Fox went pasty white. The crooked smile on his thin lips vanished. A man seeing a ghost could look no more startled.
“Something’s wrong as ——,” he muttered as his leg swung to catch the ox-bow stirrup. Beads of moisture stood out on his cheeks. His claw-like fingers shook as they wrapped about the ivory butt of the low-hung .45. He gazed as if fascinated at the oncoming herd.
With those cattle came ruination and defeat. The absence of Kipp, Tad and Shorty was now accounted for. Somehow, they had gotten into the Pocket, killed or captured Black Jack and his men and were bringing out the stolen herd. The swift vision of a prison cell made him wince. He shut his eyes against it and his chin dropped to his chest. When he looked up a moment later, the color had come back into his lips. He turned to his two followers.
“You’ll find fresh horses at the corral in town. It’s a forty-hour ride to the Canadian line. You’d better lose no time.”
The two men gazed at him for a moment, then whirled their horses and were gone in a cloud of dust, without a word of parting. Fox now turned to Hank Basset and his wife who acted like people who moved in a dream, stupefied. With steady hand, Fox brought forth Hank Basset’s note and slowly tore it to bits. The scraps of paper fluttered to the ground.
“It would be better if you rode back towards your ranch, madam. I bid you good day.”
Ma Basset hesitated, her eyes moving from Fox to her husband. Something in Fox’s bearing silenced her usually ready tongue.
“Better drift, Ma,” mumbled Hank.
She turned her horse and rode away. The old horse, headed on the homeward trail, voluntarily quickened his pace and she gave him rein.
Hank licked his dry lips and stared at Fox who had taken the .45 from its holster and was spinning the cylinder, his eyes on a solitary horseman who had quit the herd and was riding toward the lone tree.