leathers, but the bottom remained firm as far as mid channel. Gault took a deep breath and slid out of the saddle. The buckskin plunged into the deep water and thrashed frantically.
Gault clung to the saddle horn and held his Winchester in the air. The Winchester with the new firing pin and no ammunition. His boots filled with icy water. It lapped at his chest and soaked the elaborate bandages that Esther Garnett had applied with so much care. Then the buckskin found solid bottom again, and Gault climbed back into the saddle.
They had reached the north bank. He was now in Indian Territory—possibly in the Chickasaw Nation, but most likely in the southeast corner of the Comanche-Kiowa grasslands known to cowmen as the Big Pasture.
Gault put the buckskin up the sandy slope and stopped for a few minutes to empty his boots and squeeze some water from his windbreaker. His bedroll had been soaked in the crossing, and so had his warbag, but there was no help for that now. Sitting on a rock, he pulled on his boots and studied the south bank.
There was no sign of Colly.
Gault mounted and rode on to the north, over a string of sandhills. When he was on the far side of the hills he dismounted again and crawled up to the brush-strewn ridge and studied the south bank some more.
Apparently Colly had decided that Gault was going to be reasonable, return to his own business and put Standard County out of his thoughts.
Gault spent the rest of the morning on the north bank of the Red, watching for the big posseman while slowly drying out in the gentle sun. At last he decided that enough time had passed and that Colly had surely started back to the Garnett farm. He put the buckskin into the river again.
The buckskin hated that swift cold water even more than Gault did. The animal's eyes rolled in fear as it scrambled for solid bottom. His small ears lay back on his head. Gault leaned forward in the saddle and stroked the quivering withers. That was when Colly Fay stepped out of a cedar thicket and said angrily, 'Shorty said you'd try to slick me! And you did!'
Gault, with a sudden ache in his gut, stared at the big posseman and continued in his efforts to gentle the buckskin. Colly had his rifle aimed at Gault's chest. It was always a bad sign when a man took up his rifle instead of his revolver—the killer who meant business did not waste his time with hand guns.
Colly walked steadily toward Gault on the nervous buckskin. Gault took a deep breath and prepared to speak to the posseman in a reasonable tone. But he knew instinctively that Colly could not be reached with reason. Dull- witted men could endure almost any humiliation except the thought that they had been tricked—and this was the thought that Colly had locked into his own dull mind.
Yet, Gault heard himself saying quietly, 'Colly, listen to me…'
But Colly wasn't listening to anyone. Gault was already as good as dead, as far as the posseman was concerned. He smiled his loose smile and came a few steps closer. Gault sat like stone. The temptation to grab for his Winchester was almost irresistible—but the rifle was useless and Colly knew it.
Then, because there seemed nothing else to do, Gault kicked his spurs into the buckskin's ribs.
The nervous animal lunged forward as if released by a spring. The slow-witted Colly stared blankly. Gault caught a glimpse of the posseman's face as the buckskin reared and crashed down on him. He was still smiling that slack smile; in his slow-moving mind he was seeing Frank Gault laid out for burying. It was probably the last thought he had, in that instant before he died.
After it was over Gault imagined that he had heard the sound of iron-shod hoofs slashing down on Colly's skull, but reason told him it was highly unlikely. It had happened too fast. The trembling buckskin had surged forward like a bullet, all but unseating Gault in the process.
There Colly had fallen beneath the buckskin's hoofs, his shabby hat crushed down over his bloody face. Gault did not have to look a second time to know that he was dead. He spurred the animal away from the scene. For several seconds he sat bent over the saddle horn, his insides strangely cold, his stomach pushing into his throat.
For almost a year Gault's thoughts had been concerned exclusively with the subject of death. In his dreams, waking and sleeping, he had killed Wolf Garnett a thousand times. But it had never been like this, with the crunch of bone and rush of blood. In his mind it had always been swift and clean and right.
He kneed the buckskin into a gully where the corpse could not be seen nor the blood smelled, and then he slowly dismounted and tied up in a flowering redbud. He knew that he would have to go back and do something about the body. But at the moment he didn't want to think about it.
So he stayed with the buckskin, gentling the animal until it stood calmly. Only then did he make himself return to that sandy flat where the body lay. 'I didn't aim to kill you, Colly,' he heard himself saying aloud. 'Even though,' the voice continued, 'you sure as hell was aimin' to kill me.'
He still wasn't sure what ought to be done about the body. Bury it? He had nothing to dig with. Take it with him to New Boston? He smiled grimly at the thought of bringing in one of Olsen's possemen, like a dog with a bone, and laying it at the big lawman's feet.
He postponed the decision by tramping downstream to where Colly had staked his own animal. He pulled the stake pin and gentled the posseman's black gelding. Almost as an afterthought, and without much hope, he began searching the saddle pockets for ammunition to fit his Winchester.
He gave a little grunt of surprise as he pulled out a full box of .30 caliber shells. Maybe his luck was changing. He dug deeper in the saddle pocket and lifted out a carefully wrapped parcel, a package several times the size of the shell box, wrapped with considerable care in a flannel shirt and an oilskin covering. But in spite of the care that had gone into the wrapping, one end had come open. As Gault took the parcel in his hands two gold double-eagles spilled out and fell to the ground. Colly Fay was still full of surprises.
Gault hunkered down beside the gelding and carefully opened the package. For a long while he remained in that position, staring down at the contents. A yellow gold watch, and a heavy chain of the same metal. A silver penknife. Several loose coins, including four more double-eagles. A roll of greenbacks wrapped in its own protective oilskin cover. Gault unwrapped it and counted them—they came to three hundred and ninety dollars.
There was also a small buckskin pouch which Gault opened and emptied onto the oilskin. One by one, he ticked off the small items in his mind. A pair of earrings set with small stones that might have been diamonds. A string of milky white beads that could have been pearls. And at the bottom of the buckskin pouch there was a plain rose gold wedding band. It was the ring that Gault had given to Martha when they were married.
Gault could not remember how long he crouched there, holding that small ring in his hand, trying to feel something of his lost wife in the rose-colored metal. But Martha was a year dead almost. There was nothing of her in the ring.
Still he crouched there, staring out at the sprawling sandy banks of the Red. He remained so still that a squirrel darted out of a liveoak tree and scurried in front of him without seeing him. It was almost as if he had been captured there in a block of invisible ice, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, aware of nothing but that small gold ring.
The black gelding tugged at its stakerope. Gault turned and looked at the animal as if he were seeing it for the first time. Slowly, he dropped the ring into his shirt pocket. Then he rewrapped the small parcel with the same great care that Colly had taken in wrapping it for the first time.
Finally he led the black to the gully where the buckskin was waiting. Then he walked back to where the dead man lay sprawled in the sand.
'Time to get up, Colly. We're going to New Boston.'
It was early afternoon and the town was quiet when Gault entered it. Much quieter than it had been on the day of the funeral. Farmers were back working their crops. Stockmen were finishing up their spring branding. A slack day in a slack season. A town dozing beneath a gentle North Texas sun.
The hostler at the wagon yard was the first to see them. The little bandy-legged man came pushing a wheelbarrow of manure around the corner of the livery barn when he first saw Gault slouched wearily on the buckskin. Colly's black gelding plodded behind on a lead rope, with the dead posseman across the saddle.
The hostler, whose name was Abe Tricer, dropped the wheelbarrow and started running toward the center of town. Gault watched him without expression.
