Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
Running Fox, a brown blanket twisted over one shoulder, the rest of him stripped down to breechclout and moccasins, padded up to Hilario Trinfan and spoke in the guttural Pima. The mustanger translated. "The horses are still there. But there is a camp of two men on the north slope above the canyon. Both men are Anglos. They are armed with rifles and take turns watching."
Did I not see him, with my own eyes, kill a foal, tear flesh from the flanks of its dam when she tried to drop out of the run? Sí—a real diablo, that one!" "Get rid of him one way or another, Trinfan. He is a danger to the Range. He killed another stud this season. I am as sure of that as if I had seen him in action." "Ah, the blue one you thought might be a runner to match Oro.
The Trinfan outfit was small, considering the job they intended, Drew thought. A cart pulled by two mules, lightly made and packed high, was the nucleus of their small caravan. Burros—two of them—were roped behind and, to Drew’s surprise, a cow, bawling fretfully and intended, he later learned, to play foster mother to any unweaned foals which might be picked up.
Seeming to realize he was free of the pole walls, the black exploded in a burst of speed which was close to Shiloh’s racing spurt. Drew let him go. Three-quarters of an hour later he rode back, the black blowing foam, but answering the rein. He found Don Cazar, Bartolomé, and Hilario Trinfan waiting for him by the corral.
The Kentuckian regretted his own ignorance; the few words he had picked up along the trail from Texas certainly were no help now. The Mexican wiped his good hand up and down the front of his worn jacket, and then smoothed a patch of soil. On it he drew lines and explained each of them, much as Hilario Trinfan had done for the horse hunters days earlier. "What’s he sayin’ now?"
But there was no use trying to duck the ordeal, and the Kentuckian had never been one to put off the inevitable with a pallid hope that something would turn up to save him. Only this time, apparently, fortune was going to favor him. "Which one you wish, señor?" Teodoro Trinfan, rope in hand, stood there ready to cast for one of the milling colts.
Hilario Trinfan sat his buckskin at the water hole, watched Teodoro make careful adjustment of the blankets tied on the bushes. "They will be wild with thirst. Tomorrow the blankets will be taken down. There will be no sign of man here. By mid-afternoon the mares will be ready to fight past the Pinto for water. He can not hold them away. So, they will come and drink—too much.
For so small a man the Mexican on the cart seat produced a trumpet-sized voice. He touched the roll-edged brim of his sombrero, and Drew noted that his arm was crooked as if in the past it had been broken and poorly set. "Buenos dias, Señor Trinfan. This house is yours." Rennie went to the side of the cart. "The west corral is ready for your use as always.
"Can we reach a place from where we can read the brands on the horses?" Drew asked. Trinfan questioned the Pima. "Sí. But you can not go there by day. You must go in at dusk, wait out the night, and then see what you could in the early morning. Leave before sunup. Otherwise the watchers may be able to locate you. He says"—Trinfan smiled—"that he could go at high noon and would not be seen.
At a distance they circled the waiting pen with walls of entwined brush and sapling, ready to funnel driven horses into a blind canyon. The Pinto’s band must be located, somehow shaken out of the rocky territory their wily leader favored, before that drive could begin. Water, Trinfan said, would be the key.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking