Way of the Lawless

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.