Gustav shot a sour glare my way, then went back to inspecting the bodies and the ground around them. I plunged the shovel back into the earth, and neither one of us said a thing until it came time to settle the boys into the shallow little hole they were going to share for the rest of forever.
Seeing as how I’d just about broken my back digging, I made Gustav do the dragging. He rolled Peanuts into the earth first, then went back for Billy. When we had the boys curled up together, we piled on a load of rocks so the coyotes wouldn’t get at them. We didn’t throw around any words of consecration, each of us still being vexed with the other and just Christian enough to know that men who hadn’t been inside a church in ten years don’t have any business playing preacher.
Before we headed out to hook up with the outfit again, Gustav had us do a little ride south. We’d barely gone a hundred feet when we came to a fresh trail pushing east through the brush.
“You still wanna go get yourself killed, you just ride that trail good and hard,” Gustav said to me.
Our little brotherly spats tend to live and die within the span of an hour. I’m just not good at grudge-holding. So I was ready to patch things up by now.
“So what do you figure happened, big brother?” I asked.
“I’m still figurin’,” Gustav said warily.
“Well, here’s how I see it. A few wild bucks — renegades — they jumped Billy and Peanuts, cut out some cattle, then fired off a few shots to get a stampede goin’. They knew that’d scatter the rest of us while they skedaddled.”
Gustav nodded slowly. “Makes sense.”
“Sure it does. What other way would you reckon it?”
Instead of answering, Gustav pointed at the trail we’d just come across and asked a question of his own.
“What does that look like to you? Maybe a dozen head? Four or five horses?”
I’m not as good with trails as my brother. I can read English. He can read hoofprints. So it was best just to agree.
“That seems about right,” I said. “So?”
Gustav just shook his head sadly, like he was puzzled how such a featherbrain came to be a blood relation. He turned his horse and kicked him into a gallop. I followed, and we were too busy riding to have any parley until we caught up with the herd a few hours later.
Charlie and the rest of the boys had finished rounding up strays and were doing a count — a mighty big undertaking when you’ve got three thousand animals to throw a number on. We reported what we’d found, and everybody put together the same story I had. Naturally, there was some talk about hunting down the dirty redskins who’d cut up Billy and Peanuts, but Charlie put a bullet through that notion pretty fast. Dodge City was two weeks north of us. When we went in for supplies there, we’d spread word of what had happened, but that was all that could be done. We’d lost only fifteen head to the raiders and the stampede, leaving three thousand steers to look after and just ten cowpunchers left to do it.
“If it were up to me, I’d let all you Indian fighters go get yourself bushwhacked,” Charlie said. “But it’s not up to me. It’s up to our employer, the Lone Star Land and Cattle Company, Incorporated. And we know what they want: They want the job done. That’s what we’re here for and that’s what we’re gonna do. Any arguments?”
There weren’t any, but there was more than a little grumbling. My brother kept out of it, though. He was even more tight-lipped than usual. He didn’t open his mouth unless it was to stick some beans and bacon in it at supper time. His eyes had gone kind of faraway and unfocused, like he didn’t notice me, the boys, the cattle, the horse underneath his rump, nothing.
“Why’s Old Red gone so quiet on us again?” Greasy Pete asked me the day after we buried Billy and Peanuts. “Did one of them Comanches cut out his tongue?”
All I could do was shrug. That very morning I’d asked Gustav what had him all hushed up and the only thing he’d say was, “I’m tryin’ to introspect.”
The next day, we all had something new to think on. Gustav and I were riding point up at the front of the herd, him on the right side, me on the left, both of us just behind Charlie, who as trail boss was usually a quick trot ahead leading the way. We were just loping along casual as can be, sloping low in our saddles, dreaming of rocking chairs and feather beds, when a sound bounced out of the air up ahead and straightened out our spines. It was a gunshot, not too far away by the sound of it. I turned to look at Gustav, and he was already yipping his horse into a gallop. I did likewise.
“What do you think?” Charlie asked once we’d come pounding to a halt next to him.
“Came from that washout up ahead there,” Gustav said, pointing at something that didn’t look like anything more than a streak of brown in the grass. But my brother’s got eyes and ears as sharp as a razor blade, so I didn’t doubt he was right.
Neither did Charlie. He pulled out his forty-five. “All right, Old Red. You and me’ll ride on into it and see what we see. Big Red, you stay up top and hug the edge. Not too tight, though. If this is some kinda ambush, you’ll be our ace in the hole.”
“Or you’ll be mine,” I said, drawing out my own six-shooter. “Kinda depends on who gets ambushed where, don’t it?”
“Only one way to find out,” Gustav said, and on those cheerful words of parting we rode off.
There was a washout up ahead, just like my brother said. I waited a minute while he and Charlie worked their horses down into the dried-out creek bed, then I wheeled my mount to the west and trotted off. I stayed just close enough to the washout to follow the sound of hooves and the cloud of dust they kicked up.
After maybe five minutes of riding, the dust cloud stopped and drifted apart on the breeze as the hoof beats came to a halt. I stopped, too, and heard words bounce up out of the gully.
“Easy there, mister,” I heard Gustav say. “No need to go pullin’ out any hardware.”
I knew my brother wasn’t really talking to whoever was down there with him and Charlie. He was talking to me, telling me what he saw. I slipped off my horse quiet as can be and slinked over to the washout’s edge. Down below, just a few feet away, was a man standing next to a prone pinto. The dirt around the horse’s head was black-red with blood. A saddle sat on the ground near the man’s feet. He had a gun in his hand, and it was all set to go off in the general direction of my brother’s belly.
“Who’re you?” the man growled.
“Us? Oh, we’re nobody. Just some drovers movin’ through with some cattle,” my brother said from up on his horse, sounding as cool as lemonade with ice. “Me and Charlie here — oh, my name’s Gustav Amlingmeyer, by the by — we’re headed up to Billings from Brownsville. Been out on the trail nearly two months. And how about yourself? Where you headed?”
Of course, this was uncommonly chatty for my brother. But he wasn’t being sociable. He was giving me time to angle around behind the hombre with the gun.
“If you don’t know, then it ain’t none of your concern,” the man said to my brother. The gun barrel wasn’t angling down a hair. “Now why don’t you two just get offa them horses.”
Charlie and Gustav looked at each other, and Gustav gave a nod. “All right,” he said. “We’ll come on down. Won’t we, little brother?”
Well, you couldn’t ask for a plainer signal than that. I jumped, landing next to the man like a bag of hammers. I only got one hand on him, though, and he spun out of my grasp, off balance. But he looked a little dazed, and I managed to get my feet planted before he could bring his shooting iron back into the game. I threw a fist at him, and though it only seemed to graze his chin his head snapped back and his eyelids fluttered and his knees gave out from under him. He dropped the six-shooter and toppled backwards into the dirt next to the dead horse.