by Noel Loomis
Hodges went directly to Bob Macumber, and for a moment stooped in examination. Then he stood up, facing the pump house, and made a gesture of utter finality. Hughes turned away.
Watching his face to read the verdict, Sally Major suddenly hid her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook uncontrollably, and between her fingers trickled slow irrepressible tears.
Chapter Eighteen
It was dusk; the fifth dusk that they had seen from within the now bullet-spattered adobe walls of the old pump house. In all those age-long five days of the siege nothing had ever happened at just this hour. And now an unaccustomed quiet was upon the Lazy M; not the quiet of something ended, but of something about to begin.
In the five days of their siege they had withstood no less than eleven attacks, and of these eleven only two had been made by daylight. Night was the time for everlasting alertness, long strained waitings, whispered councils, all of which forever came to but one end: the shock and the roar of the guns as the people of the Lazy M once more drove the attackers back.
They knew now that Earl Shaw himself was directing the siege. Even had they not caught a distant glimpse of him as he arrived, the Lazy M people would have known that he was there by the changed tactics with which they were harassed. Before the arrival of Earl Shaw, Dutch Pete, taking the place of the fallen Alex Shaw, had twice rushed the adobe in an attempt to crash the door with a battering ram. The Lazy M defenders could have killed their besiegers by the dozen then.
But the great weakness of their position lay in the fact that so long as the Bar S faction held legal authority, the Lazy M men dared not shoot to kill, even in their own defense. Oliver Major had a stubborn faith that as word of their situation spread, such a storm of protest would rise from the cattlemen of the southwest as would force Theron Replogle to take the law from the hands of the Shaws, to whom he had given it, and secure a neutral enforcement. This hoped-for intercession—if it ever came—would be worthless to them if they had complicated the case against them by the killing of men who were acting technically in the support of the law. The defenders must shoot only to disable and drive off those who now sought to dig them out of their stubborn redoubt.
The firing from the adobe had therefore been more warning than lethal through the first day of the siege. Dutch Pete had lost eight men in wounded at his first attempt to ram the door. The second attack broke up more quickly, and only three disabled men were dragged away with the attackers when they dropped their log ram and took cover. After that Dutch Pete had settled back to await the arrival of more brains.
With the advent of Earl Shaw the siege took on a different color. Shaw had begun by planting long-range snipers in positions so secure that their disablement, except by complete destruction, was out of the question. These sharp-shooter nests brought an accurate and searching fire to bear upon the loopholes of the defenders. Those within the adobe could keep watch during the day only by peering through minute cracks; to uncover so much as a knot-hole was to court an instant splatter of lead. The diminished accuracy of the snipers after dark was all that made defense possible at all. Even at night, the long range rifles were a constant hazard.
And this fire had taken effect. A bullet which tore through the muscles at the side of Bart Holt’s neck had been almost their first warning that the hour for careless exposure was past. Holt lived and would recover; but, as far as this fight was concerned, the old tracker could help them no more.
Chris Gustafson had a hand smashed when a bullet came the wrong way of the rifle he was sighting, turning him instantly into a one-sided man. He was still in the fight, unfevered and stoic, but he was reduced to the revolver now.
Dick Major, before the fight was done, promised to fare the worst of all. A spent ricochet had broken his collar bone close to the throat; he had been shot through the left forearm, and a third shot had chucked a ragged splinter of wood into the side of his face with such effect that it was now bandaged from eye to jaw. Yet these injuries had impressed no one less than Dick Major. Twice he had opened the door recklessly to fire into the night, oblivious to lead which splattered into the planks beside him like thrown gravel; and he could not always be restrained from jerking down the defensive planking of a whole window to get a shot he wanted. Three times wounded, he remained the wild reckless kid he had always been, his incautious eagerness making him one of the primary hazards of defense.
Twice, and sometimes three times in a night, Earl Shaw sent his men to storm the adobe in his own way. Under the covering fire of his sharpshooters, his men crept forward through shadow seeking means to break the stubborn defense. Standing flat against the adobe of the outer wall of the pump house, they attacked the timbered defenses of doors and windows with axes; until Hughes and Major, partly opening the door, met them with such a storm of fire that only one or two were able to retire without help. Again they attacked the adobe itself with mattock and pick. Oliver Major and Clay Hughes, now the only two unwounded men within the defense, ripped a hole in the sod and timber roof. Defended by the walls, which extended several feet above the line of the roof, these two blasted the ambitious work party from above. Once Shaw’s men came with fire, hoping to find the roof flammable, but this was of sod; and again they attacked the wooden doors and windows of the defense with gasoline and fire, but failed again.
Thus every night brought some new mode of attack, sometimes stubborn and violent, sometimes merely clever and ingenious, designed to cause the defenders to expose themselves to the fire of the planted rifles. Yet, violent though some of the attacks might be, and expensive to the attackers in wounded men, those within had the feeling that Earl Shaw staked but little upon success by these means. They had the feeling that the boss of the Bar S was only amusing himself, playing with them as a lion plays with a hurt rabbit, while he waited for the sheer endurance of his siege to take effect.
How many men the attackers had lost in wounded and disabled the defenders could not know: they were more than a dozen, certainly; perhaps many more. Whether or not anyone had been killed in the tumult of night fighting they could not guess. They did not even know whether Alex Shaw had survived the wound he had received in his shoot-out with Bob Macumber.
One man they knew was dead: it was Art French. Now that they were fully apprised of his treachery, as well as of his almost certain connection with the death of Hugo Donnan, they could not be sorry that he was rubbed out, complicate their position though it might. Yet the gunning of Art French had all but cost the life of the man who had downed him. No one had supposed Walk Ross would attempt to take up a gun. Since he had been moved to the pump house he had laid very still, hardly the flicker of an eyelash disturbing the stillness of his bloodless face. And they had not seen him stagger to a window, and bring up a gun with the one hand which he could still use. How long Ross stood at the window, accurately locating his mark and making good his rested aim, they did not know; but when Walk Ross fired at last, it was Art French who pitched forward with a galvanic jerk, to hang head-downward, suspended from the waist, from the loft of a barn.
That had been four days ago, when the fight was young. Tonight, with their rations running very low, and no sign without of slackening or intercession, it seemed they must be very near the end—some kind of end.
Hughes went into the adobe’s smaller room, where the ponies were being kept. The animals stood head down, logy from five days’ standing. One of the defenders always had to stay in this room to watch developments at that end of the building. Two or three people were enough to keep an eye out all around most of the time, but with only four of the men still on their feet, and but two of these unwounded, Sally Major was carrying her full share of guard. It was she who was watching in the dusky stable room now. The horses moved slowly in the awkward hip-lurching way of horses close confined, as Hughes made his way through them to Sally’s side.
“Anything doing?”
“No.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, leaning close to his ear as he stoo
ped to peer out through a crack between the planks. “I want to talk to you about something, Clay. Did you notice something funny just now, just before dark closed down?”
“What kind of funny, Sally? In here or outside?”
“Outside, way outside.”
“You mean—?”
He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her presence very close. Her shoulder momentarily swayed against his arm as he stooped to peer out; the warm soft touch carried the deep electric thrill of vitality he had always received from any manifestation of the nearness of this girl. Her whisper came to him so near and quiet that he could feel the warmth of her breath upon his cheek, yet could hardly hear it at all.
“A little while ago,” she said, “did you hear Dick say he could make out somebody driving stock, down to southward?”
“Yes.”
“Did you look to see what he saw?”
“We all looked, I guess.”
His hand, as he laid it upon the deep recessed window ledge came in contact with one of hers, and he was startled to find how cold and tremulous her fingers were. Searching in the dark, he found her other hand also, moving gently and slowly for fear she would jerk them away. They seemed very small and slender; soft fingered, yet delicately strong. The tremor went out of them as he closed them in his own, and she did not take them away.
“So did I,” she said. “Clay, that didn’t look to me like anybody driving stock!”
“Could you see anything but the dust?” he asked. “I couldn’t.”
“No; but the dust different things raise is just about as different as the shadows of things. That dust was too steady, too business-like. It wasn’t like the dust you make driving loose stock at all. At first I thought it was a car; but it was too slow, and too long, and too much.”
“I noticed that,” he agreed.
“Clay, that dust was made by ridden horses—a lot of them, an awful lot of them—sixty, eighty, a hundred head! I haven’t lived all my life in a country where you can see a hundred miles, without learning to read dust.”
He hesitated before he answered. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“Oh, Clay, are you—” There came into her whisper the half-fearful, half-exultant tremor of the hope that is afraid to hope—“are you thinking what I am?”
Slowly he said, “I’m afraid I’m not.”
“But what can it be? It certainly can’t be more posse—they come in cars. And heaven knows they’ve got enough posse now against—against just two unwounded men.”
“They’ve found this old pump house an awfully tough nut to crack,” he said grimly.
“Don’t you see what it may be?” she urged. “The whole southwest must know about this terrible thing, by now. Dad has friends everywhere, old cattlemen, old trail-drivers, men of the old fighting ways that aren’t afraid of the law, or the world, or the devil. They’ll come! Somehow, in the bottom of my heart, I’ve known it all along. Clay, it must be they; the cattlemen, the old-timers, gathering to stand by their own. They’re the men that whipped the Apache and the Comanche. How could they sit back now?”
“Honey child—” he said hesitantly, “honey child—”
“Clay, what’s the matter?”
“Don’t you stake too much,” he said slowly. “Don’t you set your heart on it, Sally girl, until we know.”
“Then you don’t think—”
“If I could keep myself from thinking at all,” he said softly, “I reckon I would.”
“But, Clay, have you been watching him?” He knew that she meant her father. “He saw it too. I know he did; and he thinks as I do. I can see it in his eyes. There’s a new life come into him, Clay, a new hope. I believe it was what he was playing for all along; he knew they wouldn’t fail him, and they’re not going to, all those grand old men!”
He tried to speak, but found that there was nothing he could say. Impulsively he bent his head and pressed his lips to the palm of her hand, wondering what the expression of her face was, so near to his, yet invisible behind the thin screen of the dark…
Oliver Major and Stephen Sessions were arguing again when Clay Hughes returned to the other room. A lantern in the middle of the floor, protected by an improvised cone of sheet iron, cast a thin plane of the dimmest yellow light along the floor alone; it showed the stirrup of a saddle, a rifle butt, Oliver Major’s high heeled boots, and the corner of a bale of straw. Everything above was shrouded in heaviest shadow.
The voice of Stephen Sessions was thin and dry, seeming to have lost a great deal of body in the five days during which he had been a prisoner with the besieged; and it seemed strange to hear him speak, he had spoken so seldom since he had been their prisoner here. The presence of that silver-haired, dominant, and somehow unctuous old man had been an anomaly from the start. Once he could have turned aside the on-rushing avalanche of disaster. To Oliver Major, his presence here now was a grim joke, and a just one. To Bart Holt at least, who had never favored holding him here at all, that silent, inappropriate, and sphinx-like presence had seemed a Jonah, a constant reminder that their battle was against forces which could draw upon the resources of the commonwealth itself.
Sessions had taken his situation silently, stoically even; and though the ruddy unctuousness of the man drained out of him, that stubborn look of square-cut granite remained, nothing shaken by the gun roar, nor swayed in opinion by the nerve-racking tedium of the siege. He might have been an aged and weary traveler, waiting interminably in a way station for a train.
In the face of Sessions’ weary stoicism, some of that exasperation he had inspired ebbed away; as if, very close to the end as they were, it became more apparent that each man is what he is, as helpless between his own character and his fate as a bronc rounded for breaking.
“It’s going on three hours since dusk,” Sessions said. “They’ll be coming on again soon.”
Something new, perhaps that newly strengthened hope which Sally had seen in his eyes, was subtly resonant in the voice of Oliver Major as he answered. “It may be they’re not coming on tonight,” he said.
“You planned to fight three days,” said Sessions, dryly. “You thought the posse would dwindle and fade. Instead they’re stronger, and in a stronger position, now than ever before. Instead of three days, it’s been five. The grub is almost gone.”
“I’m thinking of something else,” said Oliver Major. His voice was very hard, but edged with that faintly vibrant note of a new hope.
There was no question in Stephen Sessions’ voice, but only a wondering, ironic statement. “You still hope, then, that Theron Replogle will reverse himself!”
“I think,” said Oliver Major, “that Replogle knows what’s best for Replogle.”
There was a silence. If in the darkness Stephen Sessions smiled with a weary dry contempt, the smothered gleam of the lantern did not disclose it. Oliver Major’s boots moved out of the flat circle of dim light, as for a few minutes he engaged himself in a tour of the lookout.
“How long,” said Stephen Sessions after a little pause, “do you think you can go on with this?”
“Go on?” repeated Oliver Major. His voice was curiously without emotion. “We can’t go on.”
“You’ve made a good fight,” said Stephen Sessions with the finality of a man who speaks of a thing that is done. “I never would have believed that you people could have made a stand of it like you’ve done.”
No one answered him. They knew that what he said was so. That thick old adobe that Oliver Major and his brother had built with their own hands so long ago had, with the improvised planking shields at its openings, stood immune to fire, impregnable to lead. The scathing rake of the enemy fire had held them down very tightly; not so much as a knot hole was safe from the searching guns. Yet, over and over again the defenders had proved that in the pinches their own guns could lash out murderously, withering short range attack. The defense was an extraordinary thing—certainly they knew it must be a singularly
baffling thing to the heavily manned, and heavily armed army-like posse without. Yet it could not last forever.
“No, Oliver,” said Stephen Sessions, “like you said, you can’t go on. God knows I tried to make you see what the end would be when you began. It had to come. But, Oliver, I want to say this: from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of my soul, I’m sorry! I can’t say more than that.”
If it occurred to Oliver Major that this man, now expressing his purely futile regret, could have, at one time, changed the whole circumstance with a word, he found no reason for bringing it up again now. They had threshed that matter to the bottom, and at the bottom they had been deadlocked still.
In the oppressive silence the dim mumblings of the delirious Walk Ross fumbled vaguely. “Three head more…before we quit… It’s darker than all blue hell…” Beyond the walls Hughes made out the thin threading cry of a coyote, far off.
“So you see,” said Stephen Sessions, as if he could bear the silence no more, “Oliver, you have to give up.”
“Give up?” said Major, very softly. “We can’t give up.”
“But,” said Sessions, the impatience of overwrought nerves coming to the surface, “you just admitted that it can’t go on.”
“I know you never believed me, Steve,” said Oliver wearily, “but if I know anything in the world, I know this one thing for truth: if we’d given Clay Hughes and my boy over into their hands they never would have been seen alive again. The same old story—‘shot trying to escape’—like it was with Grasshopper Tanner, like it’s been with others before. I know Earl Shaw, and I know this feud, root, trunk, and branch. God knows I have reason to know it well! You can’t believe that, Steve; partly it’s because you don’t want to believe. But I can’t very well give the boys up—just to prove my point.”
“I don’t see the alternative,” Sessions said.
