First place, it just naturally had to be that way. There were no signposts, no buildings, no corrals, or anything but creeks, occasional buttes, sometimes a bluff or a bank, and a scatter of trees and brush. As there wasn’t much to see, you came to remember what there was. And I was studying their sign because I might have to trail the whole outfit by one or two tracks.
There was one gent in that outfit who kept pulling off to one side. He’d stop now and again to study his back trail, plainly seen by the marks of his horse’s hoofs in the sod. It came to me that maybe it was that new rider with the scar on his jaw. Sure enough, I came upon a place where he’d swung down to tighten his cinch. His tracks were there on the ground, run-down heels and all. Something about it smelled of trouble, and I had me an idea this one was pure poison.
And so it turned out … but that was another day, and farther along the trail.
Chapter 6
The land lay wide before us. We moved westward with only the wind beside us, and we rode easy in the saddle with eyes reaching out over the country, reading every movement and every change of shadow.
Now and again Galloway rode out and took the trail and I stayed with the herd, taking my turn at bringing up the drag and eating my share of dust. It was a job nobody liked, and I didn’t want those boys to think I was forever dodging it, riding off on the trail of the Fetchens.
Of a noon, Galloway rode in. He squatted on his heels with those boys and me, eating a mite, drinking coffee, then wiping his hands on a handful of pulled brown grass. “Flagan,” he said, “I’ve lost the trail.”
They all looked up at him, Larnie Cagle longest of all.
“Dropped right off the world,” Galloway said, “all of a sudden, they did.”
“I’ll ride out with you.”
“Want some help?” Larnie Cagle asked. “I can read sign.”
Galloway never so much as turned his head. “Flagan will look. Nobody can track better than him. He can trail a trout up a stream through muddy water.”
“I got to see it,” Cagle said, and for a minute there things were kind of quiet.
“Some day you might,” I said.
We rode out from the herd and picked up the trail of that morning. It was plain enough, for an outfit of nineteen men and pack horses leaves a scar on the prairie that will last for a few days – sometimes for weeks.
Of a sudden they had circled and built a fire for nooning, but when they rode away from that fire there wasn’t nineteen of them any longer. The most tracks we could make out were of six horses. We had trouble with the six and it wasn’t more than a mile or two further on until there were only three horses ridden side by side. And then there were only two … and then they were gone.
It made no kind of sense. Nineteen men and horses don’t drop off the edge of the world like that.
In a little while Hawkes rode over with Kyle Shore. Shore could read sign. Right away he began casting about, but he came up with nothing.
“The way I figure it, Mr. Hawkes,” I said, “those boys were getting nigh to where they were going, or maybe just to those stolen cattle, so they had it in their mind to disappear. Somebody in that lot is almighty smart in the head.”
“How do you think they did it?” Shore asked.
“I got me an idea,” I said. “I think they bound up their horses’ hoofs with sacking. It leaves no definite print, but just sort of smudges ground and grass. Then they just cut out, one at a time, each taking a different route. They’ll meet somewhere miles from here.”
“It’s an Apache trick,” Galloway said.
“Then we must try to find out where they would be apt to go,” Hawkes suggested.
“Or just ride on to where they’ll likely take that herd,” Shore added. “Maybe we shouldn’t waste time trying to follow them.”
“That makes sense,” I agreed,
“Suppose they just hole up somewhere out on the plains? Is there any reason why they should go father?”
“I figure they’re heading for Colorado,” I said. “I think they’re going to find Judith’s pa.”
They all looked at me, probably figuring I had Judith too much in mind, and so I did, but not this time.
“Look at it,” I said. “Costello has been out there several years. He has him a nice outfit, that’s why he wanted Judith with him. What’s to stop them taking her on out there and just moving in on him?”
“What about him? What about his hands?”
“How many would he have on a working ranch? Unless he’s running a lot of cattle over a lot of country he might not have more than four or five cowboys.”
They studied about it, and could see it made a kind of sense. We had no way of telling, of course, for Fetchen might decide to stay as far from Judith’s pa as possible. On the other hand, he was a wild and lawless man with respect for nothing, and he might decide just to move in on Judith’s pa. It would be a good hide-out for his own herd, and unless Costello had some salty hands around, they might even take over the outfit.
Or they might do as Hawkes suggested and find a good water hole and simply stay there. In such a wide-open country there would be plenty of places.
The more I contemplated the situation the more worried I became, and I’m not usually a worrying man. What bothered me was Judith. That girl may have been a fool about James Black Fetchen; but she was, I had to admit, a smart youngster. I had an idea that, given time and company of the man and his kin, she’d come to know what he was really like. The more so since he would think he had everything in hand and under control.
What would happen if she should all of a sudden decide she was no longer inclined to marry Black Fetchen?
If she could keep her mouth shut she might get a chance to cut and run; but she was young, and liable to talk when she should be listening. Once she let Black know where he stood with her, the wraps would be off. She would have to cut and run, or be in for rough treatment
“They don’t want to be found,” I told Hawkes. “They’ve buried the ashes of their fires. And I trailed out two of them today, lost both trails.”
“What do you figure we can do?”
“Let me have Galloway, Shore, and maybe one or two others. You’ve got hands enough. Each one of us will work out a different trail. Maybe we can come up with something.”
“You mean if the trails begin to converge? Or point toward something?”
“Sooner or later they’ve got to.”
So it boiled down to me an’ Galloway, Shore, Ladder Walker, and an old buffalo hunter named Moss Reardon. We hunted down trails and started following them out. They were hard enough to locate in the first place.
The idea didn’t pan out much. By the end of two days Walker’s trail petered out in a bunch of sand hills south of us. Galloway lost his trail in the bed of a river, and Shore’s just faded out somewhere on the flat. Only Reardon and me had come up with anything, and that was almighty little. Both of us lost the trail, then found it again.
When we’d joined up again with the others, I drew on the ground with a bit of stick and tried to point out what I’d found. “Right about here – and there was no trail, mind you – I found a place where the grass was cropped by a horse. It’s short grass country, but the horse had cropped around in a circle, so figuring on that idea and just to prove out what I’d found, I located the peg-hole that horse had been tied to. It had been filled up, and a piece of grass tucked into the hole – growing grass.”
Hawkes sort of looked at me as if he didn’t believe it.
“Only there wasn’t one of them, there were three. I sort of skirted around, looking for another cropped place and I found two more, further out from camp.”
“You found their camp?”
“Such as it was. They’d dug out a block of sod, built their coffee fire in the hole, then replaced the sod when they got ready to move.”
Hawkes sat back on his heels and reached for the coffeepot. He studied the map I had drawn, and I could see he was thinking about all we had learned.