The Second Western Megapack

by Various Writers

  “I will! I will!” she answered, and her voice trembled, for he seemed to have caught at her whole soul with his hand, “but before it begins—I’ve got to say—I’ve got to tell you—”

  She stopped, then went on with a great effort: “Jim, before we die—”

  “Hush!” he said. “There ain’t goin’ to be no death for you’”

  “Before we die,” she pressed on, “remember that I love you with all my heart and soul, Jim!”

  “Jerry, you’re talkin’ loco!”

  “It isn’t much to be loved by a smalltime actress, and I’ve never once been behind the lights on the real big time. But, oh, Jim! I wish I was keen in the bean like Cissy Loftus, because then—”

  Slowly, fumbling, his arms went around her and tightened.

  “Jerry!” he whispered.

  “Yes?” she answered in the same tone.

  “It seems to me—”

  “Dear Jim’”

  “It won’t be so partic’lar hard—”

  “Dear—dear old Jim!”

  “To pass out now. But it’s too late to ask for a new deal. This deck’s already shuffled and stacked. Jerry, we’ll play a straight game even with a fixed deck. An’, an’ I love you, honey, more ’n the roan an’ my six-gun put together!”

  He gathered her close with powerful arms, but the kiss which touched her eyes and then her lips, was gentle and reverent.

  “Are you sleepin’, Jim?” called a voice.

  He turned and went with drawn revolver o the door, still slightly ajar. From behind him, Jerry could see Montgomery and Porky standing in the moonlight.

  “I ain’t sleepin’,” replied Black Jim, “but I’m figurin’ why I ain’t shot such hounds as you two, without warnin’!”

  As if he had pressed a spring which set automata in motion, they whirled and leaped behind trees.

  “Take warning!” called Black Jim, “I could have bagged you both with my eyes shut, an’ the next man of you that I see I’ll let him have it’”

  For reply a revolver barked and a bullet thudded into the heavy door. Black Jim slammed it and dropped the heavy latch. A series of wild yells sounded from the trees on all sides and a dozen shots rang in quick succession. After this first venting of their disappointed spleen, the bandits were silent again. Jerry poised her revolver and searched the trees carefully. A hand dropped on her arm and another hand took away the revolver.

  “If there’s shootin’ to be done,” said Black Jim, “I’ll do it, The blood of a man don’t wash off so easy, even from soft white hands like yours, Jerry!”

  “Then when you shoot, shoot to kill!” she said fiercely. “They are trying for your life like bloodhounds, Jim’”

  “Kill?” he repeated, taking up his place at the small window with his revolver raised. “Jerry, I’ve never killed a man yet, no matter what people say, an’ I’m not goin’ to begin now. While a bullet in the leg or the shoulder puts a man out of the way jest as well as if it went through the heart. Git down closer to the floor!”

  His gun exploded; a yell from the edge of the trees answered him; and then a chorus of shouts and a score of bullets in swift succession smashed against the logs, Through the silence that followed they heard a distant, faint moaning.

  Black Jim, running with his body close to the floor, crossed the room to the window on the other side. Almost instantly his gun spoke again, and a man screamed in the night of the trees.

  “Too high!” she heard Jim saying. “I meant it lower.”

  “They’re beaten, Jim!” she called softly. “They don’t dare try to rush the cabin. They’re beaten!”

  “Not yet!” he answered. “Unless they’re plumb crazy they’ll tackle us from the blind side. There ain’t any window in the shed, Jerry!”

  CHAPTER XL

  Back to the Law

  From three sides of the house he could command the approaches through the door and the two slits in the wall which answered in place of windows. On the side of the shed where the roan was stabled, there was not the smallest chink through which he could fire. Jerry sat twisting her hands in despair.

  “Take the ax, Jim,” she said at last, “and chop away a hole in the logs. They’re all light and thin. You could make a place to shoot from in a minute!”

  “Jerry, girl,” he said; “you’ve a heart of gold!”

  He started to fumble about in the dark for the ax. But the weak side of the cabin was too apparent to be overlooked by the besiegers. Before the ax was found, a great crackling of fire commenced outside the shed and a cry of triumph rose from the men without. The sound of the fire rose; the roan whinnied with terror. Black Jim slipped his revolver back into his holster, and turned with folded arms to Jerry.

  “So this is the finale,” she said with white lips. “Where’s our soft music and the curtain, Jim?”

  “Let the girl out!” shouted the voice of Montgomery. “We won’t hurt her! Come out, Jerry!”

  “Go on out, honey,” said Black Jim.

  She went to him and drew his arm about her.

  “Do you think I’d go out to them, Jim?”

  “I don’t think,” he said; “I know. There’s nothin’ but death in here!”

  A gust of wind puffed the flames to a roar up the side of the shed outside, and they heard the stamping of the roan in an agony of panic.

  “There’s only two ways left to me,” she said, “and dying with you is a lot the easiest, Jim. Give back my gun!”

  “Honey,” he said, and she wondered at the gentleness of his voice, “you’re jest a girl—a bit of a slip of a girl—an’ I can’t no-ways let you stay in here. Go out the door. They won’t shoot.”

  “Give back my gun!” she said.

  She felt the arm about her tremble, and then the butt of a revolver was placed in her hand. The fire hissed and muttered now on the roof of the cabin. Red glimmers of light showed before the windows and filled the interior with grim dance of shadows.

  “I never knew it could be this way, Jerry,” he said.

  “Nor I, either,” she answered, “and the day I make my final exit is the day I really began to live. Jim, it’s worth it!”

  Through another pause they listened to the fire. Outside Montgomery was imploring the girl to leave the house, and as the fire mounted, an occasional yell from the crowd applauded its progress.

  “Seein’ we’re goin’ out on the long trail together,” said Black Jim, “ain’t there some way we can hitch up so’s we can be together on the other side of the river?”

  She did not understand.

  “I mean, supposin’ we were married—”

  She pressed her race against his body to keep back a sob.

  “Seems to me,” he went on, “that I can remember some of a marriage I fence read. Do you suppose, Jerry, that if me an’ you said it over now, bein’ about to die, that it would mean anything?”

  “Yes, yes!” she cried eagerly. “We’re above the law, Jim, and what we do is either sacred or damned.”

  “The part I remember,” he said calmly, though the room was hot now with the rising fire, “begins something like this, an’ it ain’t very long Is Jerry your real name, honey?”

  “My real name is Annie Kerrigan. And yours, Jim?”

  “I was never called nothin’ but Black Jim. Shall I begin?”

  “Yes!”

  “I, Black Jim, take thee, Annie—”

  “I, Annie, take thee, Black Jim,” she repeated.

  “To have and to hold—”

  “To have and to hold.”

  “For better or worse—”

  “For better or worse.”

  “Till death do us part—”

  “Jim, dear Jim, can that part us?”

  “Nothin’ between heaven an’ hell can, honey! Annie, there was the ring, too, but I ain’t got a ring.”

  The room was bright with the firelight now. She raised her left hand and kissed the third finger.

  “Jim, dear,
this is a new kind of marriage. We don’t really need a ring, do we?”

  “We’ll jest suppose that part.”

  The roan made the whole cabin tremble with his frantic efforts to break from his halter.

  “An’ old Roan Bill goes with us,” said Black Jim; “everything I wanted comes with me in the end of things, honey. But he ought to die easier than by fire!”

  He drew his revolver again and stepped through the doorway into the shed, Jerry followed him and saw Roan Bill standing crouched and shuddering against the wall, his eyes green with fear. Black Jim stepped to him and stroked the broad forehead. For a moment Bill kept his terrified eyes askance upon the burning wall of the shed. Then he turned his head and pressed against Jim, as if to shut out the sight. With his left hand stroking the horse gently along the neck, Jim raised his revolver and touched it to the temple of Roan Bill. Another cry broke from the crowd without as if they could look through the burning walls and witness the coming tragedy and glory in it.

  “Old pal,” said Black Jim, “we’ve seen a mighty pile of things together, an’ if hosses get on the other side of the river, I got an idea I’ll find you there. So-long!”

  “Wait!” called Jerry. “Don’t shoot, Jim?”

  He turned toward her with a frown as she ran to him.

  “The wall, Jim’ Look at the wall of the shed!”

  The thin wall had burned through in many places and the wood was charred deeply. In several parts the burning logs had fallen away, leaving an aperture edged with flames.

  “I see it,” said Black Jim. “It’s about to fall. Get back in the cabin.”

  “Yes,” she answered, fairly trembling with excitement, even a strong puff of wind would blow it in! Listen! I see the ghost of a chance for us! Blindfold Roan Bill so that the fire won’t make him mad. We’ll both get in the saddle. Then you can beat half of that wall down at a single blow. We’ll ride for the woods. They won’t be watching very closely from this side. We may—we may—there’s one chance in a thousand.”

  He stared at her a single instant. Then by way of answer jerked the saddle from a peg on the wall of the cabin and threw it on the roan’s back. Jerry darted into the cabin and came out with the long scarf, which she tied firmly around the horse’s eyes. In two minutes their entire preparations were completed and a money-belt dropped into a saddlebag. Jerry in the saddle with the roan trembling beneath her, and the reins clutched tight in one hand, a revolver in the other. Black Jim caught up a loose log-end, fallen from the wall.

  “There in the center,” she called. “It’s thinnest there!”

  “The minute it falls start the roan,” he said; “I’ll swing on behind as you pass!” With that he swung the stick around his head and drove it against the wall. A great section fell. He struck again. A yell came from without as another width crushed down, and Jerry loosened the reins.

  At the very moment that Black Jim caught the back of the saddle, the roan stepped on a red-hot coal and reared away, but Jim kept his hold and was safe behind the saddle as the horse made his first leap beyond the burning timbers.

  “They’re out! This way!” shouted a voice from the trees, and two shots in quick succession hummed close to them.

  Fifty yards away lay the trees and safety. The roan lengthened into a racing stride. A chorus of yells broke out around the house and Jerry saw a man jump from behind a tree, and the flash of a revolver in his hand. The long arm of Black Jim darted out and his gun spoke once and again. The man tossed up his arms and pitched forward to the ground. Still another revolver barked directly before them and she saw, by the light of the flaming house, the great figure of Porky Martin, half-hidden by a tree-trunk. A bullet tore through the horn of the saddle.

  The woods were only a fraction of a second away from them. Martin stood in their path. Once more the revolver of Black Jim belched, and as they plunged into the saving shadow of the trees, she saw the outlaw stagger and clutch at his throat with both hands.

  “To the left! To the left!” said Black Jim, “and straight down the valley for the gap!”

  * * * *

  A week later a golden-haired girl rode down a broken trail on the side of one of the lower Sierras. By her side walked a tall man with quick, keen eyes. When they broke from the edge of the forest, she checked her horse and they stood looking down on the upper valley of the Feather River.

  Far away the water burned jewel-bright under the sun, and almost directly below them were the green and red roofs of a small village. Here the trail forked, one branch winding west along the mountainside and the other dropping straight down toward the village.

  “Which way shall it be?” she asked. “I don’t know where the west trail leads, but this straight one takes us down to the village, and that means the law.”

  “Jerry,” he answered, “I’ve been think-in’ it over, an’ it seems to me that it’d be almighty hard to raise kids right above the law. Let’s take the trail for the village!”

  WITH GUTS, GUN, AND SCALPEL, by Archie Joscelyn

  “There’s death at Deadman’s, Doc—they need a medico, bad—an’ a law-man—”

  The messenger had gasped out that much at Doc Henry’s, forty-eight hours before—had gasped it out as he fell across the threshold and then, having made a supreme effort to keep alive that long, had died, not speaking again.

  Part of it had been exposure, of course—cold, hunger, exhaustion. But a gaping rifle wound, almost between the messenger’s shoulder-blades, had been the real cause, and had confirmed with added grimness the little that he had been able to say.

  Right now, it must be twenty below, Doc judged, and the snow underfoot was deep, with more coming—a fog of flakes which filled the air and blanketed away the landscape like a shroud. The snow was piled overhead along the usually barren ridges, gathered in vast drifts. The gold camp of Deadman’s should be somewhere close, but whether it was or not, Doc no longer knew. He was lost, he realized now, lost like any tenderfoot.

  There was no road, no trail, nothing but the white bleakness. And Deadman’s lay deep pocketed in the hills. His horse had slipped on hidden ice that morning, breaking a leg. Doc had struggled ahead on foot. He’d been going almost without stopping for those forty-eight hours, alone. They needed a medico at, Deadman’s, and it was up to him to answer the call.

  Needing a lawman was outside his province, something he could do nothing about in any case. There had been no sheriff nor deputy in town, nor any likelihood of reaching one for weeks, till the snows melted. Men would call him a fool, he realized, for trying to reach the isolated, snow-bound gold camp. It looked now as though they might have the right of it.

  From somewhere, knifing through the soft silence of the falling snow, there came a cry of protest, a shrill, terror-choked shriek, sounding, in this spot, like the wail of a lost soul. Shivering with more than cold, Doc strained to see. He was a big, gaunt man with haunted, gentle eyes in a weary face which seemed years too old for his youthful frame.

  Presently, guided by the sound of voices, he made out the blurred edge of a log cabin. This must be Deadman’s at last. Like a white ghost in the storm, Doc advanced, to halt abruptly at sight of a man who stood in front of the door, watchfully holding a rifle. He had all the look of a sentry, or a guard.

  The next moment, three men slipped out of the gloom, toward the guard. Their faces betrayed rage and fear, and each man clutched a stout club.

  At sight of the rifle, however, they paused, and the guard saw them at the same moment. He raised the gun, started toward them.

  “Ah, so ye would, would ye? Interfere, eh? Drop those clubs! Drop them, I say, before I shoot ye for dirty trouble-makers! Now march into that old shack there! Quick’s the word!”

  While Doc watched, unseen and incredulous, the three, helpless before the leveled gun, were herded into a second cabin close at hand. From inside the nearer one, which he had been guarding, and from whose chimney a bit of smoke ascended, came another howl of prote
st. Doc advanced, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

  It was an ordinary enough log shack, hastily-built and crudely chinked. There was a table, a cupboard, a bench, and a bunk against the far wall. A red-hot stove stood near the middle, a rusty pipe angling up from it toward the roof.

  There were four men in the single room, all too busily occupied to notice him for a moment. One lay on the bunk, and a single glance was enough to tell Doc that he was sick, and the nature of his illness. He was close to death’s door, with the dread scourge of the wilds—smallpox.

  A second man, arms and chest bare, sat on the bench, closely watched by another burly red-haired giant who wore a six-shooter loosely in his coat pocket. A fourth man, who might have been handsome save that his face was pitted and scarred by the ancient pocks of the same disease, stood with his sleeves rolled up, and the point of a knife-blade showing a dull ugly red, where it had all too plainly been dipped into one of the sick man’s festering sores.

  “We’re doing this for yore own good, Tom McTigue,” the burly man growled. “Make any more fuss, and I’ll clip ye alongside the head with this gun-barrel. Now take it like a man!”

  With a cat-like motion, the gunman had grabbed the victim’s left wrist, holding it vise-like, while the man with the knife grasped his other. McTigue still tried to struggle, but there was little that he could do about it.

  “It’s murderin’ me ye are,” he panted, as the point of the knife-blade approached his arm. “Murder, I tell ye—”

  The burly man swore suddenly as he caught sight of Doc, there beside the stove. Knifepoint poised, the pock-faced man turned to look at him as well, and McTigue stared unbelievingly, like a condemned man who receives a reprieve just as the trap is about to be sprung. Only the man on the bunk was too sick to take any interest.

  “Who the devil are you?” demanded the man with the knife. “And how did you get here?”

  “My name’s Henry,” Doc answered evenly. “Jack Henry. I walked here. Any objections?”