“Well, it’s lucky for Matt and me that they didn’t.”
Sam rode over to the arroyo. He dismounted to study the welter of hoofprints nearby where the bushwhackers had left their horses. He was looking for prints with distinctive horseshoe markings and found a few he might be able to recognize if he ever saw them again.
He saw bootprints as well, but there was nothing remarkable about them. He studied them anyway and tried to commit them to memory.
Sam also found a number of spent cartridges that had been left behind by the would-be killers. Standard .44-40 rounds used in most Winchesters and some handguns, he decided. Nothing there that would lead him to the bushwhackers.
But some scouting around turned up more hoofprints that led southeastward.
“Is there a settlement in that direction?” Sam asked.
Juan Pablo made a face and spat.
“A place the white men call Flat Rock.”
Sam had never heard of the place. When he said as much, Juan Pablo went on, “The first white man to settle there had a trading post. He sold whiskey and women. The town grew around it. Miners and men who raise cattle go there to indulge their lusts.”
“Then I’m not surprised a bunch of bushwhackers would head for there,” Sam said. “How far away is it?”
“A day’s ride. Maybe less.”
Sam glanced at the sun.
“I probably can’t get there today ... but I can sometime tomorrow. Maybe I’ll find some answers there.” He pointed toward the bluff. “I think I’ll ride over there and have a look around.”
“But the trail is here,” Juan Pablo said as he nodded at the tracks on the ground.
“Yeah, but I want to see if I can figure out what those fellas were up to.”
Sam swung up into the saddle. Juan Pablo mounted the pony and rode with him toward the bluff.
As they came closer, Sam saw that it was a fairly common upthrust of rocky ground, probably formed sometime in the dim ages past by an earthquake.
He didn’t know exactly where the bushwhackers were when they opened fire on him and Matt, so the first thing he did was ride along the base of the bluff, keeping a close eye on the ground as he weaved around the big sandstone boulders that littered the area.
After a few minutes he reined in and pointed as he spoke to Juan Pablo.
“Look there. Wagon tracks.”
Sure enough, the iron-rimmed wheels of a wagon had cut parallel ruts into the ground, until the vehicle had stopped right here where Sam had spotted the tracks among the rocks.
It appeared the wagon had been pulled by a four-horse team and accompanied by a number of riders. Sam could tell where the driver had swung the vehicle around and started back in the direction it came from.
Sam rubbed his chin as he frowned in thought.
“Who’d drive a wagon out here into the big middle of nowhere, then turn around and go back?”
“There is no understanding the madness of the white man,” Juan Pablo said. “Even a mixed-blood like you should know that.”
Sam ignored the veiled insult and continued studying the ground.
“Looks like there were about a dozen riders with the wagon. It had an escort. An army wagon, maybe?”
“Did you and your friend see a wagon when you rode by here the other day?”
“No. At least I didn’t. I’d have to ask Matt to be sure, but I think he would have said something about it if he had. You have to remember, though, we weren’t really paying any attention to this bluff until the shooting started, and once the lead was flying, we lit a shuck for that arroyo as fast as we could. The wagon could have been here, and we just didn’t notice it among these rocks. We were several hundred yards away.”
“Or maybe it was here some other time and had nothing to do with the men who tried to kill you. There has been no rain and not much wind to disturb the sign.”
Sam nodded.
“That’s true. My hunch is that this bluff ’s not that popular a place, though. I think it’s all connected. Let’s take a look and see if there’s a trail to the top of the bluff anywhere around here.”
As it turned out, there was a narrow trail that angled up the bluff about fifty yards away. It was only wide enough for one man at a time, but Sam found several marks on the rock where boot heels had scraped it recently.
He put everything he had seen together in his mind to form a theory and tried it out on Juan Pablo.
“That wagon and about a dozen outriders came here for some reason. The man or men in the wagon stayed below, along with some of the riders, and the rest of the bunch went up to the top of the bluff to keep an eye on all the country hereabouts. As flat as it is, they could probably see a long way. Then Matt and I came riding along, and for some reason the men on the bluff didn’t want to take a chance on us noticing what’s going on. So they tried to kill us.”
“That makes no sense,” Juan Pablo insisted. “What could they have been doing to make them feel that way?”
“I don’t know, but it had to be something pretty bad, probably illegal.”
