Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/83

Rh he went on until the sun was low in the west and all the sky was rimmed with color.

The mountain desert changed now. The hills were hung with blue on the eastern sides. The coolness seemed to come out of the ground, and the wind changed its direction. But for Andy these were not pleasant things. Night had become an enemy. And the first moments of his long torment were beginning—men, who made up his danger, were also a necessity, and he felt that any danger were better than this solitude and the dark.

The sun was down, and the dusk had come over the hills in a rush, when he saw a house half lost in the shadows. It was a narrow-fronted, two-storied, unpainted, lonely place, without sign of a porch. It was obviously not made to be lived in and enjoyed. It was only a shelter into which people crept for the night, or where they ate their meals. And here certainly, where there was no vestige of a town near, and where there was no telephone, the news of the deaths of Bill Dozier and Buck Heath could not have come. Andy accepted the house as a blessing and went straight toward it.

But the days of carelessness were over for Andy, and he would never again approach a house without searching it like a human face. He studied this shack as he came closer. It was an evil-appearing building, with no sign of smoke from the stovepipe until he was almost on the house, and then he saw a meager wisp of vapor, showing that the fire had almost burned down. And if there were people in the building they did not choose to show a light. The windows were black inside, and on the outside they glimmered with the light reflected from the sky.

Andy went around to the rear of the house, where there was a low shed beside the corral, half tumbled down