Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West Part 13

"I have known stockmen of that opinion, but--"

The foreman's sentence was never finished. From a clump of bushes a hundred yards away came the crack of a rifle. A bullet sang past, cutting a line that left on one side of it Bannister, on the other Miss Messiter and her foreman. Instantly the two men slid from their horses on the farther side, dragged down the young woman behind the cover of the broncos, and arranged the three ponies so as to give her the greatest protection available. Somehow the weapons that garnished them had leaped to their hands before their feet touched the ground.

"That coyote isn't one of our men. I'll back that opinion high," said McWilliams promptly.

"Who is he?" the girl whispered.

"That's what we're going to find out pretty soon," returned Bannister grimly. "Chances are it's me he is trying to gather. Now, I'm going to make a break for that cottonwood. When I go, you better run up a white handkerchief and move back from the firing-line. Turn Buck loose when you leave. He'll stay around and come when I whistle."

He made a run for it, zigzagging through the sage-brush so swiftly as to offer the least certain mark possible for a sharpshooter. Yet twice the rifle spoke before he reached the cottonwood.

Meanwhile Mac had fastened the handkerchief of his mistress on the end of a switch he had picked up and was edging out of range. His tense, narrowed gaze never left the bush-clump from which the shots were being pumped, and he was careful during their retreat to remain on the danger side of the road, in order to cover Helen.

"I guess Bannister's right. He don't want us, whoever he is."

And even as he murmured it, the wind of a bullet lifted his hat from his head. He picked it up and examined it. The course of the bullet was marked by a hole in the wide brim, and two more in the side and crown.

"He ce'tainly ventilated it proper. I reckon, ma'am, we'll make a run for it. Lie low on the pinto's neck, with your haid on the off side.

That's right. Let him out."

A mile and a half farther up the road Mac reined in, and made the Indian peace-sign. Two dejected figures came over the hill and resolved themselves into punchers of the Lazy D. Each of them trailed a rifle by his side.

"You're a fine pair of ring-tailed snorters, ain't y'u?" jeered the foreman. "Got to get gay and go projectin' round on the shoot after y'u got your orders to stay hitched. Anything to say for yo'selves?"

If they had it was said very silently.

"Now, Miss Messiter is going to pa.s.s it up this time, but from now on y'u don't go off on any private ma.s.sacrees while y'u punch at the Lazy D. Git that? This hyer is the last call for supper in the dining-cah. If y'u miss it, y'u'll feed at some other chuckhouse." Suddenly the drawl of his sarcasm vanished. His voice carried the ring of peremptory command. "Jim, y'u go back to the ranch with Miss Messiter, AND KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. Missou, I need y'u. We're going back. I reckon y'u better hang on to the stirrup, for we got to travel some. Adios, senorita!"

He was off at a slow lope on the road he had just come, the other man running beside the horse. Presently he stopped, as if the arrangement were not satisfactory; and the second man swung behind him on the pony.

Later, when she turned in her saddle, she saw that they had left the road and were cutting across the plain, as if to take the sharpshooter in the rear.

Her troubled thoughts stayed with her even after she had reached the ranch. She was nervously excited, keyed up to a high pitch; for she knew that out on the desert, within a mile or two of her, men were stalking each other with life or death in the balance as the price of vigilance, skill and an unflawed steel nerve. While she herself had been in danger, she had been mistress of her fear. But now she could do nothing but wait, after ordering out such reinforcements as she could recruit without delay; and the inaction told upon her swift, impulsive temperament. Once, twice, the wind brought to her a faint sound.

She had been pacing the porch, but she stopped, white as a sheet. Behind those faint explosions might lie a sinister tragedy. Her mind projected itself into a score of imaginary possibilities. She listened, breathless in her tensity, but no further echo of that battlefield reached her. The sun still shone warmly on brown Wyoming. She looked down into a rolling plain that blurred in the distance from k.n.o.bs and flat s.p.a.ces into a single stretch that included a thousand rises and depressions. That roll of country teemed with life, but the steady, inexorable sun beat down on what seemed a shining, primeval waste of s.p.a.ce. Yet somewhere in that s.p.a.ce the tragedy was being determined--unless it had been already enacted.

She wanted to scream. The very stillness mocked her. So, too, did the clicking windmill, with its monotonous regularity. Her pony still stood saddled in the yard. She knew that her place was at home, and she fought down a dozen times the tremendous impulse to mount and fly to the field of combat.

She looked at her watch. How slowly the minutes dragged! It could not be only five minutes since she had looked last time. Again she fell to pacing the long west porch, and interrupted herself a dozen times to stop and listen.

"I can bear it no longer," she told herself at last, and in another moment was in the saddle plying her pinto with the quirt.

But before she reached the first cottonwoods she saw them coming. Her gla.s.ses swept the distant group, and with a shiver she made out the dreadful truth. They were coming slowly, carrying something between them. The girl did not need to be told that the object they were bringing home was their dead or wounded.

A figure on horseback detached itself from the huddle of men and galloped towards her. He was coming to break the news. But who was the victim? Bannister or McWilliams she felt sure, by reason of the sinking heart in her; and then it came home that she would be hard hit if it were either.

The approaching rider began to take distinct form through her gla.s.ses.

As he pounded forward she recognized him. It was the man nicknamed Denver. The wind was blowing strongly from her to him, and while he was still a hundred yards away she hurled her question.

His answer was lost in the wind sweep, but one word of it she caught.

That word was "Mac."

CHAPTER 7. THE MAN FROM THE SHOSHONE FASTNESSES

Though the sharpshooter's rifle cracked twice during his run for the cottonwood, the sheepman reached the tree in safety. He could dodge through the brush as elusively as any man in Wyoming. It was a trick he had learned on the whitewashed football gridiron. For in his buried past this man had been the noted half-back of a famous college, and one of his specialties had been running the ball back after a catch through a broken field of opponents. The lesson that experience had then thumped into him had since saved his life on more than one occasion.

Having reached the tree, Bannister took immediate advantage of the lie of the ground to snake forward un.o.bserved for another hundred feet.

There was a dip from the foot of the tree, down which he rolled into the sage below. He wormed his way through the thick scrub brush to the edge of a dry creek, into the bed of which he slid. Then swiftly, his body bent beneath the level of the bank, he ran forward in the sand. He moved noiselessly, eyes and ears alert to aid him, and climbed the bank at a point where a live oak grew.

Warily he peeped out from behind its trunk and swept the plain for his foe. Nothing was to be seen of him. Slowly and patiently his eyes again went over the semi-circle before him, for where death may lurk behind every foot of vegetation, every b.u.mp or hillock, the plainsman leaves as little as may be to chance. No faintest movement could escape the sheepman's eyes, no least stir fail to apprise his ears. Yet for many minutes he waited in vain, and the delay told him that he had to do with a trained hunter rather than a mere reckless cow-puncher. For somewhere in the rough country before him his enemy lay motionless, every faculty alive to the least hint of his presence.

It was the whirring flight of a startled dove that told Bannister the whereabouts of his foe. Two hundred yards from him the bird rose, and the direction it took showed that the man must have been trailing forward from the opposite quarter. The sheepman slipped back into the dry creek bed, retraced his steps for about a stone-throw, and again crawled up the bank.

For a long time he lay face down in the gra.s.s, his gaze riveted to the spot where he knew his opponent to be hidden. A faint rustle not born of the wind stirred the sage. Still Bannister waited. A less experienced plainsman would have blazed away and exposed his own position. But not this young man with the steel-wire nerves. Silent as the coming of dusk, no breaking twig or displaced brush betrayed his self-contained presence.

Something in the clump he watched wriggled forward and showed indistinctly through an opening in the underscrub. He whipped his rifle into position and fired twice. The huddled brown ma.s.s lurched forward and disappeared.

"Wonder if I got him? Seems to me I couldn't have missed clean," thought Bannister.

Silence as before, vast and unbroken.

A scramble of running feet tearing a path through the brush, a crouching body showing darkly for an eyeflash, and then the pounding of a horse's retreating feet.

Bannister leaped up, ran lightly across the intervening s.p.a.ce, and with his repeater took a potshot at the galloping horseman.

"Missed!" he muttered, and at once gave a sharp whistle that brought his pony to him on the trot. He vaulted to the saddle and gave chase. It was rough going, but nothing in reason can stop a cow-pony. As sure footed as a mountain goat, as good a climber almost as a cat, Buck followed the flying horseman over perilous rock rims and across deep-cut creek beds.

Pantherlike he climbed up the steep creek sides without hesitation, for the round-up had taught him never to falter at stiff going so long as his rider put him at it.

It was while he was clambering out of the sheer sides of a wash that Bannister made a discovery. The man he pursued was wounded. Something in the manner of the fellow's riding had suggested this to him, but a drop of blood splashed on a stone that happened to meet his eye made the surmise a certainty.

He was gaining now--not fast, almost imperceptibly, but none the less surely. He could see the man looking over his shoulder, once, twice, and then again, with that hurried, fearful glance that measures the approach of retribution. Barring accidents, the man was his.

But the unforeseen happened. Buck stepped in the hole of a prairie dog and went down. Over his head flew the rider like a stone from a catapult.

How long Ned Bannister lay unconscious he never knew. But when he came to himself it was none too soon. He sat up dizzily and pa.s.sed his hand over his head. Something had happened.

What was it? Oh, yes, he had been thrown from his horse. A wave of recollection pa.s.sed over him, and his mind was clear once more.

Presently he got to his feet and moved rather uncertainly toward Buck, for the horse was grazing quietly a few yards from him.

But half way to the pony he stopped. Voices, approaching by way of the bed of Dry Creek, drifted to him.

"He must 'a' turned and gone back. Mebbe he guessed we was there."

And a voice that Bannister knew, one that had a strangely penetrant, cruel ring of power through the drawl, made answer: "Judd said before he fainted he was sure the man was Ned Bannister. I'd ce'tainly like to meet up with my beloved cousin right now and even up a few old scores.

By G.o.d, I'd make him sick before I finished with him!"

"I'll bet y'u would, Cap," returned the other, admiringly. "Think we'd better deploy here and beat up the scenery a few as we go?"