Chance Dalton, foreman of Alamito Ranch, was in charge of the expedition that rode late that afternoon against Macdonald’s homestead to liberate Mark Thorn, and close his mouth in the cattlemen’s effective way upon the bloody secrets which he might in vainglorious boast reveal. Chadron had promised rewards for the successful outcome of the venture, and Chance Dalton rode with his three picked men in a sportsman’s heat.
He was going out on a hunt for game such as he had run down more than once before in his many years under Chadron’s hand. It was better sport than running down wolves or mountain lions, for there was the superior intelligence of the game to be considered. No man knew what turn the ingenuity of desperation might give the human mind. The hunted might go out in one last splendid blaze of courage, or he might cringe and beg, with white face and rolling eyes. In the case of Macdonald, Dalton anticipated something unusual. He had tasted that unaccountable homesteader’s spirit in the past.
Dalton was a wiry, tough man who rode with his elbows out, like an Indian. His face was scarred by old knife-wounds, making it hard for him to shave, in consequence of which he allowed his red beard
The men who came behind him were cowboys from the Texas Panhandle, lean and tough as the dried beef of their native plains. It was the most formidable force, not in numbers, but in proficiency, that ever had proceeded against Macdonald, and the most determined.
Chadron himself had bent to the small office of spy to learn Macdonald’s intention in reference to his prisoner. From a sheltered thicket in the foothills the cattleman had watched the homesteader through his field glasses, making certain that he was returning Thorn to the scene of his latest crimes, instead of risking the long road to the Meander jail.
Chadron knew that Macdonald would defend the prisoner’s life with his own, even against his neighbors. Macdonald would be as eager to have Thorn tell the story of his transactions with the Drovers’ Association as they would be to have it shut off. The realization of this threw Chadron into a state which he described to himself as the “fantods.” Another, with a more extensive and less picturesque vocabulary, would have said that the president of the Drovers’ Association was in a condition of panic.
So he had despatched his men on this silencing errand, and now, as the sun was dipping over the hills, all red with the presage of a frosty night, Chance Dalton and his men came riding in sight of Macdonald’s little nest of buildings fronting the road by the river.
Macdonald had secured his prisoner with ropes, for there was no compartment in his little house, built of boards from the mountain sawmill, strong enough to confine a man, much less a slippery one like Mark Thorn. The slayer had lapsed into his native taciturnity shortly after beginning the trip from the reservation to Macdonald’s homestead, and now he lay on the floor trussed up like a hog for market, looking blackly at Macdonald. Macdonald was considering the night ride to Meander with his prisoner that he had planned, with the intention of proceeding from there to Cheyenne and lodging him in jail. He believed there might be a better chance of holding him for trial there, and some slight hope of justice.
A hail from the gate startled Macdonald. It was the custom of the homesteaders in that country, carried with them from the hills of Missouri and Arkansas, to sit in their saddles at a neighbor’s gate and call him to the door with a long “hello-o-oh!” It was the password of friendship in that raw land; a cowboy never had been known to stoop to its use. Cowboys rode up to a homesteader’s door when they had anything to say to him, and hammered on it with their guns.
Macdonald went to the door and opened it unhesitatingly. The horseman at the gate was a stranger to him. He wore a little derby hat, such as the cowpunchers despised, and the trappings of his horse proclaimed him as a newcomer to that country. He inquired loudly of the road to Fort Shakie, and Macdonald shouted back the necessary directions, moving a step away from his open door.
The stranger put his hand to his ear and leaned over.
“Which?” said he.
At that sound of that distinctly-cowboy vernacular, Macdonald sprang back to regain the shelter of his walls, sensing too late the trap that the cowboy’s unguarded word had betrayed. Chance Dalton at one corner of the rude bungalow, his next best man at the other, had been waiting for the decoy at the gate to draw Macdonald away from his door. Now, as the homesteader leaped back in sudden alarm, they closed in on him with their revolvers drawn.
There was the sound of a third man trying the back door at the same time, and the disguised cowboy at the gate slung his weapon out and sent a wild shot into the lintel above Macdonald’s head. The two of them on the ground had him at a disadvantage which it would have been fatal to dispute, and Macdonald, valuing a future chance more than a present hopeless struggle, flung his hands out in a gesture of emptiness and surrender.
“Put ’em up—high!” Dalton ordered.
Dalton watched him keenly as the three in that picture before the door stood keyed to such tension as the human intelligence seldom is called upon to withstand. Macdonald stood with one foot on the low threshold, the door swinging half open at his back. He was bareheaded, his rough, fair hair in wisps on temples and forehead. Dalton’s teeth were showing between his bearded lips, and his quick eyes were scowling, but he held his companion back with a command of his free hand.
Macdonald lifted his hands slowly, holding them little above a level with his shoulders.
“Give up your prisoner, Macdonald, and we’ll deal square with you,” Dalton said.
“Go in and take him,” offered Macdonald, stepping aside out of the door.
“Go ahead of us, and put ’em up higher!” Dalton made a little expressive flourish with his gun, evidently distrustful of the homesteader’s quick hand, even at his present disadvantage.
The man at the back door was using the ax from Macdonald’s wood pile, as the sound of splintering timber told. Between three fires, Macdonald felt his chance stretching to the breaking point, for he had no faith at all in Chance Dalton’s word. They had come to get him, and it looked now as if they had won.
When Macdonald entered the house he saw Thorn sitting in the middle of the floor, where he had rolled
“You’ve played hell now, ain’t you? lettin’ ’em git the drop on you that way!” he said to Macdonald, angrily. “They’ll swing—”
“Hand over that gun, Macdonald,” Dalton demanded. They were standing near him, one on either hand, both leveling their guns at his head. Macdonald could see the one at the back door of his little two-roomed bungalow through the hole that he had chopped.
“I don’t hand my gun to any man; if you want it, come and take it,” Macdonald said, feeling that the end was rushing upon him, and wondering what it would be. A bullet was better than a rope, which Chadron had publicly boasted he had laid up for him. There was a long chance if Dalton reached for that gun—a long and desperate chance.
The man at the back door was shouting something, his gun thrust through the hole. Dalton made a cross-reach with his left hand for Macdonald’s revolver. On the other side the cowboy was watching his comrade’s gun pointing through the kitchen door; Macdonald could see the whites of his eyes as he turned them.
“Don’t shoot in here! we’ve got ’em,” he called.
His shifted eye told Macdonald that he was trusting to Dalton, and Dalton at that moment was leaning forward with a strain, cautiously, his hand near Macdonald’s holster.
Macdonald brought his lifted arms down, like a swimmer making a mighty stroke, with all the steam behind them that he could raise. His back-handed blow struck the cowboy in the face; Macdonald felt the flame of his shot as it spurted past his forehead. The other arm fell short of the nimbler and more watchful Dalton, but the duck that he made to escape it broke the drop that he had held over Macdonald.
Macdonald’s hand flashed up with his own gun. He drove a disabling shot through Dalton’s wrist as the ranch foreman was coming up to fire, and kicked the gun that he dropped out of reach of his other hand. The cowboy who had caught Macdonald’s desperate blow had staggered back against the foot of the bed and fallen. Now he had regained himself, and was crouching behind the bed, trying to cover himself, and from there as he shrank down he fired. The next flash he sprawled forward with hands outstretched across the blanket, as if he had fallen on his knees to pray.
Macdonald caught Dalton by the shirt collar as he went scrambling on his knees after the revolver. Dalton was splashing blood from his shattered wrist over the room, but he was senseless to pain and blind to danger. He sprang at Macdonald, cursing and striking.
“Keep off, Dalton! I don’t want to kill you, man!” Macdonald warned.
Careless of his life Dalton fought, and as they struggled Mark Thorn undoubled himself from his
Macdonald did not see what took place there, for it was over by the time he had struck Dalton into a limp quiet heap at his feet by a blow with his revolver across the eyes. But there had been a shot at the door, and Macdonald had heard the man from the back come running around the side of the house. There were more shots, but all done before Macdonald could leap to the door.
There, through the smoke of many quick shots that drifted into the open door, he saw the two cowboys fallen with outflung arms. In the road a few rods distant Mark Thorn was mounting one of Chadron’s horses. The old outlaw flung himself flat along the horse’s neck, and presented little of his vital parts as a target. As he galloped away Macdonald fired, but apparently did not hit. In a moment Thorn rode down the river-bank and out of sight.
Macdonald stood a little while in the middle of the disordered room after re-entering the house, a feeling of great silence about him, and a numbness in his ears and over his senses. It was a sensation such as he had experienced once after standing for hours under the spell of Niagara. Something seemed to have been silenced in the world.
He was troubled over the outcome of that treacherous assault. He felt that the shadow of the resultant tragedy was already stretching away from there like the penumbra of an eclipse which must soon engulf those homesteads on the river, and exact a terrible, blasting toll.
Dalton was huddled there, his life wasting through the wound in his wrist, blood on his face from the blow that had laid him still. The dead man across the bed remained as he had fallen, his arms stretched out in empty supplication. There was a pathos in the fellow’s pose that touched Macdonald with a pity which he knew to be undeserved. He had not meant to take his life away in that hasty shot, but since it had happened so, he knew that it had been his own deliverance.
Macdonald stripped the garment back and looked at Dalton’s hurt. There would be another one to take toll for in the cattlemen’s list unless the drain of blood could be checked at once. Dalton moved, opening his eyes.
It seemed unlikely that Dalton ever would sling a gun with that member again, if he should be so lucky, indeed, as to come through with his life. The bone was shattered, the hand hung limp, like a broken wing. Dalton sat up, yielding his arm to his enemy’s ministrations, as silent and ungracious as a dog. In a little while Macdonald had done all that he could do, and with a hand under the hollow of Dalton’s arm he lifted him to his feet.
“Can you ride?” he asked. Dalton did not reply. He looked at the figure on the bed, and stood turning his eyes around the room in the manner of one stunned, and completely confounded by the failure of a scheme counted infallible.
“You made a botch of this job, Dalton,” Macdonald said. “The rest of your crowd’s outside where Thorn dropped them—he snatched your gun from the floor and killed both of them.”
Dalton went weakly to the door, where he stood a moment, steadying himself with a hand on the jamb. Macdonald eased him from there to the gate, and brought the horses which the gang had hidden among the willows.
“Tell Chadron to send a wagon up here after these dead men,” Macdonald said, leading a horse to the gate.
He helped the still silent Dalton into the saddle, where he sat weakly. The man seemed to be debating something to say to this unaccountably fortunate nester, who came untouched through all their attempts upon his life. But whatever it was that he cogitated he kept to himself, only turning his eyes back toward the house, where his two men lay on the ground. The face of one was turned upward. In the draining light of the spent day it looked as white as innocence.
As Dalton drew his eyes away from the fearful evidence of his plan’s miscarriage, the sound of hard riding came from the direction of the settlement up
“That will be no friend of yours, Dalton. Get out of this!”
He cut Dalton’s horse a sharp blow. The beast bounded away with a start that almost unseated its dizzy rider; the two free animals galloped after it. Chance Dalton was on his way to Chadron with his burden of disgrace and disastrous news. It seemed a question to Macdonald, as he watched him weaving in the saddle as the gloom closed around him and shut him from sight, whether he ever would reach the ranchhouse to recount his story, whatever version of the tragedy he had planned.
Tom Lassiter drew up before Macdonald’s gate while the dust of Dalton’s going was still hanging there. The gaunt old homesteader with the cloud of sorrows in his eyes said that he had been on his way over to see what had become of Macdonald in his lone hunt for Mark Thorn. He had heard the shooting, and the sound had hurried him forward.
Macdonald told him what had happened, and took him in to see the wreckage left after that sudden storm. Tom shook his head as he stood in the yard looking down at the two dead men.
“Hell’s a-goin’ to pop now!” he said.
“I think you’ve said the word, Tom,” Macdonald admitted. “They’ll come back on me hard for this.”
“You’ll never have to stand up to ’em alone another time, I’ll give you a guarantee on that, Mac.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Macdonald replied, but wearily, and with no warmth or faith in his words.
“And they let that old scorpeen loose to skulk and kill ag’in!”
“Yes, he got away.”
“They sure did oncork a hornet’s nest when they come here this time, though, they sure did!” Tom stood in the door, looking into the darkening room and at the figure sprawled across the bed. “He-ell’s a-goin’ to pop now!” he said again, in slow words scarcely above his breath.
He turned his head searchingly, as if he expected to see the cloud of it already lowering out of the night.
