inside him, and I had it now. Something was building up. I could smell trouble in the making, and oddly enough it might have been avoided by a casual comment. The trouble was that I did not know that Torres was coming up from Socorro, and that he was returning to work for Dru.
Had I known that, I would have known what Jonathan Pritts' reaction was to be.
If Dru had happened to mention the fact that Torres was finally well and able to be around and was coming back, I would have gone down to meet him and come back with him.
Juan Torres was riding with two other Mexicans, men he had recruited in Socorro to work for Dru, and they were riding together. They had just ridden through the gap about four miles from Mora when they were shot to doll rags.
Mountain air is clear, and sound carries, particularly when it has the hills behind it. The valley was narrow all the way to town, and it was early monring with no other sound to interfere.
Orrin had come up from Santa Fe by stage to Las Vegas and had driven up to town from there. We had walked out on the street together for I'd spent the night in the back room at the sheriff's office.
We all heard the shots, there was a broken volley that sounded like four or five guns at least, and then, almost a full half minute later, a single, final shot.
Now nobody shoots like that if they are hunting game. For that much shooting it has to be a battle, and I headed for Orrin's buckboard on the run with him right behind me. His Winchester was there and each of us wore a belt gun.
Dust lingered in the air at the gap, only a faint suggestion of it. The killers were gone and nobody was going to catch up with them right away, especially in a buckboard, so I wasted no time thinking about that.
Juan Torres lay on his back with three bullet holes in his chest and a fourth between his eyes, and there was a nasty powder burn around that.
'You know what that means?' I asked Orrin. 'Somebody wanted him dead. Remember that final shot?' There was a rattle of hoofs on the road and I looked around to see my brother Joe and Cap Rountree riding bareback. The ranch was closer than the town and they must have come as fast as they could get to their horses. They knew better than to mess things up. Juan Torres had been dead when that final shot was fired, I figured, because at least two of the bullets in the chest would have killed him. The two others were also dead. I began casting for sign.
Not thirty feet off the trail I found where several men had waited for quite some time. There were cigarette stubs there and the grass was matted down.
Orrin had taken one look at the bodies and had walked back to the buckboard and he stood there, saying no word to anybody, just staring first at the ground and then at his hands, looking like he'd never seen them before.
A Mexican I knew had come down the road from town, and he was sitting there on his horse looking at those bodies. 'Bandidos?' he looked at me with eyes that held no question.
'No,' I said, 'assassins.'
He nodded his head slowly. 'There will be much trouble,' he said, 'this one,' he indicated Torres, 'was a good man.'
'He was my friend.'
'Si.'
Leaving the Mexican to guard the road approaching the spot--just beyond the gap--I put Joe between the spot and the town. Only I did this after we loaded the bodies in the buckboard. Then I sent Orrin and Cap off to town with the bodies.
Joe looked at me, his eyes large. 'Keep anybody from messing up the road,' I said, 'until I've looked it over.'
First I went back to the spot in the grass where the drygulchers had waited. I took time to look all around very carefully before approaching the spot itself.
Yet even as I looked, a part of my mind was thinking this would mean the lid was going to blow off. Juan Torres had been a popular man and he had been killed, the others, God rest their souls, were incidental. But it was not that alone, it was what was going to happen to my own family, and what Orrin already knew. Only one man had real reason to want Juan Torres dead ...
One of the men had smoked his cigarettes right down to the nub. There was a place where he had knelt to take aim, the spot where his knee had been and where his boot toe dug in was mighty close. He was a man, I calculated, not over five feet-four or-five. A short man who smoked his cigarettes to the nub wasn't much to go on, but it was a beginning.
One thing I knew. This had been a cold-blooded murder of men who had had no chance to defend themselves, and it had happened in my bailiwick and I did not plan to rest until I had every man who took part in it ... no matter where the trail led.
It was a crime on my threshold, and it was a friend of mine who had been killed.
And once before Orrin and I had prevented his murder ... and another time Torres had been shot up and left for dead.
I was going to get every man Jack of them. There had been five of them here and they had gathered up all the shells before leaving ... or had they?
Working through the tall grass that had been crashed down by them, I found a shell and I struck gold. It was a .44 shell and it was brand, spanking new. I put that shell in my pocket with a mental note to give some time to it later.
Five men ... and Torres himself had been hit by four bullets. Even allowing that some of them might have gotten off more than one shot, judging by the bodies there had been at least nine shots fired before that final shot.
Now some men can lever and fire a rifle mighty fast, but it was unlikely you'd find more than one man, at most two, who could work a lever and aim a shot as fast as those bullets had been, in one group of five men.
Torres must have been moving, maybe falling after that first volley, yet somebody had gotten more bullets into him. The answer to that one was simple.
There were more than five.
Thoughtfully, I looked up at that hill crested with cedar which arose behind the place where they'd been waiting. They would have had a lookout up there, someone to tell them when Torres was coining.
For a couple of hours I scouted around. I found where they had their horses and they had seven of them, and atop the ridge I found where two men had waited, smoking. One of them had slid right down to the horses, and a man could see where he had dug his heels into the bank to keep from sliding too fast.
Cap came and lent me a hand and after a bit, Orrin came out and joined us.
One more thing I knew by that time. The man who had walked up to Torres' body and fired that last shot into his head had been a tall man with fairly new boots and he had stepped in the blood.
Although Orrin held off and let me do it--knowing too many feet would tramp everything up--he saw enough to know here was a plain, outright murder, and a carefully planned murder at that.
First off, I had to decide whether they expected to be chased or not and about how far they would run. How well did they know the country? Were they likely to go to some ranch owned by friends, or hide out in the hills?
Cap had brought back Kelly all saddled and ready, so when I'd seen about all I could see there, I got into the saddle and sent Joe back to our ranch. He was mighty upset, wanting to go along with a posse, but if it was possible I wanted to keep Joe and Bob out of any shooting and away from the trouble.
'What do you think, Tyrel?' Orrin watched me carefully as he spoke.
'It was out-and-out murder,' I said, 'by seven men who knew Torres would be coming to Mora. It was planned murder, with the men getting there six to seven hours beforehand. Two of them came along later and I'd guess they watched Torres from the hills to make sure he didn't turn off or stop.'
Orrin stared at the backs of his hands and I didn't say anything about what I suspected nor did Cap.
'All right,' Orrin said, 'you go after them and bring them in, no matter how long it takes or what money you need.'
I hesitated. Only Cap, Orrin, and me were there together. 'Orrin,' I said, 'you had me hired, and you can fire me. You can leave it to Bill Sexton or you can put in someone else.'
Orrin seldom got mad but he was angry when he stared back at me. 'Tyrel, that's damn-fool talk. You do what you were hired to do.'
