by Noel Loomis
The frantic pony, caught between the strike of the spurs and the wrench of Clay Hughes’ weight upon the bit, whirled in a crazy plunge, and for a moment Hughes was lifted clear of the ground as it reared. Then abruptly, with the odd, sudden acceptance common to cow horses, it quieted and stood motionless, quivering slightly, on braced legs.
“Let him go!” Macumber begged. “I’ve got to go back!”
“All right,” said Hughes, “but I’m going with you, damn it! Now quick—what happened?”
“We got through the Gunsight all right—nobody tried to stop us. Sally kept changing her place up and down the train, all night. She’d go up and ride with Tom for a while, then drop back and ride with me. Then for a while I thought she was up with Tom, and Tom thought she was with me. She must have turned out and held her horse quiet with a hand over his nose, in the shadow of the timber, until we’d all gone by, and then started back. Just beyond the peak of the Pass, Tom come riding back along the train saying he hadn’t seen her for an hour… I made all the rest go on with Mona. I knew if there was going to be any trouble it was ahead, since the Pass was clear. I couldn’t believe but what Sally must be only a little way back. I follered back along the trail at the high lope. I don’t believe any animal has ever come down that trail the way I put this horse down it tonight. But Sally ain’t on the trail, I can swear to that!”
“You missed her! You must have missed her! Lead them horses out!” snapped Oliver Major. “Bring my saddle, Dick. Chris!—Chris, where are you? He’ll have to stay with Walk and Dusty—the rest of us will go back up with Bob.”
“What about Sessions?”
“To hell with Sessions! Bob, I promise you, I’ll kill you if you’ve lost that girl!”
“I hope to God you will,” said Macumber dimly.
“Here goes the Buckhorn water,” said Bart Holt.
“Damn the Buckhorn water!”
Hughes, the first saddled, already had his foot in the stirrup, when a faint, far suggestion of sound brought him to a frozen stop. He listened. “Keep still a minute! Stop everything, will you? Make that cayuse stand!” Hughes could bring into play a voice that animals obeyed; and those overkeyed men obeyed him like animals now, freezing motionless to his command. Even Major checked his hands in the act of jerking tight his latigo, and listened with the rest.
The drone of the approaching cars, within the two miles now, gave the darkness a deep humming undertone that seemed to come from the ground itself. Under this handicap Hughes at first could hear nothing more. Then, very faintly, almost as if he imagined it, he thought he heard the sound of hoofs, coming in at a running walk.
“Stand where you are!” he ordered the others savagely. “If I’m wrong I’ll sing out, and you can come on.”
He had hardly believed that they would acknowledge his abrupt usurpation of authority; yet they obeyed, waiting, finishing their saddling as he eased his pony at a quiet singlefoot into the dark.
At three hundred yards he drew up and listened again, then booted his horse forward at a dead run. Bending low on the withers he made out a mounted figure against the stars of the high horizon. It shied as he drove down upon it, and broke into a lope to circle him.
“Sally,” he shouted, “is it you?”
The other rider pulled up. “I guess so, Clay,” Sally’s voice came to him, small across the dark.
He turned his horse and brought it close, stirrup to stirrup with hers. He wanted to speak to her, but found he could not. The iron had gone out of him, leaving him limp in the saddle. For the moment it seemed to him that all struggle had found an end with the return of this girl. The roar of guns and the death of men, the destruction of a range, the throttling of the Buckhorn water itself—all that was only a little stir in the desert dust, of no significance compared with the overwhelming relief that swept him with the reappearance of Sally Major.
She swayed against his shoulder as he brought his pony close, as if very weary, and very glad to be back. The pressure of that slight leaning weight was electric. As if by reflex he flung an arm about her shoulders, very strong and steady, but gentle too; for the one thing he was utterly sure of in a world of uncertainty was that here beside him, stirrup to stirrup, knee to knee, was one reality infinitely precious, wholly irreplaceable. For a moment her high-strung vitality seemed to sag, and she leaned her head against his shoulder like a tired child. “I had to come back, Clay. Don’t let them send me away again! I want to stay here.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “if I’ll ever be able to let you out of arm’s reach again.”
For a few moments they rode so, very close together. Then she straightened up and lifted her horse ahead to meet the others. They were coming out now on a run, no longer to be restrained. Clay dropped the reins on the horn, letting the pony go back as it might, and stretched his arms luxuriously over his head. A grey light was showing beyond the trail-off of the Sweet-waters, bringing a day that Earl Shaw and the Lazy M had awaited, not through one night alone, but through the restive years. Clay Hughes shot a glance at the coloring sky, and grinned, ready to meet whatever turn of the luck with a glad heart. Sally Major was here…
“Fool kid,” mumbled Oliver Major. “Fool kid… Get them ponies back in the ’dobe! They’re nearly on us now.”
It was typical of that family that neither Dick nor old Major demanded of Sally why she had returned. Now that she was here it was as if they had half expected her to break away and ride back, all alone. While Dick explained to Sally what had happened meantime, Hughes sought out Bob Macumber.
The foreman stood well apart from the others. He was leaning against the wall, and rolling a cigarette with dull, fumbling hands.
“Don’t take it so hard, Bob,” said Clay.
Macumber raised his head, and Hughes was surprised to see in that first faint light that Macumber’s face was the peculiar grey-green of seasoning grass. “There’s no possible chance of getting her away from here now,” said Macumber. “They’re almost on top of us—they’ve cut off Gunsight Pass—”
“She’ll be all right here, Bob.”
Macumber looked at him sharply, incomprehension in his eyes. “Are you daft?” he demanded. “Why Clay—why—one chance shot angling in through a window—one wild ricochet, sweeping end to end through the inside of that ’dobe—good God, Clay, don’t you realize she’ll be under fire, here with the rest of us?”
It was a strange thing to see Bob Macumber’s face gone green and slack with fear; the astonishment of it knocked away Clay’s own presumption of Sally’s safety here. He could not conceive of a world going on with Sally Major struck out of existence; and perhaps this very incapacity had induced in him too great a faith in those solid old adobe walls and the abilities of their defense.
“That’s something,” he said, “that we can’t possibly let happen, Bob.”
“It’s my fault,” Macumber accused himself. His voice sounded tangled and unfamiliar. “She’d be safe beyond the ranges now if I hadn’t of fell down. All my life,” he added, almost inaudibly, “I’ve fell down on near everything I tried. But I never reckoned I’d come to a fall down like this. It’s a sorry thing I ever lived to come to it.”
Nothing anybody could say, Hughes knew, could be worse nonsense than that. If there was a man in the world who could be depended upon to carry a thing through with all he had, it was Bob Macumber. Anybody could see that, except Macumber himself.
Bob jerked upright, and the abortive cigarette fluttered from his fingers, a shapeless rag. “I tell you, Clay,” he said, lifting his hands in front of him in an awkward, rigid gesture, “I tell you I’d have gone to the end of hell for her, and two miles beyond! All the Buckhorn, and every soul in it isn’t worth the little finger of her. I tell you—”
Suddenly Hughes saw what he might have guessed before: Macumber was another who judged everything only in its relationship to Sally Major. “It’ll come all right, Bob,” he said.
Macumber jerked
away from him, withdrawing a couple of paces. He fumbled for his makings, and began another cigarette. “I’ll do what I can to even it up,” he mumbled. “God knows it’ll be little enough.”
The first car of the Adobe Wells string was rumbling across the wooden bridge below the farthest Lazy M corral. “Get inside!” Major was ordering them. “I aim to take no chances here.”
Unhurriedly the waiting men obeyed. “Ain’t you even going to stand out first to speak to them?” said Bart Holt. “I think we ought to—”
“Stand out, hell!” said Major. “You ought to know by this time that they’ll gun either Hughes or Dick with the least excuse, or none!”
“Or you either, for that matter,” said Bart Holt.
“I aim they’ll gun nobody at all,” declared Major. “Where’s Sessions?”
“I got him in here.”
“Come on, Hughes—Macumber! Damn it, will you come on?”
It seemed strange to take to cover without the exchange of a single shot, without even waiting for the formal challenge of Alex Shaw. But the time for formality and pretense was a long time past. They were up against the reality of war. It was a game in which the least penalty of error was the life of a man, and instant and conclusive disaster was the price of misplay. They had little enough to work with: six men, fighting behind adobe walls, against the law; six men, with their wounded—and a girl. They might ask themselves, surely, just how they expected to emerge victorious from open combat with the law; but they had the fate of Grasshopper Tanner to warn them that submission was the one course entirely out of the question.
Up by the house the first of the Adobe Wells cars passed the main doorway without hesitating, and came on directly for the pump house. Art French, of course, had tipped them off about that. The following cars seemed to draw up as they disappeared behind the house, for none of them reappeared. The one car came on slowly, alone, already within the hundred yards. Twenty yards from the pump house it rolled to a stop, and Hughes saw by that first grey light that it was the roadster of Alex Shaw.
And it was Alex Shaw himself who was now stepping out from behind the wheel with curious slow movements, as if his nerves were drawn taut against his will. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth to the other man on the seat—it was Dutch Pete. Dutch Pete nodded and remained in the car, a great sprawling relaxed figure, with one leg hung over the door.
Alex Shaw stepped forward three or four paces, his hands over his head. Here, evidently assuming that they were apprised of his intent, he dropped his hands and called out to the invisible defenders. His sheriff’s badge showed ostentatiously on his vest, an unaccustomed ornament.
“Can you hear me, Major?”
“I hear you, all right.”
“Is Stephen Sessions in there?”
“Do you think we’re fools?” Major answered equivocally.
“Well, his car’s out here!”
“I supposed you’d have found out by this time,” Major called, “that we sent a party over the Gunsight during the night.”
Alex Shaw hesitated. “Mr. Sessions,” he shouted, “if you’re in there, sing out.”
They saw Sessions fill his lungs to answer, but Bart Holt’s gun prodded the prisoner’s stomach. Sessions glanced at the hard blaze in the old cattleman’s eyes, smiled dryly, and closed his mouth.
“Well, that’s all right,” said the Adobe Wells leader after a few moments of waiting. “The men we want are in there just the same. I saw them as I come up, by God! I’m asking for the turn-over of Dick Major and Clay Hughes!”
“Go to hell!” said Major.
The new-made sheriff shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll tell you plain out,” he said, “we aren’t going to fool with you!” He stopped to pick up a blade of grass, and chewed it reflectively as he went on. “Right now you’re in the best position you’ll ever be in: you got a chance to give yourselves up in peace. If we have to rout you out of there, it’s going to cost us some men. What good will that do you? You’ll be liable for the murder of every man killed in routing you out. In the end we’ll get you, all right! You know that as well as me.”
“To hell with you,” answered Major again. “And to hell with your brother that thinks for you, and the gunmen he’s hired to do the work! Back out o’ here, before I get sore and throw down!”
“That’s final, is it?” They could make out the twisty grin that crossed the face of Alex Shaw.
“Until hell freezes and splits!”
Without another word Shaw turned on his high stockman’s heel, stepping back to his car.
Bob Macumber clapped Hughes upon the shoulder. “Well, so long, Clay. Take care of yourself.”
“What the—Bob, what you doing?” Startled, Clay Hughes made a snatch at Macumber’s wrist, as Bob flung open the door; but Bob freed himself with an impatient twist of his arm. He was walking out, toward the car of Alex Shaw.
“Bob—you damn fool—” Hughes sprang forward to catch Macumber, drag him back; but Bart Holt, unexpectedly seizing Clay’s gun belt, jerked him backward with all his strength. Bart Holt snapped, “Help me, Chris!” and Gustafson’s enormous arms closed about him, swinging him clear of the ground. He heard Bob growl, “Just a minute, Shaw!” Then he was dragged backward through the door.
“What’s the matter with you?” Clay’s voice rose in angry protest. “Can’t you see—”
“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Major, glaring into Clay’s face so savagely that he was checked. “If you go out there the shooting will start, because they’re set to get you, and you’ll both be killed. They’ve got nothing against Bob. Let him speak them if he’s set on it. Maybe he’ll get away with it. Anyway, we can’t stop him.”
The heavy door banged shut, and the bar fell.
“You can at least give him the cover of the guns,” Hughes raved.
“Well, we’re doing it, ain’t we?” growled Dick Major. He had taken a station at one of the two high, small windows on that side.
“If you’ll sit tight, we’ll let go of you,” said Bart Holt.
“All right.”
Gustafson released his terrific bear-like grip, and Hughes took his place at the shoe-box-sized window.
Beside the car Alex Shaw waited; and Macumber advanced upon him slowly, with that rolling gait of his, head forward, like a bear. Sally Major called out once, “Bob, come back!” Macumber appeared to falter in his stride, but he did not obey.
Up at the main house a shutter banged; the gray shadowless light of the early morning struck no gleams from steel, but Hughes thought he saw movement at one window of the house, then at a second window, and a third. Shaw’s deputies were swarming into the house from the far side, taking positions from which they could rake the pump house from excellent cover.
Ten feet in front of Alex Shaw, Bob Macumber had stopped, and the two stood facing each other, their thumbs hooked lightly in their belts in that deceptive nonchalant position of ready men. The two were speaking, low-voiced, so that those in the pump house could not make out what they said. Alex Shaw’s mouth twisted in that ugly one-sided smile. Then they saw Bob Macumber’s right hand move slowly away from his side, the fingers stiff and extended, and they heard the growl of his voice as he spoke an indistinguishable command.
Bob Macumber, the man who forever blamed himself, was paying off his imaginary debt to Sally Major.
What happened then was instantaneous, over with in the flash of a second. Alex Shaw’s hand traveled only a few inches as it brought the gun from the holster at the front of his thigh; it seemed that the weapon spoke almost as it came out of its leather. Bob Macumber’s holster was too far to the side, behind him almost; his right hand clutched, fumbled, and brought the gun up late. As Shaw’s gun spoke Macumber jerked violently, then caved forward to his knees. Shaw whirled and leaped for the cover of his car as Dick Major fired twice, both shots going wild. Then Macumber’s gun spoke once from the ground; Alex Shaw’s hands flew up, and he pitched full
length forward upon his face.
From the house burst a ragged fire and little gouts of dust began to jump around the now motionless body of Bob Macumber. Clay Hughes, at the window, whirled to find Sally Major close beside him.
“Down! Get down, and stay down!” He seized her shoulders roughly and forced her to her knees close against the adobe wall beneath the window. As he stood up to look out again the old wood of the window frame splintered six inches from his face; there was a thud in the adobe of the inner wall opposite, and little clods fell to the floor, rattling and whispering, as the bullet struck.
And now Dutch Pete fired from behind Shaw’s car. At the first whip of action Dutch Pete had removed himself from his vulnerable position with an extraordinary agility, and taken cover behind the machine. They could not see his position because of the unfavorable slope of the land to the bed of the Buck-horn; but as his gun spoke three times, Macumber’s body jerked, and they knew that Dutch Pete must have fired under the car itself, between the wheels. A whimpered imprecation burst from Clay Hughes, and he sprang to the door. Chris Gustafson jumped to intercept him, and once more the powerful arms of the big Norwegian clamped him, this time about his throat from behind, as Clay’s fist knocked the bar out of its slot.
Hughes fought savagely, but Bart Holt and Dick Major, coming to Gustafson’s aid, helped Chris bear him down.
“Let me go!” Hughes raged. “He’s down, and they’re letting drive at him still! If you think I’m going to stay here and—”
“What good can you do? Sit on him, Chris.”
Outside the firing had ceased abruptly. From the little high window Oliver Major said, “Old Doc Hodges is coming out. He’ll do anything that’s to be done.”
“Let me see if he is,” demanded Hughes. “If there’s a doctor going to him, I give you my word I won’t go out.” They let him stand up to peer out of the little window again, Chris Gustafson keeping a heavy hand upon Clay’s belt. A hatless man in rumpled street clothes was walking across the open toward the car beside which lay Alex Shaw and Bob Macumber. It was Hodges, the Adobe Wells medico—perhaps the only man in the Buckhorn who took no sides.
