Judith, she woke up and set to making some hot broth, and by the time I'd patched him up she was about ready with it. I figured he'd lost blood, so I mixed up some salt water and had him drink that. We had been doing that for lost blood for years back, and it seemed to help.
He was game, I'll say that for him. Whilst Judith fed soup into him, I had a look at his foot.
"Wagon tongue fell on it," he said. "Rider jumped his horse into camp and knocked the wagon tongue over and she hit me on the instep."
His foot was badly swollen, and I had to cut the boot off. He stared at me between swallows of soup. "Look at that now!" he worried. "Best pair of boots I ever did have! Bought 'em a month back in Fort Worth."
"You a Texan?"
"Not reg'lar. I'm an Arkansawyer. I been cookin' for a cow outfit trailin' stock up from the Nueces country. Last evenin' a man stopped by our wagon for a bite of grub. He was a lean, dark, thin sort of man with narrow eyes. He was rough-dressed, but he didn't look western." He glanced up, suddenly wary. "Fact is, he talked somewhat like you boys."
"Don't be troubled. There's no kin of ours about here."
"He wore a sort of red sash and carried a rifle like he was born to it - "
"Colby Rafin!" Judith said.
"You called it, I didn't," I said.
"Anyway, he et and then rode off. About the time we'd been an hour abed, they come a-hellin' out of the night. Must've been a dozen of them or twenty. They come chargin' through camp, a-shootin' and a-yellin' and they drove off our herd, drove them to hell off down the country."
"You'd better catch some rest. You look done in."
He looked straight at me. "I aint a-gonna make it, amigo, an' you know it."
Judith, she looked at me, all white and funny, but I said to him, "You got anybody you want us to tell?"
"I got no kin. Bald-Knobbers killed them all, a long time back. Down Texas way my boss was Evan Hawkes, a fine man. He lost a sight out there this night - his herd, his outfit, and his boy."
"Boy?"
"Youngster ... mebbe thirteen. He had been beggin' the boss to let him ride north with us instead of on the cars. We were to meet Hawkes in Dodge."
"Are you sure about the boy?"
"Seen him fall. A man shot right into him, rode over him. If any of our outfit got away it was one of the boys on night herd."
He sat quiet for a while, and I stole a glance at Judith. She was looking almighty serious, and she had to realize that bunch of raiders that stole the herd and killed the boy had been the Fetchen outfit. Colby Rafin was never far from Black.
"They know they got you?"
"Figured it. They knew I was knocked down by the wagon tongue, and then one of them shot into me as he jumped his horse over."
As carefully as I could, I was easing the biggest sticks away from the fire so it would burn down fast. One thing was sure. That Fetchen outfit had followed us west. But this was no place or time to have a run-in with them.
The man opened his eyes after a bit and looked at Judith. "Ma'am? In my shirt pocket I got a gold locket. Ain't much, mebbe, but my ma wore it her life long, and her ma before her. I'd take it kindly, if you'd have it as a present."
"Yes ... thank you."
"You got tender hands, ma'am, mighty gentle hands. Been a long time since a woman touched me ... gentlelike. It's a fine thing to remember, ma'am."
I'd moved off to the edge of the darkness, listening for trouble riding our way, but I could faintly hear him still talking. "That tall man here," he said, "he carries the look of an eagle. He'll make tracks in the land, ma'am. You better latch onto him, ma'am, if you ain't spoke for. His kind run mighty scarce."
After a moment, he opened his eyes again. "You knowed that man come to my camp?"
"Colby Rafin." She was silent for a moment, and then she said, "They were looking for us, I think."
"For him?" he half-lifted a hand toward me. "They're crazy!"
Galloway came in out of the dark, and I whispered to him about Rafin and how the herd was lost.
"It's like them - outlaws always. Now they've turned cattle thieves."
Neither one of us had much to say, because we were both thinking the same thing. The Fetchens had come west, all right, and they had come a-hunting us. The trouble was they had us outnumbered by a good bit, and running off this herd showed they'd taken the full step from being rowdies and trouble makers to becoming genuine outlaws. From now on it would be a fight to the death against an outfit that would stop at nothing ... and us with a girl to watch out for.
That Colorado ranch began to look mighty far away, and I was cursing the hour when I first saw Costello or Judith.
Not that we minded a fight. We Sacketts never had much time for anything else. If we weren't fighting for our country we were fighting men who still believed in rule by the gun, and no Sackett I ever heard of had ever drawn a gun on a man except in self-defense, or in defense of his country or his honor.
Right then I was glad Galloway stood beside me. Nobody ever needed an army when they had Galloway, and maybe one other Sackett ... it didn't make much difference which one.
Chapter 3
We hit trail before sunup, keeping off the skyline as much as possible, but always moving westward, riding sidewise in the saddle so as we could look all around, Galloway facing one way, me the other.
There was a look to the sky that spelled a weather change, but we didn't pay it no mind, figuring only to get distance behind us.
Short of noon a man came up from the south riding a paint pony and hazing about thirty head of cattle. When he put eyes on us he rode his pony around the cattle and came up to us, keeping his Winchester handy and studying us careful-like.
"You pass anybody back yonder? I'm huntin' my outfit."
The brand on his pony and those cattle spelled the story for me -a Half-Box H. "You got stampeded a while back," I said, "and one of your outfit died in our camp."
"Which one?"
"Said he was the cook. Come to think on it, he never did give us his name. Said he rode for Evan Hawkes, and he told us Hawkes's boy got killed in the stampede."
The man's face showed shock. "The boy's dead? That'll go hard on the boss. He set store by the lad."
Me, I curled one leg around the pommel and pushed my hat back. "Mister, looks to me like your herd was scattered hell to breakfast. We covered some miles back yonder and seen nobody. What you figure to do?"
"Drive these cattle into Dodge an' report to Evan Hawkes. All I can do."
He told me his name was Briggs. "Might as well ride with us," I said to him, "It's one more gun for each of us."
"What's that mean?"
"That was James Black Fetchen's outfit from Tennessee who jumped your herd. They're hunting us. If we meet up with them there'll be shooting, and you can lay to it that if they see you're alive they'll be after you, too "
"I'll ride along," he said.
During the next hour we picked up thirteen head of scattered cattle wearing the Hawkes brand. By nightfall we had close to fifty head more. We'd scarcely made camp when we were hailed out of the night ... in those days no man in his right mind rode up to a strange camp without giving them a call.
"That'll be Ladder Walker," Briggs said. "I know the voice."
Walker was an extra tall, extra lean man, which was why they called him Ladder. He was driving six head of steers, and he had a lump on his skull and a grouch over what happened. "You catch sight of any of that bunch?" he asked Briggs. "All I ask is a sight down a gun barrel at them."
"You stand easy, friend," Galloway said. "That's a mean outfit. If they can help it you'll not get a shooting chance."
The upshot of it was that of the herd of fifteen hundred cattle the Half-Box H sent up the trail, we drove into Dodge with a hundred and twenty, picked up along the way. No doubt a few more riders could have combed twice that number out of the breaks along the creeks and the coulees, scattered stuff left behind from the stampede.