Grant had expected it from the outside, but it came from within. Bud and Lon Calloway were riding the lease boundary, Grant was in the bunkhouse when he heard the shrill, desperate scream pierce the darkness. It was Rhea's voice and it was the voice of despair, the voice of a person who sees her world suddenly crash down around her in ruins.
Grant was on his feet immediately. Grabbing his wind-breaker and carbine, he was out in the bitter wind before Rhea's first cry was dead. From the bunkhouse he ran into a world of black shadow and dancing red light and suddenly realized that the partially finished derrick was burning.
He heard Rhea calling out again, in the darkness, “Joe, the derrick's on fire!”
Even then, it struck him as faintly amusing that she should call him “Joe” again in this time of need. He rushed headlong into the flickering darkness, but Rhea was not there. He fired his carbine three times into the air—a prearranged signal to the line riders.
Almost immediately he heard Bud Muller's big-footed clay-bank stallion pounding in from the north. And the sound of shooting also woke up the crew in the bunkhouse and they came staggering out in the shocking wind, bleary-eyed and sullen as they gazed unfeelingly at the burning derrick. Then he saw Rhea racing toward the fire dragging a heavy piece of canvas tarp through the mud.
Grant paused for a moment in his blind race and tried to get the complete picture in his mind and form a decision. It looked as if the fire had started in the partially completed belt house near the windward corner of the derrick floor, and now the bright flames were racing over the floor and up the stout legs of the structure. He knew that in a matter of minutes the fire would be beyond control. Everything about a derrick like this was soaked with oil—even before the well was spudded in, even before the structure was completed— it came from the grease and oil of the engine and drilling tools, from the oil-soaked wood of the reclaimed derrick timbers.
The ground was covered with mud and icy little ponds, and the bend of Slush Creek was less than a hundred yards away, still he knew that water was not the answer. Then he thought of the tent—the bunk tent that they had taken down when the bunkhouse was built—and he wheeled in his tracks and raced toward the shielded side of the dugout.
Now he could see Bud's claybank headed toward the derrick, and Grant raised his carbine once more and fired into the air. “Bud, over here!” Young Muller hesitated a moment, then wheeled the horse around and headed toward the shack.
“Get that crew over here!” Grant yelled. “I don't care how you do it, use your gun if you have to, but get them over here!”
Now the boy saw Grant grab hold of the cumbersome mass of folded canvas and pull it out on the ground, and he understood.
As Grant worked he could see the blaze dancing higher about the derrick legs, and he could see Rhea beating frantically with her piece of canvas. Rhea had the right answer. Water was no good against an oil fire, even if they could get enough of it to the derrick. The fire had to be smothered if it was to be stopped at all; it had to be clubbed lifeless like some hungry monster.
Straining against the tough canvas, Grant tore it with the sharp heel of his boot and ripped the bunk tent into several pieces. Bud Muller was herding the reluctant crew toward the dugout, cursing wildly, threatening them with his revolver. When they reached the shack, Grant handed out the pieces of canvas.
“Get them to the derrick fast!” he shouted to Bud. “And get your crazy sister away from there before she gets hurt!”
By this time Calloway had ridden in from the far corner of the lease. Morphy, the other driller, had produced a shotgun and was helping Bud herd the crew toward the burning derrick.
There are enough of them to handle the fire, Grant thought to himself. Young Muller will shoot them if they don't. And if he doesn't, Rhea will.
Grant did not follow the others but moved back into the deep shadows, shielding his eyes against die glare of the fire as he raked the barren landscape with a searching gaze. Until now there had not been time to wonder how the fire had got started, but common sense told him that it had been no accident.
He moved deeper into the darkness, watching for some sign of movement against the fire-splotched land. The night wind sliced through his windbreaker like an icy razor; a flurry of misty snow began to fall, causing a curious halo of light to form about the burning rig.
Several minutes passed and he waited, not moving. And then he felt himself go rigid as something flitted across the ground from one clump of brush to the other. The figure was not recognizable as a man, but Grant knew that it was a man. It was the man who had set the fire, the man Farley had hired to burn them off the lease.
Then he saw the movement again, a vague figure behind a gauzy curtain of snow racing toward the far bend of Slush Creek. He was now about a hundred yards behind the derrick and running to the right.
Grant reloaded his carbine. Farley needed a lesson, and this time he was going to get it!
At an easy, loose-jointed lope he quartered across the open field to head the man off near the bend. For a moment he lost sight of the fleeing figure in some brush. Then a rifle cracked in the darkness, the sound strangely flat and muffled by the fight blanket of snow.
Grant crouched and ran quickly toward a thicket of blackjack; the rifle spoke again with its matter-of-fact voice, and this time Grant felt the burning hiss of the slug a few inches over his head and he dived for the ground.
For a moment there was silence. The fire from the burning derrick still lighted a great circle around the rig, but Grant and the rifleman lay in darkness. Then Grant began to hear his own breathing and the hammering of his own heart. This was not his kind of business. But now something in the darkness told him that tonight he would have to kill or be killed. The last bullet had been mere inches above his head. The rifleman meant business.
It was a strange feeling, lying there in the darkness with an armed enemy a bare forty yards away and suddenly to realize that within a few minutes one of them would probably be dead. It hadn't been this way at Vinita when the two cowhands had jumped him. It had never been this way before.
But you're an outlaw now, he reminded himself. Maybe this is the kind of thing outlaws have to get used to.
Then he remembered the beating that he had taken at Farley's hands in the Wheel House, and a good part of his anxiety became anger. Slowly, he lifted himself to his hands and knees and began crawling away from the thicket. He heard movement ahead and knew that the rifleman was working his way toward the creek.
For one brief instant Grant heard the impatient stamping of iron-shod hoofs from the direction of the creek and immediately understood what the rifleman was trying to do. Somewhere down there he had a horse staked out. If he got to the horse there would be nothing Grant could do to stop him.
And he had to stop him. That was the thought that commanded Grant's mind as he shoved himself erect and began racing toward that dark, twisting bend of the creek. It was strange that he should think of Dagget at a time like this, but the squat, solemn marshal was very much in his thoughts. If this rifleman was working for Farley, Dagget would have Farley's skin, and maybe the Mullers would see the end of their troubles. Maybe, Grant thought bleakly, I'll be able to pick up and get out of here.
He did not let the thought go further than that; he did not let himself think of Rhea. Every time he thought of Rhea Muller he did something crazy, and this was no time...
Suddenly he was stumbling in the thick growth of cotton-wood and blackjack along the bank of Slush Creek, and he saw a figure ahead of him go crashing down the brittle skin of icy water. Grant yelled, but the figure did not stop, and then he raised his carbine and fired once, twice, three times.