The Smoking Iron by Brett Halliday

with a bullet through his head. His mate and the other leader struggled frantically to escape, and Dusty quieted them with soothing words while he disentangled the harness and got them free. He turned the leader loose, but kept the bridle on the other unharmed horse, a rangy sorrel who had old saddle marks on his back. He cut the leather lines off short to serve as reins, then lightly vaulted on to the sorrel’s bare back.
    He snorted and made a half-hearted effort to bow up, but he was broken to ride, and he lunged away at a lope when Dusty roweled him and headed him down the arroyo in the same direction taken by the two holdup men.
    A quarter of a mile away, the deep ravine widened out into a greasewood flat and crossed the stage road which angled around from the top of the steep cliff over which the coach had fallen.
    The hoofprints of the killers’ horses turned out of the arroyo onto the road. Dusty Morgan did likewise, keeping the sorrel at a steady gallop that ate up the miles.
    The sun rose behind him, showing a desolate country here as the road neared the Border. The stagecoach had crossed a low range of mountains southwest of Marfa, from which the terrain sloped downward through foothills and badlands into the sweeping valley of the Rio Grande. Beyond the river, the slope rose sharply to the foot of towering snow-capped Mexican peaks.
    On the American side the ground was badly cut by small gullies and dry washes, and vegetation consisted of stunted mesquite and greasewood. There was little grass for stock, and Dusty saw few grazing cows as he rode along.
    He wondered about that. He’d always heard of the Big Bend as a fine cow country, had envisioned it as rich with grass and running streams. But this part of it was as bad as the alkali flats up on the Pecos where he had been reared; wouldn’t support more’n a dozen jack rabbits to the acre, two or three head of stock to every section, maybe.
    He began to wonder if the huge and properous Katie ranch was only a myth, or if he’d somehow got turned off in the wrong direction during the night. But the stage driver had said he was headed for Hermosa; and that had been Ben Thurston’s destination too.
    The country did get a little better, he noticed, as the road veered in toward the river. Not a whole lot better, but there were some good patches of bunch grass and the lacy mesquite bushes were putting out a good crop of beans. There were more cattle too, but none that he saw carried the K T brand. Most of them had an X L on their sides, whitefaces who lifted their heads and stared after him mournfully as he rode by on the road bareback.
    He was plenty conscious of the harness bridle and the lack of a saddle as the sun rose higher behind him and he knew he must be getting nearer to Hermosa. It wasn’t part of his plan to tell anyone that he’d come from the wrecked stage, and he knew he had to get rid of the sorrel with the tell-tale blinders on his bridle before he met anyone.
    But he wanted to ride in as close as possible, not being very partial to foot-walking in his high-heeled boots, so he kept on down the dusty road at a lope, watching ahead and behind him for sight of another rider before he was seen.
    He was almost on the village of Hermosa before he realized it. Three miles back the road had turned sharply to the right and followed the slope downward toward what he guessed would be the Rio Grande, though he couldn’t see any sign of a river ahead.
    Abruptly, the road reached the edge of a sheer limestone cliff where it angled sharply downward.
    And there was the river and a town right below him. A bunch of sunbaked adobe houses squatting on a narrow strip of flat land between the base of the cliff and the river. There were giant cottonwoods along the edge of the water, interspersed with clumps of cedar.
    He pulled up sharply and slid off the sorrel’s back. These must be the rimrocks he’d heard about. Further south