His first involuntary glance was towards the house,and there was unacknowledged expectancy in his eyes.
But he did not see Jean,nor any sign that she had returned.Instead,he saw her father just mounting in haste at the corral.He saw him swing his quirt down along the side of his horse and go tearing down the trail,leaving the wire gate flat upon the ground behind him,--which was against all precedent.
Lite quickened his own pace.He did not know why big Aleck Douglas should be hitting that pace out of the coulee,but since Aleck's pace was habitually unhurried,the inference was plain enough that there was some urgent need for haste.Lite let down the rails of the barred gate from the meadow into the pasture,mounted,and went galloping across the uneven sod.
His first anxious thought was for the girl.Had something happened to her?
At the stable he looked and saw that Jean's saddle did not hang 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 did not mean to be in too great a hurry to do anything;that was Lite's habit,and he had always found that it served him well.