第 11 页

He reappeared from the haze, some two hours later, at a point of the gray stone ridge near where Glinn had been shot. Paisley knew that the sixth of June had long since passed, and that it was not probable that Gawne would pay another visit to the Gap until the following year. He did not expect to ambush Gawne at the Gap. There was another strategic vantage point—among some crags overlooking the river, reached only by going through Sunshine Gap, following the Diamond Bar trail to a certain shoulder of mountain vivid in Paisley’s recollection, and there diverging, dropping to some foothills, skirting them and climbing the river trail to the crag. Gawne rode that trail, many times. The knowledge had come to Hame Bozzam’s ears, and Paisley had overheard Bozzam talking of it. From the crag there would be no missing Gawne. Paisley was eager. And yet he knew he would have to be cautious.

He brought his horse to a halt at a narrow cleft in the gray ridge, dismounted, tightened the saddle cinches, and hiding behind the ridge looked across the river at the peaceful Gap, slumbering in the dear sunlight.

Paisley was slender and lithe. His swarthy face was rimmed by long, black hair like an Indian’s; his lips were thin, sensitive, cruel; his eyes were coal black, lambent, and hard. Only Hame Bozzam—who was his confidant—could have told whether the sobriquet “Nigger” was descriptive of his skin or his character. The other members of the Bozzam outfit shunned him; which might have damned him or angelicized him, according to one’s viewpoint.

He crouched long behind the gray ridge, his gaze on the timber-fringed mountain top that rose sentinel-like above the Gap. For when Paisley had dismounted from his horse he had noted a moving spot behind a rock barrier on the mountain, and he did not intend to change his position until he discovered just what the moving spot meant.

The spot disappeared, but Paisley waited patiently. One must be patient on a stalk, or things might end badly for the stalker. When, ten minutes later, the spot appeared again, Paisley’s black eyes grew snake-like in their glitter. For this time the spot was larger, nearer, and he knew it for a pony, bearing the child-woman of the Diamond Bar.

Paisley’s thoughts, as he watched the progress of pony and rider down the mountain slope, grew abysmal. His thin lips were set in brutish lines; he wet them many times with his tongue, and his eyes glowed with the animal-like passion that centuries of civilization have not blotted from his kind.

He saw the girl dismount from the pony and enter the cabin. From her hesitating manner he gathered there was no one with her. But he waited, to be certain. A full half-hour he crouched, watching the mountain trail; and then, when he observed that the girl was in no hurry to leave, he added another half-hour to that. A Diamond Bar puncher might be riding down the mountain trail.

And then, when the second half-hour had passed, the girl stood in front of the cabin, gazing about her. Paisley was forced to continue his vigil. But the moment came a little later, when the girl entered the cabin. Then Paisley mounted his horse, sent it swiftly down the slope of the ridge, across the river, rode it stealthily into some screening brush, dismounted and stole toward the cabin.

Flattening himself against the outside wall, near the door, he peered within. Jane was sitting on a crude bench. She was leaning forward, her back to Paisley, her gaze fixed on a rock spur that jutted from an overhanging wall of a deep washout not more than two hundred feet from the other door of the cabin. The girl remembered that she had seen her father standing on that spur, one morning when he had been leaving her for a hunting trip. He had stood there, waving a hand. The recollection haunted her; she tried to associate a memory of her mother with it, but did not succeed—her mother never figured vividly in any of her recollections, for her mother had been unkind.

When she felt two hands steal around her she started, and then sat quiet, thinking that Gawne had come for her—and she was not going to let him think he had frightened her. But when the grip of the hands tightened with a tender fierceness, strange and foreign, she looked down and saw that the hands were dark and swarthy—not in the least like Gawne’s firm, white sinewy ones.

She screamed, then—shrilly, in terror. She was lifted, violently, whirled against her assailant, her second scream stifled with a rough, brutal hand. Shrinking back, with the man’s hand pressing her mouth, she saw Nigger Paisley’s face, hideous and terrible with unrestrained passion. Her right hand fell to the butt of the little pistol in the holster at her waist. But he anticipated the movement—almost—and when her finger pressed the trigger the bullet was harmlessly directed, and her arms pinioned to her sides.

And then she was whirled from Paisley’s side, and she fell near the center of the cabin floor. She heard Paisley curse horribly, saw him crouching, tense, his arms braced against the door jambs, watching the mountain trail. She got up and peered between his arm and body and saw a gray streak splitting the timber of the mountain side. So fast was the streak coming that it seemed to flow, dipping and undulating with continuous flexibility of motion, like the progress of an eagle through the air.

It was Meteor! She ran out of the cabin, waving her hands to Gawne, laughing with joy and relief over her deliverance. She was calm now, merely yearning with a vicious passion for Paisley’s punishment, which she knew would come. And when she saw Paisley running desperately toward the brush where he had concealed his horse, intent now to escape the vengeance that was racing toward him with incredible swiftness, she danced up and down in her glee.

Paisley was riding up the slope of the papier-mache ridge when Gawne reached her side. His lips were stiff and his face ashen as he listened to her recital, and when it was over he patted her head and told her to get on Ginger and go back to the Diamond Bar. She did not ask him what he was going to do—she knew. But she did not obey his command to ride slowly, but raced Ginger helter-skelter up the mountain side. When she looked back, it was just in time to see Meteor leaping over the crest of the papier-mache ridge.

Paisley had got a good start. Yet he would have felt much better if the distance between him and his pursuer had been greater. He kept looking back, fearfully, as he rode the rim of the desert, watching the cleft of the ridge, and when he saw Meteor flash through it he leaned far over in the saddle, drove the spurs into his horse and rode breathlessly.

He was a good mile and a half in the lead, nearly two miles, he estimated, when Meteor emerged from the cleft in the ridge. But he knew something of the speed, stamina, and spirit of the gray horse that was on his trail. Yet the gray horse had added nothing to his strength in that mad, break-neck ride down the mountain side, and if the gray had been ridden much during the morning there was a chance, a bare chance, that Paisley could hold his own until he reached the Bozzam ranch. Several of the men of the outfit would be there, he knew, for he had heard Bozzam telling them to “rest up” for a ride that night, and with that mile and a half lead—even with a mile, or a half mile, even a quarter—he would have time, if Gawne followed him to headquarters, to call the men to his assistance and give his pursuer a reception that would discourage him from further pursuit.

It was a good twenty miles to the H-B—Bozzam’s ranch—and much might happen before Paisley reached there. A stumble—a short halt—and Gawne would be upon him. So Paisley kept a keen, alert eye on the trail ahead of him. He looked back many times, breathing more freely when he saw that the gray had not crept up on him, rejoicing because he had conserved the strength of his own animal on the ride over. Twice, thundering past rocks and timber groves that extended far enough into the desert to afford concealment for an ambush, he almost yielded to the impulse to lie in wait for his pursuer, but each time the impulse came to him his courage failed and he rode on again pale and perspiring coldly over the thought of what would happen to him if, concealed, he failed to kill Gawne with the first shot. His only hope was in speed, and thereafter he ceased speculating, devoting his senses to his riding, his back-muscles cringing, his eyes wild and staring with terror for the gray horse and its implacable rider, still a mile or so behind him, but coming steadily.

The emotion that raged through Gawne was not an eagerness to punish Paisley quickly, but a determination that the punishment must be inflicted. He felt no impulse to hurry; he did not intend to run Meteor to death in this race. He felt the superbly muscled animal under him leaping easily, tugging at the reins for the additional liberty he craved. There was a feel of reserved strength and speed in the animal’s movements which told the rider that, given the opportunity, he would catch the impudent atom of his breed whose flying hoofs spumed the desert dust ahead of him.

But Gawne kept a tight rein on the gray. Gawne had no knowledge of Paisley’s intentions. The man might decide to stop at the H-B, or he might take it into his head to keep going, to make the race one of endurance. Gawne was taking no chances. He maintained the distance between them; shortening it sometimes, to test the gray’s condition, letting the animal slow down often when the horse in front of him seemed to lag; and he watched Paisley’s movements closely.

No white man would have attempted what Paisley had attempted. The whole history of the West recorded no instance in which a white man had so far forgot himself as to assail the sacred honor of a woman. That Jane was only a girl made the offense more hideous in Gawne’s eyes. That she was his girl made the attack unforgivable. The law in Bozzam City was a sham and a shame. He was the law in this case, and when he had inflicted his penalty neither Jane nor any other woman in the vicinity—or anywhere else, for that matter—would be in danger from Paisley again. He would make certain of that.

He looked to his pistols as he rode, making sure of them; and the steady, springy stride of the big gray wrought a music to his ears that made his soul sing with a fierce joy.

Gawne did not know the desert trail; he had never ridden it. But when, at the end of a long, monotonous interval of riding, he saw Paisley swing from the desert rim to a long rise that sloped upward like an ocean beach to some sparse timber, he felt that the man had decided to try for the H-B.

Paisley was still about a mile in advance, and he was now riding desperately, looking back, gauging the distance between him and his pursuer. And now that Gawne knew definitely what Paisley’s intentions were, he settled himself and gave Meteor his head.

The big gray responded with a rush that instantly shortened the distance. He went up the rise with great, swinging leaps, burst through the timber edge, sank down into a basin with dizzying velocity, tore across it and up the far side of it with an eagerness and impetuosity which told that his previous impatience was not spurious. And every leap shortened the distance between Gawne and Paisley. The mile that had separated them lessened to a half—to a quarter—to a hundred yards—and Gawne drew a pistol. Just before he succeeded in getting within a range that would make a miss improbable, Paisley reached a clump of prickly pear and alder, flung himself from the saddle and vanished from view. The big gray was but a little tardy in leaping to the spot where Paisley had disappeared, and when Gawne pulled the gray up and swung out of the saddle, he saw his man, not more than fifty feet from him, running, backwards, shooting as he retreated.

Terror had palsied Paisley’s muscles. His pistol arm wavered; Gawne heard the singing of the bullets, but felt none of them. He shot from his hip as he ran, sending the bullet with savage grimness, and he saw Paisley clutch at his chest and pitch backward into the dust. He walked to his prone enemy, looked down at the twitching fingers, noting the convulsive writhing of his body, and decided that his vengeance was complete.

Then for the first time he turned to look at his surroundings. His other pistol leaped into his left hand as he looked, for he saw that he had pursued Paisley clear to the H-B. He noted several outbuildings near him—had passed a corral without seeing it—and in front of him, not more than a dozen feet distant, was the Bozzam bunkhouse. And in front of the building, grouped near the door, through which they had evidently just poured, standing tense, were several of Bozzam’s men, watching him.

One of them—he recognized the man as Connor—was just dropping a hand to the butt of his pistol as Gawne’s gaze swept him. The men had evidently emerged too late to see the shooting of Paisley—they could not have seen Gawne as he had stood over his victim. But Connor’s significant movement showed Gawne that the Bozzam men now realized what had happened.

It was war. Gawne dropped Connor with a snapshot from the waist. At the report three of the men dove headlong through the open doorway of the bunkhouse. Two that remained raised their hands and stiffened against the side of the building.

Holding them in that position by menacing them with his guns, Gawne backed away, thinking to get a small outbuilding between him and the windows of the bunkhouse—for he knew the windows would be belching bullets in an instant. He was forced to stand when he gained the shelter of the outbuildings, for Meteor was a full hundred feet away, browsing unconcernedly, and Gawne knew there would be three rifles blazing at him if he tried to cross the open space.

The two men were still rigid beside the front wall of the bunkhouse, not daring to move lest they meet Paisley’s end. They were inoffensive, and Gawne hesitated to shoot them. He would have felt much better had they gone into the bunkhouse with their fellows.

Gawne stood still, to regain his breath. The action had been rapid during the last few minutes, and he felt a pulse of excitement over his predicament. His satisfaction was vicious. His mood promised increasing catastrophe for the Bozzam outfit, and he coolly calculated his chances. He was in a bad position. The corner of the outbuilding protected him from the danger that threatened him from the bunkhouse windows; the two men standing outside the bunkhouse were a constant menace in spite of their enforced immobility, for he knew that the instant he moved they would draw and take their chance. Not a hundred feet away was the Bozzam ranchhouse with a clear sweep of dust-level intervening, and if Hame Bozzam were in the house Gawne might expect an attack from that quarter at any moment.

Gawne’s lips set stiffly in a reckless, bitter grin. They had him—he had held Meteor in too long. He took a swift glance at the animal, flashing a mute farewell to him. Then with both pistols menacing the two men near the door of the bunkhouse he backed along the wall of the outbuilding to a corner, from which, peering around, he could see one of the windows of the bunkhouse. He caught a glimpse of a rifle barrel resting on the window sill—a man’s head behind it. He jerked back, his head reaching the shelter of the corner as a bullet viciously clipped a splinter from the wall. He swung back again, throwing a shot at the window without pausing to take aim at it—and grinned when he heard an oath from that direction. That would keep the occupants of the bunkhouse interested for a few minutes.