There was a pause while I could hear a rasping in the other’s throat as
he swallowed, gulped, sought to keep his voice steady.
“What did _he_ say?”
“He is dead.”
The man fidgeted, mumbled something about “seeing the boys,” and stepped
slightly to one side.
It was a time for action, for complete assurance, a chance to dominate
the situation by sheer force of personality. I swung from my horse with
calm, deliberate manner, and approached the barrier. “Where’s the gate
in this thing?” I asked.
“Ov—over this way,” said the watcher, and himself pulled back the
twisted wire gate.
I entered, and the girl was at my heels. The man fell back, undecided. I
knew the type, recognized the symptoms. I would have no trouble with
him. He was licked. It was those men who were scattered through the
darkness who worried me.
“Here, you fellows, come on up here to the fire,” I said.
There was a silence, and then suddenly, that silence was broken by a
metallic double click—the cocking of a rifle.
My ears are acutely sensitive, and I recognized the sound at once. It
was the crucial moment. If the men yielded to my order they would leave
the property, never to return. If I should allow them to hesitate,
permit them to start a fight, my doom was sealed. They outnumbered me,
and they were invisible in the darkness.
“Stick ’em up, Barr,” came a rasping voice.
I had been prepared for that voice. The double click had warned me, had
given me the direction of the danger, had enabled me to brace my muscles
so that the smooth ripple of motion which jerked out my gun, which sent
a shot crashing into the darkness, was no mere chance. I had
deliberately planned my move. The hand that drew the gun had been on the
side away from the fire. The eyes of the man in the darkness, looking
toward the glow of the flame, could not have seen the motion. The bullet
was sent toward the location of the speaker. Shooting always by the feel
of the gun, never by an alignment of the sights, I had acquired an
accuracy which was as deadly in the dark as in the daylight.
With the shot came a scream.
“Don’t shoot!”
A man arose to his feet, clutching a dangling arm which was bleeding at
the shoulder. All about me, from the darkness, men came to the fire,
hands uplifted.
“Get your things together and start, and don’t come back,” I said. “The
next man who sets foot on this ground will have to account to Black
Barr.”
In silence they gathered their things, saddled their picketed stock, and
filed through the gate in the barrier. The man in the lead broke into a
gallop, and soon the men were headed in a mad, panic-stricken race for
the ranch-house of the Half Box. They were not fighters, merely Border
toughs, and they were yellow, clean through.
“And do we stay here?” asked the girl.
I shook my head. “We have taken possession, ejected the guards, and you
will have no more trouble. Had they headed toward town we would have
stayed, but they went to the ranch. What they will find there will
convince them that they are finished. Hired killers do not fight when
their pay has ceased. Cowards cease to obey orders which are given by
dead lips.”
She nodded.
Together again we trotted toward town.
There was a light in the restaurant of Wing Lee. I had hoped it would be
there. Probably the girl would collapse when she could let down from the
nervous strain under which she labored. The Chinaman had been a family
servant, and there is a loyalty in the Chinese race which knows no
bounds.
Wing Lee, himself, came to the door.
And then came a surprise. Both the Chinaman and the girl turned to me
with a series of swift, efficient motions. The patch of light from the
door had revealed my blood-soaked sleeve, the wound which had been
slowly welling blood during my long ride.
While the girl applied hot water and bandages the Chinaman brought forth
certain native lotions, evil-smelling, pungent, contained in red-labeled
bottles of thick glass, bottles which were three inches high, an inch
wide and contained but a score of drops when filled.
“You big killum,” announced Wing Lee when the arm had been bandaged and
he was serving tea to the girl and myself.