The Devil's Posse by Charles G. West

Author:Charles G. West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

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At roughly the same time Quincy Morgan’s gang of outlaws rested their horses in preparation for continuing their search, the man they hunted was resting the flea-bitten gray gelding he rode. Sitting on his saddle blanket beside a slow-moving stream, Logan fed a few more sticks to the fire he had built to make his coffee. He looked for a long moment at the powerful horse grazing on the short grass beside the stream. It had been a long night for Pepper, with only a couple of stops for rest, but Logan had deemed it important to make the most of the head start given him by his unlikely friend. He wondered if Ox had been able to get back to the ranch before daylight and avoid being discovered by the marshal. Since he had no way of knowing, it was the reason he had pushed Pepper all through the night.

Surely, he thought, I must have a full day’s lead on them.

When he had ridden away from the line shack, he had headed east without a clear notion as to where he was going. After a few miles, he decided it might be too easy to track him if he continued on this rolling prairie. So he had turned back to the south, with the intention of returning to the Black Hills to get lost in the mountainous terrain they provided.

Sitting here now in the clear morning light, he looked across a wide-open prairie to gaze at Bear Butte, standing alone on an empty plain. He estimated that it was at least two or three miles distant, yet he could see it plainly. And if there had been a man on a horse anywhere between where he sat and the butte, he could have seen him, too. The thought justified his decision to swing back to seek the protection afforded under the eaves of the pine-clad mountains and the isolation of their hidden gulches and ravines.

On first thought, it might seem an unwise decision to return to the vicinity where he had killed Jake Morgan and the man with him, but the Black Hills were the closest place to lose himself. He could find a spot to hole up there while he decided it was safe enough to head for distant territory. That seemed a better choice than an endless race across a hundred miles of prairie with a marshal’s posse in pursuit. A second reason to return to the Hills might be that the marshal and his posse would not figure for him to return to the vicinity where he had committed the crime.

He had attempted to sleep a little while he rested Pepper, but in spite of being awake all night, he found that he could not. There were too many thoughts swirling around in his mind to permit him to relax. He thought about the attitude of the men he had worked with on the Triple-T. It had been for such a short time, and yet their reaction upon hearing he was wanted for killing two men was to help him escape.

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