For two days Captain Burmeister’s rangers had followed the whiskey runners. Rusty and Len Tanner rode in front as trackers, though any man in the group could have read the trail as easily. The contrabanders seemed to have had no concern about being followed. They had no reason to suspect that a sharp-eyed settler had tipped the rangers about their passage.

The farmer had lost family members to raiding Indians. He had told Burmeister, “If there hadn’t been half a dozen of them I’d’ve lit into them runners myself. They don’t give a damn about the trouble they cause. They’ll get some Indians drunk and cheat them. That’ll make the Indians mad, and they’ll come raidin’ honest folks.”

Burmeister had promised, “We will stop them if we catch them before they pass out of Texas.”

“How will you know where the border line is at?”

Burmeister’s gray mustache had wiggled. “We won’t.”

The settler had ridden along the first day but felt he had to drop out and return to protect his family. “If you catch them,” he said, “bring them back to my farm. We’ll throw the biggest barbecue you ever seen. And if you’re lookin’ for a place to hang them runners, I’ve got a grove of live-oak trees that ain’t bein’ used for nothin’ but shade.”

Burmeister had promised to remember the offer.

Tanner was a little bothered. “The thought of hangin’ always kind of chokes me up,” he told Rusty. “The captain wouldn’t really do that, would he?”

Rusty shook his head. “I don’t think the law calls for hangin’ whiskey smugglers. They’ll just get room and board awhile at the state penitentiary.”

“Not too much room, I hope, and not much board.”

Most of this second day Tanner had said so little that Rusty had begun to be concerned about him. Ordinarily Tanner seldom gave his jaw much rest. If a bird flew in front of him he would speculate for half an hour on what kind it was, what it ate, and what its mating habits were.

Rusty asked him, “You feelin’ all right?”

“Nothin’ wrong with me. It’s you I been worried about.”

“Why me?”

“Because you ain’t said nothin’ about Andy. Yesterday and today I ain’t heard you mention his name.”

“What can I say that I haven’t already said? God only knows where he is or what he’s doin’.” Rusty bit down on the words and did not finish speaking all of his thought. If he’s not been killed already . . .

Tanner said, “After we catch up to these runners, maybe me and you ought to take leave and go huntin’ him.”

“You have any idea how much country we might have to cover? We could ride ‘til our whiskers got tangled in our stirrups and still never find him.”

Rusty wished Tanner would drop the subject.