the Empty Land (1969) by Louis L'amour

stretched out on the trail with a straight two miles of open country before them. Matt let his eyes check the sides of the trail ... he did not trust even the empty land.
    "She's packin ' a gun," Burke said suddenly. "I saw it when she opened her bag at Drumright's."
    Matt Corburn looked at him, his mind turning over the information, considering it. Why Madge's sudden trip? Why the gun? Was she carrying it for herself? Or for somebody else? Somebody who might want to use it suddenly?
    He had known of Madge Healy for several years. She was an unusually attractive girl, in a country where girls of any kind had been few. She had come to Eureka as only a child, with a traveling show, and she had left the show there with her aunt and her aunt's lover.

The Empty Land (1969)

    For several months they had toured the mining camps, with Madge singing, dancing, and doing monologues for the miners, who had loved her and responded richly. During all those months neither Madge's aunt nor her lover had done anything. living well off Madge's earnings, and then one night while both lay in a drunken sleep, Madge bought a horse and rode out of town. In Austin she hired the widow of an Irish miner and an old Negro who drove the rig for them and played a banjo. Madge , had been fourteen at the time, prematurely wise, prematurely cynical.
    Bookings or theatres were no concern of hers. For the next two years she had successfully eluded her aunt and her friend, doing her act wherever a crowd could be assembled, working from loading platforms, piles of lumber, stumps in the woods, in barrooms, cafes, even in livery stables.
    She looked younger than she was; she laughed, she was gay, and she sang. She sang the songs the miners remembered from their earlier years. She brought back memories of home, and they loved her for it.
    Most of the crowds had money, and they had few places to spend it. They filled the collection hat with coins, bills, nuggets, even small sacks of dust. Every boom camp in Nevada, California, Utah, and Colorado knew her in the next few years. And then suddenly she was no longer a child. She was a young woman, and it was obvious to everyone.
    At that moment her aunt's lover finally caught up with her. The aunt, so he said, had died of acute alcoholism, but she had turned over to him papers which made him Madge's legal guardian. He then, as Madge told them in the courtroom later, decided to be her lover as well as her guardian. She refused, and he had moved to use force. And Madge Healy shot him.
    She was promptly and enthusiastically acquitted.
    Now the atmosphere had changed. No longer a child, she still received applause and money, and proposals as well, and other suggestions of a less permanent nature.
    Suddenly and inexplicably, Madge Healy retired, buying a rundown ranch on the edge of Spring Valley, stocking it with a few cattle and some fine horses. Within the year she had gone off to Denver and returned with a husband.
    Matt Coburn eased the shotgun on his knees. The trail was closing in. It might be coming up now. This could be the place. Strawberry was right ahead. . . .
    With one part of his mind he was still thinking about Madge Healy. He had met her husband, Scollard, only once, in Pioche. He was tall, somewhat sly-looking, but handsome and with polish. He was connected with some banking family in the East, supposedly, and had met Madge through some business arrangement.
    He had treated his wife with a kind of lazy contempt, had brought her to town, left her in her hotel room, and spent the biggest part of the night drinking and gambling. While drunk, he had put money on the table, boasting "there's plenty where that came from."
    He lost, and lost heavily, and later that night there was a row in the hotel room, and before daybreak somebody reported that Scollard had come slipping down the hack "stairs, stuffing papers into a valise. He had rented a buckboard and driven swiftly away.
    Two days later the buckboard, drawn