more of CSI!cowboys

Morning was damp and dim, with the sun only a hazy bit of light through the clouds. Wade was awake from his watch when Dan rolled himself out of his blanket and stretched out the night's cramps and knots. He could feel Wade watch him as he lurched upright and limped closer to the campfire, where coffee was waiting.

"I've been thinking about what you said last night," Dan said over the rim of his tin mug. He'd done more thinking than sleeping, harassed all night by fears for William. Having Wade across the fire hadn't helped, had made Dan feel twitchy, but the outlaw had silent all night, too occupied with his own thoughts to try to pluck at Dan's. He swallowed a bitter mouthful of the coffee and continued, "About murders rather than killings. If they're not random killings, then there's got to be a reason behind them all. And if there's a reason, there's a pattern in 'em. If that's true, all of that, then how come no one else is paying attention to all of them?"

"Like the army, you mean."

Dan nodded. "Seems to me that this should interest someone. But we haven't run into anyone else on this trail."

He'd accepted Wade's idea, sometime after his watch ended but before the moon had set. The outlaw was the expert of the two of them on murdering and killing and otherwise ending of lives. There was that, but there as also the way the bodies were, the wounds the bodies had, the sense of it that lingered long after they left the corpses behind. This wasn't Indians out for revenge, or gang fights turned inward and turned fatal. And so Wade had been right. Accepting that had been easier than Dan had expected, but from it sprang up a thousand more questions, bleeding through Dan's mind.

Wade's voice was husky when he spoke, worn rough from his own sleeplessness. "Either they don't know or they're pretending that they don't."