Giving in to fury, Rusty dismounted and drew back his fist. Dawkins stumbled backward, trying to avoid the blow he could see coming. The captain grabbed Rusty’s arm and broke up the swing before it was completed. “Shannon, he’s a wounded man.”

“So am I. That makes us even.”

Dawkins’s cold stare said he was mentally measuring Rusty’s neck for a rope.

Rusty declared, “You hurt them women and I’ll kill you!”

The captain pulled Rusty away. “Let’s go, Shannon. We’re doin’ no good here.”

Rusty resisted leaving a worthy fight unfinished, but Tanner joined the captain in hustling him along to his horse. Tanner said, “Come on, redhead, before you get in trouble.”

“The trouble’s already here.” But he reluctantly gave up the struggle and went along, looking back toward Dawkins.

Riding away, the captain said, “You have to try to put your personal feelin’s aside and remember you represent the law.”

“Can you always do that?”

“I don’t go around hittin’ people I don’t like—unless I think it’ll do them some good.”

“It would’ve done me a lot of good.”

“Maybe I ought to send you back to camp. If we get into a chase after James Monahan, you won’t have your heart in it.”

“I’ll do my duty.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Rusty dropped back to the rear. Tanner pulled in beside him. “Looks to me like your conscience is already weakenin’ some. Would you really kill him, or are you just talkin’?”

“I hope we don’t have to find out.”

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Rusty was not surprised that most of the horse tracks veered well to the north of the Monahan farm. James would be too cagy to incriminate his family. But the sharp-eyed captain found a single set of tracks that led toward the Monahans’.

Rusty welcomed the patrol’s brief stop for a cold supper. Though the pain in his leg had lessened to a point that he was unaware of it most of the time, fatigue brought back enough that he could not ignore it. While they ate jerked beef and hard bread, the captain asked pointed questions about James. He knew Rusty once had James in custody and lost him. Rusty suspected that most of the rangers believed he had simply let James go. Few blamed him. If Dawkins had any friends in the ranger camp, they kept it a secret.

The captain said, “By the looks of things, Monahan may have thrown in with a bunch of men from the brush.”

“I feel like he was just lookin’ for revenge against Dawkins.”

“We can’t stand back and let a bunch of men just run wild. It’s our job to catch them or run them plumb out of the country.”

“Run them where?”

“A lot of union sympathizers and conscript dodgers have slipped off to Mexico. Others have gone up north to Colorado or out to California. Me, I’ve got no wish to see James Monahan dead. I’d just like to see him gone.