THE FLIGHT OF THE SWALLOWS
Divide lands north of Sleepy Cat lie high and over their broad spread,
trails open fan-like, north, northeast and northwest. Each of the
trails penetrates at a negotiable point the broken country running up
to the mountains that battle with the northern sky.
The first highways of the country followed the easiest travel lines.
Without fences or boundaries, their travelers, to escape washouts or
dust, were free to broaden them as they fancied. In this way older
ruts were gradually abandoned and new ones formed. And with heavy
travel these trails grew into sprawling avenues.
As settlers took up lands and fenced their claims, such pioneer roads
were blocked at intervals. To meet this difficulty new trails were
made around the gradually increasing obstacles and in the end roads
along section lines were laid out, with grading and bridging. But the
wagon and cattle trails of the early days, rut-cut, storm-washed, and
polished by sun and wind and sand to a shining smoothness, still
stretch across country, truncate and deserted. Under their
weather-beaten silence lies the story of other days and other men and
women.
Along one of the earliest and broadest of these trails running into the
north country, Laramie, an hour after Bradley's arrival, was galloping
with Kate Doubleday.
But for the shadow of her father's condition there was everything in
the ride to make for Kate's happiness. The sweep of the matchless sky,
the glory of the sunshine, the wine of the morning air, the eager feet
and spreading nostrils of the horses, and at her side--her lover! The
trust a woman gives to a man, the security of his protection, the daily
growth of her confidence in her choice and her surrender--these could
temper, if they could not extinguish, her confused grief.
For Laramie the shadow meant less; sympathy drew him closer to Kate;
there was even happiness in knowing that she turned in her distress to
him for consolation and guidance.
Timidly, she tried to tell him, as they rode, of some of the better
traits of her father, traits that might extenuate his cold, hard
brutality--as if to build him up a little in the eyes of one she wished
not to think of him too harshly.
"Don't worry over what I'm going to think about him," said Laramie.
"If I worried over what a lot of people think about me, where should I
be? There's some good in most every man; but it doesn't always get a
chance to work."
Kate's anxiety was reflected in her manner. "If only," she exclaimed,
"they haven't killed him today."
The two had crossed the first divide. Below them lay the Crazy Woman,
spanned by the Double-draw bridge.
"His friends were his worst enemies," continued Laramie. "But they've
got to get out of this country now. And the worst men are out of the
Falling Wall. Still if you don't like it there, we won't live there,"
he added, sitting half sidewise toward Kate in his saddle to feast his
eyes on her freshness and youth.
"I shall like it anywhere you are, Jim," she said, looking at him
simply.
The picture was too much for his restraint. He reined eagerly toward
her.
With a laugh she shied away, struck her horse and dashed ahead.
Laramie spurred after her. But they were on the level creek bottom and
riding swiftly. She gave him a long run--more than he had looked for.
He realized, as they raced toward the bridge, that he had for one
moment forgotten everything but his complete happiness. He called to
Kate to stop. In her zest she spurred the harder. He knew she must
not reach the bridge ahead of him. Yet he realized the difficulty he
faced; she would not understand; and at every cost he must stop her.
Animated by this sudden instinct of danger he crowded his horse, forged
abreast the flying girl, caught her bridle, and to her astonishment
dragged her horse and his own rudely to their haunches. They were
almost at the bridge itself.
"Back up!" he exclaimed. "Back up!"
"Jim!" she cried, "_please_ don't throw me!"
"Don't speak--back!!" he said low and sharply. Something in the tone
and manner of the command admitted of no parley.
With her horse cavorting, half strangled, as he was jerked and backed,
Kate, looking amazed at Laramie, saw in his face a man new to her--a
man she never had seen before. Not her questioning look, nor the
frantic struggles of the rearing horses touched him; nothing in the
confusion of the sudden moment drew his eye for an instant from the
bridge before him and his drawn revolver was already poised in his
hand. Kate knew her part without another protest. She tore her
horse's mouth cruelly with the curb. Where the danger was, or what,
she did not know, but she could obey orders. Her eyes tried to follow
Laramie's, bent ahead. The bottoms spread level in every direction.
The approach to the little bridge and beyond was as open as the day.
Not a living creature was anywhere in sight, nothing with life had
anywhere stirred, nothing of sound broke the silence of the morning,
except--when Laramie allowed them to stop--the startled breathing of
the horses.
"Jim!" exclaimed Kate in awed restraint. "What is it?"
His eyes were riveted straight ahead, but he answered in a most
matter-of-fact tone: "There's somebody under that bridge."
She strained her eyes to see something he must have seen that she could
not see. The dazzling sunshine, the dusty road, the rough-built, short
wooden bridge before them, were all plain enough. And Kate realized
for the first time that Laramie, who had been riding on her right was
now on her left and presently that his revolver was sheathed and his
rifle, which had hung in its scabbard at the horse's shoulder, was
slung across the hollow of his right arm.
"Kate," he said, speaking without looking at her, "will you ride back
about a mile and wait for me?"
She turned to him: "What are you going to do, Jim?"
"Smoke that fellow out."
She spoke almost in a whisper: "Is it Van Horn, Jim?"
"I don't believe he'd hide there. It's more like Stone."
"Jim! Stone's a deadly shot!"
Looking into the distance he only replied: "From cover. This may be a
long-winded affair, Kate." He added, pausing, "you'd better ride as
far as the hills."
She looked at him bravely restrained but with all her love in her eyes:
"I don't want to leave you, Jim."
"It's poor business for you to be in," he returned firmly. "There's no
way to make it pleasant."
"Don't drive me away!"
He hesitated again: "You might do this: Ride back fast about eighty
rods. Leave the road there, bear to the west and circle around the
little knoll you'll see. There's a clump of willows below the west
side of that knoll."
"Do you know every clump of willows in this country, Jim?"
He answered unmoved: "I know that one for I've crawled up there more
than once to take observations under that bridge myself. Get around
behind those willows and you can see the creek bottom all the way to
the bridge. I'm going up the creek about five hundred yards. I'll
work down. Whoever's under the bridge can't get away except down the
creek. If you see a man trying that, just fire two shots--in the air,
close together--I'll understand. If you get into any kind of
trouble--which you're kind of trying to do--fire two shots a few
seconds apart. I won't be far off."
With a plea to him to be careful--behind which all her agony of
apprehension was repressed and mastered--Kate wheeled her horse and
galloped back.
Laramie, skirting a depression, rode into a break leading to the creek
bed. The creek was practically dry; just a thread of water here and
there among the rocks marked the course of flood time. Dismounting,
Laramie shook himself out of the saddle and laying his rifle across his
arm, walked carefully down-stream along the bed of the creek.
He knew if he were seen first, the fight would be over before he got
into it; of chances to kill from cover, the criminal he felt sure he
was hunting, would need but one. No man from the Falling Wall country
was Stone's superior in the craft of hiding; but none was Laramie's
equal in the art of surprise; and Laramie meant, for once, to make an
antagonist formidable from cover, show in the open.
With this alone in purpose, he stalked with the patience of an Indian
from point to point and cover to cover down toward the bridge;
crouching, halting and peering; slipping from the shoulder of a rock to
the shelter of a boulder; flattening on his stomach to worm his way
under a projecting ledge and sliding noiselessly on his back down the
face of a water-worn glacis--but drawing closer all the time to the
bridge.
He knew every inch of the ground. He knew how well his quarry had
concealed himself to render surprise impossible. But Stone's very
safety in this respect made his retreat more difficult. A man lying in
wait under the Double-draw, staked practically everything on one
chance: that the man he sought to kill should cross the bridge. It
were then easy to pick him off from behind. But if the intended
victim, suspicious, should get unseen into the creek bed, the skulker
could hardly avoid a fight.
Three hundred yards above the bridge, the creek walls open in an
ellipse, narrowing abruptly where the bridge spans them. This open
space has been scoured by floods until the bedrock lies like a polished
floor and it was now dry except where the piers of the bridge stood in
stagnant pools. Once within this amphitheater whose vertical walls
rise twenty to thirty feet, no fighting cover is available.
Behind a rocky point that guarded the upper entrance of the opening,
stood Laramie. He was watching the shadow cast by a shrub that sprang,
shallow-rooted, from a crevice in the bedrock. For an interminable
time he waited, only noting the slow swing of the narrow shadow as the
morning sun, flooding the rock-basin, rose in majestic course.
Gradually the deflection of the slender indicator, moving like a finger
on the rock dial, marked the turn of the sun well past the shoulder of
the point at which Laramie must emerge. When that moment came he
looked sharply out, sprang from behind the point and ran sidewise into
the narrow shadow thrown from the curving wall.
Stone, uneasy and alert, stood under the bridge, his rifle across his
arm. The two men saw each other almost at the same instant. For
Stone, it was the climax of a hatred long nursed because of a supremacy
long challenged. And for him it was an open field with weapons in
which his skill was as matchless as Laramie's was held to be, at close
quarters, with a Colt's revolver.
Nor had Laramie underestimated the chances of an encounter under such
circumstances. He counted only on the slight advantage of a
surprise--knowing from disagreeable experiences how a surprise jars the
poise; and there persisted in his mind, what he had never until then
hinted to another, that Stone, shooting as an assassin from cover and
Stone himself facing death, might shoot differently. On these slender
hopes he covered Stone, as the ex-rustler jumped his rifle to his
check, and cried to him to pitch up.
Stone's answer was a bullet. His shot echoed Laramie's, and as Laramie
whipped the hat from his enemy's head, his bullet tore through the
right side of Laramie's belt. Bare-headed, and thirsty to close on his
antagonist, Stone, jumping from Laramie's second bullet, ran forward,
hugging the creek wall, dropped on one knee, fired, and ran in again.
Laramie refused to be tempted from the shadow in which he stood, until
Stone, rounding the wall again as he came on, firing, threatened to
find partial cover should Laramie stand still. It was a contest of
deadly fencing, of steady heads and cool wit, a struggle in instant
strategy. And if Stone meant to force Laramie into the sunshine, he
now succeeded--but at a fearful cost. Laramie jumped not only into the
sunshine but into the blinding sun itself, and when Stone ran in again,
Laramie tore open his hip with a bullet. It knocked the foreman over
as if it had been a mallet. But he was swiftly up and firing
persistently almost outlined with bullets Laramie's figure against the
rock wall. He splintered the grip of Laramie's revolver in its
holster, he cut the sleeve from his wrist, and tore hair from the right
side of his head; but he could not stop him. Enraged, and realizing
too late how every possibility in the fight had been figured out by his
enemy before he stepped into sight, Stone, crippled, yet forced to
circle, dropped once more on his knee to smash in a final shot.
He was covered the instant he knelt. A bullet from Laramie's rifle
shook him like a leaf. His head, jerking, sunk to his breast. With a
superhuman effort he rallied. He looked at Laramie--narrowly
watching--shook the hair from before his eyes and fumbling at the
firing lever tried to elevate his rifle to pump. But he swayed on his
bent knee; the rifle slipped from his grasp. He sank to the rock
floor, clutching with his big hands at the gravel, while Laramie
running to him turned him over, snatched his revolver from its holster
and throwing it out of reach, lifted his enemy's head.
When Kate, in an agony of suspense, made her way to the creek bed she
found Laramie scooping water up in his hands for Stone. She could not
go near the wounded man. Only by word from where she stood, piteously,
and by dumb sign, she drew Laramie to her to learn whether _he_ was
hurt. When he declared he was not, she would not believe him till she
had felt his arm where one bullet had cut his sleeve, and where the
deadliest had raised a sullen red welt along his temple.
Ben Simeral was first to come along on his way to town, in his wagon.
John Frying Pan was with him. With their help, Laramie got Stone up to
the bridge and into the wagon to take to town. He had shut his eyes
and refused to talk. Kate made Laramie tell her every detail of the
fight and breathed anew the terrors of each moment.
"I stole toward the bridge the minute I heard the firing," she
confessed, unsteadily. "Oh, yes, I know! I might have been killed.
But if you were, I wanted to be. How could you tell, when you stopped
me so, Jim, there was a man under the bridge?"
"A bunch of bank swallows nests under that bridge right where Stone was
hiding," he said, reflecting. "Those swallows always fly out when I
ride up to it. If they don't fly out, I don't cross. Today they
didn't fly out."