The Last Straw Part 61

He swung his hat across the pinto's hind quarters and the animal leaped into the trail. He heard Jane cry out to him to stop.

"Go on!" he shouted. "Go on! It's your job to bring help!"

And he heard her go on, the horse floundering up the steep rise, and knew that she obeyed. Then he turned and looked out across the flat.

Far down toward Cole's cabin was a shot. A riderless horse went past him, blowing with excitement. He crouched behind a boulder, gun in his hands, peering into the darkness. Others would not travel that trail that night so long as he was on guard....

The fight had been carried in both directions, further up into the Hole, on down toward the Gap. HC riders, partially a.s.sembled and identified, had closed on the outlaws, cut them off from the trail and for the s.p.a.ce of many minutes there was no revealed action, each waiting for the others to show themselves.

Again in the distance was the mutter of thunder and a brilliant, prolonged flash of lightning. The wind had subsided to breathless silence as if the heavens marshaled their forces for fresh outbursts.

Beck started up as the clouds flared, looking quickly about. He saw a horse with an empty saddle. He saw a man standing waist deep in brush, a rifle at his hip, ready to fire. He could not recognize the man.

Darkness; again, a silent lighting of the skies, and with that the stillness was broken. There was the sharp crack of a rifle far to his left, up toward the head of the Hole. None replied to the shot. A moment later the clouds sent out their flare again ... and this time two shots echoed.

Beck started up with a low cry. Above on the trail he had seen Jane Hunter's pinto, making for the high country, and those two stabs of yellow flame had been aimed upward and toward the wall to which her path clung.

It seemed to the man an age until lightning again revealed the earth.

He had an impression of a horseman far toward the top of the trail and behind him another, riding hard; and lastly, Jane's pinto toiling bravely up the sharp climb.

And as darkness cut in again two more fangs of flame darted toward her!

Jane Hunter, without protection, wholly revealed by the lightning, was a target for merciless men, for men who had nothing to lose and at least a fighting chance to gain by stopping her!

He had believed that she was going to safety; he had underestimated the maliciousness of those men she had driven into the open that afternoon.

He had neglected to consider the fact that on the trail she was without protection of any sort and that lightning would make her stand out like a cameo! He forgot his mental stress, he relegated his duty as sentinel to inconsequence, for she was in great danger and needed help! It was a joy to know that the life in his body, the blood in his flesh, might be the one thing she needed, for only by offering those possessions could he atone for his faithlessness. He had no idea that he could regain that desire to possess her. He only wanted her to know that what he had to give was hers; that was all!

Then another rider was on the trail: Tom Beck, roweling his horse, fanning his shoulders with the rein ends, crying aloud to him for speed, his gun in his holster, a useless thing.

He rode with abandon in the darkness, urging the horse to a speed that mocked safety. Stones were scattered by the animal's spurning feet and he heard them strike below, the sounds becoming fainter as he mounted the steep rise. Lightning again and the viper spits down there in the flat licked out for the woman ahead. Beck swore aloud and beat his horse's flanks with his hat.

The darkness, though it handicapped speed and enhanced the danger of his race, was relief. When it was dark they could not fire....

And he knew they were waiting down there, rifles ready, straining to see in the next burst of light....

He begged of the Almighty to send rain, to hold back the lightning, but no rain came; the flares continued. He heard another shot, closer, from behind, and knew it was the rifleman he had seen standing in the brush firing at those who menaced Jane Hunter's safety.

He was gaining on the pinto, slowly, with agonizing slowness. His big brown horse drove on, but, when in darkness and without perspective, it seemed as though his hoofs beat upon a treadmill. The animal's excited breathing became more clearly defined.... The pinto ahead crawled slowly and awkwardly like a dying animal, many minutes from shelter....

One of those spurts of flame stung toward Beck. He heard, almost as he saw it, the spatter of a bullet on the rock behind him. He lay low on his horse's mane.

The glimmer of lightning, unaccompanied now by thunder, became almost continuous. Against the white face of the mountain the riders were like silhouette targets. Below there were stabs of fire from a dozen places, like fire-flies on a summer night, but carrying death.

Two bullets, close together, snarled past him, one above, the other just ahead, perhaps in a line behind his horse's ears. He hoped wildly that they were directing all their fire at him, that he was drawing it from the girl above but even as this hope mounted the skies coruscated again and he saw that the pinto was stopped, saw that Jane was slipping to the narrow trail, her body wedged between the cliff and the body of the horse.

For an interminable time blackness seemed to hold. The big brown, whose breath was now laboring with exhaustion as well as with excitement, gasped scarcely a dozen breaths before the greeny light came again but to his rider it was an aeon of time. Tom Beck pa.s.sed through the veriest depths of torment in that interval and unconsciously he shouted into the night incoherent cries of suffering. He had been too late! He had sent her to physical suffering, to her death, perhaps, and before he could make her understand that he blamed himself as only a just man who has been unjust can crush himself with execration!

But light came and he saw her, still alive, still safe!

The pinto was down, hind feet over the trail. Wounded, he had tried to turn back, tail to the abyss as a mountain bred animal will turn. He had moved on unsteady limbs, his hind feet slipped over the edge and moaning, head back, eyes bulging, he clawed with his fore hoofs to stay his fall. Clinging to the reins, calling aloud her encouragement, the girl helped with voice and limbs.

For an interval she balanced the pull of the animal's own weight....

And when Tom Beck could see again she was alone on the trail, one arm raised to her face as she cringed from the bullets that spattered all about!

He cursed his horse, lashing furiously, spurring in the shoulders without mercy. He came up to her and she faced him, lips tight and in the dance of cloud fire he saw her eyes wide, nostrils distended.

"Get up here!" he muttered and lifted her to his saddle horn, winding his arms about her, bowing his head and shoulders over hers to take the missiles in his own body first.

She clutched him frantically, her warm arms around his neck, her trembling limbs across his thigh with his hand hooked beneath the knees, her soft breast cleaving to his and, slipping through his opened shirt the little gold locket that was at her throat pressed against his heart.... It was cold from the night and he felt it send a tingle through his body. Even then he wondered, with the strange sharpness which stressed thought will give to irrelevant matters, what it contained!

"Tom! It's good to have you!"

Good to have him! With death singing all about her it was good to have him; it was her first thought!

"It would be good to die for you!" he said.

"No, no!"--sharply. "Not that, Tom! Live for me ... live for me!"

She felt him start and shudder and sway and a moan broke from his lips as a searching, tearing thing ripped at the small of his back, burrowing devilishly into his very vitals. She clutched him closer, not understanding.

"It's all I've got to give you," he muttered unnaturally. "My life's all I've got, ma'am. I'd be proud to give it.... It's a little thing to give to pay ... a debt like I owe you....

"You keep your body behind mine ... always ... until we get to the top...."

"Tom!"--in alarm. "You're hit.... Oh, Tom!" She shook him, hitching herself about that she might see his face. "Tom!"

"A scratch," he said. "Just a--"

The horse threw up his head and recoiled as a bullet sang past.

"A--scratch," he finished.

The girl looked about wildly. She knew there was no shelter there, not a ledge behind which they could hide, not a tree that would screen them. The wall rose straight on one side, fell sheer on the other.

There was no place to go but up; they could not turn there and go down for there was no room ... the pinto, shot through the belly, had tried that!

The firing below grew more rapid. It did not wait for the lightning flashes now. Those spats of yellow fire struck upward continuously; in darkness, blindly; in light searching intelligently as the riders moved upward, nearer safety. HC men closed in on those who shot at the figures on the trail, aiming at the flurries of viper light, meeting counter fire as they drew nearer the murderous group of men.

"Fireflies!" Beck muttered as he looked down again. "Lightnin' bugs let loose from h.e.l.l!"

When there was no fire in the clouds those light points looked so harmless, down there in the soft, velvet darkness! Well they might have been insects, bedecking a summer night ... but from them came the whining, droning, searching projectiles that flew to find his life and Jane Hunter's life!

Fifty yards further was the first rise of rock that would protect them from below. Fifty yards, and the horse, under added burden, was sobbing as he staggered.

Beck swayed forward and regained his balance with an effort that cost him a groan, but his arms, tight about Jane Hunter's body did not relax a trifle; they held like tough, green wood. The girl cried out to him again, that he was hurt....

"It's nothin', ... my life," he replied. "It's all I could do ... for doubtin' you. I couldn't ask you to ... love me.... I could die for you ... that's all, ma'am...."

"Tom, Tom! Keep your head; keep your head one minute longer; we'll be safe.... Safe, then...."

Thirty yards to the place where the trail ran between uprising walls of rock; thirty yards to that shelter; thirty yards to safety....