“Madness,” Juan Pablo muttered.
Sam turned his horse.
“I want to take a closer look at the place where those wagon tracks stop.”
He rode back to the spot and dismounted, being careful not to disturb any marks he might find on the ground. As he walked slowly back and forth, his keen eyes searched for anything out of the ordinary.
After a few moments, he hunkered on his heels to get an even closer look at an area a short distance off to the side of the wagon tracks.
“Did you find something?” Juan Pablo asked.
“Maybe.” Sam pointed a finger. “Right here, the corner of something has gouged a little place in the dirt. There’s a line leading away from it.” His finger traced the faint mark on the ground. “There’s another corner mark, about eight feet away.” Sam moved around. “And another line in the dirt where the sharp edge of something was sitting. It goes to a third corner ... and back along there to a fourth one ...”
Sam looked up at Juan Pablo, who hadn’t dismounted.
“Somebody brought a crate of some sort out here on that wagon, unloaded it, and set it on the ground here. The crate, or what was inside it, was heavy enough to leave those marks.”
“A crate,” Juan Pablo repeated. He sounded skeptical. “What sort of crate?”
“Well, there’s no way of knowing how deep it was, but we can tell that it was about two feet wide and eight feet long.”
Juan Pablo shook his head.
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Not to you, maybe,” Sam said. “But to me that sounds an awful lot like a coffin.”
Chapter 11
“The box you white men bury your dead in?” Juan Pablo asked. He sounded slightly disgusted. The Navajo did not enclose the bodies of their dead in boxes.
“That’s right.”
“There is no grave here.” Juan Pablo pointed at the ground. “No one has dug in this dirt. We would be able to tell.”
“You’re right. Maybe it wasn’t a coffin. But it was sure shaped like one.”
“None of this makes sense,” the warrior said.
“It will, sooner or later. Once I find the men who tried to kill me and Matt.”
“You thought that some enemy might have sent them after you. Now, according to what we have found, that is not what happened. You and your friend were shot at simply because you rode along here at the wrong time.”
“That’s the way it looks,” Sam admitted.
“Then why seek them out?” Juan Pablo wanted to know. “It had nothing to do with you. You and the one called Matt still live. Why not return to the canyon, wait until he is fit to travel, and ride on? Why search for the men who shot at you?”
“Because I don’t like it when somebody tries to kill me,” Sam said. “Besides, if they were that worried about somebody seeing them, they were up to no good. They need to be stopped.”
“Why?” Juan Pablo sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Because they might hurt somebody else.”
From the warrior’s expression, it was obvious he thought Sam was completely loco.
“Look, you can go back,” Sam went on. “I never expected you to come this far with me. I’ll handle things from here on out.”
“You are being foolish.”
“Maybe, but it’s my choice to make, isn’t it?”
Juan Pablo scowled.
“If you die, what will happen to the man in my hogan?”
“If I don’t come back, as soon as Matt has recovered he’ll come looking for me. And if they’ve put me under, he’ll avenge my death. You don’t have to worry about being stuck with Matt.”
“Do what you want,” Juan Pablo snapped. “I am going back.”
He stalked over to his pony, leaped on the animal’s back, and galloped off, soon vanishing except for a thin pillar of dust that rose in the west.
Sam was glad to see him go. He was glad for Juan
Pablo’s help, but the warrior wasn’t the best company in the world.
Several hours of daylight were left. That was enough time for Sam to cover some of the ground between here and Flat Rock.
He rode back to the arroyo and picked up the trail there. He could have followed the wagon tracks, but there was still a slim possibility that the wagon and its escort weren’t the same bunch that had jumped him and Matt.
He hadn’t gone more than half a mile, though, when the two trails merged. The men who had fled from the battle at the arroyo had rejoined the wagon, and all of them had headed southeast toward the settlement called Flat Rock.
