The loafers galvanized into sudden interest. The constable started across the street and met Shea midway. He held out one hand, with the other showing his badge of office.
"Get out of my way," said Shea, lifelessly, looking through him.
"None o" that, now," snorted the constable. "You come along with me."
With a smack that was heard for half a block, the axe helve swung a vicious half-circle and landed over the officer"s ear. The constable threw out his hands and fell on his face, lying motionless. Shea strode forward.
"Lay on to him, boys, he"s locoed!" cried Aimes, turning to the men behind. He whirled again to face Shea, and his right hand crept to his hip. "h.e.l.lo, Shea! lay down that--"
"You gave me a drink last night, didn"t you?" said Shea, halting before him.
Aimes laughed, thinking that he perceived what was in the other"s mind.
"Oh, want another, do ye?" he returned. "Well, lay down that--"
"You"re the man that gave me a drink," said Shea. His deep ba.s.s voice boomed upon the morning air like a bell. "If any man dares to give me a drink again, he"ll get worse than this."
Aimes suddenly perceived danger, and whipped out his weapon. Swifter than his hand was the axe helve. It struck his wrist and knocked the revolver away. As he staggered to the blow, the axe helve swung again and smote him over the head. Aimes made a queer noise in his throat and limply sank down.
There was something frightful in the deliberate way those two men had been felled. For a moment Shea stood gazing at the loafers, who shrank back before his blazing eyes. Then:
"I"ll do worse than this to any man who dares give me a drink again," he said.
Without further heed, he pa.s.sed into the garage. Up and down the street men were calling, running. The group outside the place looked at each other, their faces blanched.
"My Lord!" gasped someone. "He"s done killed "em both! In after him, boys."
Thady Shea laid down his bludgeon in front of the dust-white flivver, and began to crank. For almost the first time in his life he had struck a man in cold anger; more terrible than this thought, however, was the acid-like bitterness in his soul.
Just as the engine caught and roared, Shea, rising, saw over his shoulder the string of men pouring in upon him. He had no time to get into his car. With a quick motion he caught up the axe helve; swiftly the foremost men flung themselves upon him, and found him facing them.
There in the obscurity of the little garage ensued a scene that is still told of from Silver City to Magdalena. All noise was drowned in the roar of the engine that throbbed behind Shea. Outside, other men paused to ask what was going on, to group about the figures of Aimes and the constable. Inside, Shea fought for more than his life.
There were six men against him; yet, in the felling of those two outside, the battle had been half won, for the cold terror of Shea"s blows had made itself felt. The first man at him shrieked out and fell, crawling away with a broken arm. The others came in before Shea could recover from the blow, and fastened upon him like dogs upon a mountain lion.
Silent, deadly, Shea swung up his weapon and waited. He took their blows without return. He braced himself against the throbbing car behind him, and awaited his time. Then he began to strike. There was nothing blind and frantic in his blows; rather there was something fearful and inhuman, for inside him was that which rendered him insensible to the smiting fists, and when he brought down his weapon it was with simple and deadly intent.
Three times he struck, each time lifting on his toes, and twice lifting one man who had fastened about his waist. To his three blows, a man reeled away into the darkness; a second plunged forward beneath an adjacent car; a third ran screaming into the open air, across his face a b.l.o.o.d.y blotch. A fourth man, unhurt, turned and ran.
Shea looked down, curiously, at the last a.s.sailant, who was still gripping him around the waist, trying to bend him backward. Then he deliberately heaved up his axe helve and brought down the rounded oval of the halt against the man"s head twice. At the second crunching blow the man"s grip relaxed. Shea threw him, staggering and clutching, clear across the garage floor, then turned and leaped into his car.
With a grinding roar and a honk of the horn, the dust-white flivver went out of the wide-open doorway into the street.
Men jumped aside, yelled, pursued. Somebody fired a revolver, and the bullet smashed the windshield in front of Shea"s face. Other shots sounded, but flew wild. The car went around the nearest corner on two wheels, and shot away toward the west at thirty miles an hour.
Thady Shea had come and gone.
CHAPTER VII-THADY SHEA HAS A VISITOR
Thady Shea was on his way to Number Sixteen. The sheriff was on his way to Silver City with Mrs. Crump, Gilbert, and Lewis. In the ordinary course of events, Thady Shea would have encountered them in the canon north of No Agua. The ordinary course of events did not obtain, however, because of Ben Aimes.
Having sustained nothing worse than a broken wrist and a sore head, Ben Aimes upon being revived at once telephoned the store and post office at No Agua to stop Thady Shea. No Agua was the jumping-off place at the edge of the bad lands, and it was nothing but a long frame building from which radiated all the canon trails to north and west.
When Shea arrived, he found a reception committee awaiting him in the shape of a dozen men, most of whom were mounted upon horses or mules as if they had convened for a Sunday holiday. Shea needed no information upon the subject of his reception. He had previously observed the telephone wires and had drawn his own conclusions. As he drew near to No Agua he was the recipient of a bullet that finished off the windshield and sent a sliver of gla.s.s slithering across his forehead.
What next happened was wild and incoherent in all subsequent reports.
Shea cared absolutely nothing for results, so long as he got through.
When he found his path barred by mounted men, he opened up the throttle wide, shut his eyes, and gripped hard to the wheel. General opinion was that the first bullet had killed him and that the car was running wild; for blood was trickling over his face from his slashed brow, and he was a fearsome sight.
The dust-white flivver smashed head-on into the ma.s.s of men and horses.
It paused as though for breath, then went ahead. The radiator was boiling over; and when that red-hot projectile began to bore its way, things happened. The steam seared into a big mule, and the mule instantly began to plunge and kick. Two horses went down and the flivver climbed over them and their riders. A vaquero was pitched across the hood and with screams of anguish managed to leap away to earth. A horse sat on the right-hand fender and toppled over upon his rider as the car went ahead.
After a moment Thady Shea opened his eyes and looked back upon a scene of wonderful confusion. Men and horses strewed the ground or were plunging in all directions. With a sigh of relief Thady Shea found that he was still going forward; so, in order to avoid the bullets that came swarming and buzzing after him, he aimed for the nearest canon, which was not his proper road at all, and followed the trail blindly.
An hour later this trail petered out at an abandoned mine in the bad lands. With a vague general idea of his directions, Shea went plunging off through the sand, winding his way past huge, eroded ma.s.ses and amid weird pinnacles of wind-blown rock. Somewhere past noon he was in the lava beds, and was apprised of the fact by his tires blowing out one by one.
Lack of pneumatic cushions did not trouble Shea in the least. He punished the poor flivver unmercifully, and by the eternal miracle of flivvers the car kept going. Shea climbed rocky ma.s.ses, shoved through sand, rolled over jutty fields of volcanic rock, and when the afternoon was half gone, came upon automobile tracks. He had found his road at last. From the tracks, he could tell that the sheriff"s automobile had lately gone that way-but in the direction of Silver City.
When, late in the afternoon, Shea came to Number Sixteen, it was deserted. Upon the door of the shack which Mrs. Crump had occupied was pinned a brief note. It read:
Thady: Set rite here till I get back. We are pinched but not for long. My gun is over my bunk. Set t.i.te. Yours,
---- M. CRUMP.
Methodically, Shea went to the other shack and began to wash the dried blood from his face, plastering the cut on his brow.
In front of him he propped the note and studied it, tried to read between the lines. It had been written, he thought grimly, as a forlorn hope, a desperate chance that Thady Shea might yet save the day. Mrs.
Crump had not been aware of his culpability; or, if she had been aware of it, she had mercifully indulged in no recriminations.
"Well, I"m here," said Shea, then glanced quickly around. The sound of his voice in that solitude was startling.
He felt in no mood for theatricalisms, and that morning he had given vent to none; but now, when he tried to express himself otherwise, homely words failed him. So long had he mantled himself in the braggadocio rhetoric and rounded phrases of The Profession, that he could not rid himself of the bluff which had bolstered up his years of miserable failure. Therefore, he held his peace and tried to face facts squarely. The lesson of primitive silence was another thing that he learned in this strange land.
Now, for the first time, he became aware that he had not come off undamaged that morning. His body was bruised, his face and head were much cut about by hard knuckles. Also, he had not eaten since the previous night, and hunger was beginning to ride him. So he took temporary possession of Mrs. Crump"s shack and began to prepare a meal.
The single room of the shack was fairly large, since it had to serve not only as living quarters for Mrs. Crump, but as a dining room for all hands. The walls were rough and bare; like the bunk in the corner, they were formed from hewn timbers, unc.h.i.n.ked. Gilbert had knocked together a big mess table; the seats were puncheon stools; in the lean-to adjoining was the kitchen, consisting of a small sheet-iron stove, frying pan, and a kettle. And yet, about this primitive bareness Mrs. Crump had contrived to throw a fragrance of femininity-a rag of curtain to the unglazed window, a faded photograph of the late departed Crump, a battered clock decorated by a scarlet cactus flower, an ancient, white, mended lace counterpane that covered her bunk. And upon the table, a red cloth that was always spick and span. Only a Mrs. Crump would have bothered to bring such tag ends of womanly presence into this bare and rugged spot in the wilderness.
Contemplating these things, Thady Shea sighed; he sighed at thought of Mehitabel Crump, doomed to live in such a place, dest.i.tute of all things her woman"s heart must have craved. He ceased his sighing, suddenly aware that his bacon was burned.
Thady Shea knew more about prospecting for tungsten than he did about cooking. His coffee was miserable and wretched in spirit. His bacon was brown and hard as wood. Trying to get the beans warmed throughout, he forgot to stir them until unpleasantly reminded of his remissness.
However, by the time he had to light the oil lamp in order to see his food, he had managed to make a fair meal, in quant.i.ty if not in quality.
Afterward, he filled his pipe and sat in the doorway, staring upon the empurpled ma.s.ses of the mountains that were piled into the evening sky, and trying to conclude what he must do next.