Oh, You Tex! Part 44

The outlaw knew that it would be nip and tuck to reach Palo Duro, close though it was. He abandoned at once his hopes of racing up the canon until the Apaches dropped the pursuit. It was now solely a question of speed. He must get into the gulch, even though he had to kill his bronco to do it. After that he must trust to luck and hold the redskins off as long as he could. There was always a chance that Ellison's Rangers might be close. Homer Dinsmore knew how slender a thread it was upon which to hang a hope, but it was the only one they had.

His quirt rose and fell once, though he recognized that his horse was doing its best. But the lash fell in the air and did not burn the flank of the animal. He patted its neck. He murmured encouragement in its ear.

"Good old Black Jack, I knew you wouldn't throw down on me. Keep a-humpin', old-timer.... You're doin' fine.... Here we are at Palo Duro.... Another half-mile, pal."

Dinsmore turned to the left after they had dropped down a shale slide into the canon. The trail wound through a thick growth of young foliage close to the bed of the stream.

The man slipped down from the back of the laboring horse and followed it up the trail. Once he caught a glimpse of the savages coming down the shale slide and took a shot through the brush.

"Got one of their horses," he told 'Mona. "That'll keep 'em for a while and give us a few minutes. They'll figure I'll try to hold 'em here."

'Mona let the horse pick its way up the rapidly ascending trail.

Presently the canon opened a little. Its walls fell back from a small, gra.s.sy valley containing two or three acres. The trail led up a ledge of rock jutting out from one of the sheer faces of cliff. Presently it dipped down behind some great boulders that had fallen from above some time in the ages that this great cleft had been in the making.

A voice hailed them. "That you, Homer?"

"Yep. The 'Paches are right on our heels, Steve."

Gurley let out a wailing oath. "G.o.ddlemighty, man, why did you come here?"

"Driven in. They chased us ten miles. Better 'light, ma'am. We're liable to stay here quite a spell." Dinsmore unsaddled the horse and tied it to a shrub. "You're sure all in, Black Jack. Mebbe you'll never be the same bronc again. I've got this to say, old pal. I never straddled a better hawss than you. That goes without copperin'." He patted its sweat-stained neck, fondled its nose for a moment, then turned briskly to the business in hand. "Get behind that p'int o' rocks, Steve. I'll cover the trail up. Girl, you'll find a kind of cave under that flat boulder. You get in there an' hunt cover."

'Mona did as she was told. Inside the cave were blankets, a saddle, the remains of an old camp-fire, and a piece of jerked venison hanging from a peg driven between two rocks. There were, too, a rifle leaning against the big boulder and a canvas bag containing ammunition.

The rifle was a '73. She busied herself loading it. Just as she finished there came to her the crack of Dinsmore's repeater.

The outlaw gave a little whoop of exultation.

"Tally one."

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

A CRY OUT OF THE NIGHT

Night fell before the rescue party reached Palo Duro. The canon was at that time a _terra incognita_ to these cattlemen of the Panhandle. To attempt to explore it in the darkness would be to court disaster. The Apaches might trap the whole party.

But neither the Ranger nor Wadley could endure the thought of waiting till morning to push forward. The anxiety that weighed on them both could find relief only in action.

Jack made a proposal to Ramona's father. "We've got to throw off and camp here. No two ways about that. But I'm goin' to ride forward to Palo Duro an' see what I can find out. Want to go along?"

"Boy, I had in mind that very thing. We'll leave Jumbo in charge of the camp with orders to get started soon as he can see in the mo'nin'."

The two men rode into the darkness. They knew the general direction of Palo Duro and were both plainsmen enough to follow a straight course even in the blackest night. They traveled at a fast road gait, letting the horses pick their own way through the mesquite. Presently a star came out--and another. Banked clouds scudded across the sky in squadrons.

At last, below their feet, lay the great earth rift that made Palo Duro.

It stretched before them an impenetrable black gulf of silence.

"No use trying to go down at random," said Jack, peering into its bottomless deeps. "Even if we didn't break our necks we'd get lost down there. My notion is for me to follow the bank in one direction an' for you to take the other. We might hear something."

"Sounds reasonable," agreed Wadley.

The cattleman turned to the left, the Ranger to the right. Roberts rode at a slow trot, stopping every few minutes to listen for any noise that might rise from the gulch.

His mind was full of pictures of the girl, one following another inconsequently. They stabbed him poignantly. He had a white dream of her moving down the street at Tascosa with step elastic, the sun sparkling in her soft, wavy hair. Another memory jumped to the fore of her on the stage, avoiding with shy distress the advances of the salesman he had jolted into his place. He saw her grave and gay, sweet and candid and sincere, but always just emerging with innocent radiance from the chrysalis of childhood.

Her presence was so near, she was so intimately close, that more than once he pulled up under an impression that she was calling him.

It was while he was waiting so, his weight resting easily in the saddle, that out of the night there came to him a faint, far-away cry of dreadful agony. The sound of it shook Jack to the soul. Cold beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. Gooseflesh ran down his spine.

His hand trembled. The heart inside his ribs was a heavy weight of ice.

Though he had never heard it before, the Ranger knew that awful cry for the scream of a man in torment. The Apaches were torturing a captured prisoner.

If Dinsmore had been captured by them the chances were that 'Mona had been taken, too, unless he had given her the horse and remained to hold the savages back.

Roberts galloped wildly along the edge of the rift. Once again he heard that long-drawn wail of anguish and pulled up his horse to listen, the while he shook like a man with a heavy chill.

Before the sound of it had died away a shot echoed up the canon to him.

His heart seemed to give an answering lift of relief. Some one was still holding the Apaches at bay. He fired at once as a message that help was on the way.

His trained ear told him that the rifle had been fired scarcely a hundred yards below him, apparently from some ledge of the cliff well up from the bottom of the gulch. It might have come from the defenders or it might have been a shot fired by an Apache. Jack determined to find out.

He unfastened the _tientos_ of his saddle which held the lariat. A scrub oak jutted up from the edge of the cliff and to this he tied securely one end of the rope. Rifle in hand, he worked over the edge and lowered himself foot by foot. The rope spun round like a thing alive, b.u.mped him against the rock wall, twisted in the other direction, and rubbed his face against the harsh stone. He had no a.s.surance that the lariat would reach to the foot of the cliff, and as he went jerkily down, hand under hand, he knew that at any moment he might come to the end of it and be dashed against the boulders below.

His foot touched loose rubble, and he could see that the face of the precipice was rooted here in a slope that led down steeply to another wall. The ledge was like a roof pitched at an extremely acute angle. He had to get down on hands and knees to keep from sliding to the edge of the second precipice. At every movement he started small avalanches of stone and dirt. He crept forward with the utmost caution, dragging the rifle by his side.

A shot rang out scarcely fifty yards from him, fired from the same ledge upon which he was crawling.

Had that shot been fired by an Apache or by those whom he had come to aid?

CHAPTER XL

GURLEY'S GET-AWAY

The boulder cave to which the Apaches had driven Dinsmore and Ramona had long since been picked out by the outlaws as a defensible position in case of need. The ledge that ran up to it on the right offered no cover for attackers. It was scarcely three feet wide, and above and below it the wall was for practical purposes perpendicular. In antic.i.p.ation of a day when his gang might be rounded up by a posse, Pete Dinsmore had gone over the path and flung down into the gulch every bit of quartz big enough to shelter a man.

The contour of the rock face back of the big boulders was concave, so that the defenders were protected from sharpshooters at the edge of the precipice above.

Another way led up from the bed of the creek by means of a very rough and broken climb terminating in the loose rubble about the point where the ledge ran out. This Dinsmore had set Gurley to watch, but it was not likely that the Indians would reach here for several hours a point dangerous to the attacked.

Of what happened that day Ramona saw little. She loaded rifles and pushed them out to Dinsmore from the safety of the cave. Once he had shouted out to her or to Gurley news of a second successful shot.