to have him talk.
No man lost blood in such cold and lasted long without care. If he left this man, he would die. Dropping to his knee, he reached for the shoulder. The fellow grabbed at Mabryâs gun and Mabry hit him with his fist. Then he bound up the wound with makeshifts and then gathered up the guns and walked back to his own shelter. He had planned to stay another night, but there was evidence that the storm was breaking, and regardless of that, he could not keep the man here or leave him to die.
He rolled his bed and saddled up, then drank the rest of the coffee.
Mounting, he rode back to where the man lay. The fellow was conscious, but he looked bad.
âWhereâs your horse?â
Too weak to fight, the man whispered an answer, and Mabry rode to the clay bank behind some trees, where he found a beat-up buckskin, more dead than alive.
Mabry saddled him after brushing off the snow and rubbing some semblance of life into the horse with a handful of rough brown grass.
When he got back to the manâs shelter he picked the fellow up and shook him. âGet up on that horse,â he said. âWeâll start for Hat Creek. Make a wrong move and Iâll blow you out of the saddle.â
He took the blankets and threw them around the man to keep in what warmth his body could develop.
It would be cold tonight, but with luck he could make Hat Creek Station.
Wind flapped his hat brim and snow sifted across the trail. He lifted the black into a trot. The country about them was white and still. In the distance he could see a line of trees along another creek.
His mind was empty. He did not think. Only the occasional tug on the lead rope reminded him of the man who rode behind him.
It was a hard land, and it bred hard men to hard ways.
Chapter 2
K ING MABRY FOLLOWED Old Woman Creek to Hat Creek Station in the last cold hour of a bitterly cold day.
Under the leafless cottonwoods whose bare branches creaked with cold he drew rein. His breath clouded in the cold air, and as his eyes took in the situation his fingers plucked absently at the thin ice that had accumulated on his scarf.
He was a man who never rode without caution, never approached a strange place without care.
There were no tracks but those from the station to the barn. There was no evidence of activity but the slow smoke rising from the chimney.
One thing was unexpected. Drawn alongside the barn were two large vans, and beneath the coating of frost bright-colored lettering was visible. He could not, at this distance, make out the words.
Nobody emerged as he approached the station. No door opened. There was no sign of welcome.
Everything was still in the bitter evening cold; even the rising smoke seemed stiff in the unfamiliar air.
Hat Creek Station had originally been built by soldiers sent to establish a post on Hat Creek in Nebraska. Unfamiliar with the country, they had crossed into Wyoming and built on Sage Creek. When abandoned by the Army, it became a stage station on the route from Cheyenne to Black Hills, and a post office. From the beginning its history had been wild and bloody.
Mabry knew the stories. They had come down the trails as all such stories did, from campfire to card table, from bunkhouse to chuck wagon.
It was at Hat Creek that Stutterinâ Brown, a stage-company man, emerged second best from a pistol argument with Persimmons Bill over stolen horses. They buried Brown.
A party of freighters bound for the Black Hills was attacked by several hundred Indians near Hat Creek Station, and was saved only by the arrival of a troop of cavalry from Rawhide Buttes.
Near a place known locally as Robbersâ Roost, a few miles from the station, there had been a series of holdups, and it was near there that Boone May, a shotgun guard, killed an outlaw.
Hat Creek Station was a convenient wayside stop for travelers from Cheyenne to Black Hills, and at one time or another most of the noted characters and gun fighters
Ann Voss Peterson, J.A. Konrath