Benedict and Brazos 3 by E. Jefferson Clay

Author:E. Jefferson Clay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: revenge, ranch, action hero, cattle rustling, the old west, colt 45, piccadilly publishing, wild west fiction, gunfighters and outlaws, ebooks westerns
Publisher: Piccadilly

Six – The Vanishing Herd

Romero threw the dregs of his coffee on the fire.

“All right, let us get on with it.”

The horsemen were weary after six solid hours in the saddle, but there was no argument. To the simple men of Rancho Antigua, Nathan Kendrick was God and Juan Romero was His deputy.

The towering ramparts of the Bucksaws were throwing huge shadows across Slave River and Sweetwater Basin as the riders swung up. A vaquero emptied the coffee pot over the little fire they’d built on the river bluffs, then stamped out the ashes. Clouds were banking up over the badlands and creeping slowly across the sky towards the afternoon sun.

“I theenk I have blisters on my backside for a month,” lamented Pancho Pino who was strictly a homestead vaquero.

“You have blisters?” said self-pitying Manuelita Orlando, another bunkhouse cowboy. “By the Blessed Virgin of Guadeloupe, I have blisters on my blisters.”

“One theeng is good,” Pino comforted them both as the cavalcade got under way. “See how the clouds come. A leetle while back I hear Señor Brazos remark that we will be unable to follow the sign tonight.”

“Does that mean that we go back to the ranchero?”

“Perhaps.” Pino frowned back over his shoulder. “Ay, look, he does not come weeth us.”

The two men reined in and looked back. Hank Brazos, who hadn’t taken the ten-minute break for coffee, was still walking up and down examining the prints of the rustled cattle, where they’d come out of the river, for about the twentieth time.

Some distance ahead, Juan Romero swore as he turned and saw the two men halted, and only then spotted Brazos farther back.

“Hold hard!” he shouted to his riders, then cantering back a short distance, yelled: “Hey, cowboy!”

Brazos looked up but made no move to mount up. His horse stood under a tree and Bullpup had gone to sleep beneath him.

Romero swore in Spanish and heeled back down to the river, jerking his horse to a tail-sitting stop.

“What do you think you are doing, hombre?”

“Readin’ sign.”

“Then might I point out to you that the sign leads east as any man with half an eye could see.”

“Oh, ain’t no doubt at all about that,” Brazos agreed with a puzzled frown that had not been absent from his face for the past twenty minutes. “But there’s somethin’ wrong with this here sign, Romero.”

“There is?” Romero’s tone was sarcastic. “Then perhaps you can explain what it is.”

Brazos could, but he just wasn’t ready to do so quite yet. Turning his back on the straw boss, he walked slowly back down towards the water. Underfoot were the deep plowed tracks of many hooves in the soft riverbank earth leading out of the water. Many times in the eight miles that they’d followed the Slave from the western end of Sweetwater Basin to where he stood now at the eastern end, the tracks of the cattle had disappeared into the river, then reappeared again farther on. It was an old rustling trick to confuse the pursuit and it had successfully delayed them many hours during the day.

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