The four wagons were parked in a line along the creek bank, separated by the spaces where the mule teams had been when they were pulled up there. One of the guards sat on the tongue of the fourth wagon, smoking a quirly. The other paced back and forth beside the lead wagon where the wounded prisoners were. He was probably moving around to fight off boredom and to help keep himself awake, Sam thought as he stood in the shadows of a nearby cottonwood and watched them.

It was dark here along the creek, under the trees, but Sam’s eyes were almost as keen as a cat’s. The light from the moon and stars that filtered down through the leafy branches was enough for him to make out the details of the scene. He waited until the pacing guard swung around, facing away from him, and then darted out of concealment long enough to circle the fourth wagon and approach the smoking guard from behind.

The man had no idea Sam was there. Sam could have killed him with no trouble at all, driving the bowie knife that was sheathed on his hip into the guard’s back and piercing his heart with the cold steel.

Sam wasn’t here tonight to kill, though. He was just after information. When he struck, his hands were empty of weapons. His left arm went around the man’s neck with the speed of a striking snake, closing hard and jerking the guard backward off the wagon tongue. The man never had a chance to make a sound.

The guard’s rifle fell to the ground. Sam reached down with his right hand and plucked the man’s revolver from its holster. The man continued to flail and writhe, but he was weakening rapidly from lack of air and his struggles were almost soundless. The groans of wounded men coming from the lead wagon would keep the guard up there from hearing anything.

After a couple of minutes, the man Sam had hold of slumped into unconsciousness. Sam lowered him to the ground, pulled the man’s belt off, and used it to tie his hands together behind his back.

The man had dropped his quirly when Sam grabbed him. The end of it still glowed redly on the ground. Sam put his boot toe on it and stubbed it out.

The other guard was too alert to sneak up on like that. Sam wouldn’t be able to take him by surprise as he had with this one. In such a case, the best course of action was usually to be bold. Sam walked toward the lead wagon like he was supposed to be there.

The man heard him coming and stopped pacing, swinging around to ask, “Something wrong, Hendrickson?”

“Yeah,” Sam grunted as another step carried him closer. “A lot.”

The other man suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, you’re not—” But Sam had closed the gap by the time the words left the man’s mouth. The next instant, a pile-driver punch exploded in the guard’s face. The blow drove him back against the side of the wagon. The back of his head struck it with a solid thump. Sam was ready to hit him again, but the man fell to his knees and then toppled over on his side. The double impact had knocked him out.

The sound of the guard’s head hitting the wall silenced the miserable noises coming from inside the wagon. Sam bent down to make sure that the man he’d hit was really unconscious, then stepped up on the hub of the wagon’s front wheel. That brought him high enough so that he could reach up with one hand and grasp a bar in the window. He held himself there and called softly through the opening, “Hey! Inside the wagon!”

He heard someone moving around on the other side of the wall. Then he saw a white blur appear in the window, and knew that one of the men had pulled himself up there to look out, like earlier in the day.

“Who…who are you, mister? You ain’t one of the guards.”

“No, I’m not,” Sam replied. “They’re both unconscious, so you don’t have to worry about them. My name is Sam Two Wolves. I’m a deputy marshal here in Cottonwood.”

“You’re not one of them?”

“If you mean, do I work for Porter and Bickford, no, not at all. I’m the one who was out here earlier. One of you called out to me for help and said that Porter was planning to murder you. Well, I’m here now. Tell me your story.”

“Oh, Lord, mister.” The man’s voice shook from pain, fatigue, fear…maybe all of that and more. “That was me. You gotta help us. Most of the fellas in here are all shot to pieces. They ain’t gonna make it if they don’t get help.”

“The doctor came to see you.”

“I know, but Porter wouldn’t let him take the boys with him who are in the worst shape. They’re gonna die.” A hollow laugh came from the man. “I don’t reckon it really matters, though. We’re all gonna die, because we didn’t have the money to pay Porter and Bickford.”

Even in Sam’s awkward position, balanced on the wheel hub and hanging on to the bar in the window, he stiffened in surprise. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Pay Porter and Bickford to do what?”

“Why, to spare our lives, of course. The way the others did.”

“What others?”

“The ones they let go. The ones who paid them off.”

Sam’s breath hissed between his teeth in surprise. “You mean they haven’t been arresting everyone they find with liquor?”

“Oh, they arrest those folks, all right, but they turn loose the ones who can come up with enough money. And not everybody they arrest is brewin’ moonshine, neither, or even drinkin’ the stuff. Some of these fellas are just farmers who didn’t have a drop of booze on their land, or pilgrims who were unlucky enough to cross trails with this bunch. That’s how most of the fellas in here got hurt, fightin’ back against bein’ arrested for something they didn’t do.”

“That’s loco,” Sam muttered. “Porter and Bickford are special marshals. They’re not supposed to arrest anyone who hasn’t broken that new liquor law.”

The prisoner at the window laughed grimly. “They can call themselves special marshals, and the governor may think they’re enforcin’ the law, but they’re crooks, Deputy, plain and simple. They’re just out for what they can get.”

“They’ll never get away with it,” Sam insisted. “When it comes out that they’ve been arresting people who weren’t breaking the liquor law and accepting payoffs to let prisoners go…”

His voice trailed off into a grim silence, which the man in the wagon broke a moment later by saying, “Yeah, that’s why all of us will get killed tryin’ to escape before we ever get to Wichita. They’ve done it before. Bickford bragged about it. They’ll haul in our carcasses and hold ’em up to show what a fine job they’re doin’ of protectin’ the state from bootleg whiskey. Then that damn fool governor will pat ’em on the heads and send ’em back out to do it again.”

Sam felt a chill go down his spine. While it was possible that the prisoner was lying to him, the man’s voice held utter conviction. And the scheme could certainly work the way the man described it.

“You say Marshal Bickford knows about this?”

“Knows about it, hell! It was his idea.”

So the jovial, friendly little man was actually the architect of this bloody plan. Sam found that a little hard to believe, but the man in the wagon sounded like he was telling the truth.

“Porter said we’d pull out in the morning,” the prisoner went on. “Some of the fellas in here are hurt so bad they won’t make it until sundown. The ones who don’t die over the next few days will be taken out of the wagons before we get to Wichita. They’ll turn us loose and make us run for it, then shoot us down like dogs. Then they can load our bodies back into the wagons and tote ’em into town like prizes.”

“Can you prove any of this?” Sam asked.

“You can talk to the rest of the prisoners. They’ll all tell you the same story.”

And that story might be a lie they had worked out, Sam thought. Outlaws couldn’t be trusted, and no matter how much he disliked Ambrose Porter, it was hard to believe such a monstrous scheme was real.

Still, this had to be looked into. The wagons couldn’t be allowed to leave Cottonwood until he and Marshal Coleman had talked to the other prisoners. That meant he needed to go to Coleman’s house right now and bring the lawman back here. At the very least, they could insist that the most severely wounded men be taken to Dr. Berger’s house so they could be looked after properly.

“Wait there,” he told the man on the other side of the bars.

The prisoner laughed. “Where am I gonna go, Deputy? I’m standin’ on a slops bucket inside a prison wagon.”

“I’m going to get Marshal Coleman, and we’ll get to the bottom of this. If you’re telling me the truth, we’ll do something about Porter and Bickford.”

“What can you do? They’ve got ten men workin’ for them, and those two are stone-cold killers themselves. I saw Bickford shoot a man in the back of the head the other day for cussin’ him, and Porter’s even more of a madman.”

Those were bad odds, all right, but maybe he and Coleman could take the special marshals by surprise while they slept in their hotel rooms, Sam thought. If they could capture the men one by one without alerting the others, they would stand a chance.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure out something,” Sam said. He let go of the bar in the window and jumped down backward from the wagon wheel.

He had just landed on the ground and caught his balance when a ring of cold, hard steel pressed against the back of his neck, under the long, raven-black hair. Calvin Bickford said in a regretful voice, “Don’t move, Sam, or I’ll have to kill you.”