Hunt Down by W. R. Garwood

Author:W. R. Garwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781428502758
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two days later Tracy, Lant, and Johnson were sitting in the low-ceilinged living room of Herb Bassett’s ranch house, under guard and the curious eyes of more than sixty ranchers, posse members, and mere gawkers.

The past forty-eight hours had brought them nothing but more hardships and disappointments, despite Tracy’s stubborn resolve to shake off pursuit.

After descending the mountain they had trekked twenty miles through the night, across the valley’s many plateaus and low cedar ridges to Sparks’s ranch on Talamantes Creek. There they’d hoped to raid the horse corral, but it was after daylight when they got there and they’d been forced to take cover in one of the ranch’s haystacks. The arrival of one section of the posse under Farnham had completely thwarted their attempt and they spent the rest of the day in the stack.

On the following morning they were able to get away in the dawn and reach the nearest Davenport sheep ranch at the Talamante forks. When the shepherd left for the other camp, Tracy had downed one of the sheep with a rock and they’d hurriedly hacked off enough mutton to carry away.

Their attack upon the sheep camp was their undoing, for the nearly starving men were crouched in a small arroyo near Powder Wash, roasting the meat, when their fire gave them away to a posse that had been scouting their trail.

On being ordered to surrender, Tracy picked up his rifle and ran for the wash, but Johnson immediately threw up his hands. Lant soon followed suit, although he was fired on by a posse member as he came up out of the wash.

After some time, Tracy, realizing the impossibility of getting out of the trap, his boots nearly falling off his feet and bereft of enough firepower to stand off six men, surrendered. And was fired on by Deputy Sheriff Farnham.

And now, as they sat in the Bassett ranch house in the late afternoon, friendless and guarded by half a dozen posse men, Ladore, Colorado Justice of the Peace J. S. Hoy, brother of the dead Val Hoy, interrogated the prisoners. It was a long, slow, and generally unrewarding process for the lawmen, with Johnson sullen, Lant vague with apprehension, and Tracy noncommittal. Only once did Tracy’s steely nerve break with exhaustion and frustrated anger—when the justice of the peace stiffly inquired: “Which of you men killed my brother?”

“Well, it must have been one of us here, wasn’t it?” Tracy stared back at the sober-visaged Hoy, knowing full well this particular Justice wouldn’t lift a finger if the crowd within the house and those gathered around the barns were to take the law into their own hands—as Hoy’s brother and others had done with Bennett.

With the cold, wintry day gradually coming to its end, the coal-oil lamp, hanging overhead, was lit and Justice Hoy, scribbling away at his papers in the yellow pool of light, at last cleared his throat to read the findings:

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