Ryan, Casey (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Western stories
You may not believe this next incident. I know I did not, when Casey told
me about it,--but now I am not so sure. Casey said that the light appeared
again, that night, moving slowly along the lip of the canyon like a man
with a large lantern. There was a full moon, which had made him decide to
travel at night on account of the heat while the sun was up. But the moon
did not reveal the cause of the light, though the canyon crest was plainly
visible to him.
William swung away from that light and walked rather briskly in the other
direction, and Casey did not argue with him. So they headed almost due
west and kept going. It seemed to Casey once or twice that the light
followed them; but he could not be sure.
Two full nights he journeyed, and on both nights he had the light behind
him. Once it came up swiftly to within a mile or so of him and William,
and stopped there for awhile and then disappeared. Casey camped rather
early and slept, and took the trail again in the morning. Night travel was
getting on his nerves.
All that day he walked and toward evening, with thunder heads piling high
above the Tippipahs, he came upon a small herd of Indian ponies feeding
out from the mouth of a wide gulch. He knew they were Indian ponies by
their size, their variegated colors, and their general unkemptness. They
presently spied him and went galloping off up the gulch, and Casey
followed until he spied a thin bluish ribbon of smoke wavering up toward
the slate-black clouds.
He made camp just out of sight around a point of rocks from the smoke,
stretching the canvas tarp which had floored the tent to make shelter
between boulders. He changed his clothes, dressing himself carefully in
the white flannel trousers, blue-and-green striped silk shirt, tan belt,
white shoes and his old Stetson tilted over his right eye at the
characteristic Casey angle. He was taking it for granted that an Indian
camp lay under that smoke, and he knew Indians. Inquisitiveness would shut
them up as effectively as poking a stick at a clam; but there were ways of
coaxing their interest, nevertheless, and when an Indian is curious you
have the trumps in your own hand and it will be your own fault if you
lose.
Casey's manner therefore was extremely preoccupied when he led a suddenly
limping William up the gulch and past a stone hut with a patched tepee
alongside it. A lean squaw stood erect before the tepee and regarded him
fixedly from under the shade of a mahogany-colored hand, and when Casey
came closer she stooped and ducked out of sight like a prairie dog diving
into its burrow. Casey paid no attention to that. He knew without being
told that he was under close scrutiny from eyes unseen; which was what he
desired and had prepared for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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