The Vigilante's Bride by Yvonne Harris Page A

about it first, neither.”
    “Regulations say he don’t have to, boss. Hunting his own cows – he’s allowed to check all herds for his own brand.”
    “He told everyone else. So how come he didn’t tell me?” Slowly, the chair wheeled around. “Suppose you take a few of our boys up there and teach him some manners.”
    “You want us to rough him up good?”
    “If that’s all you got the guts to do.” Standing, Bart splayed his hands on the desk and leaned his weight forward. His eyes bored into Clete. “I pay you plenty. Any more questions about what I want?”
    Clete shook his head.

    As the weather warmed and the snow melted, Luke and the men continued looking for N-Bar-H brands. Each day he spotted circling buzzards and followed them into isolated gullies and streambeds. Nearly always he found a few more dead cows and calves frozen in one of the storms. Winter kill, two or three percent, and to be expected. The percentages were right in line.
    So winter kill wasn’t the answer.
    On the range that morning, Luke pointed to three black specks wheeling high in the sky. “I’ll check them out,” he told Scully and the men, then galloped off before the birds went to ground.
    The grassland springing to life underfoot was broken by several small streams and big muddy patches. Gray-green sagebrush pushed upslope to the timberline of white-trunked lacy aspens. The thin, pale green foliage of the trees, full of light and wind, tossed against the sky. The vultures he had his eyes on planed out of sight behind a hillside. He followed them and almost missed it – a narrow ravine, not much more than a footpath between two cliffs.
    Luke worked Bugle down a small, pebbled incline and took him at a walk into the canyon, following a trail that curved around boulders. As they picked their way farther in, the canyon widened into bushy meadow walled in by the hills alongside.
    He poked through the underbrush and looked for strays. Though the buzzards were nowhere to be seen, he did find one cow belonging to Paxton – dead for months from the looks of it – but none of New Hope’s. He reined Bugle around and started back out for the range again.

    On the hillside, a mustang slipped between the trees, its unshod hoof beats muffled by the carpet of pine needles. Silently, its rider slid to the ground. Moccasined feet crept behind a tree trunk. For three miles, Little Turtle had stalked Light Eyes and his gray horse. Hidden behind a tree or lying in the brush, sometimes so close to the white man he could smell him, he’d watched every move Luke made.
    Two crows took flight, squawking and flapping off through the canyon. Little Turtle dropped to the ground and froze. Four men with guns walked their horses single-file into the ravine.
    Curious as to who else was following the white man, he crept into the brush and watched.
    The sounds of a horse approaching carried clearly through the ravine. One of the men raised a hand, warning the others quiet, and all four rode quickly behind a spill of big boulders jutting from the slope.
    Head tipped back, Little Turtle cupped his mouth, and the yelping howl of a coyote floated across the gorge, rising and falling.
    “Easy, boy, easy.” Luke gripped his knees tighter into the horse’s sides. Agitated, Bugle sawed his head up and down and tongued the bit. Luke remembered a mile back how Bugle had also acted up when they’d passed two big rattlers sunning themselves on a rock. It was May and the snakes were active now, mating.
    Trusting the horse’s instincts, Luke reined him in and patted his neck, letting him look around and satisfy himself. Luke scanned the grassy scrub ahead. Nothing.
    Then from behind him came a chilling sound, unmistakable: the oiled, sliding clicks of bolt-action rifles. Slowly, Luke twisted around in the saddle.
    Four X-Bar-L hands approached him on horseback.

    “Get off, Sullivan.”
    Luke turned and saw Clete Wade and Wesley Huggins staring at him. The