“I don’t know. Twenty, thirty dollars maybe.”
“That’s good enough.” Pulling his pistol, Frank held it down by his side and slightly behind him as he walked back to the front of the car.
“So what did you boys decide?” Zeke asked. “You goin’ to jump out of the car?” He and Mickey laughed.
“After,” Frank said.
“After what?”
“After this.” Frank raised the pistol and fired twice at point blank range. He hit Zeke and Mickey in the forehead, killing them instantly. Travis came up behind him.
“Why did you do that? We coulda just held ’em up.”
“They knew who we were,” Frank replied. “This way, they aren’t likely to even be discovered for two or three days, if that. Hell, this car might wind up in San Francisco before anyone discovers them. By then we’ll be so far away there won’t be any way at all anyone can ever put together the fact that we was the ones who done it. You search Mickey. I’ll search Zeke.”
“Damn!” Travis held something up. “I bet there’s over a hunnert dollars here!”
“Yeah!” Frank said with equal excitement. “There’s at least that much here. Who would have thought that?”
“Come on,” Travis said. “We’d better get off now.”
Stepping into the open door of the freight car, the two men leaped clear of the roadbed. The jump caused them to tumble forward, in keeping with Mickey’s instructions. By the time they picked themselves up, the lighted caboose of the train was rocking past them. The two men watched the car grow smaller in the distance until all they could see was the glowing red lamp that was hanging from a hook on the end of the caboose.
“What do we do now?” Travis asked.
“We follow the tracks to town.”
“It’s the middle of the night. There ain’t goin’ to be nothin’ open in the middle of the night.”
“We don’t want anything to be open,” Frank said. “When you’re stealin’ horses, it’s best that ever’one be asleep.”
Travis laughed. “Yeah.”
With only moonlight to guide them, they walked along the track, following the softly gleaming rails for a mile until they reached the town. Gilman was perched on the side of a mountain, the private homes and commercial buildings clinging to the side like sprouting bushes. Taking advantage of what level land there was, two streets formed a
It was about two in the morning, so there was not one soul awake in the town, and the only sound that could be heard was the rustle of the wind through the limbs of the aspen trees. From the far end of town, they heard a dog barking, and Frank and Travis stopped in their tracks.
“I hope that dog is tied up,” Travis said.
“I expect he is.” Frank pointed. “Look over there. Do you see what I see?”
Travis looked in the direction indicated. “All I see is a lean-to.”
“With a couple horses,” Frank replied.
“I don’t see no—” Travis stopped in mid-sentence when he saw something move in the shadows of the lean-to. “Oh, wait, yeah, I see ’em.”
Moving silently through the night, the two brothers reached the lean-to where they found two horses tied to a rail, and two saddles conveniently stored on a shelf to one side. They saddled the horses, then led them out into the open, keeping a close eye on the nearby house. Travis started to mount.
“Not yet,” Frank said. “Let’s walk them all the way out of town first. It’s quieter that way.”
“Yeah,” Travis said. “Yeah, good idea.”
CHAPTER SIX
There had been a time in Smoke’s past when he had sold all his cattle and switched over to raising horses. That had worked well for a while, because the U.S. Cavalry had provided a willing market for his stock. But with the increasing demand for beef in the East, Smoke was once more raising cattle. His ranch was the biggest in Colorado, on par with some of the largest ranches in Texas.
Although many ranchers were using Mr. Joseph Glidden’s invention as a means of keeping their herds corralled, Smoke did not believe in barbed wire, or “bobbed wahr” as Pearlie, Cal, and most of his hands called it, so he let his animals run free upon the range. That freedom gave them a lot of room to roam. Sugarloaf consisted of fifty thousand acres of titled land, with an additional one hundred thousand acres of adjacent, free range land. There was ample water and grass, and ultimately the herd was fenced in by nature, with the Elk Mountain Range to the north and Grand Mesa to the west.
With over fifteen thousand head of cattle scattered over one hundred and fifty thousand acres, rounding them up would be quite an undertaking. In fact, it was a job much too large for his full-time hands. Several additional hands had been hired for the roundup, and the operation was well underway.
The first thing was to find all the cattle carrying the Sugarloaf brand and move them into a herd. In addition, the cowboys would also have to bring in the unbranded calves that belonged to Sugarloaf. It was fairly easy to identify the calves that belonged to Sugarloaf, not only because much of the land was part of the Sugarloaf spread, but also because the newly born and unbranded calves tended to stay with their mothers—and their mothers were branded.
