draws to search, Luke.” He settled his hat back on his head. “We’ll find him.”
“I sure hope so,” Boyd said. “And I’ll rest a lot easier when we do. I set store by that bull. A time back I read that John Slaughter down in Texas had paid five thousand dollars for a prize Hereford bull. Well, a fool and his money are soon parted I guess, because I guarantee that I bought a better animal for less than half that price.”
By eleven, after four hours of sweaty, grueling work in the growing heat of the day, Tyree and the others had counted over two hundred head. But there was as yet no sign of the bull and that rankled them all, especially Boyd.
At noon, they camped in the shade of a cottonwood by the creek, boiled coffee and broiled slices of salt pork over the fire. Lorena had packed a round of yellow cornbread and a small pot of honey. They spread the corn pone thick with honey, then ate it with the pork.
“Good vittles,” Fowler commented as he brushed crumbs from the front of his shirt. “Stick to a man’s ribs.”
Tyree nodded, smiling. “You’re right about that. Salt pork does stay with a man and it keeps on repeating itself.”
“And Lorena put a good scald on the corn pone—that’s fer sure,” Boyd said. He turned to Tyree. “How you holding up, boy?”
“My side is punishing me some, but I reckon I’ll stick.”
“Good, I’m glad you’re feeling spry, because next we start on the slot canyons. Maybe my bull is in one of them.”
“How are we going to get the cows out of the slots, Luke?” Fowler asked, laying down his book. “Those canyons are so darned narrow there’s no room for a pony to turn and not enough space to swing a cat, let alone a loop.”
Boyd answered Fowler’s question with one of his own. “How long were you in the cattle business before you was sent to the hoosegow, Owen?”
“Not long—a twelvemonth, I guess.” He thought about it. “No more’n a twelvemonth.”
Tyree built a smoke and studied Fowler. The man had the long, melancholy face and sad brown eyes of a poet, and his hands were slender, like a woman’s. He was high-shouldered, his chest narrow and sunken.
Fowler was, Tyree decided, nobody’s idea of a cattleman.
“I was working as a bank clerk over to Crooked Creek when a feller rode in with twenty head of Herefords and a Red Angus bull he was trying to sell,” Fowler said, as though his start in the ranching business needed some explanation. “Well, I was getting mighty tired of the bank, so I withdrew my savings, asked for my time and bought the herd. Cost me just about every cent I owned. Then I pushed them up Hatch Wash, looking for a place to start a ranch, and by and by, I found my canyon. Built my cabin, then had it pretty good for three, four months, until Quirt Laytham moved into the territory with his herd.” Fowler shrugged. “After that, well, you know what followed.”
“I don’t, Owen,” Tyree said. “You never did tell me what happened.” He smiled. “And feel free to tell me it’s none of my damn business.”
“Since you’ve made an enemy of Quirt Laytham on my account I guess you’re entitled to know,” Fowler said. The leaves of the cottonwood cast shifting shadows on the man’s face and his eyes lost their light, fading to a dull, expressionless black.
“We had a preacher in Crooked Creek by the name of John Kent. He was a good man, cared about folks and not only his own flock. John was a sociable man and he rode up the wash to visit with me from time to time, and we’d drink coffee and talk cattle prices and books we’d read and stuff like that.
“Then one morning, nigh on nine years ago, I woke up and found John’s body near my cabin. I knew he’d been shot in the back at close range, because his coat had caught on fire. And he’d been robbed. I was leaning over John’s body when Quirt Laytham rode in along with Nick Tobin, Len Dawson, Clem Daley and a few others.
“Tobin said they’d been out looking for John since he’d failed to return home last night after visiting with me. Then he pulled his gun on me, accused me of murder and told Dawson to go search my cabin. When Dawson came back out he was holding John’s watch and some money. Said he’d found it piled up on my table where I’d left it.
“I looked up at Laytham and he was grinning, something mighty akin to triumph in his eyes. ‘We got him, boys,’ he said. ‘We got us that man who murdered John Kent.’ ” Fowler shrugged. “You know the rest. I was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years at hard labor.”
“Who do you think killed Deacon Kent, Owen?” Boyd asked.
Fowler shook his head at him. “I don’t know. A drifter maybe. All I know is that it wasn’t me. I liked and respected John. He was a good man. I had no reason to murder him.”
While Fowler spoke, Luke Boyd had been whittling on a piece of fallen tree branch. He tossed the branch away, folded his knife and said, “That’s quite a story, Owen. First time I’ve heard the whole thing.” He rose to his feet. “Time to mount up, boys. We’ve a passel of slot canyons to search before nightfall.”
“You still haven’t told us how you plan on doing it, Luke,” Fowler said, also standing, carefully putting Carlyle in his back pocket.
Boyd smiled. “Owen, I knowed you hadn’t been ranching long enough to learn about slot canyons and God apples.”
“God apples are a new one on me, too, Luke,” Tyree said.
The old rancher nodded. “All right, since neither of you know, I’ll tell you about them. A few years back a puncher had himself a one-eyed hoss for sale up in the Bradshaws in the Arizona Territory. This Easterner dude asks him why the pony has only one eye. ‘Well, sir,’ the puncher says, ‘that don’t bother him none. He’s still the best cow pony in these parts.’ But the dude wouldn’t let it go. ‘What happened to his eye?’ he asks, all curious like. ‘God did it,’ the puncher says. ‘How?’ asks the dude. ‘One time that there hoss wouldn’t go in the corral an’ I cut him down with a God apple,’ says the puncher. ‘A what?’ asks the dude, real buffaloed. ‘A rock, you eejit,’ says the puncher. ‘God left them around to help us poor cowboys.’ ”
Boyd grinned. “And that’s how come that ever since punchers call rocks God apples.”
Tyree and Fowler exchanged looks, then the younger man asked, “Luke, what’s all that to do with the slot canyons?”
The rancher smiled, bent over and extended a hand to Tyree, who took it. With surprising strength, Boyd pulled the younger man to his feet. “This is how we’re going to do it, Chance. Since you’re the youngest atween us and feeling right spry again, you’re gonna get an armload of God apples and get up on the rims of those canyons. Toss your rocks into the slots and when the cattle come hightailing it out of there, me and Owen will count them.” He nodded to Fowler. “All except my bull, Owen. I plan to dab a loop on him and lead him closer to the cabin.”
Tyree grinned. “Then I guess I’d better start searching for God apples.”
“Plenty of them around, son,” Boyd said, throwing that last of the coffee on the fire. “God provides us with every blessing in abundance, the Good Book says. So get to gathering.”
Chapter 8
Getting up to the rim of a slot canyon was no simple task, as Tyree soon discovered when he studied his first climb. He had to make it to the summit of a massive pink-and-yellow mesa that rose in a series of narrow benches to a height of about a thousand feet above the flat.
He decided his best route was to follow one of the many deep runoffs that scarred the mesa’s eroded surface where, he hoped, the going would be easier.
Tyree clambered upward along a stony, slanting streambed, then across a sandbank that held captive the skeletal white trunk of a dead juniper. The way was made even more difficult by massive boulders and a series of steep, treacherous dry falls. The searing, relentless heat was an added misery along with the weight of the rocks in his pockets.
Boyd had given Tyree a pair of work gloves for the climb that protected his hands, but cactus spines, especially those of the tiny claret cup that hid behind boulders and laid traps for the unwary, soon lacerated his knees and elbows.
Halfway up, he stopped to catch his breath on a bench, flat purple-colored rocks and clumps of sagebrush
