When Mary-Lou moved off into the darkness, heading vaguely eastward, to get their horses, and of course herself, out of the reach of any rustlers who chose to cross the river searching for them, she had no particular destination in mind. She had previously crossed this country before only to the north of the line the cattle had taken, and had never been into that area further down the plains.
With it being so dark, she had to leave the choice of path largely to Dusky, Johnnie’s big black stallion. The packhorse she kept on a halter. The others followed Dusky of their own accord.
So long as she stayed on the short buffalo grass all went well. Odd tumbleweeds caused little bother for they were still green and soft-stemmed, easily trampled down. The problems came with the matted patches of blackjack oak, cross timbers as some folks called the interlinked branches of the knee-high scrub. There was no way through the stuff. She had to find a way round each time, while still trying to maintain an eastward direction over all. Sagebrush was less of a hindrance. She could push through that, and did. She was anxious to get well away from the immediate area of the river crossing as quickly as she could.
Every now and then she came to a water course incised into the plain. The first one she met she followed north, staying out of it until she reached its dry head channels, little more than ditches, where she could cross easily and resume her progress eastwards. As she came up out of it she paused to listen to the sounds of the night, coyotes away out ahead of her somewhere, the mournful hoot of an owl, the crunching of gravel under the hooves of the horses following through the dry watercourse behind her. She wondered how far that sound might travel.
There was nothing she could do about it. It was best to keep going.
Rich on the breeze drifting past her down the plains was the smell of sagebrush, stronger in some places than others. It was almost overpowering in the places where she had to push through it, the horses crushing leaves underfoot.
Distant gunfire brought her to a halt again; three shots in quick succession, then two more close together. Echoes, faint and fading, suggested that the shooting had taken place somewhere in the canyon along the river, in fact about where Johnnie and Bobcat should have been.
There was another sound back there too, an occasional crackling, crunching borne on the breeze. Was it a loud noise from far off, or a quiet one from close to? It worried her.
She pressed on, trying to keep to clearer ground, trying to make less noise herself. Every now and then she stopped. There was no further gunfire, but whatever the other sound was, sometimes there, sometimes not, when it was audible it seemed to be getting closer.
Surely it was the same noise that her horses were creating when they pushed through the patches of sagebrush? Was somebody following her?
Beyond the next watercourse she paused again. Nothing. Then of course she had made little noise herself on the last stretch. It had been all open ground. No blackjack oak to go around, no tumbleweed to tread down, no sagebrush to push through.
Then why was the smell of sage still so strong?
After a moment’s thought, she dismounted and sniffed again. The legs of her horses, they reeked of it.
Thoughtfully, she left Dusky ground-tied, and walked back to the lip of the watercourse she had just crossed. She was then upwind of all her horses, and still the breeze was redolent of sage. Her imagination had to be working overtime. Her sense of smell was just not that good. Or was it?
Uneasy, she thought it mightn’t be a bad idea to wait for a spell, and just see if somebody was coming along behind her. The only place she could get out of the way with all her horses was down in the watercourse. There, any slight sounds they made might be masked by the ground. Thinking of that reminded her to muzzle Dusky with her bandana, otherwise he might challenge any strange horse coming near.
She was expecting the channel to drop away to the south, draining eventually back into the North Canadian, so she turned the other way intending to go further out on to the plains. Instead she found the channel growing deeper as she moved north. This watercourse had to lead to the far-off Cimarron. She was already further out than she had thought.
Again she ground-tied Dusky, and crept back along the channel to the place where she had entered it. Definitely the smell of sage was stronger.
Something crunched somewhere to the southwest of her, not exactly on her back trail, but not very far away from it. Then another crunch came from about the same place. There was no doubt about it. Something was moving out there.
Silently she eased another hundred yards along the shallowing channel. If she stood up in daylight she’d be able to see over the top. As it was there was a distinct difference between the stygian blackness in the channel, and the open ground above, where starlight had some slight effect.
Whatever was out there was still moving. She went on for another hundred yards... horses, more than one, and the smell of sage had grown quite noticeable.
She crouched in the ditch, which was all the watercourse was by then, and let the horses pass within twenty yards of her as they crossed over. One... two, and then a third.
They stopped, as she had stopped, just after crossing the ditch, but about a furlong to the south of her course.
‘Can’t hear them,’ a hoarse voice whispered.
‘Shut up. They’re not far ahead,’ another replied.
Them? They? Whoever was lurking there in the darkness wasn’t aware that she was on her own, but quite definitely they were following her. She hadn’t thought it possible in the darkness, but obviously they’d managed it so far. She’d been making too much noise. That had to be it. Aided by the breeze in her direction she’d detected their three horses. Against the wind they’d done well to keep some track of her seven.
Had there been only one of them, perhaps even with two, she’d have taken her chances with her revolver. Three were too many. Her best plan was to try to lose them. Perhaps if she kept her horses down in the watercourse they mightn’t be heard so easily.
Quietly she crept back, and took up Dusky’s reins again, walking ahead of him. By going slowly she hoped to make less noise, but the big stallion was edgy, and showed clearly that he had smelt the other horses out there.
The trouble came when the other horses smelt him. One of them neighed a challenge. Even with the muzzle on, Dusky tried to answer.
Immediately Mary-Lou whipped away the bandana, and swung up into the saddle. Speed would now be the only thing that could save her. She urged Dusky into a trot, all that she could ask of him in the darkness. For a start she had to continue along the water course, prevented from doing what she wanted, which was to go up on to the open plain with the watercourse between her and her pursuers. That wasn’t to be. The channel there was cut down into the underlying limestone, and the sides were rock straight up and down.
Confined by those rock sides, she could only plunge ahead, hoping against hope that there’d be nothing for the horses to stumble on.
Above her, even over the rumble of her own band of horses, she could hear other horses at a gallop.
She had no chance. It was too easy for one of the riders to get ahead of her, while the others stayed just beyond the rim above her.
Some way ahead a lucifer flared. A bundle of burning scrub tumbled into the channel. More scrub was thrown down on top of it.
‘Keep going folks,’ somebody above her called. ‘We’ve got you covered all round.’
They had too. She knew somebody had her outlined against the fire. Nothing could be seen of any of them.
Dusky threw his head about, objecting to the fire, but she pressed him on. Near it she came to a stop. More scrub dropped from the edge of the channel, some missing the fire, but enough landing on it to build up the blaze.
‘Undo your gunbelt, mister,’ the voice ordered.
Mister? The clothes of course. She let her weapon and cartridge box fall to the ground.
‘Anybody back there,’ the rustler yelled loudly into the night, ‘try an
ything smart and this one gets it.’
They couldn’t know that she was alone, and must have thought that her companions had gone to ground somewhere back along the way, letting her draw off the pursuit.
A man’s head and shoulders appeared above the rim nearby, lit from below by the flickering light of the fire. It was the grey man. He wore his shallow-crowned hat slung behind his shoulders, suspended by a cord about his throat.
‘Come over here,’ he ordered. ‘Give us your hand, lad.’
Mary-Lou complied. She could do nothing else. Her proffered hand was gripped from above by a fist like iron, and she was hauled up holus-bolus to stand beside her captor. Another man, a fellow in a bowler hat, his forehead very white in the reflected light of the fire, was standing in the background. A faint glint showed that he held a gun trained on her.
‘Now then, where’s...’ the grey man started to say, and stopped suddenly. He was listening.
The sound of more gunfire was being carried down to them on the wind, a regular fusillade from miles back across the plains, a pause and then two more shots... another exchange of several shots coming almost together, and finally a burst of three.
‘If you’re asking where my friends are,’ Mary-Lou said, ‘I think that answers your question.’
‘Hell, Dismal,’ the second outlaw burst out, ‘it’s a woman!’
‘It is and all,’ Dismal, the grey man, agreed. ‘That’s interestin’, ain’t it? I know you’ve been followin’ us, but who might you be?’
‘What difference does it make?’ she countered.
‘You got to be somebody’s wife, daughter, sister, but whose, eh? What sort of outfit lets their womenfolk go chasin’ stolen cattle? Do they place any value on you?’
That was a good question. Mary-Lou hadn’t thought about it. Was there any reason why the Bells should show any special concern for her?
‘Outfit?’ she questioned. ‘I’m all the outfit there is. I own half those cattle you’ve taken. The JQE brand is mine. I’m the sole owner, and I don’t have to have anybody allowing me to do anything.’
‘JQE?’she was asked,
‘Looks like a sunburst,’ she answered.
‘Oh them? You’ll be the Edison woman, then... the one they call the Cumberland Belle, eh? Oh well, somebody’ll want you,’ Dismal decided. ‘I think I’ll keep you for a while.’
What was he going to do with her otherwise?
And would somebody want her? Want her, that is, in a way that she’d want somebody to want her, somebody like Dryfe Sands Johnnie perhaps?
‘If nothin’ else,’ Dismal observed, ‘the boys’ll enjoy your company for a while.’
She didn’t like to think about that. She knew what they considered enjoyment.
Mary-Lou was bound to one of the outlaw’s horses, while one of the men was lowered into the stream channel to take charge of hers. They all kept pace with each other, until a way was found for the rest of them to get down into the channel, which they then followed down, mile after mile, until it debouched as a small stream into a tributary of the Cimarron. During that time daylight came, and their pace quickened.
FIFTEEN