Cherish Read Free

tomorrow.
    But since when had he ever claimed to be smart? The smell of blood would draw predators, and by morning, there wouldn’t be much left of the bodies. There were womenfolk down there amongst the dead, and by the looks of them, they’d suffered shame enough already. He couldn’t just ride off and leave them to become carrion for the coyotes or vultures. There were also the two surviving oxen to consider. Still trapped in the traces, the beasts would wander off before morning in search of water, pulling what was left of a sorry-looking wagon behind them. Sooner or later, a wheel would get hung up, stopping the wagon as surely as if it were hitched to a Mormon brake, and they’d die a slow death. If he turned them loose, at least they’d have a fighting chance.
    Race saw a black-tailed prairie dog frozen stock still in front of its burrow, tiny hands held to its mouth like a nervous woman biting her fingernails. Prairie dogs had aknack for sensing danger. This one’s paralytic terror wasn’t an encouraging sign.
    Setting his mouth in a grim line, Race touched his boot heels to Dusty’s flanks. The horse sidestepped and chuffed nervously, reluctant to descend the slope.
    “It’s okay, pardner,” Race said in a voice gone oddly thick.
    As Race nudged Dusty down the embankment, the muscles across his shoulders snapped taut. If the no-account skunks were out there somewhere, they were taking their own sweet time to say how-de-do.
    Even as he scoured the brush, Race kept jerking his gaze back to the ruined wagons. His strongest feeling of a presence seemed to be coming at him from that direction. Could it be that someone was still alive down there? Not likely. Leastwise not anyone in his range of vision. He knew dead when he saw it.
    Still, there were six men in the clearing and only five women. That left an odd man out. Maybe the sixth man’s wife had hidden and was now afraid to show herself.
    As he drew closer, Race saw that all but one wagon had been nearly dismantled, the tops ripped off the driver seats, attached tool chests and storage bins pried loose from the beds and torn completely apart. Shifting his gaze to the one wagon still intact, he wondered why it hadn’t received the same treatment. Not enough time, maybe? Judging by the way his hair was standing up, Race decided his arrival might have surprised the killers. They could have spotted him in the distance and skedaddled only a few minutes before Race got there.
    He scanned the opposite slope for any sign of stirred up dust. At one point along the ridge, the air looked a mite murky, the way it would if a group of men had fled over on horseback. Whirlwinds were common out here, though.
    He returned his gaze to the encampment. Going by the havoc wreaked on those wagons, the killers had been searching for something. Only what in blazes might it have been? Folks like these wouldn’t have been carrying cash or valuables. Mixed in with the stuff thrown fromtheir wagons were farming implements, telling Race that the dead men had probably been clod busters. He had yet to meet a rich clod buster.
    Keeping one eye on the hillside, Race guided Dusty to the center of camp. As he swung from the saddle, one of the oxen began to bawl, the forlorn sound slicing through the silence. Glancing down, he saw that the heel of his riding boot was planted on the spine of a small black book with gold lettering. Several other books exactly like it lay scattered around, the covers of a few closed, some open, their ribbon markers and pages fluttering forlornly in a sudden gust of wind. Race couldn’t be sure because he’d never learned to read, but it looked to him as if the sky had clouded up and rained Bibles.
    Had these folks been religious zealots? That would explain all the black clothing and why none of the dead men had a weapon on or near his body. Cheek turners . Race had run across a few in his day—men who allowed others to spit on them, praising the Lord while