“Find Munson an’ Dolly.”
“Yeah. But how? An’ what about when you find ’em?”
“Munson has a place about two miles down this bottom,” said young Bill. “I expect they'll be there. Munson’ll claim self-defense. What I’ll do—well, that depends.”
“If you’re goin’ straight to that place, I'll be along,” Charlie said, wondering, as he uttered the words, why he should, what impulse prompted him to commit himself so, what curious motive prompted him to ride with this grave-faced boy on a blood feud. For it was nothing else, now.
“You ain’t interested in this,” young Bill answered.
“I’m interested in you,” Charlie told him. “Gosh darn it, I don’t blame you, but these family feuds are hell. I’ll ride as far as this feller’s place with you just for luck. If he ain’t there and you still aim to camp on his trail, I’ll go back to the round-up.”
“All right,” young Bill muttered “That’s white of you. But don’t mix in, Charlie. ’Tain’t your funeral.”
Light grew as they rode down a winding bottom between high walls of earth, where stunted trees clung precariously. Snow masked short sagebrush. A white world with pines black on the rim of the canyon. Their horses floundered deep. The hard crust tinkled as hoofs broke through.
“Hell of a May mornin’, this is.” Charlie Shaw thought of weak cattle dying by the hundred in this untimely burst of arctic weather. What Bill Mather thought lay behind the mask of his unsmiling face.
The canyon wound a tortuous course. The sun laid a sparkling beam on the western bank. A log cabin stood on the flat. A small corral looped from the end of a low stable. A pole fence, from wall to wall of the gorge above and below the buildings, inclosed a few acres of pasture.