“Damn it all,” the man yelled. “Who's pissing off the bridge? Stop that. Damn it all. I'm getting out of here before I get drowned in piss.” And with that he turned and started scrambling his way up the embankment.

“Did you see anybody?” a voice asked.

“There ain't no one down there. And if there was, Lyman just pissed them to death. Damn, it's on my hat and everything.”

“Well, come on then,” the first voice said. “Let's get moving. We can still cut them off before they can get to the Little Dragoons. Let's get them sons of bitches.”

Then the truck fired up again, and there was a general slamming of doors and creaking as men climbed into the bed of the truck, and then it started on its way, bumping from tie to tie on the trestle and then off and toward some road.

“God, that was close,” Sisson said.

Tom was brushing the piss from his hat and coat. “Closer than you know, I guess. I'll be stinking of some Mormon's piss for a while.”

“Well, it's better than bullets. You can't just brush off lead.”

“I suppose. It ain't the first time I been pissed on by Thems, and I guess I know it ain't the last.”

“Stink is better than dead, I'd say.”

CHAPTER FOUR

1896

Jeff came up a small draw onto the mesa where he had seen the cattle. There were a number of them, maybe three dozen, grazing in the sweet grass. Of the three dozen, less than a dozen were his. He swore. This was the fifth time in three weeks he had had to ride out, hunt down the cattle, and separate his from the rest so he could drive them back to his grazing land.

Cattle naturally congregated in the best grazing areas, and cowboys came out after them, cut their own from the herd, and drove them back. A couple of ranchers let their cattle go where they would and cut them in the fall for market or to shelter over the winter. No one ever got back as many cattle as he set out. Cattle were stupid beasts that would get themselves poisoned, lost, snakebit, tangled in wire, picked off by lions or bears, or gathered up with someone else's herd and shipped to slaughter and turned into silver for another man's pocket.

Ranchers were fond of bemoaning all that as the cost of doing business. And for those who could afford to do business that way, Jeff supposed they were right. He wasn't one of those. The ten beeves he was running now were pretty much his entire stock, except for a couple of horses, a mule, and six goats. In the years since he had joined the Morgan family, a herd of two hundred had dwindled down to the ten that were inextricably lost among the rest of the free-ranging cattle.