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Show 6H andhiB gmig WCJ.C uat a , tta *««,««>„.., as murderous as ever. This time maybe he could do the surprising. If he had the ammunition. Anxious now, he pulled the Winchester 30:30 carbine out of its saddle scabbard and checked the magazine. Full; he always kept it full. But when he reached into the saddle pocket where he kept spares, he found the box crumpled and empty and eight cartridges, gritty with sand, loose in the pocket. Fourteen in all. Well, they would have to do. He wiped the sand off each of them, dropped seven into his shirt pocket, bottoned the flap down securely. Then he levered a cartridge into the chamber of the rifle, used the last cartridge to refill the magazine, slid the carbine back into its scabbard and swung aboard. "Come on, boy, " he said to the roan. "We got a morning's work to do. " The saddle was hot, pleasant to his thighs. Though it was no later than nine o'clock, the sun was high, and it was hot, already a hundred degrees, but the old man didn't mind. What bothered him was the cold, when the temperature fell below eighty and him without flesh to keep him warm, his old bones with only skin wrinkled over them. He had a tall thin nose and caved-in cheeks, the skin brown and wrinkled, fine wrinkles creeping even into his lips so that, with his mouth closed, he had no lips at all, only a line to show his mouth. But in that ancient face his eyes were as alive as a squirrel's, as black as his Ute grandmother's had been. He did not resemble her in any other way; even in youth with his hooked nose and black hair he had looked not Indian but, rosy cheeked, more like an innocent Celtic marauder. Now he only looked old, ancient, as if living in the Western desert so long he had become a part of it. But his eyes were still good, farsighted, and his hands were steady. He had always been a better shot than most and that in a land where most were pretty good, so he |