Massacre Canyon by William W. Johnstone

found some empty shell casings. The brass gleamed dully in the matchlight.
    A few yards back from that point Smoke spotted hoofprints. He hunkered on his heels, snapped a fresh lucifer to life with his thumbnail, and closely studied the tracks.
    Every set of hoofprints was different, although sometimes the things that set them apart might be so small that most people would never see them. Smoke had been taught how to track by one of the canniest scouts who had ever lived, the old mountain man known as Preacher, so to his eyes a set of hoofprints might as well have been a sign chalked onto a blackboard. He could read them that easily.
    Pearlie and Cal knew what Smoke was doing as he ranged along the bluff and continued his search by matchlight. When he returned to the horses, he swung up into his saddle and gave a decisive nod.
    â€œLooks to me like they came in from the east and headed back the same way,” he said.
    â€œWhat’s in that direction?” Cal asked.
    â€œThere’s a settlement about fifteen miles yonder,” Pearlie said. “You been there, Cal. Place called Fletcher’s Gap.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” Cal said. Moonlight gleamed on white teeth as he grinned. “Not much to it, just a wide place in the trail, but the fella who runs the one store has a pretty daughter, right?”
    Pearlie snorted.
    â€œTrust you to remember that, boy,” he said.
    Smoke turned his horse’s head to the east and said, “That’ll be our first stop. Maybe somebody there will know something about the men we’re looking for.”
    â€œAnd if they don’t?” Pearlie asked.
    â€œWe’ll keep looking.”

Chapter 14
    The sun wasn’t up yet as Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal approached Fletcher’s Gap several hours later, but the eastern sky was rosy with impending dawn.
    They had come down out of the mountains a short time earlier, through a pass that Smoke knew gave the little settlement its name. Fletcher’s Gap. The town, although calling it by that designation was generous, was about a mile out on the flats, where the grassy plains began that stretched all the way to the Kansas border and beyond.
    Smoke had spotted the settlement as they rode down the sloping trail and had counted six buildings. He thought back to previous visits and remembered a trading post, a livery stable and a blacksmith shop run by the same man, and a saloon. The other two buildings were houses. Another memory came back to him. The trading post and saloon were owned by a pair of brothers, each man operating one of the businesses.
    Nothing much here to attract a bunch of horse thieves, or men in the market to buy some stolen horses. Smoke figured the hombres he and his friends were tracking fell into one of those categories. But they might have stopped to pick up some supplies.
    There was also a chance some of them had been wounded during the ruckus several hours earlier and could have stopped here in search of medical help.
    They weren’t likely to find much along those lines in a place as small as Fletcher’s Gap.
    Now that the light was better and growing brighter by the minute, Smoke cast back and forth looking for tracks, just to make sure they were going in the right direction. It took him about a quarter of an hour to locate a number of hoofprints left by horses heading east. He dismounted, studied the tracks for only a moment, and then nodded to Pearlie and Cal.
    â€œThis is them, all right,” he said. “They probably took off from the ambush one by one, but they’ve rendezvoused and are traveling together again. And they’re headed for the settlement, all right.”
    He mounted up and they trotted toward Fletcher’s Gap. Out here on the wide-open plains there wasn’t much cover, so anybody who was up and about in the settlement and looked to the west would see them coming.
    That worried Smoke a little. The three of them might be riding into