“Mebbe the cows were bunched better and closer over to the east,” returned Webb.
The subject was dropped, but Brant still remained thoughtful.
Brant continually patrolled the Running W range, but without tangible results. The same applied to his line riders. And still the spread continued to lose cattle. Brant took to riding far to the west, near and past the borders of the Running W holdings. One day found him near where spurs of the craggy hills of New Mexico encroached on the level plains of the Panhandle. He was riding slowly, his keen eyes sweeping the terrain on all sides, when he noticed a group of moving blobs appear from a bristle of thicket to the north. He quickly identified them as half a dozen riders forging steadily in his direction. He watched them for a moment, then glanced around. His eyes narrowed as he spotted a second group of riders to the south and somewhat behind him. The direction of their progress, if maintained, would meet them with the group from the north at approximately the spot where he himself sat his tall moros.
His black brows drawing together, he spoke to Smoke and sent him forward at a fast clip. Instantly the two groups altered direction slightly. As he progressed, he still remained the focal point of the converging horse men.
“Thought so,” he muttered, speaking to Smoke again. “Looks like those gents sort of want to be sociable. A mite too sociable, the chances are.”
His diagnosis was confirmed a moment later. A puff of whitish smoke mushroomed up from the group to the north. Before the crack of the distant rifle reached his ears, a slug whined past in front of him.
“Gettin’ playful, eh?” he exclaimed. “Reckon I’m in for some fun. Trail, Smoke, trail!”
Instantly the great moros shot forward, his speed increasing at each beat of his irons. Brant, cooly watching the hard riding horse men on either side, saw other puffs rise from their ranks. Bullets whined past.
Brant was not particularly concerned. The distance was too great for anything like accurate shooting. Barring the chance of a freak shot, there was little danger of the slugs reaching their mark. And he was confident that Smoke’s great speed and endurance would soon put him beyond reach of the pursuit. He glanced ahead. The hills were close now, the track he was following leading up their lower slopes to a dark notch into which it flowed. It was nothing more than a game trail, Brant decided, but the going was good.
“Won’t take us long to lose those amigos in the rocks up there,” he assured the moros. “Then we’ll circle south and get back to our range. Lucky there’s a way up the hill. If they got us hemmed in along the base of those sags, they’d corner us in a hurry. Reckon that’s what they figured on doing. Must have been keeping an eye on us for quite a spell. Good things we wern’t farther to the south. That crack up there looks to be about the only way out.”
Smoke was slowly drawing away from the pursuers. Breathing easily he mounted the long slope and flashed into the notch. The game trail had petered out, but the going between the frowning cliffs was still good. Soon the cliffs to the north fell away. Brant found himself riding on a narrow shelf that ran west with a southward veering. On his right was a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. To the left was a steep brush grown slope that extended for perhaps a hundred yards, ending at the base of a granite wall that fanged upward into the blue. The southward trend of the shelf tended to a constant curving. At no place could he see more than a few hundred feet in advance.
The shelf became broken and uneven, also littered with loose boulders. Brant was forced to slacken Smoke’s pace. He kept glancing over his shoulder.
“Don’t want those hellions to get within good shooting range of us,” he muttered, “that is if they’re still on our tail.”
The shelf straightened out. For nearly a quarter of a mile it ran directly westward, until a bulge of cliff, around which it curved, obscured its continuation. Brant had covered perhaps two thirds of the distance to the bend when, on glancing back, he saw a string of horse men bulge around the last curve behind him and come thundering down the straight-away.
“Gained some on us,” he told himself. “Well, they can’t make any better going here than we can, and they’re still too far back to have much luck throwing lead.”
He reached the bend, sending Smoke careening around the bulge. Again the shelf straightened out for a short distance. From Brant’s lips burst an exasperated oath.
What had been a rather exhilarating race suddenly became something deadly serious. Directly ahead, less than two hundred yards distant, a crack in the cliff wall cut across the shelf. A gulf of unknown depth yawned between where the shelf ended and where it resumed on the far side. And the gulf was better than twenty feet in width!
Automatically, Brant’s grip tightened on the reins. But he instantly realized that to pull up would be as fatal as to plunge into the chasm ahead. His brain worked at lightning speed. On one side was the sheer drop into nothingness. On the other, above the slope, the cliffs shot up sheer. There was no place to go but ahead. And ahead yawned that pitiless gulf.
Brant made his decision. His voice rang out; urgent, compelling—
“Trail, Smoke, trail! Sift sand, you jughead, it isn’t a very good take-off, but you’d ought to be able to make it.”
He breathed a sigh of thanksgiving that he was riding the moros today, instead of some other critter from his string. A lesser horse would never be able to clear the gap and land safely on the continuation of the narrow shelf, which he realized now was several feet lower than the point of take-off.
Smoke snorted protest, but he laid his ears back, extended himself and drummed the rock with flying irons. Straight for the lip of the chasm he charged, pouring his long body over the ground. He squealed with apprehension as he gathered himself together and launched out over space. Brant had a hair raising glimpse of the tops of pine trees below, like to waving feathers in the depths. Then Smoke’s front irons clanged on the cracked and fissured rock beyond the gap. He lurched wildly as one hind foot failed to find solid ground beneath it, scrambled, lunged, keeping his balance by a miracle of agility. Brant eased off on the reins, abruptly realizing that sweat was pouring down his face and that his pulses were pounding.
“That one was close!” he gasped as Smoke flashed down a straight stretch that continued for some hundreds of yards. He whirled in the saddle as shots clanged behind him.
The pursuit, driving their foaming horses at top speed, has rounded the bend above the gap. Their yells came to Brant’s ears. In a fleeting glimpse he noted that the riders were masked. Another moment and Smoke was swerving around a bend and out of sight. The whoops of the pursuers grew faint as the wall of rock shut them off.
But there was something disquieting about those shouts. It seemed to Brant they held a note of triumph, of mocking derision.
“What in blazes they got to holler about?” he asked himself. “I’m willing to bet a hatful of pesos not one of those hellions will chance taking that jump. And with a horse that hasn’t got what it takes like Smoke has, a jigger would be plumb loco to try it.”
Smoke rounded the bend ahead and Brant abruptly understood. He pulled the moros to a halt, staring ahead.
“No wonder those hellions were whooping it up!” he exclaimed. “I’m trapped!”
Chapter Twelve
Hooking one leg over the saddle horn, he rolled a cigarette and considered his predicament. The shelf continued for something like a hundred yards, gradually narrowing until it petered out altogether. On one side was a gorge hundreds of feet in depth. On the other, above the narrow slope, sheer cliffs shot upward for other hundreds of feet. Ahead was dizzy nothingness. It would be impossible for Smoke to negotiate the gap behind, with the going up hill and taking-off point considerably lower than the far edge of the gulf more than twenty feet distant.
Brant’s gaze roamed about. Smoke, he decided, could make out very well for a while. The slope from the shelf to the base of the cliffs was grass grown. In several places he had noted trickles of water. But Brant
could not subsist on grass, like Nebuchadnezzar. He faced either a quick death by hurling himself into the gorge, or a slow one by starvation. He pinched out the butt of his cigarette, turned Smoke and rode slowly back toward the gap, eyeing the slope on his right the while. He rounded the final turn with caution, although he had little fear that the owlhoots would be waiting for him.
“They wouldn’t hang around,” he told Smoke. “Wouldn’t figure they had to, and they’d want to get in the clear as quickly as possible. Chances are they headed us through the notch in the hills on purpose—had it all figured out and knew that if we didn’t go down that crack when you tried to jump it, they’d have us hogtied just the same. Uh-huh, either I would pull up at the gap in the ledge and shoot it out, or would try to make you jump it. They didn’t care whether you made the jump or not. Well, this will take a mite of thinking out.”
The owlhoots were nowhere in sight as Brant approached the gap. He rather wished they were holed up around the turn on the far side and loosened his Winchester in anticipation. They would have to show themselves to take a shot at him, and he grimly decided if they did, at least one or two would remain on the shelf to keep him company. But the ledge lay silent and deserted.
Brant leaned over and peered into the gorge. It was fully as deep as the canyon on his left. The walls were sheer, impossible to descend. He shook his head, studying the ground at his feet. The shelf was seamed and cracked, with deep crevices several inches in width scoring its surface.
“Mighty lucky you didn’t stick a foot into one of those cracks when you landed,” he told Smoke. “You’d have gotten a busted leg sure as shooting.”
He measured the distance across the gap with his eye, shaking his head. He had already considered the possibility of dropping some sort of a bridge over the fissure, but his survey told him there were no trees growing there above twenty-or twenty-five feet. No trunk that would bear his weight was available. He fingered the rope slung to his saddle. It was sixty feet in length, twice the length needed to span the fissure, but there was nothing on the far side over which to drop a loop. The situation appeared more hopeless the longer he considered it. He rolled a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully, racking his brain for some solution to the problem. Absently he unlooped the rope and swung it back and forth in his hand. Abruptly he uttered an exclamation. A leaping light glowed in his eyes.
“Feller,” he told Smoke, “I believe I’ve got a notion, and I believe it will work. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing lost.”
He studied the crevices in the surface of the shelf, deciding on two that he figured would suit his purpose. Then he turned the moros and rode slowly back along the shelf, scanning the slope above.
“Those are a couple right up there that had ought to do,” he told Smoke, measuring two stout saplings with his glance. The little trees coasted trunks that ran straight and fairly thick for better than twenty feet.
“Cut ’em down, lop off a few branches, and I figure they’ll do,” he decided.
Dismounting, he clambered up the slope to where the saplings stood. Surveying the trunks, he drew his heavy pocket knife and opened the blade. Then he shook his head.
“It would take a week to gnaw ’em down with this sticker,” he muttered. “Calc’late I know a better way.”
He pocketed the knife, stepped back and drew his gun. He emptied all six chambers at the trunk, spacing the bullets across its thickness. The heavy slugs did not quite dust both sides of the tree, but Brant knew they came pretty near to doing so. He reloaded, emptying the gun again. Stepping around the tree, he repeated the operation from the other side. As he continued to fire, the tree shook and swayed and began to lean slightly down the slope. Brant holstered his gun, reached up as high as he could and caught the trunk with both hands, swaying down with all his weight. The weakened tree leaned more and more. With a sharp snapping sound, the trunk broke off where it had been almost severed by the bullets from Brant’s Colt.
“One!” he exclaimed, and went to work on the second sapling. With both trees lying on the slope, he carefully trimmed away the branches, leaving a short length of a stout limb near the upper end of each trunk. Then he tumbled the logs down the slope and dragged them to the edge of the gap. He took his rope and tied one end to the stub of the limb he had left near the smaller end of the sapling. He performed a like ser vice with the other end of the rope on the second trunk. Then, with considerable difficulty, he raised one of the saplings to a vertical position and wedged the end securely in a crevice near the lip of the gap, securing it with small boulders jammed and hammered into the crevice. The second sapling went into position in a second crevice some three feet to the right of the first. Brant stood back and eyed his handiwork with satisfaction.
The two trunks stood straight and firm. Dangling between them was a swing formed by the loop of the rope secured to the stubs near the tops of the two uprights.
Brant got the rig off Smoke and piled it at the base of the slope. “Well, feller, here we go,” he told the moros. “If I make it, I’ll come back and get you pronto. If I don’t, well I’ll wait for you on the ‘other side’ of the Big Jump.”
He drew the looped rope back and stepped into the loop, thrusting out strongly with one foot as he drew it up. The swing swayed out over the gap.
Brant began to pump as a boy does in a swing when he has no one to push him. Back and forth he swung, gaining height and distance with each sway of the noosed rope. Finally he was covering more than half the space across the gap at each outward swing. The saplings creaked and groaned, swaying and bending under his weight. With a cold finality, Brant realized what would happen if one should break or become dislodged. Far beneath, the feathery tops of the pines swayed in the draft that soughed down the crevice, revealing the black fangs of stone between which they grew.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Brant realized that he was reaching the apex of the inverted arc and was as near the far edge as he could hope to be. He measured the distance to the lip as it rushed toward him, set his teeth, tensed his muscles, and leaped forward with all his strength.
As he rushed through the air with hundreds of feet of nothingness beneath him, for one horrible instant he was sure he had jumped short. Then his boots thudded on the very crumbling lip of the bench. Frantically he hurled himself forward. He hit the stone with a shock that knocked the breath from his body. For a moment he lay half stunned, waves of blackness sweeping over him. Then, gasping and panting, he sat up, shaking in every limb, his body bathed in a cold sweat, but with a wild exhilaration pounding his pulses. He staggered to his feet, waving a hand to the watching horse. His voice rang out in triumph—
“Made it, feller! Made it! You take it easy. I’ll be back for you.”
He chuckled as he started on the long trudge to the ranch house. “Somebody is sure going to be sold!” he told himself exultantly.
Brant had little doubt as to who was responsible for the attempt on his life. He immediately discounted the New Mexico outlaws.
“Those hellions wouldn’t have taken the trouble to wear masks,” he reasoned. “Every jigger of them already has a price on his head and the noosed end of a rope waiting for him. Being implicated in another killing wouldn’t bother them. Nope, I reckon my amigos, Doran and Hansen, were out to even up the score. But I’ve a prime notion they wouldn’t be taking such a chance just to pay me off for bustin’ up Doran there in the Deadfall. Nope, there’s more to it than that. Those sidewinders have something to cover up—something they’re afraid I’ll catch onto if I’m left maverickin’ around. But in the name of blazes, what?”
Dawn of the following day was breaking when Brant, footsore and deathly weary, limped up to the Running W casa. Without arousing anybody, he tumbled into bed and within a few minutes was sound asleep. When he awakened, around toward noon, he felt little the worse for his harrowing experience. His first thought was the rescue of his horse from the bench.
This was accomplished with little di
fficulty. A light wagon loaded with long and stout planks toiled up the slope and rumbled through the notch in the hills. Riding attendance were Brant and half a dozen punchers. The planks were dropped over the crevice and Smoke was led across, lifting his hoofs gingerly and snorting as the boards swayed and bent beneath his weight.
“You better stop ridin’ around by yourself,” John Webb cautioned his foreman. “Always have some of the boys with you. The hellions are out to get you, and they won’t stop. Luck was with you this time, but next time they may do a better job of stackin’ the cards.”
Brant, however, chose to disregard the well-meant advice. He felt he had a much better chance of running a brand on the wide-loopers if he played a lone hand. He continued to ride the range. But now he employed a different method. Instead of searching the brakes and the thickets and scanning the prairie from vantage points, he continually swept the sky with his keen gaze. Finally, one crystal-clear afternoon, he spotted what he had been searching for. Rising from behind a straggling grove was a thin streamer of smoke.
Brant cleared the distance between him and the grove at a gallop. He raced around the edge of the growth, sliding his Winchester from the saddle boot. As he cleared the last fringe of brush, he viewed what he had expected to see. Crouched beside a small fire were two men. A cow lay on the ground nearby, roped and tied.
The men sprang erect as the low thunder of Smoke’s irons smote their ears. One waved his hat in a circle. The other held a rifle in his hands.
Without slackening speed, Brant charged toward them. The man threw the rifle to his shoulder. At the same time, Brant cuddled his cheek against the stock of his Winchester.
The two shots rang out almost as one. A bullet fanned Brant’s face. The rifle wielder hurtled backward as if struck by a giant fist, and fell. His companion, crouched behind the body of the prostrate cow, was shooting with both hands. A slug nicked Brant’s shoulder. A second burned the skin of his neck. His own gun boomed sullenly. The cow jerked and twitched, stiffened out. Brant shifted his aim the merest trifle and squeezed the stock. The brand blotter slumped sideways. When Smoke foamed up to the fire, he was as motionless and as satisfactorily dead as was his companion.
Longhorn Empire Page 11
