Cowboys -- Fiction; Ranch life -- Fiction; Western stories; Wyoming -- Fiction
“O God!” he screamed. “Oh, Jesus! Keep him off me! Oh, save me!” His
glaring face now seemed fixed on something close to him. “Leave me go! I
didn’t push you over. You know he made me push you. I meant nothing. I
knowed nothing, I was only the cook. Why, I liked you--you was kind to
me. Oh, why did I ever go! There! Take it back! There’s your money! He
give it to me when you was dead to make me hush up. There! I never spent
a cent of it!”
He tore from his rags the hush-money that had been sewed in them, and
scattered the fluttering bills in the air. Then once more he clapped his
hands to his head as he kneeled.
“Take off your hat!” I cried again.
He rose, stared wildly, and screamed: “I tell you you’ve got it all.
It’s all he gave to me!”
The next moment he plunged into the cauldron, a thousand feet below.
On the following day we found the two bodies--that second victim the
country had wondered about, and the boy. And we counted the money, the
guilty money that had for a while closed the boy’s innocent mouth: five
ten-dollar bills! Not much to hide murder for, not much to draw a
tortured soul back to the scene of another’s crime. The true murderer
was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.
V
THE GIFT HORSE
High up the mountain amid white Winter I sat, and looked far down where
still the yellow Autumn stayed, looked at Wind River shrunk to map-size,
a basking valley, a drowsy country, tawny and warm, winding
southeastward away to the tawny plain, and there dissolving with air and
earth in one deep, hazy, golden sleep. Somewhere in that slumberous haze
beyond the buttes and utmost foothills, and burrowed into the vast
unfeatured level, lay my problem, Still Hunt Spring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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