he introduced himself.
Abigail turned to him. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Morton,” she said. “And your friend is…?”
Scratch waved the hand holding the Stetson in Bo’s general direction. “That’s Bo Creel. Don’t let that look on his face fool you, ma’am. He ain’t as sour in disposition as he appears. Not quite.”
Bo grunted and said from the driver’s box, “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Sutherland. Just wish it was under better circumstances.”
“So do I,” said Ponderosa. “In case anybody’s forgotten, I got a dang bullet hole in my carcass!”
“Yes, and I’ll take you down to Dr. Chambers’ house right now,” Abigail told him. “Can you walk all right?”
Ponderosa sniffed. “I reckon. Got hit in the shoulder, not the leg. I was a mite dizzy earlier, but I’m feelin’ better now.”
Abigail got an arm around his waist to help support him, and they started along the street toward the rest of the settlement. She glanced up at her son as they passed the front of the coach and asked, “Can you take care of the team, Gil?”
“Sure. But where’s Dave?”
“I don’t know,” Abigail said, and that worried look was back on her face, as well as the concern that could be heard in her voice.
“We’ll give you a hand with those horses, son,” Scratch said as he put his hat back on. “Won’t we, Bo?”
“Yeah.” Bo placed the shotgun on the floorboard where he had found it.
Gil got the team moving again and drove the stagecoach around the adobe office to the barn in the rear. He took the coach all the way into the barn before stopping. Scratch followed, leading his horse.
Bo and Gil climbed down from the box. Along with Scratch, they went to work unhitching the horses. Watching the sure, practiced actions of the older men, Gil commented, “You fellas have worked around stagecoaches before, haven’t you?”
“We ran a way station in Kansas for a while,” Bo replied.
“And we hired on as jehus and shotgun guards in other places,” Scratch added. “Fact is, you won’t find many jobs on the frontier that we ain’t done at one time or another. Ain’t that right, Bo?”
“Except for donning aprons and clerking in a store,” Bo said. “I don’t think we’ve ever done that.”
A shudder went through Scratch. “And we ain’t gonna,” he declared.
When the team had been unhitched and the horses turned out into the corral, Gil reached into the compartment under the driver’s seat on the coach and pulled out a canvas pouch. “I’ll take the mail down to the post office,” he said. “If you’re going to be staying around Red Butte for a while, feel free to unsaddle your horses, give them some grain, and put them in the corral with the others if you want to.”
Scratch looked at Bo and asked, “What do you think? We gonna be stayin’ in these parts for a while?”
“We don’t have anywhere else we have to be,” Bo replied. “And Red Butte looks like a pretty nice little town.”
Scratch grinned. “That’s what I was thinkin’.” To Gil, he added, “Much obliged for the hospitality, son.”
Gil lifted a hand in farewell and left the barn while Bo was untying his dun from the back of the stagecoach. Bo commented, “I notice you started calling that boy ‘son’ as soon as you got a look at his mother. Thinking about settling down with the Widow Sutherland, are you?”
“Me?” Scratch held his hand over his heart for a moment, then grinned. “You got to admit, Bo, she’s a fine figure of a woman.”
“It was a pretty picture,” Bo mused, “her standing there on that porch with the wind in her hair and those cactus roses blooming at her feet. But we don’t know a blasted thing about her, other than the fact that she’s got a couple of sons and a stage line started by her late husband. We don’t even know how long he’s been gone. She may still be in mourning.”
“Wasn’t wearin’ black,” Scratch pointed out.
“No, she wasn’t, that’s true,” Bo admitted as he undid one of his saddle cinches.
“And she’s got a whole heap o’problems on her plate, from the sound of it. Might be we could give her a hand with ’em.”
“Nobody’s asked us for our help.”
“Give it time. Anyway, ain’t you curious about what’s goin’ on around here? You always did like to get to the bottom of any trouble we ran into.”
“That’s true,” Bo said with a shrug. “I guess we could hang around for a while and see what happens. Like I said, it seems like a pretty nice little town.”
Scratch grinned. “And a pretty nice little woman, too.”
Bo just rolled his eyes and shook his head.
CHAPTER 3
There were a couple of rocking chairs on the porch of the adobe office. Bo and Scratch walked around the building after tending to their horses and sat down in those chairs to wait. They weren’t sure what they were waiting for, but that was a pretty common situation. Years of drifting had taught them to be patient.
They didn’t have to wait long for something to happen. Three men came down the street and stopped in front of the headquarters of the Sutherland Stage Line. One of them was young, twenty or twenty-one, more than likely, and his brown hair and the cast of his features resembled those of Gil Sutherland. Bo figured he and Scratch were looking at the heretofore-missing Dave Sutherland, Gil’s younger brother.
The other two men were older but still in their twenties. One was tall and scrawny, with a shock of straw-colored hair under a battered, pushed-back hat. The other was short and broad, built like a bull, with an animal-like dullness in his eyes and on his face. He wore a derby over dark hair that grew down low on his forehead.
“You hombres looking for somebody?” asked the young man Bo and Scratch took to be Dave Sutherland. He swayed back and forth, and his speech was slurred enough to indicate that he’d been drinking.
The afternoon was well advanced, so it wasn’t like he was drunk first thing in the morning or anything like that. Still, he was a mite young to be putting away enough liquor to get him in such a condition. His companions might have been drinking, too, but they didn’t appear to be as snockered as young Dave.
“We’re waiting for Mrs. Sutherland to get back,” Bo said.
“If you wanna buy tickets on the st-stage, you might as well wait until in the morning. There’s one due in this afternoon any time now, and there won’t be another one leaving until tomorrow.”
Dave was making a visible effort to stand up straight, and he was being more careful and precise when he talked now, two more signs that he’d guzzled too much rotgut.
“Today’s
