We looked at Bragg’s spread for half of a brightly moonlit night. We rode up there in the afternoon another day. Always we sat, looking down at the ranch in plain sight. One day we rode up real early, while it was still dark.
Dawn was just starting to streak the eastern sky when we got there and held up on the hill above the ranch, where they could see us.
“Might be more clever,” I said to Cole, “if we was to sneak a little.”
“No need to sneak,” Cole said. “We’re the law.”
“Might be more clever if we got him to come into town and jumped him there.”
“I’m going to take him out here at his ranch and bring him in like Jack Bell was going to do.”
“Because?”
Cole didn’t answer. He sat his horse, looking at the ranch.
“You close with Bell?” I said.
“Not so much,” Cole said.
“But he was city marshal and now you’re city marshal.”
Cole nodded.
“And this is all about the law?”
“Killing a city marshal ain’t legal,” Cole said.
“Ralph philosopher fella say that?”
Cole grinned.
“Virgil Cole,” he said.
We sat some more. I had looked at the ranch so much that I felt as though I’d worked there. Smoke began to wisp up out of the cookshack. A couple of hands stumbled down to the big outhouse. Somebody lit a lamp in the main house, and then Bragg came out shirtless with his pants on and walked to the small outhouse.
“Now, you see that,” Cole said. “They got them a big privy down there, probably a four-holer, for the hands. And Bragg got his own personal one, nearer the house.”
I nodded. Cole never talked just to be talking, though when he did talk, he seemed to ramble. That was mostly he wasn’t talking, he was thinking out loud and new thoughts occurred to him in the process. For actual talking, if it wasn’t for me prodding him, he might not talk at all.
“All we got to do,” Cole said, “is get hold of him. Once we got him, it don’t matter how many gun hands he got.”
I nodded.
“See how them orange Osage come off at a angle from the cottonwoods along the stream?”
I nodded just to be doing something. Cole wasn’t really talking to me.
“Probably ran it up there for a windbreak in the winter,” Cole said. “Ain’t enough of it planted to fence off cattle.”
“Too short a span,” I said, just to be saying something.
“If we was to set in there behind that Osage orange, with an extra saddle horse, and maybe we be there before the sun’s up. Then we wait, and when Bragg comes down to use the privy, we move in close and take him.”
“What about the night rider?” I said.
“He’ll be looking for us up on the hill,” Cole said.
“That’s why we let them see us up there all that time,” I said. “That’s where they’ll expect us to be.”
Cole paid no attention to me.
“Before or after?” I said.
“Before or after what?”
“Before he goes into the privy, or after he comes out.”
“After,” Cole said. “I don’t want to get pissed on.”