They went back to their horses and rode to the Half-Box R, where they found Butch Reimer and Dell Blackwell saddling their horses.
“Billy DuMond is dead!” blurted Chuck, without any preliminary.
Butch stared at him curiously.
“Dead?”
“Deader’n hell,” forcibly, if inelegantly.
Butch dropped his latigo and came over to them. DuMond had been with Butch Reimer a long time.
“Yuh might tell me about it, Chuck,” said Reimer, looking from Chuck to Hashknife.
Chuck told them how they had found DuMond, and that he had been shot squarely between the eyes. Butch was visibly affected, and it seemed to Hashknife that there was fear in his eyes, which shifted from face to face.
“If old Rance McCoy wasn’t in jail——” he said, breaking off his sentence meaningly.
“Well, he ain’t,” said Chuck. “Somebody helped him break jail last night. They popped Scotty over the head.”