Blackie drew back and slipped his hand covertly into his coat pocket.
Thornton, giving no sign that he had seen, said briefly to Hap Smith:
"You"ve talked things over with Banker Templeton? And with Comstock?"
"Yes," said Hap Smith, his thick, squat figure growing tense where he sat as though with a sudden nervous bracing within. "Yes."
"And you expected me here? You will give me a free hand?"
"Yes," cried Smith ringingly. "d.a.m.n "em, yes. Go to it, Buck!"
Thornton turned stern eyes upon Blackie.
"I can shoot twelve holes through you before you get your hand out of your pocket," he said crisply. "You d.a.m.ned stool-pigeon! Now, suppose you pull your hand out ... _empty_! ... and stick it up high above your head. Think it over, Blackie, before you take any fool chances."
His left hand held Comet"s reins gathered up close as he spoke; his right rested lightly on the horn of his saddle. Blackie plainly hesitated; a tinge of red warmed his swarthy cheek; his eyes glittered evilly.... Then suddenly he whipped out his hand, a revolver in it....
But Thornton, for all of the handicap, fired first. His own right hand went its swift, sure way to the gun swinging loose in its holster under his left arm pit; he jabbed it forward even as he swung himself to one side in the saddle, and fired. The revolver slipped from Blackie"s hand and clattered down to the bed of the wagon while Blackie, crying out chokingly, his face going white with fear, clutched at his shoulder and gave up the fight.
With scant time allowed in their plans to waste on such as Blackie he was made to lie down in the bottom of the wagon, his wrists bound, his wound very rudely bandaged, his body screened from any chance view by the boxes and mail bags and a handkerchief jammed into his mouth. Within ten minutes Hap Smith was clattering on, his and the guard"s mouths and eyes grim and hard, and Thornton had again dropped behind, just out of sight around the first bend in the road.
"And now, my boy," muttered Hap Smith to his friend the guard, "keep both eyes peeled and your trigger-finger free. h.e.l.l"s goin" to pop in considerable less"n no time."
Nor was the stage driver unduly pessimistic. Half an hour after Blackie had gone down among boxes and bags the lumbering vehicle thundered into one of the many deep gorges through which the narrow road wound. Here was a sharp turn and a bit of steep grade to take on the run if the stage were to keep to schedule time. But suddenly and with a curse from Smith and a sharp exclamation from the guard, Hap slammed on his brake.
A newly fallen pine tree, three feet thick, lay across the road.
The guard"s rifle was ready in his hands; in a flash Hap Smith had dropped his reins so that they were held only by the ring caught over the little hook at the back of the seat and had whipped out his own big ugly revolver. His eyes ran this way and that; in his soul he knew well enough that no mere bit of chance had thrown the obstruction across his way. But never a head nor an arm nor a rifle barrel rewarded his look.
Until, suddenly, heralded by a curt shouted command, a man rode out into the open road from the mouth of a canon.
"Don"t be a fool, Smith! Take a little look-around first!"
It was a voice eminently cool and steady and insolent. Though his gun rose slowly Hap Smith heeded the note of arrogance and, with a hard finger crooking to the trigger, looked about him again. And this time not in vain. Yonder, from across the top of a boulder, a rifle barrel bore unwaveringly upon the breadth of his chest; ten feet higher up on the mountainside where there was a pile of granite rocks and a handful of scrub brush, a second rifle gave its sinister silent warning; two other guns looked forth from the other side of the road ... in all, at least five armed men....
Hap Smith"s eyes went back to the man sitting his horse in the middle of the road, just across the fallen pine tree. A tall, powerfully built man dressed quite as Hap Smith and the guard had been told to expect: black, s.h.a.ggy chaps, grey shirt and neck-handkerchief; broad black hat; red bandana across his face with wide slits for the eyes. And yet both of the men in the stage stared and were on the verge of uncertainty; had they not been prepared both would have sworn that it was Buck Thornton on Buck Thornton"s horse; and later they would, no doubt, have sworn to Buck Thornton"s saddle.
Five to two, seemed the odds, with all of the highwaymen saving the one bold figure screened from view and so holding the advantage of position.
And yet, for once, the odds were not what they seemed.
For now there came abruptly, and utterly with no sign of warning, the answer to the last big play of Ben Broderick and Henry Pollard and the rest. Into the road out of the same canon from which the masked man on the horse had come now rode two more men, side by side and with a thunderous racket of pounding hoofs beating at rocky soil, their heads up, their faces unhidden, their eyes hard and bright and their right hands lifted a little. Two-Hand Billy Comstock and Buck Thornton, come at the top speed of a swinging gallop to alter the odds and take a hand.
And as Thornton"s horse"s hoofs struck in the dust of the road and the masked rider swung about, startled in the moment of his supreme arrogant confidence, it looked to those who saw as if there came Buck Thornton on one big grey horse racing down upon another Buck Thornton on that big grey"s mate. With but a hundred yards between them....
"Pull the rag off your face, Broderick!" shouted Thornton savagely.
And oddly enough Ben Broderick, with a swift realization that a bandana hiding his face now could no longer befriend him and might flap across his eyes at a time when he should see straight and quick, yanked it away. And with the same gesture, he jerked his lifted gun down and started firing, straight at Thornton.
Of the five rifles trained upon those in the stage not a one was silent now. Hap Smith jumped to his feet and fired as fast as he could work the trigger; the man at his side leaped down into the road, crouched at the wagon wheel and poured shot after shot into the brush whence he had seen the muzzles of two guns. Before Ben Broderick"s pistol had broken the silence Buck Thornton had fired from the hip; and Two-Hand Billy Comstock, his reins on his saddle horn, was freshening his right to his t.i.tle, firing with one gun after the other in regular, mechanical fashion.
Hap Smith was the first man down; he toppled, steadied himself, fired again and collapsed, sliding down against the dash board and thence to the ground. His horses had plunged, leaped and in a tangle of straining harness tugged this way and that a moment and then with the stage jerking and toppling after them went down over a six-foot bank and into the thicket of willows along the creek bed. With them went Blackie, his face showing a moment, grey with fear....
Hap Smith, alive simply because the trampling horses had whirled the other way, lifted himself a half dozen inches from the road bed, struggled with his gun and fainted.... The guard saw a head exposed from behind a tree and sent a 30-30 rifle ball crashing through it; on the instant another bullet from another quarter compacted with his own body and he went down, shot through the shoulder....
Thornton"s eyes were for Ben Broderick alone. And, it would seem, Broderick"s for Thornton. But in their expressions there was nothing of similarity; in Thornton"s was a stern readiness to mete out punishment while from Broderick"s there looked forth a sudden furtiveness, a feverish desire for escape.
Broderick had never drawn to himself the epithet of coward. But now he knew what he was doing, where wisdom pointed and what was his one chance. There was still a good fifty yards between him and the man who rode down upon him, a long shot for a revolver when the horses which both men bestrode were rearing and plunging wildly. Broderick bent forward suddenly, whirled his horse, drove his spurs deep into the grey"s sides and in a flash had cleared the fallen log, shot around the bend in the road and, taking his desperate chance with all of the cool defiance of danger which was a part of the man, sent his mount leaping down the steepening bank, into the willow thicket and on across.
Shouting mightily and wrathfully, after him came Buck Thornton. But Broderick had the few yards" headstart and, for the moment his destiny was with him. Thornton saw only a thicket of willows wildly disturbed as Broderick went threshing through them and knew that for the present at least Broderick was beyond pursuit.
Swinging about angrily he rode back to join Comstock. Already the battle there in the canon was over, the smell of powder was gone from the still air, the last reverberating echo of a shot had died away. And in the road lay three men, two of them severely wounded while the other was already dead. Stooping over this man, a queer look in his eyes, stood Comstock.
"I hankered to bring him in alive," he muttered. "But, after all it"s just as well. And it had to be him or me."
"Pollard?" asked Thornton quickly. But Comstock shook his head. Then Thornton, riding close, looking down from the saddle, saw the white upturned face. This time as his eyes came back to Comstock, Comstock nodded.
"Cole Dalton, sheriff," he said gravely. "Yes. And he"s the man I came all this way to gather in, Buck. I"ve been after him for seven years, never guessing until lately that he was out here working the old Henry Plummer game of sheriff and badman at the same time. He"s kept under cover, that being always his way; you"d never have thought that Pollard, Broderick, Bedloe were all tools.... But, I got him, Buck. At last."
A moment only Thornton stared incredulously. Then his shoulders twitched as though this was a matter which could not concern him at present and he had other things to think of.
"Pollard?" he asked shortly.
"Over yonder." Comstock nodded toward the patch of brush on the mountainside. "Shot through the head."
"And the others? One was the Kid, wasn"t it?..."
But now the Kid answered for himself. He rose to his knees among the stunted manzanita bushes not twenty steps from them and for a moment knelt there, his big bulky body wavering as he tried to bring his rifle to rest at his shoulder, his eyes peering out wildly from a blood smeared face. But his gesture was awkward and slow and uncertain; he was too badly hurt to shoot straight or quick, and Thornton, swift and sure and yet merciful withal, was before him. The Kid"s rifle clattered to the ground; the Kid"s left arm, the bone broken, dropped uselessly to his side. He tried to steady the gun with his one good arm alone, but it shook hopelessly. He dropped it and turned bloodshot eyes on Thornton.
"d.a.m.n you," he said tonelessly. "Better do a clean job, you white-livered coward, or I"ll see you hang yet for killin" Charlie...."
"I was outside when he was shot," said Thornton coolly. "I saw just as much as you did. Somebody shot him from behind me."
"Liar!" jeered Bedloe. "An"..."
"Don"t be a fool, Bedloe," snapped Comstock. "The man you want is the same man we want; only the other day he had a quarrel with Charlie and got a bullet alongside the head...."
"Not Ben Broderick!" gasped the Kid stupidly. "Not him!"
"I think your little friend Jimmie Clayton knew," said Comstock. "And you ought to know that Thornton isn"t that kind."
With widening eyes the Kid stared at him. At last he got again to his knees; finally and shakily to his feet.
"Jimmie tol" me to watch him," he muttered thickly. "An" him an" Charlie did have words...."
He stared at them stupidly, hesitated, pondered the matter. Then he turned and went lumbering down the road. Comstock, stepping forward swiftly, called out:
"I say, Bedloe! None of that...."
But Bedloe neither turned again nor paused. Thornton"s hand shut down hard on Comstock"s arm.
"He"s going after Broderick," he said sharply. "Don"t you see? He"ll know where Broderick is. And we don"t. Besides ... I don"t know just why we should stop him.... If Broderick did kill Charlie...."
Comstock went back to administer to Hap Smith and the guard. Thornton watched the Kid go to a horse hidden in a clump of trees; then as Bedloe rode down into the road and pa.s.sed on whither it led, sitting slumped-forward and seeming at each step about to fall, Thornton rode after him. The Kid did not so much as look around; perhaps it mattered to him not in the least just then who followed or how many ... so that they left him to ride on ahead....