--es, yes!--he was mouthing.--tell you, he's here now! He-- gone down to the road, to watch for the cops. Come here as quick as you can, Leary--and come yourself. He-- bad! I--l try to get him drunk, or asleep, or somethin't Anyway, hurry, and for God-- sake, don't let on I told you, even after you got him corralled.-- Reynolds threw back the door and stepped in, his face a death-mask. Jackson wheeled, saw him, and gave a choked croak. His face turned hideous; the receiver fell from his fingers and dangled at the end of its cord.
--y God, Reynolds!--he screamed.--on't--don't--
Reynolds took a single step; his gun went up and smashed down; the heavy barrel crunched against Jackson't skull. The man went down like a slaughtered ox and lay twitching, his eyes closed, and blood oozing from a deep gash in his scalp, and from his nose and ears as well.
Reynolds stood over him an instant, snarling silently. Then he stepped to the phone and lifted the receiver. No sound came over the wire. He wondered if the man at the other end had hung up before Jackson screamed. He hung the receiver back on its hook, and strode out of the house.
A savage resentment made thinking a confused and muddled process. Jackson, the one man south of Lost Knob he had thought he could trust, had betrayed him--not for gain, not for revenge, but simply because of his cowardice. Reynolds snarled wordlessly. He was trapped; he could not reach Lost Knob in his car, and he would not have time to drive back down the Bisley road, and find another road, before the police would be racing up it. Suddenly he laughed, and it was not a good laugh to hear.
A fierce excitement galvanized him. By God, Fate had worked into his hands, after all! He did not wish to escape, only to slay before he died. Leary was one of the men he had marked for death. And Leary was coming to the Jackson farm house.
He took a step toward the corral, glanced at the sky, turned, ran back into the house, found and donned a slicker. By that time the lightning was a constant glare overhead. It was astounding--incredible. A man could almost have read a book by it. The whole northern and western sky was veined with irregular cords of blinding crimson which ran back and forth, leaping to the earth, flickering back into the heavens, crisscrossing and interlacing. Thunder rumbled, growing louder. The bank in the north west had grown appallingly. From the east around to the middle of the west it loomed, black as doom. Hills, thickets, road and buildings were bathed weirdly in the red glare as Reynolds ran to the corral where the horses whimpered fearfully. Still there was no sound in the elements but the thunder. Somewhere off in the hills a wind howled shudderingly, then ceased abruptly.
Reynolds found bridle, blanket and saddle, threw them on a restive and uneasy horse, and led it out of the corral and down behind the cliff which flanked the path that led up to the house. He tied the animal behind a thicket where it could not be seen from the path. Up in the house the oil lamp still burned. Reynolds did not bother to look to Joel Jackson. If the man ever regained consciousness at all, it would not be for many hours. Reynolds knew the effect of such a blow as he had dealt.
Minutes passed, ten--fifteen. Now he heard a sound that was not of the thunder--a distant purring that swiftly grew louder. A shaft that was not lightning stabbed the sky to the south east. It was lost, then appeared again. Reynolds knew it was an automobile topping the rises. He crouched behind a rock in a shinnery thicket close to the path, just above the point where it swung close to the rim of the low bluff.
Now he could see the headlights glinting through the trees like a pair of angry eyes. The eyes of the Law! he thought sardonically, and hugged himself with venomous glee. The car halted, then came on, marking the entering of the gate. They had not bothered to close the gate, he knew, and felt an instinctive twinge of resentment. That was typical of those Bisley laws--leave a man't gate open, and let all his stock get out.
Now the automobile was mounting the hill, and he grew tense. Either Leary had not heard Jackson't scream shudder over the wires, or else he was reckless. Reynolds nestled further down behind his rock. The lights swept over his head as the car came around the cliff-flanked turn. Lightning conspired to dazzle him, but as the headlights completed their arc and turned away from him, he made out the bulk of men in the car, and the glint of guns. Directly overhead thunder bellowed and a freak of lightning played full on the climbing automobile. In its brief flame he saw the car was crowded--five men, at least, and the chances were that it was Chief Leary at the wheel, though he could not be sure, in that illusive illumination.
The car picked up speed, skirting the cliff--and now Jim Reynolds thrust his .45 through the stems of the shinnery, and fired by the flare of the lightning. His shot merged with a rolling clap of thunder. The car lurched wildly as its driver, shot through the head, slumped over the wheel. Yells of terror rose as it swerved toward the cliff edge. But the man on the seat with the driver dropped his shotgun and caught frantically at the wheel.
Reynolds was standing now, firing again and again, but he could not duplicate the amazing luck of that first shot. Lead raked the car and a man yelped, but the policeman at the wheel hung on tenaciously, hindered by the corpse which slumped over it, and the car, swinging away from the bluff, roared erratically across the path, crashed through bushes and shinnery, and caromed with terrific impact against a boulder, buckling the radiator and hurling men out like tenpins.
Reynolds yelled his savage disappointment, and sent the last bullet in his gun whining viciously among the figures stirring dazedly on the ground about the smashed car. At that, their stunned minds went to work. They rolled into the brush and behind rocks. Tongues of flame began to spit at him, as they gave back his fire. He ducked down into the shinnery again. Bullets hummed over his head, or smashed against the rock in front of him, and on the heels of a belching blast there came a myriad venomous whirrings through the brush as of many bees. Somebody had salvaged a shotgun.
The wildness of the shooting told of unmanned nerves and shattered morale, but Reynolds, crouching low as he reloaded, swore at the fewness of his cartridges.
He had failed in the great coup he had planned. The car had not gone over the bluff. Four policemen still lived, and now, hiding in the thickets, they had the advantage. They could circle back and gain the house without showing themselves to his fire; they could phone for reinforcements. But he grinned fiercely as the flickering lightning showed him the body that sagged over the broken door where the impact of the collision had tossed it like a rag doll. He had not made a mistake; it was chief of police Leary who had stopped his first bullet.
The world was a hell of sound and flame; the cracking of pistols and shotguns was almost drowned in the terrific cannonade of the skies. The whole sky, when not lit by flame, was pitch black. Great sheets and ropes and chains of fire leaped terribly across the dusky vault, and the reverberations of the thunder made the earth tremble. Between the bellowings came sharp claps that almost split the ear drums. Yet not a drop of rain had fallen.
The continual glare was more confusing than utter darkness. Men shot wildly and blindly. And Reynolds began backing cautiously through the shinnery. Behind it, the ground sloped quickly, breaking off into the cliff that skirted the path further down. Down the incline Reynolds slid recklessly, and ran for his horse, half frantic on its tether. The men in the brush above yelled and blazed away vainly as they got a fleeting glimpse of him.
He ducked behind the thicket that masked the horse, tore the animal free, leaped into the saddle--and then the rain came. It did not come as it comes in less violent lands. It was as if a flood-gate had been opened on high--as if the bottom had been jerked out of a celestial rain barrel. A gulf of water descended in one appalling roar.