“Ike Brandon?” the man asked, excitedly, as he reined in. “Say, Ike, that Basco ewe-whacker o’ yours is back there a ways and plumb perforated. Some one shore up and busted him a plenty with a soft-nose thirty. We’re ridin’ for Wallace, and we found him driftin’ along in the wagon a while back. 23 I’m ridin’ for a medicine man, but I reckon we don’t get one in time.”
“Who done it?” asked Ike, grimly. The cow-puncher shook his head.
“None of us,” he said, soberly. “We ain’t any too lovin’ with sheep-herders, but we ain’t aimin’ to butcher ’em with soft-nose slugs from behind a rock, neither. We picks him up a mile or two out of Shoestring and his hoss is just driftin’ along no’th with him while he’s slumped up on the seat. There ain’t no sheep with him.”
Ike nodded thoughtfully. “None o’ you-all seen anythin’ of Louisiana driftin’ up this a way?” he asked.
“Gosh, no!” said the rider. “You pickin’ Louisiana? He’s a bad hombre, but this here don’t look like his work.”
“Pete’s rifle with him?” asked Ike.
The man nodded. “It ain’t been fouled. Looks like he was bushwacked and didn’t have no chance to shoot.”
Ike picked up his reins, and the man spurred his horse off on his errand. The sheepman rode on and soon met the wagon being escorted by two more cowboys while a third rode at the side of the horses, leading them. They stopped as Ike rode up, eying him uncomfortably. But he merely nodded, with grim, set face, swung out of his saddle as they pulled 24 up, and strode to the covered vehicle, drawing the canvas door open at the back.
On the side bunk of the wagon where the cowboys had stretched him, wrapped in one of his blankets, lay the wounded man, his face, under the black beard, pale and writhen, the eyes staring glassily and the lips moving in the mutterings of what seemed to be delirium. Ike climbed into the wagon and bent over his employee, whose mutterings, as his glazing eyes fell on his master’s face, became more rapid. But he talked in a language that neither Ike nor any of the men could understand.
With a soothing word or two, Ike drew the blanket down from Pete’s chest and looked at the great stain about the rude bandage which had been applied by the men who had found him. One glance was enough to show that Pete was in a bad way.