“Yeah, that’s me,” he said, a little smirky. Somehow he was seeing all this as proof that he was double the rest of us.
“What if they both expect babies at the same time, eh?”
Rusty was still looking smirky, so I didn’t push it. Life sure was going to be interesting.
Critter loved to get out, and now he was pretty near popping along, and Rusty’s nag had to trot now and then to catch up. We were riding through empty country, nothing but hills and sagebrush, and not worth anything except to a coyote. But that was Wyoming for you—ninety percent worthless, ten percent pretty fine.
It took us about three hours to reach the ambush place, well chosen to hide the ambushers behind a curve in the road. The jehu had given me a pretty good idea of it. There were signs around there, all right. Some iron-tire tracks, some hoofprints, some handkerchiefs, and plenty of boot heel dimples in the dun clay.
Sure enough, the iron-tire tracks led straight west, off the road, over open prairie, so we followed them.
“We’ll nail ’em, Rusty. How can we lose? Look at them tracks, smooth and hard.”
But the tracks were gradually turning, and finally came entirely around and headed for the Laramie Road, maybe a mile south of where the ambush happened. And there they disappeared. Those clean iron-tire tracks vanished. We messed around there a while, widening out, looking for the tracks, and there weren’t any. It was as if that chariot had taken off from the earth and rolled on up into heaven.
Rusty was having the same sweats as me. That just couldn’t be. Big red-and-gold chariots didn’t just vanish—unless through the Pearly Gates. I wondered about that for a while. Were them Ukrainian ladies taken on up?
The road had plenty of traffic showing on it, and we scouted it one way or the other, checking hoofprints, poking at ruts, and kicking horse turds, but the fact was, the kidnappers had ridden off into the sky, and were now rolling across cumulus, or maybe thunderheads, to some place or other.
“You got any fancy theories, Cotton?” Rusty asked.
He sure looked gloomy, like he had been deprived of a night with two of the prettiest gals ever born.
“We could ride on down to Laramie and see what’s what,” I said.
“Who’d want ’em?” Rusty asked.
“Some horny old rancher, I imagine,” I said.
“Well, there’s no man on earth hornier than me,” Rusty said.
It was dawning on him that he’d lost his mail-order bride, or brides, I never could get that straight, and he was sinking into a sort of darkness. I thought it was best to leave him alone.
“I’ll get ahold of the sheriff, Milt Boggs, and tell him what’s missing, and to let us know if we got a red chariot and two hipshot blondes floating around southern Wyoming,” I said.
“We catch them, what are you going to charge them with?” Rusty asked.
“Now that’s an interesting question,” I said. “My ma used to say people confess if you give them the chance.”
“Well, she inherited all the brains in your family,” Rusty said, just to be mean.
Truth to tell, my mind was on what might happen when we got back to Doubtful without two hip-tied blondes and a red chariot and a mess of crooks trudging along in front of my shotgun. They’d be telling me to quit, or maybe trying to fire me again. Seems every time I didn’t catch the crook or stop the killer, they wanted to fire me. I’ve spent more time in front of the county supervisors trying to save my sheriff job than I’ve spent running my office.
Well, about dusk, we got back in, and all we raised were a few smirks. Like no one thought that kidnapping Siamese twins from the Ukraine was worth getting lathered up about. Especially when it was all Rusty’s problem. He’s the only one got shut out of some entertainment. So we rode in, by our lonesome selves, without a passel of bandits and bad men parading in front, and without those brides. People sort of smiled smartly, and planned to make some jokes, and maybe petition the supervisors to get rid of me, and that was that.
Me, I felt the same way. If Rusty hadn’t mail-ordered the most exotic womanhood this side of Morocco, it never would’ve happened.
Turk showed up out of the gloom soon as we rode into his livery barn.