LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Those are horse prints,” Seth Thomas said.

      Still Garrett kept quiet, found a mound of horse apples, and broke one open, feeling it with the tips of his fingers.

      “I hope you plan on washing your hands before you fix our supper, old-timer,” Jason C. Hughes sang out, and his pals laughed.

      After he wiped his fingers on his chaps, Garrett mounted the bay, turned in the saddle and spoke with a purpose. “Tracks head toward those hills.” His chin jutted in that direction. “We’re following them.”

      “There are plenty of cows here.” Stretching his aching legs, Jason C. Hughes pointed at the Herefords. “Why don’t we just work them?”

      “I ain’t interested in those cattle.”

      His boots scattered the ash from the fire in the small box canyon.

      “When are we going to eat?” Todd asked.

      “We ain’t.” Garrett muttered a curse as he looked at the four boys riding with him. One was off in the bushes answering nature’s call, two others looked just too tuckered out to even climb down from their horses, and the fourth, Jason C. Hughes, filled his stomach with whiskey.

      “What is it?” Seth Thomas asked.

      Garrett climbed into the saddle. “Four riders,” he said, “came into the pasture down there and gathered what I reckon to be twenty head of Triangle A beef. Most likely, they used a running iron on them here, and are herding them toward the state line.”

      Hughes corked his canteen, keenly interested. “You mean…rustlers?”

      “Looks like.”

      “You’re joshing us!” exclaimed Todd.

      I wish to hell I were, he thought, but shook his head.

      “Should we ride back, tell Mr. Cahill?” Seth Thomas asked.

      “Hell, no!” It was Jason C. Hughes who answered. “We go after them, right, old man? Kill some rustlers, now that’s something nobody will believe back in Manhattan. This is just crackerjack!”

      “We need help,” Seth Thomas pleaded.

      Hughes patted the stock of his Mauser. “We have all the help we need, right?” He pointed at the coiled lariat on Garrett’s saddle. “Just like The Virginian!”

      He could put his heart into this. Do a good job, Sam Cahill had told him, and Garrett planned on doing just that. Tracking rustlers filled his bill, even if the posse riding behind him wasn’t up to snuff. Well, thirty years ago, he had ridden with posses about as worthless. Besides, at least Jason C. Hughes and Seth Thomas showed some interest in learning what it took to be a lawman.

      “When do you think we’ll catch them?” Todd asked.

      Garrett shrugged. He had maintained a hard pace, but had slowed to a walk, as much for the sake of the dudes as the horses. Todd and Hughes had ridden up alongside him, and he cast a quick glance over his shoulder to see how far the other two had fallen back. Swearing softly, he drew rein to let Seth Thomas and Abraham catch up. The bay took the opportunity to graze, and Garrett leaned over and patted the gelding’s neck.

      “Then what?” Todd asked.

      “Depends on the rustlers.”

      “Be like Steve in The Virginian, eh?” Jason C. Hughes grinned. “String ’em up.”

      He was glad Abraham had caught up and asked, “Do we rest now?” Because Garrett did not like Jason C. Hughes’s question.

      “No,” he told Abraham, and kicked the bay into a trot.

      You got an old man’s memories. He coaxed his horse into an arroyo, leaning back in the saddle, wondering if those dudes would be able to make the climb down, but not really caring. String ’em up. Something the greenhorn had read in a damned book. Smiling when he had said it.

      As a lawman, he had arrested plenty of rustlers, but couldn’t remember anything about them, yet could never forget what had happened in Colorado when he had cowboyed. Those had been horse thieves, and they had hanged. He had helped string ’em up. Memories. Sometimes he hated them.

      Thunderheads rolled over the mountains to the east. Garrett hobbled the bay, drew his carbine from the scabbard, and held a finger to his lips.

      He pointed to Todd. “You stay with the horses. Keep them quiet. Rest of you, follow me.”

      Ignoring the stiffness in his legs, he moved up the hill and into the brush, smelling wood smoke, coffee, maybe even beefsteak. Near the crest, he dropped to his stomach and crawled the final few rods until he could look down at the line shack.

      “I don’t see any cattle,” Seth Thomas said softly.

      “No.” But on the far side of the log cabin he could make out a black birch farm wagon, worn but useable, and five horses in a rawhide-looking corral behind the line shack, buttressed against sandstone formations that jutted out of the floor like tombstones. Smoke snaked from the cabin’s stovepipe.

      “How many times can that Mauser of yours shoot?” Garrett asked.

      Jason C. Hughes withdrew a five-shell clip from his jacket pocket. “As fast as I can work the bolt,” he said with a grin. “I have plenty of ammunition.”

      “All right,” Garrett said, “here’s the way we play this hand.” He handed his Winchester to Seth Thomas. “You head down to the corral, keep upwind of the horses. Hughes, you stay put right here where you got a clear shot at the door. Abraham, you come with me. Stay behind that rock yonder. I’ll get to the well, then holler for them to surrender.”

      “And if they don’t?” Jason C. Hughes asked.

      “They’d better. None of y’all pull a trigger till I fire a round. Then just shoot over that line shack four or five times apiece, fast as you can. I want them to think I got an army of deputies out here.”

      “Hot damn!” Hughes shouted. “This is a hell of a lot better than shooting some elk!”

      Garrett glared at him, and Hughes shrugged.

      “Sorry, old man,” he whispered. “You best hurry.”

      He had carried the Colt since the War of the Rebellion, an old cap-and-ball .44 that he had eventually converted to take brass cartridges. When he reached the well, he pulled the revolver, blew on the cylinder, eased back the hammer, and looked around him. Abraham crouched behind the rocks, Colt automatic in a sweaty hand. Seth Thomas knelt behind the corner post of the corral, the .30-30 aimed at the shack’s roof. Up on the hill, sunlight reflected off Jason C. Hughes’s Mauser, and Garrett smiled.

      This might work, he thought, and won’t there be some stories told at the bunkhouse this winter. Lin Garrett brings in a band of rustlers with nothing but a bunch of dudes riding for him. He fired a round into the air, then yelled, “I’m a federal marshal, and I got a posse surrounding you!” With a nod, he listened to the gunfire, keeping his eyes on Abraham, making sure the fool kid didn’t accidentally shoot him again, and when the echoes died down, as Abraham slid another clip into the Colt, Garrett thought about the lie he had just told. Well, he had been a federal deputy some years back, and he did have something of a posse.

      “Come out with your hands up!” he yelled at the cabin door. “Else we’ll gun you sons of bitches down or burn you to a crisp!”

      The door swung open, a mustached young man stepped out, waving a faded bandanna, saying, “Don’t shoot no more!”

      Immediately, Jason C. Hughes dropped him with a bullet through his leg.

      “Damn it!” Garrett climbed to his feet, not even thinking that those other three rustlers might gun him down, yelling at Hughes. The horses loped around the corral, close to the poles, spilling Seth Thomas from his seat, and Abraham muttered

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