It was just after dawn on our third day, and the trail had turned straight west. Now and then, Cole would see a hoofprint in among the ground cover. But mostly, we were able to follow them through horse droppings and the signs of campfires.
“I been thinking,” I said to Cole.
“Un-huh.”
He rode with his eyes on the ground, leading the saddle horse, with me trailing the mule.
“We’re all the law there was in Appaloosa,” I said.
“Yep.”
“And now we ain’t there.”
“Yep.”
“So,” I said. “Now there ain’t no law there.”
“Yep.”
“And that don’ bother you?” I said.
Cole looked up from the tracking for a moment.
“No,” he said. “It don’t.”
We rode on: Cole, head down, looking at the ground; me riding beside him, looking at the landscape. The saddle horse trailing placidly behind him, the mule behind me. Neither of us said anything. When we kicked up a jackrabbit, my hand went to my handgun, before I caught it. Cole never flinched. I’m not even sure he saw the rabbit. We kept on. We didn’t hurry, but we didn’t stop. Ahead, past the horizon above where our present direction would take us, there was a circular movement in the sky.
“Buzzards,” I said.
Cole looked up. His face showed nothing. We kept on. In maybe an hour, we came to where the buzzards were feeding. It was the carcass of a young buffalo, mostly bones now, and hooves. Most of what could be eaten had been. The buzzards flew up as we rode up, and landed again a few feet away. Cole ignored them. He got off his horse and went and squatted on his heels and looked at the remnants. The buzzards hopped restlessly just out of his reach. He paid no attention.
“Hide’s gone,” he said.
I sat my horse and waited, looking at the landscape. Cole didn’t need my help with the buffalo.
“Scapula’s broke,” he said.
I looked down and could see that it was. Cole rummaged a little among the bones and the blood-soaked grass where the buffalo had fallen.
“Shot,” he said.
Cole opened his hand and showed me two big lead slugs, misshapen from shattering the scapula.
“Bigger’n a forty-five,” Cole said.
“Fifty, maybe.”
“Maybe one of them old Sharps buffalo guns,” Cole said.
The vultures edged closer. There were still a few scraps on the bones.
“I didn’t see no sign of one,” I said, “with the Sheltons.”
“Nope. Wouldn’t take the hide, either.”
He was looking at the ground.
“See the horse tracks?” he said.
I rode nearer and wheeled around the dead animal, scattering the buzzards as I went.
“Not shod,” I said.
“And they bothered to skin it and take the hide,” Cole said.
“Indians.”
“Yep.”
I rode out a little way from the carcass, and in a slow wider circle, which infuriated the buzzards who had just lit there, after I’d scattered them in closer. On foot, Cole walked out toward where I was. I leaned forward in my saddle.
“Here’s the shod hoofprints,” I said. “And the unshod, mingled.”
Cole squatted, looking at the smudges in the dirt. Then he got down on his belly and put his face barely an inch away from the prints and looked, and slithered along like that, looking.
“Shod prints are older,” he said. “Sides have begun to crumble a little. Unshod prints are over them. Fresher.”
I looked at the landscape again. Nothing moved but the unhappy buzzards.
“Kiowa?” I said.
“No way to say. There’s some out here.”
“Could be hunters,” I said.
“Could be, but if they was just huntin’ they’d take bones, ligaments, horns, teeth, everything. Here they just took the hide and meat.”
“No squaws,” I said.
Cole nodded.
“When you was with the Army,” he said, “was the Kiowas hostile.”
“They were,” I said. “But you know Indians. Yesterday they were, today maybe they ain’t.
“Can you tell how far behind the Sheltons they are?”
“Ain’t that good,” Cole said.
“Can you tell how far ahead of us they are?”
“Carcass don’t smell yet,” Cole said.
“Ain’t much left that would smell,” I said.
“Blood would,” Cole said. “Soaked in the ground.”
He stood and swung back up onto his horse.
“Best keep moving,” he said.
He kept looking at the ground as we rode on. I kept looking around us.
We camped without a fire that night, in the bend of a small river, so that the water was on three sides. And we tethered the animals close.
“No coffee,” I said. “But I still got whiskey.”
“It’ll do,” Cole said.
We ate some beef jerky and cold fry biscuits and drank some whiskey.
“Indian sign turned off about five miles back,” Cole said. “Sheltons are still going straight.”
“So they give up on the Sheltons.”
“Or they had to stop and jerk that buffalo before it started to rot,” Cole said. “Or they had something to do wherever they went and they’ll come back. Them Kiowas know there’s something ahead of ’em, and how many. It’s just if they want to chase them down.”
“Sheltons got three good gun hands, plus Allie. You know how many Indians?”
“Can’t say. They’re riding too close, and we don’t have time for me to get down and look close enough for long enough. There’s more than two.”
Cole passed me the whiskey bottle and I drank some.
“You know if Allie can shoot?”
“Anybody can shoot,” Cole said. “And hit something if it’s close enough.”
“Think they’d give her a gun?”
“I don’t think nothing,” Cole said. “Can you stay awake until midnight?”
“Yes.”
“And I can stay awake from then to dawn,” Cole said. “Wake me up.”
He rolled up in his saddle blanket and, as far as I could tell, went to sleep right away. I put the whiskey away and wrapped my saddle blanket around me, sat in the dark under the high stars with the shotgun across my lap, and listened to the sound of the river, and the smell of the water and the grass mixed with the smell of horse blanket, and the night went its way. Halfway to dawn, I woke Cole. He came awake as instantly as he’d fallen asleep.
In the morning, the mule woke me up, nudging at me for its morning feed. We fed the stock and washed in the river and had a cold breakfast and moved on.
“Sheltons got to be heading someplace,” I said. “They probably got some money before they started, but nobody’s fool enough to pay them all. They got to deliver Bragg to collect the rest.”
“Be my suppose,” Cole said.
“So they’re headin’ someplace, and we’re behind them,” I said. “Good to know we ain’t just wandering.”
Cole nodded, his eyes on the ground.
“ ’Course it’d be even better to know where the someplace was.”
“Would,” Cole said.
It was late morning when Cole halted and bent out of his saddle, looking at the ground.
“Indians are back,” he said.
I moved up beside him and saw them, too. They had trailed in from the west and cut the Sheltons’ tracks.
We moved on that way for a little, slowly, with Cole hanging out of the saddle, studying the tracks.
“They’re following,” Cole said.
“Any better sense of how many?”
Cole studied the tracks as we rode.
After maybe a mile of silence, he said, “Can’t really tell much. Might be quite a few.”
By midafternoon the trail turned west, and by late afternoon we were climbing. We had to move the animals slower and rest them some. By dark, we were in the foothills of some mountains and the temperature was cooler. We camped under an overhang against the hillside, near a spring. There was grass. We let the animals graze on a long tether. We sat in the dark again that night and ate jerky and hardtack and drank some whiskey.
“We ain’t going to be able to follow these tracks much more if they keep heading up,” I said.
“We can look for broken branches,” Cole said. “Campfire ashes, the leavin’s from a meal, horse droppings, maybe some human waste.”
“If they keep going straight,” I said. “You got any idea where we are?”
“Two days southwest of Chester,” Cole said.
“You know what mountains these are?”
“Nope.”
“You think we’re closing on them at all?” I said.
“Can’t say, but I know Allie ain’t much of a rider. She may slow them down.”
“What are we going to do about her?” I said.
“We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Cole said.
“They’ll use her as a shield, Virgil, why they brought her.”
“ ’Course they will. Wouldn’t you?”
There was no moon. The sky was clouded. With our blankets around us, we sat in near absolute darkness. We couldn’t see each other. We didn’t know where we were. There was only the sound of the animals eating grass, and trickling water, and our voices. It felt like being the only living human thing in the universe.
“Hard business,” I said. “Hard business.”
“It’s all hard business,” Cole said, “what we do.”
“You all right?” I said.
Cole was silent for a time and then he said, “All right?”
“How you feel,” I said. “ ’Bout Allie and all.”
Cole was silent again, and the silence seemed so long that I thought maybe he’d gone to sleep.
Then he said, “Everett, we been together now awhile. Can’t exactly say how long, but long. And there ain’t anyone I’d rather do this work with. You’re as good as anybody I seen, ’cept maybe the Shelton boys . . . and me.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“And the reason you ain’t as good as the Sheltons or me ain’t got nothing to do with steady, or fast, or fortuitous.”
I knew he meant fortitude.
“The reason the above-named folks are better’n you,” Cole said, “is ’cause you got feelin’s.”
“Hell, Virgil, everybody got feelin’s.”
“Feelin’s get you killed,” Virgil said.
“You tellin’ me you don’t care about Allie right now?”
Again, there was silence. I could hear one of the horses snort, as if maybe he’d gotten an insect up his nose. It was a comforting sound in the vast, black silence. It sounded familiar and calm.
After a while Cole said, “I cared about Allie in town. And I’ll care about her when I get her back.”
“But right now?” I said.
I could feel Cole thinking it over.
“Gimme that bottle,” he said, and put his hand out and touched my leg so I knew where to hand him the bottle. I put the bottle in his hand and heard him drink. Then the bottle touched my leg again and I took it back and drank some.
“Right now,” Cole said, “there’s something runnin’, and I’m trying to catch it.”
I heard him stir around as if to get more comfortable, and then he was silent. I had the first half of the night. I shifted my back a little against the boulder where we were, and sipped some whiskey and sat in the thick darkness and listened.