Over the Pass Part 9

His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pa.s.s; the whistle was different. It was shrill and mocking.

"Yes, the whistle!" yelled Leddy. "No man can whistle to me like that and live!"

Jack laughed as if he appreciated all the possibilities of humor inherent in the picture of the bloodthirsty Leddy, the waiting seconds and the gallery. He turned to Mary with a gesture of his outstretched hands:

"There, you see! I brought it on myself."

"You are brutal! You are without feeling--you are ridiculous--you--" she stormed, chokingly.

And in face of this he became reasoning, philosophical.

"Yes, I admit that it is all ridiculous, even to farce, this little _comedie humaine_. But we must remember that beside the age of the desert none of us last long. Ridiculous, yes; but if I will whistle, why, then, I must play out the game I've started."

He was looking straight into her eyes, and there was that in his gaze which came as a surprise and with something of the effect of a blade out of a scabbard. It chilled her. It fastened her inactive to the earth with a helplessness that was uncanny. It mixed the element of fear for him with the element of fear of him.

"Remember I am of age--and I don't mind," he added, with the faintest glint of satire in his rea.s.surance.

He was walking away, with a wave of his hand to Leddy; he was going over the precipice's edge after thanking the danger sign. He did not hasten, nor did he loiter. The precipice resolved itself into an incident of a journey of the same order as an ankle-deep stream trickling across a highway.

IX

THE DEVIL IS OUT

She had done her best and she had failed. What reason was there for her to remain? Should she endure witnessing in reality the horror which she had pictured so vividly in imagination? A flash of fire! The fall of a careening figure to the earth! Leddy's grin of satisfaction! The rejoicing of his clan of spectators over the exploit, while youth which sang airs to the beat of a pony's hoofs and knew the worship of the Eternal Painter lay dead!

What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next; while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the only sound in her ears.

"Senor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered.

"He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech.

She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impa.s.sivity was gone. His lips were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids.

"Why?" she asked. "How?"

"I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There is a devil, a big devil, in Senor Don't Care. It sleeps so much it very terrible when it awakes. And Pete Leddy--he is all the time awake; all the time too ready. Something in him will make his arm shake when the moment to shoot comes and something in Senor Don't Care--his devil--will make his arm steady."

Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his att.i.tude toward her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.

"He will win--he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated.

Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see Senor Don't Care survive; solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the feeling of grat.i.tude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.

And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is a.s.sociated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved hardness of outline.

Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the barrels lay even with the trousers seams. They awaited the word to fire which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men, was to give.

"Wait!" Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had recurred to him. Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant, shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping over glare ice.

"Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish--honestly, we are!" he said. "The idea when Arizona is so spa.r.s.ely settled of our starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler! Why, if I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have whistled again. If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I--"

"No, you don't!" yelled Leddy. "I've waited long enough! It's fight, you--"

"Oh, all right! You are so emphatic," Jack answered. His voice was still pleasant, but shot with something metallic. The very shadow of him seemed to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles.

"Ready!" called Bill Lang.

The ruling pa.s.sion that had carved six notches on his gun-handle overwhelmed Pete Leddy. At least, let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this and not calculation was responsible for his action. Before the word for preparation was free of Lang's lips, and without waiting for the word to fire, his revolver came up in a swift quarter-circle. He was sure of his aim at that range with a ready draw.

Again and again he had thus. .h.i.t his target in practice and six times he had winged his man by such agile promptness.

With the flash from the muzzle all the members of the gallery rose on hands and knees. They were as sure that there was to be a seventh notch as of their ident.i.ty. There was no question in their minds but Pete had played a smart trick. They had known from the first that he would win.

And the proof of it was in the sudden, uncontrollable movement of the adversary.

Jack whirled half round. He was falling. But even as he fell he was still facing his adversary. He plunged forward unsteadily and came to rest on his left elbow. A trickle of blood showed on the chap of his left leg, which had tightened as his knee twisted under him. Leddy's rage had been so hot that for once his trigger finger had been too quick. He had aimed too low. But he was sure that he had done for his man and he looked triumphantly toward the gallery G.o.ds whose hero he was. They had now risen to their feet. In answer to their congratulations he waved his left hand, palm out, in salutation. His gun-hand had dropped back to his trousers seam.

Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest.

Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his forehead, while he turned cold.

"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy, you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to kill you!"

Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin, tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.

"And I am going to kill you!"

This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him--a cold, pa.s.sionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot, everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as motionless as statues.

Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pa.s.s, with its intent of something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was the savagery born--born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved face--than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was r.e.t.a.r.ded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.

"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.

She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.

"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.

"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed, but never in such deliberate fashion.

"Take it out'"

There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed to dominate everything--men, earth, and air.

Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red.

It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb.

Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy.