The Walters Brothers
Copyright© 2020 by qhml1
Chapter 2
Something was wrong. We could read the sign and feel it. There were no horse and cattle tracks around the springs and creeks we crossed newer than last week or longer. Dan and Jose might be a lot of things, but slackers weren’t among them. They were excellent stockmen, the main reason Pa had sent them out. If the tracks were off there had to be a reason and it wouldn’t be good.
We came up on the line cabin and sat back a ways, sizing it up. We could see through the field glasses Zeke carried that the door was wide open. Without discussing it I angled one way and Zeke went the other, approaching under as much cover as possible. We may as well have ridden right on in. I stepped through the door first going to the right, Zeke going left.
We found Jose on the cabin floor. He’d been dead two weeks or better and the critturs had been at him something fierce. We rolled him in a blanket as best we could and carried him outside. It took us a few hours to find Dan, hunkered down in a buffalo wallow a couple miles out. His weapons were gone, but judging by the spent shells we found he’d put up a pretty good scrap. There wasn’t much to move so we brought out the shovels, carried Jose with us, and buried them both in the wallow. We put up two crosses we knew would be gone by next spring, read from the Book, and said our farewells.
Neither of us were inclined to sleep in the shack so we rolled up in our blankets under the moon. The next morning we hit the trail. It had been a while but there hadn’t been that much rain and 500 cows left a lot of tracks. They went straight to the river and Zeke didn’t hesitate in following.
We rode in Mexico about as often as we did at home and both spoke pretty good Mexican. In fact, our stepmother was Mexican from one of the better families in the region. I was a little better with the language because I had a weak spot for the exotic looking, raven haired senoritas. A hankering that led to a couple of scraps over the locals objecting to a Gringo sparkin’ their women. It never got out of hand because the family on our mothers’ side made it plain they wouldn’t interfere if it was one on one. Gang up on us, though, and they’d lend a hand.
It only happened once. I thought I was a goner, holed up in a cantina, down to three shells in my pistol when Zeke showed up with Uncle Miguel and cousin Santos and a few of their riders. The got behind the boys, disarmed them, and called me outside.