Blood on the Moon by Luke Short

frightened.
    “All afternoon.”
    “Then—you saw me at Riling’s place.”
    “Yes’m.”
    Carol tried to laugh and failed, and Elser weighed its meaning and was curious.
    “What do you think of it?” Carol asked slowly.
    Ted shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “That’s your business, I reckon.”
    Carol didn’t speak, and Elser waited out his time and then said doggedly, “I think we better ride back.”
    Carol didn’t object, didn’t speak. Docilely she pulled her horse around, and they started back for the canyon. They reached it and made the long climb up the switchbacks and at dark crossed through the malpais. Still Carol hadn’t spoken. There was something wrong, Elser knew, and he kept silent and wondered.
    The pressure on Carol broke finally. She reached out and seized the bridle of Ted’s horse in the dark and hauled him up savagely.
    “This can’t go on,” Carol said in a tight voice. “I’ve got to know.”
    Ted didn’t answer her, didn’t help her.
    Carol said impatiently, swiftly, “Ted, you’re in love with me, aren’t you?”
    The shock in his face wasn’t visible to Carol, nor the slow readjustment as he tried to stop his hands trembling. He said in a reluctant, miserable voice, “Yes.”
    “You’d do anything in the world to save me from hurt, wouldn’t you?” Carol went on brutally. “I know you would because you’ve done it today. It’s in your eyes, in the way you talk. Isn’t that true?”
    Ted nodded now, unable to speak.
    Carol moved her horse closer to him and reached out and laid a hand on his. “I thank you for that, Ted. I need your help terribly.” She paused and she could feel the muscles in his hand iron-hard and trembling beneath her own.
    “I want you to forget this afternoon,” Carol said, her voice hard. “I don’t care what you think, but I don’t want anyone ever to know. No one, Ted— no one! Do you love me enough to promise that?”
    “More,” Ted said. He said it in a dry, ironic voicethat surprised Carol. Coming from this stubborn, dull man, it was a revelation. She had always supposed him incapable of irony, of understanding.
    “Then I have your word, your promise?” she asked.
    “Till death do us part,” Ted murmured. He moved away from her then, waiting for her to move. She had won his promise, Carol knew, but in an obscure way she knew she had lost something else. And strangely enough this troubled her as she touched spurs to her horse and they rode on into the chill night.
    Cap Willis reached the north herd across the Massacre before dark, gave his orders to the five men there without dismounting and then pushed on to Ferg Daniels’ herd, arriving late.
    A night herder took him into camp and stirred up the fire, then left, and the crew came out of blankets. As soon as Willis told them they’d move tonight the horse wrangler drifted off in the dark and the rest of the crew pulled on boots. The fire was built up, and Cap Willis squatted beside it, conferring with Ferg Daniels as to the best route for the drive. The herd was bedded down in a shallow valley that fingered off among the pines to the south and west and was on the short plateau that lay between the mountains and the river flats.
    Cap Willis knew this country as he knew the lines of his face, and tonight, for the first time in weeks, he felt as if he was counting for something. Up to now Lufton had figured, and rightly so, that his lowliest punchers could ride the brush and gather his herds. Cap had been kept at Blockhouse becauseit was in the Basin that Lufton figured the trouble would start. It hadn’t, and Cap had been a general without any army. Tonight he was in command again, and it suited him. He was an abrupt man, sure of himself, shrewd in the ways of his work. At times he had the deceptive appearance of a cow-town banker gone to belly; his quick and authoritative manner of speech and the saddle of thin hair that he plastered across his skull heightened the