by Short, Luke;
“In about twenty minutes, then,” Johnny drawled, “we ride. And this time, we’ll know what we’re shootin’ for.”
Hank looked up at Turk. Hank had ridden long enough to know when a man had been in the saddle countless hours and was dead for sleep. Turk had that look now. He was starved for a good sleep, but Hank saw no sign of protest on his face. Johnny Hendry, when he wanted to, could drive a man hard, and he was wanting to now, Hank saw; and he sighed a little. This was really the beginning of trouble now.
Since Johnny had no means of knowing about Leach’s attempted bushwhack of Major Fitz the night before, he reasoned that the next move would be Leach’s, and that Leach would strike at the Bar 33. So, once they were clear of the malpais, mounted on fresh horses, Johnny headed down through the foothills for the Bar 33. As false dawn was breaking, they cached themselves in the brush of the ridge from which Hank had beheld that first suspicious parley in the corral lot of the Bar 33.
Johnny had the glasses. Hank and Turk lay down to sleep, and when then the first faint light of clean day broke, Johnny focused his glasses on the Bar 33. Already, he had seen the lights in the bunkhouse and the main house, and he was anxious to see what these betokened. His glasses told him. The whole Bar 33 crew was out in the corral lot, a cluster of them around the corral cutting out mounts. They were getting ready to ride.
Relentlessly, Johnny wakened Hank and handed him the glasses, saying, “What do you make of it?”
Hank looked a full minute and said, “Trouble for Leach Wigran.”
Johnny took the glasses back. He picked out Major Fitz’s horse, which was being saddled. Slowly the group took shape. As they mounted, Johnny began to count them. He could see only two men who were not ready to ride, and one of them was the cook. Surprised, Johnny studied them carefully, but again he arrived at the same count.
“He’s a trustin’ soul,” Johnny murmured. “How many men do you see afoot, Hank?”
Hank looked and he reported two.
“Uh-huh,” Johnny said softly. “Maybe our chance has come.”
“Chance?”
“Wake up Turk.”
Hank did, and Turk joined them, his eyes half closed for want of sleep. But as Johnny unfolded his plan, Turk’s eyes opened wide, and he listened carefully. “Suppose we’re seen?” Turk asked at the end.
“We won’t be,” Hank put in. “That one jasper will likely hit for this ridge to act as lookout, and he’ll be asleep in a couple of hours. The cook will go back to the kitchen. Fitz ain’t the kind of man who’ll give anybody credit for thinkin’ faster’n he does.”
“Then what’s holdin’ us?” Turk growled.
They waited until the cavalcade of horsemen rode out of the Bar 33, headed for the foothills. Fitz, Johnny guessed, would take to cover, so as to keep his movements as secret as possible.
Then they got their own horses, mounted, rode along the side of the ridge toward the west. Soon the ridge petered out, but its bulk still remained between them and the house. Hank cut off straight across the flats until he came to an arroyo. “This is the one,” he said. “This’ll take us close.”
They put their horses down into this dry stream bed, and Hank led off, first warning them to lean down over their saddle horns, so that their heads would not be visible above the banks of the arroyo. They rode in silence for a good twenty minutes, and as they progressed, the banks kept getting steeper and higher. Presently, Hank reined and motioned to the bank. “This is the closest spot.”
Johnny dismounted, took off his hat, climbed the bank, and, where a clump of sagebrush raised its icy-green branches over the very lip of the arroyo, he stuck up his head.
The main house was only three hundred feet away. Between it and arroyo, there was a tangle of wild currant bushes which the major had left to serve as a kind of landscaping. The house was broadside to them, hiding the cookshack and most of the corrals.
Johnny beckoned them up, and crawled up himself. Then they started the careful approach to the house, keeping in the thick shelter of the currant bushes. Once they had achieved the side of the house, Johnny said, “Raise every window you can, Hank. And you and me, Turk, we’ll gather up this dry grass.”
A hundred sweeping winds had stacked tumbleweed at the base of every bush. They put them against the side of the house in a tinder-dry pile. As Hank raised each window—and none of them were locked—Turk and Johnny followed him with great armfuls of tumbleweed and dry brush, which they shoved inside. They worked fast and hard, and in ten minutes had contrived to pile an enormous amount of tinder inside the house. The rest was simple, and yet none of them wanted to strike a match.
Johnny, watching Hank’s uneasy gaze, said grimly, “All right, I never asked a man to do a thing I wouldn’t do.”
“It ain’t that,” Hank muttered. “It’s just—Oh, shucks, Johnny. This ain’t no way to fight a man.”
Johnny’s hard eyes did not soften, but his voice was reasonable as he looked from Hank to Turk. “Nobody said it was. But you ain’t fightin’ a man—you’re fightin’ a jasper that’d shoot you in the back, and that’d steal a widow to starvation and laugh.”
He whipped the match across his Levi’s leg, and while it was still flaring, he tossed it in the window. Soon Hank and Turk were at work. When, by hoisting themselves up to window level, they had made sure that the tumbleweed had caught, they returned to the arroyo, leaving the windows open to create a draft that would help kindle the fire.
In the arroyo, they wasted no time, but mounted at once and rode back the way they had come, again seeking the ridge.
When Johnny had the glasses again, he trained them on the house. Only the faintest smoke streamers were rising into the still air. The cook, busy at his work on the back porch of the cookshack, hadn’t noticed yet. Soon the smoke started to darken, a sign that the fire had taken hold of wood and curtains and carpets. It was the other ranch hand who discovered the fire. He came running around the end of the cookshack, pointing frantically at the house, and the cook dropped his work to run with him.
They disappeared into the house, and the smoke at once increased as soon as the cross draft from the open door caught it. Almost immediately the cook and the puncher ran out again, coughing and rubbing their eyes.
Their attempts to put out the crackling flames were as ludicrous as they were futile. As soon as the water buckets from the cookshack and bunkhouse had been thrown through a window, the two of them realized the hopelessness of their fight, and stood, arms akimbo, watching the fire’s hungry progress.
“That’ll raise enough smoke for Fitz to see,” Johnny said grimly. “And after that, he’ll wonder why he ever waited this long to ride out after Leach.”
The walls themselves were slow to catch since they were of solid logs flattened on both sides. But slowly and surely the interior was gutted, and the smoke that poured out rose in a dust-colored pillar to the cloudless sky.
It wasn’t long before Hank, who had been watching in the direction where Fitz had ridden, turned and said, “And now, gents, we’d better ride. Here comes Fitz.”
They didn’t linger to see his arrival. Mounted, they turned east along the ridge, raised their horses to a smart trot, and headed for the mountains. The first step in fanning the Fitz-Wigran feud to open violence had been accomplished. And when thieves fall out—
The second step was to come later, and it was the fruit of the first. All day long, they traveled tirelessly and swiftly toward the Running W, so that it was late afternoon when they rode across Running W range. They crossed the road that ran between the hills to the Running W, and it was here that Johnny drew up.
“You’ve got your orders,” he told them. “Scatter out. Give me the first shot. Watch out for any guards Leach has got out, and meet me on the same ridge where we watched the place before.”
Hank and Turk rode north up one ridge, and Johnny crossed the road and went on up the other. He rode carefully in the timber, reining up occasionally t
o listen. He calculated his course as a long circle, which would bring him out above the Running W. Once, approaching the lip of a ridge, he dismounted and cautiously regarded the valley below him where the road ran. He saw the form of a horse in the trees below, and after a moment’s search, picked out its owner crouched in the brush watching the road. Leach Wigran, at least, did not hold with the major’s idea that the best defense is a good offense.
Johnny withdrew and widened his circle. Now he was on the downslope, approaching the basin from the west. His pace slowed now, he sought out a clearing where the Running W was in plain view. Then he reined up, drew his rifle from the saddle boot, and squatted beside his horse, rolling a smoke. When he finished it, his time was up and he set to business. Lying down in the short grass, he raised the sights on his rifle, leveled it, and then sent shot after shot whipping down the slope. The first shot only boomed hollowly against the house, but the next one knocked out a windowpane. A ranch hand who had been out in the wagon shed streaked for the house.
Johnny paused, listening. Another rifle across the valley was sending its flat and reaching whanging over the late-afternoon air; and even as Johnny smiled, the third one joined in. Reloading, he started shooting again and now that he had the range, he picked out window light after window light. A flurry of shots answered him from the house, but these were blind and aimless, mere bravado. When Johnny had exhausted half his shells, he rose, mounted his horse, and traveled along the ridge until he came to the spot where they had waited before. The other shots had ceased.
Observing the house, he saw no movement there. It was as if they were waiting for an open attack. Minutes later, he saw a horseman approach the valley on the far side and sit motionless in his saddle for many moments. Then this man put spurs to his horse and rode madly for the house and the shelter of a wagon shed. This was the first of the guards. In five minutes Hank arrived, and together they watching the second, third, and fourth guards approach the house in the same manner.
When Turk arrived, dusk had fallen, and he reported that he had almost been run down by a fifth guard hurrying for the security of the house.
This was as Johnny wanted it. He had planned to warn Leach to expect an attack, so that a surprise move on Major Fitz’s part would not result in wiping out Leach and all his men. For Johnny’s blood was up, and he was playing this hand with a strategy that would have done credit to Major Fitz.
“Why let Fitz clean out Leach or Leach clean out Fitz all of a sudden? Keep ’em fightin’ and let ’em cut each other down. That way, we’ll step in for the cleanup,” he told Hank and Turk as they waited there in the falling dark.
Even after dark, not a light showed in the Running W. Johnny understood the feeling of those tense men waiting inside that house. The hours of watching, their nerves pulling more and more taut until Fitz finally arrived, would be an exquisite torture.
A fingernail moon deep in the west washed its thin light over the basin and house below, and still all was silent, watchful. Johnny began to grow impatient, and he strained to see the house. Once, long after dark, he thought he saw figures moving at the outskirts of the valley and close to the house, but this could well have been Running W men leading their horses to the safety of the barn.
And then, when he ceased looking at the house, and felt the sure grip of sleep take hold of him, a shot broke the stillness of the night. It was the signal for a hundred others. In five seconds, the valley had wakened to an uproar of gunfire, and Johnny knew that Major Fitz had struck at last. Leach had remained quiet, and Fitz, lured by the look of desertion about the house, had ridden up to it.
Now, looking down, Johnny could pick out the places where Fitz’s men were forted up. In every corner of the barn, in the angles of the outhouses and corrals, little telltale pencils of stabbing orange light marked out their hiding-places. And from every window in the house gun flames were licking out into the night.
For a full ten minutes, this fumbling in the dark continued, Johnny watching it with growing impatience. This was not like Major Fitz; it had none of his daring and boldness. It might have been a scrap between two bands of peeved rustlers.
Hank watched, saying nothing. Turk, his will finally succumbing to his body, lay stretched out in sleep in the grass.
And then, suddenly, there was a rumbling, bellowing, earth-shaking explosion, and a great spout of orange light flared up by the house. By its vast and sudden blink, Johnny saw that one corner of the Running W main house had been dynamited. Following the blast, the wood of the house slowly started to catch fire. The savage hammering of the gunfire swelled the crescendo. At the same time, flames began to show in the big barn, and it seemed only a matter of a few seconds until the shadows of the basin were pushed back by the growing fire of both the house and barn.
“That’s more like it,” Johnny murmured grimly. “That’s the real Fitz.”
But as they watched, it became apparent to Johnny that Leach Wigran and his men were trapped in a burning house. Systematically, too, Fitz’s men were firing the outhouses, leaving only the spacious wagon shed, where the horses were. Soon Leach would have to make the choice of making a run for it or burning alive.
Johnny rose and said to Hank, “Come on.” As they made their way down the slope, Johnny could see the huddled figures of at least six men in the yard of the house. These were the first casualties, but they were not to be the last.
When Johnny and Hank got down to the lower fringe of trees, the fire was well under way at the main house, but the rifle fire had not ceased. Fitz’s men were forted up behind water tanks, the well house, anything that would give them shelter, and were pouring a merciless fire at the house.
Watching it breathlessly, Johnny saw the first Running W man break from the house and run for the shelter of the wagon shed. In that confusion, he made it, and it encouraged two more. They also made it, but now the Bar 33 was rearranging its men, scattering them. It was hard to do, because the three in the wagon shed were sending out an answering fire. After the change, the fifth and sixth runners were cut down before they had run fifty yards.
The most telling fire came from four men forted up beside an overturned wagon by the windmill. Their backs were to Johnny, and he could see their every movement.
Another hardy Running W hand tried running for it, and he, too, was cut down. Swearing, Johnny rose and leveled a shell into his rifle. “This’ll end too quick,” he told Hank savagely. “Smoke those jaspers out from behind that wagon.”
With monotonous precision, Johnny started firing. His first shot kicked up dust from the wagon bed, and one of the riflemen rose and turned to look behind him. His carelessness cost him a slug full in the back, and blindly he tried to run, only to dive onto his face out in the open. Slugs plucked at his body stirring it a little, for the Running W hands were taking no chances.
Johnny kept on firing, Hank joining in, and now the three remaining riflemen knew from what direction they were being harried. One of them made a frantic run for the well house, and he made it, although he had to crawl the last ten feet.
The other two huddled in abject fear. Not seeing any more gunfire from the wagon, the men in the house assayed the trip to the wagon shed. About half of them made it. That path of danger was strewn with dead men. When Johnny reckoned that only Leach Wigran and a few more were left inside, he started to harry the Bar 33 men again, for he wanted Leach Wigran to live. And Leach was the next to attempt the run. Swiftly, Johnny and Hank poured lead into the waiting Bar 33 men, and this time, they were answered. Three riflemen out there had their range, and the slugs whipped through the grass and trees around them.
But doggedly, one eye on Leach, the other on the Bar 33 riflemen, Johnny poured out a hail of lead. When he saw that Leach had reached the safety of the wagon shed, only then did he realize that he and Hank were just missing a scorching blanket of gunfire directed up at them.
They moved to one side. The Bar 33 men could not come over to get them, or they
would lay themselves open to the fire from the wagon shed. The fight settled down now into a gun duel—or so Johnny thought until he saw the first Running W man leave the wagon shed and break for the near timber close to where Johnny and Hank stood. Again Johnny moved, and he and Hank again threw their protective fire over the wagon shed.
Wigran, as if he understood that these men on the timber fringe were his allies, took advantage of their blistering curtain of fire to evacuate the shed. Johnny, shooting blindly now, counted them. Including Leach, who was the last man to leave the shed, there were nine Running W hands left. They were safe now in the protection of the timber.
The firing trickled off, and Johnny waited to count the remaining Bar 33 hands. The house was one blazing bonfire now, throwing so much light that it searched out every shadow of this basin.
Instinctively, the Bar 33 men knew that they were on the defensive now that their enemies were in the timber, and one by one they ran for the wooded terrain opposite. Johnny counted only fifteen of them. That didn’t include Fitz and Carmody, who were probably watching from a ridge up the slope.
Satisfied, Johnny and Hank faded back into the deep timber. There were men calling around them now, and Johnny hoped desperately that Turk would not sleep through this until someone stumbled on him. They made their clearing. Turk was still sleeping, the horses behind him snorting and stomping with excitement.
It was only the work of seconds for them to mount and ride up the slope. Turk, cursing his luck, heard the story from Hank as they rode.
“Nine to seventeen,” Turk murmured. “That sounds better.”
And to Johnny’s tired ears it did, too.
Chapter Twenty: BOOM
Something had happened in Cosmos. The streets were jammed with groups of men conversing excitedly, and the ore freighters roared themselves hoarse in an effort to clear a way through all the confusion. Slowly, two and three at a time, men were leaving town with pack horses and disappearing into the hills. For there was a rush on in Bonanza canyon. Gold had been found there!