By his estimation, it was sometime after noon when he caught sight of the wagon rounding the bend in the road as it wound around the hill. “You find ’em?” Conner asked after he rode around the wagon and loped up ahead. Hawk held his thumb up and motioned toward the sky. Conner looked up to see the buzzards circling. “Oh,” he said, and dismounted. “Pretty bad, huh?”

“It might be pretty hard for those men in the wagon to take,” Hawk answered. “Now that we’re here, I’m wonderin’ if it was a good idea to haul those poor souls back here to see this. It ain’t just the sight of it, it’s also the smell of it. I can’t see as how they’re gonna be of any help in tellin’ us which way they went, anyway. Hell, they were pushed off a damn cliff up there. They don’t have any notion what the bastards did after that.”

“Well, they’ve been talking about feeling obligated to give their friends a decent burial,” Conner said, and looked over his shoulder at the wagon pulling up to them. “I guess we can see how they feel about it now.”

“This is the place!” Lewis exclaimed, and hopped down as the wagon rolled to a stop. “This is it, ain’t it, Corey?” The man named Corey said that it was. Lewis turned to Conner and started to explain. “They were waiting here in the middle of the road, I remember now. There were four of ’em, just sitting on their horses, waiting for us. David Booth said there was no need to fear them, he knew who they were. He rode on up ahead to talk to them. When he came back he said they told him there was a big war party of Blackfoot Indians coming this way, and we needed to ride up through the trees there to hide on top of the hill.” He paused only briefly to look at the other three men for verification, then he continued, “When we got up on the hill, they suddenly pulled their guns and one of them handed a gun belt to David. He put it on and pulled the pistol out of the holster and said if nobody did anything foolish, nobody would get hurt. Brother Adams was leading the mule carrying all our money, and he tried to run with it, and that’s when they all went crazy. They shot poor Brother Adams down, and then they all started shooting. I can’t remember much of what happened after that. There was just so much noise, the shooting and the screaming, and the next thing I knew, I was falling. When I hit the water, it musta knocked the wind outta me, ’cause I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was drowning.”