up as big as trees. When the horses stirred, the ground squelched under them, and you could see the dark shadow of water soaking up around their hoofs through the snow. In places, though, the slush was already getting icy, and split when it was stepped on.

Several times we heard the steers sounding off again, hollow in the wind, and sounding more distant than they could have been.

After a time Tetley led us out to the edge of the aspens to where the wind was directly on us again. We waited there, peering into the snow blowing in the valley, and

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