Jean of the Lazy A | Page 5

on its
accustomed peg inside the door, and he breathed freer. She could not
have returned, then. He turned his own horse inside without taking off
the saddle, and looked around him puzzled. Nothing seemed wrong
about the place. The sorrel mare stood placidly switching at the flies
and suckling her gangling colt in the shady corner of the corral, and the
chickens were pecking desultorily about their feeding-ground in
expectation of the wheat that Jean or Lite would fling to them later on.
Not a thing seemed unusual.
Yet Lite stood just outside the stable, and the sensation that something
was wrong grew keener. He was not a nervous person,--you would
have laughed at the idea of nerves in connection with Lite Avery. He
felt that something was wrong, just the same. It was not altogether the
hurried departure of Aleck Douglas, either, that made him feel so. He
looked at the house setting back there close to the bluff just where it
began to curve rudely out from the narrowest part of the coulee. It was
still and quiet, with closed windows and doors to tell there was no one
at home. And yet, to Lite its very silence seemed sinister.
Wolves were many, down in the breaks along the river that spring; and

the coyotes were an ever-present evil among the calves, so that Lite
never rode abroad without his six-shooter. He reached back and
loosened it in the holster before he started up the sandy path to the
house; and if you knew the Lazy A ranch as well as Lite knew it, from
six years of calling it home, you would wonder at that action of his,
which was instinctive and wholly unconscious.
So he went up through the sunshine of late afternoon that sent his
shadow a full rod before him, and he stepped upon the narrow platform
before the kitchen door, and stood there a minute listening. He heard
the mantel clock in the living-room ticking with the resonance given by
a room empty of all other sound. Because his ears were keen, he heard
also the little alarm clock in the kitchen tick-tick-tick on the shelf
behind the stove where Jean kept it daytimes.
Peaceful enough, for all the silence; yet Lite reached back and laid his
fingers upon the smooth butt of his six-shooter and opened the door
with his left hand, which was more or less awkward. He pushed the
door open and stepped inside. Then for a full minute he did not move.
On the floor that Jean had scrubbed till it was so white, a man lay dead,
stretched upon his back. His eyes stared vacantly straight up at the
ceiling, where a single cobweb which Jean had not noticed swayed in
the air-current Lite set in motion with the opening of the door. On the
floor, where it had dropped from his hand perhaps when he fell, a small
square piece of gingerbread lay, crumbled around the edges. Tragic
halo around his head, a pool of blood was turning brown and clotted.
Lite shivered a little while he stared down at him.
In a minute he lifted his eyes from the figure and looked around the
small room. The stove shone black in the sunlight which the open door
let in. On the table, covered with white oilcloth, the loaf of gingerbread
lay uncovered, and beside it lay a knife used to cut off the piece which
the man on the floor had not eaten before he died. Nothing else was
disturbed. Nothing else seemed in the least to bear any evidence of
what had taken place.
Lite's thoughts turned in spite of him to the man who had ridden from

the coulee as though fiends had pursued. The conclusion was obvious,
yet Lite loyally rejected it in the face of reason. Reason told him that
there went the slayer. For this dead man was what was left of Johnny
Croft, the Crofty of whom Jim had gossiped not more than half an hour
before. And the gossip had been of threats which Johnny Croft had
made against the two Douglas brothers,--big Aleck, of the Lazy A, and
Carl, of the Bar Nothing ranch adjoining.
Suicide it could scarcely be, for Crofty was the type of man who would
cling to life; besides, his gun was in its holster, and a man would hardly
have the strength or the desire to put away his gun after he has shot
himself under one eye. Death had undoubtedly been immediate. Lite
thought of these things while he stood there just inside the door. Then
he turned slowly and went outside, and stood hesitating upon the porch.
He did not quite know what he ought to do about it, and so he