

High Plains Justice

By Maryk Lewis

First published by Robert Hale, London, 1992 as

A Black Horse Western

Published 2014 by Maryk Lewis at Splashwords

Copyright Maryk Lewis 2014

### Hot lead flew, and blood flowed freely in 1859. The Cheyenne were raiding. When outlaws gunned down two sleepy cowpokes, and rode off with a thousand Texas longhorns, their main problem was what to do with the slow-moving cattle. Johnnie Bell's problem lay in getting them back. The army couldn't help — they had the marauding Indians to deal with. Texas Rangers had no jurisdiction once the cattle were over the border, and other settlers had their own homes and herds to guard. Luckily for Johnnie, he had two Comanche friends with points to prove, and along the way he met up with a feisty widow woman, who had lost both husband and herd to the self-same rustlers.

### All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

### ePub format ISBN 978-0-473-31075-2

### Kindle/Mobi format ISBN 978-0-473-31076-9

### iBook format ISBN 978-0-473-31077-6

### By the same author

### By Fickle Winds Blown

### ONE

The rustlers struck late in the day. Half-an-hour before sundown all was peaceful and quiet. Most of the stringy longhorn herd had mobbed up on the river flats along the true left bank, and the rest were drifting out of draws and arroyos to join them. Soon the older beasts would have begun settling down for the night, lulled and calmed by Eb de Lange's dreamy singing, as he patrolled the up-river end of the bedding ground.

Johnnie, the range boss, had gone back down river to the ranch, and would not be back until the morning. As he rode away the two cowpunchers he left with the herd grinned tolerantly at each other. They didn't mind. Johnnie, the owner's son, was young yet. Too easy-going, a bit green, and too darned good-looking for his own good; given time they would get him trained, the way all paid hands trained their employers. In the meantime he was a good man to work for, they liked him, and a bit of give and take would do no harm, or so they all thought at the time.

Only Eb and his partner Rastus, then, were left to watch the herd. That was not expected to be a particularly demanding task, as most of the spring growth was in the bottomlands along the river, and the cattle were not likely to shift far away from it.

Slow and gentle, the black cowpuncher's mount, a hulking great half-draught horse, plodded across to the river. Then it turned, unbidden, back toward the left-hand terrace. Above the terrace the high plains of Texas rolled back mile upon barren mile to the sharp clear line of the horizon.

Just as he turned, the first bullet lifted Eb from the saddle, and pitched him down on to the rocks by the river's edge.

His horse reared back, and lost its footing on the crumbling bank. Its shrill scream was cut short, when it landed back-first across a washed up log. The crack of its spine breaking sounded like a pistol shot.

By then more and real shots were sounding from the mesas above both river terraces, and the panicking longhorns were surging, bawling, up the river, and away from the frightening noise of the guns.

Startled, Eb's partner, Rastus, came loping out of the cottonwood grove where their line camp was set up. He toted a Tennessee long rifle that had been all but worn out when his grandfather was a boy. That did not stop him from using it. He spilled black powder into the pan, tested the flint, and swung the long barrel up questing for a target.

Far out across the sea of milling, rattling horns, and plunging brown backs, he spotted one of the raiders whooping in, intent on preventing any of the fear-maddened cattle from heading back down river. The rifle steadied. The blade of the foresight cut a line between the ears of the rustler's horse. Rastus raised just a little. After all, the gun was old. The touch hole was bigger than the makers ever intended. When he squeezed the shot away, black powder, still burning, jetted up and sprayed his black forehead.

Blue-black smoke blossomed from the muzzle.

Rastus had to step to one side to see past the cloud. The rustler, hands to his face, was tumbling from his horse.

Quickly, Rastus spat on his sponge, and probed his barrel for any lingering sparks. From his pouch he tipped in a quantity of powder, estimating the amount by eye. When it looked right, he pressed home a wad, and poked a lead bullet in after it. The ramrod he tucked in his belt.

Another target?

There were plenty offering. A dozen riders were driving up the flats on the near side of the river, and a couple of men were across on the other bank, turning back any cattle which tried to wade through. On the mesa, above and behind him, the whooping and hollering suggested at least as many more.

Because he was on foot, a black man in dingy cast-off clothing, hidden in the evening shadows by the cottonwoods, Rastus had not yet been noticed. His powder smoke seemed just part of the gloom under the trees.

He looked to choose another man to kill. He had the choice, and whichever one took his fancy would die. The fat one nearby? He would be an easy mark, and his death would be a kindness to his horse. The one in the bowler hat, with a white shining brow above his red bandana? That brow was tempting. Rastus had once had an owner with a brow like that. Still, he really ought to concentrate on one of those bellowing orders, say the tall man reined up by the river's edge. The distance to him would help to disguise where Rastus's fire was coming from.

Again smoke bloomed from the rifle, its cough lost in the racket created by the rustlers trying to keep the cattle moving. When he could see again, Rastus found the tall man folded in the middle, clutching at his horse's neck with failing fingers. The fellow lacked the strength to hold on. He slid away to the off-side, where his foot caught in the stirrup.

His horse, already spooked, took fright even more, and turned to bolt, fishtailing, back down river. The unfamiliar weight dragging under its hind feet hindered it. It tried to kick its way clear, still fishtailing, which only dragged the tethered body further under its hind feet. Flesh and bones gave before the onslaught, but still the outlaw's foot remained trapped in the iron, and he died, kicked and trampled, smashed again and again, by his own horse.

Rastus was not watching. He had his third victim picked, a man with two guns. Two guns were worn by men who lived by their guns. That was a good enough reason for this one to die, and he did... taken clean through the temple at a good two hundred paces.

Where next? Rastus prepared his rifle for the next shot without even looking down at his hands. In a moment the rustlers would all be out of range, and he wanted just one more to show the boss.

Old Jamie Bell, 'Ding Dong', was a good boss. One who knew, too, that Rastus, for his part, was a good worker, but there was sure going to be some cussing and swearing at the loss of this herd, and Rastus wanted to be damned sure that the old man had ample proof of how well this cowboy had earned his pay.

One left. A little weedy fellow had stayed back, over on the edge of the river bank. He had pulled a shotgun from his saddle scabbard, and he was kneeing his horse around to get a line on something out of sight below the bank.

Eb had been over there some place. What else could the rustler be aiming at?

That last shot from the old rifle took him high in the back of the neck before he could fire. Blood, teeth, and bone splinters spewed over the bank, and the rustler's body followed right after. His horse promptly disappeared into the dust raised by the stampeding herd.

A southern planter's yell brought Rastus swinging about. He knew that sound. It featured in his nightmares, the hallooing of the young masters hunting slaves on the run. He had last heard it for real when they came after him. After all this time one of them had found him... and his rifle was empty!

Grey, both horse and rider, grey doom, plunging out of the draw at the end of the cottonwood grove, came thundering down on the trapped cow- puncher. He swung the rifle up to use the butt as a club, a desperate, useless gesture, but he had to try.

The rider's gun muzzle, the business end of a Colt revolver, opened enormous, round, hollow black in his face... and then came the shot, and that was it!

For a while Rastus's body twitched, and his heels drummed. The thudding of his killer's horse faded up the river flats. Further away was the diminishing rumble of the stolen herd, but in a short time that too was gone.

There was a time then of peace and quiet again, but it didn't last.

Before it got fully dark the birds in the cottonwoods had begun chittering, shrill warnings of the vultures winging in to clumsy landings, and not long afterwards the coyotes arrived to scrap over the dead calves, which had been pulped under the pounding of all those fear-driven hooves.

Other carcases were also there, but the calves tasted better. No peace was to be found in that place for the rest of that dreadful night.

Come morning, and the sun was high, before young John Bell appeared far down the river, a dusty rider on a big black horse, with a smaller bay carrying a pack saddle behind him. Yellow hair, worn long and tied back with a bootlace, was covered by a broad-brimmed hat. The shaded features were long-jawed and sandy, clean-shaven the previous evening. The usual easy grin had been wiped away by a worry new found.

He was coming fast, for his horses had scented blood on the breeze a couple of miles back, and their unease had caused him to push them into a smart trot. From a half mile down he knew there was trouble, and the last stretch was taken at a gallop.

By the black cowpuncher's body he drew rein. Breath caught shocked in his throat, even though he was by then expecting just what he found. Some had been chewed away from one arm, though otherwise Rastus was untouched... well, untouched that is, except for a bullet hole in his face, and there being no back to his head. The other bodies lying out on the bedding ground told part of the story, but it was left to the ravens squabbling down by the river to draw him to the rest.

Guilt flooded through him. He should have been there. Dryfe Sands Johnnie they called him, the darling of the ladies in Baton Rouge. Dear God! The first real test he had ever faced, and he had failed his men by not being there.

Eb de Lange was still breathing, unconscious, though certainly not dead. He was lying half under a driftwood log, and his horse, dead, was sprawled over the top. Also there, dead, with half his face missing, was the last rustler Rastus had killed.

Johnnie, two yards of solid bone and muscle, swung down from the saddle, to ground-tie both his horses, before going to kneel by his wounded man. The bullet had taken the end off a floating rib, and torn out a whacking great hole almost under the solar plexus. A lot of blood had been lost. There was also bruising behind the left ear, where Eb had hit his head as he fell.

That had to be the first job, of course, tending to Eb's wound, and preparing him to be taken back to the ranch.

He fetched the medical kit from the camp, and after pouring raw whiskey all over the open wounds, stitched the ragged edges together with horse hair, which had also been doused in whiskey. Any dirt in the wound should have washed out with all that bleeding. A pad made from a clean shirt, smeared with zinc ointment, went over the top, and was bound tightly in place with cotton bandages. Eb's wife, Jasmine, had made them pack those bandages, old cotton sheeting torn into strips. It was as well they had listened to her.

But then, it must be admitted, they usually did. Everybody did.

With Eb tended to, the next job was a travois, a horse stretcher, two long cottonwood poles with cross pieces bound to take a canvas groundsheet. The front ends tied to the pack saddle, one each side of the horse, and the trailing ends did just that, trailed on the ground, sliding along, and being springy, taking the worst of the bumps out of what had to be a rough journey.

Everything else from the camp was bundled up, and hung in the trees. Coyotes, bears, any other scavengers in the area would rip it to bits otherwise.

Rastus? Johnnie would like to have taken Rastus's body back to the ranch for burial. Trouble was, Rastus's horse was gone, either stolen by the rustlers, or broken loose during the night. The torn end of the dangling halter could have meant either.

Not so, the spare horses, which had been left in a fenced-off box canyon a short distance up river. They had been stolen. A section of the post and rail fence had been deliberately dropped, and the horses driven out, not only the cowpuncher's spares, but twenty or more breeding mares that belonged to the ranch blacksmith.

There was a shovel among the line camp equipment. Johnnie took it up to the mesa overlooking the bedding ground. If anything of Rastus was still around and watching, he would like that place. There was a view, far and near. The distant view suggested the freedom that Rastus had known only in the last part of his life. The near view was of the place where he had gone out in triumph.

Deep the hole had to be. No wolverine or wild hog could be allowed to disturb Rastus's rest. At least Johnnie could do that for him. Equally important, there had to be room for four. Rastus had made him a mattress of dead men to lie on, and his three victims had to be fitted into that hole first. Somewhere back in Rastus's ancestry, there had been warriors. His last resting place would have met with their approval.

Much of the day had gone before Johnnie was ready to set out for home. Eb was still breathing easily. The bullet had gone close, but didn't seem to have punctured a lung. Johnnie wondered what else was in there that might have been damaged.

### TWO

Toward evening Johnnie's father met him about a mile out from the ranch house. His approach had been seen, and Ding Dong... James Lockwood Bell, had been the first to horse. Two other riders followed a minute or two behind.

'Indians?' the old man demanded, a worried look on his grizzled, weatherbeaten face.

'Not by what I could see,' Johnnie told him. 'There were a whole lot of different shoe patterns. More likely reivers. An Indian band would have had all their animals shod by the same man.'

'What in hell would reivers want with our cattle?' Ding Dong asked. 'What could they do with 'em?' His question had been bothering Johnnie since the first intimation of trouble that morning. Situated as they were, the cattle spread farthest up the Brazos River at that time, they were right on the outer edge of settlement. Only Commanche Indians held the land further out, and there was peace with them, settled by treaty. In addition, Ding Dong had sweetened the bargain with presents of cattle, and trade goods, to make sure that his relationships with the tribe were of the friendliest. They were. Several individual tribes-folk had become personal friends, and treated the ranch almost as a second home.

Further away there were the Kiowa peoples, but they were allied with the Commanche, and would not poach on their territory. In the other direction were the Osage, and they had enough trouble with still other Indians to their north, without buying further grief with the 'white eyes'.

Reivers, as the Bells called rustlers, would have a problem disposing of their booty. Few, but the Bells and their like, would have a better understanding of the economics of cattle thieving. Generations back, their ancestors had themselves been Scottish reivers, ravaging over the border into England, until King James the Sixth, the king of the Scots, had been offered the English crown as well. When he had become king of both kingdoms at the same time, James had decided to clean up the borders between them. A mess of Bells, and Johnstones, Grahams, Armstrongs, and other thieving border rabble had been hung, conscripted, pressed, or otherwise driven from their lands.

This line of Bells had escaped first to Northern Ireland, and then to Nova Scotia, trying to do what they knew best, run cattle and breed horses. Always they sought land, grazing for their animals, inheritances for their sons, property to replace that which King James had taken from them. This later and more humble James... James Lockwood Bell, a younger son, when his turn came, had taken his share of his father's cattle, to drive south from the Kansas settlements to where new lands were going cheap.

Here, to the upper Brazos, he came with his wife, Betsy... Elizabeth Irvine Bell, his children, and few drifting range riders who needed the money he paid.

The hands who had come with him had soon drifted on. Some were wastrels, and useless. Those ones had not cared for the remoteness, the lack of towns, and saloons, and bar girls. The good ones only stayed until they could set up with stock of their own. There was a desperate need for workers willing to stay. He had all too few of them. Some jobs could be left until there were hands enough to do them, but for much of the work he had to have constantly available labour.

As soon as possible, Ding Dong had taken what little ready money he could find, and had ridden off to Baton Rouge, the one sure place he could get himself some permanent workers.

He left Betsy in charge of the ranch, guarded by a few trusted hands, two of them Commanche braves come to learn blacksmithing, and trading their labour in return. Nobody was mentioning the fact, but the pair, Bobcat Pouncing and Little Hawk were lying low after a horse-stealing raid they had been on in the previous year, 1858. Following their chief Buffalo Hump, they had raided a settlement of Chickasaw Indians, not knowing that the Chickasaws were under the protection of the United States Cavalry at Fort Arbuckle. Not many of Buffalo Hump's six hundred people had survived to tell the tale. These two found the Bells' Dryfe Sands Ranch a good place to be while the dust settled. They owed Jamie Bell, Ding Dong, their lives when the rancher spoke up for them in the aftermath of the raid.

At Baton Rouge was the slave market, not that Jamie Bell wanted any truck with slavery, but there was labour to be had there, when he could not find it anywhere else.

When he returned, he had brought with him Eb de Lange, Rastus, and Eb's wife Jasmine. The de Langes had been handed their manumission papers on the day he bought them. Ding Dong never mentioned where Rastus had come from, and nobody dared ask him.

Jasmine was a natural-born housekeeper, and Betsy was only too pleased to have her. Betsy had enough to do, what with children to raise and school, her own and others, besides riding range with the menfolk when they were shorthanded.

Consequently, when the horse sledge bearing the still unconscious Eb drew up in front of the ranch house, two women were waiting there to meet it. Betsy was 'tut-tutting' like a disturbed chicken, while Jasmine was wringing her hands in her starched white apron, and making a hell of a mess of it.

'Bring him right in here,' Betsy ordered. 'He'll have to go in the guest room, where we can all keep an eye on him, watch him round the clock.'

In next to no time, they had Eb stripped, cleaned up, and rebandaged. Despite the whiskey, the edges of the wound were looking an angry red. Jasmine hung a fresh steak out on the porch to get flyblown. When they could see eggs on it, they would bring it in, and bind it directly over the wound. Maggots were the best thing going for cleaning up a putrefying wound, gorging themselves on pus and dead meat, while leaving the living flesh to heal.

One of the ranch hands, who helped to carry Eb inside, was Danny Long Knife, a stocky, broadfaced Indian-looking man, although in truth his father had been an Irishman. The other part Commanche, Danny had been educated at a Spanish mission school, where the curriculum had covered reading, writing, figuring and black-smithing. The priests were realists. Danny earned his living working for a few weeks at a time for each of a string of remote Texas ranches. At the moment it was the Bells' turn to have him. In any case, he spent more time with the Bells than he did anywhere else, as he had a deal with Ding Dong to run horses on the Bell range.

The Commanche up river also had an interest in those horses. That was one of the reasons for Ding Dong not expecting Indians to steal his cattle.

'My horses are gone too?' Danny echoed when they told him. 'I don't understand it. Who'd want to buy trouble with the Commanche? What'd they do with the horses? They've all got winged spur brands.'

The brand was the Bells', but Danny used it on his stock too, and therefore many Commanche horses also bore it. What law there was in Texas, the rangers, the army, and certainly all the horse copers and livery stables would recognize it. Nobody would be able to sell the horses without having a good explanation of how they had come by them.

'Settlers going further west?' Cab Phillips, a recently employed rider suggested. 'There's wagons by the hundred going through to Santa Fe, and more still on the Oregon Trail.'

'We've looked at that before,' Johnnie replied. 'It's not likely. Those folk have got their stock before they start. They've got no money to buy more along the way. They'd not be expecting to find any to buy, anyway.'

'Yeah, but what ifn they're stealing 'em to keep for themselves; breeding stock to start their own ranches?'

'So the army finds them on the trail with stolen stock. How do they get away with it? They can't make more than a dozen or fifteen miles in a day, so we can ride 'em down as soon's we're ready. I can't see what they're expecting to get, 'cept'n a sure enough humdinger fight with us.'

'How many of them are there?'

'I found tracks for a couple of dozen. They've got near on a thousand head of our cattle beasts.'

'Hey. Hey, there ain't enough of us here to handle that number! We'll have to fetch the rangers,' Cab Phillips suggested.

'They won't want to come away up here,'Johnnie argued. 'They've got troubles enough along the Mexican border.'

'So we ride over to Fort Washita, and get the army after them,' Ding Dong said. 'Some of us keep a tail on 'em, whilst some of us go for the army.'

'And some of you, Jamie Bell, stay here, and keep this place running,' Betsy insisted. 'All those late calves still aren't branded. You can't all go gallivanting about, and getting yourselves shot at.'

'Sooner we get after them, the less trouble it will be,' Ding Dong claimed.

'In the morning will do,' his wife argued. 'Even if those rustlers went twenty miles overnight, and more today, some time about now they've got to be bedding down some place. I reckon even I could follow their trail. They're still going to be less than fifty miles away by tomorrow night. You can be up with them before then.'

'That'll do,' Ding Dong agreed. 'Johnnie, a couple of the boys, can sit on tne rustlers' tails. No rough stuff, mind you. Just watch 'em. I'll go fetch the army, and we'll find ourselves a good place to deal with the buggers.'

'Jamie!'

'Devils ...'

Cab Phillips looked doubtfully at Johnnie, Dryfe Sands Johnnie. Perhaps the youngster would have enough sense to stay out of range of the rustlers' guns, perhaps not. Cab, an older man and cautious, decided to hold his tongue. After all, it was not his place to play the nursemaid.

'I want to go with Johnnie,' Danny Long Knife said. 'They've got my horses.'

'Me too,' Bobcat Pouncing claimed. For the Indian, backing the Bells' oldest son was a way of repaying the family for the safe haven they had given him during the repercussions from the Chickasaw raid. Besides, a good showing against the rustlers would restore some of his lost honour ... an important consideration if he was ever to attract a squaw.

For the same reason, the other brave, Little Hawk, might have gone too if Ding Dong had allowed it. As it was, the rancher had other need of him.

Accordingly then, just the three of them set off back up the Brazos at daylight the next morning. Each of them took two horses, and they shared a packhorse between them, not that there was much for the packhorse to carry. Bedrolls and slickers fitted behind the cantle on the ridden horses. Reserve ammunition was slotted into cartridge belts in the main, although there were a couple of extra packets with the eating irons and dixies. Food was mostly flour, coffee, salt, and a bag of dried beans. The rest they would pick up along the way. Apart from that, there was only the medical kit, and a square of canvas to form a shelter roof for use on wet nights. They were not travelling light. They had all completed long journeys with much less.

At the line camp they stopped and checked the gear still hanging safely in the trees. While they spelled the horses, Johnnie brewed coffee, and Danny and Bobcat took the opportunity to go up on the mesa above, to examine the tracks left by the rustlers. The tracks up there would be less disturbed by milling cattle, or scavengers in the night. When they came down they reported that they had between them memorized the characteristics of a half dozen individual horses' hoofprints.

'Show you something, Johnnie,' Danny Long Knife invited. He led Johnnie out to the edge of the cottonwoods. 'These tracks coming past the trees. That's the fellow as killed Rastus. That's the boss man.'

'How do you know?'

'He's been riding back and forth over the top of other men's trails. He'd be doing that to supervise them, to give orders, eh?'

'Yes, I see that,'Johnnie nodded.

'Right, so now you see this nail head here,' Johnnie went on, pointing to an indentation in the left hind print.

'It's bent sideways.'

'Yeah, so now we know one of the horses that that man rides. Bobcat and me, we can sort out some of the other men too. How about you getting to know a few of the tracks that came across the river?'

When they rode on, Johnnie had memorized three sets of prints to watch for. Less than two hours later, however, he was finding those prints overlaid by others he could not identify.

By that time the marks of the cattle, and the men with them, had led them up the grassy flats beside the Brazos, until they saw where the panicked cattle had slowed to a manageable walk. Soon after they had turned up a side canyon, which must have been hard to negotiate, for it would have been late twilight by the time the rustlers reached it. Not far up, a draw had let them up on to the mesa, and from there they faced a long stretch of the open grasslands of the high plains. That they must have crossed with nothing but the stars to light their way.

'Hey,'Johnnie called a halt. 'Aren't we looking at more tracks than there ought to be?'

'That's so,' Danny agreed. 'I was just waiting for you to see it for yourself.'

'So what's happened.'

'There's another big party ahead of us, also following the rustlers?'

'Commanche?'

'No,' Bobcat told him. 'I would know the tracks, the men who made them.'

'Then who?'

'Indians, but not Commanche, not Kiowa.*

'But there shouldn't be any other tribes on this ground.'

'No,' Bobcat replied flatly, and left the young range boss to think about that.

### THREE

It was the wrong time of year for marauding Indians to be about, and even then foreign tribes should only be trespassing on this part of the plains if they were deliberately looking for trouble. Had it been autumn, particularly September, and the Indians Commanche or Kiowa, possibly Apache, then Johnnie wouldn't have been too concerned about them. Such bands wouldn't be bothering Texian settlers. They'd be heading south into Mexico for much easier pickings; a little spot of raping and plunder, without any repercussions from the blue coats.

'What do you think their game is?'Johnnie asked his friends.

'Could be,' Danny suggested, 'that they're planning to let the rustlers drive our stock off Commanche territory, off Kiowa territory, and then hijack 'em. In the meantime, if we manage to bring the army in smartly, the rustlers catch all the grief, and these Indians, whoever they are, are left free to move in later and clean up whatever's left.' 'How many do you reckon there are?'

'Forty, maybe fifty. There'll be scouts out. We haven't seen their tracks yet.'

'Outnumber the outlaws two to one then.' 'Outnumber us more'n a dozen to one at the moment, and we'll be lucky if'n they ain't got back markers watching us right now.'

'Reckon they'll try to drygulch us?'

'Could do, but like the rustlers, they must know others will come up behind us following these stolen cattle and horses. All they can do is delay the pursuit, and gunning us down won't help 'em much. We're no immediate threat to 'em. They'll be more concerned about the Commanche or Kiowa war parties that are sure to turn up eventually, if the blue coats don't arrive first.'

'We'll go on then,' Johnny decided. 'We're no worse off than we were just looking for the rustlers to be watching their back trail.'

'Their bullets kill you just as dead,' Bobcat observed, and shrugged.

They rode on, always with two of them reading sign, and the third studying the land as it came into sight far ahead of them. To the casual observer it all looked uniformly flat, unbroken grassland out to the horizon in all directions, except to the west where, far away, the broken tops of the Davis Mountains sawed at the cloudless sky. Odd scruffy plants, weeds, but not a tree, not a rock outcrop was in sight anywhere.

The uniformity was deceptive. In fact the land was cut, and re-cut, again and again by dry watercourses, streams, and even great rivers, all in deep, steep-sided channels in the land. All the trees were down in those. In between them were many low swellings and bumps to break what in fact was a quite imperfect flatness.

Whichever man was taking a turn at watching the distance, rode out to either side to take advantage of every little rise that would give him a longer view. Everywhere it was quite apparent that others had made the same use of the same rises.

Eventually Johnnie, on one of his side trips, spotted a distant rider far ahead of them.

'I think it was one of the rustlers,' he reported. 'He was wearing a European hat, big brim to it.'

'Some Indians wear them,' Danny argued.

'Old men,' Bobcat said.

The other two nodded. If the rider ahead was an Indian, he would be a young one. Watching the back trail would be below the dignity of an older brave.

By the time they reached the point where the watcher ahead had been seen, he was long gone. His prints, though, were still there, and Johnnie recognized them. They were one of the sets that he had taken responsibility for.

'Rustler then,' he observed.

'Yeah, and he didn't just wait here for us to come up,' Danny noted. 'He came back to here looking for us.'

'Then why didn't he run into the Indians?'

An answer to that appeared inside the next mile. The Indians had turned off the trail of the stolen stock, and disappeared instead down a dry watercourse leading off toward a branch of the Red River, then lying far to their north-east.

It appeared that the rustler had come back as much to look for the Indians, as to look for the Dryfe Sands party. What the rustlers thought they were doing was still very much a mystery, but finding strange Indians behind them must have given them a nasty shock.

'We're not going to have any trouble coming up with the rustlers,' Johnnie pointed out. 'They're just too slow to get away from us. I think it would be wise to check closer on the Indians.'

In consequence, the three of them also turned off the rustlers' trail, and followed instead the tracks in the watercourse, one man down in the bottom of the gully, and one on each rim. There was less chance that way of suddenly riding into an ambush.

After several miles the Indians had switched from riding down the growing watercourse, and instead had begun to ascend a branch coming in from the left. In time that gully broke into smaller and smaller branches, with the Indians always choosing one that led north-west. Each joining involved one or other of the rim riders coming down into the watercourse in order to cross over to the rim of the next branch.

'You know,' Johnnie said to Bobcat on one such changeover, 'this is going to bring us right out again in the path of the cattle drive.'

'True,' Bobcat agreed, and kept on riding.

A little later Danny called down, 'Hey, you fellows, hold it! Come and look over here.'

Danny had gone up a shallow side branch, the channel not deep enough to leave his head below ground level unless he hunkered down. Both of the others joined him, and when they looked over the top of the bank, they were looking out across a gently sloping plain to the cattle drive going past, something like two miles away.

'Well, we certainly didn't lose those fellows,' Johnnie said. 'Where are the Indians?'

'Somewhere out ahead of the cattle,' Danny answered. 'They must be setting an ambush.'

Strung out across a half mile of grassland, the cattle were ambling placidly along. At intervals of a hundred yards or so, riders accompanied them, some along each flank, and a bunch bringing up the rear. The remuda, the mob of stolen horses, the riders' spare mounts, and several packhorses, were more tightly bunched and supervised ahead of the cattle. All but the leading horses were chewing dust, and dust hung in a cloud for miles back behind the churning hooves. Away in the distance single riders could be seen scouting ahead, while another was far behind in the clean air where the dust had settled again.

Of the Indians there was no sign.

'Well, what do we do about that?' Johnnie puzzled. 'Do we want to interfere? If the Indians have a go at the rustlers, whichever side wins is sure going to be short of a lot of people, and the survivors are still going to be stuck with all those slow-moving cattle. All it does it make our task easier when the army finally catches up on us.'

'We sure won't do any good getting ourselves mixed up in their ruckus,' Danny nodded.

'The Indians must have something in mind to do with the cattle surely?'

'Help if we know which Indians,' Bobcat said gruffly.

For an hour they spelled their horses, peering over the rim of the watercourse, and letting the rustlers draw ahead of them. There was no indication that the rustlers were aware of their presence.

When the last man was safely out of sight, they resumed their tracking of the Indians. That only led to more puzzlement.

The marks left by the Indians took them down to the line of the cattle drive, and there disappeared. The cattle had been driven over the top of them.

'Now the rustlers have to know that the Indians are in front of them,' Johnnie pointed out. 'Are they just going to follow their tracks, or what?'

'They'd be no worse off that way,' Danny replied. 'No matter what the rustlers do now, the Indians can always set an ambush ahead of them.'

'Indian tracks all gone,' Bobcat commented. 'That's the point,' Johnnie acknowledged. 'If we hadn't seen the Indians' tracks up to here, we wouldn't know that the Indians were there at all. Anybody cutting across the tracks of the cattle drive from now on, wouldn't know that the Indians were up ahead of them.'

'Indians not know cattle are stolen,' Bobcat mentioned.

'Say, that's right. They wouldn't, would they, unless they were told. Nor would anybody else,' Johnnie agreed. 'What's your point?'

'Maybe Indians not interested in stealing cattle. Not worth losing braves for. Not want fight. Only want to use cattle to cover tracks.'

'They've got to come out from under those cattle tracks sooner or later. Why should the rustlers keep following them?'

'Why not?' Danny suggested. 'The line the rustlers are taking heads almost due north. If they keep going, they'll cross the Red River, two branches of the Canadian, and then hit the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail. There's nowhere else for them to go till they get to there. They've got to cross the rivers where the fords will let them, so the route the Indians are taking is as good as any, and they're in no more danger following the Indians, than in heading off any other way.'

'Indians can lose themselves at rivers, or on Santa Fe Trail. Not leave tracks there,' Bobcat said.

'The fellows in the rustlers' chuck wagon must be sweatin' some,' Danny suggested. 'I wouldn't care to be in their boots.'

The chuck wagon would be at that time several miles ahead of the trail drive, and most likely manned by a cook and a boy. After feeding all hands each morning, they had to clean up, and then catch up and pass the herd during the day, to move on ahead of them and select the next bedding ground, where they would have the evening meal prepared by the time the herd arrived. Finding a large Indian band coming up on them, while they were so vulnerable, must have been a somewhat unnerving experience.

'I think we'd best leave this lot to it,' Johnnie decided. 'Whatever the Indians do, we're still going to be able to find the herd again for quite some time to come. I think we'd best head for Fort Washita, and let the blue coats know that these Indians are involved. It wouldn't be too good to have them come out to deal with a couple of dozen rustlers, and find that they've got an Indian war on their hands instead.'

'I stay?' Bobcat suggested.

'No, come with us. Watching the rustlers now won't make any difference.'

They cut back, still unseen, along the watercourse, and stayed with it all the way down to the Red River, which they found, next day, flowing swift between high banks clothed with mesquites, willows, and cottonwoods. The nearest ford was a good distance downstream.

'Indians been here,' Bobcat declared, when they came out on the far bank.

'Yeah, that same band,' Danny agreed.

The hoofprints were all headed into the water, going the other way, and had been made several days before.

'They're more or less on our route,' Johnnie noted. 'Let's just back-track them a way, and see where they've been. Maybe we can pick up something to tell us who they are.'

Toward evening they found where the Indians had joined the Red River from a tributary coming in from the north. The Indians' out-going prints were overlaid by those of a small party going up that stream.

Danny grinned when he saw them. 'Them folks're lucky they didn't happen along sooner,' he said.

Their own route still lay on down the river, but there was a day's travel yet to get down to the fort. It was time to call it quits for the day. They wanted to finish with their campfire before full dark, so that it wouldn't call unwanted attention to them.

As it happened, they were unsuccessful in that. While they were still cooking their evening meal, the Dryfe Sands cowpuncher Cab Phillips rode in on them. He was with Little Hawk, the other Commanche from the ranch, which was where both of them were headed. They were riding double on a very tired horse.

'I thought you'd be with the soldier boys,' Johnnie greeted him.

'Fraid not,' Cab replied. 'Those soldier boys are out hunting Indians way up toward the Arkansas country. There's Cheyenne, Arapaho, and others stirring up a bit of bother.'

'Yes, we've been following forty or fifty of them.'

'Oh, that's only a part of 'em. One count made it more'n two hundred in one bunch alone, and there seems to be other lots as well. Several ranches have been attacked. There's folk in from all over, lookin' for the blue coats to help. They're a-tryin', but they're full drawn. They done took our horses to mount some of the garrison troops.'

'Where's the old man, then?'

'He's headed north, still trying to find the army. There's only a small garrison left at Fort Washita, mainly the wounded and sick. They won't be comin' out. Meantime, Ding Dong says Little Hawk an' me... we've gotta go back to the ranch. He's worried about your Maw bein' there shorthanded.'

'Perhaps we'd better do that too,' Johnnie considered.

FOUR

By morning, though, he had thought about it some more. If the Indians they had followed were Cheyenne, then they seemed to be already headed homeward. Perhaps they had in mind stealing the Dryfe Sands cattle for their last act, that particular band taking the cattle, while their fellows distracted the army elsewhere. Keeping the army, and consequently the settlers, off balance, seemed the one possible way for the slow-moving cattle to be stolen entirely away.

'You two take our spare horses back for the rest of our people, and then go on back to the ranch,' he told Cab and Little Hawk in the morning. 'Us three will be along in a day or two. We'll check on where the cattle have gotten to first. Should be safe enough, with all the excitement now being to the north of here.'

After seeing the other pair on their way, Johnnie and his two, with only their riding horses, started up the stream the Cheyenne had come out of several days before. According to Cab Phillips, the small party, whose tracks they had seen going up there ahead of them, consisted of a rancher's wife being escorted back to her home by the Fort Washita sutler, and some friendly Indians, Apaches who lived among the Kiowa people. The lady had been sent down to the fort for safety during the Indian scare. The sutler, responsible for provisioning the fort, was going on a buying expedition anyway, beef, eggs, cheese, and garden produce, and to oblige, was starting his round with this lady's home. Many ranchers' wives ran small sidelines to earn themselves a little ready money of their own.

Johnnie's idea was to follow up the north branch of the Red River, and come out on the high plains somewhere ahead of both the Cheyenne and the rustlers. He knew roughly where their line of march would go, having twice brought small herds the other way through there himself, breeding stock his father had purchased from the far-off Kansas settlements. His first hint of further trouble came well on into their second day. Bobcat spotted a coyote disappearing into the mesquite on the far bank of the stream. It was carrying a domestic chicken in its mouth.

'No good,' he said.

'So it's stolen a chicken,' Johnnie shrugged. 'There must be a ranch close by.'

'Why ranch dogs let coyote in?' Bobcat asked.

Johnnie nodded thoughtfully, and reached for the Sharp's breech loader he carried in his saddle scabbard. He rode with it across his knees thereafter, loaded.

In a short while they detected black dots circling in the sky far ahead, buzzards. There would be something going on below them to keep them up there. Equally, there would be something dead below them to keep them interested.

The next thing was distant gunshots, popping noises coming downstream on the wind.

'Movin' this way,' Bobcat said.

The sounds were getting louder. The buzzards, too, were beginning to drop. The action had to have shifted away from the ground underneath them.

'The edge of that butte up there,' Johnnie indicated. 'We'll hole up. Let whoever it is come down river to us.'

The place he had pointed out was where the cemented limestone, which underlay the high plains, was exposed at the edge of the canyon they were in. Fallen boulders dotted the scree slope where the stream swung round in an oxbow turn. It was a good place to defend, provided they kept an adequate cover on the high ground behind them. Anybody coming over the top would have a long stretch of open grass to cross.

They had barely settled in position, with a good view up the canyon as far as a grove of cottonwoods about a half mile away, when four riders burst out of the trees, and galloped down the river flats. One was a woman riding side-saddle. Another wore an army campaign hat, but with a black cutaway coat, the Fort Washita sutler obviously. The other two were Indians.

At a small stand of sycamore trees, part way down the clearing, the two Indians peeled off, to edge into the shelter the trunks afforded. The sutler and the woman kept coming.

When they were almost to the turn, three more Indians suddenly dashed from the distant cottonwoods. Two were turned in the saddle, emptying their handguns into the trees behind them. The third was hunched in his saddle, bleeding, though that wasn't stopping him from thumbing fresh loads into his chambers as he fled.

Supporting fire came from the first pair of Indians, who were both sporting Sharps. Their nimble fingers were whipping cartridges out of their bandoliers and into the breeches at a surprising rate. How long their ammunition would last was another question. There was no doubt about the effect they had though. While their three comrades hightailed it flat stick down the clearing, other riders who had appeared under the trees behind them, spun their horses smartly back into shelter. Europeans? The rustlers again?

'Barney! Barney McLay!' Johnnie yelled at the sutler. 'Get yourselves up here. We'll make a stand.'

Surprised, but thankful for Johnnie's unexpected appearance, the sutler turned his horse in behind the fall of scree without argument. He had thought his predicament hopeless, ammunition running low, and the nearest help or shelter days away. The woman pulled in beside him.

She was young, barely out of her teens. A light coloured poke bonnet covered her hair. Tears had left ragged pathways through the red-brown dust on her cheeks, and her red-rimmed eyes were distant, almost unseeing. Probably in repose she was good-looking, but distraught as she was, Johnnie's response to her was pity, rather than natural male interest.

'What's going on?'

'Indians burnt out Jamie Edison's spread about ten days, a fortnight ago,' the sutler answered. 'This is Mrs Edison. Jamie got her away to the fort with this bunch of friendlies, and knowing the raiders had gone north, and were away over the Canadian again, I was asked to see her back home. When we got there, Jamie, all his men were dead, and this mob were busy running off the cattle. The Indians took horses, guns, and ammunition. These vultures were cleaning up what was left. Mrs Edison, she's feelin' pretty bad about it, eh.'

Johnnie looked at her. She was one sad lady all right. She was obviously still in shock.

'Europeans this lot, are they?' he asked, looking back to the attacking party.

'Mostly. Bit of a mixture, but yeah, you could say Europeans.'

The three nearest friendlies, Kiowa Apaches, were coming around the foot of the scree slope. Barney McLay called to them, bringing them up panting to join their small group among the rocks. The last two were attracting a hail of fire from the trees. One of their horses was down on its side, feebly kicking. Even as Johnnie took aim himself to do the job, its owner put a bullet into its head.

'You folk keep them busy from here,' Johnnie ordered. 'They don't know about us. Come on, Danny, Bobcat, we'll go over the top, circle around behind them. We can fire down on them from the rim along there.'

Danny and Bobcat cast knowing glances at each other. Dryfe Sands Johnnie sounded full of fire and confidence at the moment, but they rather expected an abrupt change of tune once the lead began to fly.

Leaving the sutler with a packet of their reserve ammunition, Johnnie led the way on foot across the open grassland above the rim of the canyon. At the last moment they dropped to their knees to peer cautiously down into the stream bed behind the screen of cottonwoods. They could see several men in under the trees, some dismounted, others poised ready to take up the chase as soon as the two nearest Apaches were dealt with.

There were probably thirty men down there. The number gave Johnnie pause, but there was no way of avoiding a fight with them, not if he was ever to face his friends and family again.

'One each, and we move,' he whispered, hoping his voice sounded steady. There was no need to assign targets. Danny, on the right, knew to take his choice from the righthand end of the bunch, while Johnnie had the centre, and Bobcat the left. Their three shots rang out in a rattle, which re-echoed back and forth across the canyon. Men dropped, two slackly from their saddles, the other writhing on the ground.

Johnnie and his friends were already rolling away from the edge, and spreading out to find other positions. When they next peeped down into the canyon, the men below were looking for them. No time could be allowed for a proper aim after that, nor for Johnnie to think much about what he was doing. A snap shot, and move away had to be the pattern. At least the people below couldn't keep track of how many men they were faced with. On the other hand Johnnie couldn't tell what further success he was having.

Behind him, though, Danny and Bobcat had already exchanged approving nods. The young fellow was doing all right for himself so far.

One of the Apaches shifted from the scree slope to come part way along the canyon rim. His fire was giving the outlaws something else to think about. Johnnie shifted again, until he found a place where, hatless, he could peer through a screen of yucca blades, and get a general view of what was happening below.

Five bodies were in sight; only a couple of dozen or so to go. That was a thought he could do without! He needed something to keep pressure on them.

All the rustlers' horses had been drawn in under the trees, and he could only see where any of the men were by the jets of smoke when they fired.

'Keep them busy,' he told his companions. 'Watch for any attempt to make a charge up here. I'm going to see if I can get across the river; take them from that side as well.'

'They try coming up this slope below us,* Danny replied, 'Barney's lot can see them.'

Johnnie wanted his horse. Getting unseen to a vantage point across the river involved going a long way around. Therefore he cut back to the reverse side of the scree slope, where he found Mrs Edison patching up the wounded Apache with strips torn from her petticoats. Having something useful to do had brought back some of the colour to her cheeks.

'If I had a gun, I could join in,' she offered. 'I can use one.' If it hadn't been for their circumstances, her slow southern accent would have made him smile, it was so like the speech of the ex-slaves on the Dryfe Sands' payroll.

'You can have my revolver, Mrs Edison,' he agreed soberly. 'It kicks something awful though.'

'I'll manage. Call me Mary-Lou. I'm a widow woman now.'

'Mary-Lou,' he nodded, unstrapping his gunbelt. The Sharps was all he needed, if he was to fire from across the river.

'Oh my,' she said, when she took his revolver from its holster. 'I haven't seen one like this before. What is it?'

'It's French made. A Lefancheaux. I bought it from a French slaver in Baton Rouge. It loads like this,' he explained, and went on to show her how to load the chambers from the rear with ready- prepared metal cartridges. The Colt weapons she was used to all had to be loaded from the front with percussion caps, and then powder, and then bullets, all separately.

Mary-Lou, he thought, as he went for his horse. She seemed to have a darned sight more spirit than he would have expected. He had heard talk of her at the time of her wedding — Mary-Lou Cumberland Edison now, the Cumberland Belle they had called her. She was a daughter of rich southern planters, who had married a younger son, James Quincy Edison, if he remembered the name correctly. Himself the scion of a Mississippi cotton dynasty, Edison had hoped to found his own fortune in cattle. The talk had been that both of them would be too soft for the ranching life. Well, she had certainly been given the opportunity to test whether that estimate was true of herself.

He led his big black horse down on to the flat, before he mounted up. The nearest break in the canyon rim across the river was some half mile back. He was in a hurry, and galloped all the way.

When he slowed, looking for a place to drop into the river, his horse nickered.

'Hush Dusky,' he said. 'What is it?'

He had long since learned to take notice whenever his horse was trying to tell him something. This time Dusky had detected a presence in a clump of willows under the canyon wall. Perhaps a cougar, a bobcat. Time was short. Getting into a new position was more important than investigating Dusky's unease. He was about to move on, when there was an answering nicker from the willows.

That was different. Another horse was where another horse shouldn't be. Cocking the Sharps, but wishing he had his revolver in his hand, he kneed Dusky forward into the willows.

A bay mare, a mustang, barebacked, was tethered there. Its bridle was of woven hair, an Indian's horse, but not Commanche. If it had been Commanche, there would have been a loop braided into the horse's mane, and hanging under its neck. The animal hadn't been there when they had passed this spot not more than half-an-hour before.

Bare feet had left their pattern in the dust. A man had gone up to the mesa above. Clearly he would be spying on the gun battle up the river... only who would he then be reporting to? It was important to find out. More friendlies would certainly be welcome, Apache, maybe Kiowa in this country. Or they could be neutrals, people not wanting to get mixed up in the white man's squabbles. Then again, they could be Cheyenne, Arapaho, or some such, not withdrawn from the area at all.

A short distance away a draw offered a steep route up out of the canyon. Johnnie put his horse to it. Riding up would be faster than going on foot, and it was a fair bet that the spy would be somewhere directly above his horse. Johnnie must have taken him by surprise by coming down river so fast, while the gun battle was still going on.

Sure enough, as Johnnie expected, as soon as he started the climb up the draw, the Indian made a break for his horse.

There was a brief glimpse of buckskin in the mesquite, and a crashing of breaking twigs under the trees. A moment later horse and rider broke cover, going for dear life down the river flats.

Johnnie held his fire. He had no wish to shoot anybody who wasn't definitely an enemy.

Too late, he found that this one was. The brave was a Cheyenne scout. He was gone while Johnnie was still trying to identify him. 'Where was he going?' was the question.

On up the draw, Johnnie came out on the open grassland again, and again he correctly guessed what the other man would do. In a few minutes the brave appeared out of a draw further down river. He turned in the saddle, looking back at Johnnie, while heading east across the grass as fast as he could go.

East? That was back in the direction of Fort Washita, more or less. There were still marauders, then, ravaging further down the Red River.

Thoughtfully, Johnnie turned back along the canyon rim. He had changed his mind about firing on the rustlers from across the river. There were more urgent things needing doing.

### FIVE

'We've got more trouble behind us,' Johnnie told Barney McLay, Mary-Lou, and the two Apaches with them. He had left his horse ground-tied out on the grass above them. 'Can you get your other two fellows up here? We've got to get out of here smartly.'

'Covering fire,' Barney replied. 'It's the only chance they've got. What's behind us?'

Johnnie told them.

'Yeah, right,' the sutler agreed. 'You know, I could've stayed right on workin' in my Pappy's general store back east.'

'Go on, Barney,' Mary-Lou joshed. 'You're loving every minute of this.'

The spark of spirit pleased Johnnie more than he would have thought. If she could still come up with a quip after the pounding fate had handed out to her, perhaps this gently-bred lady might have some depth to her after all. Certainly the businesslike way she was handling his revolver, admittedly two-handed, suggested that she was fit to manage more than tea cakes and bone china.

He stood out on the grass, hidden from the people down in the canyon, and waved to the three men they had spaced out along the rim to the west. When he had their attention, he signalled for a burst of more concentrated fire.

The two Apaches caught below were quick to grasp the chance offered them. One wriggled out and recovered the bedroll from his dead horse, though he had to abandon the saddle. Then, as lead rained down on the cottonwood grove, temporarily silencing the gunmen hidden there, the pair loosed their remaining horse, and legged it for the next clump of cover down river. The horse tagging on behind them provided an additional shield.

Satisfied that they were in the clear, Johnnie called down for them to bring the rest of the horses up to the mesa. All the while the plunging fire from the guns on the rim, though now reduced, continued to force the rustlers to keep their heads down.

'What are we doing?' Barney asked.

'I want to get us up-river of those rustlers,' Johnnie explained. 'When the Cheyenne or the Arapaho arrive, I want the rustlers between us and them.'

'We're a horse short,' Mary-Lou pointed out.

'Yeah, somebody will have to ride double,' Johnnie nodded.

'You and me,' she suggested, her eyes cool and steady. 'I'm lighter than anybody else, and you've got the biggest horse.'

Johnnie refrained from mentioning that he was heavier than anybody else. He could see that riding double with the widow lady wouldn't be an unpleasant experience.

After shifting his bedroll to the back of Danny's horse, he similarly fixed Mary-Lou's behind Bobcat's. Then he took those horses, and the one belonging to the Apache who was firing from along the rim, and placed them appropriately for their riders, telling them at the same time what he proposed.

When he circled back to pick up Mary-Lou, she scrambled up behind him, and settled herself on her bunched up skirts. Her long legs hung down behind his own. Where his were enclosed in stout canvas range pants, hers were covered by scalloped silk pantaloons to the ankle, with the bottoms tucked into dainty little high-heeled riding boots.

Barney looked away, blushing, but the braves made no bones about having a good look at what she was wearing. They gave each other droll grins, and shook their heads in mock despair. These white eyes sure liked to make their lives complicated.

The Apache who had been given Mary-Lou's horse took off the side-saddle, and hid it down under the lip of the escarpment. One day she might be able to recover it. In the meantime, it wasn't of much use to him. Nevertheless, he kept the underblanket, surcingle, and stirrups.

For a while the marksmen left on the rim allowed their rate of fire to slowly drop. The rustlers weren't wasting as much lead as they had been. Everybody on both sides had to think about what ammunition was left.

Johnnie signalled for their fire to die away completely.

Only after a couple of minutes did one of the rustlers dare to show his face. Danny's shot raised splinters inches from his head.

Several minutes passed before another man tried. This time he was allowed to walk out from under the trees, and then go back for his horse, before three bullets at once cut him down just as he settled in the saddle.

'Now we go,'Johnnie said.

'Later,' Bobcat disagreed. 'I come later.'

From nearly a mile up the bank, they heard Bobcat fire again, though even then, he still failed to follow them.

'He'll be along,' Danny said. 'He's just making certain they don't follow too close.'

'Oh well, we'll cut down here then,' Johnnie replied. 'I can see what I want across the river there.'

Mary-Lou's arms, clasped so confidently about his waist, were very much in his awareness, but didn't distract him from what needed to be done. He led the party down an easy slope into the bottom of the canyon, and continued on up the grassy flats until he came to a place where the river had swung in against the bluffs, leaving them nowhere else to go but into the water. A small sidestream was coming in almost opposite.

'We go into the river here,' he said, 'but we don't come out the other side. We hide our tracks by going up that little creek over there. There's still something like twenty outlaws to come up behind us, so with any luck their tracks will cover ours over this last section, and hide the fact that ours don't continue on the other side.'

Single file they threaded the smaller stream, and the arroyo it emerged from. By the time it levelled into a tree-studded watercourse incised into the barren high plains, they were well out of sight of anybody riding up the canyon, and far enough back to go unseen by any scouts riding the near canyon rim.

'This will do,' he said. 'We'll rest up here a spell. I'll go back and see that Bobcat knows where to come.'

'I'll come with you,' Mary-Lou said. 'I want a look at those rustlers as they go by. I want to be sure that I'll know them if I see them again.'

'You'll get your boots wet.'

'I'll go barefoot. I'm used to it, and the bottom of this stream is sandy anyway.'

The lady was full of surprises.

'I'm just glad it's not mud,' Johnnie told her. 'Dirty water going downstream would be a dead give-away.'

To one side of the stream where it emerged into the canyon, the limestone was undercut into a shallow cave, screened by a fresh growth of fire weed. Lying prone, they could be seen from neither above nor below.

Mary-Lou promptly removed her bonnet. Its light colour was too easily seen. She shook her head to release a cascade of brown hair. It glistened where it fell across her shoulders. So did Johnnie's eyes looking at it.

They had only been in position a minute when Bobcat appeared galloping along the far bank of the river below them. Johnnie drew his breath to yell to him, but Mary-Lou beat him to it. She put both her index fingers in her mouth, and blew a shrill whistle, which reverberated across the canyon, and lifted birds protesting from the scrub.

Bobcat looked around, obviously unable to tell where the sound had come from. Johnnie waved his hat over the top of the fire weed, dark against the limestone. He stood to his feet, and mimed to Bobcat that he wanted him to come up the creek bed.

While he watched the Commanche carefully easing his horse up through the shallow water, he said, 'That's sure some whistle, my lady.'

'My brothers taught me. They whistle to control their dogs when out hunting.'

'Still, not the kind of accomplishment one expects of the Cumberland Belle.'

'Oh that,' she sighed. 'I think folks were just being a little sarcastic, calling me that. I guess I was a bit of a tomboy. Anyway, I've heard too, what they call you: Dryfe Sands Johnnie. You cut quite a swathe with the ladies down in Baton Rouge, don't you?'

'I don't know about that,' he answered stiffly, and turned to speak to Bobcat just passing them in the watercourse.

'How was the shooting?' he asked.

'One more,' Bobcat shrugged.

'Are they going to come back this way then?'

'Soon,' Bobcat said, and rode on.

'The man is monosyllabic,' Mary-Lou noted.

'He's also not very talkative,' Johnnie said, and laughed when he saw that she thought he hadn't understood her polysyllabic word.

'You tease,' she accused.

'Not to hurt. Never to hurt.'

'No, I hope not. We've got enough misery to cope with.'

'Any help I can be...'

'Yes, thanks. Somehow, I'm going to have to go back to my folks with my tail between my legs.'

'That bad?'

'Yes. They didn't want me to marry Jamie in the first place. There were other beaus with better prospects. Now I've lost Jamie, and my dowry, and everything. Jamie's what matters to me, but my family are going to look at all those cattle gone, the debts, the furnishings even. They're all gone. I've no way of getting them back.'

'The army...'

'What army? They've got their hands full just helping folks who can help themselves a little. They've got a full-blown Indian war to keep them occupied. They've got no time for chasing a few cows.'

'Your brothers ?'

'What can they do in this country? They're not Indian fighters.'

'Well, there must be something 'What hope have you got of getting back the cattle that have been stolen from your spread?'

'I must admit that that doesn't look too good any more. If we can't call on the army, and there's no other law to speak of way up here...'

He paused. She followed his line of sight.

On the far rim, perhaps two miles away, three horsemen were wending their way in and out of a crosscutting watercourse.

'That's the Cheyenne arriving,' he said. 'There'll be other scouts over this side, and the main body down in the canyon. We'll have to watch, because sooner or later some of them are going to pass along above us. I just hope they won't be near enough to smell us.'

'They can do that?'

'Bobcat can.'

Then it was her turn to stiffen.

A party of horsemen had appeared riding along the canyon below them; the rustlers. They were in a hurry too. As Barney had said, they were mostly European, but at least one man was black, and two were Indians of some kind in European clothing. Twenty-two of them sat their saddles, even if some were bandaged and sat badly. Eight were tied on their mounts face down. Three riderless horses were being led. From the worried looks the rustlers were casting behind them, they plainly knew who and what was on their tails.

'Can you see their faces all right?' Mary-Lou whispered.

'Well enough,'Johnnie replied in kind. 'I'll know some of them again.'

After the rustlers had gone by there was a space of about five minutes, before the Cheyenne scouts on the far rim came level.

'Look, way, way back on the plains,' Mary-Lou whispered.

'Yes, more scouts,' Johnnie said, eyeing the distant black dots brushing the horizon. 'There'll be more out beyond them again. Some could be twenty and thirty miles away.'

'No wonder they don't miss much. It'll be hard to surprise them.'

'If we had a regiment with us now, we'd have them.'

'If...'

'Now who's monosyllabic?'

Cheyenne, a few Arapaho with them, began to appear in the canyon below, the first dozen or so single file, scanning the canyon walls as they went. After that the riders spread across the flats, a disorderly mob, except that the chief, surrounded by a clump of his more important braves, was up toward the front centre. Behind them the river flats became packed solid with mounted braves. Differences in hair styles and dress suggested more than one tribe being represented.

Most of them carried bows, with quivers of arrows slung behind their shoulders. A few carried long lances. Even fewer had guns, and those a strange assortment of muzzle loaders and carbines, and any other rubbish sharp traders could unload on to Indians who were unable to legitimately come by anything else.

'How many men do you count?' Johnnie whispered.

'Far more than two hundred anyway,' Mary-Lou replied nervously. 'There's more back in the trees yet.'

The first few riders were hanging from their mounts, arms flung over their necks, reading sign. They plunged into the river, and crossed to come out higher up where the rocks were still wet from the passage of the rustlers.

Thirty odd horses had churned up the ground there. Who was to say whether or not there were another nine still ahead of them? The braves paused, some looking back to their chief for the word to go on. Some were still busy with the canyon walls. One was signalling to the scouts on the rim. One was looking suspiciously across the river at the small stream Johnnie had led his party up.

It seemed that that one was about to come down and investigate it more closely.

There was an audible click as Mary-Lou cocked the Lefancheaux. Johnnie swallowed, and eased back the hammer on the Sharps. Perhaps they'd be able to hold the Indians back long enough to enable their friends to get away. There didn't appear to be much hope of anything else.

### SIX

Hardly had the curious brave taken the first step, however, than he stopped to answer somebody calling him. The sound masked those which Mary-Lou and Johnnie had made. It appeared that the chief wanted that particular warrior, and there was no arguing with a chief. The hidden pair both sighed with relief as the brave went back across the river.

For a short while there was a conference among the older men surrounding the chief, and soon after about fifty of the Indians crossed the river, while most of those already there went back. The reorganization spread like ripples in a pond outward from the chief. The main body got themselves turned about and headed back down the river, while the smaller group continued the pursuit of the rustlers.

In about fifteen minutes the floor of the canyon had cleared. The last of the Indians down there disappeared into the trees, some upriver, and some down. Scouts on the far rim were also moving away, a few galloping off into the distance carrying word to the outlying patrols.

'There's still scouts above us somewhere,' Johnnie cautioned. 'They could be anywhere. We'd best stay put for a spell.'

'Yes, but what are we going to do then?'

'You'd better come back to Dryfe Sands with me,' Johnnie suggested. 'We can't do anything about your spread, and now we can't get back to Fort Washita. I think your best course is to throw in your lot with us. Our ranch will be the safest place for you until things settle down again. Perhaps we'll be able to salvage something of yours later.'

'Do you think those are the same rustlers who stole your cattle?'

'Not that I could tell. I've only seen ours from a distance, but I don't think they were the same men.'

'It's strange, then, how so many rustlers should all start operating at once. I mean, there's always been the odd beast or two taken. Drifters butcher them on the range, but they haven't before driven off whole herds. I can understand the rustlers making use of the disturbances caused by the Indians raiding, but how come so many rustlers just happen to be about at this time at all? Where are they coming from? How do they happen to be here right now?'

Johnnie nodded. 'There's got to be some way they can dispose of what they've stolen; some way of making those herds disappear until they can be turned into cash.'

When he thought enough time had elapsed, they crept around into the arroyo again, and peeped cautiously out over the top. The way seemed clear.

Further up the watercourse they found the others safely waiting for them. The Commanche and the Apache were settled in amiable conversation, a condition fostered by having a common enemy to contend with. Danny was hunkered just below the lip of the channel, keeping watch.

'You're probably wise,' Barney McLay agreed, when Mary-Lou told him that she intended going with Johnnie to Dryfe Sands. 'Safest place for you. These Apache folk want to get back to their village. They'll be needed there with all these Cheyenne on the loose. I'd better go with 'em. They'll know more of what's happening, so I'll probably get back to the fort sooner that way.'

'Which way do you intend to go?'

'We'll try and get around to the west of where these Cheyenne are likely to be. This splinter group isn't likely to go too far west, surely, with their main body having gone east again? I mean, they'll be inviting trouble from the Commanche and the Kiowa if they go too far west.'

'Don't forget, some of them, the ones we first saw, were fairly high on the plains.'

'The Apache reckon they know the line those ones'll take. We can stay west of them again.' Johnnie's group stayed with the sutler's party, keeping to the bottom of the watercourse, until

they came to a branching of the channel. Then while Barney took the westerly fork, Johnnie continued to bear away to the south, eventually, having crossed a wide sweep of grassland, to come out on the Brazos two days later. They were downstream from the ranch, and reached it that evening, without having seen another soul.

Warned by a watchkeeper, perched on the water tower, Betsy Bell and Jasmine were on the porch to greet them. Apart from the watcher, and Eb de Lange bedded down on the porch for the fresh air, the place seemed deserted.

'Who do we have here?' Betsy asked, smiling. 'I wasn't expecting Johnnie to bring a young lady home.'

She lost the smile when Johnnie introduced her, and added, 'Her husband was killed by some rustlers a few days ago.'

'Oh you poor thing. Come right in here,' Betsy was all sympathy, and with Jasmine also clucking over her, Mary-Lou was whisked away indoors.

'How are you, Eb?' Johnnie asked the black cowpuncher.

'Mendin', Johnnie. On the mend. Ain't goin' to be wrasslin' no steers for a time though.'

'Where is everybody?'

'Mostly takin' all the beeves up country. Yo Maw, she's fixed it for grazin' out the month on Commanche land. There's enough stock stolen already, without havin' anybody come and take the rest. A couple of fellows are still here. They're posted out on the high points to give a warning of any troubles cornin' this way.'

'I didn't see them.'

'They'll have seen you.'

'And what happens if more rustlers or hostile Indians do turn up?'

'There's horses ready saddled in the corral. Can't defend the place, so yo Maw says ever'body, they just got to hightail it out of here.'

'Are you up to that?'

'Not likely. There's a false wall made to go over the cheese cellar. I'll hide out in there. Outlaws, Indians, iff'n they do come, they won't stay around long whatever.'

When he asked after Cab Phillips and Little Hawk, he learned that they had not yet arrived, and Johnnie's news was the first the people at the ranch had heard of the current Cheyenne raiding.

That evening, Johnnie and Mary-Lou saw each other without a coating of range dust for the first time. She had green eyes, he noticed, and her complexion was like cream. A tin bath in an outhouse had been filled and emptied several times while each of the new arrivals cleaned up. Clothing for Mary-Lou was a problem, Betsy being too tall, and Jasmine too stout. The best solution had been to give her some of the stored clothing belonging to one of Johnnie's younger brothers, who was away at school in New Orleans. Apart from the way she filled out the front of the shirt, boys' clothing went quite well on her slim, willowy figure.

'How many brothers do you have?' Mary-Lou asked, when they were seated for the evening meal. She was looking everywhere, but at Jasmine seated opposite her.

'Two, both younger, both at school back east,' Johnnie replied. 'There was an older one, but he was shot down by Indians before we came here from Kansas. My two sisters, both married, are back there in Kansas.'

'What about your relatives now?' Betsy asked.

'They'll take me back,' Mary-Lou continued, when she had explained who and what they were, 'but they'll not help me rebuild Jamie's ranch. We're squatters to them. They look down on squatters. I'm an embarrassment to them now.'

'Yo go back, yo'll be the widowed aunt the rest of yo life,'Jasmine said flatly.

'Yes,' Mary-Lou agreed, and flushed. She wasn't accustomed to black women who spoke without being spoken to. 'You know how these things work back there,' she added, concerned not to offend Jasmine for her own sake, but also aware of her hosts' attitude to the woman.

Later, when Eb had been carried in and installed back in the guest room, Johnnie and Mary-Lou stood out on the porch looking at the stars.

'You're not used to black folk?'Johnnie asked.

'Not as people,' Mary-Lou replied. 'They were all around me while I grew up, but only to give orders to. You know their names, but you don't know the people. I was never allowed to mix with anybody but the quality, always white, preferably rich, and certainly either Episcopalian or Presbyterian. Perhaps now I'll be able to change that.'

'Jasmine and her husband, and our other black man, Rastus, have taught us a lot,' Johnnie told her. 'Black folk were pretty strange to us too for a start, and we're not plantation-bred like you. The Bells are fairly plain folk. We might meet your family's requirements on the white, and the Presbyterian bit, but there's never yet been any Bells could be described as quality.'

'I don't think the people who use the term really know what it means,' Mary-Lou replied. 'Your mother, the way she runs this place, I think she's quality.'

'Yes, her family all think that too, but I guess we might be prejudiced.'

'Not half as prejudiced as my lot, and then in a better way. A lot of my opinions have changed radically in the last year. I'm finding that my mind is opening to a lot of things.'

Around noon the next day Cab Phillips arrived with Little Hawk. They too had seen nobody in the past couple of days, though they had seen more than they wanted before that.

'We'd have been dead ducks without your horses,' he said. 'We ran smack bang into some Cheyenne scouts, and only the fact that we had guns and they didn't saved us. We met them just above where we camped the other night. One of them got away from us, so we had to get out of there smartly. There was a whole parcel of 'em got in behind us, an' blocked us from comin' thisaway, or gettin' back to the fort.'

'I trust you didn't lead them in this direction anyway.'

'Not so far's I know. We tried to make it look we'd gone up the Red.'

Four hours later Ding Dong himself appeared, bedraggled, and aged years in a week. The three hands with him were in little better case.

'She's all bad news between the Red and the Arkansas,' he reported. 'Three places burnt down along the Canadian, folks killed, horses run off by the Cheyenne and their Arapaho allies on the rampage, and some mention of other places losing cattle to rustlers.'

'Well, you keep your dirty pants off my cushions, Jamie Bell,' his wife responded, 'and we'll get you bathed and fed before anything else goes wrong.'

'Some woman, your mother,' Ding Dong observed to Johnnie with a grin. 'Gets her priorities right. Who's this?'

On being introduced to Mary-Lou, and told of her circumstances, he said, 'You'll have to figure on all your horses being gone. That's what the Cheyenne have been after; horseflesh and guns. We won't see those again. Your cattle just might be another matter. At the rate they move, it'll take a couple of months or more to get them to anywhere that matters. The Cheyenne aren't bothering with any they can't eat on the spot.'

'Are you going after yours again, Mr Bell?' Mary-Lou asked.

'Jamie, call me Jamie,' he invited.

'Oh, please, not Jamie,' she protested. 'Not from me.'

'That was her husband's name,' Johnnie explained.

'Oh, well then, I'm sorry. Something else. Not Ding Dong though. It doesn't sound right coming from a lady.'

'We'll think of something, but what about your cattle?' she persisted.

'Now that there's enough hands here, I'll start out in the morning again, and see if I can find out what's happening,' Ding Dong answered.

'You'll do no such thing, Jamie Bell,' his wife contradicted, towering over him, a Nordic Amazon to his string and bone frame. 'If there's hostile Indians about, I want you here to protect me.'

'I'll go,'Johnny said. 'It'll be just to keep a track on them. That's all we'll do; watch them until you can bring in the army, or whatever.'

By morning, after much argument, Mary-Lou had won her contention that she should go too. Her cattle were also out there somewhere. It was the same argument that Danny used with regard to his horses. That she was a female wasn't a sufficient reason to keep her confined to the ranch house. She'd accompany Johnnie and Danny Long Knife, and they'd look for the stock stolen from both ranches, starting this time with hers.

With a free choice from the wardrobes of Johnnie's younger brothers, she made herself up a range kit of boys' clothing. Having already proven her ability to use Johnnie's big Lefancheux revolver, even if needing two hands to do so, she was allowed to borrow one of their weapons also, a more manageable point three one calibre Colt, with a five-shot cylinder, and a barrel less than six inches long. Ding Dong punched another hole in the cartridge belt, so that she could tighten it around her waist, and not have the whole weighty contraption continually slipping down around her knees. There was a point three two breech loader the boys used for antelope and peccary hunting. She took that too. Even she had to admit that a Sharp's buffalo rifle was more than she could handle.

When they saddled up, Mary-Lou taking a rig belonging to one of the boys, they found Bobcat and Little Hawk were also preparing to ride with them.

'You fellows don't have to come,'Johnnie said.

'True,' Bobcat agreed.

Little Hawk merely nodded. Having lost his wife, along with his honour, on the Chickasaw raid, Little Hawk was another looking for redemption. Only a respected warrior could hold a squaw.

So five of them went.

With them they took supplies for a month, a well-weighted money belt, and bag of the sundry knick-knacks it always paid to carry whenever travelling through Indian country. They were well-armed too, each with revolvers and Bowie knives strapped to their hips, and rifles and Commanche tomahawks attached to their saddles.

When they camped that first night, Mary-Lou laid out her bedroll, head to the fire, just like the men.

After a supper of beans and bacon, followed by hot black coffee, Johnnie found sleep slow to come. It wasn't only the coffee affecting him, as after a long active day, he seldom failed to drop off quickly, no matter how much coffee he drank. The trouble was he was just too aware of Mary-Lou wrapped in her blankets a scant few feet away.

For a time he lay looking up at the stars, brilliant in the desert night. One by one he named fifty or more of them, magic names for other suns blazing so far away. Then he traced out the constellations, the Greek ones his father had taught him, the Commanche ones he had learned while sitting around other desert campfires. It was no use. He couldn't blank out Mary-Lou nearby in the darkness.

She was crying. He knew she was. She was crying silently, grieving for her dead husband, keeping very still so as not to disturb her companions, but Johnnie knew... somehow, in a way he couldn't explain, he knew.

Perhaps the other three men also knew. It was hard to tell with them. They always slept without making much noise. Their Commanche upbringing had trained them that way.

Wracked with sympathy for the young widow, but prevented by his own conventions from offering her any comfort, he could do nothing but let her cry it out.

There was another trick which sometimes worked for him, sometimes let him drift away into sleep in spite of the turmoil of his emotions: trying to decide which faint star was the farthest away. After that, morning was suddenly there, and he had no memory of having reached a decision.

Two hard days later they slipped in carefully through the trees, which grew in the gully behind the burnt-out buildings of the Edison ranch. The place, like the range all about it, was deserted.

'They ain't left much,' Danny commented.

'We'll salvage anything we can,' Johnnie directed.

They separated, and began poking through the sad wreckage. Some timbers, iron tools, wheel rims could be used again. Johnnie found a branding iron, a squashed circle with five unevenly radiating spokes like a buckled sunburst. He was about to take it across to where Mary-Lou was raking broken crockery from the ashes of her kitchen, when he saw that she was standing shaking, her face as white as snow.

He went to her. Danny saw her condition and came too.

'I've found Jamie!' she said tightly, her eyes rounded with horror. 'Nobody's buried him.'

'Oh, dear Lord,' Danny cried. 'It's been near on a week.'

'I know,' she answered. 'It shows. The coyotes have been.'

### SEVEN

There was little more than bones left in the rags of clothing, and Johnnie and Danny had to lift carefully to avoid them falling apart, as they transferred them to a partly-burnt plank. The two Commanche went down to the river and brought back a load of cattail and mulberry saplings, leaves and all. Using a buckboard axle as a crowbar, and a broken plate for a scoop, the four men took turns digging a grave on a rise behind where the house had been.

They laid the skeleton, plank and all, on a bed of mulberry in the bottom of the grave. Bobcat and Little Hawk then sprinkled yellow cattail pollen on it, and placed the sunburst branding iron beside it. The cattail saplings went next, a green leafy shroud, while Johnnie recited what he could remember of the burial service. All the while Danny and the other two kept up a rhythmic chant in the Commanche tongue, of which Johnnie understood a little. Between them, their efforts should have helped James Quincy Edison to the happy hunting grounds on the other side, one way or the other.

Mary-Lou helped when they scraped the red-brown soil and limestone rubble back into the grave. She helped too, when they carried up broken brickwork from the fallen ranch house chimney and piled it over the top. There was no sense in allowing the coyotes and wild pig to dig up what they had worked so hard to bury.

'I won't build here again,' Mary-Lou said. 'There's open range still to the south and west of here. It's further from Fort Washita, but I can't see that that makes much difference any more.'

'Commanche that way,' Little Hawk said. 'You not need fort.'

Johnnie was anxious to get Mary-Lou away from that place. The other men were just as anxious to leave. Nobody said so, but all were hoping that Mary-Lou wouldn't remember that other men had also died there. More unburied bodies had to be lying around somewhere. They would rather leave the burying of them until shovels and other tools were available. Proper respect for the dead was all very well, yet with so much time having passed already, a little more couldn't make too much difference.

'All the traffic went on past here up the river,' Danny suggested.

They had paused momentarily to examine the tracks as they rode across them in getting to the ranch site. The Indian band had gone past. They had to assume that the rustlers were still ahead of them at that point.

'Those Indians will want to rejoin their main body at some time,' Johnnie said. 'We'd better not get caught, if they come back past this way again.' With that thought in mind, when they moved on, they set Bobcat and Little Hawk to scout the open grassland to either side, while the other three stayed with the tracks going up the river. Following them wasn't difficult. The cattle had spread widely, obviously pushed on by only a few men, while the rest had stayed back to loot what the Indians had left of the homestead. Their passage was marked here and there by abandoned carcases, too many even for the ravens and coyotes to have finished cleaning the bones. Early in the drive, the rustlers must have tried to rush the cattle more than the calves could manage, trying to get quickly clear of the area.

'Your husband seems to have had the cattle close in to the ranch,' Danny commented.

'Yes, he mustered them when we heard there were hostile Indians about. I guess that was just a gift to the rustlers.'

'Had he branded the new season's calves?'

'Yes.'

'Why that brand, the sunburst?*

'It's not a sunburst really. If you look, the circle is flattened on both sides, and the rays aren't equal. What you have is a "Q" overlaid with a "J" on one side, and an "E" on the other.'

'JQE,'Johnnie noted. 'James Quincy Edison.'

'The brand is something I'll keep anyway,' Mary-Lou declared. 'Why do you have a winged spur?'

'A tradition that dates back to Scotland. My ancestors helped the Johnstones to win a clan battle against the Maxwells. Since then my family have been granted the right to add the Johnstones' symbol to our crest.'

'A clan battle? How does that differ from a tribal battle, Indian wars?'

'It doesn't, does it? Perhaps one day our grandchildren's children will claim Commanche totems.'

She glanced at him sharply, but he was leaning from his saddle to study the ground ahead.

Some miles up the river they came to the place the herd had reached, when the main group of rustlers, in a terrible hurry, had caught up on them. Those driving the herd had left their posts to join their fleeing confederates. Their tracks were still showing. The herd had scattered.

Over the rustlers' tracks lay the ones left by the Cheyenne, and thereafter those were mostly what showed going up the river. Later, however, they found the rustlers' marks superimposed once more, many with individual shoe prints they had learned to recognize.

'Them's very determined fellows,' Danny opined. 'They've shooken off the Cheyenne somehow, and come back for the cattle.'

That was so. All that could be quickly found of the herd had been gathered in again. At an arroyo nearby, they had been driven northward up on to the open plains, and then swung more westerly.

'The Cheyenne, eh?' Johnnie then suggested. 'We follow them. We can always come back to the cattle.'

They followed the traces left by the Indians all the rest of that day, and part-way through the ' morning of the next, before they read of the next development in the marks. Evidently the rustlers had decided, during their first trip up the river, that they couldn't go on for ever with the Cheyenne dogging their heels. The frequent stumbles, shown in the dragging hoofprints, indicated how tired the Indian ponies were getting, so the rustlers' mounts couldn't have been in any better shape. That the Indians hadn't caught up on the rustlers, though, seemed more due to the fact that the Indians didn't want to.

So long as they had the better weapons, the rustlers had too much of an advantage. The Cheyenne were waiting either for the rustlers to run out of ammunition, or for ground or other circumstances which might turn the bias their way. They wanted the rustlers' guns and horses, yet not at any great cost to themselves. On the other hand, if they continued too far on the present course, they'd be drawing uncomfortably close to Kiowa villages, and that was a complication both rustlers and Cheyenne could do without.

Be that as it may, the rustlers on their first trip up the river found a place where they could call a halt to their flight. The river had cut an ox-bow in the plains, and then cut through the neck. The small mesa, not more than an acre, left in the loop, was in turn gashed by an arroyo, and that was masked in a growth of mulberry and cottonwood.

In the top end of the arroyo, there was just room to hold the horses out of reach of the pursuing Cheyenne. From the top of the mesa, the rustlers enjoyed an all-round field of fire, while the Indians had hardly a weapon among them that could match the range of those possessed by the defenders.

It was a stalemate. The rustlers couldn't leave, while the Indians couldn't get at them without a considerable loss of life. Against that, the rustlers had no water.

A moon lasting all night had enabled the situation to continue for at least a couple of days. During that time a full dozen men had been buried on the top of the mesa, so another four had died either from their wounds, or at the hands of the Cheyenne. Eighteen were left, along with thirty- two horses. Somehow, they had also lost one of their horses.

Then the situation had changed again. The Cheyenne had abandoned their siege, and left suddenly, riding away across the plains to the northeast. The rustlers would later drive the Edison cattle through that same area.

The reason for the Cheyenne's abrupt departure was not then obvious, but while the Indians had gone north-east, the rustlers had crossed the river and taken off across the plains south-east. Eventually they must have curved to the north again, for Johnnie's party had already seen where they had returned to collect the cattle again.

'Where to now?' Danny asked.

'Well,' Johnnie summarized, 'the way the Edisons' rustlers are now headed, they're going to come in behind the Dryfe Sands rustlers. Maybe they're associated after all. There's Cheyenne to the east and north east of here, and if nothing else has happened, there's the Dryfe Sands rustlers and another Cheyenne band a little to the west of due north of us. I think we should swing around to the west of the Dryfe Sands bunch, and see if we can get some idea of what they're doing.'

His proposal made sense to his companions, so they chose a route to take them out across the high plains to the north-west.

Hardly had they gone a mile than they crossed tracks headed north-east. Something like a couple of dozen horses were involved. They all dismounted to walk along the marks looking for clues as to who had left them.

'Here,' Bobcat grunted eventually, pointing to the dusty outline of a shod hoof. 'Barney McLay.'

'Ah, Kiowa Apache then,' Johnnie nodded. 'That's why the Cheyenne pulled out in a hurry. The Cheyenne scouts must have spotted them nosing about.'

'Apache scouts,' Mary-Lou wondered. 'Who's behind them then?'

'More Apaches or Kiowa,' Johnnie replied. 'That's what the Cheyenne will be thinking. It suits us though.'

In fact they came across nobody else in the next four days. By then they had cut across the marks of the Dryfe Sands cattle still plodding steadily northward. Whoever was riding herd on them was riding the rustlers' horses, but there was nothing to show just who was mounted on those horses. For all they could tell, the rustlers could be food for the vultures, their bodies left far back across the plains, while the Cheyenne now drove those cattle.

Cougars and coyotes were trailing the herd, but with the weak calves long since fallen by the way, no further free meals were being left for the scavengers.

With the idea of trying to get ahead of the herd again, to find a place to watch them go past, Johnnie continued a few miles west, and then swung north to ride parallel with the route the herders were taking. In this region the high plains were hardly plains any more, but gave way often to broken country, with hills and high plateaux standing above the level of the prairies. When he thought they had gone far enough, he began visiting each high point they saw along the way, hoping to get a distant view of the cattle plodding along.

Perhaps it was the number of times he did it, without seeing hide nor hair of the stolen cattle, nor the men who drove them, that made him a little careless. They came to a high point, high for the plains that is, that looked as if it would offer a distant view. At some time an ancient river had changed course, and left an old river terrace standing slightly proud of the dusty plains. A half mile short of it they saw a puff of smoke rise from the short grass on the crest.

'Duck!' Danny yelled, at the same moment that the sound of a rifle shot reached them. Then the bullet whirred through their group at shoulder height, and thumped up a cloud of dust a hundred yards or so behind them.

### EIGHT

On Danny's yell, he and the two Commanche had dropped promptly down the leeward sides of their horses, to each hang there with a heel hooked over the back of their mounts, and a hand clasping the braided loop, which hung under each of their horses' necks. Mary-Lou and Johnnie could only crouch low, and spur away from the hidden marksmen.

Two further shots, coming close together, showed that there was more than one.

Well out of effective range, another half mile back, the five of them pulled up, and looked back at the place the shots had come from.

'Those were buffalo rifles,' Johnnie noted. 'I think we've found our cattle drovers. They don't seem to be coming after us.'

'They just want us to keep away from 'em,' Danny said. 'Whoever they are, they're not anxious to show themselves, and give us a target to fire back at.'

'Suits me for now,'Johnnie nodded. 'We'll circle wide, and come in again ahead of them.'

Several miles further on they found another rise that would give them a view eastward. Tiny in the distance, three riders were on a line that matched their own. Away back, over the horizon, a cloud of dust was drifting lazily, marking the expected passage of the herd.

'What do you think?'Johnnie asked. 'Rustlers or Cheyenne?'

'Still can't tell,' Danny answered. 'The rustlers are just as likely as the Cheyenne to have scouts out.'

They moved on, and when they judged they were far enough ahead of the trail drive, they cut eastward across the line the herd was taking. Right on that line they found fresh wagon tracks. Though they rode on another couple of miles, there were no other tracks out ahead of the herd.

'That's it then,' Johnnie summed up. 'The Cheyenne would have no use for a chuck wagon going ahead of them, so it must be the rustlers still with the herd. The Indians must have given up on them; decided to go looking for easier prey.'

'Or,' Mary-Lou cautioned, 'decided, like us, that they can find the rustlers again whenever they want to. Perhaps they're leaving the rustlers only until they're better prepared to deal with them.'

'Which is what we'd better concentrate on too,' Johnnie agreed. 'Preparing a reception for them some place further up the trail.'

'Such as?' Bobcat asked.

'Well,' Johnnie reasoned, 'now that we know it's the rustlers still, probably both lots combined, we know they'll be heading for a trail, and it's got to be the Santa Fe Trail one way or the other. They could head east on that trail, if they've got some way of bluffing their way through with cattle bearing our brands. Neither of them are easy brands to blot, so I can't think how they'd manage it, but it's obvious that they know something that we don't. The only other thing they can do is head west on one or other of the two branches of the trail. It's possible, that if they've got somewhere in the unorganized territories to take those cattle, they, or somebody who's promised to buy the cattle on the cheap, might be planning just to start their own ranch with them, and make their money out of them from the calf crops from future years.'

'So what we have to do,' Mary-Lou said, 'is organize reception committees for them whichever way they go.'

'What if the rustlers think along the same lines, and do go overland to avoid the trails?' Danny suggested.

'Then we'll just have to organize to cover all the possibilities.'

'Apache villages that way,' Bobcat said, pointing to the north-west. 'Start there.'

'The Apache won't be keen to get mixed up any further in the white man's battles,' Johnnie demurred.

'No, they're willing to help against other Indians, especially ones encroaching on territory they themselves have an interest in,' Mary-Lou agreed, 'but we can't expect them to get involved with the rustlers again.'

'They watch though,' Bobcat argued.

'True,'Johnnie growled deep voiced, causing the other men to laugh at his imitation of Bobcat's usual taciturnity.

Three days later they were stopped by the outer sentries, and led into one of the Kiowa Apache villages, a dozen or so earth lodges in the bottom of a wooded canyon.

The headman was there to greet them, standing beside a smokeless fire. He was dressed in buckskin, bright with beading across the chest and around the wrists. A blanket hung like a cloak from his shoulders, and a flower-patterned cloth was twisted around his head for a headband. Eagle feathers hanging behind his head denoted his rank. Bobcat and Little Hawk had met him before.

'He makes us welcome,' Little Hawk translated, the chieftain having no English, or at least not admitting to having any. Johnnie had learned some of the Commanche dialect, and, helped along with a bit of sign language, could make himself understood to most of the tribes on the plains, but not to the Apache, who had only their own tongue. They, like the Navajo further west, spoke versions of a quite different family of languages.

'Please express our gratitude,' Johnnie asked, tendering a shiny horse brass he had taken from his bag of knick-knacks. The present was accepted graciously, but with a complete lack of expression. The score of braves looking on, however, particularly the younger ones, allowed a glint of approval to show.

They were invited to sit by the fire. Squaws, wearing their best abalone shell pendants, their broad faces framed in black, black hair, brought them corn hotcakes in small woven baskets. There were also small pottery goblets. They contained neat whiskey. Mary-Lou, who had been given one, even though she had taken a place sitting behind the men, had to hold her breath to avoid spluttering. That raw, rotgut whiskey said much. The Apache shouldn't have been in possession of it, for American law forbade taking spirits into the Indian Territory. Being offered it was a declaration of trust, and Johnnie wondered what he had done to deserve it.

It was a measure of his thinking that it never crossed his mind to attribute it to his relationships with Danny and the two Commanche, the way he spoke with them, rather than to them. To Johnnie, the three men were his partners. The Apache had seen white men treat Indians otherwise.

After an exchange, in which sign language was used freely, for even Little Hawk found these Apache very difficult to communicate with, the chieftain undertook to keep a watch on the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail. He did anyway, but now he'd keep his eyes open for stock bearing either the winged spur of Dryfe Sands, or the JQE brand. If the rustlers took the stock west along that trail, he'd send word to the Bell ranch.

When they rode on, parting with many expressions of mutual goodwill, they set a course overland for Bent's Fort on the northern branch of the Santa Fe Trail. To get there they'd cross the Cimarron Cutoff at a right angle. Not using a recognized route or trail suited them, for the Commanche preferred not to travel anything in the nature of a road if they could help it, and going straight across country enabled them to supplement their supplies with small game found along the way.

Their next encounter, two days later, was with a band of Kiowa, who were cutting cane on a tributary of the Canadian. They were preparing arrow shafts, selecting the best shoots from the vigorous spring growth, and treating them so that they'd dry straight and true. Bobcat had relatives among them, and had no problem in obtaining a promise that they'd watch for the rustlers trying to drive through their territory on a direct line for the Raton Pass, which they'd have to use if they wished to take the cattle further west. Again, it was arranged for any news to be sent to Ding Dong.

Soon afterward a known landmark, the distinctive outline of the Black Mesa, began to rise over the horizon ahead of them. The short grass prairie still stretched away for ever in all directions except west, where distant mountain tops continued to keep them company, so sighting the mesa was a welcome change from the same scenery day after day.

Another day's riding brought them to the first of the well-beaten trails they were to see so much of during the next month. At that time none of them had any idea how long they'd have to spend in the saddle in a frustrating search for a counter to the rustlers' guns.

The Cimarron Cutoff, at the point they came to it, was seven or eight sets of more or less parallel wagon tracks cut deep into the turf. Between them, and to either side of the tracks, the grass was beaten down, ground down under the passage of thousands of hooves, cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, whatever would carry the thousands of settlers to the new lands opening up in the west. They could see for miles in both directions. There wasn't a soul in sight.

'The way I heard it,' Danny said, 'the settlers are normally just about nose to tail along thisaways.'

'The Cheyenne have choked off the flow,' Mary-Lou answered.

They crossed the trail, and continued on toward the Black Mesa, angling to leave it to their left. On two occasions Kiowa scouts came out to see who they were, but otherwise the land seemed empty of people. Not so the game animals. There was no need to devote any time to hunting to fill the pot. All they needed bobbed up right in front of them somewhere along their day's trek.

As they by-passed the Black Mesa, further peaks showed over the horizon ahead, the Rockies, the ultimate western boundary of the plains all the way up into Canada. A special peak, far away, had to be the one named Pike's.

In time they came to streams flowing down into the Arkansas River, their banks lush with spring growth, but on the plains above the canyon rims, the grassland grew steadily poorer and more sparse as they moved nearer and nearer to the mountains. When they came to the Purgatoire, the last major tributary before the Arkansas itself, the river was flowing fast and sandy with snow melt. It took some time to find a place where they could swim their horses across it, and be sure of coming out on a shelving beach on the other side. To have been carried down to meet with bluffs would have been fatal. The river was well named. It was a hell of a river to cross.

Wet and bedraggled, they found the last day down to the fort comparatively easy going.

Bent's Fort hadn't originally been an army fort, but had been established by the traders Bent, St Vrain and Company about a quarter of a century earlier. Other traders, Indians, and fur trappers who worked the Rocky Mountains, had made up their clientele. Then about a dozen years ago the army had taken it over to give them a presence between the Kiowa and Arapaho lands. Traders and trappers still made good use of it, though, and so the sentries took little notice of them as they rode in.

The stockade enclosed a large area of weed-choked gardens and patches of young corn. Collapsed haystacks still held the last mouldering remnants of the previous year's grass. Among the higgledy-piggledy scatter of cabins, barns, and rough shelters the dragoon barracks stood out only by its size. The building next to it, with the flagpole out front, and whitewashed boulders lining a path to the door, had to be the headquarters.

Nobody stopped them entering. The oak logs forming the walls were adzed to give almost flat walls, with posters and notices tacked to them. The floor was bare dirt. A sergeant snoozing in a tilted-back chair was the only occupant.

'Eh, what?' he exclaimed, as his chair legs hit the dirt with a thud. 'Where'n bloody hell have you folk come from? I mean...' he spluttered as he realized that Mary-Lou wasn't just another cowhand.

'We've just come across the high plains from Texas,' Mary-Lou cut in before he could apologize for his language. 'We need to speak to an officer.'

'There's only the lieutenant,' the sergeant said, in a tone that implied they'd be wasting their time talking to him. 'Everybody else has gone down river. There's Indian troubles.'

'That's partly what we're here about,' Johnnie told him. 'We've also got rustlers operating.'

'I'll fetch the lieutenant. Jest don't expect much.'

The warning was justified. The lieutenant was hardly more than a boy, and his appearance wasn't helped by having to stand next to his sergeant. There being only one chair, he couldn't sit in it in Mary-Lou's presence.

'I can record your problem,' he agreed, when he had listened to them, 'but I can't take any men out to go and deal with these rustlers. I've only got a few left, and with those I have to stay and garrison the fort. I can guarantee,' he offered, while the sergeant behind him rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, 'that they won't take your cattle past here though. We'll stop them doing that.'

'They won't come this way,' the sergeant said. 'You know what they've done? Those rustlers have done a deal with the Cheyenne. Why do you think the Cheyenne have left them alone? What's goin' to happen, is them beeves are goin' to be driven right up through Cheyenne country, where part of them will be left in payment, while the rest of them are taken down somewhere near Westport Landing, and loaded on to river boats somewhere along the Missouri. So long as the Indians keep stirrin' up trouble, we're not goin' to have the men free to go after them rustlers, and you settlers your ownselves ain't goin' to find the manpower to take on the Cheyenne. I reckon you've lost them cattle.'

### NINE

There was nothing for it. The sergeant's contention was the most sensible anybody had yet come up with. They had to go all the way out to Westport Landing, or Kansas Town as many were calling the growing township nearby, and do what they could to foil the rustlers getting the cattle out that way.

Most of the next month for them all, then, consisted of days of hard riding, and little satisfaction from any of them. They visited Camp Dodge, Kansas Town, Fort Leavenworth, and even went far to the south to Fort Gibson, sealing as best they could every outlet the rustlers might find for their stolen beef. Officials everywhere were free with their promises. Perhaps some of them would be kept.

Along the way they managed to buy, at much inflated prices, an extra horse each to help out their badly overtaxed mounts. Johnnie also treated himself to an extra revolver, one of the new point four four calibre Remingtons with a removable cylinder that was loaded from the front.

Finally they came back to the high plains, and the tracks of their cattle still shown to be plugging stolidly northward.

'We'll get ahead of them again and see what they're doing,'Johnnie said tiredly.

It took another two days to safely find a vantage point from which they could look down on the cattle then fording a branch of the North Canadian River. They were not in fact ahead of them at that time, but the place gave them a good view. There was also plenty of cover along the river banks, so Bobcat was able to creep down much closer without the rustlers suspecting his presence.

'Both herds are together,' he reported on his return. 'Did not see grey man though.'

They crossed the river themselves higher up, choosing a stretch with a shingle bottom, so as not to send dirty water downstream to warn the rustlers. Again they made use of dry stream beds to keep below the level of the plain, while they angled across country looking for further good vantage points.

One of the best was a high mesa from which they could see the cattle as a dark smudge spreading across the short grass many miles below them. By looking half left they could see down into the Cimarron, where a tiny far-off streak was a part of the Santa Fe Trail.

'Tomorrow they'll be there,' Danny commented.

'I think we should check for any advance guard that might have been sent ahead,' Johnnie suggested.

Accordingly he and Bobcat went down to examine the country a mile or two in advance of the cattle. To avoid leaving their own tracks, they covered the last stretch by walking their horses down a shallow stream, and by doing so, they chanced upon another set of marks which they had come to know well.

They dismounted and looked closely at them. Seven riders and two packhorses, according to Bobcat, had cut across the stream at an angle heading almost north. The marks were a little over a day old.

'Grey man,' Bobcat said.

Johnnie nodded. He had already seen that.

The fellow, with just half-a-dozen of his men, had left the rest to bring on the cattle, while he went ahead on some mission that Johnnie would very much like to know about.

'You follow his marks,' Johnnie ordered. 'I'll go fetch the others, and we'll catch up on you. Wait for us on the Cimarron Cutoff, if that's where they've gone.'

By the time they caught up with Bobcat, it was coming on evening. The Commanche had indeed reached the trail. He was walking along, leading his horse, while he studied the churned-up ground. There had been a lot of recent traffic on the trail, and it was covered in a mass of hoorfprints, all headed west. There were, however, no wheel marks.

'The settlers have started moving again, now that the Cheyenne have cleared off,' Danny read. 'The faster people have gone through already, and the wagons will be along in a day or two.'

'Have you lost the grey man's tracks under all that?' Mary-Lou asked Bobcat.

'Grey man went that way,' Bobcat replied, pointing east.

'What, you can see his tracks under all that mess?'

'No,' Bobcat allowed himself a rare smile. 'Grey man turn off trail a mile along. Tried to use stream trick, but forgot packhorse not follow straight. They still go north.'

They all looked north to where the Black Mesa was lifting above the horizon. They had already been that way several weeks before.

'I hope we're not going round in a circle,' Mary-Lou said.

'All we can do is follow on,'Johnnie told her.

After camping a couple of miles up the small stream, they picked up the grey man's tracks again the next morning, and continued to follow them for the next four days. At the start they thought their quarry was making for the northern branch of the Santa Fe Trail with the intention of heading east along it. When his marks drew them more around to the west, as they worked around the bottom of the Black Mesa, they began to think he was making for Bent's Fort. Then on being led further west still it looked as if he was planning to take the trail heading west.

'It doesn't make much sense,' Danny complained. 'He could have just stayed on the Cimarron Cutoff.'

At the Purgatoire, much higher upstream than they had crossed it last time, the grey man's tracks were covered by those of a large Indian band. The Indians had camped near the river crossing, and Bobcat and Little Hawk went and poked around among their leavings.

'Arapaho,' Bobcat diagnosed. 'They look at grey man's tracks, but not to follow.'

'If these ones were with the Cheyenne, perhaps they've had enough of white men for a while,' Mary-Lou suggested.

'True,' Bobcat agreed. 'They gone upstream. Maybe hunting.'

The grey man, though, had continued westward, to reach the Santa Fe Trail about twenty five miles or so above Bent's Fort, and had then crossed it to still continue westward.

'Where in...' Danny started, before glancing at Mary-Lou and changing to; 'I mean, where's he going?'

His question had no answer then, and still didn't when they came down to the Arkansas River, which they swam to follow the grey man's tracks to the other side. There they lost them.

On the north bank of the Arkansas a new and much travelled trail had been formed. Even as they climbed up to it from the river, a mounted party of twenty or more men rode past headed west. They waved, from about a mile away, but otherwise made no attempt to communciate. They, and others before them, had smothered all sign of the rustlers' party.

'West, eh? We follow those fellows,'Johnnie said. 'East will just take us back to Bent's Fort.'

Two hours later, with the mountains rearing higher and higher above them, they rounded the end of a spur and found themselves entering a small township.

'Where are we?' Johnnie asked. 'I didn't know there was any town up this way.'

His friends were unable to answer, for they were no wiser.

As towns went, it was raw and rough. Obviously it had been a trappers' camp, and many dilapidated framed tents were still standing. Some adobe buildings had been added to them, as had also a few of pit-sawn lumber. There was a main street, the only street, but many of the buildings were nowhere near it.

The folks who had just arrived ahead of them were unsaddling in a livery stable built of planks standing on end. Next to it was an odd structure with a boarded front, skin-covered windows, and a roof of sagging canvas. A dozen or more horses were tethered to a rail in front of it. A banner strung above them said, 'Welcome to Pueblo'.

'Well, I know what that place is,' Danny observed cheerfully.

'And I know one of those horses,' Mary-Lou said. 'It's got my brand on it.'

So it had, as they could all see when they got closer. They nudged in among the other horses, trying to see any more familiar brands.

'Here! Stand away from my horse!'

The savage snarl came from a range-grizzled man who had appeared from the door of the makeshift saloon. He was a stranger to them. A revolver handle stood out from his hip.

'That one?' Mary-Lou demanded, not in the least cowed by him, and pointing to the one she had identified.

'What's it to you?' he growled, sounding a bit uncertain.

'My horse!' Mary-Lou replied determinedly.

Suddenly, without any prior warning, the man went for his gun.

Johnnie's dive from the back of his horse carried him across the back of Mary-Lou's, and he scooped her off it on the way. They landed sprawling in the dust on the sheltered side.

There was a loud bang, shockingly loud, for neither of them had ever before been so close in front of a gun when it was fired. The bullet whacked up dust beside them.

Three answering shots from Danny and the two Commanche sounded almost as one. Splinters showered off the open saloon door, but the stranger had already dived back inside.

Dusky, running loose, was up on his hind legs, pawing the air, and screaming. The rest of the remuda went into a bucking, screeching frenzy, and the two packhorses showered all their carefully-packed possessions across the ground in front of the saloon.

After firing, Bobcat and Little Hawk reached down and grabbed Mary-Lou, an arm each, and not waiting for her to regain her feet, hauled her away with her heels dragging, to the shelter of an adobe building about twenty yards back. Danny methodically emptied the other five rounds from his Colt into the doorway of the saloon. By the time he had finished, his companions were all back in the shelter of the adobe building, somebody's home. Their other horses had scattered in all directions.

Danny rapidly joined them.

'I think we've finally caught up on some of the rustlers then,' he suggested brightly.

'I think you're right,' Johnnie agreed, reaching round the corner to place another shot through the saloon door. 'What are we going to do about it?'

The horses tethered outside the saloon had torn the hitching rail loose from its posts, and while some had broken away, the rest for a while still stamped and bucked around it, a shrieking melee, with several horses bruised and bleeding where they had been hit by the thrashing rail. Every now and then another horse came free, and bolted away between the buildings. One of the last was a flea-bitten grey that bucketed off, taking the rail with it.

In the meantime men were pouring out the back of both the livery stable and the saloon, and those heading to the right were making for a stand of aspen where the ground sloped up toward the beginning of the hills. Which were the rustlers, if any, and which were the innocent patrons, remained to be seen. The man who had first fired at them wasn't among them. Nor was any of them clearly the man in grey.

To the left of the livery another adobe house was partially obscured, leaving a hidden way for anybody to get to it unseen. Obviously the rustlers had to be going that way. Johnnie tried to snatch glimpses from around the corner, while the three who had fired hurried to reload. Not much could be achieved until they had. In the meantime, the rustlers were getting an opportunity to scatter.

'Mary-Lou, Danny, you two stay here/ Johnnie directed. 'Try to stop any of them from coming out of the saloon around this side to our right. The rest of us will go to meet them coming around the other way.'

'How will we know which ones they are?' Mary-Lou asked.

'They'll be trying to kill you. There isn't anything else they can do, now that they know we've followed them here.'

Mary-Lou was pale, but her lips had set determinedly.

'Don't worry. I'll cover her,' Danny offered.

'Don't fire unless they try to rush you,' Johnnie advised. 'Just remember, they'll be waiting for you to stick your head around the corner of this building.'

With Bobcat and Little Hawk, Johnnie circled to the left, aiming to find whoever had run from the saloon in that direction. The single street, and all the open ground, was deserted. Some townsfolk were looking out of windows and doorways in several places. None attempted to interfere.

Their first opposition was a shot which seemed to come from nowhere, until they observed the line of it as it skittered away through the dust. Back down that line was the open doorway of the plank-built livery stable. The gunman had to be in the deep shadows inside, where his gunsmoke would be lost in the gloom.

Little Hawk dodged back. Johnnie and Bobcat dived for the corner of the next building, a rickety construction of uneven pine logs. More lead urged them on their way. Not all of it came from the stable. Gunfire echoed and re-echoed off the hills, overlaying the loud neighing of the horses, the anxious voices of townsfolk yelling at their children.

'They're spreadin' ahead of us,' Bobcat observed, while he tried to locate the several places the fire was coming from.

Little Hawk had taken a position at the corner of their first building. He would stop anybody attacking Mary-Lou and Danny from behind, Johnnie and Bobcat moved on around the log cabin.

Almost immediately Bobcat fired past him. His target was a man who was trying to catch a horse, which had one of its forelegs caught up in its trailing reins. The man abandoned the attempt, drew, and fired back. Only then did Johnnie recognize him. He had been one of the party that had stolen Mary-Lou's cattle, one of the men who had been chasing Mary-Lou when he had first met her.

Johnnie raised the Lefancheaux, and hesitated. He had never before fired directly on a man, face to face, in a gun duel. It was different to what he expected. It was certainly nothing like a longdistance stand-off with a rifle, where enemies are largely anonymous.

Bobcat saw his hesitation, cursed, and fired again.

The outlaw had no such qualms either. He threw one wild shot at Bobcat, one at Johnnie, and raced back toward the stables, seeking cover. Before he could reach it, Bobcat's third shot bowled the fellow head over heels, and left him heaped up against the stable wall. He didn't move again after that.

Johnnie looked at his unfired gun, and went pale. The chips were down, and he was being found short.

### TEN

Somebody else fired on them from the end of the stable. A length of corral fence was joined to the building there, and drying hides were hanging over the rails. They provided cover for somebody who was taking snapshots, and moving before there could be a reply.

One outlaw down then, three located in or near the livery stable, and three others to find.

Bobcat stayed at the near corner of the log cabin to keep the stable covered, while Johnnie moved on again. By racing around two sides of the cabin, he expected to come to where he would be able to see along the back of the stable. Around the first corner, however, he came face to face with one of the outlaws coming the other way. It was the man they had spoken to in the saloon doorway.

He fired at Johnnie point-blank. The bullet brushed hot over Johnnie's left shoulder, and in passing seemed to snap some hidden cord that was holding Johnnie back. Johnnie's first shot blasted the fellow backwards, and before the man could fire again, Johnnie did so, a coolly aimed shot which smashed the man's chest in.

A second outlaw was behind him, revealed as the first went down. This next man had been unable to fire because of his friend in the way, and then left it too long when he did get a clear sight.

Johnnie, on the other hand, his doubts gone, just kept squeezing the shots away, and as the front man sank to the ground, Johnnie's third and fourth shots thumped into the man behind.

The unexpected shot which came next was from further away. All Johnnie saw was gunsmoke drifting from behind a tent some distance to his left. He put lead that way just to discourage the marksman, and beat a hasty retreat back around the corner of the cabin.

Metal cartridge cases meant that he was quickly able to reload the five chambers out of six he had emptied from the Lefancheaux. His new Remington was still in reserve fully loaded.

Hoping that the opposition wouldn't be expecting him to appear again so quickly, Johnnie burst from the shelter of the building, and legged it rapidly for the tent the last shot had come from. Nobody was there.

The grassy meadow beyond sloped away toward the river. A terrace edge hid some of the middle ground, but further down was more grass on the river flats, and there most of the runaway horses were milling nervously in two groups. Dusky led one band. The flea-bitten grey, now without its length of railing, was prominent in the other.

One of the enemy was somewhere down there below the terrace. It was the only direction the man behind the tent could have taken. Three more were still around the stable. Those three seemed to be the immediate danger to Mary-Lou, so Johnnie went back to his original intention of trying to outflank them.

Mary-Lou, meanwhile, was doing quite well at looking after herself. She had worked out that only one of the outlaws was in a position to fire in her direction, the one inside the stable, and he could only fire through the open stable door.

'Can you fire in there too high to hit any of the horses, but low enough to make that fellow keep his head down?' she asked Danny.

'No,' Danny replied promptly, 'not if you're planning to make a dash over there to get alongside the stable. You do the covering fire, and I'll go over there.'

The man hiding in the stable wasn't as green as they hoped. Mary-Lou emptied her revolver, all five shots, through the stable doors, only to cause the man to lie prone for his return fire. It caught Danny in the legs, as he raced for the blind side of the stable; the right thigh, and again in the calf of his left leg. To add to his troubles, Danny knocked himself senseless by cannoning full tilt into the stable wall, and finished up in a bleeding heap at the bottom of it, fortunately hidden from within.

Mary-Lou felt dreadfully guilty. The idea had been hers, but Danny had paid the price of it. That he had agreed with the idea was, to her, beside the point.

From the other end of her building Little Hawk was keeping busy the two rustlers behind the stable. Bobcat was helping him from the next building along.

Peeping around her corner, Mary-Lou could see that the outlaw inside the stable was angling for a view of where Danny had got to. It seemed that the man wasn't aware of the effects of his shooting, and wasn't happy about having Danny so close, and yet out of his sight. Quickly she closed up her revolver, with only one chamber reloaded, and snapped a quick shot at him.

She heard him yelp. He couldn't have been hurt too badly all the same, for he whipped one back at her just as fast.

Six, she thought, he has fired six. We are both empty.

Rapidly she pushed home fresh percussion caps, and rammed the measures of powder down on top of them, hoping that she was working faster than the outlaw. Would he stop to fill all six chambers? Six to her five?

She risked a peep around the corner.

He was right by the stable door, seeking the light to work by, only half-hidden by the near jamb. The gun he held was a Remington, like Johnnie's new one. His cylinder was in his left hand, while he squeezed tightly fitting lead into the chambers. Even as she closed her own weapon, he began to mount the cylinder back into his. She was ahead of him!

Her initial shot ripped through his sleeve, and, shocked, he dropped the cylinder. It hit the ground, and rolled out into the open.

Desperately, he lurched after it, his now useless gun in his right hand.

Mary-Lou bolted into the open to meet him. They were both still out of sight of the men behind the stable.

'Drop it!' she yelled at him.

He glanced at her, sneering, but kept reaching for the dropped cylinder.

Mary-Lou fired at the groping hand. Blood sprayed away from the back of it.

He reared back, gasping.

Mary-Lou stopped two yards from him, beyond his reach, her gun pointed right in his face.

'You want to live?' she demanded.

He looked at her, surprised more than anything.

There was no sneer on his face any more though.

'You people killed my husband,' she said. 'I'd as lief kill you. Drop it!'

He let the useless gun fall from his hand. She meant what she said, and now he knew it.

'Now follow me over here,' she ordered, backing away from him. 'Just keep that distance.' She had no intention of allowing him to lay his hands on her.

It was a relief for her to get back into the cover of the adobe building again. The other two gunmen were still firing the other way from their end of the stable, and one of them could come around to see what was happening at any time. Sooner or later they'd realize that their companion had stopped firing.

'Keep coming.'

The outlaw trailed unhappily after her, as she drew him around behind the building, the first corner, and then the next, while she sought one of her own people to support her. She had left her post undefended, and she also wanted to get back to it to keep some sort of watch over Danny's unconcious body.

Little Hawk was lying on the ground at the next corner. Beyond him, behind the corner of the next building, the log cabin, was Bobcat.

'Little Hawk,' she asked, 'can you keep a watch on this fellow, while I go back for Danny? He's been shot.'

There was no reply from Little Hawk. He continued to lie there, his head at the corner, not responding to her.

'Send your prisoner here,' Bobcat called to her.

'You heard,' she reiterated. 'Get yourself over there to my friend.'

She backed away with her gun still on the outlaw, but giving Bobcat a clear sight of him also. The fellow gave her a dirty look, and then surveyed the gap between the two buildings. When he crossed it, his friends by the stable would be able to see him.

'Get moving!' she snapped.

He scuttled rapidly across the open, hands high, hoping that would stop his friends from firing blindly at the movement before they recognized him.

He needn't have worried.

Johnnie, by then, had reached a position which allowed him to see along the back of the livery stable. The man lying behind the corral fence was partly obscured by a bundle of hides, but his companion was in plain sight at the rear of the stable. Johnnie aimed carefully at the easier target, and fired twice, then a third time, but it was the second bullet that did the damage, whacking into the man's neck to splatter the rough planks with blood and splintered bone.

The one on the ground rolled promptly under the corral fence, and came up firing at Johnnie, who emptied the Lefancheaux at him, both of them missing every time.

Not so Mary-Lou. She had a view through the railings of the corral, and knew that the gunman had to be firing at Johnnie. One of her bullets hit him as he stood. Another took him under the chin even while he was falling away from her. Then her gun was empty again.

Hooves were pounding. Somebody was galloping their way, coming fast. Johnnie whirled about, reaching for the Remington with his left hand, while he shucked the Lefancheaux with his right. A bullet whirred past his head, another, and still another.

It was the man in grey. The horse he rode was the flea-bitten grey, and a second followed on a halter. Flipping the loaded revolver into his right hand, Johnnie tried to hit the man, without hitting either of the horses. That, of course, just made him fire high. It was enough, though, to make the rider swerve away, and spoil his aim for his next shot.

He thundered by on the other side of the tent, and disappeared around the back of the log cabin.

When he came around to the other side, Mary-Lou suddenly found him looming over her. She looked him full in the face. His gun started to come down towards her, while hers was still open in her hands, nothing but the percussion caps as yet in the chambers.

Bobcat too had an empty gun. All he could do was yell, and he did, high-pitched, blood curdling, trying to attract the gunman's fire away from Mary-Lou. The bullet meant for Mary-Lou went his way instead, missing him by scant inches.

Johnnie once more had a view, but had to fire over Mary-Lou's head. Again his fire went high. Even so, it threw the grey man off his aim for nis next shot, and caused him to look about for the source of the fire directed at him.

Mary-Lou's captive saw a chance. He lowered his hands, and dived for the spare horse his leader had in tow. It was a good try, but he missed. The horses were going too fast for him. His hands did no more than brush the rump of the led horse.

The man in grey looked back as he galloped away, gun in his right hand; in his left the reins of the spare horse. His man stood bereft, appalled, calling desperately for help. The rider had one shot left. It blew a shower of spilled brains from the head of the abandoned outlaw.

Mary-Lou sank to her knees, and vomited in the dust.

When Johnnie reached her, coming to crouch beside her, he too was shaking like a leaf.

The man in grey kept on going. Their last glimpse of him was when he rounded the end of the spur where the trail came in from the east.

### ELEVEN

'Little Hawk?' Mary-Lou asked. There were tears cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

'Gone,' Bobcat told her, and went to turn over the body of his friend. A bullet ricocheting off the adobe had gone in through his cheek. He was stone dead.

'Danny's hurt too,' she said, though her eyes were on the fallen outlaw. 'That was deliberate, wasn't it, killing his own man like that?'

'He had to be killed to stop him from telling us something,' Johnnie said to her. 'He must have known what they intend to do with our cattle.'

Automatically, Mary-Lou continued the loading of her gun.

'I'll be all right now,' she claimed, as Johnnie wiped her lips with his bandana. 'Danny needs our help.'

They rose to their feet, and with Bobcat joining them on her other side, Mary-Lou, still trembling, led them back towards the livery stable where Danny lay. As they went, she asked, 'Surely the rustlers didn't come all this way just to get a drink?'

'Likely they did,' Johnnie argued. 'It's the only place with liquor available that I've seen this side of Kansas Town, and even then it shouldn't be here.' As both his companions knew, he was referring to the fact that it was against federal law to take liquor into or through Indian country. Everybody was well aware, however, that there were plenty of smugglers who did, and the makeshift saloon here had to be one of their outlets. The bootleg alcohol was sold not only to the Indians, but also to passing settlers headed further west, fur trappers, and the stray prospectors who haunted the area. There was big money in the trade.

'They come to get a couple of barrels for their friends,' Bobcat offered.

'Yes,' Johnnie agreed. 'Those fellows are stuck on the trail with our beef for a long time. They're not the sort to go dry for so long. Their leader would have to go to this much trouble just to keep his men happy. A lot of them would be likely to ride out on him otherwise.'

A rattle of hooves preceded the arrival of Dusky back in the open space in front of the saloon. He was looking for Johnnie, now that the shooting seemed to have stopped. Three of their other horses, including one of their packhorses, were hanging back shyly, still suspicious that more shooting might break out. When they saw some familiar humans gathering around Dusky, they came on again.

Danny had lost a lot of blood, but seemed to have no lead left in him. He'd most likely die in a matter of days if he did, and painfully too.

He recovered consciousness while they were bandaging him with strips torn from Little Hawk's clean shirts.

'You've bled clean,' Mary-Lou assured him. 'Nothing broken, but you're not going to be good for much for a while.'

Bent's Fort was their only option for a safe place to take him. They discussed it with him, and he was insistent that that was what they'd have to do. Nobody knew of a medico this side of Kansas Town, but there was a corporal at Bent's Fort who was experienced in dealing with gunshot wounds.

It turned out that the saloon keeper, who also owned the livery, had a suitable wagon to hire them. Johnnie would drive it, while Mary-Lou rode herd on their remuda, which now included the horses the dead rustlers had been riding. Bobcat had another job.

'I take Little Hawk to place to rest,' he said. 'Come back for him later.'

While some of the townsmen helped by getting Danny bedded down and comfortable in the wagon, and others rounded up their scattered horses, Mary-Lou held Little Hawk's mount still, letting Bobcat and Johnnie arrange the Indian's body face-down over its back.

When all was ready, Bobcat set off ahead of them to ride down-river, with two horses on leads, one his own, and the other carrying Little Hawk. The ground they were on was Ute territory. Bobcat would go down-river until he could cross into the Kiowa lands, and there he'd find a temporary grave for Little Hawk, until he could come back with his people and take him home for an honourable burial. Later Mary-Lou and Johnnie would meet up with Bobcat again at an agreed spot on the flanks of the Black Mesa, a place which their cattle would have passed, and one which was also on their way home. All three agreed that that was where they'd have to go next.

The rustlers now knew that they hadn't frightened away the pursuit. Their outlet with the cattle was blocked by the military in all the directions it seemed possible for them to go. If the Cheyennes had indeed had enough, and were gone back north, while their erstwhile Arapaho allies were lying low, there could no longer be any objection to bringing in an armed citizen's band, a posse comitatus, to deal with them. It was time to go back and fetch the posse which Ding Dong was supposed to have organized.

On their way down-river, during the next couple of days, a storm which had blown up in the mountains they were leaving behind, helped them on their way. Distant lightning flashes, and the rumble of thunder carried down on a following wind, helped Mary-Lou to keep all the loose horses going the way she wanted.

During that time they were passed by a surprising number of gold prospectors heading the other way. Apparently there had been a rich strike somewhere along the mountains to their north, and the hopeful newcomers were planning to try their luck in other places in the same region. One useful thing the travellers were able to tell them was that the Cheyenne troubles were over, and that the settlers, no longer held up, were flooding in greater numbers than ever along both branches of the Santa Fe Trail.

When they joined the trail themselves some miles short of Bent's Fort, they certainly found the truth of that. Moving against the flow, they could spend little time actually on the trail proper, while people by the hundred, with all manner of stock and conveyances, made their plodding way in the opposite direction. They moved in fits and starts, each wagon train finding its own pace, with always at least one group somewhere in sight along the rutted track.

'It will be worse for the rustlers when they try to take our cattle along here,' Mary-Lou observed. 'They'll have to go a long way out to the sides to find any feed for them.'

'They probably won't even try to stay near the trail,' Johnnie replied. 'If it was me driving them, I'd make a bee-line across country a bit to the north.'

'Once they start that, we'll know where they're heading,' Mary-Lou pointed out.

'Soon,' Johnnie answered, 'they won't be able to avoid our finding out, no matter what they do.'

At the fort they had no trouble getting Danny admitted to the infirmary. He had been extremely weak, but rational, during the first part of the journey. Later, though, he had lapsed into unconsciousness and delirium, so they were glad to get him into a place where he could rest safely, and be cared for. The officer in charge, still the same stripling lieutenant, named a fee for a month's treatment, and accepted some of their spare horses in part payment. For the balance Johnnie wrote a letter of credit on a bank in Baton Rouge. The corporal who'd be doing the actual nursing accepted his consideration in coin. He also undertook returning the hired wagon to its owner.

If they hadn't had the horses they'd recovered from the rustlers, Johnnie would have been unable to find the ready cash. As it was, he and Mary-Lou had empty pockets when they rode out of Bent's Fort.

Two days later they met up again with a worried-looking Bobcat.

The Comanche explained that after finding a suitable cave where he could leave Little Hawk's body safely walled in, he had gone to look for the cattle. He had followed the marks of the combined herd up to the point where they had joined the northern branch of the Santa Fe Trail, and there had lost them.

'Lost them?' Mary-Lou echoed. 'You can't lose a herd that size.'

'They go on trail,' Bobcat told her, 'and then other cattle go past driven over the top. Cattle, wagons, horses, all going west. I look a dozen miles each way for marks of rustlers, but cannot see.'

'Surely,'Johnnie suggested, 'the rustlers will have just taken our cattle across the trail, and will have gone north a little bit?'

Bobcat shook his head, perhaps offended that Johnnie should see any need to ask.

'Well,' Mary-Lou reasoned, 'all that could have happened is that they've gone more than a dozen miles one way or the other along the trail. We're sure to pick them up again somewhere, once we get back with the men Ding Dong has raised. That many cattle can't just disappear into thin air.'

There seemed little point in trying to pursue the cattle any further at that time and, in any case, their money exhausted, they couldn't afford to, so the three of them turned their faces southward, heading for home. With them they had a spare horse each, and a single packhorse to carry their camping gear. They had hardly any food to speak of, so what they couldn't shoot along the way would have to be done without.

For a route they had simply to follow the beaten trail their cattle had left on the way up. It would lead always to the easiest river crossings, and give them an open passage through the stretches of mesquite, blackjack oak, or other scrub country. Trail-weary, their horses ambled along almost without guidance. Until they returned to tackle the rustlers again, it was easy to assume that the pressure was off, the need for alertness was behind them.

Only Bobcat's quick eye saved them from disaster.

By staying long hours in the saddle, they had crossed the crowded Cimarron Cutoff on the second day, and on the day after that had reached the slope leading down to the North Canadian. The crossing at that point was the best to be found for a considerable distance in either direction, and consequently several Indian trails converged there.

Bobcat called for a halt before they reached it.

'Look at hawk circling,' he directed, pointing to a distant speck in the sky on the other side of the river.

'That's a hawk? You can tell that from here?' Mary-Lou wondered.

'Tell by wing beat... way bird flies,' Bobcat said. 'Watch what bird does.'

As they studied the pattern of the bird's flight, they saw that it kept returning to a particular clump of mulberry that overlooked the trail up out of the river on the other side. Each time the hawk approached the bushes, it wheeled up and banked away. Then it returned to the bushes again from another direction, to wheel up and bank away again.

'Little Hawk say ambush waiting,' Bobcat said.

Mary-Lou and Johnnie glanced at him sharply. Bobcat just nodded, confirming his words.

There was no doubt that the distant hawk was making it plain that there was something wrong with those bushes.

'We swim horses across up there,' Bobcat suggested, indicating the land upriver. 'I know place can get out on other side.'

That was an important consideration. The far bank was steep, and the bluffs above it even steeper. Places to take horses up on to the mesa on that side were few and far between. Ways to get down to the river on their own side weren't all that plentiful either.

Following Bobcat, they turned away westward.

Across the river three horsemen appeared from the clump of mulberry, and kept pace with them along the opposite rim.

'Grey man,' Bobcat claimed.

From that distance neither of the other two could confirm his identification, although one of the riders was certainly on a grey, and seemed to be wearing a shallow-crowned hat.

'They're trying to stop us from going back to Dryfe Sands,' Mary-Lou said.

'I should have thought of that,' Johnnie agreed. 'It's his best way of delaying any further pursuit. All he's got to do is stop us from crossing the river.'

### TWELVE

'We can go across by night,' Mary-Lou suggested. 'He can't cover all the places we could try.'

'No, but tomorrow morning they'll soon find our tracks, and on these horses it won't take them long to catch up on us. I'd be surprised if his horses aren't fresher than ours.'

'What can we do then?'

'Eat,' Bobcat growled.

His suggestion was as good as any. So long as they needed to wait for darkness to go any further, they might as well use the time getting a meal for themselves. As the people on the other bank couldn't get quickly across to them without being seen, there was no need to hurry.

While their horses grazed, Bobcat slipped away to visit a prairie dog town they had passed not far back, and Johnnie went down to the river for water. There was no corresponding break in the rim on the other side of the river, meaning that the rustlers couldn't get close enough to him for a shot. In their absence Mary-Lou gathered some brushwood, and set up a campfire in a dry wash.

Before long both men were back, Bobcat with a brace of black-tailed prairie dogs. Then, with Johnnie keeping a watch on the horsemen across the river, and them sitting their horses looking right back at him, Mary-Lou and Bobcat prepared a quick meal. Three hindlegs were spit-roasted over raked- out embers, and the rest of the meat was diced or shredded to be stewed with sage, sow thistle and a mush of prickly pear heart.

By the time they had consumed it all, evening was drawing on.

'Once it's dark,' Johnnie said, 'and those fellows can't see what we're up to, we'll leave you to mind the horses, Mary-Lou, while Bobcat and I mosey across the river. We should be able to find something we can do to discourage those fellows.'

'Won't they come across to our side trying to do the same thing?' Mary-Lou asked.

'Probably,' Johnnie nodded, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. 'So long as they don't find you is the main thing. It'd be best if you ride Dusky, and head way out across the plain. The rest of the horses will stay with you if you're on Dusky. Just don't come back till the morning, and then look for us on a high point about a mile down-river from the crossing.'

Mary-Lou wasn't particularly happy with the plan, but having nothing better to suggest, agreed.

In the last of the daylight they repacked their gear, and checked all the tack. Before she mounted, Mary-Lou paused, to look worriedly at each of her companions. Then, catching Bobcat for once slow to react, she reached up and kissed the Indian's leathery cheek. Johnnie, knowing what was coming, stood rooted to the spot, while she kissed him too in the same way.

'Take care,' she said, a curious break in her voice. Then she mounted, and was moving quickly away into the darkness.

'You too,' Johnnie called softly, touching the still-tingling place on his cheek.

Bobcat shrugged. These white-eyed women were emotional creatures. He looked at Johnnie, who had yet to take his eyes off the shadow fading into the night. So were some of the men.

'Split up, eh?' Bobcat said.

'What?'Johnnie asked vacantly.

'I cross here. You cross down there,' Bobcat persisted. 'Not shoot each other.'

'Oh, yeah, sure,'Johnnie nodded.

His thoughts, though, were still not really on what he was doing, as he strode off through the thin scattering of knee-high blackjack oak which masked the rim of the mesa along that stretch. He was hard put to know how to deal with a widow woman, whose husband had only been a few short weeks in the ground. It was easy enough, given a few unavoidable allowances, to treat her more or less as he would a very tomboyish sister. He had grown up with a couple of those. The problem came if he allowed himself to see her, under all the grime and his young brothers' clothing, as a very beautiful and eligible young woman. Up until that time he had mostly been able to avoid such thinking, but Mary-Lou's kiss, even though only to his cheek, and given equally to Bobcat, had unexpectedly broken through his resolve.

Not until he came to an arroyo giving easy access to the river did his whirling thoughts begin to slow down.

The river was running high, filled still with water from the storm that had racked the mountains a few days before. With no moon to help, it was hard to make out the far bank, so he had to commit himself to the current with no guarantee as to how he'd fetch up. To help him, he found a piece of driftwood, a short but thick length of red cedar, and on it he fixed his guns, cartridge belt, and ammunition box, all wrapped in his slicker.

With the makeshift float tucked under his left arm, he lowered himself into the cold water, and set out. Immediately he was ripped away from the bank. There was nothing to be gained by trying to fight it. All he could do was keep working his way across the flow, and ignore the distance he was being carried downstream. At least the float allowed him to keep his head well clear, and see what little there was to be seen.

Eventually, gasping, and with a worrying numbness beginning to creep up his limbs, he was glad to be able to make out bushes overhanging the right bank. Because of the high water, they'd have branches within his reach, if he could only get to them. On his first attempt, the twig he grabbed came away in his hand, but before it did the drag it provided had the effect of swinging him in yet closer to the bank.

He caught at more substantial branches as the current rammed him into them. For a moment he almost lost his grip on the float. The belt he had fixed around it was loose, swollen from the water it had soaked up. The slippery driftwood was sliding through the loop. Only his gear mattered, so he let the wood go, and heaved his wrapped bundle up among the tangle of branches.

Then he started to force his own way through, no easy task in the dark, with rough edges jabbing into him, and scratching at his hands and face. Wherever he broke a branch in his efforts, a spiked end was left to catch in his wet clothing, or tear at the parcel he was trying to drag with him.

By the time he reached open ground, he was chilled, shivering, and exhausted. He was also worried about the noise he had made.

Quickly he headed for a darker patch in the darkness, a stand of cottonwood, which gave him some shelter from the breeze coming down the river. There he stripped off his wet clothing, and wrung out as much of the water as he could. When he was dressed again, he put on his slicker over the top, and then belted his cartridges over that. They were coming to no harm from the dampness, but he couldn't allow himself to open his ammunition box. Until he could get himself properly dried out, he'd be unable to reload his Remington.

Gradually his shivering stopped. The damp wool of his clothing held in the heat of his body, while his slicker kept off the chilling wind.

He felt himself ready to go looking for the outlaws.

At least one of them would already be looking for him.

Before he left the shelter of the trees, Johnnie crouched low and listened to the sounds of the night. Far-off coyotes were of no interest to him. Of far greater importance was a frog that had started croaking while he was wringing out his clothes, but which had now stopped. Probably it had been croaking before he arrived, and it would have resumed when his activities no longer disturbed it. Now it had stopped again. Why?

For a while Johnnie held his place, straining to see anything moving from the direction of the frog, but not neglecting all the rest of his environment even so.

Something crunched under an unwary foot. Soon after came a soft scratching sound, the kind of noise made by leaves brushing against oiled canvas. Somebody was coming along the riverbank, and whoever it was, it wasn't Bobcat.

Bobcat would never give away his presence so easily. Besides, he'd be staying in his own territory up-river to avoid just such a mistake.

Not that Johnnie was complaining about or criticizing the noise. He had made enough of a racket himself in his endeavours to get out of the river, and probably all that noise was what had drawn at least one of the outlaws to him.

Johnnie eased in behind the trunk of a tree. The other man was somewhere between him and the river. If he kept coming on that path, the other man would be outlined against the stars, while Johnnie was sheltered in the blackness under the trees.

Johnnie waited... boot leather scuffed against a loose stone. The man was almost level with Johnnie, and then suddenly there he was, a black silhouette against the night sky.

'Up with 'em!' Johnnie called. 'You're covered.' He could still not bring himself to fire on an unwarned man. The outlaw must have thought him a gift.

Flame blossomed from the dark. The crash of the shot was shockingly loud. Lead thwacked into the tree trunk in line with Johnnie's chest.

'Drop it I said!' Johnnie yelled, and fired over the fellow's head.

All he got for a reply was another bullet; this one buzzing like a bee right where his head had been.

That did it!

From ground level Johnnie put two quick shots slightly high and to the right of the flash made by the other man's gun.

There was a clatter, and a thump, several smaller thumps, heels drumming on the ground. The silhouette was no longer there.

Johnnie waited.

After a few minutes, he moved, slipping silently to his right, angling to get downwind of the fallen outlaw. There was something Danny had told him... the smell of freshly dead men.

There it was. Blood, and urine from when his victim's bladder relaxed after death. If the man had been still alive he'd have been sweating, and that would have given the sharp, acrid smell of fear.

Johnnie moved in close, and felt around the body. Stone dead all right. Stubbled face. Hair tied back with a bootlace. Johnnie couldn't remember that on the man in grey, so this had to be one of the others. He found the dropped gun, a revolver, and turned the cylinder back to leave a spent chamber under the hammer. Then he thrust it barrel first into a pocket of his slicker. The fellow's cartridge box went into the pocket on the other side.

Satisfied that there was nothing more to be feared from that outlaw, Johnnie returned to the shelter of the trees, and waited for another.

Between them, Johnnie and the dead man had advertised the place to any interested people within a dozen miles of them. Sooner or later somebody would come to investigate the shooting. It wasn't likely to be in an outlaw's nature to do the sensible thing and wait for daylight. That was another of Danny's little ideas.

It bore fruit too.

More than two hours passed, but finally there came a faint whistle from downstream. The frog hadn't been heard from again in all that time, so Johnnie thought it was more than considerate of the approaching outlaw to advertise his presence.

Gradually the whistle grew closer and closer, sounding perhaps only once in any quarter of an hour, but always working nearer as the searcher moved from cover to cover.

Johnnie let him come right up almost to where he had killed the first man. Then this one's outline also appeared suddenly against the stars.

'Hold it!' Johnnie started... and flying lead nearly took his head off.

Shockingly, the roar and flash of gunfire was coming not from the man in front of him, but from another about twenty feet behind him.

Johnnie fired back, once, twice, and then at where the man had been in front of him.

That one had dropped flat, and was firing at the flash of Johnnie's gun, only to hit the tree trunk which sheltered him.

Johnnie rolled away, fired again at each of them, and rolled back to the tree trunk again. More fire blasted over his head. Somewhere behind him something, perhaps a broken-off tree branch, fell to the ground. One of the men fired at it. Johnnie fired at him, twice.

There was a sound of boots beating on the ground. One of them was rushing in. Two more shots brought him to a halt, but didn't stop him from firing.

Again Johnnie shifted position. The Lefancheaux only had one shot left, the Remington two.

He laid down the Lefancheaux under his chin, and pulled out the gun he had taken from the dead man. He used that to fire at the next man who fired at him.

'Together!' one of his opponents yelled.

Both of them fired at him at once. He immediately fired back at both of them.

'Now rush him!' came the shouted command. Johnnie expected that. He had fired twelve shots in rapid succession.

Two black shapes reared up against the stars, and came rushing at him.

Johnnie carefully put the last shot from the dead man's gun into the fellow who had been shouting, and emptied his Remington into the other. As both crashed to the ground, he grabbed his Lefancheaux and rolled out of the way.

Despite the two bullets in him, the second man wasn't dead. He fired again at where Johnnie had been. For a moment his head showed in the flash from his gun. Johnnie used his last bullet to silence him.

Now Johnnie's weapons really were all empty.

### THIRTEEN

As quietly and carefully as he could he eased further back into the trees, until there were several thick trunks between himself and the place where the two outlaws lay. Only then did he start thumbing fresh loads into the Lefancheaux. He could do that by feel in the dark, and without needing to worry about getting his powder damp. The Remington would have to stay empty. The third weapon was still back there on the ground where he had dropped it after firing its last shot.

From somewhere up the river another gun boomed. Echoes played off the bluffs across the river, and cackled away into the distance.

Bobcat had to be involved in that. Who had he come across? They had seen three men on this side of the river, and Johnnie had already dealt with three men, so how many were there?

With his gun loaded again, Johnnie silently repeated the trick of getting downwind from his victims. Again he detected the smell of blood and urine, without any of the acrid odour of fear. His victims had nothing left to fear... on this side of the great divide anyway. Nonetheless, he approached them with care, and felt carefully around them to make sure they really were dead. They were. The grey man, though, was still not one of them.

Their weapons and ammunition, together with the gun from his first kill, when he found it once more, made quite a load. He didn't want any other outlaws who might be about to find them, so he had to take them with him, unless he chose to throw them in the river. He thought about that, but dismissed the idea. It would be better for his own people to have more guns. The value of having an extra reserve of firepower had already been proven for him that night.

His best way of carrying the other weapons and ammunition was by taking the outlaws' belts, holsters, and ammunition boxes, and draping them around his neck. The weight unbalanced him, making him doubly careful as he crept away into the night.

The vicinity of the three dead men wasn't a place to linger. If there were any other outlaws to contend with, they would be looking for him there, and mightn't be so gullible after hearing all the shots that had been fired. To be on the safe side, his best place was up on the mesa, and back some distance from the rim.

An arroyo leading the way he wanted to go was tempting, but he figured that others could reason that it was likely to be used by anybody coming away from the fire fight, so that was as good a reason as any not to use it. He chose instead to clamber up a place where the bluffs were a little less steep, where, by taking his time, he was able to reach the top without making any detectable noise, and equally importantly still had breath to spare.

The ground on top was short grass prairie with patches of bare dust, and odd clumps of bushes and scrubby weeds. Anybody who wanted to would have little trouble in following his tracks once the sun came up. He decided that his best course was to pick a suitable place, and lie up to see who might come sniffing along those tracks with daylight. A grouping of several yucca plants provided the cover he wanted, and also gave him a good view across the mesa in all directions.

When he stopped, his still damp clothes allowed the chill to creep in. By the time a suggestion of paleness tinged the eastern sky he was feeling the cold badly, and worried about the effect it might have on him. That didn't, however, stop him from maintaining a careful watch.

A figure moving quietly on the edge of the mesa, where it dipped to the river, caught his attention.

Somebody there was trying to see what had happened down in the canyon during the night. It was still too dark to see who it was, though he suspected it wasn't Bobcat. The Indian wouldn't be so easily seen.

Whoever it was obviously decided against going down into the canyon, for shortly he moved away to the east, taking a path set back a short distance from the rim.

Johnnie slipped quietly after him.

For Johnnie, the other man was outlined against the lightening sky. If the outlaw looked back, Johnnie would be still hidden in the darkness. Both of them went on like that for some time, until the man in the lead came to where the main trail cut down to the river. Just over the rim at that point would be the mulberry bushes where the little hawk had called their attention to the waiting ambush. That seemed to be where the man was heading.

Johnnie watched him drop out of sight, and then crept up to the edge and peered over. Every minute the darkness was becoming less intense.

There were horses tethered behind the mulberry bushes, eight of them, and several saddles, both riding and pack saddles, were heaped nearby. Just the one man was there. He was busily saddling up one of the horses.

Johnnie withdrew a few yards back from the edge, and shrugged off his load of belts and weaponry. Then taking just his own guns, he returned to look down on the lone outlaw. The fellow was almost ready to mount up.

'Stop right there!' Johnnie yelled at him. 'Put your hands up.'

The man did anything but! He ducked under his horse's belly, and came up the other side with a gun blazing over the saddle. Johnnie stepped back as soon as he saw the gun coming up, and two bullets whirred over his head.

'Problems, Johnnie?' a voice said right behind him.

He whirled. Bobcat was nearly at his shoulder.

'Hell!'Johnnie gulped. 'Don't do that to me.'

'I thought you might like help,' Bobcat grinned, all white teeth in the early morning gloom.

'Yes, well, I think there's only this one left,' Johnnie told him. 'There's eight horses down there, and three of them are pack horses. I heard you fire, so I assume you shot one?'

'Not shoot,' Bobcat replied. 'Use this.' He touched the bone haft of the wicked knife sheathed on his hip. 'Other man, he shoot at shadows.'

'Well this fellow ain't,' Johnnie said. 'He's shooting at me.'

He approached the edge again further along, and peeped over. Bobcat slipped away along the rim in the other direction. The rustler was backing away toward the river, carefully keeping his horse between himself and where he thought Johnnie was up on the mesa.

Johnnie wished he had a rifle with him. The shot was a bit on the long side for a revolver. There was too much danger of hitting the horse.

Using both hands, Johnnie lined up the Lefancheaux on the outlaw's feet where they showed under the belly of the horse. Wounding him would at least stop him from getting away. Johnnie knew that downhill shots tended to go high. Fear of hitting the horse caused him to aim lower still, and of course he missed. The boom of the gun made the horse shy away, and the outlaw went with it, trying to control the beast with one hand, while he took another shot at Johnnie with the other.

He missed too.

Bobcat didn't. Turning away from Johnnie had exposed the outlaw to the Indian's fire, and Bobcat made the most of the opportunity. The horse buckjumped aside, leaving the crumpled form of the outlaw sprawled on the ground. He didn't move again.

'That should be the last of them,'Johnnie called.

'Then who are these people coming behind us?' Bobcat called back.

Johnnie looked where he was pointing. Just visible in the growing light, something like a mile away, a large group of horsemen were coming over the plains from the south. They were following the line of the cattle drive, which now constituted a trail in itself.

'We'd better get back across the river before they arrive,' Johnnie decided. 'They'd have us like rats in a trap here.'

'Leave saddles, but take the horses,' Bobcat advised.

'Right,' Johnnie agreed promptly, 'but I'll take these guns. You grab that fellow's.'

The saddled horse was too nervy from the shooting to allow them near it, but the tied horses were more manageable. They loosed them all, retaining one each to ride bare-backed. Then they herded them all into the river.

As compared with the places they had swum in the night, the crossing there was relatively shallow. For most of the distance the horses were touching bottom, so that they arrived on the other side only a short distance below where they had entered. Both of them were wet to the chest again, however, and some of the ammunition was spoiled from a wetting.

A grove of cottonwoods masked the entrance to a narrow draw, which led up to the mesa on the northern side. They tied the horses behind the trees. The saddled one, calmer after its journey through the river, was caught and put with them.

'We'll discourage these fellows from crossing for a while,'Johnnie said.

'Won't be able to hold them all day,' Bobcat argued.

'No, but perhaps we can leave them not knowing whether we're here or not,' Johnnie suggested. 'That should give us a longer start when we do ride off.'

Together they gathered together some driftwood from the riverbank, and piled it into a rough barricade from which they could command the river crossing, while leaving themselves an easy retreat into the cover of the cottonwoods behind them. They expected the group of horsemen to appear at any minute, and attributed the fact of them not having arrived already to the other party's caution in approaching the scene of the shooting they must have heard.

'That grey horse isn't here,' Johnnie observed while they waited. 'Is that who you killed up the river there?'

'Not that man,' Bobcat replied. 'Grey horse, his marks are on ground behind us. Two other horses also. When we cross river up there, grey man, he cross river down here.'

'He'd better not come back then, while we're facing this way,' Johnnie commented. In his mind, though, he was thinking over the possibilities of where the man in grey might have gone. It was likely that he and his two companions would have gone north along the river seeking Johnnie's party at the place they had last been seen. Surely, even so, all the shooting on the south bank should have brought him back to the river. He was just considering leaving Bobcat to watch the crossing alone, while he went up to the mesa above in case the grey man was up there somewhere, when the party of horsemen arrived across the river.

They appeared suddenly, all at once, lined up along the rim of the canyon on the other side of the river, near on forty of them, all mounted, and with a great many packhorses in tow. Rifles at the ready showed plainly against the early morning sky.

'Who are you fellows down there?' a voice bellowed, a very welcome voice. Johnnie knew it well.

'It's me, Dad. Johnnie,' he shouted back, standing to his feet.

Prominent among the men silhouetted on the skyline was Johnnie's father, Ding Dong. The men with him had to be the citizens' band he had raised from the other squatters who had settled on the high plains.

'You stay there,' his father called. 'We're coming across.'

'I'll meet them, and bring them up to date,' Johnnie said to Bobcat. 'How about you taking a look to see where the grey man, and the other two rustlers, might have gone.'

While Bobcat slipped away, taking the saddled horse with him, Johnnie went down to meet his father coming across the river.

'We heard the Cheyenne have gone,' Ding Dong reported, while he was still in mid-river. 'I decided it was time we came ahead, eh. We couldn't wait for the governor's okay any longer.'

'I was just on my way back to get you,' Johnnie agreed.

'What was all the shooting we've been hearing?' Ding Dong asked as his horse scrabbled for a footing on the wet river bank.

While he watched his father's party streaming across the river, Johnnie explained about the ambush the rustlers had tried to set to prevent him carrying word southward.

'Wouldn't have done them much good,' Ding Dong commented. 'We were camped less than three miles down the way. We heard your guns in the night, but thought we'd better wait to arrive in daylight, so's we could see what we were letting ourselves in for.'

As men came out of the river, Ding Dong named the ones Johnnie didn't already know. There was little hope of him remembering all the names right off, but he determined that he'd make a point of doing so as soon as he could. All of them were in one way or another cattlemen from the high plains, their cowhands, or people connected with them through trade. One of them was a cattle buyer. Another was a mule driver who sold household goods, cutlery and tinware from ranch to ranch.

'How's Eb?' Johnnie asked after the black cow- puncher he had last seen bedridden at the ranch.

'On his feet, but a mite wobbly yet,' he was told.

When his men were all assembled, and had heard what Johnnie had to say, Ding Dong took charge. 'We'll collect Mrs Edison, and push straight on north then,' he ordered.

By that time Bobcat had been gone a good half hour. Johnnie wasn't particularly worried. It probably meant that the three rustlers were keeping their distance, and Bobcat had had to go a fair way to find any sign of them. The likelihood of them coming across Mary-Lou out on those broad plains was slight. She should have been much further to the east than they were likely to go, and they'd have been unable to find her tracks until daylight.

He changed his mind when he rode on to the mesa top himself. Bobcat was coming across country at a full gallop.

'That man, those outlaws,' Bobcat puffed, when he skidded to a stop in front of the party, 'they gone after Mary-Lou, eh. Their tracks in night go that way.' He pointed eastward.

'They wouldn't know she was there,' Johnnie objected. 'They wouldn't be able to see her tracks tillhalf-an-hour ago.'

'They hear her,' Bobcat said. 'They find her. You see.'

### FOURTEEN

When Mary-Lou moved off into the darkness, heading vaguely eastward, to get their horses, and of course herself, out of the reach of any rustlers who chose to cross the river searching for them, she had no particular destination in mind. She had previously crossed this country before only to the north of the line the cattle had taken, and had never been into that area further down the plains.

With it being so dark, she had to leave the choice of path largely to Dusky, Johnnie's big black stallion. The packhorse she kept on a halter. The others followed Dusky of their own accord.

So long as she stayed on the short buffalo grass all went well. Odd tumbleweeds caused little bother for they were still green and soft-stemmed, easily trampled down. The problems came with the matted patches of blackjack oak, cross timbers as some folks called the interlinked branches of the knee-high scrub. There was no way through the stuff. She had to find a way round each time, while still trying to maintain an eastward direction over all. Sagebrush was less of a hindrance. She could push through that, and did. She was anxious to get well away from the immediate area of the river crossing as quickly as she could.

Every now and then she came to a water course incised into the plain. The first one she met she followed north, staying out of it until she reached its dry head channels, little more than ditches, where she could cross easily and resume her progress eastwards. As she came up out of it she paused to listen to the sounds of the night, coyotes away out ahead of her somewhere, the mournful hoot of an owl, the crunching of gravel under the hooves of the horses following through the dry watercourse behind her. She wondered how far that sound might travel.

There was nothing she could do about it. It was best to keep going.

Rich on the breeze drifting past her down the plains was the smell of sagebrush, stronger in some places than others. It was almost overpowering in the places where she had to push through it, the horses crushing leaves underfoot.

Distant gunfire brought her to a halt again; three shots in quick succession, then two more close together. Echoes, faint and fading, suggested that the shooting had taken place somewhere in the canyon along the river, in fact about where Johnnie and Bobcat should have been.

There was another sound back there too, an occasional crackling, crunching borne on the breeze. Was it a loud noise from far off, or a quiet one from close to? It worried her.

She pressed on, trying to keep to clearer ground, trying to make less noise herself. Every now and then she stopped. There was no further gunfire, but whatever the other sound was, sometimes there, sometimes not, when it was audible it seemed to be getting closer.

Surely it was the same noise that her horses were creating when they pushed through the patches of sagebrush? Was somebody following her?

Beyond the next watercourse she paused again. Nothing. Then of course she had made little noise herself on the last stretch. It had been all open ground. No blackjack oak to go around, no tumbleweed to tread down, no sagebrush to push through.

Then why was the smell of sage still so strong?

After a moment's thought, she dismounted and sniffed again. The legs of her horses, they reeked of it.

Thoughtfully, she left Dusky ground-tied, and walked back to the lip of the watercourse she had just crossed. She was then upwind of all her horses, and still the breeze was redolent of sage. Her imagination had to be working overtime. Her sense of smell was just not that good. Or was it?

Uneasy, she thought it mightn't be a bad idea to wait for a spell, and just see if somebody was coming along behind her. The only place she could get out of the way with all her horses was down in the watercourse. There, any slight sounds they made might be masked by the ground. Thinking of that reminded her to muzzle Dusky with her bandana, otherwise he might challenge any strange horse coming near.

She was expecting the channel to drop away to the south, draining eventually back into the North Canadian, so she turned the other way intending to go further out on to the plains. Instead she found the channel growing deeper as she moved north. This watercourse had to lead to the far-off Cimarron. She was already further out than she had thought.

Again she ground-tied Dusky, and crept back along the channel to the place where she had entered it. Definitely the smell of sage was stronger.

Something crunched somewhere to the southwest of her, not exactly on her back trail, but not very far away from it. Then another crunch came from about the same place. There was no doubt about it. Something was moving out there.

Silently she eased another hundred yards along the shallowing channel. If she stood up in daylight she'd be able to see over the top. As it was there was a distinct difference between the stygian blackness in the channel, and the open ground above, where starlight had some slight effect.

Whatever was out there was still moving. She went on for another hundred yards... horses, more than one, and the smell of sage had grown quite noticeable.

She crouched in the ditch, which was all the watercourse was by then, and let the horses pass within twenty yards of her as they crossed over. One... two, and then a third.

They stopped, as she had stopped, just after crossing the ditch, but about a furlong to the south of her course.

'Can't hear them,' a hoarse voice whispered.

'Shut up. They're not far ahead,' another replied.

Them? They? Whoever was lurking there in the darkness wasn't aware that she was on her own, but quite definitely they were following her. She hadn't thought it possible in the darkness, but obviously they'd managed it so far. She'd been making too much noise. That had to be it. Aided by the breeze in her direction she'd detected their three horses. Against the wind they'd done well to keep some track of her seven.

Had there been only one of them, perhaps even with two, she'd have taken her chances with her revolver. Three were too many. Her best plan was to try to lose them. Perhaps if she kept her horses down in the watercourse they mightn't be heard so easily.

Quietly she crept back, and took up Dusky's reins again, walking ahead of him. By going slowly she hoped to make less noise, but the big stallion was edgy, and showed clearly that he had smelt the other horses out there.

The trouble came when the other horses smelt him. One of them neighed a challenge. Even with the muzzle on, Dusky tried to answer.

Immediately Mary-Lou whipped away the bandana, and swung up into the saddle. Speed would now be the only thing that could save her. She urged Dusky into a trot, all that she could ask of him in the darkness. For a start she had to continue along the water course, prevented from doing what she wanted, which was to go up on to the open plain with the watercourse between her and her pursuers. That wasn't to be. The channel there was cut down into the underlying limestone, and the sides were rock straight up and down.

Confined by those rock sides, she could only plunge ahead, hoping against hope that there'd be nothing for the horses to stumble on.

Above her, even over the rumble of her own band of horses, she could hear other horses at a gallop.

She had no chance. It was too easy for one of the riders to get ahead of her, while the others stayed just beyond the rim above her.

Some way ahead a lucifer flared. A bundle of burning scrub tumbled into the channel. More scrub was thrown down on top of it.

'Keep going folks,' somebody above her called. 'We've got you covered all round.'

They had too. She knew somebody had her outlined against the fire. Nothing could be seen of any of them.

Dusky threw his head about, objecting to the fire, but she pressed him on. Near it she came to a stop. More scrub dropped from the edge of the channel, some missing the fire, but enough landing on it to build up the blaze.

'Undo your gunbelt, mister,' the voice ordered.

Mister? The clothes of course. She let her weapon and cartridge box fall to the ground.

'Anybody back there,' the rustler yelled loudly into the night, 'try anything smart and this one gets it.'

They couldn't know that she was alone, and must have thought that her companions had gone to ground somewhere back along the way, letting her draw off the pursuit.

A man's head and shoulders appeared above the rim nearby, lit from below by the flickering light of the fire. It was the grey man. He wore his shallow-crowned hat slung behind his shoulders, suspended by a cord about his throat.

'Come over here,' he ordered. 'Give us your hand, lad.'

Mary-Lou complied. She could do nothing else. Her proffered hand was gripped from above by a fist like iron, and she was hauled up holus-bolus to stand beside her captor. Another man, a fellow in a bowler hat, his forehead very white in the reflected light of the fire, was standing in the background. A faint glint showed that he held a gun trained on her.

'Now then, where's...' the grey man started to say, and stopped suddenly. He was listening.

The sound of more gunfire was being carried down to them on the wind, a regular fusillade from miles back across the plains, a pause and then two more shots... another exchange of several shots coming almost together, and finally a burst of three.

'If you're asking where my friends are,' Mary-Lou said, 'I think that answers your question.'

'Hell, Dismal,' the second outlaw burst out, 'it's a woman!'

'It is and all,' Dismal, the grey man, agreed. 'That's interestin', ain't it? I know you've been followin' us, but who might you be?'

'What difference does it make?' she countered.

'You got to be somebody's wife, daughter, sister, but whose, eh? What sort of outfit lets their womenfolk go chasin' stolen cattle? Do they place any value on you?'

That was a good question. Mary-Lou hadn't thought about it. Was there any reason why the Bells should show any special concern for her?

'Outfit?' she questioned. 'I'm all the outfit there is. I own half those cattle you've taken. The JQE brand is mine. I'm the sole owner, and I don't have to have anybody allowing me to do anything.'

'JQE?'she was asked,

'Looks like a sunburst,' she answered.

'Oh them? You'll be the Edison woman, then... the one they call the Cumberland Belle, eh? Oh well, somebody'll want you,' Dismal decided. 'I think I'll keep you for a while.'

What was he going to do with her otherwise?

And would somebody want her? Want her, that is, in a way that she'd want somebody to want her, somebody like Dryfe Sands Johnnie perhaps?

'If nothin' else,' Dismal observed, 'the boys'll enjoy your company for a while.'

She didn't like to think about that. She knew what they considered enjoyment.

Mary-Lou was bound to one of the outlaw's horses, while one of the men was lowered into the stream channel to take charge of hers. They all kept pace with each other, until a way was found for the rest of them to get down into the channel, which they then followed down, mile after mile, until it debouched as a small stream into a tributary of the Cimarron. During that time daylight came, and their pace quickened.

### FIFTEEN

'Aren't you going to wait for the rest of your men back there?' Mary-Lou asked early in the piece.

'There's enough of them there to deal with your two fellers,' Dismal replied. 'By the sounds of things they already have. They know where to come when they're ready.'

The Cimarron, when they reached it, was carrying much less water than the Canadian, and there was a shinglebank along the near edge. Only a few inches of water covered it.

'We'll stay with that for a spell,' Dismal directed. 'We'll put halters on these animals first though.'

A lariat was taken from the packhorse's load, and cut into suitable lengths. Mary-Lou's horses were then taken, a pair to each of the rustlers. Dismal transferred to Dusky, and took up the halter of the horse carrying Mary-Lou. His own flea-bitten grey was the only one left to run free.

They then walked the horses up the shallow edge of the river, keeping them all where the current would wipe out their tracks as they went. Several times they crossed the river and followed along the other side, when the first stream ran into a deeper channel. Eventually they came to a sidestream with a fair flow of water, the third such they had seen, and Dismal led them up it. After several smaller branches had split from it, the sidestream no longer held enough water to hide their passage, but by then there was a good three-mile break in the line of hoofmarks they had left behind them.

'Why are you taking such precautions, if you're so sure my friends have been killed?' Mary-Lou enquired.

'I always take precautions,' Dismal informed her. 'Your friends wouldn't be the only ones as would like to know where I'm goin'.'

Where he was going, over the next several days, was some distance to the north of the Arkansas River, up one of its tributaries which drained down from the direction of Pike's Peak, the high mountain that showed above the horizon even from far down the Santa Fe Trail. Dismal smuggled his prisoner across each of the branches of the trail by night, avoiding any chance that she might call for help from the settlers who were threaded along it like beads on a string. Their halting places were marked by sparkling camp fires, and the canvas covers of the great Conestogas candle-lit from within.

The outlaw took his little party on to the northern branch of the trail at a place where he could trek westward along it for some distance, before turning up the stream he wanted, a wide shallow stream with a sandy bottom. Again he made use of the shallow water to hide the place where they had left the trail. By the following noon their spoor to that point would be buried under the marks of the passing settlers.

It was two more days before Bobcat and Johnnie reached that place, and they passed it by with a dismissive glance.

They were riding horses borrowed from friends in Ding Dong's citizens' band. They had no spares, and these ones were tired and footsore. The mounts they had inherited from the rustlers who had died along the North Canadian all bore strange brands, and it was thought better that those animals should be kept with the main party in case they met anybody who wanted to debate their ownership.

Elements of the band were spread far and wide over many miles of country, with small groups seeking the continuation of the tracks they had found and lost time after time.

In the beginning the whole party had streamed across the Canadian, and followed Bobcat across the plains to where he had located Mary-Lou's and the rustlers' tracks. As they went Bobcat explained how the three rustlers had managed to find Mary-Lou in the dark. All they had had to do was trace the source of the strong smell of sage in the night air. Where it was strongest was downwind of where Mary-Lou had passed. Once they had a line on her general direction, it was only a matter of hurrying along it until they got close enough to hear her.

When they came out on to the banks of the Cimarron, and the rustlers' prints couldn't be found on the far bank, Ding Dong organized the first of the spread searches. He divided his people into three groups, the first and less mobile to stay with him at a more or less central point where the day's cooking and some types of field maintenance could be done. The other two groups then went in opposite directions hunting for the rustlers' sign, one group with Johnnie in charge of them, and the other led by one of the better known squatters, Caleb Moore, who had a ranch to the south of Dryfe Sands.

Each time one of the search parties came to some feature that seemed worth investigating further, some of the party members hived off, while the rest continued on the line they had already been following. By the time the parties split and split again, there was an expanding ring of men spreading away from their original starting point. Gunshot signals were arranged for when somebody found the rustlers' tracks again, or for when Ding Dong wanted everybody back to the centre for a fresh start.

'What happens ifn we run into them rustlers themselves?' a young cowhand asked.

'Don't worry,' Ding Dong told him. 'We'll hear you. You won't need to give any signal.'

The device cut down on the tracking time considerably, but nevertheless the tracks got progressively older and older as first one day, and then another day passed. They soon learned to look for routes through shallow water. It was the one good trick that would work time after time, for everywhere else the ground was such that there was no way of avoiding leaving tracks. The grey man used the trick well, though, and played many variations on how far he'd go in the water, and which way he'd turn into sidestreams.

At the Cimarron Cutoff he had crossed straight over and continued north, giving the impression that the other branch was where he was making for. Between the two he abandoned subterfuge, and instead pegged his hopes on his speed of travel. Many times they found the places where the rustlers had switched horses. They could afford to do that more often than their pursuers.

While others were out front reading sign, Johnnie took several opportunities to talk with his father.

'You got no help from the rangers,' he commented on one occasion.

'They sent a man up, but he had to pull out again when he found that the rustlers were already out of Texas.'

'Just one ranger to a whole gang of rustlers?'

'He was supposed to organize us into a posse to back him. It wasn't his fault. He had strict orders not to cross into Indian country. Besides, they've got trouble down at the border.'

'They've always got trouble down at the border.'

Another time, over a campfire, the conversation got around to Mary-Lou, and her situation once they had rescued her. Neither of them doubted that they'd rescue her in the finish. Any other alternative was unthinkable. What her condition might be when they did rescue her was another matter.

'They can't afford to do her much harm,' Ding Dong said. 'They need her for a hostage. When we close in on them, they're going to need something to bargain with. They know they can't shift those cattle fast enough to stay ahead of us for ever.'

'I'll hunt down every last one of the bastards if they do harm her,'Johnnie declared.

'Getting a mite fond of her are you, lad?'

'Ah, come off it, Dad. Her husband's hardly had time to go cold yet.'

'Out in this country, Johnnie, you can't let such considerations weigh too heavy in the balance. You go after her if you want her. Your mother and I like the stamp of her.'

'She mightn't want me,' Johnny replied. 'If the rustlers treat her badly, she mightn't want any man.'

'Would you let that stop you trying for her?'

'No,'Johnnie answered thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. 'No, not at all.'

Bent's Fort again was the assigned destination for Johnnie's search party, which had been given the western part of the Santa Fe Trail to search, after they had last lost the rustlers' tracks. By the time they reached it, only Bobcat and Johnnie were left of the fifteen men he had started with. The rest had been sent off in twos and threes to investigate every possibility, no matter how unlikely, for a place where the rustlers might have left the trail.

Caleb Moore had taken a similar party in the opposite direction to do the same thing as far as Camp Dodge. With the rest of the men, Ding Dong was heading out on to the plains to try the lines that could have been taken if the rustlers were looping north across country toward Kansas Town and Westport Landing.

At Bent's Fort there was still only the young lieutenant and his handful of men. They had seen no rustlers, nor unexplained mobs of cattle.

'My men have looked at every brand, horses and cattle alike, that's gone past here,' the lieutenant claimed. 'Neither of those brands of yours could be blotted without us spottin' it.'

Danny was looking a much better colour, sitting up and cheerful, when they looked in on him.

'I'll be on my feet before you know it,' he reckoned.

'And helping us break in some fresh horses as well?'Johnnie joshed.

'Well, at least I'll be able to mosey around here, and find out what I can from the folks goin' past. I reckon there could be things they'd tell me, as they wouldn't tell that there young officer feller.'

Once more Johnnie and Bobcat headed east, picking up their men along the way. Sometimes the men were waiting for them at the side of the trail. At others they had to go out and look for them. One pair were just coming out of a shallow river.

'How far up did you go?'Johnnie asked.

'A good twenty miles or more,' was the answer. 'We stayed with it till we jest couldn't believe no more that anybody'd stay in the water so long. You'd expect 'em to come out on the bank some place.'

'Shallow all the way, was it?'

'All the way whilst we were with it. O'course, she ain't always like that. You can see where she floods some after a storm.'

'Spreads out over the banks does it?' Johnnie asked, with a sudden idea about how cattle tracks could be hidden. He remembered the storm which had followed them out of Pueblo, the township up the Arkansas, the place where Little Hawk had died in the gunflght.

'Oh, yeah, way out to each side. You can see the driftwood lines where the water gets to.'

'What's the country like for cattle?'

'Hopeless. Sandy and dry, and what growth there was hasn't recovered yet from the prairie fires last fall. Didn't see a sign of any kind of animals at all.'

Johnnie's idea collapsed, as had so many others before it. Besides, he couldn't think of anywhere out in that direction where the rustlers might want to take the cattle.

Two days later he met up again with his father, and soon after Caleb Moore appeared with his men. All had tales of frustration and failure to recount.

A camp site was found for the night some way back from the trail. They had to go a long way from it just to find any firewood. When the cooks served up a hash of wild pork and beans, they all sat around in the gathering dusk mulling over again and again every idea that anybody could come up with as to where the rustlers could possibly have gone.

At a touch on his shoulder, Johnnie, who was crouched over his plate, looked behind him, expecting to find one of the men about to tell him something. Instead he found his great black stallion, Dusky, skinny and saddle-sore, looming over him.

'Where in hell did you come from?' he burst, standing to his feet, and spilling beans in all directions.

He looked for Mary-Lou to be with the horse, the other horses too, but there was only Dusky, all alone. His mouth was raw around the bit. His reins, worn and ragged, trailed on the ground between his hooves, and the saddle had been days on his poor chafed back.

### SIXTEEN

All hands waited impatiently for daylight, hoping that Dusky's tracks could be followed back to where he had escaped from. Pride of place was accorded to Bobcat, their best tracker, but Johnnie stayed close on his heels, while everybody else hung back so as not to lose any other marks which might be there to be found.

'You fellows watch out,' Ding Dong had ordered. 'There could be somebody coming the other way, tracking this horse in an attempt to catch him before he reaches us.'

As it happened, there was somebody coming the other way, Danny Long Knife, braced awkwardly in the saddle, holding his horse to a gentle walk on the Santa Fe Trail.

Bobcat had by then led the posse back along Dusky's tracks past where the riderless horse had branched from the trail to come down to their night camp. He was anxious to trace the horse back as far as possible before the marks became lost under the traffic that would pass that way when the settlers began their daily stint. Some five miles on they found Danny coming towards them.

He looked sick, weak, a dreadful grey colour.

'What in hell are you doing on that horse, man?' Ding Dong demanded. 'You should be still lying up.'

'I guess so,' Danny agreed weakly. 'Can yuh help us down? I can't seem to manage that meself no more. I'm kinda stiffened up, eh.'

'How long have you been in that saddle?' Johnnie asked, as willing hands lifted the wrangler down.

'Coupla nights,' he wheezed. 'Poor ol' hoss, he's hardly stopped walkin'.'

'You're mad,' Ding Dong told him. 'What'd you want to be doing this for?'

'Found something out,' Danny managed a weak grin. 'Weren't nobody else I could get to come an' tell yuh all. Feller as took your beef... his name's Dismal Dacre. He's sellin' 'em a cow at a time to the gold prospectors.'

'He surely can't get rid of the whole herd that way, two herds even?'

'Sure can. There's thousands of them prospectors from here to way up past Pike's Peak. One count's fifty thousand've 'em. Even iffen it's on'y half that number, they'll eat both herds in a coupla weeks or so.'

While everybody chewed over Danny's information, Bobcat, with a dozen men behind him, was sent on to stay with Dusky's backtracks for as long as he could. Meanwhile a camp was set up where Danny and his horse could rest. The man was something of a mess after his long hours in the saddle, and he needed to be bathed down completely, rebandaged, and dressed in borrowed clothing, before Ding Dong would allow him to continue with his story.

'Now, how did you learn these things?' Ding Dong asked when he was satisfied with all that had been done for Danny.

'Feller rode into Bent's Fort on one of my hosses, a young un' I ain't got around to brandin' yet. I reckernized it though. This feller, he lives up with the Utes, eh; trades for them. Brings stuff out from Kansas Town that the Indians can't get fer themselves. Anyway, I got the sojers to tackle him, like. What's he doin' on my hoss?'

'The soldiers took your word for it?'

'Yeah, they know me now, eh?'

Piece by piece the story came out. The trader had bought the horse from Dacre, whom he had known as a squatter down near Kansas Town. Dacre had seen the number of prospectors heading west, not only along the Santa Fe Trail, but also on the Oregon Trail further north. He had sold dried beef to them, and later some of them had come back looking for more. Food was short on the gold fields, and the wild game in the vicinity had soon been shot out. A huge market for beef had opened up, and Dacre had been one of the first to recognize it.

He had rounded up his own herd, and driven it up the Oregon Trail to the South Platte River, which he had followed in towards its headwaters. On the high edge of the plains he had trailed it south into the semi-desert country opposite Pike's Peak, a sort of no-man's-land between the Arapaho Indians and the very different Ute people who inhabited the mountains where the gold prospectors had struck lucky. There he had found an area of reasonable grazing along the Big Sandy Creek which drained water from those mountains. From there, his herd had been broken into small mobs for delivery piecemeal to all the places where gold was being worked.

The prices he could command for his beef had made him a rich man in a matter of weeks. By going back to Kansas Town and buying up what beef he could from his former neighbours, he made himself even richer, but in the meantime his source of supply dried up. Soon there was no more beef to be bought. What he hadn't taken already, had been bought at high prices by the settlers moving west. Dacre had a ready market, and no beef to fill it.

He could have stopped at that point with a fortune greater than any of the gold prospectors ' were ever likely to make, but he was greedy. He wanted more, and as the Bells had good reason to know, the Dacres were a family from the north of England, who had for centuries stolen cattle from across the Scottish border. Cattle reiving would come naturally to a Dacre.

This scion of that ancient breed promptly paid off his honest ranch hands, and recruited a motley crew of rascals from among the failed prospectors retreating starving from the gold fields. Knowing that the Cheyenne and Arapaho were bent on raiding their Indian neighbours to the south, Dacre had taken advantage of their marauding, and skirting the disturbed country, had made his own raids, like them, on his own kind. The Dryfe Sands herd, and Mary-Lou's JQE beasts, were just in the right places at the right times to fill his needs.

'He's still got to keep us off his back until he can sell them though,' Ding Dong pointed out.

'Yes, but you're all,' Danny argued. 'The rangers couldn't follow him through Indian country, the military were too busy, and the Kansas Town people too concerned with their own affairs. There jest ain't no law where he's gone. All he's had to do was slow you down until he could make them cows disappear, and they'd all be sold and eaten before you could work out where they'd gotten to.'

'They sure have disappeared,' Ding Dong admitted. 'Out from Pike's Peak some place you say. Now how did he manage to get them there without leaving tracks?'

'I think I know,' Johnnie said. 'I think I've seen it. The way that fellow loves using water to hide his tracks, I should have noticed where there'd been enough water to hide the marks of a whole herd.'

They had taken Danny and his exhausted horse down to a box canyon somebody had discovered facing onto the Arkansas River. There they made their friend comfortable, with plenty of food and water close to hand, and left him to sleep. His horse wasn't likely to move away from the good forage. If nobody returned for him during the next few days, he was sure he'd be able to make his own way back to Bent's Fort.

Bobcat, when they caught up on him, still had Dusky's tracks in view, but lost them soon afterwards. Until then they had continued to come from the west along the trail. A wagon train moving out had covered them, and by the time they had overtaken and passed those particular settlers, another train still further ahead had been for some time on the trail.

'We're pretty sure Dusky has come down from the north,' Johnnie said. 'We should pick up his tracks again on that side of the trail. I think I know where.'

Sure enough, when they eventually reached the place, Dusky's tracks once more were where he expected to Find them, in the broad, sandy valley coming down through the burnt-over land to the north of the trail.

'Hell, we've been twenty miles up there,' one of the cowhands swore. 'There weren't a mark to be found.'

'No, and there's why,' Johnnie replied. 'That valley's been flooded side to side. The floor being so sandy is what fools the eye. It dries out fast, and the wind blows away the riffle marks, but I should have remembered, all this was flooded just after we had the gunfight up at that Pueblo place. We saw the storm up behind us that day.'

Dusky's tracks lay clean cut in the sand. Accompanying them were half-a-dozen other sets of marks.

'Them rustlers,' Bobcat commented, 'they've follered Dusky this far, an' then given up on 'im when they saw they couldn't catch 'im. See, there's Dismal Dacre's tracks, an' that one there, he was nearby when Rastus was killed that first day when the herd was stolen.'

'They've gone back up the river,' Johnnie suggested.

'I'd say so,' Bobcat agreed.

'They'll be waiting for us,' Ding Dong said. 'There'll be an ambush set somewhere up there.'

'And meantime Dacre will be trying to sell off our cattle as fast as he can,' Johnnie nodded, and rubbed his chin. 'He's not going to be with that ambush. He's going to be up in the mountains selling cattle.'

'And Mary-Lou?' Ding Dong asked.

'Well, Dacre can't be dragging her about with him, so she must be being held somewhere in behind that ambush. What say I leave you to tackle the ambush from the front, while I try and go around it with a few men, and see if we can get her out.'

'Just see you don't get her killed in the attempt,' Ding Dong replied.

Johnnie took Bobcat, Cab Phillips, and several other men away to the east in an attempt to come in from an unexpected direction on what might be left of their herds. Dusky, trail-worn and sore, stayed with them. Leaving the horse to run loose, unburdened, was the best thing that could be done for it.

Cab Phillips more or less invited himself on the party. He was regretting not having gone with the rancher's son in the first place, and wondered if Little Hawk would still be alive, if there had been another experienced man there to back him at the time. Cab wasn't too happy about how much responsibility was being heaped on young Johnnie's shoulders, and was determined that this time he'd be there if he was needed.

Far out across the plains they circled, until they were due east of Pike's Peak, and then cut in on a line directly for that unmistakable marker. Eventually the party would come onto the upper reaches of the Big Sandy Creek at a point that had to be upstream of the outlaws' main camp.

Meanwhile Ding Dong split the rest of his force, sending half of it under the command of Caleb Moore to follow up the same river from the downstream end, but riding about a mile to the west of it. Ding Dong's party kept pace with them about a mile to the east of it. When both those parties set patrols to either side of themselves, they were advancing north on a front of nearly three miles.

The land was almost bare. What little fresh growth there had been, since the prairie fires of the previous season, was sparse and widely spaced. Only along the river were there any places where the rustlers could conceal themselves. There the limestone underlying the plains had been exposed where the turns and twists of the river had cut into the banks in one place or another. Among the resultant tumble of rocks a few desert plants had been able to escape the flames. Everywhere else just the low rise and fall of the country between drainage channels offered any concealment, but at least that did mean that horsemen a mile apart could be out of sight of each other, if they kept to the lower ground.

There was no hope that their approach could be hidden from gunmen lying in wait. All that could be achieved was to disguise their numbers, and have as many as possible remain unnoticed when contact was eventually made.

With the spread of men Ding Dong had put out, somebody had to run across the expected ambush somewhere, and they did.

At long last the rancher had caught up on the outlaws who had shot up his people, and stolen his cattle.

### SEVENTEEN

A sharp-eyed cowpuncher, riding in front of Ding Dong's group, had picked up a glint of sun on metal beside a rock buttress overlooking the riverbed. A branch of sage moved against the wind. Somebody there was preparing a reception for the three-man patrol down closest to the river. When the cowpuncher reported his sighting, Ding Dong called everybody to a halt while he studied the position.

'They've made a mistake there, I think,' he said with a broad grin. 'Their cover's only good against us coming up the river in a bunch. Once we spread around them, we'll have them trapped.'

Before he ordered the men with him into the attack, he first told the cowboy who had made the sighting to take a shot at the place, even though he couldn't see who was there.

'I won't hit anybody at this distance,' the man complained.

'No matter,' the rancher replied. 'I just want you to warn our own folk.'

The Sharps breech loader the man carried had a reputation for range and accuracy. It also made a very loud bang when it was fired. One way or the other, nobody for miles around failed to note that the fight had started, when that first bullet raised red-brown rockdust from right where the movement had been seen.

The replies blasted out from several places among the rocks by the river, as the hotheads gave away their positions with jets of blue-black powder smoke.

'Spread wide men,' Ding Dong called. 'Don't forget the rest of our people are over on the other side of them. We don't want to go shooting our own folk.'

Before his men could disperse far, Ding Dong called several of them back. 'I want you fellows with me,' he explained.

Drawing back a way, and then keeping beyond range of the outlaws' rifles, he led his small band in a loop far out on the plains to come in on the river again upstream of the ambush.

'Those fellers can see what we're a doin' of,' a rancher noted.

'Sure can,' Ding Dong agreed blandly. 'I don't want them thinking they can pull back up the river. If we miss any of them, I don't want them anywhere where they can give Johnnie any more trouble.'

From the ambush site, and from the rising ground out to the east, a continuous crackle and popping of gunfire marked the position of the people so far engaged. Powder smoke drifted between the two sides. Accurate shooting at any distance was becoming more and more difficult by the minute, and still Caleb Moore's main party hadn't made their presence known.

In the dead ground under the shelter of a rock outcrop Ding Dong had his people ground-tie their horses, while they made their way downstream on foot. Their only cover then was the rising ground in the curves, where the river swept first one way, and then the other.

Past the first curve they came in sight of the outlaws' horses, twenty or more of them, ground tied on the righthand side of the river. They were milling nervously, upset by the gunfire. A man guarding them was crouched under the lip of the riverbank, only his head and shoulders showing. Three more of the rustlers were running up the edge of the river to join him, obviously sent to deal with the threat of Ding Dong's group interfering with those horses.

Ding Dong went down to one knee, and rested his left elbow on the other to steady his shot, while he lined up his Sharps on the nearest outlaw. The other man fired first, but his bullet, fluttering end over end past Ding Dong's head, failed to put the rancher off his aim. His reply threw the man back on his haunches, and tumbled him kicking into the river. Pink blood swirled away on the current. For a moment the victim tried to lift his head out of the water, but the effort was too much for him, and it disappeared again below the surface.

The other three outlaws opened up at the same time as Ding Dong's companions began firing. A man next to him went down, and rolled groaning for the cover of the riverbank. Ding Dong tumbled over the lip close behind him, and checked to see where he had been hit. The fellow was bleeding profusely from a gaping wound in the upper back, and his arm on that side flopped uselessly. The entrance wound near the shoulder was a bluish hole from which leaked the merest trickle of bright red blood.

His shirt, rolled into a ball, made a suitable pad, which Ding Dong positioned against the bank.

'Here lean back against that,' he said gruffly. 'It'll hold the bleeding till we can tend to you properly.'

Rifle fire was skimming off the top of the bank, forcing him to keep his head down, but he could see that another of his men was sprawled unmoving out in the open. One of the others was emptying a revolver over the top of the bank in an attempt to disconcert the rustlers, while an attempt was made to bring the downed man into shelter.

'Leave him!' Ding Dong yelled. 'He's dead.' He could see the hole in his head, and grey brain matter leaking over the exposed cheek.

For the horses, the racket was too much. They were bolting in a disorderly mob toward the open range out to the north-west. With them went the oudaws' hope of any retreat from their thwarted ambush. All that was left for them now was fighting it out, or surrendering to face an almost certain hanging. A land without law was also a land without jails.

The three along the river began to pull back toward the tumble of rocks which sheltered their accomplices. Two failed to make it that far, but who they fell to was hard to say. Fire was also ranging in on them from across the river.

Far out to that side men had left their horses back out of range, and were working their way closer, often on hands and knees to present a smaller target. The wiser among them had pushed up small heaps of earth and chert pebbles to shelter behind. From Ding Dong's position only the lip of the riverbank offered any protection, so his party began to edge in, carefully keeping close to the water.

The last man had a better idea. He pulled the dead body of the original horse minder from the water, and rolled it up on to the bank. It made a good breastwork. His weapon was a well-worn Henry rifle which was a little slow to load, the cartridges having to be introduced into the magazine at the front, but once loaded it could be used to wicked effect. Its projectiles slammed in among the rocks where the rustlers lay, ricocheting at sharp angles to create mayhem among the very men who had thought themselves best covered.

Caleb Moore's party picked that moment to begin contributing their share. Leaving their horses back over the horizon when the shooting started, they had approached down a dry water channel, which debouched into the mainstream below the ambush site. From the rim of the channel they commanded the top of the outlaws' rock outcrop, and all the outfall from the southern face of it.

From that moment the friendly fire became almost as dangerous as that from the desperate rustlers. What saved the situation was that everybody knew it, and made sure that their shots hit low among the rocks, and didn't either overshoot them, or bounce off the top. That way, anything that did go through was at least almost spent before it reached as far as the besiegers on the other side.

Hopeless as the rustlers' position was, they could do nothing but fight on. With enemies widely spaced around them, every time they tried to take a bead on one of their tormentors, they showed themselves to yet another. Hence their fire was wild. There was no time to aim properly. At best they could whip up, fire, and drop back again before anybody could get a line on them. It made little difference. Places where they could fire from were so limited in number, the outlying marksmen only had to keep throwing shots into them at random, and sooner or later a rustler bobbed up straight into an incoming shot. What was more, most of the hits were head shots. There were few wounded able to keep on fighting.

Now and then a muffled thump came from the rustlers' position, a different sound to the sharp crack of their rifles and pistols.

'A shotgun?' a cowpuncher queried. 'They cain't hit anyone from there with a shotgun.'

'Yes they can,' Ding Dong told him. 'It's the coup de grace. They're putting their wounded out of their misery.'

'It makes sense,' the other rancher agreed. 'They do it for themselves, or we do it for them.'

The hail of fire pouring into the rocks settled into a steady, almost rhythmic clatter. That coming out died away as one after another rustlers stopped shooting, lost the ability to shoot, lost the ability to even breathe.

For several long minutes nothing at all came from the rocks. Slowly the encircling posse allowed their own fire to die away.

Nobody moved. Gun smoke wafted away on the wind down the plains.

'They're finished!' a cowboy called, and stood to his feet.

A bullet took him in the hip, and spun him to the ground. The crack of the shot was a shock even to fire-deafened ears.

More smoke showed over the rocks.

Fire from all directions poured into that one spot. A man there reared defiantly to his feet, trying to raise a rifle over his head. The weight was too much for him. He dropped it. Bullets were tearing his torso to shreds, but still be tottered there, a glare on his powder-scorched face. Then he folded forward, spread himself over the rock in front of him, and smothered it with his blood.

'Is that it now?' a voice called.

'That'll do,' Ding Dong yelled in reply. 'Everybody pull back. Come around upstream behind me.'

'Ain't we goin' in there to clean 'em out? There might be some still alive.'

'Good luck to them,' Ding Dong bellowed. 'I don't want to risk any more lives finding out.'

'He's right,' Caleb Moore's yell supported him. 'T'aint worth goin' in there. Any still left ain't of no account now. The buzzards can have 'em.'

All the same Ding Dong left a couple of his best shots keeping watch on the rocks, while the rest of his men pulled back. Unbeknown to him, until later, Caleb Moore had done the same around the other side.

The body count when they came together wasn't good news, but could have been worse. Three good men were tied face-down over their saddles. The wounded were more numerous, eleven being too hard-hit to ride, and at least one of them not likely to last the day out.

'We could send somebody up to Bent's Fort for a wagon,' Caleb suggested, himself standing braced while one of his men used a horse hair to stitch up a deep furrow in his upper right arm. Raw whiskey had left a clean patch around the wound, and had cut runnels in the dust on his forearm.

'Good thinking,' Ding Dong agreed. 'I'll leave you and some men here to attend to that, while I go on up-river to help Johnnie. I've got a couple of fellows keeping watch on where those rustlers were. I don't want any trouble from any we might have missed.'

'I've got a couple there too,' Caleb grinned. 'Yeah, you go on. I won't be much use once this stiffens up.'

All those who still had whole skins sorted themselves out, and prepared to ride out with Ding Dong. The lightly wounded, and one who had managed to break a wrist while diving for cover, thought themselves able enough to care for their more seriously hurt comrades. The dead would be taken to the cemetery up at the fort.

Long after Ding Dong and the rest of his followers had ridden away, those who remained kept a wary eye on the rocks where the dead rustlers lay. Buzzards circled overhead, but none landed. The watchers wondered why. Two men, who were detailed to ride up to Bent's Fort to fetch a wagon, and another who was going, back down country for Danny Long Knife, gave the rocks a wide berth when they left.

When night fell, still nobody had approached the scene of the failed ambush, apart from a lone coyote which snapped and snarled at something in the blackness, and then retreated to grizzle to the stars from somewhere out on the plain.

Only then did a movement come, a stealthy shifting from under a slab of rock near the bottom of the slope. A young fellow crept out, skinny, wiry, and quivering like a mouse in a cattery. Probably no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, he had revolvers holstered on both thighs, and loaded gunbelts crossed around his waist. In his hand was a Sharps rifle, loaded, and in his pocket rested a reserve of ammunition for it. Not one of the weapons had been fired. Not a shot had been taken from his belts or his pocket, not one.

Silent tears streaming down his cheeks, be unbuckled both belts, and lowered them, revolvers and all, quietly to the ground. Then he just walked away from them.

The rifle and the reserve of ammunition for it went with him. That was a hunting weapon. He couldn't see that he would ever again have a use for the others.

Somewhere along the Santa Fe Trail he'd join up with a party of settlers heading west. Of all the people who listened to Dismal Dacre's promise of an easy fortune, he was one of the few who actually gained anything out of the association. He had kept his life, and learned something about what he could and couldn't do with it.

### EIGHTEEN

Johnnie's party came to the Big Sandy Creek in the early evening, just after the sun had disappeared behind Pike's Peak. For the last couple of miles they had been riding through a lush growth of early summer grass, the best they had seen in many a long day. There were also trees and scrub along the river, box elders, willows, and oaks of various kinds. Antelope sprang away at their approach, and though there had been a time when the meat would have been welcome, they left them be, for they had no wish to advertise their presence with gunfire.

Near the stream a beaten trail showed that there had been a considerable traffic of cattle and horses along the banks.

'They're not trying to hide their tracks in the water,' one of the cowhands observed.

'They don't need to any more,' Johnnie replied. 'They must know that if we start looking for them along here, we're going to find them anyhow.'

It was apparent from the tracks that at different times small mobs of ten or a dozen cattle had been driven up the river by three or four riders, who had returned alone a day or two later. These signs had to have been left when drafts of cattle were taken out for sale to the gold prospectors. The main herd, therefore, had to be somewhere downstream.

Darkness fell while they were still making their way in that direction. They kept on, and after several miles began to find dark bulks scattered in the grass ahead of them. Small mobs of cattle were bedded down wherever there were trees or a growth of scrub to shelter them from the wind.

Crooning softly, so as not to startle the animals, Johnnie and Bobcat approached several of them one after the other. After all the weeks they had been on the trail, the cattle were well accustomed to having men around them at night. By taking their time, Johnnie and Bobcat were able to go right up to them, and feel along their flanks for the scar tissue left by their branding. In many cases they could recognize no pattern in the ridges and bumps they felt in the darkness, but in two cases their gently probing fingers were able to make out the familiar shape of a winged spur, and in another case the sunburst of Mary-Lou's JQE brand.

'Those are our cattle all right,' Johnnie told the other men.

'I don't see no night guards around 'em,' Cab Phillips observed.

'Too short-handed,' somebody else commented.

'These couldn't be cattle that's already been sold to the gold prospectors?' another man asked.

'Not out here,' Johnnie replied. 'We're too far out from the mountains for that. Anybody we find with these cattle will be part of the gang that stole them. I don't think we need to worry about shooting some innocent gold prospector by mistake.'

For a while they pushed on, looking for some sign of a camp. It was Bobcat, naturally, who found it, he being the first to detect the smell of a doused campfire on the wind.

'You fellers wait,' he said. 'Johnnie and me, we go look.'

Leaving their horses, and Dusky, Johnnie and Bobcat slipped away through the night, tracing back the smell of burnt wood. Before long they caught the pale loom of tents set back by a copse of tall trees, hickory by the smell of them. Somewhere behind them a horse whickered softly.

Both knew that Mary-Lou could be in one of the tents, but the question was which?

Slowly they eased up to the nearest tent. Breathing could be heard inside, heavy, deep breathing; certainly not hers. The soft sounds of Mary-Lou asleep were very well-known to them after all the campfires they'd shared. Two men were in that tent.

The next was empty. They checked inside, feeling around with their hands, but found only flattened grass and leafage that had been gathered for sleeping on. As they left again, they heard a movement by the front of the next tent in line.

Bobcat touched Johnnie's shoulder, and pressed him to the ground.

After that the Indian seemed to simply disappear. The movement stopped suddenly a moment or two later. There was a splashing sound, a soft gurgling, and the scent of blood on the air.

'Lofty?' a voice queried from inside the next tent.

'Yeah,' Bobcat grunted, deep voiced, muffled.

From inside the tent came a stirring, followed by a metallic click, and then a rustling by the front flap.

Again the movement stopped suddenly, and there was a splashing sound.

Then a gun went off, startlingly loud in the night. The flash from the muzzle was low down, ground level, but it was directed at the stars... a dropped gun firing accidentally.

The whole camp came awake like a stirred-up hornets' nest. Cursing men were calling out to see what had happened.

'Come,' Bobcat's whisper came from right next to Johnnie's ear.

They eased back into the gloom under the trees, both trying to work out where Mary-Lou might be. They wanted no accidents where she was concerned.

'Somebody here's had their damned throat cut!' a voice snarled from the blackness.

Another gun went off. Flame belched out, giving away the firer's position.

'Hell!' somebody screamed. 'I'm shot. You bloody fool, you've shot me.'

'Anybody else comes near me gets shot too!' was all the answer he got.

From the noises being made, it seemed that the rustlers were anxious to get clear of the tents, where it was impossible for them to tell friend from foe. They were spreading out in several directions.

One came blundering in under the trees, and tripped over Johnnie's legs. Almost before he hit the ground, Johnnie was feeling for his head, reaching over his left shoulder for a grip under his chin, and prodding with his Bowie knife over the other shoulder, searching for the throat. The knife was the only way. By shooting, he'd reveal his own position.

Before Johnnie could get a firm grip, the man screamed. All secrecy evaporated with the terrified shrilling, but by then Johnnie was committed to the knife. Hands came up, trying to pull the knife away, but Johnnie had found the place, and forced the tip home. Hot blood gushed over his left hand, still not firmly clamped over the fellow's jaw. The screaming went on, louder than ever, until Johnnie turned the knife in the wound, and levered it outward. Then the sound dropped away, gurgling, bubbling, dying as the man died.

Blessed silence returned.

Nobody came to the man's aid.

Nobody dared get involved.

Johnnie swallowed the bile burning in his throat, and wondered at his own new-found readiness to kill.

As his ears readjusted to the quietness, he picked up the sounds of movement in several directions. Out on the river flats disturbed cattle were lumbering away. Somewhere among the trees a small twig was crushed under a careless foot. In another place somebody brushed against leafage. Neither of those would be Bobcat. Nor would those men have Mary-Lou with them.

If she was anywhere nearby, she'd probably still be in one of the tents. Why was she not making some sort of noise then? She'd have to know that rescuers had come for her.

Cautiously, Johnnie eased back towards the tents again. Just because the first had been found empty once, didn't mean that it was still empty. Anything could have happened under the cover of the shooting and screaming. He checked carefully, listening outside first, and then entering each of the first three tents. All empty, deserted.

Approaching the fourth on hands and knees, his cocked revolver thrust out before him, he sensed a warmth in the pitch black right in front of him. He paused, flattened himself to the earth, and listened. He could smell somebody's dried sweat. There was somebody lying on the ground immediately in front of him. There was no smell of blood, so it wasn't one of the corpses.

Who but Bobcat would lie still like that beside one of the tents? It had to be him.

Gingerly, Johnnie explored with his left hand. Cloth, clothing, a woollen shirt. A hand came down on his own, gripped, held his still. Bobcat.

The Indian was lying with his head pressed to the side of that fourth tent. Johnnie edged in alongside him and listened too. Breathing. Somebody inside was trying to breathe quiedy, and not making a very good job of it.

Why was Bobcat waiting?

Johnnie listened some more. Under that first heard breathing, was a second... very quiet. He'd have missed it, had he not spent that extra time listening.

Still Bobcat waited. Still Johnnie listened.

That quieter breathing wasn't regular. Every now and again there was a catch in the rhythm.

Bobcat's hand slid down Johnnie's back, and stopped at the knife sheathed at his waist. He tapped the sheath.

Bobcat wanted Johnnie to use the knife?

No, he was still waiting for something.

Knife?

Somebody was doing something with a knife. There was irregular breathing, and there was a knife involved.

Realization hit him.

The second breathing was Mary-Lou, and somebody was holding a knife at her throat.

Suddenly gunfire erupted again about a quarter of a mile upstream. One gun fired, was answered by a second, and then came a crash of several weapons firing together. A rustler had run into Cab Phillips and the rest of Johnnie's party.

'Hold still!' a whispered snarl came from the tent.

'You're hurting.' Mary-Lou's voice.

Johnnie was ready to rush in there, but Bobcat continued to hold him still.

Somebody was coming along the tent lines from the other direction. A dark shape blotted out some of the stars.

Bobcat pressed Johnnie to the earth once more, and then was gone, headed around the back of the tent.

'Bert, are you still there?' the newcomer whispered.

'Who's that?' came from inside the tent.

'Me, Vince.'

From his prone position Johnnie saw a second shadow rise up beside Vince. The shadows blended. There was a soft grunt.

Immediately Johnnie moved, reaching for the tent flap, grunting himself as he bent to enter, masking the sounds of what Bobcat was doing to the unfortunate Vince behind him.

'Keep the noise down!' Bert, the man in the tent whispered hoarsely, letting Johnnie place him in the pitch blackness.

Johnnie reached for him, felt the arm with the elbow lifted toward him, and knew that that had to be the one with the knife.

'Watch it,' Bert complained. 'What are you doing?'

What Johnnie was doing was feeling for the wrist, and once he had it, wrenching the arm, knife and all, away from Mary-Lou's throat.

Bert gasped, and thumped at Johnnie with his free hand. Together, they rolled over, with Johnnie hanging on desperately to the knife arm. Johnnie tried to turn his face in under his opponent's body to avoid further blows, and then realized that none were coming. Bert would be using that hand to reach for his gun.

'Ah, shit!' Bert yelped, and began thrashing about. Unbeknown to Johnnie, Mary-Lou, tied hand and foot, had found Bert's other hand, and had her teeth clamped firmly into it.

Then Johnnie had Bert's knife pried away, his two hands to Bert's one. It took only a moment to turn the knife over, feel down the length of Bert's straining arm, and drive the blade home between his ribs. Blood gushed, warm and sticky, soaking Johnnie in gore. He twisted the blade, and worked it back and forth. Bert groaned, kicked out with his legs, and shuddered. Gradually he became still.

'Mary-Lou?' Johnnie whispered, despite all the noise his latest victim had made.

'All right,' she answered, finally unclamping her teeth from the dead hand. 'I'm tied up.'

He felt for her, found an arm, and traced it down. 'We'll soon have you out of here,' he promised, cutting into her bindings with the bloody knife.

'The gang leader was here when the shooting started,' Mary-Lou said. 'He'll be close by somewhere. His name's Dismal... Dismal Dacre.'

'Yes, I know,' Johnnie replied, slicing away the ropes from her ankles. Quickly he told her of his father's arrival on the scene, and of the citizens' band he had with him.

'That's why most of the outlaws have gone off down the river then,' Mary-Lou said.

'Yes, Dad was expecting to meet them,' Johnnie told her. 'He'll deal with them, while we get you out of here.'

'There's still several of them here, including Dacre,' Mary-Lou answered. 'It won't be too easy.'

'Come,' Bobcat's voice came from the flap of the tent. 'Men coming back.'

The night's work was still a long way from being finished.

### NINETEEN

'My gun,' Mary-Lou protested, 'the Baby Colt, it's here somewhere.'

She groped around in the blackness, and shortly gave a grunt of satisfaction. In a moment they heard her strapping it on.

Swiftly the three of them left the tent line and ghosted away into the trees. Any of the rustlers could have been in there also, so they had to move cautiously, but in the end came to the river terrace behind the copse without running into any further trouble.

'Up top,' Bobcat whispered. 'You go up there. Wait for me.'

Unquestioningly, Johnnie accordingly led Mary- Lou up the slope of the terrace, and found a place to wait up on the open mesa above. Just as they were settling down, there came a burst of firing from the trees below them, half-a-dozen shots, followed by the thunder of horses' hooves.

'The rustlers' horses,' Johnnie said. 'Bobcat's driven them off. That should make it difficult for them to get away from us.'

'They won't be in too much of a hurry anyway,' Mary-Lou replied.

'Why's that?'Johnnie asked.

'The gold and the money they got for the cattle they've sold is all down there. They won't be going far without that. There's a fortune there. Sacks and sacks of it. They've sold our beef for ten and twenty times what we can get at Baton Rouge.'

Again gunfire came from the darkness below, but this time far out toward the river. Muzzle flashes showed fire from four or five guns opposed to two.

'That's some of our people, I think,' Johnnie explained. 'I have five more men out there somewhere. Some of the rustlers must have run into them.'

'I hope they're not shooting each other.*

'That's a definite possibility,' Johnnie agreed, 'either for our people or the rustlers. However, our ones have been told to stay together. If they've done that they should be all right.'

'Fools if not,' Bobcat's voice came from out of the night.

'What now?'Johnnie asked him.

Before he could answer another gun exploded some way down the river. There was just the one shot, and no sign of the muzzle flash.

'Wait till morning,' Bobcat advised. 'The rustlers, they shoot at shadows.'

Waiting suited Johnnie. He had no wish to subject Mary-Lou to any other risks. Quickly he told Bobcat what Mary-Lou had said about the money and gold the rustlers had in their camp.

'Good,' the Indian commented. 'Come morning, we take that from them.'

While Bobcat kept watch at the edge of the terrace, Johnnie quietly brought Mary-Lou up to date on what had been happening. She in turn told him about her capture, and imprisonment in the outlaws' camp, where Dacre had intended to use her to keep her friends at bay until he had finished selling their cattle.

'How many has he sold?'Johnnie asked.

'About half of them,' she said, 'perhaps a few more. What's left is still worth a king's ransom if we sell them to the gold prospectors like Dacre's been doing.'

'That money, the gold down there already,' Johnnie suggested. 'If Dad's willing, we should share that evenly with all the men in the citizens' band, the men who've turned out to help us. We get back what's left of the cattle for our part.'

'That would suit me,' Mary-Lou agreed. 'If we sell them to the gold prospectors there'd be enough for me to re-establish our... my ranch.'

'I'd see there was. Perhaps you'd let me help you,' he offered.

'I'd like that,' she said simply, and her hand found his in the darkness.

Before he quite understood how it happened, she was wrapped in his arms, and his lips were pressed sweetly down on hers. After that the night slipped away almost too quickly.

It was hardly a peaceful night. Guns in nervous hands saw to that. Every now and then somebody fired at something, and guns racketed up and down the riverbed. All of the surviving rustlers appeared to have separated in their first panicked flight, and thereafter fired on anybody or anything that came near them. Apparently Johnnie's half-dozen cowpunchers had stalked a couple of the rustlers who had been firing, but appeared to have found the exercise too dangerous. In the second half of the night they also had become content to wait for daylight.

With the first paling of the eastern sky, Bobcat informed them that he intended checking that no horses had returned for the rustlers to find.

'Bad men not get far,' he said. 'When your father's men come, we get them all.'

After the Indian had gone, Johnnie decided that his best course was to keep a watch on the tents where the money and gold was stored.

'Dacre will be doing that too,' Mary-Lou warned.

'That's what I thought,'Johnnie nodded.

'You could wait for your father. All those men could help to capture Dacre.'

'They could,' Johnnie agreed, 'but it's really my job, I think. After all, I was in charge of the first herd he took. That makes him my responsibility.'

Mary-Lou couldn't talk him out of it, but neither could he prevent her from following him down into the trees, and taking up a position not far behind him.

The place he found, while it was still dark under the trees, was between two stout hickory trunks, where a fallen limb gave him good cover from the front. Mary-Lou was under a dead tree, which was propped up by its own snapped-off branches. Both had a good view of the line of tents, and also of the grassy flats out towards the river.

Gradually sunlight crept up the eastern sky, and colour returned to the grass, the trees, the bushes, any of which could have concealed Dacre and his remaining men. They had to be somewhere there, making their last desperate try to collect their loot, and ride out with a fortune before the rest of the vengeful cattlemen caught up with them. They had to know that the few who had already found them would soon be followed by others. They couldn't afford to wait long before they made their play.

Johnnie could. He only hoped his other men had worked that out too.

Quietly he lay and waited. Mary-Lou stayed low, hugging the ground under her sloping tree trunk. Both were wishing they had eyes in the backs of their heads.

The first movement came from far down the river. A horseman appeared on the rim of the eastern terrace. One moment there was just the blank skyline, bright and blue, and the next the pinto horse and its red-shirted rider were there, tiny in the distance; Cab Phillips, unless there was a rustler with an identical horse, and a shirt of that particular redness. They were too far away for most rifles, but somebody had to try. So far as any of the rustlers could see, the rider represented a force which had come between them, and the rest of their people who had gone down river to lay the ambush.

From a position in the trees, a couple of hundred yards downstream from Johnnie, a rifle thumped, its sound deadened by the tree trunks. Immediately four other rifles spoke from different places along the eastern skyline. Seconds later they all fired again.

Johnnie eyed that skyline worriedly, but he couldn't distinguish the men under any of those four patches of drifting gunsmoke. Each had fired twice, and then drawn back from the edge. It was anybody's guess where they would appear next.

All the same, the rustlers had now placed five of their opponents, the horseman and four others, as somewhere on the mesa to that side of the river. There was now no sign of the rustler who had been their target.

Johnnie waited some more. He glanced back at Mary-Lou, and smiled at her encouragingly. She smiled back, nervous but determined. A hell of a good partner that one. A man could do well with her beside him.

The next movement came, a stirring in the low growth across the river. Somebody was wriggling through the grass and scrub over there, trying to reach a draw leading up to the mesa on that side. One of the rustlers was trying to stalk his tormentors.

Johnnie lined up on the movement, prepared to take the first good sighting he got. Bobcat beat him to it, firing from almost the exact spot where the first rustler had fired from. That outlaw, then, had to be dead, dealt with by Bobcat even if all eight shots from across the river had missed him.

Now Bobcat had eliminated the next one too. The man was jerking and shuddering, half-draped over a patch of blackjack oak, where he had reared up when the bullet took him in the head.

For a moment, another head came up not far from him, a confederate shocked into taking a thoughtless look. Johnnie swung his barrel that way, but again was too slow. Three shots came from different places along the eastern skyline, where three rifles had been poised for just such a showing. Another outlaw was gone, three so far, and none of them Dacre. Along with those killed in the night, they must surely by this time have taken out nearly all of them. Nearly, but not quite.

Johnnie wished there had been some way of checking Mary-Lou's count of how many there had been in the camp to start with. Perhaps only Dacre himself was left.

Away down the river Cab Phillips continued to tease whoever might still be there to see him, bringing his pinto a short way along the terrace rim, and then turning away into the hidden plains beyond, offering himself as a target, but not too good a target. Nobody accepted his dare. The price had been shown to be too high.

On his next appearance, back at his original starting point, Cab was joined by another rider, the horse not one Johnnie remembered from the small group who had accompanied him. Soon another rider, and yet another drew up beside them. The newcomers could only be Ding Dong's vanguard; the main party coming up the river behind them.

Opposite Johnnie, across on the eastern rim, a man stood to his feet waving, and moved back from the edge. No shot rang out, despite the easy mark he offered in those few seconds. Dacre had to be there to see him. So had any of the other rustlers still alive.

Further down river a second man stood and waved. Then further on a third, and a fourth. They were waving at somebody out of Johnnie's view, right across the river on the western rim, showing themselves so as not to be fired on by their friends. The main party was coming up along both banks then. If they were evenly split, they constituted a considerable force. The ones Johnnie could see on the eastern side now numbered more than a dozen, Ding Dong prominent among them.

Dacre had to make a run for it soon.

He did.

Not, though, from among the trees or the scrub where Johnnie expected him to be.

There was tearing sound at the back of the third tent along, the one where Mary-Lou had been held. A knife blade protruded through the canvas at the top of the apex, and swept down to cut a long slit. Through it Dismal Dacre forced his way, knife back in its sheath, and revolvers in both hands.

A pair of bulky saddle bags hung down over his chest, the connecting strap passing around the back of his neck. They must have been heavy. He was tilted well back on his feet, and stumped weightily on the ground as he walked.

Johnnie had the rifle on him from just thirty yards away, an easy shot from safe cover... an easy shot for somebody else that is. Johnnie still couldn't take it.

'Drop them Dacre!' he roared, lumbering to his feet with the rifle poked out.

Dacre whirled his way with no intention of dropping anything. The outlaw's eyes blazed with hatred as he recognized his challenger.

Johnnie fired. His lead whacked into the righthand saddlebag just as Dacre fired. Both his shots went high.

As Dacre stumbled back a pace, gold coins spilling from a gash in his righthand bag, he threw down again, but Johnnie heaved the empty rifle at him, twisted away, and reached for his own ill-matched revolvers. Bark flew from the tree beside him. The blast of Dacre's twin weapons was a physical force in itself.

Again Dacre fired. Still off balance, again his lead flew wild.

Then Johnnie fired, the Lefancheaux first, the Remington afterwards, each aimed separately. One shot went home between the bags. The other took Dacre fair in the throat. Both guns dropped from hands suddenly gone limp, and the outlaw chief fell back into the opening he had ripped in the tent.

Wide eyed, Johnnie stared at him falling, appalled at what he had done to the man, much and all as it had needed to be done. So intent was he on the collapse of his enemy, he failed to see the snout of another revolver appear through the hole in the tent at head height.

Not so Mary-Lou. She saw it. Five times she fired, past Johnnie's shoulder, emptying her little Colt through the fabric of the tent. Every bullet hit the man still hiding inside. He pitched partly through the torn opening, and sprawled over the body of his dead leader. A bowler hat rolled free, and came to rest brim up.

'That's it,' Bobcat called, appearing from the trees to their right. 'That's my count. Them's the last two.'

'Thank the dear Lord for that!' Johnnie let his held breath go in a rush. He was standing there shaking, a smoking gun still in each hand. 'I don't think I could do that again.'

'I could,' Mary-Lou said, though she was no steadier, and he could feel her trembling when he holstered his weapons, and clasped her to his side. 'I could,' she said, 'given the same reasons.'

'You could too,' Bobcat grinned at Johnnie. 'Somebody kill your friends, threaten your family, you could. Somebody hurt Mary-Lou again, you will, eh?'

Johnnie looked down at her as they stood with an arm about each other. It was true. Anybody laid a hand on her again, he most certainly would.

When his father rode up, a few minutes later, with Cab Phillips at his side, and the rest of the posse on his heels, Dryfe Sands Johnnie and the Cumberland Belle were standing over their victims, calmly reloading their weapons. Their friend Bobcat was dragging sacks of coins out of the tent.

One way or another, the riders were quite impressed.

