Silvertip's Strike (16 page)

“You are,” said Silver. “I've seen men that I'd like to drift some lead into. But I hate to shoot at a man I don't know.”

Waring grunted his disbelief as he rolled a cigarette.

“How did you happen to have that dynamite along?” asked Silver.

“Ferris again!” exclaimed Waring. “The fool only got what he deserved. He was on a prospecting trip, him and a mule. We come across him in the hills, and we picked up him and our bad luck and brought 'em both along to help out. A lot of help he was. But come on, Silver. Make your bargain.”

“I give up a third of the cattle for the sake of one man?” said Silver.

Waring winced, as though he felt the force of this argument.

“Well,” he said, “that's the proposition, and I gotta stick to it.”

Suddenly Silver nodded. “I'll make the exchange,” he said.

Waring heaved a breath of relief.

“Well,” he said, “that's great. I gotta admit that you're a reasonable gent to do business with. Mighty reasonable. We'll just run the cows out of the desert and off the ranch into the hills, and then you can have your partner. You can have him safe and sound.”

Silver smiled.

“Hey, what's the matter?” asked Waring.

“You keep him till you've got the cattle where you want 'em, eh?” queried Silver.

“What's the matter with that? Mean that you don't trust us, old son?”

Silver shook his head. “If I let you get the cattle through the hills, you may turn Farrel over to me, but he'll be a dead man when I find him.”

“I swear,” said Waring, lifting one hand and rolling up his eyes with a solemn shake of his head. “I swear — ”

“Don't do it,” said Silver. “Take your hand down and don't swear. It doesn't work with me, Waring.”

The fat man slowly dropped his hand. A faint stain of red crawled up his throat and over his face. He said nothing.

“I'll have to make another sort of deal,” said Silver. “I'll have to have security that you'll turn Farrel over to me if I let the herd go.”

“What sort of security?” asked Waring.

“A man for a man. If Delgas or Rutherford will put themselves in my hands, I'll take 'em as bail for Farrel.”

“Delgas — Rutherford — you ain't crazy, Silver, are you?” shouted Waring.

“It's the only way I'll talk business,” said Silver.

Waring stared at him, started to talk, changed his mind. Then he stood up.

“How long before you expect an answer?” he asked.

“Sunset,” said Silver. “If one of 'em rides out from the house at sunset, I'll know that he's come to be bail for Farrel, and the deal goes through.”

Waring, his head fallen in thought, rode off without another word.

Silver waited out the hours of that long afternoon among the sun-baked hills. He was very hungry, and a big jack rabbit obligingly poked its foolish head up above a rock to make a dinner for him. He took off the head of the rabbit with a .45-caliber slug and broiled the flesh over a small fire. He ate it slowly, because he had very little water to wash it down. Parade was now so thirsty that he had stopped grazing altogether, so Silver took him across country to the verge of the big tank and let him drink from that muddy water.

In the sunset he came back toward the ranch house and stopped five hundred yards from it, where he began to drift the horse forward and backward. Nearer he dared not come, for there were men in that outfit to whom even five hundred yards was not impossible with their favorite rifle. He depended on the flare and uncertainty of the light at this time of the day.

In the meantime, he scanned the horizon and saw from south and east and west approaching clouds of dust which told him that some of the punchers were bringing up the cattle that they had collected across the face of the desert. All of those dust clouds moved toward the ranch house as a focus. Some time during the night, perhaps, the big herd would be assembled, and the drift toward the mountains would start.

Already it was rather late. He had waited long, and, if he rode to get help, they might have most of the cattle deep in the ravines before he returned.

He had thought of that all during the day, but he had not dared to ride for a posse. By that means he would be able to save the herd, of course, but he would never be able to save Danny Farrel. They would shoot him out of hand at the first sign of approaching danger, of course.

But what a quandary Delgas and the great Rutherford must be in at this moment, risking, as they were, the value of both land and cattle. For, though they might rush the cows through, they would certainly lose their landed acres as men outlawed for their crime.

It could only be that they hoped against hope that they would be able to sell the herd and deliver it, and then that they could dispose of Farrel and leave Silver with empty hands.

If afterward Jim Silver appeared in the law courts — though that was not his wont — then a staunch agreement between themselves would swear down his testimony in nearly any court of the law.

He thought of this grimly, as he saw the sun go down beneath the horizon without sign of anyone coming toward him from the ranch house.

A number of the punchers had gathered near the house, staring out toward the shimmering, golden figure of the stallion. Silver could see them watching, pointing, gesticulating. He could hear the dim tremors of their voices. He could hear a man calling from the bunk house, a sound like a bird in the far-away sky. But increasing dimness of the twilight thickened the air. And at last, as only a dull band of orange burned along the horizon, he knew that no one would come out to him.

The house disappeared in darkness, then was marked by a single ray of yellow light, which told him of poor Esther at work in her kitchen with ice in her heart.

He looked around the black immensity of the earth, and it seemed to him that his mind was as empty of all resources as the darkening vault of the sky. Still he could hear voices, the slamming of doors, from the house, though he could no longer make out individual figures. But some of the men were probably still there, staring across the night at him, wondering what he, poor fool, could do about it.

That was the thing. What
could
he do?

He could only grit his teeth and pray for an idea. So long as they held poor Danny Farrel, they held Jim Silver, also, and they were clever enough to know this. That was what forced him to make up his mind to the impossible. He would go straight into the house of the enemy and there do what he could for Farrel.

He rode back through the night slowly, trying to sketch a plan. The house was fairly well in his mind, but now he wished that he had drawn a print of every room and every window. He had to plan, and yet there was not much to plan about. It seemed almost better to advance blindly and leave everything to chance when he came in contact with the Rutherford and Waring men.

What worried him most of all was Rutherford. The others might be surprised, taken off their feet by a sudden move; but the imagination of Rutherford was of the capacious sort which understands what other men are likely to conceive.

The shallow draw which ran out of the desert toward the house gave Silver such good cover that he could ride the gold stallion within a very short distance of the place. There he dismounted, made the tall horse lie down, and prepared to go ahead on foot.

He turned himself into a ragamuffin for the purpose. Coat, sombrero, boots, socks went into the discard. He rolled his riding trousers to the knee. He had with him the weight of his two Colts, and that was all, when he came over the edge of the draw and started for the house.

The windmill offered some sort of cover for his advance, but it was the sort of skeleton protection which would be watched by the men on guard without actually making a shield for a spy. So he gave up the thought of the windmill and went straight at the house. He had on the straight line only the almost imperceptible undulations of the ground and one good-sized cactus. It was not protection. It was hardly a hint at protection. What he would have to rely upon was the fact that people do not look for men working like snakes in the dust, as he was working now.

He was almost at the cactus, blessing the size of its three large leaves, when lantern light began to wash across the black earth around him. Not one, but several lanterns were brought, and, while he lay there behind the wretchedly imperfect shadow of that cactus, he saw a lantern nailed up at every corner of the house!

That was Rutherford. He was the fellow who would think of bathing the house with light to expose all who approached, whereas most people would have kept their eyes open in darkness and so would have hoped to trap the invader. But Rutherford had a brain.

Not only was there a light at each corner of the irregular building, but there appeared to be a man on guard there, also.

Silver lay sweating in the dust, and it was by no means the heat of the ground that caused the water to pour.

For his position seemed to him most perfectly helpless. To worm his way forward in the darkness had been dangerous and hard enough. To worm his way backward through the light until he reached the edge of the draw would be worse than madness, he was certain. Then what remained for him to do?

In his excitement, he drew a breath that was chiefly dust, and had to lie, strangling, choking, stifling, for whole minutes, controlling the convulsions of his body with a mighty effort of the will to keep from drawing a single gasping breath.

When at last he was able to breathe again, he could give his mind to an insoluble problem. He was more and more convinced that he was hopelessly trapped. There was not even a thing to hope for, except a rain and hailstorm so tremendous that it would blot out the light of the lanterns and give him a chance to crawl away through the mud, but to pray for rain under the starry sky of the desert was like praying for a miracle. Ten months might pass, here, before so much as a shower fell.

The Rutherford men were ideally placed. They had light by which to spy him out if he so much as stirred, and they had their saddle horses at hand if the least suspicious sign appeared to their eyes. They could be in the saddle and away like bullets at the first signal. The mustangs, with thrown reins to anchor them, stood in three groups near the house, four or five in a bunch. There were more than were needed, for the reason, perhaps, that Rutherford had decided to be forehanded and equipped in every possible particular.

Silver, lying flat on his face, could have groaned with despair. He heard one of the men at the nearer corners of the house saying:

“One way of looking at it, this here is a funny business — we hang out a light for a gent to shoot at us by.”

“He won't shoot,” said the other. “Silver ain't that kind. There ain't no Injun about him. He don't take no advantages.”

“Ain't he a gunman?” asked the other.

“Sure, he's a gunman.”

“Then what you mean he don't take advantages? He's faster with a gun than other folks are, and he's straighter with his shooting. That means that he's got all kind of advantages.”

“I mean, he don't play 'em. When they crowd him, he fights back, and that's all there is to it.”

“You sound kind of nutty to me,” said the other. “Here's a gent with a list of dead as long as my arm, and you say he don't take advantages? How could he have such a record if he didn't go out for scalps?”

“You dunno the kind of a fool this bird is. He goes where the water is likely to have fish in it, and then he waits for a fish to show. He don't drop a line in. He waits for the fish to bite him, and then he bites back.”

“That sounds like fool talk.”

“Does it? What I mean is that he waits for the other gents to crowd him. If they won't crowd him man by man, they'll crowd him in couples or gangs. There ain't many stories of Silver hunted by single men. There's plenty of stories of him hunted by a whole crew.”

“It looks to me as though Rutherford and Delgas and Waring have got him beat to a frazzle in this here business.”

“Nobody's got him beat till he's ten feet buried underground, and even then he's likely to claw his way out. But there's numbers and brains against him now. There's Waring and Rutherford, to say nothin' of Delgas, that's worth a little speech all by himself.”

“What is goin' to happen to Danny Farrel?”

“The same as always happens to a gent that tries to go straight when going crooked is the way the others around him are walking.”

A shadow fell over Silver as he listened to the last words. That shadow struck his brain like a bullet. He hardly dared to look up, but then he saw that it was only one of the horses which had edged close to smell at the tempting green and the bristling thorns of the big cactus. If the brute suddenly took notice of a man lying on the ground and jumped away with a snort, it was apt to bring the attention of the guards to Silver.

Then he saw that the thing might be a sort of act of Providence to give him deliverance from his danger of the moment.

Some one called out at the other end of the house. One of the nearest sentries turned to watch; the other sang out in reply.

That moment Silver used to rise slowly to his feet.

He could not sit in the saddle, of course, but he fitted his knee into the stirrup leather just above the stirrup, and, with his weight resting on that support, he slid the other leg far back, hooking his toes around the pony's quarter. With his hands he gripped the saddle flaps. He was embarked. Neither his feet nor his body showed, for the moment. He was something suspended in empty air, as it were.

The great advantage was that Silver was at last off the ground. The black shadow of the body of the horse was as a blessing to him, but that mustang was not bestowing more than one blessing at a time. He reached around, got a good grip, and took a bite at the shoulder of Jim Silver. The tough flesh slipped from under the teeth of the horse, but it was agony for Silver. He dared not move to beat the head of the horse away, at that moment, for his knee threatened to slip out of the stirrup leather and let him down with a crash in the dust.