“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.”
“I think you’re right,” Madden said, “but I’ll ride up there anyway.”
In the low ground I found the place where he had stopped to pull on his boots, and he had walked on from there. By that time his feet must have been sore.
The low ground turned out to be some old wallows, with a cut where run-off water had headed for the creek. He had followed that slight cut, scarcely deep enough to cover a creeping man, down to the creek bed.
That creek wasn’t much. Dry now, in wet weather it must have run with a good stream. There were traces in the bottom of recent water … it had probably been there only a short time before our man came along. He might even have found a drink.
We scouted both ways, and found his trail going upstream. He had stopped often to rest. “Must be wounded,” Cotton said.
“Or maybe he’s a city man, not used to rough walking.”
“You think it’s Tarlton?”
“Could be,” I said.
A few spattering drops of rain fell, and we went into our blanket rolls for our slickers and put them on. The rain fell harder, and cut visibility. It was a cold rain, driven by a stiff wind that kept our hatbrims slapping our brows.
“This’ll wipe out the tracks,” Cotton said.
“He’ll stay with the stream bed. It’s his best chance to find water … a pool somewhere, or maybe a spring.”