Laramie Holds the Range Part 54

The picture was too much for his restraint. He reined eagerly toward her.

With a laugh she s.h.i.+ed away, struck her horse and dashed ahead.

Laramie spurred after her. But they were on the level creek bottom and riding swiftly. She gave him a long run--more than he had looked for.

He realized, as they raced toward the bridge, that he had for one moment forgotten everything but his complete happiness. He called to Kate to stop. In her zest she spurred the harder. He knew she must not reach the bridge ahead of him. Yet he realized the difficulty he faced; she would not understand; and at every cost he must stop her.

Animated by this sudden instinct of danger he crowded his horse, forged abreast the flying girl, caught her bridle, and to her astonishment dragged her horse and his own rudely to their haunches. They were almost at the bridge itself.

"Back up!" he exclaimed. "Back up!"

"Jim!" she cried, "_please_ don't throw me!"

"Don't speak--back!!" he said low and sharply. Something in the tone and manner of the command admitted of no parley.

With her horse cavorting, half strangled, as he was jerked and backed, Kate, looking amazed at Laramie, saw in his face a man new to her--a man she never had seen before. Not her questioning look, nor the frantic struggles of the rearing horses touched him; nothing in the confusion of the sudden moment drew his eye for an instant from the bridge before him and his drawn revolver was already poised in his hand. Kate knew her part without another protest. She tore her horse's mouth cruelly with the curb. Where the danger was, or what, she did not know, but she could obey orders. Her eyes tried to follow Laramie's, bent ahead. The bottoms spread level in every direction.

The approach to the little bridge and beyond was as open as the day.

Not a living creature was anywhere in sight, nothing with life had anywhere stirred, nothing of sound broke the silence of the morning, except--when Laramie allowed them to stop--the startled breathing of the horses.

"Jim!" exclaimed Kate in awed restraint. "What is it?"

His eyes were riveted straight ahead, but he answered in a most matter-of-fact tone: "There's somebody under that bridge."

She strained her eyes to see something he must have seen that she could not see. The dazzling suns.h.i.+ne, the dusty road, the rough-built, short wooden bridge before them, were all plain enough. And Kate realized for the first time that Laramie, who had been riding on her right was now on her left and presently that his revolver was sheathed and his rifle, which had hung in its scabbard at the horse's shoulder, was slung across the hollow of his right arm.

"Kate," he said, speaking without looking at her, "will you ride back about a mile and wait for me?"

She turned to him: "What are you going to do, Jim?"

"Smoke that fellow out."

She spoke almost in a whisper: "Is it Van Horn, Jim?"

"I don't believe he'd hide there. It's more like Stone."

"Jim! Stone's a deadly shot!"

Looking into the distance he only replied: "From cover. This may be a long-winded affair, Kate." He added, pausing, "you'd better ride as far as the hills."

She looked at him bravely restrained but with all her love in her eyes: "I don't want to leave you, Jim."

"It's poor business for you to be in," he returned firmly. "There's no way to make it pleasant."

"Don't drive me away!"

He hesitated again: "You might do this: Ride back fast about eighty rods. Leave the road there, bear to the west and circle around the little knoll you'll see. There's a clump of willows below the west side of that knoll."

"Do you know every clump of willows in this country, Jim?"

He answered unmoved: "I know that one for I've crawled up there more than once to take observations under that bridge myself. Get around behind those willows and you can see the creek bottom all the way to the bridge. I'm going up the creek about five hundred yards. I'll work down. Whoever's under the bridge can't get away except down the creek. If you see a man trying that, just fire two shots--in the air, close together--I'll understand. If you get into any kind of trouble--which you're kind of trying to do--fire two shots a few seconds apart. I won't be far off."

With a plea to him to be careful--behind which all her agony of apprehension was repressed and mastered--Kate wheeled her horse and galloped back.

Laramie, skirting a depression, rode into a break leading to the creek bed. The creek was practically dry; just a thread of water here and there among the rocks marked the course of flood time. Dismounting, Laramie shook himself out of the saddle and laying his rifle across his arm, walked carefully down-stream along the bed of the creek.

He knew if he were seen first, the fight would be over before he got into it; of chances to kill from cover, the criminal he felt sure he was hunting, would need but one. No man from the Falling Wall country was Stone's superior in the craft of hiding; but none was Laramie's equal in the art of surprise; and Laramie meant, for once, to make an antagonist formidable from cover, show in the open.

With this alone in purpose, he stalked with the patience of an Indian from point to point and cover to cover down toward the bridge; crouching, halting and peering; slipping from the shoulder of a rock to the shelter of a boulder; flattening on his stomach to worm his way under a projecting ledge and sliding noiselessly on his back down the face of a water-worn glacis--but drawing closer all the time to the bridge.

He knew every inch of the ground. He knew how well his quarry had concealed himself to render surprise impossible. But Stone's very safety in this respect made his retreat more difficult. A man lying in wait under the Double-draw, staked practically everything on one chance: that the man he sought to kill should cross the bridge. It were then easy to pick him off from behind. But if the intended victim, suspicious, should get unseen into the creek bed, the skulker could hardly avoid a fight.

Three hundred yards above the bridge, the creek walls open in an ellipse, narrowing abruptly where the bridge spans them. This open s.p.a.ce has been scoured by floods until the bedrock lies like a polished floor and it was now dry except where the piers of the bridge stood in stagnant pools. Once within this amphitheater whose vertical walls rise twenty to thirty feet, no fighting cover is available.

Behind a rocky point that guarded the upper entrance of the opening, stood Laramie. He was watching the shadow cast by a shrub that sprang, shallow-rooted, from a crevice in the bedrock. For an interminable time he waited, only noting the slow swing of the narrow shadow as the morning sun, flooding the rock-basin, rose in majestic course.

Gradually the deflection of the slender indicator, moving like a finger on the rock dial, marked the turn of the sun well past the shoulder of the point at which Laramie must emerge. When that moment came he looked sharply out, sprang from behind the point and ran sidewise into the narrow shadow thrown from the curving wall.

Stone, uneasy and alert, stood under the bridge, his rifle across his arm. The two men saw each other almost at the same instant. For Stone, it was the climax of a hatred long nursed because of a supremacy long challenged. And for him it was an open field with weapons in which his skill was as matchless as Laramie's was held to be, at close quarters, with a Colt's revolver.

Nor had Laramie underestimated the chances of an encounter under such circ.u.mstances. He counted only on the slight advantage of a surprise--knowing from disagreeable experiences how a surprise jars the poise; and there persisted in his mind, what he had never until then hinted to another, that Stone, shooting as an a.s.sa.s.sin from cover and Stone himself facing death, might shoot differently. On these slender hopes he covered Stone, as the ex-rustler jumped his rifle to his check, and cried to him to pitch up.

Stone's answer was a bullet. His shot echoed Laramie's, and as Laramie whipped the hat from his enemy's head, his bullet tore through the right side of Laramie's belt. Bare-headed, and thirsty to close on his antagonist, Stone, jumping from Laramie's second bullet, ran forward, hugging the creek wall, dropped on one knee, fired, and ran in again.

Laramie refused to be tempted from the shadow in which he stood, until Stone, rounding the wall again as he came on, firing, threatened to find partial cover should Laramie stand still. It was a contest of deadly fencing, of steady heads and cool wit, a struggle in instant strategy. And if Stone meant to force Laramie into the suns.h.i.+ne, he now succeeded--but at a fearful cost. Laramie jumped not only into the suns.h.i.+ne but into the blinding sun itself, and when Stone ran in again, Laramie tore open his hip with a bullet. It knocked the foreman over as if it had been a mallet. But he was swiftly up and firing persistently almost outlined with bullets Laramie's figure against the rock wall. He splintered the grip of Laramie's revolver in its holster, he cut the sleeve from his wrist, and tore hair from the right side of his head; but he could not stop him. Enraged, and realizing too late how every possibility in the fight had been figured out by his enemy before he stepped into sight, Stone, crippled, yet forced to circle, dropped once more on his knee to smash in a final shot.

He was covered the instant he knelt. A bullet from Laramie's rifle shook him like a leaf. His head, jerking, sunk to his breast. With a superhuman effort he rallied. He looked at Laramie--narrowly watching--shook the hair from before his eyes and fumbling at the firing lever tried to elevate his rifle to pump. But he swayed on his bent knee; the rifle slipped from his grasp. He sank to the rock floor, clutching with his big hands at the gravel, while Laramie running to him turned him over, s.n.a.t.c.hed his revolver from its holster and throwing it out of reach, lifted his enemy's head.

When Kate, in an agony of suspense, made her way to the creek bed she found Laramie scooping water up in his hands for Stone. She could not go near the wounded man. Only by word from where she stood, piteously, and by dumb sign, she drew Laramie to her to learn whether _he_ was hurt. When he declared he was not, she would not believe him till she had felt his arm where one bullet had cut his sleeve, and where the deadliest had raised a sullen red welt along his temple.

Ben Simeral was first to come along on his way to town, in his wagon.

John Frying Pan was with him. With their help, Laramie got Stone up to the bridge and into the wagon to take to town. He had shut his eyes and refused to talk. Kate made Laramie tell her every detail of the fight and breathed anew the terrors of each moment.

"I stole toward the bridge the minute I heard the firing," she confessed, unsteadily. "Oh, yes, I know! I might have been killed.

But if you were, I wanted to be. How could you tell, when you stopped me so, Jim, there was a man under the bridge?"

"A bunch of bank swallows nests under that bridge right where Stone was hiding," he said, reflecting. "Those swallows always fly out when I ride up to it. If they don't fly out, I don't cross. Today they didn't fly out."

CHAPTER XLII

WARNING

By nightfall Kate had the hope that her father might live. Doctor Carpy, indeed, promised as much, though he confessed to Laramie that he was partly bluffing. It was, he explained, a question of const.i.tution and nerve and he thought Barb had both. For better care he had him brought to town, and within the same hospital walls that sheltered Doubleday, lay Stone, in even more serious condition. The sole promise Carpy would make concerning him was that he would fit him up either for trial, or for his museum--or, as Lefever suggested, for both.

The excitement of the town lay in the pursuit of Van Horn. Laramie during the first uncertain days of her father's condition stayed within Kate's call.

"While Van Horn's loose, Jim," said Tenison one day, "you're the man that's in danger; don't forget that."

"I'd like to forget it," he returned. "But I guess it wouldn't be just exactly safe to. Barb warned me yesterday to look out for a surprise--Van Horn's good at them. Then again he may have left the country--there's no word of him from anybody yet.