“What about the rest of you?” he asked. “Was anybody hurt?”
“One of my riders, Ben Conroy, was killed,” Boyd said grimly. “Couple men got creased, but that’s all.” He looked around the mesa. “Any more of the varmints up here?”
“None breathing,” Sam told him. “There were four men with the cattle.”
“This is just about the craziest thing I ever saw,” Boyd went on. “Who’d be loco enough to drive cattle up a narrow little trail like that to the top of a mesa?”
“Somebody who knew the chances of you findin’ ’em would be mighty small,” Stovepipe said. “If it wasn’t for Sam’s eyes, likely we never would’ve spotted the way up here.”
Boyd looked at Sam and nodded. He waved a hand to indicate the cattle and the dead rustlers.
“I reckon this proves you didn’t have anything to do with that stock being stolen, Two Wolves. You wouldn’t have done what you did if you were part of this bunch.”
“If you check the bodies, you’ll see that they’re all white,” Sam pointed out. “Not Navajo.”
In his habitual gesture, Boyd rubbed his chin.
“Yeah, I reckon I was wrong about that, too,” he said.
“You ever seen this fella before, Mr. Boyd?” Stovepipe asked as he nodded to the man who had bled to death.
Boyd frowned.
“I don’t think I have.”
“I have,” Wilbur said. “I don’t know who he is, but I remember seein’ him in Flat Rock durin’ the past week or so.”
Stovepipe nodded and said, “I was just thinkin’ the same thing, pard. Let’s have a look at the others.”
“You won’t be able to tell much about one of them,” Sam warned. “He got caught in the stampede.”
“Got to pick him up with a shovel, eh?” Stovepipe hunkered on his heels next to the man Sam had shot in the head. “Well, we’ll let that one go. This one, though, I’ve seen him in town, too. Don’t you think, Wilbur?”
“Yeah, he looks familiar,” the freckle-faced puncher agreed.
“So the gang’s holed up in Flat Rock,” Boyd said. “We’ll go in there and clean out the whole place if we have to.”
“That won’t do any good,” Sam cautioned. “You don’t know who else is part of the bunch. What we need to do is figure out a way to draw them into the open.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Boyd said with obvious reluctance. “I know my boys, though, and they’re gonna want to go in shooting.”
“You’ll have to keep them from doing that.” Sam turned toward the rope corral, which had survived the stampede intact as the cows went around it. “I want to take a look at their horses. Maybe that’ll tell us something.”
“I was just thinkin’ the same thing,” Stovepipe said.
Together they examined the rustlers’ mounts. The brands were ones that Sam didn’t recognize, and neither did Boyd.
“That just means they didn’t come from any of the spreads around here,” the rancher said. “I figured as much.”
All four horses were unsaddled, but as Sam ran his hands over the flanks of a leggy roan, he said, “This one is hotter than the others. He’s been run hard fairly recently.”
“You reckon one of those fellas made a fast trip out here?” Stovepipe asked.
“That would mean the rustlers left three men to keep an eye on the cattle,” Sam said. “That sounds reasonable.”
“Then why’d the fourth man come out here all hell-for-leather?” Wilbur asked.
“To warn the other hombres that we were tryin’ to trail the stolen herd,” Stovepipe answered. “That the way it lays out to you, Sam?”
“Yeah. The men who tried to bushwhack me this morning hurried back to Flat Rock to tell their boss that I wasn’t dead. They must have seen the two of you join up with me, and then Mr. Boyd and his men came along and we all started trailing the cattle. The boss sent word to his men out here, hoping they’d get rid of us.”
“They jumped the gun a mite,” Stovepipe drawled.
“Yeah, one of them has a habit of doing that,” Sam said. He thought it was very likely that the man who had taken that first shot at him and Matt was dead now, one of the four men who had been killed here on top of the mesa.
“Getting those cows down off this mesa is gonna be a chore,” Boyd complained. “I’ll be damned if I’ll leave them up here, though. We’ll wait until morning and see if we can drive them back down that trail.”
“That’s up to you and your men,” Sam said. “Now that you’ve decided that Stovepipe and Wilbur and I are trustworthy after all, there’s something else we need to do.”
“What’s that?” Stovepipe asked.
Sam thought about Matt. The canyon where Caballo Rojo’s clan lived wasn’t very far away. They might not be able to reach it by nightfall, but he thought he could find it even after darkness had fallen.
