by Zane Grey
Sterl worked the lever of his rifle, waited a moment, then snatched up his sombrero, and leaped on King. The excited horse was hard to hold. Sterl rode by the wagon. With one grim glance at the drover, lying on his back, with one eye blank and the other set hideously, Sterl took up the wheel tracks and raced through the bushland.
It grew more open as he progressed. In less than half a mile he sighted another wagon, standing still, the foremost team of horses plunging. Sterl drew closer to the wagon and was pulling King to a slower gait, when again he heard gunshots, and not far away. Two guns of different caliber. No rifle shot. Throwing caution to the winds, Sterl struck the steel into King’s flanks. As the black tore on at top speed and reached the wagon, Sterl saw the drover, Bedford, hanging head first over the right wheel. His feet had caught somewhere. In the middle of his broad back his gray shirt showed a huge, bloody patch. Red had shot him through from front to back.
The third and last wagon! It had been pulled half broadside across the line of wheel tracks. Horses had been tethered to the rear. They were plunging, and on the moment one broke away. Sterl recognized Leslie’s Jester even at that distance through a drizzling rain.
The driver’s seat was vacant. No one in sight. But another shot cracked and that from Red’s gun. The cowboy was alive! Sterl’s heart leaped out of its petrifaction. Sterl drove King down upon the wagon with tremendous speed. The trees blurred.
Suddenly to Sterl’s right and ahead his strained sight caught the gleam of something white, something red, something black. There was a bare glade close ahead—a huge gum towering over the wagon—a low branch sweeping down. Through the thin foliage that white thing moved. A woman’s scream, high-pitched, piercing, rent the air.
Sterl lay back with all his might upon the bridle. King broke his gait, flashed by the brush, and plunged to slide on his haunches into the glade.
Red, his temple bloody, was lying in the middle of the bare spot, raised on his left elbow, his gun extended, his posture unnatural. In a flash Sterl was out of his saddle, his gun leaping as his feet thudded the earth.
The white thing was Beryl Dann, half nude, in the grasp of Ormiston. A black blanket had slipped to her knees. Ormiston crouched behind her, left arm around her middle. In his right he had a gun leveled at Red. As he fired, the girl pushed his arm. She shrieked in terror, in fury. And she fought the drover like a panther. The red thing near them was Leslie’s horse, Sorrel, saddled and bridled. Ormiston had tried to get away on that horse.
“Kill him…Red…don’t mind me!” panted the girl wildly.
Chapter Twenty
Sterl leveled a cocked gun, but dared not risk firing. Only a portion of Ormiston’s body projected from behind the desperately struggling girl.
She hung onto Ormiston’s rigid arm as he lifted her in an effort to align his gun upon Krehl. He fired. Dust and gravel flew up into the cowboy’s face. Red rolled convulsively over and over, as if struck. Sterl, stricken at that terrific instant, just barely held himself back from a rash onslaught at the drover. But Red came out of that roll to lie flat with his gun forward.
“Hurry, Sterl!” shrieked the girl frantically.
Then the drover espied Sterl, and struggled to aim at him. Sterl leaped to dive behind a rock. His momentum carried him almost beyond it. Swift to get on his knees, he thrust his gun over the top. He was in time to see Beryl’s last frenzied struggle to destroy the bush-ranger’s aim. Then she collapsed, arms, head, and shoulders hanging down supported by Ormiston’s clutching clasp. But this caused him to crouch lower to hide his head. Sterl all but shot at it on that instant. Ormiston’s further stooping caused him to bend his left leg, and his knee became exposed. Red’s gun cracked. Sterl heard the bullet thud into flesh. The bush-ranger yelled in agony. That shot of Red’s had broken his aim. Cursing savagely, he gathered his forces for another attempt.
Sterl screamed like a Comanche at Ormiston; his finger quivered on the trigger in the act of imperiling Beryl’s life to save Red’s. Behind Sterl a strange yet familiar tussling sound checked his firing. Whizz! A dark streak flashed across his line of vision. Chuck! Sterl’s taut senses registered the sickening thud of something rending flesh.
Ormiston uttered a strangling, inhuman yell and sprang up as if galvanized. His gun went flying to the ground and exploded. Beryl dropped from his hold like an empty sack. Ormiston’s hands were up, clutching at something, as a drowning man might at straws. His powerful physique strained and reeled accompanied by unnatural cries. An aborigine spear stuck out two feet beyond his throat. Its long end still quivered with the tremendous force that had impelled it. Ormiston’s hands tore at it, broke the long end square off.
“Friday!” yelled Sterl as he leaped from behind the rock. “Look, Red, look! Friday has done for him!”
Red got up, bloody-faced and grim as death. He had been shot over the right temple and in the left shoulder. But he showed no weakness. As he strode toward the whirling Ormiston, swift footfalls thudded behind Sterl, and Friday came leaping with savage mien and energy.
“Hold on, Friday!” yelled Red, blocking the aborigine. “No go with thet. You’re gonna help me with a little necktie party.”
Sterl could not have unrivetted his sight from the terrible spectacle of the doomed Ormiston. He reeled and swayed like a drunken man, his hands still tearing at that shaft. No blood showed on his brawny neck, but a red-tinged froth issued from his mouth with his awful cries. He fell only to bound up again with marvelous agility and strength. He was a conscious madman, still capable of destroying his foes, if he could find a way.
Sterl kicked Ormiston’s gun into the grass. Again his trigger finger pressed quiveringly, as the bush-ranger roared and plunged like a wounded bull.
“Bore him, Red! Put him out of it!” shouted Sterl.
Red’s jangling footfalls sounded behind Sterl, just as Ormiston’s protruding eyes fell upon Beryl. She was on her knees, trying to pluck up the blanket over her bare shoulders. He made at her, insane to drag her to perdition. But before Sterl could shoot, still waiting for the expected shot from behind, a hissing lasso shot out. The noose fell over Ormiston’s head, to be stopped by the spear through his neck. Red gave the rope a tremendous pull. Ormiston lunged backward, to fall face forward, his arms up-flung, and that queer vociferation ended abruptly.
“Lend a hand, Friday,” shouted the cowboy. “Don’t forget how this white trash treated you!”
Probably without that ruthless urge the black would have lent a hand. As it was, he leaped to Red’s assistance. They dragged the bush-ranger under the spreading arm of the huge gum tree. The cowboy paused there to gaze down at his victim. Sterl had seen Red, after the custom of gunmen on the frontier, bend such a look upon an expiring foe who had provoked the old, even-break encounter. It seemed more terrible here, yet Sterl could not find voice to interrupt retribution and ruthless justice.
“Rustler, you swing! Jest the same as any cattle thief in my country! But bad as they came, I never seen one as low-down as you!”
Evidently Ormiston was still conscious, although choked beyond the power of speech. Red threw the free end of his lasso up over the low end branch and caught it as it fell.
“Lay on, Friday! Pull, you black man who’s shore no nigger! All my life I’ll love you for this day’s work. Ha! There you air, Ormiston! Swing an’ kick! An’…yore black soul!”
Sterl wrenched his fascinated gaze from that gruesome spectacle and wheeled to Beryl. He was startled to see her on her knees, the blanket slack in her nerveless hands, wholly oblivious to her nudity, her big, blue eyes fixed in horror upon that frightful execution. No doubt she had seen it all.
“Beryl! Don’t look!” cried Sterl, sheathing his gun and rushing to her. In a second he had flung the blanket around her and obstructed her sight by lifting her to her feet, into his arms. “Shut your eyes, Beryl. It’s…all over. You’re saved. And he…it’s justice, Beryl, no matter.”
But he realized that
she had fainted. He carried her to the wagon and laid her up in the seat, out of the rain, and tucked the blanket around her bare feet. Her eyes fluttered open. “OK, now?” inquired Sterl. She nodded. “Then lie here a while, until you get yourself together. No more danger.” And he drew away.
How long he leaned there he did not know, but a jingling step aroused him, and he turned to see Red approaching. Beyond the cowboy, Friday appeared, silhouetted against the green, gazing fixedly up at the limp figure, grotesque and strangely still, in dark relief against the gray sky.
Warmth rushed over him at the sight of his cowboy friend. Red had come through another appalling crisis, and here he was again, blood and dirt all over him, the passion and fire that had sustained him gone, as if by magic.
“Close shave, pard,” he said just a little huskily, as he wiped his bloody hands with his scarf, and glanced up to see Beryl’s pale, quiet face.
“Gosh! I don’t recall a closer!” ejaculated Sterl.
“Reckon I cain’t, either. But wasn’t Beryl the game kid? My Gawd, who’d ever thought she’d fight like thet? For me…against him? She kept him from borin’ me a second time. An’ I reckon she saved yore life, too.”
“Like as not, Red. I was afraid to shoot, for fear I’d hit her.”
“She fainted, I see. Wal, it was about time. I’m glad she didn’t see the end of it.”
“But she did, Red. She did! When I could look away from you and Friday, I found Beryl on her knees, eyes wide as doors, staring right at you. She saw it all, believe me.”
“Aw, thet’s too bad. Pretty tough, considerin’ how she must have loved…. But, pard, did you get it? Beryl had on only her nightgown. Thet hombre stole her from her bed. She didn’t run off with him!”
“Yes, I savvied that, Red, and I never was any gladder in my life. But you’re all shot up. Let me see.”
“Nothin’ a-tall, pard.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Wal, they’d have to be a hell of a lot wuss than they air to croak me now. Let me tell you. When I ran down on Bedford, he saw me comin’, an’ he was ready for me. I bored him, but damn if he didn’t hit me heah in this shoulder. Ormiston heahed all the shots, I reckon, for he was trying to get away with Beryl on the sorrel when I run in on him. Beryl was fightin’ him. But for her, I’d shore have bored him before he got in thet first shot. It knocked me flat, but not out, an’ I was tryin’ to get a peg at him behind her when you got heah.”
“Red, didn’t you take an awful chance?” Sterl queried gravely.
“What the hell else could I do? Them drovers were separated. Ormiston had Beryl.”
“We can always tell better after it’s over. But we should have…both of us…gone after Ormiston first.”
“I reckon. We didn’t have any too much time to figger. Great, wasn’t it…Friday ringin’ in there with that spear? Jest great! Better look these bullet holes over an’ tie them up. This one on my haid hurts like hell.”
Examination disclosed a painful, although not serious, wound in Red’s head, a groove that cut through the scalp, but had not touched the skull, and another in his left shoulder, high up, where the bullet had lodged just under the skin on the far side. It would have to be cut out, but Sterl left that operation for camp and bound his scarf tightly around under his arm.
“We’d better leave the other one open,” said Sterl. “It’s not bleeding much. Besides, we haven’t anything clean to tie round it. Your scarf is…. Hello, what’s that?”
“I heahed it. Reckon we forgot about the cattle, an’ the job we left three pardners to do. Gosh, Sterl. Thet’s cattle aplenty an’ hoofin’ it for fair.”
“Fag end of a stampede. Look to Beryl. I’ll wrangle the horses. Come, Friday.”
The black ran off under the gums to get Duke, while Sterl drew King and the sorrel back away from the open. Two of Leslie’s Thoroughbreds, haltered to the wagon, were released and put with the other horses. Red had been standing by Beryl, in case she had to be moved, and waiting to see when and where the mob would appear.
A bobbing line of cattle soon hove in sight down through the brush, loping along wearily.
“Wal, they might have started wild, but they’re bein’ chased now,” said Red. “Get the rifles heah, pard, an’ if it happens to be any of Ormiston’s outfit, they’ll never get nowhere. Gosh, I hope Larry an’ Rollie didn’t get wiped out. New to them…such a deal.”
On a front perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, so wide in fact that Sterl could just make out the far end, a herd of cattle came loping past, scattered and bawling, almost ready to drop. The trampling roar swelled and receded. No stragglers ran close to the wagon. It did not take the herd more than five minutes to pass.
“Lot of cattle, but not all Ormiston had, do you think, Red?”
“Coupla of thousand haid, shore as you’re born. Thet’s sort of queer. I recognized one of them steers. Couldn’t have been Ormiston’s, for I seen him jest lately. Pard, thet was the bunch raided out of Dann’s last night.”
“Might be.”
“Heah comes some riders. Two! Thet’s Larry’s hoss…an’ Rollie’s, too. OK, Sterl, it’s our friends. But Drake ain’t with them.”
The two riders had checked their approach upon sight of the wagon. When they recognized the cowboys, they came on again. Some hundred paces distant they espied the hanged bush-ranger swinging with horrible significance, and this brought them up into a quick halt.
“Come on, Larry. It’s all over heah but the shoutin’,” called Red.
Then the drovers rode slowly up, their eyes gleaming, their lips tight.
“Rollie, that’s Ormiston!” ejaculated Larry in awe, and forced his gaze ahead. But Rollie appeared divided between curiosity and shock. He rode closer, exclaiming incoherently. He pointed to the spear.
“Beryl?” Larry queried hopefully.
“She’s heah on the seat, in a daid faint. Ormiston stole her out of her bed. She was daid game. Fought him to a standstill heah, when he hid behind her. Saved us both. She spoiled his aim, an’ we couldn’t shoot,” declared Red, and it seemed more than evident that he was elated to give this information.
Larry slumped out of his saddle to sit down like a man whose legs were wobbly.
“Then Friday slung thet spear through the dirty dog’s neck an’ the fight was over. But you should have seen the show.”
Sterl did not like the looks of either of the drovers.
“Where’s Drake?”
“He wouldn’t shoot bare-faced that way from ambush,” replied Larry tragically. “Rol and I didn’t know it though, till right at the last he ran out, yelled at Anderson and Henley, then, as they jerked their guns, shot them both off their horses. I…I killed Buckley…and Rol did the same by Smith. Herdman and Smith had begun to shoot. It was Herdman, I think, who hit Drake. Rol’s horse was shot from under him. The mob rushed, ran us back into the brush. They split. Part of the mob headed back. Herdman and Smith had to ride hard. But they got around them and headed off to the east. We couldn’t chase them until the cattle had run by. Then it was too late. They got into the brush. We’d have caught up with the wagon sooner, if we could have got around the other half of the mob that rushed this way.”
“A-huh. Too bad about Drake. Air you shore he was daid?”
“There was no doubt of that.”
“It’s orful tough, Larry. I reckon Sterl an’ me feel for you. But the fact is, we got off lucky.”
“Jack and…Bedford?”
“They beat Ormiston to hell pretty considerable. Pard, them two hombres thet got away…they’ll hang back in the bush to see what we do…an’ thet’s somethin’ to figger on.”
“Easy, Red. There’s only one thing,” returned Sterl. “Take Beryl back to camp pronto. You’re all shot up, too. We’ve got to cross that infernal river before dark.”
“I agree, pard. Spring yore idee. My haid is kinda thick.”
“Larry, stay here with Red. Keep your eyes pe
eled sharp. Those two drovers might sneak up for a shot, although that’s doubtful. Red, get a dry blanket to wrap Beryl in. Search Ormiston. That hombre was heeled. Rollie and I will ride up to search Jack and Bedford.”
“Rustle a-back. I ain’t so keen on bein’ left heah.”
“We won’t go. It’ll be little enough that those hombres will have. But Ormiston….”
Sterl found a money belt upon the bush-ranger. Heavy and full it had lent Ormiston a corpulence that he really did not possess in flesh. Sterl also took his watch and a pocketbook full of papers. He carried these to where King stood and buckled them inside his saddlebag.
Meanwhile, Red had wrapped Beryl in a couple of dry blankets, and he was folding a third. Beryl had come to, and sat hunched in the driver’s seat, with great, dilated eyes staring out of her pallid face.
“Pard, I was plumb worried about her nightgown,” said Red. “I feared it’d be wet. But only a little. She’ll be warm.”
“That’s good. Let’s get to it.”
They approached the river and again were astounded, especially by its speed and big waves. Sterl waded King some yards before the horse had to swim. Friday, preceding him, waited and got his tow. Rollie followed a rod behind. For Sterl, so far as he was concerned, this crossing did not rouse acute sensations of apprehension, as he had felt before. King was surely a magnificent horse in the water as well as on land. Striking the mid-current, they were swept down and soundly threshed, but that lasted only a couple of tense moments, then they were out of the bad water. Stanley Dann, the Slyters, with Heald and Monkton, and one of Dann’s drovers awaited their landing visibly laboring under extreme excitement and fear.