“You stay with the horses. Keep them quiet. Rest of you, follow me.”
Ignoring the stiffness in his legs, he moved up the hill and into the brush, smelling wood smoke, coffee, maybe even beefsteak. Near the crest, he dropped to his stomach and crawled the final few rods until he could look down at the line shack.
“I don’t see any cattle,” Seth Thomas said softly.
“No.” But on the far side of the log cabin he could make out a black birch farm wagon, worn but useable, and five horses in a rawhide-looking corral behind the line shack, buttressed against sandstone formations that jutted out of the floor like tombstones. Smoke snaked from the cabin’s stovepipe.
“How many times can that Mauser of yours shoot?” Garrett asked.
Jason C. Hughes withdrew a five-shell clip from his jacket pocket. “As fast as I can work the bolt,” he said with a grin. “I have plenty of ammunition.”
“All right,” Garrett said, “here’s the way we play this hand.” He handed his Winchester to Seth Thomas. “You head down to the corral, keep upwind of the horses. Hughes, you stay put right here where you got a clear shot at the door. Abraham, you come with me. Stay behind that rock yonder. I’ll get to the well, then holler for them to surrender.”
“And if they don’t?” Jason C. Hughes asked.
“They’d better. None of y’all pull a trigger till I fire a round. Then just shoot over that line shack four or five times apiece, fast as you can. I want them to think I got an army of deputies out here.”
“Hot damn!” Hughes shouted. “This is a hell of a lot better than shooting some elk!”
Garrett glared at him, and Hughes shrugged.
“Sorry, old man,” he whispered. “You best hurry.”
He had carried the Colt since the War of the Rebellion, an old cap-and-ball .44 that he had eventually converted to take brass cartridges. When he reached the well, he pulled the revolver, blew on the cylinder, eased back the hammer, and looked around him. Abraham crouched behind the rocks, Colt automatic in a sweaty hand. Seth Thomas knelt behind the corner post of the corral, the .30-30 aimed at the shack’s roof. Up on the hill, sunlight reflected off Jason C. Hughes’s Mauser, and Garrett smiled.
This might work, he thought, and won’t there be some stories told at the bunkhouse this winter. Lin Garrett brings in a band of rustlers with nothing but a bunch of dudes riding for him. He fired a round into the air, then yelled, “I’m a federal marshal, and I got a posse surrounding you!” With a nod, he listened to the gunfire, keeping his eyes on Abraham, making sure the fool kid didn’t accidentally shoot him again, and when the echoes died down, as Abraham slid another clip into the Colt, Garrett thought about the lie he had just told. Well, he had been a federal deputy some years back, and he did have something of a posse.
“Come out with your hands up!” he yelled at the cabin door. “Else we’ll gun you sons of bitches down or burn you to a crisp!”
The door swung open, a mustached young man stepped out, waving a faded bandanna, saying, “Don’t shoot no more!”
Immediately, Jason C. Hughes dropped him with a bullet through his leg.
“Damn it!” Garrett climbed to his feet, not even thinking that those other three rustlers might gun him down, yelling at Hughes. The horses loped around the corral, close to the poles, spilling Seth Thomas from his seat, and Abraham muttered something that sounded like a laugh.
“Hold your fire! And the rest of you sons of bitches come out of that shack before we torch the damned thing!”
Inside the cabin, a baby cried.
“Aw,” Garrett said, “hell.”
“Listen, mister,” the man with the mustache said through clenched teeth, “I got a sick wife and a baby. Nothin’ to eat hardly. It ain’t like you think.”
Garrett drew a silk bandanna through the bullet hole in the meaty part of the man’s thigh, then splashed whiskey over the wound. The man screamed and almost fell out of the chair.
“This is Triangle A land,” Garrett told him. “You’re squatting.”
“I know that, but my wife took sick. Wasn’t nobody here. Been tryin’ to get to Lander. Matilda, that’s my missus yonder, she’s got a sister up there.”
Garrett looked at the woman, feverish, lying on a cot, saw Seth Thomas bouncing the baby girl on his knee, and ran the man’s story through his head once again.
Three riders stopped for the night, each with an extra horse, suggested he help them round up some cattle, said they’d pay him five dollars. He didn’t know the stock was stolen, just thought he was helping out.
That part was a lie. They’d taken the cattle to a box canyon, worked the brands with running irons. No, this gent knew they were rustlers. But…well…Garrett had thrown a wide loop in his younger days, too. Lots of cowmen had.
Once they had driven the cattle back here, the wounded man had said, the three strangers had left the winded horses in the corral, saddled fresh mounts, and ridden out with the cattle. Tracks Garrett had found told him that much was probably true. The three horses left behind were most likely stolen.
“You didn’t suspicion them when they left their horses behind?” he asked.
The man grimaced. “Mister…” was all he could say, sweating heavily.
“You left your wife, sick as she was, and kid here?” Garrett asked him again.
“Matilda insisted on it. Said she was feelin’ better. Wouldn’t be gone more’n a couple of days, and five dollars is a lot of money to me.” He bit his lip against the pain. “When I got back, Matilda had taken another bad turn. You gotta believe me, mister!”
“You butchered one of those steers.”
“They let me. Give me a steer instead of money. Wife’s sick. My girl’s only eighteen months old. You tell me you’d let your family starve. I’ll work off whatever I owe for the beef. And for the week I been at your cabin.”
“You’ll work it off, mister,” Jason C. Hughes said from the doorway. “With a rope.”
The man’s eyes widened. “Look, I got a wife, a daughter, you can’t—”
“Where’d your pards go?” Garrett asked him.
“They wasn’t my pards. Just strangers.”
“Their names?”
“I don’t know. One called hisself Red. There was a tall one, about your size, went by the name of Ed. The other fellow was a Mexican. He never said much. Never heard his name that I recollect.”
“Where’d they go?” Garrett asked again.
“Think they said Virginia Dale. They’re in Colorado by now.”
“Todd and me have the rope ready, old man,” Jason C. Hughes said. “Let’s string him up.”
