Yet what to do? And where? Johnny Lyle turned toward the corral with a sudden idea in mind. Suppose he could appear to have left town? Wouldn't that lookout go to Hook with the news? Then he could come back, ease up to Lacey suddenly, and call him, then draw.
Gar Mullins saw Johnny walking toward the corral, then he spotted the lookout. Mullins intercepted Johnny just as he stepped into saddle.
"What's up, kid? You in trouble?".
Briefly Johnny explained. Gar listened. and, much to Johnny's relief, registered no protest. "All right, kid. You got it to do if you stay in this country, and your idea's a good one. You ever been in a shoot-out before?".
"No, I sure haven't.".
"Now, look. You draw natural, see?.
Don't pay no mind to being faster'n he is. Chances are you ain't anywheres close to that. You figure on getting that first shot right where it matters, you hear? Shoot him in the body, right in the middle. No matter what happens, hit him with the first shot, you hear me?".
"Yeah.".
Johnny felt sick at his stomach and his mouth was dry, his heart pounding.
"I'll handle that lookout, so don't pay him no mind." Gar looked up. "You a good shot, Johnny?".
"On a target I can put five shots in a playing card.".
"That's all right, but this card'll be shooting back. But don't you worry. You choose your own spot for it.".
"Wait!" Johnny had an idea. "Listen, you have somebody get word to him that Butch Jensen wants to see him. I'll be across the street at the wagon yard. When he comes up, I'll step out.".
He rode swiftly out of town. Glancing back, he saw the lookout watching. Gar Mullins put a pack behind his own saddle and apparently readied his horse for the trail. Then he walked back down the street.
He was just opposite the wagon yard when he saw the lookout stop on a street corner, looking at him. At the same instant, Hook Lacey stepped from behind a wagon. Across the street was Webb Foster, another of the Lacey crowd. There was no mistaking their purpose, and they had him boxed!.
Gar Mullins was thirty-eight, accounted an old man on the frontier, and he had seen and taken part in some wicked gun battles. Yet now he saw his position clearly. This was it, and he wasn't going to get out of this one. If Johnny had been with him--but Johnny wouldn't be in position for another ten minutes.
Hook Lacey was smiling. "You were in the canyon the other day, Gar," he said triumphantly. "Now you'll see what it's like. We're going to kill you, Gar. Then we'll follow that kid and get him. You ain't got a chance, Gar.".
Mullins knew it, yet with a little time, even a minute, he might have.
"Plannin' on wiping out the Slash Seven, Hook?" he drawled. "That's what you'll have to do if you kill that kid. He's the old man's nephew.".
"Ain't you worried about yourself, Gar?" Lacey sneered. "Or are you just wet-nursing that kid?".
Gar's seamed and hard face was set. His eyes flickered to the lookout, whose hand hovered only an inch above his gun. And to Webb, with his thumb hooked in his belt. There was no use waiting. It would be minutes before the kid would be set.
And then the kid's voice sounded, sharp and clear.
"I'll take Lacey, Gar! Get that lookout!".
Hook Lacey whipped around, drawing as he turned. Johnny Lyle, who had left his horse and hurried right back, grabbed for his gun. He saw the big, hard-faced man before him, saw him clear and sharp. Saw his hand flashing down, saw the broken button on his shirtfront, saw the Bull Durham tag from his pocket, saw the big gun come up. But his own gun was rising, too.
The sudden voice, the turn, all conspired to throw Lacey off, yet he had drawn fast and it was with shock that he saw the kid's gun was only a breath slower. It was that which got him, for he saw that gun rising and he shot too quick. The bullet tugged at Johnny's shirt collar, and then Johnny, with that broken button before his eyes, fired.
Two shots, with a tiny but definite space between them, and then Johnny looked past Lacey at the gun exploding in Webb Foster's hands. He fired just as Gar Mullins swung his gun to Webb. Foster's shot glanced off the iron rim of a wagon wheel just as Gar's bullet crossed Johnny's in Webb Foster's body.
The outlaw crumpled slowly, grabbed at the porch awning, then fell off into the street.
Johnny stood very still. His eyes went to the lookout, who was on his hands and knees on the ground, blood dripping in great splashes from his body. Then they went to Hook Lacey. The broken button was gone, and there was an edge cut from the tobacco tag. Hook Lacey was through, his chips all cashed. He had stolen his last horse.
Gar Mullins looked at Johnny Lyle and grinned weakly. "Kid," he said softly, walking toward him, hand outstretched, "we make a team. Here on out, it's saddle partners, hey?".
"Sure, Gar." Johnny did not look again at Lacey. He looked into the once bleak blue eyes of Mullins. "I ride better with a partner. You got that stuff for the ranch?".
"Yeah.".
"Then if you'll pick up my horse in the. willows, yonder, I'll say good-bye to Mary. We'd best be getting back. Uncle Tom'll be worried.".
Gar Mullins chuckled, walking across the street, arm in arm with Johnny.
"Well, he needn't be," Gar said. "He needn't be.".
*.
In Victorio's Country.
The four riders, hard-bitten men bred to the desert and the gun, pushed steadily southward. "Red" Clanahan, a monstrous big man with a wide-jawed bulldog face and a thick neck descending into massive shoulders, held the lead. Behind him, usually in single file but occasionally bunching, trailed the others.
It was hot and still. The desert of southern Arizona's Apache country was rarely pleasant in the summer, and this day was no exception. "Bronco" Smith, who trailed just behind Red, mopped his lean face with a handkerchief and cursed fluently, if monotonously.
He had his nickname from the original meaning of the term wild and unruly and the Smith was a mere convenience, in respect to the custom that insists a man have two names. The "Dutchman" defied the rule by having none at all, or if he had once owned a name, it was probably recorded only upon some forgotten reward poster lining the bottom of some remote sheriff's desk drawer. To the southwestern desert country he was simply and sufficiently, the Dutchman.
As for "Yaqui Joe," he was called just that, or was referred to as the "breed" and everyone knew without question who was indicated. He was a wide-faced man with a square jaw, stolid and silent, a man of varied frontier skills, but destined to follow always where another led. A man who had known much hardship and no kindness, but whose commanding virtue was loyalty.
Smith was a lean whip of a man with slightly graying hair, stooped shoulders, and spidery legs. Dried and parched by desert winds, he was as tough as cowhide and iron. It was said that he had shot his way out of more places than most men had ever walked into, and he would have followed no man's leadership but that of Big Red Clanahan.
The Dutchman was a distinct contrast to the lean frame of Smith, for he was fat, and not in the stomach alone, but all over his square, thick-boned body. Yet the blue eyes that stared from his round cheeks were sleepy, wise, and wary.
There were those who said that Yaqui Joe's father had been an Irishman, but his name was taken from his mother in the mountains of Sonora. He had been an outlaw by nature and choice from the time he could crawl, and he was minus a finger on his left hand, and had a notch in the top of his ear. The bullet that had so narrowly missed his skull had been fired by a man who never missed again. He was buried in a hasty grave somewhere in the Mogollons.
Of them all, Joe was the only one who might have been considered a true outlaw. All had grown up in a land and time when the line was hard to draw.
Big Red had never examined his place in society. He did not look upon himself as a thief or as a criminal, and would have been indignant to the point of shooting had anybody suggested he was either of these. However, the fact was that Big Red had long since strayed over the border that divides the merely carel
ess from the actually criminal. Like many another westerner he had branded unbranded cattle on the range, as in the years following the War Between the States the cattle were there for the first comer who possessed a rope and a hot iron.
It was a business that kept him reasonably well supplied with poker and whiskey money, but when all available cattle wore brands, it seemed to him the difference in branded and unbranded cattle was largely a matter of time. All the cattle had been mavericks after the war, and if a herd wore a brand it simply meant the cattleman had reached them before he did. "Big Red" accepted this as a mere detail, and a situation that could be speedily rectified with a cinch ring, and in this he was not alone.
If the cattleman who preceded him objected with lead, Clanahan accepted this as an occupational hazard.
However, from rustling cattle to taking the money itself was a short step, and halved the time consumed in branding and selling the cattle. Somewhere along this trail Big Red crossed, all unwittingly at the time, the shadow line that divides the merely careless from the actually dishonest, and at about the time he crossed this line, Big Red separated from the man who had ridden beside him for five long, hard frontier years.
The young hardcase who had punched cows and ridden the trail herds to Kansas at his side was equally big and equally Irish, and his name was Bill Gleason.
When Clanahan took to the outlaw trail, Gleason turned to the law. Neither took the direction he followed with any intent. It was simply that Clanahan failed to draw a line that Gleason drew, and that Gleason, being a skillful man on a trail, and a fast hand with a gun, became the sheriff of the country that held his home town of Cholla.
The trail of Big Red swung as wide as his loop, and he covered a lot of country. Being the man he was, he soon won to the top of his profession, if such it might be called. And this brought about a situation.
Cholla had a bank. As there were several big ranchers in the area, and two well-paying gold mines, the bank was solvent, extremely so. It was fairly, rumor said, bulging with gold. This situation naturally attracted attention.
Along the border that divides Mexico from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was an ambitious and overly bloodthirsty young outlaw known as Ramon Zappe. Cholla and its bank intrigued him, and as his success had been striking and even brilliant, he rode down upon the town of Cholla with confidence and seven riders.
Dismounting in front of the bank, four of the men went inside, one of them being Zappe himself. The other four, with rifles ready, waited for the town to react, but nothing happened. Zappe held this as due to his own reputation, and strutted accordingly.
The bank money was passed over by silent and efficient tellers, the bandits remounted, and in leisurely fashion began to depart. And then something happened that was not included in their plans. It was something that created an impression wherever bad men were wont to gather.
From behind a stone wall on the edge of town came a withering blast of fire, and in the space of no more than fifty yards, five of the bandits died. Two more were hung to a convenient cottonwood on the edge of town. Only one man, mounted upon an exceptionally fast horse, escaped.
Along the dim trails this was put down to chance,. but one man dissented, and that man was Big Red.
Clanahan, for Big Red had not forgotten the. hard-bitten young rider who had accompanied him. upon so many long trails, and who had stood beside him. to cow a Dodge City saloon full of. gunfighters. Big Red remembered Bill.
Gleason, and smiled.
Twice in succeeding months the same thing happened, and they were attended by only one difference. On those two occasions not one man survived.
Cholla was distinctly a place to stay away from.
Big Red was intrigued and tantalized. Although he would have been puzzled by the term, Big Red was in his own way an artist. He was also a tactician, and a man with a sense of humor. He met Yaqui Joe in a little town below the border, and over frequent glasses of tequila, he probed the half-breed's mind, searching for the gimmick that made Cholla foolproof against the outlaw raids.
There had to be something, some signal. If he could learn it, he would find it amusing and a good joke on Bill to drop in, rob Cholla's bank, and get away, thumbing his nose at his old pard.
The time was good. Victorio was on the warpath and had run off horses from the army, killed some soldiers, and fought several pitched battles in which he had come off well, if not always the victor. The country was restless and frightened and pursuit would neither be easily organized nor long continued when every man was afraid to be long away from home.
"Think!" Red struck his hairy fist on the table between them. "Think, Joe! There has to be a signal! Those hombres didn't just pop out of the ground!".
Yaqui Joe shook his head, staring with bleary eyes into his glass. "I remember nothing-- nothing. Except ..".
His voice trailed off, but Big Red grabbed his shoulder and shook him.
"Except what, Joe? Somethin' that was different! Think!".
Yaqui Joe scowled in an effort to round up his thoughts and get a rope on the idea that had come to him. They had been over this so many times before.
"There was nothing!" he insisted. "Only, while we sat in front of the bank, there was a sort of light, like from a glass and the sun. It moved quickly across the street. Like so!" He gestured widely with his hand, knocking his glass to the floor.
Clanahan picked up the glass and filled it once more. He was scowling.
"And that was all? Yuh're shore?".
Waiting until he was sure Gleason was out of. town, Big Red rode in. He did not like to do it, but preferred not to trust to anyone else. At the bank he changed some money, glancing casually around. Then his pulse jumped, and he grinned at the teller who handed him his money.
He walked from the bank, stowing away his money.
So that was it! Andof course, it could be nothing else.
The bank stood in such a position that the windows caught the full glare of the morning light, and that sunlight flowed through the windows and fell full upon the mirror that covered the upper half of the door that led behind the wickets where the money was kept.
If that door was opened suddenly, a flash of light would be thrown into the windows across the street! A flash that would run along the storefronts the length of the street, throwing the glare into the eyes of the bartender in the saloon, the grocer and the hardware man, and ending upon the faces of the loafers before the livery stable. One at least, and probably more, would see that flash, and the warning would have been given.
He gathered his men carefully, and he knew the men to get for the job. Yaqui Joe, because when sober he was one lump of cold nerve, then Bronco Smith and the Dutchman because they were new in the Cholla country, and skillful, able workmen. Then he waited until Victorio was raiding in the vicinity, and sent a startled Mexican into town with news of the Apache.
With Sheriff Bill Gleason in command, over half the able-bodied men rode out of town, and Big Red, with Yaqui Joe at his side, rode in. Bronco Smith and the Dutchman had come in a few minutes earlier, and it was Smith who blocked the opening of the mirrored door.
The job was swift and smooth. The three men in the bank, taken aback by the blocking of their signal, were tied hand and foot and the money loaded into canvas bags. The four were on their way out of town before a sitter in front of the livery stable recognized the half-breed.
Under a hot, metallic sky the desert lay like a crumpled sheet of dusty copper, scattered with occasional boulders. Here and there it was tufted with cactuses or Joshua palm and slashed by the cancerous scars of dry washes. A lone ranch six miles south of Cholla fell behind them and they pushed on into the afternoon, riding not swiftly but steadily.
Clanahan turned in the saddle and glanced back. His big jaws moved easily over the cud of chewing tobacco, his gray-green eyes squinting against the hard bright glare of the sun.
"Anything in sight?" Bronco did not look around. "Mebbe we'll lose 'em
quick.".
"Gleason ain't easy lost.".
"You got respect for that sheriff.".
"I know him.".
"Maybe Joe's idea goot one, no?" The.
Dutchman struck a match with his left hand cupping it to his cigarette with his palm. "Maybe in Apache country they will not follow?".
"They'll follow. Only in Victorio's country they may not follow far. When we shift hosses we'll be all set.".
"How far to the hosses?".
"Only a few miles." Red indicated a. saw-toothed ridge on the horizon.
"Yonder.".
"We got plenty moneys, no?" The Dutchman slapped a thick palm on his saddlebags and was rewarded with the chink of gold coin. "Och! Mexico City! We go there and I show you how a gentlemans shall live! Mexico City with money to spend! There iss nothing better!".
Two ridges gaped at the sky when they reached the horses, two ridges that lay open like the jaws of a skull. Red Clanahan turned his horse from the dim trail he had followed and dipped down into the gap where lay a wide space of flat ground, partially shaded by two upthrust ledges that held a forty-degree angle above the ground. Four horses waited there, and two pack mules.
Smith nodded, satisfied. "Those mules will take the weight of the gold off our hosses.
Grub, too! Yuh think of everything, Redffwas.
"There's a spring under that corner rock.
Better dump yore canteens and refill them.
Don't waste any time.".
"How about south of here?" Bronco stared off over the desert. "Is there more water?".
"Plenty water." Joe accepted the question. "Latigo Springs tomorrow night, and the day after Seepin' Springs.".
"Good!" Smith bit off a chew of his own. "I was dry as a ten-year-old burro bone when I got here.".
He needed nobody to tell him what that bleak waste to the south would be like without water, or how difficult to find water it would be unless you knew where to look.
"How much did we get?" Dutch inquired.
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