I noticed, as we raced off, that none of the buffalo hunters were mounted yet—they were all standing moodily in the middle of the street, watching the hard riders come.

“What about them?” I yelled at Tully—something about their big glum faces shook me.

“They ate their horses, it’s adiós, I guess!” Tully yelled.

We had scarcely passed the wall where the shooting contest between Katie and Hill had been held, when a far more deadly contest was joined in Greasy Corners. I didn’t look back—I was just trying to hang onto my panicked mule—but I heard the first booms of the big buffalo guns, and the more rapid pecking of the Texans’ rifles.

Russell of the Times might have stayed and got the story firsthand—I just flailed the mule and ran for my life.

27.

Years later, in a little half-dimer called Nute Rachal; or, The Deadly Fight, I tried to do justice to the heroic stand the buffalo hunters made in Greasy Corners that day.

They did make a fort of sorts, hastily taking cover behind the moldering, smelly piles of unshipped buffalo hides at the south end of town; from there they held the Texans at bay until sundown, losing only two men in the course of the long fight.

Several times the Texans tried to rush them, but their horses could not take the smell of the putrid skins. They bucked and quivered, but would not charge into the fort of hides; six Texans were killed while trying to encourage their frightened steeds.

“Shabby fighting,” Isinglass told me later. “I should have just let Mesty whittle the community down in his own good time.”

The gunfighters, and Joe and Tully and Billy and I, did not realize immediately that the buffalo hunters had checked the Texans. We raced on across the naked plain for twenty miles or more; not until it became necessary to rest our winded mounts did we notice that the only dust being raised was our own. The prairie behind us was empty.

Billy Bone was abashed and vexed when he saw that no army of gunmen was in pursuit.

“Why, we’re only cowards,” he said indignantly. “Why did we run? If the dern buffalo hunters beat the Texans we’ll all be laughingstocks.”

“It seemed like a lot of Texans, Bill,” Simp Dixon said. “Just because they ain’t here yet don’t mean they won’t show up.”

When the horses were fully rested we rode on into the shadows of evening, arriving not long after dark at the broken gullies of the Arroyo del Macho.

The strategists in the company felt that the Arroyo was an ideal place to make our stand.

Billy Bone only got more sulky. He felt that he had been startled into an unnecessary and undignified flight, and he held Joe Lovelady responsible.