“Rustlers took our cavy out of the north pasture a couple of hours ago,” Chet said. “You boys put out that fire. Reg, you go get Pa and Heck up here. Branding’s over for today.”
“Is May back?” Dale Allen asked about his wife as he sat on his fretting horse that circled around under him.
Susie nodded. “I had to wait for her to get back to watch Ma and the kids.”
“They’ve got a big head start,” Chet said. “But they can’t race that many horses.”
“They can sure scatter them from hell to breakfast.” Dale Allen shook his head in disgust.
“Aw, they must be nuts,” Chet said, the consuming anger firing his veins. “They sure as hell know we’ll run them down.”
“We won’t standing here.”
Chet heard his impatient brother’s comment and tried to ignore it. When he could see Reg and two others riding up from the cowherd, he went for his mount. “Paw’s coming with Heck. You tell them what’s happened.”
Damn, what next? About the time the Comanche had been run off that part of Texas, white rustlers had taken their place. There were close to sixty broke horses in that pasture, and Chet intended to use them on their cattle drive in the spring. No small investment, and one he could ill afford to lose—he had every intention of sending Dale Allen as the ramrod on this year’s push north. Chet had been up there several times, and possessed no big urge to sit on a horse that long again. Besides, it was his brother’s turn. Chet needed to gather up another herd for the following year—something he was better at than anyone else in the family. Most of it involved dealing with Messikins on the border. Any more the cattle available for them to drive north besides their own had to be bought up from deep in Mexico—those were the last remaining ones aside from them from the small outfits’ assignments.
He tightened the cinch on his blue roan and threw a leg over, reining him back to the others. Even in the distance he could see how red Pa’s face was over the news of the theft. The old man hated rustlers—red or white.
Waving his finger at all of them, the old man shouted, “I want them sons a bitches hung by the neck till they’re dead.”
“We’ll catch ’em, Pa. We’re headed for the house to get some grub, bedrolls, and rifles. They won’t get away.”
“Well, by Gawd, they’ve got a good head start—”
“Easy, you’ll have your ticker all upset,” Chet said, concerned about the old man’s anger flaring up his heart again.
Pa spit to the side and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “If I was ten years younger, I’d go after them by myself.”
Chet nodded. From his boyhood, he recalled how the old man and a posse went to look for the abducted Cagle. When they returned empty-handed, Pa was never the same. But it was his last desperate trip five years later, looking for the twins as he pursued the Comanche, that hurt his heart so deeply. He hadn’t been heard from for three months. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink for days. He’d returned broken down and demented from his relentless pursuit and coming up empty-handed. For months on end afterward, he never said a word, simply sat on the front porch in a rocker and stared off at nothing.
That year, Chet turned eighteen and began running the ranch, and had ever since. His brother, Dale Allen, younger by a year, would always stand back and let him do it all, too. Then Dale Allen would complain if it wasn’t just right. The thing Chet regretted the most was that he’d never had time to be a boy—to ride off and see some new country, raise some hell, stake out a place of his own, his own brand, his own house, and even find a woman of his own like his brother had.
“Susie, you take Reg’s fresh horse and he can ride that hot one back. Go home and get some food ready for us to take along and we’ll be coming.”
“How much?” she asked, stepping down and exchanging reins with the lanky boy.
“Oh, enough for a couple of weeks.”
“I’ll get the bedrolls out.” She looked at him with the question of how many as she slipped into the saddle and pushed down her dress to cover her exposed knees.
“Three. Reg and J.D. are going along.”
“But they’re boys.” Dale Allen frowned in disapproval.
“I need you here to run things.” Chet knew he sounded sharp, but sometimes his brother needed the truth spelled out. “Pa can’t go and your oldest boy’s too young. We’ll find them and deal out the justice that’s needed.”
“What’ll Aunt Louise say about you taking them two after rustlers?”
“Maw’ll say good riddance.” Freckle-faced Reg grinned big at him.
“Like hell—you better think about this, Chet Byrnes,” Dale Allen shouted after him.
Chet was already trotting his horse and a hundred feet ahead of the rest. He had thought it over and that was his answer. Dale Allen didn’t like it, he could go stick his head in a pail of water. Chet ran the ranch. He jabbed spurs to the blue roan. Already out of sight, Susie was heading for the ranch house.
There was lots to do.
Chapter 2
The two-story limestone house that Rock Byrnes first erected had grown into a fortress over the years. The huge wooden front gates had not been closed in a decade. A twelve-foot-high wall encircled the headquarters and inside the compound, the once-small two-story structure had festered into several connected residences, a bunkhouse, multiple corrals, pens, barns, a blacksmith shop, and a grain storage building. Two windmills filled the tank towers that provided water pressure to the faucets in the kitchen, the bathhouse, and the livestock tanks.
When Chet came in sight of the main house, Dale Allen’s wife, May, stepped out on the porch wringing her hands in a tea towel. The short woman had lost most of her shine since the pudgy girl had married his brother a few years earlier as his second wife. Childbirth and having to oversee things with Susie had been a big chore for a town girl and banker’s daughter who’d lived a sheltered life up until her marriage.
“What’re you going to do?” May asked.
Everyone asked him that all the time. “Take two of the boys and go get them back.”
“Boys?”
“Reg and J.D. We’ll need to be ready to leave in twenty minutes. When they ride in, you wave them in to eat lunch.” He gave a head toss. They were a quarter mile behind him. “I’ll get a packhorse and then be back.”
“Why not get the sheriff?”
“They’ll be in Kansas, May, before I could even tell him.”
“Guess you’re right. I’ll get the boys fed and the food ready for the trip. Good thing we’ve got plenty of jerky.”
“Thanks.” He turned Blue toward the corrals and at the horse pen, dismounted to hitch him. He took a lariat off a post and shook it loose while walking to the gate. In the lot, the dozen horses threw up their heads from eating hay off the ground, and he picked out a stout black he knew would lead good. The bunch broke hard around the pen, and he raced on foot to head them off. Overhanded, he tossed the rope, and it settled over the black’s head. Chet sunk his boot heels in the dirt and put on the brakes when the noose jerked tight.
Snorting and acting the part of a walleyed fool, Black shied from Chet like he was ready to plunge off as Chet came up the rope hand over hand. “Whoa, stupid.”
He fashioned a halter and led the horse out. Dale Allen’s six- and eight-year-old sons by his first wife Nancy, who had died in birthing the youngest, a girl, Rachel,