The others began firing as well, and within a few seconds they were right on the camp, shooting into the bedrolls.
Cletus noticed it first.
“Ray!” he said. “Ray, hold it! There ain’t nobody in them bedrolls!”
“What?” Ray replied.
“Look at ’em! The bedrolls is all empty!”
“What the hell? What’s goin’ on here?”
“Now!” they heard a voice call from the darkness, and the riders suddenly discovered that the tables had been turned. Instead of shooting at targets,
“Let’s get out of here, boys!” Ray called, spurring his horse into retreat.
The sun was just coming up by the time Ray, Cletus, and the others returned to the ranch. They pulled to a halt in front of the porch.
“Does someone want to tell me what the hell happened back there?” Lou Reeder asked. “I thought this was supposed to be easy!”
“They was waitin’ for us,” Ray answered.
“Hell, yes, they was waitin’ for us,” Lou said. “But my question is, why? I thought they was not supposed to be nothin’ but a bunch of dumb gandy dancers.”
“Someone must have been with them. Someone must have organized them.”
“It ain’t no mystery who that someone is,” Cletus said. “It was Falcon MacCallister.”
“How do you know that? Did you see him?” Ray asked.
“I didn’t have to see the son of a bitch,” Cletus replied. “I’ve got to where I can smell the son of a bitch anytime I get a mile away from him.”
“Yeah?” Lou said. “Well, it might’a helped us tonight if you had smelled him before we ran into that hornet’s nest.”
Pete was weaving in his saddle, and his face was pasty white. It wasn’t until then that the others noticed he was bleeding.
“Pete,” Cletus said. “Pete, what’s wrong with you?”
Pete was holding his hand over his stomach, and he pulled the hand away from his wound. The palm of his hand was filled with blood, and it spilled down onto his saddle and down his pants leg, though, as his saddle and trousers were already soaked with blood, it was hard to discern new from old.
“I got hit back there, when all the shootin’ started,” Pete said. He weaved back and forth a couple of times, then fell from his saddle.
“Pa!” Cletus shouted. “Pa, get out here!”
Ike Clinton came out onto the patio then, and saw Pete’s blood-soaked body lying very still.
“What the hell happened?” Ike asked, kneeling beside Pete. He put his hand on Pete’s neck, felt for a pulse, then looked up. “He’s dead.”
“Damn, they killed him,” Cletus said.
“Funny, Pete never said a word the whole time we was comin’ back,” Ray said.
“Who killed him?” Ike asked. “Where were you? What were you doing?”
“Pa, while you was gone, I found out that Garrison was beginnin’ to build his railroad,” Ray said. “So what we done is, we rode out at the railroad construction site just to stir things up a bit.”
“Yeah, we figured we could catch ’em all sleepin’,” Cletus said.
“When we got there, the bedrolls was all spread out around the fire an’ all, so we started shootin’ at ’em. We rode all the way into the camp shootin’ at them bedrolls. But it turns out, there wasn’t nobody in any of them. They was all empty.”
“And the next thing you know, all hell broke loose,” Cletus said.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “Yeah, the whole thing was an ambush. They was hidin’ in the rocks just outside the camp, and they opened up on us.”
“That’s when they killed Pete,” Cletus said.
“They didn’t kill him, sonny. You two boys did,” a sibilant voice said.
Both Ray and Cletus looked at the man who had spoken. Neither of them had ever seen him before.
“Who the hell are you?” Cletus asked.
“Boys, this is Jefferson Tyree,” Ike said.
“Jefferson Tyree?” Cletus said. “Wait a minute. Do you mean the outlaw Jefferson Tyree?”
“I mean Jefferson Tyree,” Ike said without commenting on the outlaw reference.
“What’s he doin’ here?”
“I hired him.”
