They weren’t going to stand for that. Their hands edged toward their guns.
“You fellas best stay on your horses,” Bo said in a quiet, dangerous voice.
Ridley’s angular face darkened with fury. “You old codgers are going to shoot it out with us?” he demanded as if he couldn’t believe it.
“If we have to,” Bo said.
The dust that had been kicked up by the riders had blown away. Now the air was filled with the tense expectation of gunplay and sudden death instead.
CHAPTER 2
Before anybody could slap leather, one of Ridley’s men spoke up, saying, “Somebody comin’ over yonder, boss.”
He was looking back to the east, behind Bo and Scratch, and for a second Bo thought it was just a trick to get the two of them to turn around so Ridley’s gun hawks could get the drop on them.
But then Bo heard the distant pounding of hoof-beats.
“Hold it,” Ridley snapped to his men. “Don’t start anything. Not until we find out who that is.”
Bo had a hunch who the newcomers were. They were coming from the direction of Circle JP headquarters, so in all likelihood they were some of Big John Peeler’s men.
That turned out to be the case. After a couple of tense minutes, eight riders led by Joe Archibald swept up. Big John ramrodded his own crew, but Archibald was his segundo and gave all the orders that Peeler didn’t.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded of Bo and Scratch, unwittingly echoing what Ridley had said a few minutes earlier.
Scratch nodded toward the rival rancher. “Mr. Ridley here’s got a problem with this fence Big John told us to put up, Joe.”
“Of course I’ve got a problem,” Ridley said. “The damn fence is on my range!”
Archibald looked toward the hills, then turned his head to gaze toward the line of mesas. Then he faced Ridley again and said, “Looks like it’s in the right place to me.”
“It’s half a mile too far west!”
“A minute ago you said a thousand yards,” Scratch said, drawing a murderous glower from Ridley.
Archibald leaned forward slightly in his saddle and said, “This fence is stayin’ right here, Ridley…unless you think four against eight is good odds for an argument.”
Ridley’s face turned an even darker, mottled shade of red, but before he could say anything, Bo spoke up.
“Wait a minute, Archibald. This is between Ridley and his men, and Scratch and me. We’re the ones he came up to and started bellowing at and ordering around.”
Under his breath, Scratch said, “Bo, what’re you doin’?”
Bo ignored his old friend’s question. “If anybody settles this, it ought to be Scratch and me.”
Archibald grunted. “Is that so? Have you gone loco, Creel? They outnumber you two to one.”
“We’ve faced long odds before, haven’t we, Scratch?”
“Yeah, but not when we didn’t have to. Dang it, Bo, what’s got into you?”
“I just think we ought to fight our own fights—”
Archibald sent his horse forward, and the men with him followed suit. They bulled past Bo and Scratch to face Ridley and his men across the fence line.
“You two saddle tramps just stay out of this,” Archibald snapped. “This is between Ridley’s bunch and ours, and anyway, you’re too old to be gettin’ mixed up in ruckuses like this. Just stay out of the way.”
Bo’s jaw clamped tight. His breath hissed between his teeth. Scratch watched him with a worried frown.
Ridley shook a finger at Archibald. “This isn’t over!” he blustered. “There’ll be another day, Archibald. And tell Peeler that this damned fence won’t stand, either!”
“Tell him your own damned self if you want to come callin’,” Archibald said.
Ridley spun his horse around and jabbed his spurs cruelly into its flanks. He galloped away, back toward his ranch headquarters, with his men following him.
Archibald watched them go for a moment, then turned to the men with him. “All right,” he said. “I want this fence finished today, so you’re all gonna work on it.”
“Mr. Peeler gave that job to us,” Bo protested.
“Well, you ain’t gonna get it done quick enough. You and Morton can still help, but we’ll finish it. Then we can have men ridin’ patrol on it all the time to make sure Ridley doesn’t try anything.”
Scratch touched his old friend’s arm. “Come on, Bo. Look at it like this—at least we don’t have to work out here in the hot sun all day by ourselves.”
“Yeah,” Bo said with bitter cynicism in his voice. “Aren’t we lucky?”
No cowboy enjoyed stringing wire, so there was plenty of complaining going on as the men set to work, but nobody was going to contradict Archibald’s orders. And, Bo had to admit, with ten men working instead of two, the fence went up a lot quicker. It would have taken him and Scratch days to string the wire across the valley by themselves. With the other men pitching in, the job could be done in a day, as Archibald had commanded.
As the day went on, a sneaking suspicion began to lurk in the back of Bo’s mind. It seemed to him like Archibald and the other men had shown up awfully conveniently. Maybe Peeler had sent him and Scratch out by themselves as bait of a sort, to find out if Ridley was keeping an eye on the valley. Archibald could have followed them, with orders to step in if Ridley showed up at the fence line. Forcing Ridley to back down was just the sort of slap in the face that Big John would enjoy dealing out to his rival.
By late afternoon, the fence was finished. Archibald told a couple of the men to stay there and patrol the length of it until he got back to headquarters and sent some relief out to them. Then he said, “Creel, you and Morton load up the wire that’s left and take the wagon back.”
Bo looked up at the segundo, who was mounted again, and said, “Listen, Joe, did the boss set this up just to get Ridley’s goat?”
Archibald frowned at him. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“I thought Big John and Ridley had agreed about putting up a fence and where it was supposed to be.”
“It’s supposed to be right here where it is. If you got a problem with that, Creel, maybe you better draw your time and ride on.”
“Now, hold on,” Scratch said. “We don’t want to go jumpin’ to no conclusions such as that. I reckon Bo was just a mite curious, that’s all.”
“It don’t
