“We better leave our horses here,” Charlie suggested. “Only a few steps to where we can get a look from a bank right above the pens.”
Rock nodded. They took no chances of their mounts shifting, despite the fact that every cow horse is trained to stand on dropped bridle reins, as if he were anchored. They tied them to saplings. Carbines in hand, they stole warily to a point where the thicket inched out on the edge of a drop-off. They were on a narrow bench. Behind them, like a series of huge steps, other benches rose, one above the other, to a bare grassy ridge.
From the timber they could not quite see over the brow. They dropped on all fours, crawled a few yards, crept, then crawled on their stomachs and, at last, lay peering down a sharp slope.
Rock’s eyes lit up at the activity below. The corrals were right under them. He could have cast a stone into the fire where the irons glowed. The hidden pens were built the shape of a dumb-bell. Two circular inclosures made the knobs. A chute connecting the two was the grip. Either pen would hold fully five hundred head of stock. The one nearest them was jammed with cattle.
Three mounted men worked in this uneasy mass of horned beasts, forcing them, one by one, into the chute. There, at the most constricted part of the passage, an ingenious arrangement wedged each animal fast, while through an opening in the wall of poles an artist with a running iron sent up little puffs of smoke from scorching hair and hide.
Rock couldn’t read the brands, either the old or the new ones, at that distance. He had no need. He knew as well as if he had been sitting on that fence that the brand those cattle bore when they had passed through the chute was not the mark seared on when they were frisky calves. They carried a different mark—the mark of a different owner, deftly superimposed over the first. The old brand and the new could only be what he knew they must be, because he could recognize more than one man diligently laboring in the dust and the heat.
Buck Walters was there, unmistakable in his high-crowned hat with the silver band; also, Dave Wells, long, lean and efficient. Neither was a common-looking man. Rock knew every characteristic pose and action of Dave Wells. Buck Walters loomed as distinctive. He could swear to them.
A group of saddle horses stood outside the corrals. Rock counted. Three men mounted, three working at the fire—six. Out on the flat, where the grassy basin spread like a pocket in the vast skirt of the butte, two more riders rode herd on a bunch of cattle. Eight men in sight.
“That stuff on the flat isn’t worked yet, I don’t think,” Charlie whispered. He, too, was counting noses. “So they’ll probably have a herd of rebranded stuff down the canyon on the creek. Likely be two men on herd there.”