“Dex got a crease on his leg, Pa,” one of the brothers reported. Matt still wasn’t quite sure which one was which.
“Ah, hell, I’ll be all right,” Dex said. “Ain’t nothin’ but a puny little scratch.”
“Looks like it bled right smart for a puny little scratch,” Harlow said with a nod toward his son’s blood-soaked pants leg. “Better let your sister take you inside and clean that up.”
Frankie took hold of Dex’s arm. “Come on and don’t argue about it.”
“Pa, she’s rough as a cob when she goes to tendin’ to hurts, and you know it!” Dex protested.
“Go on, boy,” Harlow said. “You don’t want to get blood poisonin’.”
While Frankie took her brother into the cabin, Matt walked over to the barn, expecting to find at least one body there. Instead, although there were a couple of generous splashes of blood on the ground, there were no corpses.
“Either those hombres I ventilated weren’t quite dead, or their compadres took the bodies with them,” he said to Thurman Harlow, who had followed him.
“I seen a couple of them helpin’ other fellas into the saddle,” Harlow confirmed. “Wish I’d gotten outside in time to give ’em a load of buckshot.”
“If you had, they might have killed you, too,” Matt pointed out. “I reckon we were all mighty lucky that things didn’t turn out any worse than they did.”
Harlow shook his head. “Luck didn’t have nothin’ to do with it,” he declared. “I reckon the rest of us are alive right now ’cause you were around to lend us a hand, Mr. Bodine. Without you and Frankie doin’ what you did, they’ve have blowed up the still and roasted my boys along with it. Then they’d’ve rooted me out of the cabin and killed me, too.”
Harlow was probably right about that, Matt thought. But he just nodded and said, “I’m glad I was here. You think it was Cimarron Kane and his kinfolks?”
Harlow rubbed his fingers across his stubbled jaw. “Well…I didn’t actually see Cimarron amongst ’em, mind you…but who else could it have been?”
Matt didn’t have an answer for that. He figured Cimarron Kane was to blame for this attack, whether the leader of the bloodthirsty clan had actually been part of it or not.
“Maybe we ought to think about takin’ the war to the Kanes,” he said. “Otherwise, all we can do is sit back and wait for them to hit you again.”
“You reckon? Maybe what happened today will convince ’em to leave us alone.”
Matt glanced at the blood spilled on the ground next to the barn and knew there wasn’t a chance in hell of that.
Chapter 20
Sam watched as Ambrose Porter, Calvin Bickford, and the other men drove the prison wagons into the shade of the trees along the creek at Cottonwood. Porter designated two deputies to stand guard over the wagons, while the others took the saddle mounts to the livery stable.
They would probably be surprised, Sam mused, if they knew they were turning their horses over to the man responsible for selling illegal liquor here in town.
Sam wasn’t just about to tell them, though, and he didn’t think that anyone else in the settlement would, either.
Porter and Bickford left the wagons and walked toward Main Street, carrying their rifles. As they came closer to Sam, Porter stopped short and frowned at him, suspicion etched deeply on the hawkish, sunburned face.
“Don’t I know you?” he snapped.
“We met yesterday,” Sam said. “Ten miles west of here where you blew up that cabin.”
Bickford grinned and said, “Oh, yeah, sure! Ambrose, this is that fella Two Wolves. Where’s your friend Bodine?”
“Tending to some business of his own,” Sam replied.
Bickford nodded at the badge pinned to Sam’s shirt. “You didn’t mention you were a lawman.”
“Wasn’t, then,” Sam replied with a shake of his head. “I just took the job of deputy to Marshal Coleman today.”
“Marshal Marshall Coleman,” Bickford said with a laugh. “A good man, from what I hear.”
“He is,” Sam said.
Porter said, “Stay out of our way.”
Sam frowned. “I wasn’t intending to—”
“Our authority supersedes yours,” Porter went on as if Sam hadn’t said anything. “If you try to interfere with us, you’ll be subject to the same treatment we’d give anyone selling or brewing illegal liquor.”
Sam tried to rein in his temper, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “You mean you’ll blow me up with a bomb, too?”
“Just give me an excuse,” Porter said between clenched teeth. Then he pushed past Sam, brushing him harder with a shoulder than he needed to.
Sam half turned to watch him go, then said to Bickford, who still stood there, “Is he like that with
