by Max Brand
This time there was an answer. Bud Trainor saw the flash of the weapon in the hand of his comrade, saw the muzzle of it jerk suddenly upward. And the other, spreading out his hands before him, leaned slowly from the saddle, and then slid to the ground!
Dead?
He lay still where he had fallen, while the Kid, sweeping on, caught the silver stallion by the reins and, completing a small circle, headed straight back for Trainor in the rear!
Then, at last, Bud understood, and his heart leaped in him. He looked again to the right, to the left, and now he saw still more frantic efforts on the part of the pursuers.
Let them try!
He asked the gelding for its last speed, now, and he gave it with a strong heart. A moment more, and the Kid had turned before him, holding the silver stallion on his left side, and well out.
A circus trick to change mounts at full gallop, but Bud Trainor had spent all his life among saddles, and stirrups, and bare backs, for that matter. Shifting his left foot to his right stirrup, he waited for the proper moment, and then swung out. His left hand missed the pommel and caught the flashing mane. But his right hand gripped true, and in another moment, he was on such an animal as he never had backed before.
CHAPTER 23
Compliments
All the running which it had put behind its long legs had not in the least broken the spirit of the silver stallion. As it felt the weight of a new rider mount its back, it swerved and pitched so that Bud Trainor nearly fell on his face on the ground which was spinning past beneath him. But he found both stirrups in a moment, and the grip of his strong knees established him in place He had the reins thrown to him by his friend, next, and with a new animal beneath him, Trainor was riding for his life.
And yet not that, either!
For a sudden change had come over the tactics of the Kid. Instead of spurring wildly ahead, he glanced around him and surveyed his antagonists with a new eye.
He had ridden out to get a horse of safer speed for his comrade, but now that that was done, the need for flight somehow or another did not seem so pressing.
Four men were swinging up toward them from the southeast. One rider was hard-galloping out of the northeast. And the two, the Kid and Bud Trainor, were the focal point at which the five men were aiming.
Suddenly he pulled his horse to a trot, to a walk, and Bud Trainor, wondering, followed that example, while his discarded gelding badly spent, but still gallant, came lumbering past at a winded gallop.
“We’ll have a look at those fellows if they want to press us,” said the Kid, as he stared toward the group of four to the south.
“Give it to two, Kid! That’s no safe gamble!” said Bud.
“Not safe. There’s no fun in a safe gamble,” declared the Kid. “Who’d want to tackle a dead-sure thing, and an odds-on bet? A hundred bucks to win one, say? No, no, Bud. Here’s a chance to take some of the starch out of these fellows. They came out seven strong, these hand-picked beauties of Champ Dixon, these hothouse flowers, these orchids, you might say. Well, one of them is out of it with a broken-down horse. And there’s another who won’t be dangerous for a while. And as for the other five—why, let’s play tag with ’em!”
As he spoke, he snatched the Winchester from its saddle scabbard, and, whipping it to his shoulder so fast that the barrel flashed in the brilliant sunshine like a sword blade, he took a shot at the last remnant of the northward-riding contingent of the enemy.
This man, who had ridden very well on a strong little piebald mustang which simply could not match strides with the longer legs of the silver stallion and the mare, was coming in gallantly now, bent far forward.
But as the rifle exploded suddenly in the hand of the Kid, this champion’s hat blew off, as though a gust of wind had snatched it.
The Kid, looking after him, laughed loudly for, indeed, it was a funny sight.
For the other, jerking the piebald mustang about as fast as he could, was spurring to the rear at full speed. He had not dreamed, apparently, that he had come into such good shooting range.
“Kid,” gasped Bud Trainor, “I knew that you was good with a Colt, but I didn’t know that you could do it with a rifle, too! Why, all you gotta do is to wish a bullet on its way!”
But the Kid merely laughed.
“That was luck, Bud,” said he. “I’m no giant with a rifle, take it from me. I’m a tramp, compared to some of these old hunters. But now and then good luck comes to the fellow who wants it most. Now watch those fellows give us leeway!”
Plenty of room, in fact, all the five pursuers now appeared willing to give to the two fugitives.
Those who were coming up hand over hand out of the southeast now jerked their horses about and scattered to either side, frantic to spread out so that they might not offer one large, united target to such a rifleman as the Kid appeared to be.
Then, from a distance, they resumed a cautious approach once more. They began to open fire.
Every now and then one would halt his horse and fire. Several times the rider on the piebald actually dismounted, threw himself on the ground, and fired from a rest.
It was plain that he had been angered by the bullet hole in his best sombrero!
But these shots were falling wild. The distance was great. And now the two who were withdrawing came to the place where Chip Graham sat up, clutching at a red spot over his left breast.
He was dusty. He had received a scratch across the forehead in falling to the ground, but in spite of his wounds, his fall, he looked up at them with such an eye that Bud Trainor shuddered profoundly.
“You’re Chip Graham, are you?” asked the Kid.
Chip, in place of answering, turned a solemn eye upon the silver stallion, and then he raised his glance to the face of Bud.
“You’re Trainor, are you?” said Chip. “And you’re the Kid, of course?”
His fine, dark eyes dwelt malevolently upon the pair of them. “How badly are you cut up?” asked the Kid.
“I’m shot just inside of the shoulder,” said Chip, with utmost calm. “It’s nothing bad. Three weeks. Unless the shoulder’s stiffened up for good.”
“We’ll take you on where you’ll get medical treatment,” said the Kid. “We’ll take you on to the ranch house, Chip. Bud, get down and give him a hand up on your old gelding, while I take a look at the rest of these fellows.”
He began to ride in a little circle, while the five who had been following gradually rode at high speed around a great circumference Plainly they were planning to thrust themselves between the fugitives and the ranch house, and hoping to find such good cover that they would be able to get fairly close to the deadly marksman, the Kid.
Bud Trainor saw this, and he called out: “Listen to me, Kid! If we take Chip along, they’ll fight like devils to get him away from us. He’s one of their best men, and they won’t give him up without making a scrap of it. It would disgrace them! Leave Chip lie here, and we’ll go on safely, I reckon.”
“Get him up into the saddle,” returned the Kid shortly. “I know what I’m about in this game, Bud. Get him up. Chip, stand up!”
“I’ll not move!” said Chip sullenly. “If you really want me, you can carry me!”
At this. Bud looked blankly toward his companion, and he was in time to see a startling change in the face of the Kid. It seemed as though his brow swelled with black blood, and his eyes glared like the eyes of a beast. His nostrils were expanded, and his lip, pinched in.
“Carry you? Carry you?” cried the Kid. “I’ll carry you!”
He swerved the mare back and, leaning a little from the saddle, he cut young Chip Graham across the body once and again with the lash of his quirt.
“Get up and into that saddle,” commanded the Kid.
Chip Graham uttered no sound, but looked up at the Kid with the incredible malice of a ferret. His lips parted. His teeth showed. He seemed to be smiling at some exquisitely secret jest. And Bud Trainor, in spite of himself, rubbed
a hand across his eyes to shut out the ugly vision.
The Kid having already delivered the whip strokes, whirled away again on the mare to resume his survey of the enemy, but Chip did not wait for a second flogging.
He rose, unassisted, and, while his left arm dangled, and the blood flowed down from within his wristband and trickled across the back of his hand, he gripped the pommel with the right hand, and swung himself lightly into place on the gelding.
“I’ll tie up your shoulder,” suggested Bud Trainor.
“Ask him if he’ll let you,” answered Chip through his teeth.
There was an odd dryness in the throat of Bud Trainor. He had felt, in his day, that he was as rough and as tough as most. He had been proud of the way in which he had flung himself at the raw-handed mankillers in his father’s house, the evening when he had saved the Kid. But now, compared with the nature of the kid himself and Chip Graham, Bud felt like a child in a savage wilderness on a wild night. He seemed to be pressed upon from two sides.
However, he did not ask permission from the Kid. In his saddlebag he had bandages and an antiseptic. He cut away the sleeve, and cleaned and tied up the wound as well as he could. Lightly as Chip Graham had spoken of it, it was a grisly thing to see. It explained a part of the singular green pallor which was on the face of that proud young man, now. But the chief part of that color was, no doubt, owing to the infernal passion which was consuming him.
Somewhere in the future—perhaps before the end of this very day—he would have his chance at the Kid again, and that second time one of them would surely die.
Like a grim prophet, Bud Trainor was aware of these things. But, the wound being dressed, he now found the Kid impatiently waiting, as he called out:
“Are you going to put him into a cradle, Bud? Get him along here. And if he holds back, give him another taste of the same sort of quirting. It’s all that he understands. Some dogs come to heel when you speak, but some of them have to be flogged into shape! And as far as I’m concerned this baby-murdering cur, he is in the second category!”
By “baby-murdering,” Bud knew that the Kid was referring to the starving of the dumb cattle. But this explanation probably was not so clear to Chip Graham. However, he said nothing at all, and they rode on, side by side, approaching they knew not what danger might await them.
For Champ Dixon’s men had already disappeared behind a rather high rise of ground in the direction of the ranch house.
“By gosh!” broke out Bud Trainor. “Suppose that they’ve gone off to rush the ranch house, now that the fightin’s begun?”
“They’re not likely to,” said the Kid. “They’ve no orders to that, and Dixon’s a man who keeps people strictly to his orders. Is that right, Chip?”
Chip sneered, and said nothing.
“He’s proud, Bud,” said the Kid. “Look at his proud, handsome, enduring face. He won’t speak. He scorns speaking. And all he wants is a slice of my heart and another off my liver to toast and feed to the dogs. But I tell you, Chip, when the time comes that you can pull a gun and manage it again, free and easy, I’ll come across the continent to get at you, and I’ll finish the job that I started today, you hell-cat, you sneaking rat of a baby murderer!”
His face was convulsed as before, and Bud Trainor, who had endured enough already, cried out:
“Kid, he’s a guest, you might say. Watcha mean by talkin’ to him like that?”
The Kid whirled in the saddle. He seemed as if he would leap at his friend. But he mastered himself at once, and loosening the rein, made the mare bound forward and away from the other two.
CHAPTER 24
The Law
Whether Dixon’s men found no proper cover, or perhaps changed their minds about pressing matters with the mysteriously good marksmanship of the Kid against them, at any rate, they did not appear again to trouble Trainor and the captive beside him But they went on comfortably, with sometimes a glimpse of the Kid on a ridge before them.
Whatever bad temper he might have been in when he left them, he was ahead, now, scouting out the lay of the land. Only when they were in sight of the ranch house did he appear once more, riding suddenly out at them from a thick copse of poplars.
He waved his hand toward the house.
“Take this boy in with you, Bud,” said he. “If everything is all right over there. I’ll come on in when you give me a signal.”
“What could be wrong?” asked Bud Trainor, amazed.
“Well, I’ve told you before. The Dixon men might be lying there. I don’t think they will, though, or I wouldn’t ask you to go in alone. But I don’t like fixed quarters, where people can look for me. See if everything is all right. I’ll have my glass turned on the house. If you’ll come out and wave a hand in a big circle. I’ll come in.”
So Bud Trainor rode on in with his companion.
It was the full heat of the middle day, now. The effect of the waves of reflection was to make the ground tremble like water before them, and the very shape of the old ranch house was distorted the roof sometimes dissolving, so that it seemed quivering with blue flames.
This heat was hard enough even on a sound man like Trainor, but it turned the wounded captive white with suffering and distress. When they reached the house, Bud had to help him down from the saddle, and through the door into the dining room, where he slumped down on a couch.
Mrs. Milman and Georgia came hurriedly to help.
“I’m all right,” said the white-faced Chip. “I dunno what’s the matter with me, cracking like this. Gimme a drink of water, and I’ll be fine as silk in a few minutes.”
Georgia took charge. She made him stretch out on the couch, and arranged a pillow under his head. At her command, Bud Trainor pulled off the boots. The shirt was opened at Chip’s throat, and his head raised so that he could take a swallow of water.
His face, however, began to assume a more and more set expression of suffering, and, avoiding their faces, he stared fixedly up to the ceiling.
Mrs. Milman dressed the wound with care, putting on a pad of the softest lint, and she declared, after manipulating the arm a little, that there was no danger at all. No bones had been crushed by the bullet in its passage. There had not been enough loss of blood to make serious trouble.
“Are you still in great pain?” asked Georgia, leaning above him.
He drew his eyes from the ceiling to her face, and flicked them hastily back again.
“Poor fellow!” said Georgia. “Poor chap! Won’t you tell me what’s the trouble—where the pain is the worst? We might try a cold pack, Mother. He’s in a fever!”
“Aw, I’m all right!” declared Chip in a husky murmur.
Here Bud Trainor touched the arms of the two women and drew them to the farther side of the room.
“Leave him be,” he suggested. “You dunno what’s the matter with him, but I do.”
“What is it?”
“He’s one of Dixon’s crowd that’s been trying to throttle your ranch.”
“Well, I guessed that.”
“But to see you treatin’ him so like a white man, it’s sort of hard on his nerves.”
“What do you mean?”
“It cuts him up a good deal. He don’t deserve to be treated no better than a dog, and he knows it.”
The women exchanged glances.
“How was he hurt?” asked Mrs. Milman.
“And where is the Kid?” broke in Georgia. “Oh, good heavens, Mother. He’s got to be warned away if he’s coming back here!”
“He’s not coming back in a hurry,” answered Bud Trainor. “He’s taking his time and waiting for a signal to call him.”
They went into the next room.
“What’s happened?” they asked of Bud.
“Why, the Kid went out explorin’. He wanted to lead Dixon into makin’ an attack on us, and then he thought that the law could be pretty useful to you all. You could put an injunction on ’em—kick ’em off the land by process of law
, or something like that. Anyway, you could switch the law on ’em and get it around to our side of the fence.”
“And so? You mean that he went out there, and dared the lot of them?” demanded Georgia.
“Aye, that’s what he sure enough done.”
“But that’s—”
“Aye, that’s crazy. But he done it. They tried to sneak some men out on both sides of the fence and slip around us. Oh, they wanted the Kid’s scalp pretty bad, all right. We come back flying. The Hawk, she could wing away from ’em any time, but my gelding didn’t have enough foot for that sort of work. They gained on us—”
“And the Kid wouldn’t leave you?” cried Georgia, with a shining face.
Her mother looked sharply across at her, but said nothing.
“The Kid.” said Bud Trainor, speaking slowly, and rather softly to keep the emotion out of his voice, “is the kind that’s always better than anybody else, in a pinch. No, he wouldn’t leave me, even when I told him to go.”
“That’s grand!” said Georgia.
There were tears of pleasure and excitement in her eyes. And again her mother saw them.
“It was grand, all right. And dangerous, too. This here Chip Graham, he was on that hoss of his, the Silver King. And the King stepped out pretty fast. He got ahead of us. He aimed to turn us or to hold us till the rest of the crowd came up. There was seven of them, all told. But then the Kid went out and dropped Graham, and got the King for me to ride. And when the rest of ’em came too close, he just up with his rifle and shot the hat off one of their heads!”
He laughed with a fierce pleasure.
“He didn’t kill that man?” gasped Mrs. Milman.
“Him? Of course not,” said Bud Trainor with an almost religious and devoted belief. “He could snuff a candle at about a thousand yards; I guess. But when we came back near to the house, he wouldn’t come in with us. He thought there might be trouble waiting for him here.”
“He’s right! He’s right,” said Mrs. Milman. “Nothing but trouble for him here. My husband and Chet Wagner are in the front room with the sheriff and a deputy, right now. They’ve come out for the Kid; or Mr. Beckwith-Hollis, as he calls himself.”
