Read the Bounty Hunters (1953) for Free Online Page A

walk down to the corner and buy a box whenever they feel like it. Almost all the people were killed after they'd given up with bullets and that isn't Apache. On top of being hard to get, a bullet's too quick.
    I've been told not to try to figure them, Bowers said.
    That might apply to why they do something, but you can make sense out of how they do it. To Flynn the signs were plain. Many were plain because they were not there. A branch had been used to drag the footprints out of the sand. That wasn't Apache. The wasting of bullets. The scalping. Generally Apaches did not scalp. But they learned quickly. They have learned many things from the white man. They take the children of certain ages, to bring them up in the tribe because there was always a shortage of men. And there were many children here, dead, that an Apache would have taken.
    They took Nita, and perhaps others, he thought. The taking of women is Apache but it is hardly exclusively so.
    And there were other things that he felt that told him this wasn't the work of Apaches. But it would take time to tell Bowers.
    Lieutenant, he said then. You've got your work cut out for you. Get your tactical mind turning while I go up-trail.
    Bowers began gathering the bodies, dragging them to a level sandy opening off the trail. His body was tense as he worked. He was aware of this, but he could not relax. He thought: They looked deader because their clothes are white and because they were shot in the back of the head.
    He looked up-trail, up the slight rise over which Flynn had disappeared, then to the high steep banks of the draw. A faint breeze moved through the narrowness; it brushed the pine branches lazily and carried the burned-wood smell of the wagons to the young lieutenant. The redheaded, sunburned, slim-hipped lieutenant who had graduated fifteenth in his class from the Point and was granted his request for cavalry duty because of his high grades and because his father had been a brigadier general. His father was dead five months now. The smooth-faced, clean-featured, unsmiling lieutenant who now felt nervously alone with the dead and looked at the slopes, squinting up into the dark green, his eyes following the furrows of cream yellow that zigzagged up the crest; then, above the crest, the pale blue of the sky and the small specks that were circling lazily, gliding lower, waiting for the things that were alive to leave the things that were dead.
    This was not cavalry. This was not duty his father, the brigadier, had described. A year at Whipple Barracks and he had not once worn his saber beyond the parade quadrangle. Four-day patrols hunting something that was seldom more than a flick of shadow against towering creviced walls of andesite. Patrols led by grizzled men in greasy buckskin who chewed tobacco and squinted into the sun and pointed and would seldom commit themselves. Cautious, light-sleeping men who moved slowly and looked part Indian. Every one of them did.
    No, Flynn did not. That was one thing you could say for him. He was different from most of the guides; but that was because he had been an officer. One extreme, while the old one with the beard, Madora, was another. That was too bad about Madora, but perhaps he would recover. Flynn did not seem to view things in their proper perspective. He had probably been a slovenly officer. Deneen had said he would have to be watched, but he knows the country and that's what qualified him for this mission. Mission! Dragging home a filthy, runaway Indian who didn't know when he was well off. An unreasoning savage, an animal who would do a thing like this. Flynn is out of his mind thinking it was someone else. Get it over with. That's all; just get it over with.
    When Flynn returned he was leading two mules.
    Those must have gotten away, Bowers said.
    Or else they didn't want them.
    Not if they were Apaches, Bowers said.
    Flynn nodded. That's right. Not if they were Apaches.
    They hitched the mules to one of the wagons,