Boyd turned back to Tyree. “All right, go do it, boy, but when you find the camp come hightailing it back here, mind. There’s too many of them for one man to handle.”
His face revealing nothing, Tyree touched the brim of his hat then swung the steeldust toward the top of the hogback. He crested the rise and rode down the other side, dropping four hundred feet, his horse sliding most of the way on its haunches. He crossed an area of sandy, open ground, dotted here and there with patches of prickly pear cactus and mesquite, and rode into a shallow arroyo.
The moon came up, silvering the night, and out among the canyons the coyotes were talking.
Tyree thought he smelled smoke, but with no wind to carry the scent the odor was faint and fleeting. He reined up the tired steeldust, stood in the stirrups, and lifted his nose, testing the air.
There it was again, just a fragile whiff of burning cedar that seemed to come from right ahead of him. And there was something else, another smell intertwined with the cedar—the tantalizing aroma of frying bacon.
The steeldust, mountain bred and as sensitive to the nearness of danger as any wild creature, suddenly tensed and tossed up his head, the bit jangling loud in the silence. The horse let out a low, soft whinny. Tyree whispered, “Easy, boy, easy.”
He swung out of the saddle, yanked his rifle from the scabbard, then went ahead on foot, leaving the steeldust with its reins trailing.
His boots shuffling softly in the sand, Tyree crouched low and worked his way out of the arroyo, then across flat ground, stepping quietly through cactus, clumps of mesquite and scattered rock toward the source of the smoke. He had no illusions about what he was facing. Rustling was a dangerous, rake-hell business and these young men would be as tough as rawhide, hard and good with guns, and willing to fight like wolves to escape the consequences of their misdeeds.
There would be no backup in them. Chances were they’d be fast and deadly as striking rattlesnakes. They would not give mercy—or ask for it.
His face grim, his jaw set and stubborn, Tyree took a moment to ask himself if his falsehood back there at the hogback had been justified. But he knew full well it had. Owen Fowler was no gunfighter and would only be in the way. Luke Boyd was slowed by age, good with a Spencer at a distance, but up close and sudden as this fight would be, he’d lack the flashing speed to make his gun count.
There had been no other way, Tyree decided. He might survive this fight, but the chances were that Owen and Luke would not, and they were men he liked and respected.
Moving with care, Tyree inched his way forward. In the distance, near a stand of trees he could not identify, he caught the flicker of a campfire. Fearing no pursuit, the rustlers had built the fire large against the desert cold of the night.
And it was getting cooler. Tyree shivered slightly as he worked his way toward the camp. In the distance the coyotes were calling louder as their hunger grew, their noses lifted to the rising full moon . . . a rustler’s moon.
Carefully, making no sound, Tyree moved closer. In the moonlight the bare, white rocks around him stood out clearly and the green branches of the brush were frosted with silver.
When he was still a ways from the camp, Tyree shifted the Winchester to his left hand. If the outlaws chose not to surrender and made a fight of it, he’d be faster with the Colt.
He stopped in the shadows when he was just a dozen yards from the camp. Water chuckled somewhere close, probably one of the numerous streams that ran into the canyon country off the Colorado a few miles to the west, and the snap and crack of the fire was loud in the silence.
Tyree carefully studied the camp and marked the locations of the rustlers. One man lay on his back while smoking a cigarette, his head on a saddle. Another was concentrating on the fry pan he held over the fire, and a third was rubbing down a horse with a handful of bunchgrass.
Most cowboys held their mustang ponies in slight regard and seldom worried about them. But gunmen, gamblers and outlaws took excellent and constant care of their mounts, since a fast horse could mean the difference between life and death.
It seemed this bunch was no exception.
Now it was time to make his move.
Tyree rose to his feet and stepped into the camp, careful to avert his eyes from the blazing fire to keep his vision unclouded.
“Evenin’, boys,” he drawled, smiling, “any of you seen a prize Hereford bull hereabouts?”
Chapter 9
The man who’d been lying down sprang quickly to his feet. He threw his cigarette butt into the fire and faced Tyree, his eyes wary. The cook, his bacon sputtering, carefully placed the fry pan at the edge of the coals and began to rise. He was a tall, lanky man who unraveled like a piece of string, coming together only when he was upright. The third man dropped the grass he’d been using and stayed right where he was, his hand close to his gun.
“Well, Lordy me.” Tyree grinned, looking past the outlaws to where the bull was grazing. “And there he is.” He let his grin grow wider. “Thanks for finding him, boys. My boss surely sets store by that bull.”
For a few moments nobody spoke. The flames of the campfire cast flickering scarlet shadows on the faces of the men across from Tyree. Three pairs of eyes were fixed on him, glittering like ice in the dark hollows of their sockets.
The man who’d been grooming the horse stepped closer. He was of medium height, a redhead, dressed in dusty range clothes. He wore two guns in crossed belts, a showy mode of carry that was seldom seen.
“Mister,” he said, “we’ve laid claim to that bull. Now, if you want to keep on living, you just turn and walk on out of here.”
Tyree did not allow his grin to slip. “Sorry, boys, but you seem to have made a mistake. See, that’s my boss’s Hereford and he told me I had to bring him home right quick. So, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll just dab a loop on him and be on my way.”
Again a tense silence stretched between the four men, taut as a fiddle string.
The three rustlers were sizing up Tyree, taking his measure, and he knew what they were seeing. There was nothing in Tyree’s appearance to intimidate these three, and the contempt in their eyes told him they’d summed him up and had found him wanting.
The redhead turned to the man who’d been frying the bacon. “Jed, what do you think?”
“I think we kill him and be done.” The man called Jed grinned, a sudden recklessness in the look he threw at Tyree. “Hell, the bacon is burning, so it’s high time we ate.”
Then he went for his gun.
Jed had barely cleared leather when two of Tyree’s bullets smashed dead center into his chest. Jed staggered, his lips peeled back in an ugly, defiant snarl. His gun dropped from his hand and he turned away, out of the fight.
Tyree ignored the dying outlaw and concentrated on the redhead who had shucked both guns and was firing, streaks of orange-red flame slashing across the darkness. A bullet burned across Tyree’s right cheek as he slammed a shot at the redhead, then another. Hit hard, the man screamed and went down, blood blossoming scarlet on the front of his shirt.
A bullet tugged viciously at Tyree’s sleeve. The third outlaw steadied himself for another shot and both men fired at once. The rustler’s bullet spitefully split the air next to Tyree’s ear, but Tyree’s own Colt bucked and the round smashed into the man’s right shoulder. The rustler cursed and took a couple of steps back, his gun hanging loose in an arm that no longer had the power to lift it.
“Don’t even think about trying,” Tyree snapped as the outlaw tried to throw his Colt to his left hand. “Make the shift and I’ll drill you square.”
It was over.
The wounded outlaw swore savagely, his face a twisted mask of disbelief and hate. He dropped the gun and stepped away from it. “Damn you,” he yelled, pain hacking at his voice. “Who the hell are you?”
“Name’s Chance Tyree.”
Recognition dawned in the outlaw’s face and his stunned jaw hung slack. “Heard that name plenty of times. They say Clay Allison once backed off from you.”
Tyree nodded. “That’s what they say.”
“We never stood a chance agin’ you, did we?”
His face bleak, Tyree answered, “There were three of you and you were ready and I reckon you could have done better. But as soon as you drawed down on me, you were bucking a losing game.”
“My name is Roy Will, and that’s my brother Jed lying there with two of your bullets in his chest,” the rustler said. “Is he dead?”
“As he’ll ever be.”
“Then I swear to God I’ll kill you for this, Tyree. One day I’ll catch up with you and kill you, even if it takes me the rest of my life.”
“Which won’t be long, boy,” Luke Boyd said, stepping from the shadows into the circle of the firelight. “On account of how I plan to hang you right here and now from the nearest tree.”
“No, Luke.” Tyree’s words were soft spoken, but they cut like a knife across the silence that followed Boyd’s statement. “Seems to me, there’s been enough hanging around here already.”
The old rancher looked shocked. “But, Chance, that’s what we do with no-good rustlers in the canyonlands.”
Tyree was suddenly tired, sick of all the dying that lay around him. “Luke, Lorena told us that Quirt Laytham and Sheriff Tobin have declared open season on rustlers. Take him into Crooked Creek and let those two deal with him.”
Boyd seemed uncertain, but when he met Tyree’s eyes and saw their hard, determined light he let it go. “Well, if you say so, but I’d rather string him up my ownself.” He glanced around the camp. “I heard this one say his name was Roy Will. Who are the other two?”
“The man by the fire is Jed Will, this one’s brother. The redhead over there, I don’t know his name.”
“Trace Henderson,” the man called Roy said. “Out of Blanco County, Texas. Ran with Jesse Evans for a spell and killed his share.”
“Well, his killin’ is done,” Boyd said. “And good riddance I say.”
Owen Fowler led the horses into camp and looked around him, his face pale with shock. “Are they . . . are they . . . ?”
“Yup, Owen, both of them are dead as rotten stumps,” Boyd said, rising from where he’d been kneeling beside Henderson.
“Then we have to bury them,” Fowler said, a man who couldn’t come to terms with the destruction around him desperately latching on to something he did understand.
“Need a shovel for that, and we don’t have one,” Boyd said. “I saw a cave back in the arroyo. We’ll lay ’em in there. Good a place for their kind as any.”
Tyree kneeled by the fire and placed the fry pan back on the coals and shook the bacon. “Let’s eat first,” he said. “No point in letting good grub go to waste.”
Tyree and the others rode back to the cabin with their prisoner under a moonlit sky ablaze with stars.
When he was a ways off, Boyd yelled to Lorena that he was coming in, and the door swung open a moment later, throwing a rectangle of light onto the porch. The girl ran into the yard.
When her father dismounted, Lorena threw herself into his arms. “Pa, where were you? I’ve been so worried.”
“Later, child. I’ve got a wounded man here.”
“Who?”
Lorena’s alarmed eyes went directly to Tyree, but he smiled and jerked his thumb at Roy Will. “Not me, him.”
Had he seen real concern in Lorena’s face? Why, when her father said someone was wounded, had she looked for him first? It could, Tyree decided, mean nothing. Or everything.
Fowler volunteered to unsaddle and feed the horses. Tyree followed Lorena and her father into the cabin. As the girl began to wash blood from the outlaw’s shoulder, Boyd told her what had happened, sparing none of the details.
Lorena stopped what she was doing and looked at Tyree, an expression of horror crossing her lovely face. “You killed two of them?” She glanced at Will’s shattered shoulder. “And you did this?”
Tyree nodded. “It was either them or me. It was a mighty sudden thing and I didn’t have time to study on it.”
Lorena continued to look at Tyree for a long moment, a tangle of confused emotion in her eyes. She’d been born and raised in the West, and she knew well what happened to rustlers when they were caught. But now, seeing it up close in all its bloody reality, she was obviously struggling to come to terms with what had happened.
“Chance did what he had to do, Lorena,” Boyd said mildly. He pointed at Will, who was sitting with his head bowed, sullen and silent. “Him and the others were taking my bull and they were willing to fight to keep it.”
Lorena struggled to regain her composure. “Is this what it means to be a named gunfighter, Chance? Am I seeing the true, cruel reality behind all the dime novels? In a single instant to have the ability to cut down two men and smash another’s shoulder to pieces?”
Though aware of the barb, Tyree smiled. “Yes, that’s what it means. That and other things.”
The girl lifted her head high. “Then I hope to God I never meet another gunfighter. There isn’t a Hereford bull in the world that’s worth the lives of two men.”
“I’m with you there,” Tyree said, nodding toward Will. “But maybe him and the other two should have thought of that before they stole it.”
“That’s what I say, boy,” Boyd agreed. The rancher put his hand on Tyree’s shoulder. “Do you recollect my telling you to ride on once you were well enough? Well, that don’t go no more. You played the man’s part today, Chance, and I’m beholden to you. Stay on here as long as you want.”
Whatever Tyree was about to answer was lost as the door opened and Fowler stepped inside. “I rubbed down the horses and fed them,” he said. “Turned the rustlers’ mounts into the corral. Rubbed down your paint too, Lorena. He was lathered up some.”
The girl nodded. “I went riding just before sun-down. I was about to go see to him when you all came back.”