Puffs of dust rose from the roan's shambling trot, and Chick Bowdrie shifted his position in the saddle.  It had been a long ride and he was tired.  From a distance he had glimpsed a spot of green and the vague shape of buildings among the trees.  Where there was green of that shade there was usually water, and where there were water and buildings there would be people, warm food, and some conversation.

No cattle dotted the grassland, no horses looked over the corral bars.  There was no movement in the sun-baked area around the barn.

He walked the roan into the yard and called out, "Anybody t' home?"

Only silence answered his hail, the utter silence of a place long abandoned.  The neat, carefully situated and constructed buildings were gray and weather-worn, and the gaping door of the barn showed a blank emptiness behind it.

It was strange to find no people in a place of such beauty.  Trees shaded the dooryard and a rosebush bloomed beside the door, a rosebush bedraggled and game, fighting a losing battle against the wind, the dust, and the parched earth.

"Nevertheless," he said aloud, "this is as far as I go tonight."

He stepped down from the saddle, beating the dust from chaps and shirt, his black eyes sweeping the house and barn again.  He had the uneasy sense of a manhunter who knows something is wrong, something is out of place.

The hammerheaded roan ambled over to the water hole and dipped his muzzle into its limpid clearness.

"Somebody," Chick muttered, "spent a lot of time to make this place into a home.  Some of the trees were planted, and that rosebush, too."

The little ranch lay in the upper end of a long valley that widened out into a seemingly endless range that lost itself against the purple of far-off hills.

The position of the house, barn, and corrals indicated a mind that knew what it wanted.  Whoever had built this place had probably spent a lot of days in the saddle or up on a wagon seat planning just how he wanted it.  This was not just a ranch for the raising of cattle; this was a home.

"Five will get you ten he had him a woman," Bowdrie said.

Yet why, when so much work had been done, had the place been abandoned?  "And for a long time, too," Bowdrie told himself.

There were tumbleweeds banked against the side of the barn and caught under the water trough in the corral.  This place had been a long time alone.

The dry steps of the house creaked under his weight.  The closed door sagged on its hinges, and when he tugged on it they creaked protestingly, almost rusted into immobility.  Yet when the door opened, his boot rested on the step and stayed there.

A man's skeleton lay on the floor; his leather gunbelt cracked and dried to a stiff, dead thing, still clung to his waist.