“What do you think, Moss? You’ve hunted buffalo all over this country.”
“Sand Creek,” he said, “or maybe Two Buttes.”
“Or the breaks of the Cimarron,” Kyle Shore suggested.
Moss Reardon threw him a glance. “Now, that might be,” he said. “It just might be.”
We moved westward with the first light, keeping the small herd moving at a good pace. As for me, just knowing that Judith was out there ahead of us gave me an odd feeling of nearness. Up to now we hadn’t been exactly certain which way she was taking, but now I had the feeling that if I was setting out to do it I could come up to them by sundown.
That night we camped on the north fork of the Cimarron, and scarcely had coffee boiling when a rider hailed the fire. In those days, as I’ve said before, nobody just rode up out of the dark. If he wanted to live to see grandchildren he learned to stop off a piece and call out.
When he was squatting by the fire and the usual opening talk was over, such as how did he find the grass, and how beef prices were, or had he seen any buffalo, he looked across the fire at me and said, “You’ll be Flagan Sackett?”
“That I am.”
“Message for you, from Bat Masterson.”
He handed me a folded paper. Opening it, I found another inside.
The first was a note from Bat: If we had known this!
The second was an answer to our telegram sent to Tazewell: J. B. Fetchen, Colby Rafin, Burr Fetchen and three John Does wanted for murder of Laban Costello. Apprehend and hold.
“So they killed him,” Galloway said. “I had a thought it might be so.”
“We got to get that girl away from them, Galloway,” I said.
“If what you surmise is true,” Hawkes said, “they might want her for a bargaining point with the old man. Look at it this way. They’ve got a big herd of cattle and no range. They could settle on free range most anywhere, but there will be questions asked. Mine is a known brand, so if they haven’t altered it, they must.”
“They ain’t had the time,” Walker said. ‘Takes a spell to rope and brand that many head.”
“We’re wastin’ time,” Larnie said. “Let’s locate the herd and take it from them.”
“There’s nineteen of them,” Briggs objected. ‘Taking a herd from such an outfit wouldn’t be that easy. A man’s got to be smart to bring it off.”
“Larnie’s right about one thing,” Hawkes said. “We’ve got to find the herd.”
In a wide-open land like this where law was a local thing and no officer wanted to spread himself any further than his own district, a man could do just about what he was big enough to do, or that he was fast enough with a gun to do. The only restraint there was on any man outside of the settled communities was his own moral outlook and the strength of the men with him.
Black Fetchen and his kin had always ruled their roost about as they wanted, and had ridden rough-shod over those about them, but they had been kind of cornered by the country back there and the fact that there were some others around that were just as tough as they were.
The killing of Laban Costello had made outlaws of them and they had come west, no doubt feeling they’d have things their own way out here. They started off by stealing Hawkes’s herd, killing his son, and some of his men as well, and seeming to get away with it.
They had been mighty shrewd about leaving no tracks. Galloway and me were good men on a trail, and without us Hawkes might never have been on to them. That’s not to say that Kyle Shore and Moss Reardon weren’t good – they were.
But the West Fetchen and his men were heading for wasn’t quite what it had been a few years before, and I had an idea they were in for a surprise. Circumstances can change in a mighty short time where the country is growing, and the West they had heard about was, for the most of it, already gone.
For instance, out around Denver a man named Dave Cook had gotten a lot of the law officers to working together, so that a man could no longer just run off to a nearby town to be safe. And the men who rode for the law in most of the western towns were men who weren’t scared easy.
James Black Fetchen was accounted a mighty mean man, and that passel of no-goods who rode with him could have been no better. I had an idea they were riding rough-shod for grief, because folks in Wyoming and Colorado didn’t take much pushing. It’s in their nature to dig in their heels and push back.
This was an uncomplicated country, as a new country usually is. Folks had feelings and ideas that were pretty basic, pretty down to earth, and they had no time to worry about themselves or their motives. It was a big, wide, empty country and a man couldn’t hide easy. There were few people, and those few soon came to know about each other. Folks who have something to hide usually head for big cities, crowded places where they can lose themselves among the many. In open western country a man stood out too much.
If he was a dangerous man, everybody knew it sooner or later; and if he was a liar or a coward that soon was known and he couldn’t do much of anything. If he was honest and nervy, it didn’t take long for him to have friends and a reputation for square-dealing; he could step into some big deals with no more capital than his reputation. Everybody banked on the man himself.
Once away from a town, a man rode with a gun at hand. There were Indians about, some of them always ready to take a scalp, and even the Indians accounted friendly might not be if they found a white man alone and some young buck was building a reputation to sing about when he went courting or stood tall in the tribal councils.
A rustler, if caught in the act, was usually hung to the nearest tree. Nobody had time to ride a hundred miles to a court house or to go back for the trial, and there were many officers who preferred it that way.
Now, me and Galloway were poor folks. We had come west the first time to earn money to pay off Pa’s debts, and now we were back again, trying to make our own way. And the telegram from Tennessee had changed everything.
We had made no fight when Black Fetchen claimed Judith, because she had said she was going to marry him, and we had no legal standing in the matter. But the fact that he had killed her grandpa changed everything, and we knew she’d never marry him now, not of her own free will.
“We got to get her away from them, Flagan,” Galloway said, “and time’s a-wasting.”
But things weren’t the way we would like to have them around the outfit, either. That Larnie Cagle was edgy around us. He had heard of the Sackett reputation, and he reckoned himself as good with a gun as any man; we both could see he was fairly itching to prove it.
Kyle Shore tried to slow him down, for Kyle was a salty customer and he could read the sign right. He knew that anybody who called a showdown to a Sackett was bound to get it, and Shore being a saddle partner of Cagle’s, he wanted no trouble.
Half a dozen times around camp Larnie had made comments that we didn’t take to, but we weren’t quarrelsome folks. Maybe I was more so than Galloway, but so far I’d sat tight and kept my mouth shut. Larnie was a man with swagger. He wanted to make big tracks, and now he had a feeling that he wasn’t making quite the impression he wanted. A body could see him working up to a killing. The only question was who it would be.
Like a lot of things in this world, it was patience that finally did it for us. Galloway and me were riding out with Moss Reardon. We had followed a faint trail, picking up where we’d left off the day before, as it had run along in the same direction we were taking. On that morning, though, it veered off, doubled back, turned at right angles, switching so often it kept Galloway and me a-working at it.
All of a sudden we noticed Moss. He was off some distance across the country but we recognized that paint pony he was riding; we hung to our trail, though, and so did he. And then pretty soon we found ourselves riding together again.