Ike didn’t expect it to be very long.
“When can we have the woman?” Gonzalez asked, for the fourth or fifth time.
“When Joshua’s free again,” Garth answered, trying to suppress the feelings of irritation that went through him. “I ain’t takin’ no more chances. I want her safe and sound to use as leverage against that husband o’ hers just as long as we might still need him.”
Along with the other members of the gang, they were riding along about two miles behind the wagon carrying Joshua Shade. Garth had spotted it earlier through his spyglass when they paused at the top of a long swell that provided a good view of the territory to the south.
Earlier, when the wagon tracks had left the main road and turned south, Garth had studied the map that Shade always used when he was planning their jobs. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out what the marshal was doing.
Thorpe wanted to get his prisoner on a train as soon as possible, because that was the fastest and safest way to transport Shade to Yuma. So instead of going all the way to Tucson to catch the train, he had struck out across country toward the railroad, following a meager track that barely qualified as a trail.
“Right there,” Garth had said, stabbing a blunt finger at the map he had spread out on a rock. “He’s headed for Pancake Flats.”
Since then, nothing had happened to change his mind. It was mid-morning now, and the wagon was still headed in the same direction.
Garth turned his head to look at the others. Mrs. Winslow rode double with Jeffries; they had abandoned the wagon back where the gang had been camped before. It wasn’t that Garth trusted the dapper gunman not to molest the woman, but he probably trusted him more than he did Gonzalez and the other men.
Mrs. Winslow had her baby in her arms, cradling the kid against her. Garth felt an unaccustomed twinge of pity. He had killed plenty of times in his life—men, women, children, whoever he needed to kill to get what he wanted— but every now and then, such as now, some fleeting, unwanted memories came back to him. Memories of a time before he was a killer and an outlaw, when he’d had a woman and a young’un of his own…
With a grimace, Garth turned around to face front once again. Those days were long gone, and good riddance to ’em. They’d ended badly anyway, and he’d just as soon not think about them.
“Hey, Garth,” Gonzalez said.
“What?” Garth snapped, his voice abrupt and angry because he figured the Mexican was fixing to pester him again about raping Mrs. Winslow.
Gonzalez had something else on his mind, though. “I think I saw a couple of riders up there, off to the east of the trail.”
Garth looked where Gonzalez was pointing and didn’t see anything. He reined in and motioned for the others to do likewise. Fishing the spyglass out of his saddlebags, he extended it and lifted it to his eye, squinted through it.
The pepper-eatin’ son of a bitch was right, Garth thought as he focused in on a pair of riders. They were too far away for him to make out any details about them, but they were also a good quarter of a mile east of the trail leading to Pancake Flats.
“Just a couple o’ cowhands, more than likely,” Garth said as he closed the spyglass. “There are some cattle spreads down this way, but they’re pretty scattered. Or maybe they’re just drifters passin’ through these parts.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Jeffries said.
“You heard what Winslow said. The marshal wasn’t takin’ anybody with him except some outriders. The whole bunch is with the wagon.” Garth tugged on his mustache as he frowned in thought. “But I reckon it wouldn’t hurt anything to be sure. The rest of us will ride on ahead and circle around the wagon to the west so’s we can set up an ambush. Larkin, you and Glenister go check out those riders over east a ways.”
The two outlaws Garth had selected for the chore nodded in understanding. One of them asked, “What do you want us to do about ’em?”
“Oh, hell, might as well play it safe,” Garth said. “Wait until the shootin’ starts, then kill both the sons o’ bitches.”
Chapter 22
During the morning, Matt and Sam had swung gradually to the east as they followed the wagon, so that they wouldn’t be directly behind the vehicle. They didn’t want Thorpe to check his back trail, spot them, and take them for members of Shade’s gang.
Nor did they want the outlaws to realize that they were riding herd on the wagon. With some distance between them and Thorpe’s party, even if Shade’s men noticed them, they might not think the two of them had any connection to the wagon.
“Do you think the gang will try to take Shade away from the marshal before the wagon gets to Pancake Flats?” Sam asked.
“Well, if I was a no-account outlaw, that’s what I’d try to do,” Matt said. “Be harder to take him off the train. Not impossible, mind you, but harder.”
Sam nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. How would you go about doing it?”
Matt rubbed his jaw and frowned in thought. “Well, again, if I was a no-good, murderin’ skunk like Shade’s men, I reckon I’d try to get ahead of the wagon and set up some sort of ambush.”
“You know Marshal Thorpe has to be thinking the same thing,” Sam pointed out. “He’ll be ready for something like that.”
“Bein’ ready for something and bein’ able to stop it when it starts happenin’ are two different things.”
