“You had better hurry,” Tom said.
“Yes.”
Tom sat his horse as Rebecca disappeared into the woods. He waited a few minutes before he rode ahead. When he crested the hill, he saw that Rebecca had already returned to the encampment, so he knew the others would be expecting him. He rode slowly and steadily toward the camp. Sally came out to greet him when he arrived.
The other side of the river
“Hey, who is that?” Morrell asked.
Doyle moved to where he could look over the berm that was providing them with both cover and concealment.
Doyle chuckled. “You ought to recognize him, Morrell,” he said. “He’s the one that proved you was lyin’ in the hearing. His name is Tom something.”
“Yeah,” Morrell said. “Yeah, that is him, ain’t it? Well, I’ll just settle accounts between me an’ him right now.”
Morrell jacked a round into his Winchester and raised it to his shoulders. Seeing him, Lovejoy reached out and grabbed the rifle from him.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lovejoy asked.
“That’s the son of a bitch that called me a liar in court,” Morrell said.
“If you shoot him now it will give us away. I’m only interested in one man, and that’s Matt Jensen, the one who killed Frank. Now if you can’t go along with that, then you can just leave now. Without the one hundred dollars.”
“No, no, that’s all right. I reckon there will be plenty of time to kill that fella after we kill Matt Jensen.”
“Where are the others?” Doyle asked. “Seems to me like those wagons have been there long enough now.”
“Maybe that’s what this fella, Tom, come up to tell them,” Morrell suggested. “Like as not he come up to tell ’em that the others would be along directly.”
Back at the herd, Dusty was the first to see a rider coming toward them.
“Clay, we got a galloper coming in,” Dusty called.
Pulling their guns, Clay and Dusty both rode toward the rider. The rider held one hand in the air as he approached.
“Is this the herd Matt Jensen is with?” the rider asked.
“Yeah, it is. What of it?” Clay asked.
“My name is Billy Lovejoy.”
“Lovejoy?” Dusty said. “Ain’t that the name of the man Matt kilt?”
“Yes,” Billy said. “Frank Lovejoy was my brother.”
“So what are you doing here? Have you come for revenge?” Clay asked.
“No, on the contrary. I’m here to warn you about my Pa. He is planning to set up an ambush at the Cimarron River.”
“We know,” Dusty said.
“You know?” Billy asked in surprise. “How do you know?”
“They were spotted on the other side of the river.”
“So, what are you going to do now?”
“We are already doing it. We sent someone to deal with it.”
“Let me go to my father,” Billy said. “Let me see if I can talk him out of it.”
“Why didn’t you try to talk him out of it before he came down here?” Clay asked.
“I did try. He didn’t listen to me.”
“What makes you think he would listen to you now?”
“I don’t know, maybe he won’t. But I feel like I have to try.”
“What do you think, Dusty?” Clay asked.
“How do we know he isn’t comin’ to warn his Pa that we are on to him?” Dusty asked.
“I’m not,” Billy said. “Please, you must let me go.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t take the chance,” Clay said.
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Billy urged his horse into a gallop. By the time Clay and Dusty recovered, then got their horses turned around, Billy was sixty feet away. Clay aimed his pistol.
“Better not, Clay!” Dusty shouted. “If this herd gets spooked into a stampede now, with only the three of us, we’ll never get it stopped!”
Clay lowered his pistol without firing.
“I think maybe the fella came to do just what he said he came to do,” Dusty said. “And if he can get there in time to stop any shootin’, well that would be better all around, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Clay agreed. “But I doubt he will get there in time.”
“This looks like the place,” Smoke said, pointing to three rocks which, as Dusty had indicated, were stair-stepping down.
Matt walked down to the edge of the water and stuck his hand into it. “Damn, it’s cold,” he said. “Couldn’t we just come back in the summertime?”
“Americans are always complaining about the cold,” Duff said. “If you want cold, sure ’n you should come to Scotland.” Duff rode down into the water. “Och!! ‘Tis cold!” he said, and the others laughed.
All four rode down into the river and, just as Dusty had promised, the water was deep enough to come up on their legs. The water was cold, cold enough that the horses didn’t have to be prodded to cross quickly. Fortunately, the ford wasn’t too difficult.
When Smoke, Falcon, and Duff got across, they looked around to see Matt coming behind them. Unlike them, Matt had not kept his feet in the stirrups. Instead, he lifted them up and wrapped them around the saddlehorn. As a result, unlike the others, he didn’t have cold, wet legs.
“Would you look at that?” Falcon said. “What’s the matter, can’t take a little cold?”
“You just wish you had thought of it,” Matt said. “Let’s face it, sometimes being young and innovative counts more than experience.”
“Let’s find them and get this done,” Smoke said.
Deadly serious now, the four men quit teasing and went to work. Because of the way the river made a big U right here, when they crossed they were not only on the same side as the ambushers, they were behind them as well.
Ground-tying the horses, the four men snaked their Winchesters out of their saddle-sheaths then moved quickly, on foot, until they came up behind the would-be ambushers. Smoke counted nineteen of them. All were well-armed, and all were in position behind a berm that would shield them from observation and protect them from return fire.
That is, if the return fire was coming from the other side. In this case, they were on the same side of the river with them, and they were behind them, which meant that the cover and concealment the Back Trail riders had picked for themselves were absolutely useless against Smoke, Matt, Falcon, and Duff.
“Where the hell are they? What’s takin’ ’em so long?” one of the Back Trail riders asked, his question clearly heard by Smoke and the others as they came up on them.
“Maybe them Black Angus cows just take longer to drive than any other cow,” one of the others suggested.
“I don’t know, I’m beginnin’ to get a bad feeling about this. I think we should just ride across the river, kill them three women and that fella that’s with them, then go out and meet the herd.”
“No need to go out looking for us. We are right here,” Smoke called out to them.
“What the hell?” Seth Lovejoy shouted, whirling around to see Smoke and the others standing about fifty yards behind them. The first thing Seth Lovejoy noticed was that the four men behind them were at the outer edge of pistol range. On the other hand, they were well within rifle range, and all four the men were holding Winchester rifles.
“They’re behind us!” Lovejoy shouted. “Shoot them! Kill them!”
Duff raised his rifle and with the first shot took down Morrell, who was the only one of the bunch who had a rifle in his hands.
The others began firing their pistols. Smoke, Matt, Falcon, and Duff could hear the bullets whizzing by. It wasn’t that the pistols couldn’t shoot that far, it was that it took an extremely skilled marksman to be accurate at that range.