“I don’t know,” said honest Oliver Wayland. “I’m no great fighting man.”
“Have you even got a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see it.”
He pulled it out.
“Sink a bullet in that blazed pine over there,” she commanded again.
He raised the gun, took careful aim, and fired. There was no result.
“I pulled a little to the right,” said Wayland, shaking his head. “But now I’ll allow for “
She dragged the gun out of his hand. “Look!” she said, and fired carelessly, with hardly a glance at her target. But Wayland saw the bark fly.
“You can’t shoot at all,” she said to Wayland. “If you meet your man, he’ll murder you—and that’s that! Oliver, will you try to have some sense?”
“I’m trying to have it,” he said, taking back the gun ruefully.
“Then give up this nonsense and come home with me, because you can see for yourself what would happen if you met your robber!”
He began to breathe hard. He squinted at the distance, not because he was trying to see anything there, but because he wanted to get the pretty face of the girl out of his eyes and out of his mind.
“Father wants you,” she said. “He says the one bad thing he ever did in his life was blaming you for a thing you couldn’t help—you and a wooden-legged man against three thugs! He’s ashamed, and he wants you back. He says you’ll make a better ranch foreman than you ever made a cashier. He says he wants to have you hear him swear at his pmto mustang. I can’t stand listening, but perhaps you can. Oliver, come home with me this minute.”
He smiled. The kindness, the bluffness, the real tenderness of old Rucker touched him. He was glad he was looking at the distance, because he knew that there were tears in his eyes.
“How did you happen to come here?” he asked.
“Dad’s ranch is only a few miles away. And I knew you were somewhere up in this direction. I’ve ridden up toward Iron Mountain every day for a week. Lew Ransome saw you down in Limber Gulch some time back. To-day I had all the luck in a bunch. Here, grab that silly burro and we’ll start back, Oliver.”
He managed to swing his eyes around and look at her.
“I can’t do it. May,” said he.
“Can’t do it? Why can’t you do it?’*
“I’ve told myself about the other job. I’ve got to try to finish it.”
“Finish it? You might spend ten years.”
“Yes, I might,” said he.
All the smiling and the color were struck out of her face in an instant.
“Look at me, Oliver!” she pleaded.
“I’m looking at you,” he said.
“No, you’re staring right through me and past me. You’re seeing the day when you came to our front door and wanted to speak to me, and I came into the hall and wouldn’t talk to you. I was afraid of dad. I went off to my room afterward. I cried. And then I beat the pillow to death and hated myself.”
“I’m not thinking about that,” said he.
“You are. And you’re telling yourself that you’ll find the robber and get back the money, and give it to dad, and tell him and me that you never want to see either of us again.”
“I’m not thinking that,” said Oliver Wayland huskily.
“But all that will happen,” said she, her voice shrill, “is that you’ll keep on the trail till you find your man, and then he’ll shoot you deader than that dead tree over there. Oliver! Will you try to talk and make some sense? Look at me, Oliver!”
“I’ve got to stay on the job,” said Wayland.
Afterward it seemed to him that he had been torn in two with pain. She had not talked a great deal more before she got on the roan and fled away on the horse swiftly, her head down.
She had begun to cry before she remounted. He told himself that he was a fool, that he always had been a fool, and that nothing could come of any attempt that he made in this life of his.
And then, striding forward, he began to follow the little burro down the slope, halting whenever the animal stopped to pluck at a good bit of grass.
They came to more woods, passed through them, and as they came toward the farther side, through a gap in the trees he saw a man riding a horse at full speed across the open ground beyond.
The rider was rushing away from him, crouched low over the pommel of the saddle, and into the dreaming, unhappy mind of Wayland came the thought that he had seen this picture before, of just such a rounded stoop of the shoulders as a man fled for his life.
Then he remembered. It was when he had stood before the bank in Elkdale and watched the four fugitives; it was when he had led the posse up the mountain trail and identified the three men who had entered the bank—and the fourth man who slunk so low when he tried to get speed out of his horse.
And yonder—he knew it perfectly—was the man that he pursued!
XIV—HAND TO HAND
Wayland got out his revolver. He found his fingers gripping it so hard that the whole gun shook in his grasp.
First he grabbed the burro and pulled it back a little farther inside the trees, for through them he could see that the stranger was amusing himself by putting his mustang through its paces, racing it back and forth, taking the air, and riding cruelly with whip and spur to get the most out of the gelding.
When Wayland saw the face of the man, he was sure that the stranger could not have been a member of the bank-robbing gang. He looked too much like a little rat; all the features ran out to a point. The eyes were set in close to the long nose. Those eyes glittered and shone uneasily. To be sure, the fellow looked like a beast of prey, but he seemed too small, too weak, too sneaking to have associated with such a man as Phil Bray.
So Wayland held his hand and watched the other put the mustang through figure eights, and every time the man rode toward him, Wayland was sure that it was not the fellow he wanted, and every time the back of the man was turned, Wayland was confident that this was the fugitive he had followed before.
In the midst of the evolutions of the horse, a rabbit jumped up from a big tuft of grass and started kiting across the green open ground. At this, the stranger jerked his mustang to a halt so suddenly that it almost squatted on the ground, and, while it was still down, before it could rise, the man snatched out a revolver and fired.
The rabbit landed against the stump of a tree with a heavy thump and fell back to the ground, dead, and blurred over with red.
The mind of Wayland changed again. He had thought the little man too inoffensive to be a bank robber; now he felt that the stranger was certainly too formidable with guns to be tackled by a novice like himself.
He watched his quarry dismount and pick up the rabbit in one hand. Wayland, in the meantime, slipped down the edge of the woods and came suddenly out behind the other. He was not five yards away as he said:
“Hands up!”
The bleeding rabbit dropped out of the hand of the stranger. His whole body wilted. He sagged at the knees. Then, by degrees, his head jerked around until he could look over his shoulder at Wayland.
“Up with them!” shouted Wayland, relief at his first step of success putting strength into his voice, strength into his body and his spirit. “I don’t want to shoot you through the back, but—get those hands up!”
He came slowly closer as he spoke. He was not two strides away by this time, and now the hands of the stranger rose gradually, unevenly, to a level with his head.
At the same time he turned little by little, until he was facing Wayland.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Wayland. What’s yours?”
The stranger blinked rapidly. Then he said: “Ralph Smith.”
“What’s your name?” repeated Wayland savagely.