by Matt Rand
“Gypsy Carvel!” gurgled Rance. “Well, I’ll be—and theah’s Manuel Cavorca or I’m a dogie’s hind foot!”
Hatless, his golden hair shimmering in the sunlight, the outlaw, shooting with both hands, distanced his companion. Rance could see his handsome face, distorted by the killer-lust, could almost feel the blaze of his blue eyes.
“That jigger’s a devil got outa hell ahead of the Jedgment!” muttered the Ranger.
Suddenly the girl’s horse reared high, almost unseating her. It screamed with pain, whirled and went thundering on a long diagonal toward where the valley floor fell away to a rugged gorge that flanked The Black Hell. An instant later Rance had El Rey pulled around and was racing in pursuit. Gypsy Carvel’s horse had been shot in the mouth, the bit knocked loose, leaving her powerless to guide the frenzied animal. Fighting to control her mount, she did not notice what Rance from his vantage point of higher ground had seen.
Directly in the maddened bronk’s path lay the almost perpendicular side of the gorge, its lip fringed and hidden by thick bushes.
With voice and hand Rance urged El Rey to a supreme effort. The black horse, pouring out his very soul in wind-like speed, swiftly closed the distance, charging down on the runaway at a slant.
Gripping the reins with his left hand, Rance leaned far to the right. El Rey’s black nose reached the other horse’s flank, gained an inch, a straining foot. Rance leaned farther.
There was a crash of parting bushes, the wounded horse screamed an almost human scream of terror and went plunging over and over down the slope to the rocks below.
Rance Hatfield, gripping Gypsy with his right arm, clinging to the reins with his left, braced himself as El Rey also went over the lip. In the final split second of time he had snatched her from the saddle.
El Rey did not lose his balance. Down the slope he went, slipping and teetering, snorting as his hoofs clattered across smooth rock. He skittered magnificently down a last nearly-straight-up-and-down stretch, “sittin’ on his tail,” and reached the bottom, on his feet and uninjured.
Rance Hatfield looked down into the white face of the girl.
“Ma’am,” he drawled softly, “guess that evens us on that snake haid!”
Rifles were still cracking. Shouts and screams drifted down to them. Rance wheeled El Rey and rode swiftly down the gorge until he reached a place the horse could climb.
“Where are you going?” panted the girl.
“I got a little bus’ness to ’tend to,” Rance told her.
El Rey surged over the gorge lip and stood blowing. Rance glanced about with eager eyes.
The posse was storming up the valley less than a hundred yards distant. Rance raced to meet them.
“Take her!” he ordered, thrusting the girl into Sheriff Bethune’s arms.
Before the astounded sheriff could protest, Rance had wheeled El Rey again and was riding to where all that were left of Ike Trainor’s claim jumpers were holding up their hands and bawling for mercy. The mysterious riders were streaming back into the canyon whence they had just come. Last of all, astride a limping horse and far behind his men, rode Manuel Cavorca. A last gleam of golden hair and the canyon had swallowed him.
Scant minutes later, Rance Hatfield, his eyes slits of gray fire in his grim face, also vanished between the dark portals.
Without attempt at concealment, Rance urged El Rey on. He must overtake the outlaw before the fleeing bandits discovered his absence. He had to take the chance of an ambush.
A half-mile, a mile, between close, frowning walls. Cavorca could not be far ahead. The canyon wound and turned like a snake in a cactus patch, its beetling cliffs flinging back a maddening confusion of echoes. Rance leaned low in the saddle, wondering if his own horse was making all that racket.
Around a sharp turn, and there, scarce fifty yards ahead, was Cavorca!
Outlaw and Ranger saw each other at the same time. Cavorca’s gun roared, the bullet creased El Rey’s flank and the black horse went momentarily insane.
Plunging and snorting, hurling himself toward the outlaw in prancing zig-zags, he made it utterly impossible for Rance to shoot with accuracy. One of his guns was empty. A wild plunge knocked the other one from his hand. Cavorca, sitting his motionless horse, fired coolly with careful aim.
The Ranger’s quick mind saw but a single desperate chance, and he took it. Flinging himself sideways from the saddle, he clutched the stock of the rifle protruding from the boot as he went down. If the rifle stuck he would be a dead man in another instant!
His sweaty palms slipped on the smooth stock. The hammer snagged on something. The grip of one hand was torn loose. Then he was under the plunging horse, clinging to the rifle with one desperate hand.
Over he rolled, flinging the gun up, his gray eyes glancing along the sights.
The rifle roared. Cavorca, in the act of throwing down for a last shot, stiffened, rose in his stirrups and pitched from the saddle.
Rance scrambled to his feet, rifle ready; but the outlaw lay still.
“Feller,” Rance told the trembling black, “you came dam neah sunfishin’ yoreself outa a good boss!”
Rance walked over and took a look at Cavorca. The rifle bullet had cut a neat furrow along the side of his head.
“Jest creased. Be settin’ up cussin’ in another five minutes,” the Ranger decided.
Cavorca cursed plenty a little later, as securely bound, he rode his limping horse out of the canyon, Rance Hatfield following behind. They met the posse, Gypsy Carvel and the Gandaras scrambling down the slope. The girl’s face was paper-white, her eyes great dark pools of pain. Rance Hatfield’s own face grew bleak as his gaze met hers.
“Sorry, ma’am, but I hadda do it,” his lips framed the words.
“Who the hell you got theah, Ranger?” shouted Tumbleweed Turner. “What did he—”
The little deputy’s voice was drowned by an anguished cry:
“My God! Manuel! My son! My son!”
Rance Hatfield’s face went white as the girl’s as he stared at old Alfredo Gandara.
“Yore son!” he gasped. “Manuel Cavorca, this murderin’ outlaw! Yore son?”
“I tried to save him,” sobbed Gypsy. “I begged him not to come here; but when he heard those men were going to jump our claims he went mad with rage.”
Silently the posse rode out of Silver Valley, the snarling Manuel Cavorca, Ike Trainor and the other prisoners in their midst. Rance Hatfield stared straight ahead with brooding eyes.
“I ain’t blamin’ you,” said old Alfredo brokenly, “you were doin’ yore duty; but it’s hard, feller, it’s hard!”
Rance turned and looked into Gypsy Carvel’s eyes. Something he saw there lifted some of the shadows from his own eyes. Impulsively he held out his hand.
“Goodbye, ma’am.”
She hesitated an instant, then placed her slim fingers in his grasp.
“Goodbye, Ranger.”
CHAPTER 10
“And it is the sentence of this court that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead!”
Manuel Cavorca took it standing. Not a line of his inhumanly handsome face quivered. The mocking smile that had hovered about his perfectly formed but cruel mouth during his trial did not fade. His blue eyes stared straight into the stern face of the old jurist. Nothing, it appeared, could shake the iron nerve of the bandit.
“Don’t look like a greaser, does he?” whispered a spectator in the back of the courtroom.
“Ain’t no Mexican,” another whispered back. “American born—old Spanish stock. He—”
Crash!
A side window flew into a million splinters. The black barrel of a heavy six-gun jutted through the opening, blazing fire and smoke.
The old judge half rose in his chair, then slumped back with a groan, clutching at his shoulder with reddening fingers. Sheriff Dobson leaped to his feet, tugging at his Colt. A bullet took him squarely between the eyes. Another knocked Deputy Hank Thomas sp
rawling.
Men surged through the door—dark-faced men with sombreros pulled low. They menaced the courtroom crowd with pistols and rifles. A voice rang out:
“Manuel, to me—pronto!”
Cavorca went—quickly! He kicked the dying deputy aside, jumped over the sheriff’s body and lunged for the door. A brawny cattleman leaped from the snarling confusion of the benches and tried to stop him. Cavorca weaved aside. A slim figure in the doorway, masked and seraped, snapped a shot past him and the ranch owner went down. Cavorca hurdled the twitching form and reached the door.
“This way,” shrilled the masked voice—a woman’s voice—“horses, Manuel!”
Cavorca and the masked girl vanished. The courtroom seemed to explode with the reports of six-shooters. Ranch owners and cowboys fought themselves free from the milling mob of town loafers and courtroom hangers-on and were shooting it out with the dark-faced bandits. One went down, drilled dead center. Another cursed himself through the doorway, his gun arm swinging limp. His companions, crouching low over their smoking sixes, back-stepped after him. Outside sounded a clatter of swift hoofs.
Rance Hatfield wasn’t in the courtroom when sentence was pronounced. He was at a nearby restaurant surrounding a husky portion of pig’s-hip-and-hen-fruit.
“I roped myself enough hell droppin’ my loop on that jigger ’thout listenin’ to the jedge ’splain to him he’s gotta do a dance on nothin’,” Rance told himself. “I never did fancy hearin’ that kinda—sufferin sandtoads!”
Chair and table went over as the Ranger leaped for the door. He hurled the squalling Chinese hash slinger aside and reached the street, guns sliding from their sheaths.
Yells, screeches, the crackle of pistol shots and blue smoke boiled from the courthouse, two blocks down the street. Horses were plunging and snorting in front of the building, shadowy and distorted in the gathering dusk.
Like pips from a squeezed orange, two figures shot from the courthouse door. They flung themselves into saddles, wheeled their frantic horses and streaked it down the street.
Rance Hatfield’s guns let go with a rattling crash. One of the fleeing figures was bareheaded and Rance caught the glint of hair golden as sunlight in a lily’s cup.
“That sidewinder! He’s loose again!” glutted the Ranger, firing as fast as he could pull trigger.
Down went Cavorca’s horse, plunging and kicking. The outlaw was hurled over his head. He turned a complete handspring in the air, lit on his feet and lit running. The other fugitive pulled to a hoof-sliding halt. Cavorca left the ground like a spring, forked the bronk behind the saddle, and away went the pair!
Rance, shoving cartridges into his empty guns, saw them vanish around a turn.
Men were boiling from the courthouse. Bullets began to strike all around the Ranger. He dodged behind a post and returned the fire with interest. He emptied two saddles as quickly as they were filled; but the post wasn’t thick enough, he realized, as a slug cut a furrow along the inside of his left arm and another grazed his right cheek.
He went across the street in a zig-zag run, paused in the scant shelter of a hitch-rack and emptied his guns after the dying thunder of hoofs.
A shouting, milling crowd filled the street. “The Ranger got two of them,” somebody yelled, “and theah’s another dead one inside the co’ht house.”
Rance loaded his guns and walked down the street. “Cavorca got away!” a fat man squalled at him. Rance recognized the fat man as the town’s mayor.
“Oh-huh, I see he did,” Rance replied.
“Ye-a-ah!” raved the fat mayor, “jest goes to show what a helluva lot of use the Rangers are! Let a herd of greaser gun slingers amble ’crost the Line, shoot respectable citizens down and snake a damn murderer right outa the co’ht house. Rangers! Jest a lotta lazy pants-seat warmers usin’ up the taxpayers’ money! This’ll settle the lot of you, though. Come the next legislature and the territory’ll be shed of you!”
For a moment the utter injustice of the attack left Rance speechless. Before he had recovered, another was speaking. Rance recognized Walsh Patton, the county prosecutor. Patton was an angular, lantern-jawed individual with mean eyes and a meaner disposition. He was political boss of Cochise county and had a pull that reached all the way to Washington.
“Keepin’ a eye on the Border’s a Ranger job, ain’t it?” demanded Patton. “That’s one of the arg’ments used to get the last legislature to vote for organizin’ the Rangers. Swell job yore doin’. Tomas Fuentes and his whole damn revolution army could come ’crost any time he feels like it, for all anythin’ you fellers’d do to stop him.”
Rance Hatfield’s lips set in a grim line, choking back the angry words of reply that stormed for expression. Nothing would be gained by arguing with either Patton or Mayor Thomas. Nothing would be gained by reminding them that the help the Rangers had offered to safeguard Cavorca had been curtly refused by the county authorities. Patton and Thomas, leaders of a clan bitterly opposed to the newly formed body, The Arizona Rangers, would make the most of the convicted bandit’s escape, slurring over then own culpability, using every means in their power to cause the territory in general to believe Ranger negligence was responsible. Rance quietly asked a question:
“How many got killed in the co’hthouse?”
The sheriff and his deputy were dead, Rance quickly learned, two cowboys and the cattleman, Blanton, were badly wounded. The judge was suffering from shock and a smashed shoulder. The bandits had taken their wounded with them.
“Ain’tcha gonna get a posse t’gether and chase ’em?” the fat mayor demanded of Rance.
“Chase ’em wheah?” asked the Ranger, jerking a scornful head toward the purple mountains looming only a few miles south of the town. “Theah’s Mexico, so clost you can hit it with a rock. They’re acrost the Line by now, wheah we ain’t got no ’thority. And don’t fool yoreself, feller,” he added, “theah’s a young army jinin’ Cavorca down theah.”
The mayor indulged in a sneer, after Rance had walked away.
“Theah’s the Rangers for you!” he snorted. “Ain’t got the guts to get a posse t’gether and chase them fellers!”
A lanky, hard-bitten cowboy regarded him coldly.
“I rec’lects it was that theah same Ranger what caught Cavorca in the fust place, and ’tacked his whole gang and got shot up doin’ it,” he drawled. “Likewise it was the Ranger’s gun what ’counted for two o’ them three ‘good’ bandits layin’ over theah under blankets. I figger you fellers’d do well to sing sorta small fer a while.”
CHAPTER 11
Rance had his wounded arm bandaged. Then he rode out of town, alone. He headed north.
“What them jiggers back theah don’t know won’t hurt ’em, and, what’s a darn sight more important, it won’t hurt us,” he told his magnificent black stallion, El Rey. “I ain’t so sho’ but somebody theah knowed all ’bout that raid ’fore it happened. It was timed mighty fine for guesswork.”
As the Ranger rode, he did some very serious thinking. “Patton and Thomas waren’t talkin’ for me to hear,” he growled. “They was talkin’ to the crowd. They’re buildin’ up a case ’gainst the Rangers, and ’tween you and me, hoss, they’re doin’ a purty darn good job of it. No use tellin’ folks they practically ordered us to stay away from their blasted town while the trial was goin on. They’ll jest keep on squallin’ that it was the Rangers’ job to keep that gang from sneakin’ ’crost the Line. They’ll spread it ’bout that if the Rangers had had their eyes open it couldn’ta happened. Thomas owns a newspaper and Patton has the ear of all the political big bugs in the territory. Hoss, theah’s jest one way out—and you and me has gotta hawgtie Cavorca again!”
Out of the Ranger’s desperation had been born a plan—a plan fraught with such danger and difficulty as to make its success possible through its very daring. Rance tied its loose ends together as he rode through the lovely blue dusk of the south-west. Three miles north of the town he entered
a gloomy canyon.
The canyon wound and twisted in a confusing manner. When Rance finally rode out of it, under a blazing net of stars that seemed to brush the mountain tops, he was headed a trifle south of west. A little later he turned into a dim track that ran due south.
“This oughta cut ’crost their trail,” he mused. “I figger they’ll head straight for Paloa. That’s a tough pueblo if theah ever was one. It’s Tomaso Fuentes’ town, too, and Fuentes is too big a shot for even the Diaz gov’ment to monkey with, much. Cavorca’ll feel safe theah till he gets his bearin’s.”
A few miles farther on the track did cross another trail, a better and more travelled one. Rance nodded with satisfaction.
His satisfaction was even greater when he reached a sagging barbed-wire fence. Where the fence crossed the trail, the strands had been cut! Without hesitation Rance rode through the gap. He had another talk with his horse.
“Guess you know, feller, that fence marks the Line. We’re in Mexico now and the only ’thority we got heah is what we carries in our heels and holsters. Them heels of yores has got us outa more’n one jam. Don’t forget I’m dependin’ on ’em t’night.”
The black horse rolled his eyes and snorted. Then he jingled the bit impatiently and quickened his stride. Rance scanned the shadowy loom of the mountains ahead.
A discouraged slice of a moon climbed painfully over the eastern crags, paling the golden stars to silver, flooding the rolling prairie with ghostly light. It was well after midnight.
Other stars pricked through the black shadows ahead. Golden stars that did not pale as the moonlight drenched them. Rance checked the stallion’s pace somewhat as the golden stars grew larger.
“That’ll be Paloa,” he muttered. “Lots of lights for this time o’ night. Looks like they’re celebratin’ somethin’. Mebbe we can help ’em to make her a bit livelier.”
He pulled the horse to a walk before he reached the outskirts of the town. Hoofs making little or no sound, the black ambled between rows of dark houses. Now and then the adobe wall of a garden straightened out and lowered the ragged line of the roofs. Ahead lights glowed.