The Max Brand Megapack. Max Brand
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he finished his coffee he said, staring into a corner: “I don’t know why I came back to you, Sally.”
“You didn’t mean to come back when you started?”
“Of course not.”
She flushed, and her heart beat loudly to hear his weakness. He was keeping nothing from her; he was thinking aloud; she felt that the bars between them were down again.
“In the first place I went because I had to be seen and known by name in some place far away from you. That was for your sake. In the second place I had to be alone for the work that lay ahead.”
“Drew?”
“Yes. It all worked like a charm. I went to the house of Jerry Wood, told him my name, stayed there until Conklin and several others arrived, hunting for me, and then gave them the slip.”
She did not look up from her occupation, which was the skilful cleaning of her gun.
“It was perfect; the way clear before me; I had dodged through their lines, so to speak, when I gave Conklin the slip, and I could ride straight for Drew and catch him unprepared. Isn’t that clear?”
“But you didn’t?”
She was so calm about it that he grew a little angry; she would not look up from the cleaning of the gun.
“That’s the devil of it; I couldn’t stay away. I had to come back to you.”
She restored the gun to her holster and looked steadily at him; he felt a certain shock in countering her glance.
“Because I thought you might be lonely, Sally.”
“I was.”
It was strange to see how little fencing there was between them. They were like men, long tried in friendship and working together on a great problem full of significance to both.
“Do you know what I kept sayin’ to myself when I found you was gone?”
“Well?”
“Todo es perdo; todo es perdo!”
She had said it so often to herself that now some of the original emotion crept into her voice. His arm went out; they shook hands across their breakfast pans.
She went on: “The next thing is Drew?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no changing you.” She did not wait for his answer. “I know that. I won’t ask questions. If it has to be done we’ll do it quickly; and afterward I can find a way out for us both.”
Something like a foreknowledge came to him, telling him that the thing would never be done—that he had surrendered his last chance of Drew when he turned back to go to Sally. It was as if he took a choice between the killing of the man and the love of the woman. But he said nothing of his forebodings and helped her quietly to rearrange the small pack. They saddled and took the trail which pointed up over the mountains—the same trail which they had ridden in an opposite direction the night before.
He rode with his head turned, taking his last look at the old house of Drew, with its blackened, crumbling sides, when the girl cried softly: “What’s that? Look!”
He stared in the direction of her pointing arm. They were almost directly under the shoulder of rocks which loomed above the trail along the edge of the lake. Anthony saw nothing.
“What was it?”
He checked his horse beside hers.
“I thought I saw something move. I’m not sure. And there—back, Anthony!”
And she whirled her horse. He caught it this time clearly, the unmistakable glint of the morning light on steel, and he turned the grey sharply. At the same time a rattling blast of revolver shots crackled above them; the grey reared and pitched back.
By inches he escaped the fall of the horse, slipping from the saddle in the nick of time. A bullet whipped his hat from his head. Then the hand of the girl clutched his shoulder.
“Stirrup and saddle, Anthony!”
He seized the pommel of the saddle, hooked his foot into the stirrup which she abandoned to him, and she spurred back toward the old house.
A shout followed them, a roar that ended in a harsh rattle of curses; they heard the spat of bullets several times on the trees past which they whirled. But it was only a second before they were once more in the shelter of the house. He stood in the centre of the room, stunned, staring stupidly around him. It was not fear of death that benumbed him, but a rising horror that he should be so trapped—like a wild beast cornered and about to be worried to death by dogs.
As for escape, there was simply no chance—it was impossible. On three sides the lake, still beautiful, though the colour was fading from it, effectively blocked their way. On the fourth and narrowest side there was the shoulder of rocks, not only blocking them, but affording a perfect shelter for Nash and his men, for they did not doubt that it was he.
“They think they’ve got us,” said a fiercely exultant voice beside him, “but we ain’t started to make all the trouble we’re goin’ to make.”
Life came back to him as he looked at her. She was trembling with excitement, but it was the tremor of eagerness, not the unmistakable sick palsy of fear. He drew out a large handkerchief of fine, white linen and tied it to a long splinter of wood which he tore away from one of the rotten boards.
“Go out with this,” he said. “They aren’t after you, Sally. This is west of the Rockies, thank God, and a woman is safe with the worst man that ever committed murder.”
She said: “D’you mean this, Anthony?”
“I’m trying to mean it.”
She snatched the stick and snapped it into small pieces.
“Does that look final, Anthony?”
He could not answer for a moment. At last he said: “What a woman you would have made for a wife, Sally Fortune; what a fine pal!”
But she laughed, a mirth not forced and harsh, but clear and ringing.
“Anthony, ain’t this better’n marriage?”
“By God,” he answered, “I almost think you’re right.”
For answer a bullet ripped through the right-hand wall and buried itself in a beam on the opposite side of the room.
“Listen!” she said.
There was a fresh crackle of guns, the reports louder and longer drawn.
“Rifles,” said Sally Fortune. “I knew no bullet from a six-gun could carry like that one.”
The little, sharp sounds of splintering and crunching began everywhere. A cloud of soot spilled down the chimney and across the hearth. A furrow ploughed across the floor, lifting a splinter as long and even as if it had been grooved out by a machine.
“Look!” said Sally, “they’re firin’ breast high to catch us standing, and on the level of the floor to get us if we lie down. That’s Nash. I know his trademark.”
“From the back of the house we can answer them,” said Bard. “Let’s try it.”
“Pepper for their salt, eh?” answered Sally, and they ran back through the old shack to the last room.
CHAPTER XXXIX
LEGAL MURDER
As Drew entered his bedroom he found the doctor in the act of restoring the thermometer to its case. His coat was off and his sleeves rolled up to the elbow; he looked more like a man preparing to chop wood than a physician engaging in a struggle with death; but Dr. Young had the fighting strain. Otherwise he would never have persisted in Eldara.
Already the subtle atmosphere of sickness had come upon