Louis L'Amour Read Online Free Page B

can box some. Get you in shape.”
    We ate for a while without talking, and then Eddie went on, “I boxed forty-seven times in the ring for money. I boxed Paddy Ryan before he was champion, and I boxed Charlie Mitchell over in England. I boxed Joe Goss, Dominick McCaffrey, and Joe Coburn.”
    Little as I knew about prize fighting, I’d read the
Police Gazette
enough to know who they were, and they were the best.
    “You could learn me,” I said. “All I ever knew about fighting I picked up by working at it.”
    “I’ll rustle up some mitts,” Eddie said.
    There was no sign of Tom Gatty in Milestown—or, as they were calling it now, Miles City—although I covered the whole of it. Most of the time I listened, and what I heard didn’t make me feel any better. Yet it was less what I heard than what I didn’t hear. There were a lot of suddenly suspicious folks around town, and a lot that wasn’t being said.
    A stranger coming to Miles City would see just the dusty main street with a row of false-fronted frame buildings along either side. The signs mostly extendedfrom the buildings to supporting posts on the edge of the boardwalk. There were water barrels here and there along the street, in case of fire. Usually one of the Diamond R bull teams was standing in the street, and there were buckboards or other rigs in from the ranches about.
    An eastern man looking along that street would think there wasn’t much to it, but he would be wrong. In my time I’d been a sight of places, and I’d call Miles City a big town—big in the outlook of most of the folks who lived there, and big in the country it took in all around.
    They had law there, but nobody paid it much mind. I mean, when trouble came nobody thought of going to the law about it; you handled it yourself. If somebody made trouble in the town, usually the marshal would run them in for the night; or, if they packed a gun, he’d take their gun away and tell them to go sleep it off.
    Times were changing, and there were new faces around. The big outfits were losing stock and they didn’t like it. And that meant they would do something about it when they got to the point where they decided action was called for, and I had a hunch that time had come.
    As we were going along the street Eddie said to me, “You ought to get you a place of your own, Pronto. A man’ll never get nowhere working for the other fellow.”
    “Never had money enough,” I said. “Most money I ever saved was forty dollars, to buy a saddle.”
    “Why, you must have spent more’n that in Chicago, the way you tell it.”
    “I did. On’y that was gamblin’ money, and gamblin’ money don’t stick to a man. Down by the stockyards I got into this dice game, and I was hitting a few hot licks. I started with less than thirty dollars, and ran it up to more than three hundred. Then the cops came, and somebody hollered ‘Bull’ and everybody grabbed. Mostly they grabbed my money, and I came up short with on’y sixty bucks, and a fine to pay.”
    “You sure played in hard luck.”
    “Never knew any other kind, come to think of it, but I never kicked up any fuss about it. I’m a man does his job, and fights a lick or two come Saturday.”
    “You got to get you a place of your own. Little outfit down on one of these cricks you been tellin’ of.”
    “Trouble is,” I said, “big ranchers run cows on most of those cricks. They take it mighty unkind for anybody to go to nesting on their water.”
    “You need to save your money, get yourself a front,” Eddie insisted.
    “What’s a front?”
    “Clothes, that’s what. Get yourself some new boots, keep them polished up, get yourself a new hat. Maybe a suit. You look like money, money will come to you.”
    “Man I knew once, Eddie, he figured like that. He got himself all that outfit you’re speakin’ of, and a new horse and saddle along with it. So they hung him.”
    “
Hung
him?”
    “Sure. There was stock missin’, and everybody