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  One of the men at the table wet his lips. "Hell, it ain't no sweat off us. They rode in from the south, and they went back that way. They were askin' about another herd of Lazy TC cattle. We hadn't seen 'em. He was also askin' about you ... if you're Chancy."

  "I'm Chancy," I said, "Otis Tom Chancy. And if you see those boys again, you tell 'em I'm looking for them. And if they've killed my partner, Bob Tarlton, I'll see they hang."

  We started toward the door. "And that goes for anybody who lends them a hand, or buys any more cattle from them."

  Outside the air was cool. We swung into our saddles, Handy Corbin still carrying the shotgun. He glanced over at me as we started to ride away. "Mister," he said, "you can sure build yourself a fire if you've got the right kindling."

  Chapter 8

  AT THE SUTLER'S store, we split our supplies, taking what we could pack on one horse. We left the other supplies with him, and turned the rest of our stock into his corral. Briefly, I explained what had happened, and left word with him for Tarlton if he should happen to come in before we did ... if he was still alive.

  We followed a south-bound trail There was no use hunting for tracks until well away from the fort. Army patrols and folks coming and going would have trampled all sign into a mess of tracks imposed upon tracks.

  Five miles south, when the tracks had thinned out, I described the tracks of Andy Miller's horse and that big black of Kelsey's to Cotton Madden and Handy Corbin. "We'll camp tonight," I said, "and in the morning Corbin will ride east and Cotton west. Five miles should do it. If either of you boys comes on the Kelsey lot, don't start a war all by yourselves—cut the rest of us in on it."

  "You figure there's been shootin'?" Cotton asked.

  "I don't know. Only Kelsey's outfit seems to have a pattern of holding the main herd back in the hills, and driving a few head into town to sell. Like as not we'll find the herd somewhere south of here."

  At daybreak, after a quick cup of coffee, we started out. When the others had gone, I taken my rifle from the scabbard and started south, leading the pack horse and studying the ground in long sweeps to right and left

  Now, most Indians travel by landmarks, and if a body can figure which landmarks an Indian is using, he can afford to pay little attention to tracks on the ground. But these were white men, not as canny at hiding a trail as an Indian is, yet smart enough not to be taken lightly.

  I moved slowly south. The sun climbed into the sky, the day grew warm. I found occasional buffalo tracks, and several small herds of antelope started up and ran off, but I saw no tracks of riders. I studied the terrain with care, for I was wary of ambush.

  Suddenly in the eastern sky there rose a trail of smoke. Dismounting, I hurriedly put together a few clumps of sage and lighted them to signal Cotton Madden, in case he had not seen the original smoke.

  Corbin hadn't waited. Cotton rode up shortly after I came up to where he had been, and we found the remains of the fire and an arrow of stones indicating the trail, which was a good fifty feet from the fire.

  Corbin's own trail was alongside the trail of the four riders and two pack horses. We started on at a trot, for that trail was a good three to four days old. Evidently they were not worried about being followed, for their tracks led straight away, and surely they had not reason to suspect we were anywhere around, nor anybody else who might be interested in following them.

  They had made their nooning under some cottonwoods beside a small stream, and from the looks of things they had taken their time. The tracks indicated that they had loafed about, perhaps napped a short time, and drank some beer. The bottles were close by. When Kelsey and the others had started on again, their pace was leisurely.

  Handy Corbin, on the other hand, was pushing hard. So we were left with no choice—we had to ride fast ourselves, or let Corbin come upon them alone.

  Suddenly the trail turned at right angles and dipped into a draw. At this point, Corbin had swung wide, not liking the change, and he had ridden on ahead, scouting the draw from some distance away. Then he had dismounted, left his horse among some brush, and had crawled up to the arroyo.

  There was nothing about it that I liked. Corbin was moving too fast ... he should have waited for us. Drawing rein, I sat my saddle and listened, and for a while I heard no sound but the slight creak as Madden eased his weight in the saddle, or the shifting of a hoof by one of the horses.

  My eyes scanned the country ahead, taking in every clump of brush or rocks, every dip or hollow that I could see. Without any reason I could name, I was feeling uneasy. I felt a soft breeze stir along my cheek, but there was no other motion. There seemed to be nothing around us but the desert.

  Touching a heel to my horse, I started him forward at a walk. The logical thing was to slip up to the edge of that arroyo and look over ... or ride up and look over. A body would just naturally want to see what Handy Corbin had seen ... if anything.

  "Cotton"—I spoke low, without even turning my head—"you take the lead rope on this pack horse. When I give the word you break hard to your right and ride like hell. There's a hollow yonder. You get into it and ride for the draw up ahead. I'm going in right here."

  If they were waiting for us—and I had my hunch they were—they'd be thrown off balance when we split in opposite directions.

  Softly, I spoke to my horse. "All right, boy," I said, "here we go!"

  I felt his muscles tense, and when I said, "Now!" I let him have the spurs. He jumped as if he'd been shot, and we lit out on a scramble for the arroyo. Into it we went, rifle in my hand, and swiftly wheeling him I charged up the arroyo.

  There was a muffled shot, then I rounded the bend in the arroyo and they were there, dead ahead of me. Pointing the rifle with one hand, like a pistol, I shot into the nearest man at point-blank range.

  They had expected us to ride together, and they had expected us to try to get away. Instead, we had split apart evidently just as one of them shot.

  My horse was at a dead run when I came on them, and when my shot went off my rifle muzzle wasn't more than six feet from the man's chest. The bullet slammed him down, and a hoof from my horse caught him as he fell.

  The other man, the one who had fired, was caught without warning. He was up at the edge of the arroyo, and his footing there was bad. As he turned sharply around to bring his gun to bear, the sand gave way beneath him and he slid, off balance, to the bottom of the arroyo.

  Still holding my rifle like a pistol, I tried a shot at him and missed by three feet, my horse still charging forward. I spun him around—and like any good cutting horse, he could turn on a dime and have five cents left—and he turned, just barely making it in the narrow confines of the arroyo.

  The fallen man was scrambling to his feet, a stocky man with red hair whom I had never seen before. His face was red, his pale blue eyes were staring wild, and his lips were drawn back. He had dropped his rifle and was coming up with a six-gun. There was no time. I charged my horse into him and knocked him spinning into the rocks, and his gun flew from his hand.

  My horse stopped and swung around and I held my rifle on the sprawled-out man, for an instant hesitating whether to shoot or not. He saw it and threw out a hand. "For God's sake, man! Don't shoot!"

  "You came hunting me," I said, still holding the rifle on him.

  Desperately, I wanted to look at the first man. Was he dead, or only injured? I side-stepped my horse until I could see them both. The other man was lying still, no weapon within sight.

  Were there more of them? "If you want to live, mister," I said, "you'd better start talking, and if I even take a notion that you are lying, I'll put one into your brisket and leave you here."

  "Don't shoot!" he pleaded again. "Look, I'm all busted up as it is. I don't know how bad."

  "Pretty bad," I said. "Who put you up to this?"

  I could see their horses now, and I knew one of them. It was one of the Gates horses, stolen when the cattle were stolen, no doubt.

  "That Que
enie woman. She said it would be easy, an' she offered us thirty dollars apiece for you all."

  "Where is she now?"

  "Yonder, I expect, over at the Forks with the herd."

  "How'd she know we'd be coming?"

  "Damned if I know. Cax, he didn't think you were anywhere around, but that redhead she knew. She swore you'd be coming; but if you didn't, we were to ride on up to Fort Laramie and nose around until you did come."

  "What happened to Corbin?"

  "Who's he?"

  "Handy Corbin ... he was ahead of us."

  "Handy Corbin? The hell you say! We saw nothing of him, mister and if we had he'd have only seen us runnin'. I want no piece of him—he's Hell on wheels!"

  "So you got me instead. All right, you keep talking. Are there any more of you out here?"

  "No."

  "How many at the Forks?"

  He hesitated. He was growing more wary, so I told him where he stood. "Listen, you talk, or I'll take your horse and leave you. I don't know how bad you're busted and I don't care, but my guess is you've got yourself a few busted bones. You know about how long you'd last out here without a horse, without water, without a gun."

  He wet his lips. His face was becoming pale now, and I had a hunch he was beginning to feel the pain as the shock wore off. He might be only bruised, but a badly bruised bone can trouble a man as much as a broken one.

  "There's nine, all told," he said. "That's including the women. There's the redhead and there's Steve Camden's woman. Seven men."

  "What's there? I mean, what's at the Forks? Is it a hide-out for thieves, or a ranch or what?"

  "It's Camden's ranch ... the Circle C. Two of the boys there work for him. The others just holed up there for one reason or another."

  Urged by my gun muzzle and a few threats, he kept on talking, once he'd got started. Camden's place was an outlaw hideout, with fresh horses and meals always available ... at a price. Also, stolen cattle could be pastured there.

  There had been an attack on a herd by Caxton Kelsey's outfit, and they had lost a man, with two others wounded. They had killed at least two men, and had driven the others wounded and afoot, into the sand hills. The survivors, if there were any left by now, were without water, without horses.

  Persistent urging from me brought out the fact that Kelsey kept a man on a butte with field glasses, watching for anybody coming north. If any survivors did manage to get that far they would be hunted down and killed. There was, the wounded man assured me, no chance at all for anybody to get by that butte unseen, either going or coming.

  Cotton Madden came riding back down the arroyo leading the pack horse. He had seen nobody. So where was Corbin?

  We went over to the other man. He was still unconscious, but he was breathing. When I had come charging in, holding the rifle in one hand, my bullet, which I had tried to aim low, had actually glanced off his skull. The scalp was ripped open, and he probably had a concussion.

  Cotton found a few sticks of wood in the bottom of the arroyo and we put together a small fire. After collecting their guns, I helped the red-headed man up. One leg was badly wrenched, although it did not seem to be broken, and the back of his shirt was soaked with blood from deep lacerations caused by falling on the sharp-edged rocks. His arm was scraped, and there was something wrong with the elbow—it looked as if it might be broken. I might have tried setting a leg or an arm, but an elbow was something I didn't want to tackle.

  "We're going to make some coffee," I said, "and you're welcome. Then you better mount up and head for Fort Laramie and the sawbones at the fort. You've got a bad arm there ... I think something is busted."

  "You turning us loose?" the redhead asked.

  "We don't want any part of you," I said. "We could shoot you, but you'd likely poison all the buzzards in the country. So we're turning you loose only, we'll keep your guns."

  "Now, wait a minute!" he protested. "You leave us with no guns, and the first Indian we meet will have our scalps."

  I grinned at him. "Red, you better heist your heels for the fort. If you can pray, and if you're lucky, you won't meet any Indians."

  He grumbled some, but I was of no mind to give the guns back to men who had shot at me. "What about him?" he said, and gestured toward the still unconscious outlaw.

  "You carry him along," I said. "I figure he'll come to before long. There's one more thing, though. I'd take it most unkind if I found you on my trail again. If I was you I'd get fixed up at the fort, and then when you're able to travel you head for the Nation, or anywhere I'm not likely to be."

  We gave them coffee and turned them loose, and then tied the spare rifles on our pack horse, and stuck the spare pistols in our bags. That made two extras I had, for I was still packing the gun I'd taken off the would-be sheriff.

  There was still no sign of Handy Corbin. We studied around, hoping to pick up his trail, but he'd left no more tracks than a ghost.

  The country before us looked open, but actually it was not. Long ago I had discovered that much of the western plains or desert terrain can fool a man, for where it looks flat or only gently rolling there may be deep hollows or draws that cannot be seen until a man is right up to them.

  We came suddenly on the trail of the cattle when we were thinking only of the trail of Caxton Kelsey and his partners. Cotton was off to one side, maybe a quarter of a mile east of me at the moment, and he was the first to see the tracks.

  He rode over to join me, following the tracks down to where they intersected our own trail. At this stage the herd was walking, and superimposed on the tracks of the cattle were those of the riders who rode the drag. One of them was Kelsey's black.

  "Where do we go from here?" Cotton asked. He squinted his eyes into the distance toward where the cattle had gone. The trail was several days old, and was already beginning to dust over, but we could pick it up easy enough. What was bothering me was Tarlton and those riders he had with him—riders that were working for me as well as for him.

  "We'll go back," I said. "Maybe all of those boys are dead, but we'll give them a decent burial, and if there are any still alive we'll find them."

  "It's been a while," Cotton said.

  "Those were tough men," I said, "and a tough man with a will to live is a hard man to kill. If Tarlton wasn't shot dead, he's making a fight for it somewhere right this minute. We'll ride back."

  "What about Handy?"

  "He'll have to go his own way. He took off on some wildgoose chase or other, so he's on his own. He might have gone off there," I gestured toward the east, where the herd had come from, "and he might have followed the herd."

  "He's a hunting man," Madden said. "He'd follow the herd."

  "Luck to him," I said. "We'll ride east."

  We turned our horses and rode along the dusty trail. My eyes searched the sky. I knew what I was looking for, and Cotton knew enough not to need to ask.

  I was watching for buzzards.

  Chapter 9

  ABOVE THE SAGEBRUSH, levels where no cattle grazed, the buzzards hung almost motionless against the sky. We had seen them from well over a mile back, and rode warily, with fear for what we might find. We rode in silence—there was only the creak of our saddles, only the hoof-falls of oar horses.

  The first thing we came on was a horse. It lay sprawled in death, the saddle gone. Beyond was the body of a man, a stranger. He had been stripped of clothing and mutilated.

  "No Injun did that," Cotton said. "It was somebody trying to make it look like Injun work."

  We spread out, to cover more ground. We found another body; this time the mutilation had been hasty, as somebody might do who was in a hurry and wanted to get it over with; it was not done with the thoroughness of an Indian who did not want to meet an armed and dangerous enemy in the happy hunting grounds.

  Cotton lifted his arm and I rode over to him. In a buffalo wallow there was another dead horse—it had been a mighty fine animal—and the earth was torn up by much moving around. A
body could see where boot toes had been dug into the ground by a man who lay on his belly shooting. And he had been shooting. Cotton counted forty-two cartridge cases. Somebody had made quite a stand here.

  Superimposed on the tracks were the tracks of a shod horse, or horses. One of the cartridge shells had been tramped into the ground.

  "Whoever it was, he got away," I said to Madden.

  "For a while, anyway. Must've been he stood them off until dark, then slipped off. These horseshoe tracks must've been made when they came hunting him and found him gone."

  We circled, studying the sign. Clouds were gathering wind whipped our hatbrims, stirred the dust. "Goin' to rain," Madden remarked. "I wonder what became of Corbin." But we had no answer to that.

  We found a trail, quite by accident, it seemed. We had started to turn away to check toward the east when I saw a smudge underneath the edge of a clump of sage. "Look here," I said.

  "Well, I'll be damned," Cotton Madden said, and he studied the track, then looked up. "Smart ... he took off his boots. He's in his sock feet."

  The prints were vague, indefinite, but we knew what to look for now, and we found it. There was another, more defined print a bit farther on. He was beginning to hurry ... but they had not looked this far, and they had been looking for boot tracks.

  For an hour we worked steadily at the trail, sometimes losing it, then finding it again, hoping to find the man, who might be wounded. It was a case of by guess and by God.

  He had traveled half a mile before he stopped to put on his boots. We found that track by obvious means. When we ran out of sign we sat our saddles and contemplated the situation. Where would a man go who desperately needed to hide?

  We scanned the country. On a ridge nearby there were rocks and trees, and off to the west was rough low ground with scattered brush.

  "I'll gamble on the low ground," I said. "This hombre is smart, whoever he is. He'd figure on them looking up yonder."