sure. Just a traveler possibly. This time of year Laramie gets its share of stock buyers and whatnot.”
Lew stopped speaking as Hub Wheaton came up, nodded, and smiled downward. “Glad to see you in town, Miss Amy,” he said. “You’re looking pretty as a May flower.”
Amy smiled and Lew reached far over to draw forth an empty chair. “Sit down,” he said. “Had your supper?”
Hubbell said he had but he sat, and, when a waiter came around, he asked for a cup of coffee. While he waited, he looked at Lew and said: “You’re quite a fancier of horseflesh. If you have a minute after supper, I’d like you to walk over to the livery barn and look at an animal with me.”
“Sure,” said Morgan casually. “You looking for another saddle animal, Hub?”
“No. No, the one I’ve got is good enough for me. At least for now. Just want your opinion about something is all.”
Lew, sensing nothing here, went ahead with his meal, but Amy was slower to abandon her study of the sheriff’s melancholy face.
They talked of casual things until the meal was over. They left the dining room as a trio, went out to where Lew had his top-buggy, and there they drove northward and across to the livery barn.
“I’ll only keep him a minute,” said Hubbell Wheaton to Amy, as he climbed out and turned to look back. He seemed to be balancing something in his mind. In the end he didn’t say it; he only nodded and walked around the rig where Morgan was waiting. Together they passed out of sight between two smoking carriage lanterns into the barn’s gloomy interior.
Amy watched riders pass through alternate splashes of light and dark around her on the roadway. She heard the tinkling laugh of a saloon woman come out of the Great Northern, and she saw the stranger leaning idly against an overhang upright, smoking another black cigar and looking out into the westerly velvet night as though unconscious of everything around him, as though entirely lost to everything except his thoughts. He did not stir or drop his gaze, even when two rowdy cowboys swung past behind him. Her interest quickened again, seeing him like that. Then he did an entirely unexpected thing. He stepped down off the plank walk and strolled purposefully toward the Lincoln Ranch buggy. At the last moment, though, when Amy was positive he had seen her, had recognized her, and was going to speak, he swung out and around, passed behind the rig, and appeared upon the far side, walking past her uncle and Hubbell Wheaton where they were emerging from the barn. After that he was lost to her. The next moment her uncle mumbled—“Good night.”—to Hubbell Wheaton, grunted up into the rig, freed the lines, kicked off the foot brake, and clucked at the horse between the shafts.
Lew drove well beyond Laramie out on to the prairie before either of them spoke. There was the beginning of a full moon above. Star shine lay silver-soft over everything and mantled the distant dark-cut mountains with an eerie paleness.
“There’s a thoroughbred horse in town,” Lew said abruptly, without any preamble at all. He swung his head. “That doesn’t mean anything to you, though, does it?”
Amy shook her head and leaned back. There was something to a night such as this one that stirred her, made her restless and dissatisfied.
“The blood bay is a thoroughbred, Amy.”
Gradual understanding came now. She rolled her head upon the seat back to look, hard, at her uncle. It was not what he had said, but what he had not said that encouraged her to say: “And the owner of this other thoroughbred…?”
“Hub’s going to find out. He just happened by tonight. The hostler called him over, invited Hub to look at one of the finest specimens of horseflesh the hostler had ever seen. It was this thoroughbred.”
“Hub thought of the blood bay?”
“Not right off. He said it struck him an hour later when Johnny Fleharty was telling him how a stranger in town asked Ace McElhaney if he had killed that Travis feller.”
Amy said no more. She rolled her head in the opposite direction and solemnly looked up where stars like flung-back tears shone with diamond brightness.
Lew was also quiet. When they arrived back at Lincoln Ranch, he saw her to the main house door, then muttered something about caring for the horse, and was gone two hours, long enough to feed and bed down twenty horses.
Amy did not remain indoors. It was too still and stiflingly hot. She went out into the rose garden behind the house, sat down there in a little arbor, and heard a timber wolf cry in the far distance, this sound coming faintly in its sad, sad way down the hushed long miles.
The warnings were going out, she thought. Hubbell Wheaton had been first, then her uncle, and now, she was certain, Lew had gone to the bunkhouse, taken Charley Swindin outside, and had told him, too.
She stood up. She paced across the yard and back again. Her restlessness was stronger than ever. Finally she turned rigid in soft shadows, looking at the rear of the house. Inside, someone was moving about. A light came on in her uncle’s bedroom. He had, she knew, come back from caring for the horse, which meant that once more a chain reaction was in motion.
She made a slow swing of the garden and beyond it out into the yonder ranch yard. She had no purpose in doing this except the driving restlessness that possessed her.
She had no purpose at any rate until she stopped out there, looking beyond the orange-lighted bunkhouse where Swindin and her uncle’s other riders lived, straight at the immense wooden barn where it stood, moon- shadowed in soft gloom.
The idea came in a rush. Her uncle was retiring. The men at the bunkhouse were also bedding down. If any of them thought of her at all, they would think she had also gone to her room. No one would stop her; no one would miss her.
She was halted, woman-like, for a detaining second while she considered how she was dressed, for supper in town at the hotel dining room, not for racing down the night on her horse. But Amy Morgan was direct in thought and action. She dismissed this notion and struck out deliberately for the barn.
It required very little time to saddle up, to rig out her horse and mount it, to go quietly out of the barn’s rear opening on to the plain beyond, make a wide circuit, and eventually come upon the stage road, then to ease her horse over into a long lope and feel the whip of good night air against her burning face.
The ride into Laramie never seemed long in a buggy. Even at other times when she’d gone in on horseback, it had never appeared to take as long as it did this night When it appeared that she’d never arrive, the few late-hour lights sprang up out of the onward night, burning yellow in the otherwise natural light. She slowed at Laramie’s north end, looked right and left, then paced along to the livery barn where her uncle and Hub Wheaton had looked at the thoroughbred horse. There, she turned in on her lathered mount, came under the astonished stare of the night hawk, and asked at once who owned the thoroughbred horse.
The nighthawk was an elderly, paunchy man known only as Toby. His face very clearly said that he was now nonplussed at Amy Morgan’s being out this late unescorted, in a fine gown, and looking as though she’d been racing in the moonlight.
“The thoroughbred…?” he said blankly, not at once drawing his scattered thoughts together. “Oh…you mean the brown thoroughbred.”
Amy nodded. She had no idea of the animal’s color, had in fact never seen him, but there couldn’t be two thoroughbreds in the livery barn, so she said: “Yes, the brown thoroughbred.”
“Well, Miss Amy, as far as I know it’s some feller stayin’ over at the hotel. Feller named Jones…or was it Smith? No, it was Jones.”
Amy sprang down, tossed her reins to the night hawk, and ran lightly across the darkened roadway. Toby stood there, gaping after her until she disappeared between the globe lights on either side of the hotel’s entrance. Then he blinked at her horse, slowly wagged his head back and forth in a scandalized fashion, and led the animal in out of sight. It was quite late. There was little chance of anyone’s seeing the horse much less recognizing it as Amy’s in the night gloom, but a man of Toby’s age and ironbound proprieties preferred not to take any risks at all.
He was sitting on a horseshoe keg, looking as solemn as an owl, when Amy came hurriedly back, thanked
