Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,37
circling high overhead. He returned to his scrutiny of the ranch buildings. The place, he decided, was almost surely abandoned. There was no mailbox out here at the road, no telephone or power lines leading in.
It would be a long walk in the scorching heat of midday, and he’d better have a drink of the water before he started. He went back and was about to crawl between the strands of barbed wire beside the gate when his attention was suddenly caught by the chain encircling the post. It had been cut.
Somebody had used bolt cutters to remove a quarter-inch section of one side of one of the links, and not too long ago. The clean metallic gray of the ends contrasted sharply with the rusty condition of the rest of it. It had been carefully arranged in back of the post where it would remain unnoticed by anyone going past in front. This had to be the place, he thought, and his eyes were cold as he slipped the adjoining link through the gap and opened the gate.
He could have been the only person in this end of Nevada as he drove through, closed the gate, and rehooked the chain again. There was no dust in sight along the road as far as he could see, no sound of car or truck. As soon as he had dropped down the short grade into the flat, he was out of sight of the road except for the rising dust cloud of his passage. He drove slowly, keeping his eyes on the building for any sign of life. Nothing moved anywhere except the vultures, taking off in alarm as he went past. Whatever carrion they were tearing at was hidden by the sage some hundred yards off to his right.
He was near enough now to see that most of the panes were broken in the old-fashioned sashes of the two windows in front. It was a small house, of board-and-batten construction, long unpainted, with a porch across the front and a roof of weathered shingles. There was a fieldstone chimney at the right end of it. He stopped in the shade of one of the trees in front and got out in the silence and the incandescent glare of noon.
The windmill and the big galvanized water tank were straight ahead, some fifty yards off to the right of the house. Nearly half the mill’s blades were missing, and its framework and ladder were discolored with rust. The corral fence and barn were behind the windmill, both silvery with age and fallen into disrepair. It was years, he thought, since anybody had lived here, but the place had definitely had visitors. The baked earth of the yard bore the tracks of at least two vehicles, one of which he thought must have been a truck of some kind because the tires were bigger and the treads more deeply impressed. This one had apparently been back and forth several times.
He walked around to the rear. There was a small back porch. The windows here had broken panes in them, too. The tire tracks of the heavy vehicle came on into the backyard, and the truck or whatever it was had apparently stood for some length of time in two places under the big cottonwood some distance behind the porch, judging from the accumulated drops of leaking crankcase oil. There were a great many heel marks and scuffs of shoe soles as though a number of people had been walking around, but the ground was too hard-baked and they were too indistinct for him to gather any information from them. The other building, off to one side of the barn, was apparently a chicken house, and there was an old privy farther back.
He walked out to the barn, continuing to study the ground. The wide double doors were open and sagging on their hinges, and the ground was softer inside, a mixture of dust and sand and ancient manure unbaked by the sun. There were some stalls at the far end, an enclosed feed bin, and an opening above leading into a hayloft, but the ladder beneath it was gone except for two rungs near the top. One of the vehicles—the lighter one, he thought—had been driven in here just once and then backed out. A few drops of oil discolored the ground between the tracks where it had stopped, but as a measure of the time it had stood here they were meaningless.