It was a little past noon and he decided to stop and have something to eat. He made a quick fire out of some small dry branches and made a pot of coffee. He ate a chunk of pan bread after he warmed it by the fire and was finishing his first cup of coffee when he heard a rider approaching. He calmly removed his scattergun from his back holster and laid it across his lap after re-filling his cup. The rider, who looked to be in his fifties with a large bushy beard was just topping the rise as Jess took a swallow from his tin coffee cup. Stumpy had seen the smoke at the top of the hill, which is why he detoured off the trail. He didn’t know who it was, but it might be someone he could hire and send off to Henry Thornton. What he found was a young man, sitting on a boulder, sipping coffee. Stumpy was not lost on the fact that the young man had a scattergun across his lap. He reined up his horse about thirty feet from the young man. “Mister, might I sit a spell and share a cup of coffee with you?”
