The cattle will come up for feed, and we’ll get what we want and be gone before either one of the Talbots even gets out of bed.”
J.B. grinned. “Good thinking, Moses.”
* * *
They made a quick run to a nearby town to get a couple of sacks of cattle cubes, and then went home for the day. Before sunrise the next morning they were ready.
It wasn’t all that far to the old Bailey place from where they lived, and they were there within fifteen minutes. They followed their own tracks back through the overgrown pastures to the backside of the Talbot farm, then cut the fence and drove right out into the pasture, looking for the herd.
They found them just over the hill from where they’d come in, still bedded down. But when the cows heard the pickup and the trailer rattling over the rough ground, they got up.
Moses turned in a half circle so that they were now facing the cut fence for a quick exit, then got out and opened the back gate to the trailer.
“Let’s get the feed,” Moses said, so they got a sack apiece, emptied them in a circle, and waited.
The cattle came running, pushing and shoving a little to get to the cubes. The Gatlin brothers let them eat a little, and then J.B. got a cattle prod, and Moses had a pole. They got on either side of a couple of steers and just turned them around from where they were standing with the pole. Then with one poke of that prod, the first steer jumped forward right into the trailer and the other one followed. They got three head in the front half of the trailer, then shut that gate, and then took some of the feed and led two more inside. They didn’t know one of the cows they loaded up had a calf until it followed her inside and began to suck.
“Score,” J.B. said, when he saw it.
They shut the back gate and locked it, then took off for the truck and drove away, back through the fence they’d cut, and then through the Bailey property and back out on the road. They went straight to their place long enough to remove the ear tags from the cattle, then headed to the auction house J.B. had used when he sold that first cow.
They left the auction house with over four thousand dollars and went straight to the bank in Savannah to deposit the money into the account they’d opened after their second sale. The people there didn’t know them as anything other than cattle jockeys—men who bought and sold cattle for a living—and thought nothing of it, and after the account had been opened, the brothers made a point of depositing all of their money from odd jobs there as well.
It made them feel like regular people to have a bank account, and adding in the little dabs of legal earnings to go with the rustling business made them feel better. They’d almost convinced themselves that making a deposit with legal money canceled out the money they’d made from selling stolen property.
“This was our last run,” Moses said.
“Yeah, I remember,” J.B. said.
“And we’re not doing this again,” Moses added.
J.B. shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
Once they got home, they washed the fresh cow poop out of the trailer, then took it to the barn. Just for good measure, they sprinkled some dry dirt into the trailer bed, then filled it up with junk and old wire from inside the barn to make it look like it hadn’t been used in ages, and dragged it out into the weeds behind the barn and left it there. The next morning they drove into Savannah to pick up some much-needed supplies.
They didn’t know Jack Talbot had already found the broken fence, but they wouldn’t have cared. As far as they were concerned, they’d gotten away unseen, the cattle were sold, and that was the end of that.
* * *
Duke was on his way home when his phone rang, and when he saw Jack’s name pop up in caller ID, he knew his brother was checking on him. He answered, then put it on speaker and kept driving.
“Hello.”
“Are you okay?” Jack asked.
“I’m fine. I’m almost home,” Duke said.
“Well, okay then. I was getting worried. Didn’t think you’d be gone this long and—”
“Yeah. Kinda got caught up in a little incident in Blessings and wound up taking a lady to the ER.”