It was my notion of the older Thomas. I don't think a more commonplace looking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in fourteen years.
"'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here." Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair.
"What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why, though. The old man had ordered him up—not in words, you understand, for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his eyes off of him for ten seconds.
"A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow—twenty feet forward picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles, but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh, we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"
The trail from above ended in a briar tangle
fifty feet up the hill from the ledge on which four of the five outlaws slept. The fifth man, posted as a sentry, was on the lower trail, somewhere out of sight of the party led by "Cap" White. When the deputies came up to the briars, therefore, they could see no one. As soon as the four sleepers came out of shelter, however, White's men could cover them with their guns.
What had to be done, obviously, was to rouse the four outlaws without revealing the presence of the deputies above. It could be done by some one in the woods below the ledge. But the outpost was down there to reckon with. They could not all be trapped merely by waiting, for they would come out, after waking, one by one; and White wanted the whole bunch.
It was decided that three men should be sent, by a round-about trail, down to the creek; that they should follow it up until they got opposite to the ledge; and that they should then rouse the sleeping men. They were also to find the sentry and capture him. The risk was that the sentry might discover the three first and spoil the chance to take him. The detail might be dangerous, though with luck it should prove easy.
Brunner was assigned to lead the three. Young Thomas and Kelso were named by White as the other two, but Brunner, who had been aware of that duel on the trail, said he preferred the old man to Jim Kelso.
They beat back for a short distance, then, separating, dropped down the steep hillside to the creek. In open order, they went forward quietly, slowly; they might come upon 'Kep' Queen's outpost at any turn. Now and then they came in sight of one another. Each time Brunner saw that the old man was edging closer to his son. Still there was no word spoken—only a grim old man's gray eyes were fixed upon a young man's shifting, over-bright eyes, and the young man moved on, cautiously.