When he approached the edge of the stream, he stopped and dismounted, leaving Rascal in the trees where Blue and Tater had left their horses before. Pausing in the cover of the trees, he watched the still figure lying on the edge of the shallow stream. After a few minutes without any sign of movement, he walked carefully toward the man, ready to react should Blue suddenly raise his rifle to shoot. Still there was no sign of life, so he walked up beside him, then reached down and took the rifle from his dead hands. He had bled to death. “Well, Blue, there’s nothin’ you can tell me, I reckon,” Hawk said softly. Then as a matter of general principle, he took hold of the back of Blue’s coat and dragged his body out of the stream, so as not to contaminate the water. From listening to the two men talking back and forth after Blue was shot, he knew that the dead one was Blue, and the one who deserted him was Tater. “That was more than I knew before,” he said, then whistled softly and waited for the big buckskin horse to trot up to him. “We’ve got one more body to take care of,” he said to Rascal, and turned to look at the carcass of the doe he had shot. “I still need food.”

* * *

“What tha . . . ?” Jesse Corbin blurted when Tater rode up to the cabin, leading Blue’s horse. “Where’s Blue?”

“Blue’s dead, or maybe he ain’t. I don’t know,” Tater replied as he stepped down from his horse. He was not inclined to confess that he felt pretty sure that Blue was dead by now. He figured Blue was fading fast when he left. And even if he wasn’t, the man in the buckskin shirt would most likely finish him off, probably as soon as he had run off with the horses. “He got shot,” he went on, “by some feller down in the canyon. We was chasin’ some deer we ran up on, and when we got ready to cross over a stream we saw this feller. Him and Blue shot at each other. He caught Blue in the side, but Blue missed with his shot.”

“Booth!” Jesse called for his brother, who was inside the cabin, then turned back to Tater. “What happened to that feller? What about you, did you get him?” His first thought was that somehow, they already had a lawman on their trail.

Tater shook his head as Booth and Trip came out to see what the noise was about. “I couldn’t get a shot at him,” Tater answered. “He got back in the woods where I couldn’t see him.”