that to do with the slot canyons?”
The rancher smiled, bent over and extended a hand to Tyree, who took it. With surprising strength, Boyd pulled the younger man to his feet. “This is how we’re going to do it, Chance. Since you’re the youngest atween us and feeling right spry again, you’re gonna get an armload of God apples and get up on the rims of those canyons. Toss your rocks into the slots and when the cattle come hightailing it out of there, me and Owen will count them.” He nodded to Fowler. “All except my bull, Owen. I plan to dab a loop on him and lead him closer to the cabin.”
Tyree grinned. “Then I guess I’d better start searching for God apples.”
“Plenty of them around, son,” Boyd said, throwing that last of the coffee on the fire. “God provides us with every blessing in abundance, the Good Book says. So get to gathering.”
Chapter 8
Getting up to the rim of a slot canyon was no simple task, as Tyree soon discovered when he studied his first climb. He had to make it to the summit of a massive pink-and-yellow mesa that rose in a series of narrow benches to a height of about a thousand feet above the flat.
He decided his best route was to follow one of the many deep runoffs that scarred the mesa’s eroded surface where, he hoped, the going would be easier.
Tyree clambered upward along a stony, slanting streambed, then across a sandbank that held captive the skeletal white trunk of a dead juniper. The way was made even more difficult by massive boulders and a series of steep, treacherous dry falls. The searing, relentless heat was an added misery along with the weight of the rocks in his pockets.
Boyd had given Tyree a pair of work gloves for the climb that protected his hands, but cactus spines, especially those of the tiny claret cup that hid behind boulders and laid traps for the unwary, soon lacerated his knees and elbows.
Halfway up, he stopped to catch his breath on a bench, flat purple-colored rocks and clumps of sagebrush scattered along its length and breadth.
Tyree took off his hat and wiped sweat from the band with his gloved fingers, the blazing sun hammering at him mercilessly. He was about to replace his hat but stopped in midmotion, frozen in place by a sudden, angry rattle.
He turned slowly. Ten feet away a huge side-winder that had been basking on a rock raised its head, tongue flickering, warning him to keep his distance.
Tyree took a step backward, then another, his hand dropping to the gun on his hip. But the snake, its point made, slithered into a cluster of boulders shot through with bunchgrass and disappeared.
Swallowing hard, Tyree settled his hat back on his head and began to climb again.
The slot canyon itself was a deep gash in the sandstone rock, sculpted over millions of years into fantastic twists and turns by raging floodwaters. Judging by the closeness of the walls in some places, parts of it were so narrow a wide-shouldered man would have been forced to turn sideways to get through.
When Tyree stood on the rim and looked down into the canyon’s depths, he could see twenty or thirty feet of wall bathed in a dim amber light, and below that only darkness.
There was no telling if there were actually cows down there, but if there were, the God apples would hopefully get them moving.
One by one Tyree tossed his rocks into the canyon and listened to them bounce off the walls. A few moments later there was a thud of hooves as spooked cattle ran in panic along the sandy bottom.
Tyree grinned, let out a wild whoop and tossed down a few more rocks. Luke had been right—it was actually working.
But after four hours and as many slot canyons, Boyd and Fowler had counted only a handful of cows, and the Hereford bull was not among them.
After throwing the last of his rocks, Tyree decided this fourth canyon, carved into the side of a high, flat-topped butte, was his last. He was scraped and bruised all over from climbing, and his knees and elbows were