Cold hostility was written upon the faces of the men who were about the
green cloth. Evidently I had become unpopular. The man who was sitting
across the table had lowered his cards slightly—sufficiently for me to
see the corners of four kings.
That was the last straw.
I swept my hands to my guns even as I leapt from the chair. The cheap
killer did as I anticipated. He had dropped the note and had started for
his weapons as soon as he saw me start to get back from the table.
Ordinarily a man would have got to his feet, and then started things.
Then the killer would have had the advantage. As it was, I was having
almost an even break with him.
Never had I been in better form. Never had my hands worked with smoother
rhythm. My guns were out before the other’s hands had started from his
holsters, and, suddenly, it flashed through my mind that here would be a
good chance to show him in his true colors. I did not fire, but thrust
the weapons into the pit of his stomach.
So wide a margin did I have on him at the draw that he had time to
appreciate it, to take stock of the situation. His hands paused, the
guns half out from his holsters, and his bulging eyes fastened on my
face.
My mouth was writhing, twisting into that deadly smile which has made
the name of Black Barr known from one end of the Border to the other,
all over the West, wherever men of the outdoors gather about camp fires
or carry braided ropes coiled on their saddles.
“BLACK BARR!” he yelled, his face turning a sickly yellow with sheer
terror.
And then the lights went out.
How it had been arranged I do not know, probably by some clever
arrangement for just such a purpose, as ordinarily a lantern of this
sort is not quickly extinguished. At any rate the room plunged into
darkness with no stage of transition, no slight afterglow. One moment I
was standing there, weapons drawn, the yammering coward before me,
slavering at the thought of death. The next instant and all was dark,
and I had thrown myself forward.
Guns blazed in the dark, shots which came from the location of the card
table. Bullets thudded into the wood of the bar over my head. But there
were no flashes of light from where stood the man who had picked up the
letter. He had learned his lesson.
As for the others—I had no quarrel with them other than the holding of
those cards, four queens which would have been out against four kings.
And then there was the matter of those flashing guns which had been
directed toward the place where I had been standing when the lights went
out. That matter could wait.
I rolled over, crawled under the card table, made for a corner of the
room, ran into a mass of huddled humanity—non-combatants who were
crowding away from the flying lead—felt a welcome breeze coming through
an open side door, stepped out into the night, through a cluttered yard,
into a narrow alley down to the street and up to my horse.
When the lights should again be turned on and the men look for the
riddled body of Black Barr they would have a shock. I would have
vanished into the night without so much as a trace behind. I had not
fired a shot, had said no word. When there had been no answering flashes
from my guns they would have felt certain I was dead. Their feelings
when the lights came on could be readily imagined. Black Barr has a
reputation, and these men who had sought to kill him would not be
resting very easy, knowing that he was out in the night, a constant
menace.
The black had finished his grain, and had worked off the nosebag, a
trick of his, and stood regarding me with distended nostrils. He had
heard the shooting and was wondering whether there would be the smell of
blood in his delicate nose. I quieted him with a word, swung into the
saddle and loped off into the night.
I usually sleep alone under the stars. Not for one who has a price on
his head, who is the quarry of every gunman who shoots from ambush, can
there be the luxury of a hotel bed. Too many gunmen would like to have
the honor of having dispatched the notorious Black Barr.
I rode several miles away from the town. Of a sudden men had become
obnoxious to me. I wanted the quiet of the night, the swinging stars,
the noises of the desert, the rustling of sage, the whispering of
drifting sand.
I unsaddled, turned the black loose where there seemed to be some feed,
rolled out my blankets, and drifted off into warm drowsiness, lulled by
the hushed noises of the outdoors, a great peace descending upon me.
It was some time later, how much later I had no means of knowing, that
flooding consciousness came back to my brain. My mind was weary, my body
warm and resting, and my senses rebelled against being awakened, but
some mysterious force snapped open my eyes, and when the red blotch on
the horizon registered upon my brain I sat upright, all thought of sleep
gone from me.
It was a fire, not the scattered, diffused radiance of a brush fire, but
the ugly, sullen glow of a house. Above the glow there showed a
writhing, twisting column of smoke, smoke which twisted this way,
writhed that, puffed up into great billows, then spread out into
scattered wisps.
Somewhere over the little ridge which lay to the south, not over two
miles from where I was laying, a house was going up in smoke.
I kicked out of my light blanket and whistled for my black. Out in the
darkness he whinnied his response, waited for a second whistle, and then
came cantering up, surprised at a start in the dead of night, but
holding steady, nevertheless, while I threw the saddle blankets and cold
saddle on his back. A few moments more and I was ready to travel; but,
just as I swung into the saddle, I heard the thud-thud-thud of many
hoofs, horses proceeding at a rapid pace, bunched, compact.
I ducked low in the saddle, insured the silence of my horse by a word,
and waited.
Out of the darkness there came a vague, floating shadow, and then, for a
brief instant, there showed against the red glare on the horizon some
ten horsemen, riding in close formation. A moment only and then they
were gone. For several seconds the sound of the horses came to my ears,
and then that, too, faded away. Silence once more on the floor of the
valley, a silence that was rimmed with mighty mountains and blazing
stars. The glare over the ridge deepened. A tongue of flame writhed and
twisted up in the smoke.
I turned the horse and we went at a swift gallop. As I rode, I thought
of the dark mystery of the shadowy horsemen. During all of the time I
had been able to hear them there had been no word spoken. The men had no
elation over the outcome of their errand, had such a perfect
understanding that words were idle. They had merely floated through the
night like a black cloud gliding silently over the trackless heavens.
Once over the top of the ridge and I could see that both a house and
barn were burning. They were within half a mile, and I pressed the black
forward, but, even as I rode, I could see that it was too late to save
anything from the flames.
A figure that seemed surrounded by a filmy halo dashed back and forth
before the fire, and, as I rode closer, I could see that it was the
figure of a girl, that the filmy halo was the diaphanous transparency of
some thin night attire which floated about her in light folds. Her
activity puzzled me. She was not attempting to save anything from the
blazing inferno, but rather she seemed to be executing some strange
dance, some weird incantation before the burning buildings, using them
as a ceremonial fire about which she leapt.
The firelight outlined her shapely limbs, seemed to gild them with
flickering flame, turned to ruddy gold the flowing locks of her hair,
the fluttering silk of the night-dress. I could not make out the dance.
It was like the dance of an Indian ceremonial, rhythmic, elemental,
unmeasured, yet graceful, purposeful.
My black thundered on. The distance was shortened to yards, to feet. The
girl turned, and I recognized the features of the girl I had seen in the
restaurant.
And then suddenly she paused, stooped, and whirled with elbows elevated.
For a moment I could not understand the posture, and then I flung myself
sideways. She was aiming a rifle directly at me, and the raised elbows
of the silhouette was all that the firelight showed me.
There was a flash, the whisper of a bullet as it skimmed through the
air, the rapid motion of the girl’s arms as another shell was thrown
into the gun.
“I am a friend!” I shouted.
The words served only to give her a more accurate conception of my
whereabouts for her next shot. There was a flash, and the whipping
impact of a bullet in my hat brim.
Bending low over the saddle, I swung out in a series of zigzags, and
from the darkness somewhere to my right came the mocking sound of a
taunting laugh, a laugh that was the laugh of a man. The girl, too,
heard the laugh, for she shifted her position, the firelight glittered
redly along the barrel of the rifle, and two shots crashed out in the
direction of the laugh.
After that there was silence.
I went over the top of the ridge before I again unsaddled, stretched out
my blanket and rolled within it. A moment more and I was asleep with the
black crunching the short grass nearby. If our help was not wanted it
would not be given. I had offered the girl assistance. My answer had
been the deadly whisper of a bullet, the crash of a rifle. She could
dance around the fire until doomsday so far as I was concerned.
I awoke in the soft hush which comes before dawn, when there is the
faintest whisper of a mysterious wind sweeping over the plain, when the
colors in the east run from brassy green to bright orange.
By sunup I was in the saddle, headed toward Caliente Flats, and, as I
rode, I loosed my guns in their holsters. The action was purely
instinctive, prompted perhaps by a subconscious recollection of the
mysterious riders, the flaming building, the mocking laugh from the
darkness.