'Tell him you've been looking after a cow ready to calve,' Hal said.
Mullins relayed the message. He shouted as an afterthought that he would be back pretty soon. The inquirer went back into the house and closed the door.
'You're doing fine,' Hal congratulated his prisoner. 'Maybe I can get you out alive.'
He prodded the homesteader to the ravine and tied his feet under the belly of the horse. The loop of his own rope he put around the man's neck.
'An hour from now we'll both be out of here or permanent residents,' Hal told him coolly. 'It's up to you to play on my side just now.'
To reach the ledge road they had to pass within fifty yards of the house. Mullins hung back.
'If anybody opens the door—'
'Then the band will begin to play.' Hal felt the pulse of excitement beating in him that the presence of danger always set drumming. 'And since I am, like Mercutio, the very pink of courtesy, I'll let you lead the way. Undale, compadre!'
Hal's rifle lay across the saddle in front of him. In spite of his blithe manner, the rustler knew he must obey that order to go. The roan moved forward, and before it had taken a dozen steps light streamed out from the opened cabin door.
Frawley's big frame stood in the entrance. He gave a shout of warning. 'What's going on here?'
'We've got to run for it,' Hal cried, and lashed the rump of the roan with his quirt.
The horses raced straight for the house.
'It's Stevens,' Frawley roared, and disappeared from the doorway.
Hal swung his horse against the roan. 'Cut to the right,' he ordered. Mullins did as he was directed. He was as eager to get out of range as his captor. Looking back over his shoulder, the heart died in him. Men were pouring out of the house like seeds squirted from an orange. The crash of revolvers filled the night. A rifle's sharp whine whipped across the park.
The buckskin was hit. Hal could feel the horse begin to go down an instant before its collapse. He threw himself out of the saddle, caught at Mullins's belt, and swung himself behind the man.
'Keep going,' he snapped.
A man ran forward to cut them off from the road. Hal realized later that he could not have been in the house at the time Frawley discovered them. He was a big bull-necked fellow with buck teeth. Without stopping, he fired and missed. Plunging forward, his hand caught the bridle rein. Hal had dropped the rifle when vaulting to the back of the roan, but his revolver was out. Flung off-balance by the impetus of the horse's motion, the rustler lost the fraction of a second that might have saved him. Before he could steady himself, his finger pressed the trigger and sent a bullet flying skyward. The slug from Hal's .38 plowed into his brain. A slack hand fell from the bridle and the big body of the outlaw sank to the ground.
The horse almost went down over the body, but Mullins steadied its head and lifted it to its feet again. He urged the roan into a slow heavy gallop. The fugitives were now out of revolver range. The rifle still pumped at them, but the light was not good enough to make out objects clearly at a distance. They had reached the road, and the weighted cowpony was laboring with difficulty up the hill.
Hal slipped from the back of the roan and ran beside it on the inside of the ledge trail. Apparently a second rifle had joined the first, and both of them were raking the rocky hillside. Only the darkness saved the escaping men from being picked off by the marksmen in the valley.
'They'll get us yet,' Mullins said fretfully.
'Not unless someone makes a lucky shot,' Hal amended.
'Soon as they can saddle, they'll take after us. How can we get away on one horse? If you're smart you'll let me go and ride like the heel flies are after you.'
'I like yore company,' Hal drawled. 'With you here I won't be afraid of the dark. Come to think of it, we have half a world of darkness in which to hide. I reckon we'll make out.'
'You'll push yore fool luck too far some time,' Mullins complained angrily.
'It has stood up fine so far,' Hal mentioned cheerfully.
He had lost a good horse and saddle, but he felt the elation that comes after escape from danger pressing close on one.
CHAPTER 34
Hal Makes a Run for It
HAL knew that as soon as the outlaws could catch and saddle they would come pounding up the ledge road after him. This did not disturb him greatly, for in this rough country scarred with gullies their chance of finding him at night would be slight. The danger would come later, when after daybreak he drew close to the M K. Probably they would be waiting in the brush for him there.
At the summit of the shale ridge bounding the mountain pocket, he left the road and cut into the brush-covered mesa. Hal walked beside the horse, a hand on the stirrup leather. It was likely that they would get lost temporarily in this tiptilted No Man's Land, but eventually they could get down to the valley by bearing south.
A water-gutted arroyo slashed through the mesa. Hal pulled up the horse to listen. On the gentle night breeze there came to them a rumor of drumming hoofs, so faint that only a trained ear could register the sound.
'Yore anxious friends aren't losing any time,' Hal mentioned to his prisoner.
'What's the sense in taking me with you?' Mullins wanted to know fretfully. 'Why don't you take the horse and let me hoof it back?'
'I wouldn't desert you after all we've been through,' his captor told him with gentle irony. 'Question before the house is, Do we follow this arroyo or keep going straight ahead?'
'We'll get lost, whichever we do,' Mullins prophesied sourly.
'So we may,' Hal agreed. 'But we'll have each other for company. The arroyo wins. Right face.'
The bed of the ravine became a thicket of yucca, mesquite, cholla, and bisnaga. Hal mounted behind the hill man, to protect his legs from the thorns snatching at them.
The pony picked its way along the line of least resistance with the sure instinct of a horse trained in brush country, and after a few minutes came to a cañon with high perpendicular walls. The darkness was almost impenetrable. Far above was a narrow ribbon of star-dotted sky, but the light did not reach the floor of the gorge along which they were feeling their way.
A cleft opened in the left wall, a narrow gulch down which in floodtime water must have poured for thousands of years. Whether it was possible to get out of the gorge by this steep stairway, they could find out only by trying.
Hal cocked an inquiring eye at his companion. 'How would you like to be a human fly, Mr. Mullins?' he asked.
Mullins declined emphatically. 'I'm not going up there. A mountain goat couldn't make it.'
'Now — now, that's not the spirit,' Hal chided. 'In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as can't. Remember how Hannibal crossed the Alps — and Caesar the Rubicon.'
His captive looked at him angrily. 'You're crazy as a hoot owl. I don't want to break my neck, if you do.'
Yet a minute later the cowpony, with Mullins on its back, was scrambling up the defile. Hal led the way on foot, to help with suggestions at the more difficult bits. The gorge was strewn with rubble that offered bad footing and in places big boulders filled the floor. The roan stumbled, slipped, slithered down, found its feet, and pressed forward with catlike sureness.
They came to a trough so steep that Hal hesitated to try it, but just above this the way eased gently to the summit.
'Told you we couldn't make it,' Mullins exulted. 'But of course it had to be your way. Nothing you don't know.'
'We'll have to give the horse some help,' Hal said, after studying the situation. He untied the rope that bound the feet of his prisoner and put the loop around the neck of the roan. 'I'll go ahead with the rope far as that rock outcrop, you come next with the bridle coaxing the horse up the trough.'