Barney was waiting for him. It was the first time he had seen him in days, but he knew that owing to the illness of one of Coyle’s drivers, Barney had been handling a team.
“Matt,” he said excitedly, “a few minutes ago one of Massey’s men got on a horse and rode away! From the way he looked and from what was said, I have an idea he was going to meet someone. Dad told me you’d heard there was a rendezvous arranged up ahead, somewhere.”
“Thanks, Barney. You’re exactly right. You keep a gun handy, and be sure it’s loaded and ready. Something may break and it may not.”
“Can’t we do something now? To stop them I mean?”
‘That’s what I’d like to do, but after all, what do we know, Barney? All of it is a lot of suspicion with a few disconnected things that seem to tie in with those suspicions. You can’t arrest a man or shoot him for what you think he’s going to do, and we haven’t a shred of evidence against anybody that would hold in court. Moreover, we’ve got to think of the women and children, for if a battle starts some of them are going to get hurt.”
Barney nodded soberly. “Everybody looks worried this evening, even some of the women who don’t know anything may be wrong. It’s like the whole wagon train was suddenly touched with some sort of blight. Nobody is singing this evening like they usually do, and nobody was riding out from the wagons today. Even Jacquine acts different.”
Matt started to speak, then thought the better of it. What he had to say should be said to Jacquine.
What Barney had said was true. Silence seemed to have fallen over the wagon tram. The groups around the fires talked in low tones and the men moved about restlessly. Buffalo Murphy leaned his back against a wagon wheel and his eyes seemed never to stop moving. Ban Hardy kept nervously hitching his gun belts, and Jeb Stark moved from time to time out of the circle of light and vanished into the darkness beyond the wagons. Once a branch cracked loudly in the fire and Ban’s gun was half out of his holster before he realized.
The tension lay upon all of them, and upon Massey’s men as well. From that part of the great circle there came no shouts as usual, nor laughter. It was silent, as the camp waited with queer expectancy for something to happen, and nothing did.
The night passed without incident and the morning broke gray and dull with lowering clouds and a faint spattering of rain began to fall as the wagon train began to rumble out upon the trail toward the Tongue. Matt glanced down at Tolliver beside whose wagon he was riding. “If we had a way through those mountains, we could make the Shell easy. It ought to be just due west of us.”
“We’ve changed our course, haven’t we? Looks like we’re bearing more west.”
“That’s right. Northwest now.”
By mid-morning Matt dug his slicker from behind his saddle and got into it. The light spatter of rain turned into a crashing downpour. The wagons continued, moving slower and slower, and scattering out to find firmer going away from the ruts of the other wagons which filled with water as rapidly as they were made.
Matt bowed his head into the storm and kept the dun moving up and down the line of his wagons, a line that grew more and more extended as the morning drew on. Where a wagon was stuck or having difficulties, he was beside it, putting a shoulder to the wheel, or moving obstructions.
Through the gray rain the Big Horns loomed like a monstrous wall, close on their left. Time and again he found his eyes straying toward them, remembering the green depths of their forests, the free running streams, the leaping fish, and the deer. This was a man’s country, if one had ever been built, and beyond the mountains was the basin. He was eager to be back, eager to have a place of his own and be working again at something he could build, something to last.
The rain drove against his face and rattled like hail upon his poncho. There was no time now for talk, for it was work to keep moving. Luckily, it could be no more than a dozen miles to the Tongue by the route they were following, and the day should be short unless too many wagons became stuck.
Squinting his eyes against the battering ram, he drew up and stared ahead. His own wagons were scattered over at least a mile of trail. Those of Coyle were some place further ahead, and Reutz must be behind. Yet both were lost in the rain. He bowed his head to let his hat brim shield his face and rode on.
There was no sign of a let up. He laid a hand on the dun’s wet shoulder and spoke to him. “Rough going, isn’t it, boy?” The horse cocked an ear at him and shook his head with disgust. Had it been left to him he would have turned his back on the rain and wind and cropped some of this good grass. Wet it might be, but it was grass and good. There was no sense in driving on into a rain, but then, when did men have horse sense? The dun plodded patiently ahead like a husband with a nagging wife, letting the storm blow by his ears.
Raising his head, Matt saw one of his wagons stopped, the oxen straining. He rode rapidly over the soggy prairie to lend a hand. It was Aaron Stark.
When the wagon was rolling again, he put his head in over the tailgate. “How are you, Ma’am?”
The girl lifted a hand, and then he heard her say, “All right, thank you.”
Matt walked back to his horse which he had left to one side and wiped off the saddle. He put a foot in the stirrup and swung up. His stirrup was twisted, and he bent to pull it around in place, feeling with his toe for it. He got it straightened, and looked up. A body of horsemen were riding toward him, and even as he straightened up, a gun flared and something struck him a wicked blow on the head, even as he felt himself falling, he grabbed for his gun, struggling to get at it under the poncho.
At the first shot, his horse had leaped frantically, and his precarious hold on the stirrup was lost. Another shot rang out, and he felt himself falling. Down … down … the ground hit him with terrific force and he saw a wave of blackness rolling toward him and fought desperately to stave it off, his hand fighting for a gun, and then he felt his hold on consciousness slipping, and as the blackness rolled over him, he knew he had failed.
Clive Massey had struck under cover of the rain when the wagons were scattered and without unity, and when everyone was busy fighting to keep moving. He had struck and struck swiftly, and there was no chance for concerted defense, no chance to use the ammunition they had recovered, no chance for anything but to fall and die, each man alone, each man fighting.
Rain spattered on his face as he lay sprawled in the mud and dimly, through the veil of the rain and his failing awareness he heard Stahl’s voice, grim with satisfaction. “Got him!”
“Who is it?” That would be Hammer.
“Bardoul! Matt Bardoul, By God! Drilled him right through the head, first shot!”
The rain pounded down upon the prairie, and the wagons rolled on as if nothing had happened, and the dun horse dashed off through the ram, stirrups flopping loosely. Behind it, face down in the mud, Matt Bardoul lay sprawled, and under him a darker stain began to mingle with the rain and stain the mud a deep crimson.
Then the sound of the wagons was gone, and the prairie was silent again but for the rushing, driving rain, battering at the soil and bending the grass before it, and through the gray curtain the dark loom of the Big Horns lifted high, strong, formidable.
Almost two miles away Ban Hardy lay on his back under the rain, face up to the clouds, riddled with bullets. He had been alone when he saw them coming, and he had reached for his gun, but he had no chance. Four men had opened fire on him at once and he tumbled from the wagon seat to the mud. Riding past him, Bat Hammer had let drive with two more shots.
It had been amazingly quick, amazingly simple. Nine of the honest men were killed, and only one of the renegades. Clive Massey, his dark face hard, turned to Logan Deane. “See? I told you it would be easy.”