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Comanches and Kiowas had probably used not many years before when they were raiding down from the Territory. Due north was the Big Pasture and the Nations, where Frank Gault was known and respected. Where there were men who would lend him money to get started again, if he were to ask for it.
    But he did not head north. He bore east, making for the upper reaches of the Little Wichita. And behind him he could almost hear his trailers shrug resignedly and check the loading of their weapons.
    Around midmorning Gault caught a glimpse of the lead rider. He was a short, blocky man with a blunt, pugnacious look about him. Expertly, he threaded a sturdy little claybank in and out through the stands of cottonwood and oak. They were moving in fast now, not overly concerned with whether or not Gault spotted them.
    A few minutes later Gault raised the fields that he guessed belonged to the Garnetts. There were several acres of cotton in even rows, almost ready for its first thinning and chopping. Set farther back from the river there was a good-sized patch of early corn, young and tender green and languid looking on that mild spring morning. Closer to the house and sheds was what Gault knew to be a vegetable garden, although he couldn't tell at that distance what was planted there.
    The house itself was a half sod, half timber affair, maybe three rooms. A big house, Gault thought immediately; an unusually prosperous looking spread for that particular part of Texas. The rare farm that Gault had chanced across in North Texas usually amounted to no more than a one-room soddy and maybe two or three acres of scratched red clay. The Garnett place included several permanent sheds and outbuildings, some work animals, a wagon, a scattering of chickens and probably a cow for milking. A
very
prosperous looking layout, Gault thought again with bitterness. Either the Garnetts were exceptionally industrious, or they had received considerable help.
    A rider that Gault had not seen before appeared from a wild plum thicket near the water. He was a stolid, slack-jawed man in his middle years, with coarse features and the impersonal stare of simple-mindedness in his pale eyes. He rode toward Gault with an abstracted grin tugging at the corners of his mouth—but there was nothing simple-minded or unbusinesslike in the way he held a short saddle rifle pointed at Gault's chest.
    "Set easy," the man said placidly. "We don't aim to hurt you. If you behave yourself and mind what we say."
    Gault twisted in the saddle and saw the short man coming toward them from a thicket farther upstream. When he was close enough to be heard, the short man said, "My advice is do like Colly tells you. He may not look right bright, but there ain't many men hereabouts that can best him with a rifle."
    Colly
. The name struck a spark in Gault's mind. He remembered the two pals of Wolf Garnett's that the sheriff had mentioned. One had been Colly Fay. The other Shorty Pike. Two harmless drovers working a herd up the Western Trail to Dodge, the sheriff had said. Two ignorant farm boys who had fallen in with bad company for a while. But they had seen the error of their ways and turned back to the path of honesty and truth—according to Sheriff Grady Olsen. Gault wondered if Sheriff Olsen would be surprised if he could have seen his two farm boys now, both of them with snub-barreled rifles pointed at Gault's chest.
    Gault did not look at the rifles. He did his best to act and talk as if they were not there at all. "You boys strayed pretty far from bedground, looks like. Sheriff Olsen seemed to figger you'd gone back to drivin' cattle, after you took it on yourselves to ride over to New Boston and identify Wolf Garnett's body."
    Colly Fay continued to smile abstractedly. Shorty Pike shrugged his shoulders and casually slipped his saddle gun back in its boot. "We won't go into that now. Just say we changed our mind."
    All right, Gault thought, let's see what kind of cards you're holding!