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  In the meantime, he moved up alongside Cecil Tolliver and Captain Wedge at the head of the troop. Wedge was saying, “... gang looped around San Rosa after they hit that ranch. We lost their trail when we hit a rocky stretch a ways north of here. So you can see why I think it might have been the Scorpion’s men who attacked you, Tolliver. They were right here in the area.”

  Tolliver shook his head. “I don’t believe it. They were Almanzar’s men.”

  Frank said, “What if Don Felipe Almanzar is the Black Scorpion?”

  The question had been an idle one, but both Tolliver and Wedge looked sharply at him. “Damn it!” Tolliver exclaimed. “That might be the answer. I wouldn’t put anything past Almanzar!”

  “Well, maybe,” Wedge said. He didn’t sound convinced, though. He went on. “Why would Almanzar turn owlhoot? He’s got a pretty good ranch on the other side of the Rio, from what I hear.”

  “It’s in his nature,” Tolliver insisted. “He was born no good.”

  Once again, Frank thought Tolliver was reaching pretty far in his attempt to blame everything on his old enemy. Tolliver would seize on any idea that made Don Felipe Almanzar look bad.

  They reached the site of the gun battle a short time later. Landmarks were sparse in this flat, brushy country, but Frank recognized the place from a small clump of scrubby live oaks nearby. He saw the marks in the road where the buckboard had overturned, too.

  Tolliver pointed out the same marks to Captain Wedge. “Right there,” he said. “That’s where the buckboard wound up when it crashed. Ben and I got behind it and started bangin’ away at the sons o’ bitches with our Colts, and a second later Frank came gallopin’ up and joined in on the fracas.”

  “If you’ll look there in the road,” Frank said, “you’ll probably find bloodstains where the wounded men fell. Cecil’s men probably didn’t see the blood when they came out to recover the bodies because the light was already bad.”

  Wedge nodded. “Let’s take a look.”

  True to Morgan’s prediction, the bloodstains were easily found in the clear light of an autumn morning, even though someone had kicked dirt and gravel over them. Whoever had taken the bodies had tried to conceal the evidence that there was a fight here, but they had been in too much of a hurry to do a good job.

  Roanne’s buggy rolled up, trailed by the two Rocking T hands. She hauled back on the reins and brought the buggy horse to a stop. “Was this where you were attacked, Cecil?” she asked her brother-in-law.

  “It sure is.” Tolliver pointed to the ground. “And there’s some of the blood the polecats spilled when we ventilated ’em!”

  Roanne glanced down at the dark splashes on the road and then looked away, paling a little. She was a frontier woman and not easily spooked, but the sight of that much blood was still a little unnerving to her, Frank thought.

  She lifted the reins and said, “Well, since you gentlemen don’t need me here, I’ll go on to town.”

  Frank and Wedge touched their hat brims and nodded politely to her as she flapped the reins and got the horse moving again. The buggy started off up the road. Frank watched it dwindle.

  “You can see the tracks that bunch left,” Tolliver said, pointing at the road again.

  “There are a lot of tracks,” Wedge said. “This is a well-traveled route.”

  “Yeah, but look how they’re all together,” Tolliver insisted.

  Frank wasn’t as talented a tracker as the old mountain men, such as Jim Bridger and Preacher, had been, but he could read signs well enough to see that Tolliver was right. The profusion of hoofprints on the road made it more difficult, but he thought they could track the gunmen.

  Wedge seemed more dubious. “We’ll give it a try,” he said. He lifted a hand and waved for the troop to follow him.

  A few hundred yards farther on, the tracks left the road and cut north. With Frank, Wedge, and Tolliver in the lead, the Rangers followed them. The brush made for slow going, but in a way it helped with the tracking because from time to time the men spotted a broken branch that indicated a man on horseback had forced his way past.

  The morning stretched out, and the sun grew warmer as it rose higher in the sky. If this had been June or July instead of November, they would have been baking by now, Frank thought. The Rangers pushed on, with only an occasional stop to rest their horses.

  Toward noon, Wedge reined in and grated, “Damn it.”

  “What’s wrong?” Frank asked as he brought Stormy to a halt.

  “I recognize these parts,” the captain explained. “We’re just about back to the place where we lost the Black Scorpion’s trail yesterday.”

  That seemed like too much to be a coincidence. Maybe there was something to the idea that Almanzar’s men and the Black Scorpion’s gang were one and the same. Either that, or Almanzar had had nothing to do with the attack on Tolliver and Ben and the Black Scorpion had really been to blame for it.

  A frown creased Frank’s forehead. This situation was anything but clear-cut.

  The Rangers rode on, and a few minutes later they came to a dry creek bed that marked the border of a wide area of barren, rocky ground. “This is it, all right,” Wedge said bitterly.

  The tracks they had been following disappeared onto the rocks. “How big is this stretch?” asked Frank.

  “Half a mile wide, three or four miles long,” Wedge replied.

  “The raiders had to go somewhere,” Frank pointed out. “If we ride along the edge, we’re bound to find their tracks.”

  “Unless they split up and left one by one at different spots. One man can cover up his trail pretty well. Then they could rendezvous somewhere else and regroup.”

  Frank nodded. Wedge’s theory sounded reasonable, but the only way to prove it was to check the edges of the rocky area. He was about to point that out when the captain went on. “But we’ll check it out. That’s about all we can do.”

  “You’ll have to do it without me,” Tolliver said. “I got a ranch to run, so I’ll leave you to this chore. Frank, are you goin’ with Captain Wedge or comin’ back to the Rockin’ T with me?”

  “I think I’ll stick with the captain a while longer,” Frank said, making his decision without any hesitation. “I’ve gotten a mite interested in this Black Scorpion fella.”

  “I wish you luck, then.” Tolliver raised a hand in farewell and wheeled his horse to ride back the way they had come.

  Quickly, Wedge issued commands, dividing his troop into two forces. They would circle the rocks in either direction, meeting up again on the far side. That would cut in half the time required to check all the way around the area.

  “If you find any tracks, fire three shots,” Wedge instructed the Ranger sergeant in charge of the second group. “We’ll come a-runnin’.”

  “Sure, Cap’n,” the man said. “You do the same.”

  The party split up and resumed the search. Frank went with the group led by Wedge.

  They searched slowly and carefully, and it took until mid-afternoon before the Rangers rendezvoused on the far side of the rocks. Wedge’s group hadn’t found anything, and Frank could tell from the glum looks on the faces of the second group that their search had been equally futile.

  When the sergeant had said as much, Wedge cuffed his black Stetson to the back of his head and looked disgusted. “Whoever they are, they’ve given us the slip again,” he declared. “They must’ve done like I said and snuck out of here one at a time.”

  Wedge didn’t look to Frank for agreement, but Frank nodded anyway. “Are you going back to San Rosa?”

  “I reckon. Not much else we can do except wait for the Black Scorpion to hit somewhere else and hope we can get on his trail again.”

  “I’ll ride with you, if that’s all right.” Frank found himself eager to see the settlement of San Rosa. The fact that Roanne Williamson would be there had nothing to do with it, he thought.

  But he wasn’t sure if he believed that.

  Wedge said cu
rtly, “Suit yourself.” Whether his brusque attitude came from his disappointment at losing the trail or his dislike of the idea of Frank visiting San Rosa, Frank couldn’t have said. Nor did he particularly care.

  The riders made their way back to the road. They had been out all day, eating a cold lunch of jerky and biscuits from their saddlebags, and it would be late in the afternoon before they reached the settlement. Frank was looking forward to supper, although he doubted if it would be as good as the meals he had gotten at the Tolliver ranch.

  They were still several miles from San Rosa when the crackle of gunfire suddenly sounded to the south. Frank and Wedge reined in sharply, and the members of the Ranger troop followed suit.

  “What in blazes?” Wedge exclaimed. “Sounds like a small war going on down there.”

  “Is that shooting on this side of the river,” Frank asked, “or the Mexican side?”

  Wedge shook his head. “Hard to say. The Rio’s a couple of miles in that direction. We’ll go check it out.”

  The brush wasn’t quite as thick here, so the Rangers were able to move through it easier than they had earlier. The shooting didn’t last long before it died away into an ominous silence. Frank glanced over at Wedge and saw that the captain’s face was set in grim lines.

  Smoke began to rise in the sky ahead of them.

  Wedge grated a curse. “There’s a little farm down there, I recollect. The Black Scorpion must have raided it!”

  “Why would an outlaw raid a farm?” Frank asked. “There wouldn’t be enough loot there to make it worth the bullets.”

  “That’s the sort of bloodthirsty mongrel the Scorpion is. He wants everybody on both sides of the border to be scared of him, so that he can come and go without anybody helping the law track him down. Every so often he raids some farm or small ranch just as an example of his power, to keep all the other settlers in line.”

  Frank’s jaw tightened. Such wanton destruction rubbed him the wrong way. He found himself hoping that the Black Scorpion was real and that he himself would be with the Rangers when they caught up to the bandit leader and his gang.

  The Rangers pushed on quickly, and after a few minutes of riding toward the smoke they came in sight of its source: an adobe house that was blazing brightly inside. The thick earthen walls wouldn’t burn, but the roof and the interior would, and that was what was happening. Off to one side of the burning building were several sheds and corrals that seemed to be untouched.

  Frank expected to find the bodies of women and kids, perhaps, and he wasn’t looking forward to what he might see. As the Rangers galloped up and reined in, however, Frank spotted only the sprawled shapes of a couple of men. That was bad enough. Maybe worse, in fact, because if a family had lived here, the other members might still be inside that burning house.

  Wedge put that worry to rest by saying, “Looks like the Hernandez brothers tried to fight back and got wiped out. It’s a damned good thing they didn’t have wives and kids, or it would have been really bad.”

  “They’re the only ones who lived here?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah. Just a couple of harmless pepperbellies.”

  The dead men were lying facedown, with the rifles they had dropped on the ground nearby. Wedge and Frank dismounted. The captain used the toe of his boot to roll the Hernandez brothers onto their backs. Both had lean, wolflike features that were distorted by the grimaces of pain that death had frozen onto their faces. Judging by the bloodstains on their clothes, each man had been shot once.

  Wedge brushed back the tails of his black coat and shifted his gun belt a little. Staring toward the south, he muttered, “The Scorpion thinks that running back across the border will keep the Rangers from coming after him. Well, he’s wrong.”

  “You don’t have any jurisdiction in Mexico,” Frank pointed out.

  “If you’re worried about that, you can turn that spotted horse around and ride out, mister,” Wedge snapped, scorn dripping from his voice. He looked at the Rangers and added, “As for us, we’re going after the men who did this!”

  A cheer of agreement went up from the troop.

  Wedge swung up into the saddle and kicked his horse into a run toward the Rio Grande, which was only a few hundred yards away. The Rangers followed him. Frank watched them go, then looked at Stormy and Dog and sighed.

  “Sometimes I’m a damned fool,” he said. With that, he mounted up and rode after the Rangers, thinking that neither the Appaloosa nor the big cur had disagreed with him.

  7

  A few minutes later, Stormy splashed up out of the waters of the Rio Grande and The Drifter was in Mexico. Dog emerged from the river, too, and paused to shake the water violently off his muscular, thick-furred body.

  Frank put the Appaloosa into a fast lope that quickly brought them up even with the Rangers. He made his way to the head of the group, next to Wedge.

  The captain glanced at Frank and said over the noise of the hoofbeats, “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  “I’ve got just as much right to be over here as you do,” Frank said. “In Mexico you’re a civilian just like me.”

  Wedge grinned humorlessly. “The way I figure it, this badge gives me the right to go wherever I need to, to defend the State of Texas.”

  Frank wasn’t going to waste any breath arguing with him. Instead, he kept his eyes on the tracks that the raiders had left after wiping out the Hernandez brothers and torching their jacal.

  The vegetation was sparser on this side of the river, the ground sandier and more likely to take a print. Frank and the Rangers had no trouble following the trail. It looked as if Wedge was right about the outlaws being confident of their escape. Frank wondered what would happen, though, if the Rangers ran into a troop of Rurales. The Mexicans probably wouldn’t be happy about finding a group of armed Texans on this side of the river.

  The trail led south from the Rio Grande for a mile or two and then swung back to the west. The sun sank toward the horizon and was swallowed by a bank of clouds, meaning that night would fall earlier than usual. Wedge had been setting a fast pace, but now he reined in and settled his horse into a deliberate walk.

  “We don’t want to ride right up their backsides before we know what’s going on,” he said by way of explanation. “They can’t be too far ahead of us.”

  That made sense to Frank. He matched Stormy’s pace to that of the captain’s mount.

  The clouds continued to move in, and a cool breeze freshened from the north. It was too early in the year for one of the blue northers that whistled into the Texas Panhandle seemingly straight from Canada, and besides, Frank doubted such a cold snap would penetrate this far south. It was certainly possible, though, for some chilly weather to move in here in northern Mexico, and it looked like that was what they were in for. Not a freeze by any means, but air cool enough so that a man’s breath would fog in the morning.

  The advancing clouds brought the shadows of dusk with them. Beside Frank, Wedge muttered, “Will they push on in the dark, or make camp somewhere?”

  Frank didn’t know if Wedge was directing the question at him or just thinking out loud, so he didn’t attempt to answer. Anyway, he had no idea what the raiders would do.

  The terrain was a bit more rugged on this side of the border, as it sloped gradually upward toward a mountain range that rose in the west. The landscape was cut with arroyos that were dry nearly year-round, except during the infrequent rainstorms when they were prone to flooding. It was also dotted with occasional mesas and other upthrusts of stone. From time to time a spiny ridge wound its way across the countryside.

  The Rangers were climbing one of those ridges when Frank said sharply, “Wait a minute.”

  Wedge lifted a hand to signal a halt and then, sounding irritated that Frank had issued a command, asked, “What the hell is it?”

  Frank sniffed. “Smell that?”

  Wedge took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said after a second. “Smoke. Somebody up ahead of us has buil
t a fire.”

  “That sounds to me like the men we’re after have decided to camp for the night.”

  “I think you’re right. Probably not more than half a mile in front of us, either.” Wedge hipped around in the saddle and called a low-voiced order for his men to dismount. The Rangers in the front of the group passed along the order to those farther back. They began to swing down from their horses.

  Frank dismounted as well. Wedge detailed a couple of men to hold the horses. Frank handed over Stormy’s reins somewhat reluctantly.

  “Will that animal behave himself?” Wedge asked, gesturing curtly toward Dog. “Or will he start barking and give us away?”

  “He’ll behave if I tell him to,” Frank assured the captain. He bent to rub a hand on Dog’s neck and said, “Quiet now, Dog, you hear?”

  Wedge grunted. “You talk to him almost like he was human.”

  “I prefer his company to that of a lot of humans I’ve run into,” Frank said.

  Wedge didn’t ask him what he meant by that.

  Now on foot, the Ranger troop slipped stealthily toward the top of the ridge. When they reached the crest, Frank and Wedge knelt to take a look. Both men had keen eyesight, and it took them only a moment to spot the orange glow in the sky, emanating from a spot about a quarter of a mile ahead of them.

  “What did I tell you about those bastards feeling like they’re safe because they’re on this side of the river?” Wedge said.

  “That’s a good-sized fire, all right,” Frank agreed. “They must not think anybody is on their trail.”

  “They’re about to find out how wrong they are,” Wedge said grimly.

  He passed the word for the men to advance on foot. It wasn’t necessary to tell them to check their guns as they moved forward. They did that anyway. Frank slipped the thong off his Colt and slid the revolver up and down slightly in its holster, even though he knew it would move smoothly.

  Darkness fell quickly and completely as the Rangers cat-footed toward the source of the smoke that all of them could now smell. They passed several clumps of yucca plants and slid down a shallow bank into an arroyo. Sand and gravel grated under their boots.