“Proof, I reckon.”
There were men milling around the chuck wagon, horses snorting steam and pawing the ground, whickering at the approaching riders and whinnying like a clutch of old women at a Sunday school picnic. Some of the men held coffee cups and a couple were smoking cigarettes and stamping their boots to get their circulation up and the cold out of their toes. Two of the men were pissing into the creek and making a faint yellow steam rise from the cold waters.
Those standing around the fire went silent as Dag rode up. They shifted their gaze to Luke, astraddle his horse. Disbelief shimmered in the quivering muscles on their faces. Barry Matlee stepped forward. Behind him loomed the bulky figure of Deuce Deutsch, his forbidding scowl visible even in shadow.
“Dag, what you got there? Is that Luke?”
Dag handed him the arrow shafts.
“Son of a bitch,” Matlee said.
The sun inched above the horizon, sent golden streamers across the land and flared on the dark statues of men who bore the deep silence that comes in the presence of death. One of the Matlee men choked up and let out a soft unmanly sob.
Matlee looked up at Little Jake, his eyes blazing with a sudden anger.
“I ought to kill you, you little bastard,” Matlee said, his right hand streaking for the pistol on his hip.
In that one terrible moment, time seemed to stand still as the sun raged ever higher, setting the high, thin clouds afire in its rising.
Chapter 3
Dag leaned over from the saddle and grabbed Matlee’s forearm. He dug his fingers into the soft flesh of the muscle and pushed downward so that the rancher couldn’t draw his pistol.
“There’s plenty of death to go around as it is, Barry. You back off. Little Jake didn’t have nothing to do with what happened to Luke.”
“I told them two not to go out alone this morning,” Matlee said, relaxing his hand’s grip on the butt of his pistol. “Damned if I didn’t warn them both.”
“Ain’t no matter now,” Dag said, his voice as soft as the disappearing dawn. “Could have been me or you, Barry. Me ’n’ Jimmy was up and out awful early. Ten minutes sooner, we might have wound up like Luke there. Settle down, son.”
Matlee looked up at Dag and nodded like a man too numb to speak. There was a sadness in his eyes. It flickered like a shadow darting in and out of sunlight.
“Which way did the Comanches head?” he asked.
“North. Jimmy and I camped way north of you. They got a good head start.”
“How many head did they get?”
“I don’t know,” Dag answered. “I don’t think Little Jake knows either. He was pretty shaken up.”
“Ain’t enough we got rain comin’ tonight or tomorrow. Now we got Comanches stealin’ stock.”
“I don’t figger they got more’n one or two head, the way they lit out. Probably a single head and they got it butchered by now.”
“Shit fire, Dag, we’re in a stretch to come up with enough head to drive to Cheyenne and you picked a trail what ain’t no good no ways.”
Dag stepped out of the saddle.
“Are you backing out, Barry?” Dag asked.
Matlee hesitated. Deuce stepped forward and waddled his considerable weight over to where Dag and Matlee were standing.
“I’m pulling my herd out, Dagstaff,” Deuce said. “This is the kind of thing I worried about ever since you told me about this drive.”
“Deutsch, you’re making a big mistake. You have more at stake than the rest of us. Pulling your cattle out will leave me way short.”
“We’re just getting started with the roundup, and already a man dead we have, and cattle stolen right from under our eyes.”
“A few hungry Comanches, Deutsch, that’s all. We’ll probably never see them again. Besides, we’ll have enough men and cattle on the drive, we can hold off a Comanche raid.”
The other men, from the various ranches, including his own, gathered around, listening to every word. Dag didn’t look at them, but he knew they were probably just as skeptical as Deutsch, and he granted that they had good reason. The roundup was starting off badly. His idea had been to separate the cows with fresh calves and just take the hardiest cattle up the Palo Duro and then drift them to the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Deutsch had been the hardest to convince that the drive would be both successful and profitable.
Jimmy dismounted, as well, but Little Jake remained on his horse, looking down at the assemblage in abject wonder.
“You won’t drive a single head of Rocking D cattle on your wild-goose chase,” Deutsch said. “I will not risk it.”
Matlee cursed under his breath. “Dag, we ain’t got enough head between us to go all the way to Cheyenne and come up empty.”
“That’s true,” Dag said. “Deutsch, you promised. You accepted my offer. Are you backing out now?”
“I am. I said I would let you drive my cattle to market if you had sufficient head and there was no danger of loss.”
“There’s always a danger of loss in anything,” Dag said, realizing his argument was weak. But without Deutsch’s cattle, none of them would earn a cent. The contract called for thirty-eight hundred head of prime beef stock and he could not make the drive with less than four thousand head, factoring in losses along the way.
“I will not take that risk,” Deutsch said. “My cattle the drive will not make.”
When he was angry, Deutsch always put his English in German grammatical form. And he was angry. His face was puffed up and red as a sugar beet. The cords in his neck wriggled like writhing snakes and the veins stood out like blue earthworms.
“You’re awful quick to call this,” Dag said. “You’re hurtin’ almost as bad as the rest of us, and we can’t rub two nickels together. What you got up your sleeve, Deuce, besides an arm?”
“To Sedalia, in Missouri, we will drive my cattle, Felix.”
“The Shawnee Trail?”
“We call it the Sedalia Trail, but the same it is, yes.”
“You won’t get the price I can get for you,” Dag said.
“No. The thirty-five dollars a head we will get and that is enough for my herd. It is the safe way, sure.”
Dag looked down at the ground and began working the toe of his boot into the dirt, scraping a smooth spot as if clearing his own mind in that same way. He tilted his foot and scraped with the edge of his boot. Then he looked up, stared into Deuce’s eyes.
“Sounds to me like you already made up your mind before you came to roundup, Deuce.”
“I make my mind up now.”
Dag searched the faces of the men standing around them. He looked at one man, stared at him hard. The man was Sam Coker, Deuce’s segundo. Coker bunched his lower lip up against his upper, then shifted his gaze to another part of the landscape.
“That right, Coker?” Dag asked. “You didn’t know anything about this change of plan?”
“I go with what Mr. Deutsch says.” Coker still avoided Dag’s gaze.
“You were going to use us all to help you with roundup, Coker, and all the time you and Deuce had no intention of honoring our agreement.”
Coker sucked in a breath.
No one spoke a word.
Dag looked back at Deutsch, an expression of contempt on his face. His eyes narrowed to dark slits.
“All right, Deuce, you called it. That’s my chuck wagon there. You and your hands clear on out of here. You’ll
