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 Queenie 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.