by Max Brand
CHAPTER 9
At the same time the rifles of the two men of the posse rang, but theymust have seen the fall of their leader, for the shots went wild, andAndy Lanning took off his hat and waved to them. But he did not fleeagain. He sat in his saddle with the long rifle balanced across thepommel while two thoughts went through his mind. One was to stay thereand watch. The other was to slip the rifle back into the holster andwith drawn revolver charge the five remaining members of the posse.These were now gathering hastily about Bill Dozier. But Andy knew theirconcern was in vain. He knew where that bullet had driven home, and BillDozier would never ride again.
One by one he picked up those five figures with his eyes, fightingtemptation. He knew that he could not miss if he fired again. In fiveshots he knew that he could drop as many men, and within him there was aperfect consciousness that they would not hit him when they returnedthe fire.
He was not filled with exulting courage. He was cold with fear. But itwas the sort of fear which makes a man want to fling himself from agreat height. But, sitting there calmly in the saddle, he saw a strangething--the five men raising their dead leader and turning back towardthe direction from which they had come. Not once did they look towardthe form of Andy Lanning. They knew what he could not know, that thegate of the law had been open to this man as a retreat, but the bulletwhich struck down Bill Dozier had closed the gate and thrust him outfrom mercy. He was an outlaw, a leper now. Any one who shared hissociety from this moment on would fall under the heavy hand of the law.
But as for running him into the ground, they had lost their appetite forsuch fighting. They had kept up a long running fight and gained nothing;but a single shot from the fugitive had produced this result. Theyturned now in silence and went back, very much as dogs turn and tucktheir tails between their legs when the wolf, which they have chasedaway from the precincts of the ranch house, feels himself once more safefrom the hand of man and whirls with a flash of teeth. The sun gleamedon the barrel of Andy Lanning's rifle, and these men rode back insilence, feeling that they had witnessed one of those prodigies whichwere becoming fewer and fewer around Martindale--the birth of adesperado.
Andrew watched them skulking off with the body of Bill Dozier heldupright by a man on either side of the horse. He watched them draw offacross the hills, still with that nervous, almost irresistible impulseto raise one wild, long cry and spur after them, shooting swift andstraight over the head of the pinto. But he did not move, and now theydropped out of sight. And then, looking about him, Andrew Lanning felthow vast were those hills, how wide they stretched, and how small hestood among them. He was utterly alone. There was nothing but the hillsand a sky growing pale with heat and the patches of olive-gray sagebrushin the distance.
A great melancholy dropped upon Andy. He felt a childish weakness;dropping his elbows upon the pommel of the saddle, he buried his face inhis hands. In that moment he needed desperately something to which hecould appeal for comfort.
The weakness passed slowly.
He dismounted and looked his horse over carefully. The pinto had manygood points. He had ample girth of chest at the cinches, where lungcapacity is best measured. He had rather short forelegs, which promisedweight-carrying power and some endurance, and he had a fine pair ofsloping shoulders. But his croup sloped down too much, and he had ashort neck. Andy knew perfectly well that no horse with a short neck canrun fast for any distance. He had chosen the pinto for endurance, andendurance he undoubtedly had; but he would need a horse which could puthim out of short-shooting distance, and do it quickly.
There were no illusions in the mind of Andrew Lanning about what laybefore him. Uncle Jasper had told him too many tales of his ownexperiences on the trail in enemy country.
"There's three things," the old man had often said, "that a man needswhen he's in trouble: a gun that's smooth as silk, a hoss full ofrunning, and a friend."
For the gun Andy had his Colt in the holster, and he knew it like hisown mind. There were newer models and trickier weapons, but none whichworked so smoothly under the touch of Andy. Thinking of this, heproduced it from the holster with a flick of his fingers. The sight hadbeen filed away. When he was a boy in short trousers he had learned fromUncle Jasper the two main articles of a gun fighter's creed--that arevolver must be fired by pointing, not sighting, and that there must benothing about it liable to hang in the holster to delay the draw. Thegreat idea was to get the gun on your man with lightning speed, and thenfire from the hip with merely a sense of direction to guide the bullet.
He had a gun, therefore, and one necessity was his. Sorely he needed ahorse of quality as few men needed one. And he needed still more afriend, a haven in time of crisis, an adviser in difficulties. Andthough Andy knew that it was death to go among men, he knew also that itwas death to do without these two things.
He believed that there was one chance left to him, and that was tooutdistance the news of the two killings by riding straight north. Therehe would stop at the first town, in some manner fill his pockets withmoney, and in some manner find both horse and friend.
Andrew Lanning was both simple and credulous; but it must be rememberedthat he had led a sheltered life, comparatively speaking; he had beenbrought up between a blacksmith shop on the one hand and Uncle Jasper onthe other, and the gaps in his knowledge of men were many and huge. Theprime necessity now was speed to the northward. So Andy flung himselfinto the saddle and drove his horse north at the jogging, rocking lopeof the cattle pony.
He was in a shallow basin which luckily pointed in the right directionfor him. The hills sloped down to it from either side in long fingers,with narrow gullies between, but as Andy passed the first of thesepointing fingers a new thought came to him.
It might be--why not?--that the posse had made only a pretense ofwithdrawing at once with the body of the dead man. Perhaps they had onlywaited until they were out of sight and had then circled swiftly around,leaving one man with the body. They might be waiting now at the mouth ofany of these gullies.
No sooner had the thought come to Andy than he whitened. The pinto hadbeen worked hard that morning and all the night before, but now Andysent the spurs home without mercy as he shot up the basin at full speed,with his revolver drawn, ready for a snap shot and a drop behind the farside of his horse.
For half an hour he rode in this fashion with his heart beating at histeeth. And each canyon as he passed was empty, and each had some shrub,like a crouching man, to startle him and upraise the revolver. Atlength, with the pinto wheezing from this new effort, he drew back to aneasier gait. But still he had a companion ceaselessly following like theshadow of the horse he rode. It was fear, and it would never leave him.