“You son of a bitch! You shot my ear off!” he shouted in fear and anger.
“I didn’t shoot it off, I just shredded your ear lobe some,” Matt said. “If you want me to shoot your ear off, I’ll do it. Now, toss your gun over like I said.”
The man with the bleeding ear tossed his gun over and the other two followed suit.
“Now your boots,” Matt said.
“Whoa, hold it now. Have you seen the kind of rock that is around here?” Logan asked. “Some of it is as sharp as a razor. You go walkin’ barefoot on that, you’re goin’ to cut your feet to pieces.”
“Then you’ll have to walk real slow and careful, won’t you?” Matt said. “That’ll give my friend and me time to get through the canyon without worryin’ about someone trying to kill us. Throw your boots over, like I said.”
Grumbling, the three men sat down and pulled off their boots, then dropped them over the edge. They stood up again.
“I’ll tie your horses off down at the bottom of the canyon,” Matt said.
“The hell you will!”
Logan produced another pistol from somewhere, and he fired at Matt, the bullet coming so close that Matt not only heard the pop as it passed his ear, he felt the concussion of air.
Matt returned fire, hitting Logan in the chest. Logan dropped his pistol and put his hands over the wound as blood poured through his fingers. His eyes rolled up, and he fell back.
The other two would-be assailants looked down at him.
“Either one of you two have another pistol?” Matt asked.
“I ain’t got one.”
“Me neither.”
“Hell, can’t neither one of us afford a second pistol.”
“Who was this man?” Matt asked, pointing to the one on the ground.
“His name was Logan. Sam Logan,” one of the men answered.
“Logan?” Matt remembered Gilmore telling him that Logan had been with Madison and Jernigan.
“That’s what he told us his name was.”
“Do you men work for Poke Terrell?”
“Poke Terrell? No, there don’t none of us work for Poke Terrell. Don’t none of us work for nobody except odd jobs from time to time,” the more talkative of the two men said. “That’s how we wound up with Logan.”
“What’s your name?” Matt asked.
“Folks call me Cooter.”
“Well, Cooter, if you aren’t working for Poke Terrell, what were you doing up here, waiting to ambush me?”
Cooter pointed to the body. “Like I said, we take odd jobs from time to time. Logan, he give us ten dollars apiece to come up here with him,” he said.
“Did he work for Poke?”
“He didn’t say,” Cooter said. “He never give us no reason for comin’ up here to shoot you. All he done was give us ten dollars.”
“And you agreed to kill someone for ten dollars? You consider killing somebody an odd job, do you?” Matt asked.
“He made it seem like it wasn’t goin’ to be all that hard to do.”
Matt raised his pistol and aimed it at Cooter. “It’s not much of a man who would agree to kill someone for ten dollars,” he said. “The world would be better off if I just killed you now.”
“No!” Cooter said, putting his hands out in front as if he could ward off the bullets. “No, don’t shoot!”
“Oh, damn, I just peed in my pants,” Mole said.
With a sigh, Matt lowered his pistol. “Like I told you, I’ll leave your horses at the bottom,” he said. “Being barefoot, it will take you a while to get there, but if you are careful, you can make it without cutting your feet up too bad. But hear this.” He raised his pistol again and waved it back and forth pointing at all of them. “If I ever seen any one of you again, I will kill you.”
“You ain’t never goin’ to see me no more, Mister. I can promise you that,” Cooter said.
Ten minutes later, Matt returned to the buckboard, leading the three horses.
The buckboard was empty.
“Mr. Gilmore?” Matt called out in some concern. “Mr. Gilmore, are you here?”
“I’m here,” a muffled voice answered and Matt saw the lawyer crawling out from a fissure in the side of the promontory.
Matt laughed. “It looks like you found a good hiding place there, Mr. Gilmore,” he said. “I didn’t even see you.”
“I heard shooting,” Gilmore said. “I didn’t know—that is, I wasn’t sure what was happening.”
