At the same time the rifles of the two men of the posse rang, but they
must have seen the fall of their leader, for the shots went wild, and
Andy Lanning took off his hat and waved to them. But he did not flee
again. He sat in his saddle with the long rifle balanced across the
pommel while two thoughts went through his mind. One was to stay there
and watch. The other was to slip the rifle back into the holster and
with drawn revolver charge the five remaining members of the posse.
These were now gathering hastily about Bill Dozier. But Andy knew their
concern was in vain. He knew where that bullet had driven home, and Bill
Dozier would never ride again.
One by one he picked up those five figures with his eyes, fighting
temptation. He knew that he could not miss if he fired again. In five
shots he knew that he could drop as many men, and within him there was a
perfect consciousness that they would not hit him when they returned
the fire.
He was not filled with exulting courage. He was cold with fear. But it
was the sort of fear which makes a man want to fling himself from a
great height. But, sitting there calmly in the saddle, he saw a strange
thing--the five men raising their dead leader and turning back toward
the direction from which they had come. Not once did they look toward
the form of Andy Lanning. They knew what he could not know, that the
gate of the law had been open to this man as a retreat, but the bullet
which struck down Bill Dozier had closed the gate and thrust him out
from mercy. He was an outlaw, a leper now. Any one who shared his
society from this moment on would fall under the heavy hand of the law.
But as for running him into the ground, they had lost their appetite for
such fighting. They had kept up a long running fight and gained nothing;
but a single shot from the fugitive had produced this result. They
turned now in silence and went back, very much as dogs turn and tuck
their tails between their legs when the wolf, which they have chased
away from the precincts of the ranch house, feels himself once more safe
from the hand of man and whirls with a flash of teeth. The sun gleamed
on the barrel of Andy Lanning's rifle, and these men rode back in
silence, feeling that they had witnessed one of those prodigies which
were becoming fewer and fewer around Martindale--the birth of a
desperado.
Andrew watched them skulking off with the body of Bill Dozier held
upright by a man on either side of the horse. He watched them draw off
across the hills, still with that nervous, almost irresistible impulse
to raise one wild, long cry and spur after them, shooting swift and
straight over the head of the pinto. But he did not move, and now they
dropped out of sight. And then, looking about him, Andrew Lanning felt
how vast were those hills, how wide they stretched, and how small he
stood among them. He was utterly alone. There was nothing but the hills
and a sky growing pale with heat and the patches of olive-gray sagebrush
in the distance.
A great melancholy dropped upon Andy. He felt a childish weakness;
dropping his elbows upon the pommel of the saddle, he buried his face in
his hands. In that moment he needed desperately something to which he
could appeal for comfort.
The weakness passed slowly.
He dismounted and looked his horse over carefully. The pinto had many
good points. He had ample girth of chest at the cinches, where lung
capacity is best measured. He had rather short forelegs, which promised
weight-carrying power and some endurance, and he had a fine pair of
sloping shoulders. But his croup sloped down too much, and he had a
short neck. Andy knew perfectly well that no horse with a short neck can
run fast for any distance. He had chosen the pinto for endurance, and
endurance he undoubtedly had; but he would need a horse which could put
him out of short-shooting distance, and do it quickly.
There were no illusions in the mind of Andrew Lanning about what lay
before him. Uncle Jasper had told him too many tales of his own
experiences on the trail in enemy country.
"There's three things," the old man had often said, "that a man needs
when he's in trouble: a gun that's smooth as silk, a hoss full of
running, and a friend."
For the gun Andy had his Colt in the holster, and he knew it like his
own mind. There were newer models and trickier weapons, but none which
worked so smoothly under the touch of Andy. Thinking of this, he
produced it from the holster with a flick of his fingers. The sight had
been filed away. When he was a boy in short trousers he had learned from
Uncle Jasper the two main articles of a gun fighter's creed--that a
revolver must be fired by pointing, not sighting, and that there must be
nothing about it liable to hang in the holster to delay the draw. The
great idea was to get the gun on your man with lightning speed, and then
fire from the hip with merely a sense of direction to guide the bullet.
He had a gun, therefore, and one necessity was his. Sorely he needed a
horse of quality as few men needed one. And he needed still more a
friend, a haven in time of crisis, an adviser in difficulties. And
though Andy knew that it was death to go among men, he knew also that it
was death to do without these two things.
He believed that there was one chance left to him, and that was to
outdistance the news of the two killings by riding straight north. There
he would stop at the first town, in some manner fill his pockets with
money, and in some manner find both horse and friend.
Andrew Lanning was both simple and credulous; but it must be remembered
that he had led a sheltered life, comparatively speaking; he had been
brought up between a blacksmith shop on the one hand and Uncle Jasper on
the other, and the gaps in his knowledge of men were many and huge. The
prime necessity now was speed to the northward. So Andy flung himself
into the saddle and drove his horse north at the jogging, rocking lope
of the cattle pony.
He was in a shallow basin which luckily pointed in the right direction
for him. The hills sloped down to it from either side in long fingers,
with narrow gullies between, but as Andy passed the first of these
pointing fingers a new thought came to him.
It might be--why not?--that the posse had made only a pretense of
withdrawing at once with the body of the dead man. Perhaps they had only
waited until they were out of sight and had then circled swiftly around,
leaving one man with the body. They might be waiting now at the mouth of
any of these gullies.
No sooner had the thought come to Andy than he whitened. The pinto had
been worked hard that morning and all the night before, but now Andy
sent the spurs home without mercy as he shot up the basin at full speed,
with his revolver drawn, ready for a snap shot and a drop behind the far
side of his horse.
For half an hour he rode in this fashion with his heart beating at his
teeth. And each canyon as he passed was empty, and each had some shrub,
like a crouching man, to startle him and upraise the revolver. At
length, with the pinto wheezing from this new effort, he drew back to an
easier gait. But still he had a companion ceaselessly following like the
shadow of the horse he rode. It was fear, and it would never leave him.