“It’s Smoky, miss,” he said. “He stayed out to watch the cows tonight so we wouldn’t have to round ’em up again in the mornin’. His horse just come home alone — an’ there’s blood on the saddle!”
6
It seemed like a crazy thing to attempt — to set out to look for a man’s body at night, in wild broken country, with several square miles of it to cover. But they did it.
They belted on guns and picked up flashlights and rode out in a reckless cavalcade. But it was possible only because the moon was bright and clear, brilliant enough to throw hard black shadows against the ground that it washed with luminous grey, so bright that for any ordinary observation the flashlights were less than unnecessary. It was one of those amazing subtropical desert moonlights which are unknown to any other parts of the earth, which seem to have been designed expressly and solely for soft music and romance, and the Saint rode beside Jean Morland and reflected that this sort of thing always seemed to be happening to a lot of good moments in his life. Perhaps it was part of the price you paid for living that way: the same trail of adventure that led towards romance just as inevitably had to lead on and lead away again...
They headed for the canyon where they had had lunch, and found Smoky’s camp fire still burning; his bed-roll was opened beside it, but hadn’t been slept in. There was no sign of any disturbance. Apparently he had just mounted his horse and gone on a late patrol, or gone to investigate something that had aroused his attention or his suspicion.
They broke up and spread out from there; after arranging their signals Simon took the spoke of the fan that pointed most directly towards the hill from which he had reconnoitred Valmon’s territory that morning, and it was he who found Smoky, with surprising quickness, lying out on an open slope only a few yards from the boundary. He looked at the crumpled figure very briefly, and then fired one shot in the air and swung his flashlight round and round in a vertical circle for a while until he had received five answering twinkles from different directions.
Jean and Hank reached him first, and they looked at the sprawled heap that had been Smoky while Jim and Nails and Elmer rode up one by one and clumped stiffly into the circle.
Nails said it first.
“The same way as Frank Morland. His haws musta throwed him an’ then trod on him.”
It looked just like that; there was the clear print of a horseshoe on the side of Smoky’s pulped face, and others, just as clear, in the bloody mess where his chest had been crushed in.