bodies again. “What about them?”
“I’ll be damned if I’m gonna get their blood all over my buckboard,” Cecil Tolliver said. “When we get to the ranch, I’ll send a rider to San Rosa to notify the law. In the meantime, a couple o’ my hands can come back out with a work wagon to load up the carcasses. The undertaker can come to the ranch to get ’em for plantin’.”
“There’s law in San Rosa?”
“Yeah, a town marshal who don’t amount to much. But there’s a company of Rangers that’s been usin’ the town as their headquarters for a spell, while they try to track down some bandits who’ve been raisin’ hell around here.”
Frank’s interest perked up at the mention of Texas Rangers. Over the past year or so he had shared several adventures with a young Ranger named Tyler Beaumont. Beaumont was back home with his wife in Weath-erford now, recuperating from injuries he had received in that fence-cutting dustup in Brown County. Frank respected the Rangers a great deal as a force for law and order, even though his reputation as a gunfighter sometimes made the Rangers look on him with suspicion.
He wasn’t looking for trouble down here along the border, though, so it was unlikely he would clash with the lawmen.
Tolliver and Ben climbed onto the seat of the buckboard. Frank tied his packhorse on at the back of the vehicle, then sat down with his legs dangling off the rear. When he snapped his fingers, Dog jumped onto the buckboard and settled down beside him. Tolliver got the team moving and drove on toward his ranch, the Rocking T.
Frank saw cattle in the chaparral as the buckboard rolled along. They were longhorns, the sort of tough, hardy breed that was required in this brushy country. Longhorns seemed to survive, even to thrive, in it where other breeds had fallen by the wayside. The ugly, dangerous brutes had been the beginning of the cattle industry in Texas, back in the days immediately following the Civil War. Animals that had been valuable only for their hide and tallow had suddenly become beef on the hoof, the source of a small fortune for the men daring enough and tough enough to round them up and make the long drive over the trails to the railhead in Kansas.
As a young cowboy, Frank had ridden along on more than one of those drives, pushing the balky cattle through dust and rain, heat and cold, and danger from Indians and outlaws. Since the railroads had reached Texas, the days of such cattle drives were over. Now a man seldom had to move his herds more than a hundred miles or so before reaching a shipping point. As much as he lamented some things about the settling of the West, Frank didn’t miss those cattle drives. They had been long, arduous, perilous work.
With an arm looped around Dog’s shaggy neck, he turned his head and asked the Tollivers, “How much stock have you been losing lately?”
“Not that much,” Ben said.
His father snorted. “Not that much at one time, you mean. Half a dozen here, a dozen there. But it sure as hell adds up.”
Frank knew what Tolliver meant. Rustlers could make a big raid on a ranch, or they could bleed it dry over time. Either method could prove devastating to a cattleman.
“The Rangers haven’t been able to get a line on the wide-loopers?”
“They’re too busy lookin’ for the Black Scorpion.”
“The Black Scorpion?” Frank repeated. “What’s that?”
“You mean who’s that. You recollect what I said about the Rangers huntin’ for a gang of owlhoots? Well, the Black Scorpion is the boss outlaw, the son of a bitch who heads up that gang.”
Ben laughed. “Now you’re talking like the one who’s been reading dime novels, Pa.”
“The Black Scorpion’s real, damn it,” Tolliver said with a scowl. “Folks have seen him, dressed all in black and wearin’ a mask, leadin’ that bloodthirsty bunch o’ desperadoes.”
That sounded pretty far-fetched to Frank too, like the creation of one of those ink-stained wretches who made up stories about him. There might be some truth to it, though. The West had seen mysterious masked bandits before, such as Black Bart out in California. Frank was going to have to see this so-called Black Scorpion for himself, though, before he would really believe in such an individual.
Ben was equally skeptical, saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it. It seems to me that Captain Wedge and the Rangers are wasting their time looking for phantoms when they ought to be hunting down rustlers.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna argue about that,” his father said. “I wish they’d do something about the damn rustlers too.”
Frank sat in the back of the buckboard and mulled over what he had heard. He had come down here to the border country looking for someplace warm and peaceful. It was warm, all right, but evidently far from peaceful, what with the feud between Cecil Tolliver and Don Felipe Almanzar, the rustlers plaguing the Rocking T, and another gang of bandits led by a mysterious masked figure. With all that going on, it seemed like trouble could crop up from any direction with little or no warning—or from several directions at once.
“Is it possible the Black Scorpion could be responsible for the rustling?” Frank asked.
“Folks have thought about that,” Tolliver replied, “but me and some o’ the other ranchers around here have lost stock on the same nights that the Black Scorpion’s gang was reported to be maraudin’ on the other side of the border. The varmint can’t be in two places at the same time.”
“No, I reckon not,” Frank said, but he wasn’t completely convinced. His instincts told him that there was even more going on around here than was readily apparent.
His instincts also told him that the smart thing to do would be to unhitch Stormy from the team, mount up, and light a shuck out of here. The troubles had nothing to do with him, and if he stayed around and was drawn deeper into them, his hopes for a quiet, relaxing winter might well be shattered.
On the other hand, he had never turned his back on trouble just to make it easier on himself, and he was a mite too old to start now. A leopard couldn’t change its spots, nor a tiger its stripes.
The sun was low in the sky by the time the buckboard reached the headquarters of the Rocking T. Frank saw a large, whitewashed house sitting in the shade of several cottonwood trees. Behind it were a couple of barns, several corrals, a bunkhouse, a cookshack, a blacksmith shop, a chicken coop, and some storage buildings. There
