“Hell, the cows is gone, too!” commented Dalhart. “It’s lucky we ain’t!”
McMasters, once banished, had now without election been received back into the ranks of the Del Sol men. Indeed, he was now their leader. Before the stripped trail drovers made any move they held council.
“Yellow Hand knows he don’t have to swap,” said McMasters. “He knows he can choose between dead buffalo and dead cattle. Our horses—they know what we’ve got in that line. They know all they want to know, except what’s in there.” He nodded toward the carts. “They’ll come back to find that out.”
The men all looked at him in silence. He spoke again, to Nabours.
“There’s only one good thing about this whole thing,” he said. “Rudabaugh has not seen these men. They haven’t heard of the killing of those two Comanche women. If they had they’d have rushed us long ago. The women must have been in a visiting village, over toward the Arbuckle hills.”
Nabours was silent for a moment.
“The jig’s up. We’d just as well leave the herd,” said he at length. “We can’t spare men to send after them. It looks like our only hope is to push on ahead with the carts and find a place to fight for what we’ve got left.”
McMasters nodded.
“I think that’s best. They know they’ve got only bows and arrows against our repeating rifles. Horses they like more than anything else. Maybe they’ll be contented with rounding up our remuda if we slip away. Maybe we can come back again and pick up what they leave us. At least, they don’t yet know what we have in there.”
Once more he nodded toward the close-drawn flaps of the carts, to which not a man had yet ventured. They did not want the women to know. “We’d better be on our way before anything worse happens.”