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Updated: June 1, 2025
An’ seem’ as how they was only one company hereabouts—Howard’s Rangers—they didn’t try. That’s when Johnny Shannon had his big bust-up with his pa an’—" "His father!" Drew could not help that exclamation. "Wal, Don Cazar ain’t Johnny’s real pa, o’ course. But he shore thinks th’ world an’ all of Johnny, raising him up from a li’l cub.
"He has no right to give such an order," Don Cazar was beginning when the alcalde interrupted: "Compadre, for a man such as that your talk of rights means nothing. He is eaten by the need to impress his will here, and that will bring trouble. I do not like what I have heard, no, I do not like it at all." "You know what may be really eating at him this time, Hunt?"
"Now ain’t they th’ purtiest things?" he inquired of the stable at large. "’Bout th’ best stock we’ve had here since th’ last time Don Cazar brought in a couple o’ hissen. Where’ll I put your plunder, mister?" He was already loosing Croaker’s pack. "You be stayin’ over to th’ Jacks?" Drew glanced up at the haymow from which Callie had just descended.
Topham’s arm went about the shoulders under the black-and-silver jacket, drawing Don Cazar into the light, music, and excitement of the cantina. While Drew watched, the stouter back of Bartolomé cut off his first good look at his father. So ... that was Don Cazar—Hunt Rennie! Drew did not know what he had expected of their first meeting. Now he could not understand why he felt so chilled and lost.
"Make it ahead of us now?" Rennie laughed shortly. "If he does, he’ll have a warm reception. The Pimas are already scouting both passes. We planned to close the border when we set up that ambush. Meanwhile"—he glanced back—"Teodoro!" "Sí, Don Cazar?" "How far are we from your hunting-camp site?" "Two, maybe three miles. Slow riding in the dark, Don Cazar." "We’ll head there.
All the way out from Texas he had practiced doggedly with the lariat, and his best fell far short of what a range-bred child could do. Yet he had an audience waiting down at the corral. Drew’s mouth was a straight line. He would soon confirm their belief that Don Cazar had in truth hired Shiloh instead of his owner.
He was weaving in and out among the fallen men in the pass. "They ride." He was half choked by the effort to force his message past heavy gulps for breath. "Who rides?" Rennie demanded. "Three—four men ... that way." He waved a plump hand to the east. "They go like the wind, Don Cazar. And one—he rides the big gray!" Drew whirled. The big gray—there was only one horse to be named so on the Range.
"Yesterday——" Drew tried to think back to how he had felt yesterday about Topham’s warning and how he himself had held the absurd belief that if Don Cazar was going to be in trouble, Drew himself wanted to be there. That was yesterday. But still he pointed his horse south—to the place where Hunt Rennie would return, bringing Johnny Shannon. The Kentuckian fell back on the old "wait and see."
Johnny warn’t more’n four o’ thereabouts when Don Cazar went back to Texas an’ got him. Don Cazar’s been like a pa to Johnny since, an’ a mighty good one, too. But when th’ Rangers was round here in ’62 Johnny—he had a big row an’ run off to join ’em. Jus’ a half-growed kid, not big ’nough to raise a good brush o’ hair on his chin yet.
"Don Cazar, he has offered money—a hundred dollars in gold—to have off the Range that killer pinto stud. But that one, he is like the Apache; he is not to be caught." "Can’t someone pick him off with a rifle?" "Perhaps. Only that has also been tried several times, señor. My father, he thought he had killed him only two months ago.
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