Del Williams stopped, leaned over and shook hands with McMasters, whom he had not seen north of the Washita crossing.
“Why, everything’s fine,” said he. “We’re holding the herd about three miles north. Come on out and see us. So long. I got to be going now.”
He waved his hand, passed on at a gentle trot.
But Del Williams did not hold his trot. He did not ride to a saloon, neither did he swing northward out of town to join the herd. To the contrary, he jerked his horse’s head around to the south, sunk home the spurs and left town, heading south, as fast as a good cow horse could carry him.
Many men saw him cross the town of Abilene at speed, but a cowman on a running horse was no new sight on that busy day. Liquor was flowing at every bar. Del Williams, coatless, penniless, ragged, bearded, unkempt, not a dollar in a pocket and without a morsel of food, had no one to say him nay as he headed back down the long trail which just now had found its end. Plenty of men remembered how he looked. But no man, friend or stranger, ever looked on him again in that part of the world. He disappeared as though some quicksand had engulfed him.
So passed poor Del Williams, as good a cowman as ever crossed the Red River. Poor Del Williams, for after all he had not seen the face of the woman whom he adored, had not touched her hand, had never spoken to her a word of the love he had given her since his own boyhood. He knew that a murderer might never look into her face. True, he knew that the record of the shot, piercing the several partitions, would have been a perfect alibi as an accidental case of homicide. But he knew also that he had been a murderer in his heart. So he never looked into Taisie Lockhart’s eyes and never touched her hand at all. And to this day no man knows what ever became of Del Williams, for no word ever came back from him. Perhaps he got into Old Mexico; perhaps he disappeared somewhere in the Indian Nations; perhaps he lived to old age and perhaps he did not live twenty-four hours.
Dan McMasters and Wild Bill Hickok, quasi officers of the law, after their hurried investigation, looked one into the other’s eyes and agreed that it would have been absolutely impossible for a man to kill another man in that way except by accident. In that case, and in Abilene at that time, there remained no need to question the killer or to pursue him. Neither of them asked or mentioned the name of the rider heading south, and if either had a suspicion, neither voiced it.
CHAPTER XL
MR. RUDABAUGH APPEARS
LEN Hersey, one of the swing men, condescended to converse with Cinquo Centavos, the fourteen-year-old horse herder. They sat their horses in the sunshine, watching the distant herd contentedly grazing. The wind was very soft and the sky very blue. Life would have been a pleasant thing for them both had they not been so close to town. They planned metropolitan conquest, both of them.
“I want to take a ride on the railroad kyars afore I go back home,” resumed Cinquo. “If I didn’t, my folks wouldn’t think I wasn’t much noways.”