Chapter Text
The steer came out of the dusk alone.
Hopalong Cassidy saw it while the Bar-20 outfit was making camp beneath a shelf of red stone, where the country rolled westward in long folds of sage and rabbitbrush. The animal moved stiffly, foam dried white along its jaws, one horn chipped at the tip. It had been ridden hard without ever wearing a saddle.
Johnny Nelson stood from the fire. "That one of ours?"
Hoppy did not answer. He walked toward the steer slowly, talking under his breath until it stopped shying. On its left flank lay the clean Bar-20 brand. On the right, half hidden beneath fresh hair and an ugly burn, was another mark.
Hoppy's face changed.
"Well?" Johnny asked.
"Circle D."
Johnny laughed once, then stopped when Hoppy did not. "Can't be."
"No."
The Circle D ranch had burned fifteen years before. Its owner, Amos Danner, had died with it. The range had gone unused ever since, a stretch of broken mesas and dry washes that cowmen called Dead Man's Range because cattle vanished there and riders disliked sleeping there after dark.
Yet the mark on the steer was new.
Hoppy crouched. The second brand had been laid over the Bar-20 mark badly, as if someone had begun the job and changed his mind. There was dried blood on the animal's hock and a thin gray smear along its hide.
"Mine dust," he said.
Johnny glanced toward the western hills. "There ain't a working mine within thirty miles."
"That's what makes it interesting."
They followed the steer's trail at first light. It led west, crossed hardpan, then vanished where somebody had deliberately swept the ground with a cedar branch.
Johnny stared at the erased tracks. "Friendly country."
"Very polite," Hoppy said. "Even cleans up after itself."
By noon they found a dead rider in a wash.
The man was face-down beside a dry cottonwood, his horse gone, his gun still holstered. There was no money in his pockets and no identification, only a brass token stamped with the same Circle D brand.
Hoppy turned it over.
On the reverse someone had scratched three words:
THE RANGE REMEMBERS.
A rifle cracked from the ridge.
Hoppy hit the ground before the echo returned. Johnny rolled behind a boulder and fired twice toward a flash among the rocks. Another shot slapped dust from Hoppy's sleeve.
Then silence.
They climbed the ridge separately. Whoever had fired was gone, but hoofprints led west toward Dead Man's Range.
Hoppy stood over them, black hat low against the afternoon glare.
Johnny knew that look.
"We goin' back for help?"
"Eventually."
"That's what I was afraid you'd say."
Hoppy slipped the brass token into his pocket.
Far off, beyond the red mesas, something flashed in the sun - a window perhaps, or a rifle barrel.
A place that had been dead fifteen years had just taken a shot at him.
Hoppy smiled without amusement.
"Let's go see who's resurrecting it."