Gustaffson nodded. “We’ll be ready to ride in a few minutes, Ranger.”
Thad said, “I’m burying Tip before I go anywhere.”
“Put him next ... next to your ma, son,” Gustaffson choked out. “He was always her dog more than anybody else’s.”
“I’ll help you, Thad,” The Kid offered.
Thad started to refuse with a stubborn shake of his head. Then he said, “I’m obliged, Morgan. Let’s go.”
As they walked out of the cabin and started toward the gravesite, Thad went on, “Which one of the posse shot him?”
“You don’t need to know that,” The Kid replied. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
Thad glared at him. “Was it you?”
“No. I don’t think I would have done that.”
After a second, Thad shrugged. “No, I don’t reckon you would have.”
Nick came out of the barn to join them. “Can I give you a hand, Mr. Morgan?”
“I think that would be fine, Nick.” The Kid performed the introductions. “Nick Burton, Thad Gustaffson.”
“I’m sure sorry about ... about everything, Thad,” Nick said.
“Thanks. We’re gonna bury our dog.” Thad drew in a deep, ragged breath. “You have a dog, Nick?”
“No. I did for a while when I was a little kid, but he got sick and died.”
“Sorry,” Thad muttered.
The Kid hung back a little to let the two youngsters talk. Tragedy sometimes brought people together and made them friends. It had happened in his case, and those friendships had helped him get through some mighty rough times. Maybe it would be like that with Nick and Thad.
Less than half an hour later the posse, stronger by three, rode out and took up the trail of the outlaws.
Chapter 13
“How long do you think it’ll take Cooper and the others to catch up to us?” Duval asked as he and Latch rode at the head of the big group of riders.
“They had better catch up by the end of the day,” Latch snapped. “All they had to do was finish off those girls, kill all the livestock they could find, and burn everything to the ground. That shouldn’t have taken them more than an hour or two.”
If that was all they had done, Duval mused.
Cooper was a pretty good man, but Rattigan was one of the four Latch had assigned to handle the mopping up. Like the creature that formed part of his name, Rattigan was a particularly loathsome vermin, even for that bunch of cutthroats. He was sly, too, and had a way of wheedling other men into going along with what he wanted.
The other two outlaws who’d been left behind at the ranch, Fellows and Clark, were easily led. Duval could easily see Rattigan persuading them they ought to have another go at the twins before they killed the girls, and with the three of them united, Cooper would have had to go along with them.
But maybe he was worrying for nothing, Duval told himself. Maybe the four men would do exactly what they were supposed to do and nothing more, and by nightfall they would have come galloping up to rejoin the rest of the gang. It didn’t make any sense to go borrowing trouble.
By late afternoon, though, when Latch and Duval began looking for a good place to camp, there had been no sign of Cooper and the others. Duval saw familiar sparks of anger in Latch’s eyes, a bad sign.
The plains through which they had ridden for the past several days were starting to peter out into a stretch of rugged, wooded hills and canyons. Several more days of riding through the rougher terrain lay between them and San Antonio, which was situated where the landscape became flatter again and started to turn into the coastal plain running all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Latch found a hollow he liked the looks of and announced, “We’ll camp here for the night.”
The rest of the men immediately dismounted and set to work tending to the horses, gathering wood for a fire, and setting up camp.
Latch stalked to the top of the ridge that formed one side of the hollow and stopped, peering back to the west, the direction from which they had come.
Seeing that, Duval went up to join him. “Looking for Cooper and the others?”
“They should have caught up to us by now,” Latch snapped. “They’ve disobeyed my orders.”
He wasn’t worried about the possibility that something had happened to the four men, Duval realized. The thing that bothered Latch was the chance somebody hadn’t done exactly what he’d told them to do.
“Maybe they decided they’ve had enough of riding with us and went off on their own,” Duval suggested.
“Without their share of the loot?” Latch shook his head. “I don’t think so. One thing all my men have in common is greed.”
He was probably right about that, Duval had to admit.
“No, it’s more likely they lingered there to enjoy themselves some more with those girls,” Latch went on. “I told them not to waste any more time. But that man Rattigan is scum. Clever scum, but still scum.”
Latch was thinking along the same lines Duval had, earlier in the day.
But so much time had passed, he didn’t think that was a satisfactory explanation anymore. “Even if they had, it wouldn’t have taken them all day, boss. They still should have caught up to us by now.”
Latch jerked his head in a curt nod. “Yes. Something has happened to them.”
“Maybe that posse from Fire Hill is still after us. Maybe they rode up to that ranch while Cooper and the others were still there and caught them.”
Latch frowned. “Those men should have turned back by now. We’ve never had a posse chase us for this long.”
“We never burned down a whole town before, either,” Duval pointed out.
Latch stroked his beard and smiled in obvious pleasure at the memory of all those buildings going up in flames as the crackling roar was accompanied by shrill screams. “That’s true, Slim,” he said softly. “We never did.”
He straightened and took a deep breath. “We need to find out for certain. Can you follow our back trail at night?”
“I reckon I can,” Duval said.
“Take three men with you and scout behind us,” Latch ordered. “I want to know if that posse is back there, and if they are, how close they are. Can you do that, Slim?”
“Of course I can,” Duval answered without hesitation. He didn’t particularly relish the job, but if that’s what Latch wanted him to do, he would try his best. To do otherwise would be too dangerous, and Slim Duval was a cautious man.
“Good. I assumed they would turn back after we hit them before. Men like that get worked up and join a posse, but as soon as they realize it could get them killed, their courage evaporates. If this bunch is being particularly stubborn, we may have to take steps.”
“Steps?” Duval repeated.
“That’s right. We may have to stop long enough to wipe them out.”
By nightfall, Abel Gustaffson and his sons had settled into an attitude of stoic, stolid grief. It matched what the other members of the posse from Fire Hill had felt a few days earlier when their homes had been destroyed and their loved ones killed.
That pain had dulled slightly for them with the passage of time, but it was still fresh for the father and his two sons.
That was the thing about pain, The Kid mused as the men went about the work of setting up camp. It never went away completely. For days at a time, you might not think about everything you’d lost in life, but then something unexpected would remind you and you’d feel that all-too-familiar twinge deep inside, like somebody had just poked you in the vitals with a knife.
Maybe by the time thirty or forty or fifty years had passed, those feelings finally went away. The Kid hadn’t lived that long yet and didn’t really expect to, the way he kept getting mixed up in things where people shot at him.
But somehow he doubted that grief ever really died.
Nick was hanging around with Thad Gustaffson, and his brother Bill had joined them. The Kid figured it was probably good for all of them.
Some of Bill’s worries had been eased when the posse stopped at the neighboring ranch and found that Latch’s gang hadn’t been there. Doris Horton, the pretty brunette eighteen-year-old Bill had been courting, was fine.
She and her mother and her sisters had all cried when they heard what had happened at the Gustaffson ranch. Doris’s father J. W. Horton had shaken Abel Gustaffson’s hand, slapped him encouragingly on the back, and solemnly promised to look after Abel’s place for as long as necessary.
“If we’re not back in a couple weeks, consider it yours, J.W.,” Gustaffson had told him. “You’ve been a mighty good friend and neighbor to us, and I don’t know anybody else I’d rather see take over the place.”
“Now, don’t be talkin’ like that,” Horton had told him. “You’ll be runnin’ your own ranch again before you know it. You and the boys are gonna come back and be just fine.”
Gustaffson hadn’t had anything to say to that. They might come back, The Kid mused, but he doubted if they would ever really be fine again.
After that side trip to the Horton ranch, the posse had picked up the trail of the outlaws again and put quite a few more miles behind them.
As The Kid sat beside Culhane at the campfire that evening, the Ranger said, “Another day, maybe less, and we’ll start gettin’ into the hill country. Ever been there, Morgan?”
The Kid shook his head. “Like I told you, I’ve been to San Antonio, but I don’t know that much about the rest of Texas.”
“It’s a land of ... what do you call it? ... infinite variety,” Culhane said with the note of pride in his voice common to people who had been borned and raised in the Lone Star State. “Just about any kind of country you’re lookin’ for, you can find it here. Just about every kind of people, too. Most of ’em are good, hard-workin’ folks. For them that ain’t ... well, that’s why we got the Rangers.”
“Where did Latch come from?”
“Georgia. His folks brought him and the rest of the family here after the war, when Latch was just a little shaver. They’d lost pert near everything when ol’ William Tecumseh Sherman came marchin’ through, and then the Yankee carpetbaggers come in and took the little bit that was left. Made Latch’s pa pretty bitter, I expect. He settled the family over in East Texas, close to Nacogdoches. I don’t care for that piney country. Too woody and snaky for my tastes.
“Anyway, that’s about all I know. I got a hunch Latch was a mite off in the head all along. A fella don’t go that loco overnight. When we sent Rangers over to Nacogdoches to find out if any of his family that’s still there had seen him lately, they heard stories about some of the things he done as a kid growin’ up.”
Culhane shook his head. “The neighbors learned mighty quick to keep their own kids and their pets away from that Latch boy.”
“You wouldn’t think somebody like that would be able to put together such a big gang and manage to avoid being caught for so long,” The Kid commented.
“Just because a fella’s plumb crazy don’t mean he ain’t plenty smart, too.”
The Kid knew that was true. In his past, he had been plagued by a vengeance-seeking woman who had been cruelly insane, but also cunning enough to wreak havoc in his life on several occasions, in several different ways.
It was a good thing Pamela Tarleton had never met Warren Latch, he mused. If those two had ever gotten together, the results might have been too horrifying to contemplate.
But Pamela was dead, and with any luck Warren Latch soon would be, too, or at least safely locked up behind bars.
The men began to turn in for the night, except for the ones who would be standing guard. The Kid had one of the middle shifts, so he rolled into his blankets and went to sleep.
Woody Anderson, the burly blacksmith from Fire Hill with the wounded arm, woke him when it was his turn to be on watch.
“Everything quiet, Woody?” The Kid asked.
Anderson nodded. “Yeah, nothin’ stirrin’ out there tonight.” The man’s voice was a rumble, even when he was trying to be quiet.
The Kid clapped a hand on the shoulder of Anderson’s good arm. “Fine. Go get some sleep.”
He picked up his Winchester and walked out beyond the small ring of light cast by the fire, which had burned down to embers, giving off only a feeble glow.
Plenty of stars and a sickle-shaped moon revealed the landscape around him. A couple hundred yards from the camp, The Kid found a small knoll where he could sit down.
Culhane had said the posse would reach the end of the plains the next day, but for tonight, they were still surrounded by flat prairie dotted with brush and an occasional stand of scrubby trees. The hardy grass was starting to turn brown from the summer heat and lack of rain.
All The Kid’s senses were alert as he sat there watching, listening, and even smelling the night. His instincts were on keen edge. He had no real reason to think the posse might be attacked, but the possibility always existed that Latch might double back and try to ambush them.
Other, unknown dangers could be lurking out there in the night, too. It never hurt to be careful.
Because even when you were, things could happen.
Terrible things.
Because he was so on edge and just waiting for trouble, it wasn’t surprising that a little while later The Kid heard a noise, the sort of faint sound most men wouldn’t hear and wouldn’t think anything of if they did.
It was only a tiny
clink
, but he knew it was the sound of a horseshoe hitting a rock.
Somebody was out there.