Read Online Bloody Season by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page B

of brass cartridge shells caught fire in the glow. Wyatt picked one up and flicked snow off the flanged end. “Winchester short. They used up enough of them to kill just two.”
    “I count seventeen,” Paul said. “Here is where one of them waited with the horses.” He carried the light into the mesquite. The new snow lay bowl-shaped in depressions where the earlier fall had been trampled. He hooked something out of the brush and held it out.
    Virgil turned the item over and handed it to Wyatt. It was a triangle of black cloth with lengths of frayed rope sewed around the edges.
    Paul said, “I thought they was yellow whiskers. They each was wearing one.”
    “The trail is hours old,” said Behan, when the men returned to their animals. “The snow will melt come morning and we will have nothing but lathered horses to show for our trailing.”
    Wyatt mounted. “Bat can read sign like an Apache. I am no poor shakes at it myself and neither is Virgil.”
    First light was a metallic sliver over the Dragoons. Bob Paul swung a leg over the black he had brought back from Benson after delivering the stagecoach and the party set out, the horses shuddering and snorting milky vapor.
    The sky cleared at dawn. The sun warmed the earth and drew forth a fog that burned off by mid-morning, the droplets prisming into brilliant colors in the moment of dissipation. The snow dissolved into patches that became brown puddles in the afternoon. By then all of the riders except Behan, hanging back with Breakenridge, had shucked their coats and rolled them behind their cantles.
    Now and then they stopped while Masterson rode his paint around in a circle, leaning out of the saddle, or dismounted and went ahead on foot to study the ground. Sometimes he was joined by Wyatt.
    “These fellows are not new to life on the scout,” said Masterson, stepping into leather. “Doubling back and using riverbeds and rock face. Johnny would have lost this one thirty miles back.”
    Wyatt showed his teeth. “Johnny would lose his ass in a washtub unless it had a county ballot tattooed on it.” “You are still chewing over that appointment?”
    “He promised me undersheriff and then turned around and gave it to Harry Woods. The difference comes to twenty thousand a year. I guess I am still chewing over it.”
    They camped in the Dragoon foothills, where Masterson served Billy Breakenridge a plateful of beans and curled bacon with a hibernating scorpion on top of it and smiled when the deputy squealed and dropped the plate. The others howled, all except a scowling Behan. After supper Morgan shared a bottle with Masterson and Virgil, who offered it to Bob Paul, but it was declined. Wyatt smoked a pipe. Behan took off his sombrero and combed his spidery hair forward over his dome. They banked the fire and slept. Marshall Williams snored loudest.
    In the morning the trail bent north and then west past Tres Alamos, following the swollen San Pedro River up the valley. There it mingled with other, older tracks at sundown and Masterson lost it.
    “Rancher named Wheaton went bust sometime back,” Wyatt told him, separating a prickly pear from his chaparreras between thumb and forefinger. “His place is a day and a half upriver. If I was planning a holdup in the snow and wanted a place to shelter fresh mounts it would be there.”
    “It’s worth looking. That San Pedro crowd has pushed too many stole cattle through this country to track an ammo wagon after them.”
    Part of Wheaton’s roof had tipped in, the adobe beaten down to rubble on that side and the windows gaping. The barn, a solider construction, stood swaybacked a hundred yards away with sunlight streaming between leaden gray sideboards not yet carried off by scavengers in a region starved for wood. They rode down on the shack out of a lifting sun, six men unshaven and mortared from crowns to rowels with three days of dust and dried mud and their horses throwing lather. The two county men trailed