# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 41/Number 1/The Way Out

pp. 42–46, 111–112. Illustrations by William Meade Prince may be omitted.
He met the cold gaze of Horsehead's town marshal, unperturbed. “You didn’t think I'd go to jerk my gun for twenty dollars, Chief?” he asked.
The Way Out By
Frederick R. Bechdolt
No one Can restore the magic of the old West more perfectly than the author of this story of “Kansas,” hard rider and quick killer, who, after many days, escaped his nemesis and found—the way out.
THE plain had become an enormous round shadow upon which objects showed vague and mellow in the gathering dusk: the blurred herd off in the middle distance; a horse and rider moving thither in pastel silhouette; and here in the center the covered chuck-wagon, the forms of men, recumbent, merging with the earth; a trio of cowboys saddling up their ponies; the foreman with one foot upon the wagon-tongue, elbow on knee and chin on hand, his lean back curved.
The foreman frowned thoughtfully as he watched young Kansas and his two companions drawing up their latigos. In those days of the Southwest every man’s business was supposed to be his own affair, and he did not even know the boy’s real name. Just “Kansas,” that was all. But when Bob West and Owl-head Johnson were swinging into their saddles, he reached a decision and beckoned him.
The other two rode on. Vacations came few and far between on the trail to Dodge; they were due back by the morning’s second hour to take their turns guarding the sleeping herd; Horsehead lay more than ten miles away, and their money was burning the pockets of their tight jean breeches.
“I'll catch up,” Kansas called after them, and came, with a faint jingle of spurs, to the wagon-tongue. “What’s on your mind, Jeff?”
He was good to look upon, a study of harsh beauty, of untamed youth, slim-flanked and graceful as a cat, with his mop of crisp dark hair and the red stain of the Texas wind upon his reckless face. The foreman met his bold young eyes and smiled.
“I don’t want to lose any hands at this end of the drive,” he said, “and Bill Scarborough’s the marshal at Horsehead now—one of them killers. Somebody’s sure to tell him who you be.”
Young Kansas’ eyes met those of the older man with sharp interrogation.
“Meanin’?” he asked.
“I got it in Horsehead this afternoon,” the foreman told him, “that you done killed one of the Herald gang last summer in the Lampasas County war.”
The boy nodded. “I thought I’d kept that news behind me,” he said lightly. “Them things get to be a nuisance when you go to town.” As he was turning the stirrup, he asked over his shoulder: “This Scarborough—he’s lookin’ for new scalps?”
“He’s got him a reputation,” the other answered, “and it looks like he’s aiming to keep it up.”
“Reckon I got to stay half sober, then. Adios!” Kansas was in the saddle and the pony was leaping forward when he called his farewell. As he rode after his companions, he got a glimpse of the horseman who was going toward the herd. The man was singing softly, one of those long ballads which used to be heard on every cattle-trail. The cadences came quavering across the darkening plain. Young Kansas threw back his head, and he too sang, full-heartedly, care-free:
The sun was sinking in the west
And fell with lingering ray,
Through the branches of a forest
Where a wounded ranger lay.
Beneath the shade of a palmetto
And the sunset silvery sky,
Far away from his home in Texas
They laid him down to die
Bob West and Owl-head Johnson were jogging soberly along ahead of him. They heard him coming when he was in the second stanza.
A group had gathered round him,
His comrades in the fight.
A tear rolled down each manly cheek
As he bid his last good night.
One tried and true companion—
That was as far as he got when they spurred their horses and he leaned forward in the saddle, racing after them.
“Reckon the girls’ll be settin’ up fer us?” Owl-head Johnson called as their companion came thundering up behind them.
“There is,” young Kansas answered, “a stud-game in some of them deadfalls that’s due to suffer when I get to town tonight, boys.”
A flaring affront to the yellow stars, outraging the surrounding night, Horsehead lay asprawl under tall cottonwoods upon the river's bank. Passing trail-herds contributed sunburned young riders to the sidewalk crowds that milled beneath the wooden awnings on either side of the main street. Light gushed upon them through wide-open doorways, and floods of mingled sounds—the shrill of dance-hall fiddles, the click of chips and billiard-balls, the brassy voices of the women. Out beyond the edges of the town, where the noises dwindled to a pulsating hum during whose lulls you could hear the whispering of the evening wind, four rows of silent cowboys lay outstretched beneath long heaps of stones.
Some persons might have thought that graveyard’s population overlarge, considering the hamlet’s size. But Horsehead owned a rigid moral code. The visitor might indulge himself in every sin known to Gomorrah of old, and no man would say a word of reproof—in fact, the visitor who did not steep himself in some wickedness or other was not given so much as a passing welcome; but he must not discharge his fire-arms within the town limits. To enforce this edict Horsehead kept a town marshal; and in order to make good with his constituents, the official, who had a sawed-off shotgun handy for the purpose, felt it incumbent on himself to slay a cowboy every so often. Such towns were not uncommon in that day, and Bill Scarborough was a typical specimen of the cold-eyed breed who passed, in some of them, as Lords of the High Justice. They resembled the real frontier peace-officer very much as the short-card man of the period resembled the old-time square gambler. And like the former, they never took a chance.
The three companions were enjoying their first drink in the saloon nearest to the hitching-rack where they had left their ponies, when the Marshal entered the place. Young Kansas turned from contemplation of the back-bar mirror with its pair of polished steer horns and its soap-painted mountain landscape, and knew him on the instant. He would have known him by his eyes, without the star.
“This here’s on me,” Owl-head Johnson was saying. Kansas was smiling when he faced the bar again.
“Some one,” he mused, “has told him already. Jeff was right.” Bob West pointed a scornful finger at his half-filled glass.
“You don’t call that a drink?” he cried.
“No,” Kansas answered with a sigh, “but that is all I aim to take.”
They wandered down one side of the street and up the other, entering such doorways as gave forth appeal to their eager fancies. They met comrades of past seasons upon whom they heaped epithets varying in badness with the depth of their affection. They bought themselves such things as colored hand-kerchiefs, hair-cuts, revolver-cartridges, and whisky at a bit a glass. Twice during the early part of the evening Kansas saw the Marshal on the outskirts of the crowds which moved before the bars, and both times he found those icy gray eyes fixed on him.
Sometime after ten, at the conclusion of a lively quadrille in the Atlantic and Pacific Dance-hall, he sought out his two companions.
“I’m going to buck the stud-game at the Crystal Palace,” he told them. “Come after me at midnight.”
Marshal Scarborough was talking to a burly floor-manager in the back of the long room as Kansas left by the front door, but when the cowboy had gone a half-block, he looked over his shoulder and saw the Marshal pushing his way through a sidewalk group behind him.
“I sure have got to ride deep this evenin’,” he reflected, “for he’s out to get my scalp.”
Yet neither that knowledge, nor the memory of the slaying which had made him a shining mark for such men as Scarborough, marred his young serenity. He had done his killing in a fair fight defending his employer’s herds. As for the imminence of any danger now-why, such men as Scarborough were like rattlesnakes and boggy fords and foundered horses, part of one’s life; one took them as they came, and that was all there was to it.
Luck settled down upon him in the Crystal Palace. If he had not been keeping one eye on the goings-on in the long room, he would probably have thought nothing of it when the management changed dealers an hour before midnight; but as it was, he felt reasonably certain that this had come about as a direct consequence of a quiet conference between the Marshal and the gray-mustached proprietor at the end of the long bar. So when Owl-head Johnson and Bob West came hilariously to seek him out in accordance with the appointment, he was quite ready for the thing that took place.
The new dealer, a sleek-haired, rat-eyed half-breed, took the chips as Kansas shoved them across the table to cash in, and counted them with swift precision.
“Two hundred and eleven dollars,” he announced, and smiled the wrong way of the mouth. There was something in his voice, although he had not raised it, which made the others at the table fall silent. “That’s more’n you'd make in six months stealin’ cows back in Lampasas County.”
Those who caught the gist of that allusion to last summer’s warfare, wherein the ownership of range-cattle was at issue, comprehended the fullness of the insult, and it was their unostentatious movement to one side which turned all eyes on Kansas. He had risen from his chair and stood looking down across the card-littered table at the dealer. Thus for a long fraction of a second. And then he smiled.
“I reckon mebbe it is,” he answered lightly. “And now I'll take the dinero, if yo’-all are through with them little jokes of yours.”
The half-breed peeled several greenbacks from a pile before him, wetting his fingers on his thin lips as he counted them, then placed a silver coin on top of them.
“Two hundred and eleven dollars,” he said aggressively and pushed the money across the table with his left hand. The right hand’s lean fingers rested lightly on the drawer wherein he kept his gun. Kansas picked up the bills and told them off aloud:
“Hundred, hundred and fifty, hundred and seventy, hundred and ninety.” He picked up the silver: “Hundred and ninety-one.” He turned his back upon the dealer as he announced the total, and met the cold gaze of Horsehead’s town marshal, unperturbed.
“You didn’t think I'd go to jerk my gun for twenty dollars, Chief?” he asked—and laid his hand on the shoulder of Bob West, who was starting to remonstrate noisily. “Come on; I’m going to buy a drink.”
“Going?” Scarborough called after him as the three cowboys were departing a moment later.
“I reckon,” Kansas answered evenly, “you will hear me when I do go.”
Bob West and Owl-head Johnson made no comment as they walked down the sidewalk toward the town’s edge, where their ponies were awaiting them. Hilarity had fallen from them, and in its place had come a silent alertness. He knew that they were biding his word, ready to do their part in what was to come.
For according to the unwritten code of those days, when men challenged one another to combat as in the age of chivalry, he had flung his gage to Scarborough; and everyone within reach of his voice had understood the import of his defiance. He was going to shoot up Horsehead before he left.
As to the outcome, he took no thought. The situation had confronted him, and he had met it—just as he had to meet many another sudden grave issue in this wild life of his—without wasting time to reckon on what might lie beyond. Let future developments take care of themselves; in the meantime he would do what he had set out to do. When they reached the hitching-rack in the deep shade of the cottonwoods, he spoke.
“Lend me your six-shooter, Bob.” The cowboy handed him the weapon without a word. “You boys ride back the way we came,” Kansas bade them, “and wait for me where the road forks, two miles out.”
They started to argue, maintaining that it was their right to remain beside him, but he shook his head.
“He tried to ambush me, and I’ve eat dirt. Now I’ve got to play this hand alone.”
Having no answer for that, they wished him luck and rode away. When the hoofbeats of their ponies grew faint out in the blue night, he swung into the saddle and turned his horse toward the flaring center of the town.
One dimly lighted square lay between him and the glaring doorways. Somewhere beyond that block, within the shadows which those lamps cast upon the empty spaces between buildings, he knew that Scarborough would now be awaiting him with his sawed-off shotgun, according to the custom of his cold-eyed breed. As he spurred forward, that knowledge gave him a sort of reckless satisfaction.
His horse raced down the block, and when he came into the next, Kansas threw back his head. He gave the long wolf yell and saw the sidewalks before him clearing as if his voice were a gigantic broom which swept whole groups of men back through the open doorways. For Horsehead’s populace realized the significance of that cry and to a man remembered the fate of bystanders on one or two past occasions when frolicsome cowboys had started to burn powder on the main street.
A thin stream of flame leaped from the muzzle of Bob West’s revolver toward the distant stars—three times in swift succession, then thrice again. Before the last heavy report had died away, Kansas was thrusting the emptied weapon beneath his waistband. He pulled his own from its holster.
Now, as the pony was in the middle of a stride, he got sight of Scarborough. In the black shadows of a vacant lot, so close to the ground that only its abrupt forward movement betrayed it as a substance other than the earth, the Marshal’s form revealed itself. Before it a fan-shaped pathway of radiance sifted in from the street between the shade of the next building’s wall and the raised sidewalk.
The right hand of Kansas was sweeping upward from his hip; his thumb was on the six-shooter’s hammer, bringing it to the full cock. Before the instant had gone by, the sawed-off shotgun flung a lurid splash into the darkness.
The harsh breath of passing buckshot fanned the cowboy’s cheek. He knew that he had reeled a little in the saddle, but he was unconscious of his wound. For all of his faculties were concentrated on the movement of his own right hand as he diverted his aim from the star-flecked heavens to the vague form of his assailant. He pulled the trigger. Into the fan-shaped pathway of radiance Marshal Scarborough pitched forward upon his face.
Kansas drew rein. The cow-pony’s hoofs scraped on the hard roadway with the abruptness of its stop. The rider turned him where he stood and looked upon the prostrate form. He had seen death often enough to know it, and there was no mistaking that limp sprawl.
The cow-pony’s hoofs scraped on the hard roadway with the abruptness of its stop. The rider had seen death often enough to know it, and there was no mistaking that limp sprawl.
Then he rode forth from Horsehead. Somewhere beyond the foothill graveyard, he pulled down his pony to a walk and thrust his hand beneath his shirt to feel the hole which a stray buckshot had made on entering his side. He explored the place with clumsy fingers.
“Done glanced off along a rib—I reckon it’s lodged somewheres in my back.” When he had given himself this diagnosis and had made sure that the loss of blood was not dangerous, he spurred on and faced the situation as it stood.
He realized that there was more to it than Scarborough. It had begun with last summer’s killing. That had made him worth the Marshal’s while. Now he had slain two, and one of them wore a star. That meant, for one thing, that he was outlawed in this part of Texas—and for another, that wherever the story of his deeds was told, he was a marked man. Men would regard him as a desperado, and sooner or later some one else would seek his life again. So long as he rode where the events of the past year were known, he must keep a hand close to his revolver.
The boys were waiting for him at the forks of the road. While they dressed his wound he told them what had happened.
“Plug up the hole with a wad of axle-grease, and she'll heal slick’s a whistle,” Owl-head Johnson said. Kansas buttoned his shirt and handed the borrowed revolver back to Bob West.
“Tell Jeff,” he bade them, “not to look for me. I’m headed west.”
That was in April.
ONE evening early in July old John Chilson sat on his ranch-house porch among the pale plains beyond the Pecos, where there was no law. His blunt face was turned eastward, and he kept his little eyes on the gray road which wound along the flanks of the low bluffs toward the hamlet of Puerta de Luna by the river, twenty miles away.
The cattle king of Lincoln County—that was the name which men gave him, for he held two hundred miles of range down the wide valley, and the number of his beef-steers was beyond his knowledge. In that wild land where rights of property and rules of action were, for the most part, defined by rifle-muzzles, he still retained, by force of arms, the possession of those leagues of pasture which he had wrested from the Indians. With him, as with those old feudal barons who had thriven in very much the same fashion, there was seldom a month went by that did not see his hard-faced riders going forth to exterminate bold enemies.
He watched the road for the return of such a party now. A little cloud of dust appeared above the nose of the bluff at the farthest bend; and as it advanced around the turn, catching the last sun’s rays above the mesa’s summit, the forms of riders emerged from beneath it. He counted them: two, four and finally a fifth. Then he rose slowly, sighing as one who has read good news, and went within the house.
Some minutes later, through the scuffle of hoofs and the sound of the cowboys’ voices by the corrals, he heard footsteps on the veranda; his foreman entered.
“Well, Ben?” the old man asked. chair from beside the oilcloth-covered table and perched himself upon its back with his feet on the wooden seat.
“Rudabaugh wont rustle no more of your steers,” he announced, and rolled a cigarette. He puffed for some moments in silence, holding his folded hands between his knees
“This feller Kansas,” he went on, “is clean strain. There was a while I thought he was going to show plumb yellow.” He shook his head. “I never see a man swallow more’n he did before he jerked his gun.”
Old Chilson let his lips relax, and showed his big teeth.
“Think Rudabaugh knew who he was runnin’ up against?”
“He said so.” The foreman smiled grimly. “The play come up in ol’ Griselkowski’s saloon. The five of us was havin’ a drink when Rudabaugh come in with half a dozen of them O Z rail punchers. He spotted Kansas from the start and headed straight for him. Said he done killed that feller in Horsehead from behind. And all that Kansas done was laugh.
“He laughed at the things Rudabaugh called him, and asked him if that was the best he could do. Said that down in Texas where he come from, them words went fer pet names, and he reckoned he’d take ’em as sech.”
“And Rudabaugh,” said John Chilson softly, “shore can misname a man. I mind the time he made me swallow conside’ble rough talk which he was handin’ out acrost his six-shooter right in front of that there same bar.”
“Well, he wont cuss you out no more,” the foreman answered quietly, “and he wont kill no more of your punchers. Kansas done asked him to have a drink. I was plumb disgusted with your he-wolf, John. And I reckon Rudabaugh was gettin’ thet-a-way himself. He acted like he had begun to think Kansas was too easy to monkey with, and he was in a hurry to get the job done. Just pulled his gun and started fer to kill him! The lad was standin’ with his back toward him, too—and let him get the six-shooter out of the holster before he drilled him between the eyes. He seen him in the lookin’-glass behind the bar.” He paused and then, after brief reflection: “Quickest draw I ever see.”
“Them’s the kind of warriors a man needs in this kentry,” old Chilson said, and pulled a thick black plug of tobacco from his hip pocket. He was worrying off a chunk when the door opened, and Kansas stood before them on the threshold.
“Set down,” the cattleman bade him. “Ben was jest tellin’ me.” But the cowboy made no movement to accept the invitation.
“’Pears like my name has got up this way.” He held his eyes on Chilson as he was speaking. “And that trouble down in Texas—”
The foreman laughed.
“The’s a heap of good men along the Pecos that’s been outlawed in Texas,” he announced.
“This here Rudabaugh,” Kansas went on with his eyes still on the cow-man, “seemed to know all about it.”
John Chilson spat cheerfully.
“Reckon he did,” he answered.
“Did you-all know that he knew?” The question came with a disarming gentleness. The cattle king of Lincoln County rubbed his grizzled chin reflectively.
“We sort of figgered that-a-way,” he said at length.
“Then”—the young fellow’s voice hardened, but there was no anger in his eyes; they were a little weary as they looked into those of his employer—“I want my time.”
He caught up his own horse before darkness had settled down, and he did not stop for supper. but rode straight away into the West. Once, toward morning, when they were passing a ranch-house, the pony lagged perceptibly, and as he touched him with the spur—
“Not for a long ways yet,” the cowboy said. “We got to keep shovin’ on.”
THE night wore by, and the rays of the rising sun fell upon his back. That day he found a sheep-herder watching his flock and made camp with him: then he pressed on again through the bare hills that climbed toward the timber-crowned summits of the main divide. The pony was going footsore; he made up his mind to give it a few days’ rest before he struck off by that route toward the setting sun.
So when he rode down into the tree-dotted swale and found the feed knee-high at the White Oaks Springs, he told the two prospectors at the little peeled-log cabin which was tucked away in this nook under Baxter Mountain, his intention to make camp. And they accepted him after the manner of their kind, without comment or question.
To his way of thinking, they were strange men. He could not tell whether they were old or young; a hairy, bearded twain, bent-backed, and with the habit of silence strong upon them. They never took the trouble to ask him his name, but christened him as the fancy seized them; sometimes they called him Bud and sometimes Jack, but in the end his soft drawl impressed them somewhat, and they settled down on “Texas.” He took a sort of indulgent interest in their endless toil. Every morning, when they had washed down their weighty flapjacks with some villainous decoction which they called coffee, they loaded a mouse-colored burro with two kegs of water at the spring and drove him to the diggings in the sun-baked gulch two miles away.
There they labored with pick and shovel, gathering gravel from among the hot rocks, or crouched for weary hours over a rocker, which looked for all the world like a little homemade cradle. There was in this endless routine a monotony which sometimes strained the cowboy’s easy tolerance. And when they gathered the scanty teaspoonful of yellow dust from the wet blanket at the close of the day, he would find himself marveling over the mental slant which would lead human beings to drudge so patiently for such a small reward.
In the evening when they were resting, after a third onslaught on flapjacks, he now and then overheard them talking. Always the subject was the same. He listened to their tales of great strikes, of men made rich by a lucky stumble, of hidden ledges waiting for discovery in these hills. He knew that such things had happened, and that they would again; but to his mind there was something wildly vague in the whole idea; and their serene faith that such could ever come to one of them struck him as pathetic.
A week went by; his horse was beginning to put on a bit of fat; the feet were well.
“Reckon I'll pull out tomorrow,” he said them. And that day he climbed the flank of Baxter Mountain until he came among the scented pines. There he was resting, sprawled out in the shade, when he happened to notice the outcropping. The ever-recurrent talk of minerals had made its impression on him, for he worked for a good half-hour with the butt of his six-shooter until he had chipped two heavy fragments from the ledge.
“Here,” he told them when he was back at the cabin that evening. “is some specimens.” And in spite of his detached and somewhat superior attitude, he felt something like a glow of pride in his discovery when they seized the gleaming chunks, exclaiming with one voice that his was real thing.
The next morning when he was saddling up they came forth from their cabin and tried to stop him. But his mind was set on pressing on, and the utmost delay that he would grant them was a brief two hours during which he took them part way up the mountain and pointed out the spot above. When they begged him to stay over for his own sake and stake out a claim, he merely shook his head. So he left them climbing the steep slope, their picks over their sweating shoulders and the hot New Mexican sun glaring down upon them. He went on down to his waiting pony and struck off for the distant road that led farther into the West.
A SOLITARY buzzard was wheeling slowly on that August afternoon above San Simon Wash. It saw the buckboard with its load of mail-sacks and its two passengers rattling westward down the road; the Apaches riding eastward two miles farther down the gulch, a dozen warriors, all but naked, with dirty turbans binding their frowsy hair; and behind them old Bill Savage, the Indian-fighter, with six hard-eyed companions, hanging to their trail. As if the buzzard were Fate and had arranged the drama’s final scene to be played out here for its delectation, it watched them all.
The buckboard lurched among the boulders in the arid bed. Thorn-studded ocatillas thrust their leafless branches between the whirling spokes, playing a brisk tattoo upon the wheels. Dust spurted up between the sun-baked stones, shrouding the weird shapes of the cacti beside the road, settling down upon the vehicle and its two occupants.
“So you aint the reg’lar driver?” Kansas was saying. The other plied the whip and swore briskly at the mules.
“Driver pulled into Lordsburg with a busted laig.” He spat copiously across the dashboard—an unpleasant man, with rheumy eyes and hair plastered over his forehead. “Nobody was lookin’ for the job. Too much talk of Indians. But I was on my way to Tombstone, and I'd done gone broke. So when the agent waved a twenty-dollar bill in my face, I said I'd fetch her through to the San Pedro.” He glanced sharply at Kansas. “Come fur?” he asked abruptly.
“Silver City,” the cowboy answered easily. “My hoss done played out. So I sold him. Which way you from?”
“Me,” the other chuckled. “Oh, most anywheres, I reckon. What I was going to say—you got the look of a man I heard tell of over White Oaks way.” He shot another sidelong glance at Kansas, who still gazed straight ahead.
“White Oaks?” he asked softly. “Seems to me I heard the name.”
“It’s a new camp.” The driver interrupted himself to curse the mules again. “Lessn a month old. And boomin’! Biggest strike sence the Comstock. The mountain’s lousy with gold. What I was goin’ to say—this here young feller—seems he come from Texas. Seems like he was gettin’ out of the country becuz he'd shot a man or two. Well, he was camping with two prospectors and ’twas him that made the strike; but he was in sech a rush to be shovin’ on, that he never stopped to stake a claim. And now them two ol’ terrapins is plumb rich and lookin’ all over fer him, so’s they can declare him in on the deal.” He paused to jerk his thumb over his shoulder. “The’s a couple of rifles back there beside the mail-sacks. I reckon we might’s well get organized. Them there Apaches might be out yet—and this is a likely place.”
“What's wrong with those mules?” Kansas asked as he handed the driver one of the weapons. And then a spattering of dry reports came from both sides of the gully less than one hundred yards ahead. The buckboard careened with the sharpness of the turn as the driver swung the team out of the road. He pointed to a round knoll of boulders which rose from the gully’s bed.
“If we can make that hill!” he cried.
A dirty turban bobbed up behind a rock and vanished before Kansas could bring his rifle to his shoulder. Two or three tenuous puffs of smoke rose from the summit of the nearer bank. A mule squealed shrilly; and in the next moment both men were scrambling to their feet among a litter of mail-sacks and blanket-rolls beside the overturned vehicle.
Bullets snarled past them, ricocheting from the boulders as they climbed. They heard the screams of the wounded mule, the rattle of the rifles; and then suddenly, when they had flung themselves prone at the summit, the whole place became as quiet as if there were not a savage within miles.
“Aimin’ to sneak up where they can kill us off easier,” the driver growled.
“Well,” Kansas said, “I’m glad that mule’s dead, anyhow.”
They settled down to wait. A lizard scurried over the hot stones. The buzzard wheeled in wide circles overhead. Otherwise they saw no sign of life. A half-hour passed.
“Reckon the mules smelled them Apaches?” the cowboy asked. But before the other could answer him, the rocks upon the crest of the nearer bank fifty yards away blossomed with white smoke-puffs, and the two of them set to work with their rifles. At times they got a brief glimpse of a turbaned head or a lean brown body squirming among the boulders; then, barely waiting to line their sights, they fired.
“That,” Kansas called after the passage of another hour, “makes two that I can swear to, anyhow.” The driver wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand and profanely apostrophized the hidden enemy. A moment or two later he glanced over and saw his neighbor lying on his back, staring at the blazing heavens with unseeing eyes.
BILL SAVAGE and his Indian-fighters were spurring hard when they heard a volley more furious than those which had gone before. There followed a stillness broken only by the rattle of their ponies’ hoofs. They swept around the nose of a low bluff just as the naked renegades were darting from rock to rock toward the knoll’s summit. Flinging themselves from their saddles, they opened fire.
They were old hands at this sort of thing, and they went about it with umhurried precision, like good mechanics starting the day’s work. Occasionally one would speak:
“Wind’s a-drawin’ straight acrost the wash up there;” or “Leetle under five hundred yards, the way I make it;” and again: “I see that last shot of your’n kickin’ dust from that there big black rock. Pull down a notch.”
And that hillside became, from the Apache viewpoint. a most undesirable spot within the next ten minutes.
“Two of ’em and both daid,” the first to reach the summit of the knoll announced. He pointed down the wash. “What’s Bill up to, anyhow?”
“Gettin’ his skelps,” another told him. “Le’s scoop out the graves right here. It’s way above flood-water level.”
Bill Savage was a good half-hour prowling around among the rocks. There were one or two fine points of proprietorship to be decided, and he owned rigid scruples against taking trophies where there was any doubt of his having bagged the game. So by the time he had finished with this and with the examination of the mail-buggy, the grave-digging was completed.
There was, however, only one mound of rocks upon the summit of the knoll when he reached it.
“The other feller’s just creased along the top of his haid,” one of his companions informed him. “The boys have got him behind the rocks in the shade. He’s comin’ to already.”
They took the wounded man that night, to the San Pedro, where he told his story. And as the weeks went by, the news traveled back along the trails. It reached White Oaks before snow flew; it drifted to John Chilson’s ranch, and on to Horsehead. So the men who would have liked to kill him, and the men who would have liked to use him as a killer ceased to think of Kansas, and those who would have enriched him ceased their search for him. But the story lived, of the outlawed cowboy fleeing from Texas, to stumble on great riches beyond the Pecos, and to meet his death before the fruits of his discovery could come to him.
OLD John Wilcox told it to me differently one day.
We were sitting in his office in the bank of which he was the president, and when he had finished his version, I noticed for the first time the long scar half hidden by his snowy hair.
“That is the straight of it,” he said.
“I can’t help thinking,” I ventured, “how much of a temptation that money must have been to you.”
He smiled.
“I've heard the share in the claims was worth one hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “In those days I acted quicker than I do now. When I realized how things stood, after I’d come to, that afternoon—the other fellow dead, nobody knowing who he was, the money waiting back in White Oaks. Go and take the cash! Or give it up, and get shut of the whole blamed thing that had been following me all the way from Lampasas County! Why, right then I saw that here was my way out. So I told them that the dead man was Kansas.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1950, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 73 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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