The Settling of the Sage Part 32

"You move along back, Billie," he said. He patted her shoulder and smiled. "I'm a-running this layout and if you don't mind the old sheriff he'll have to picket you."

She nodded and pulled Papoose out of the trail till the others filed by, riding with Horne in rear of the rest.

The party halted while Harris dismounted to examine the trail. It was hard-packed but the scant signs showed that shod horses had come in since any had gone out.

"At least, there's some of them back," he said. "Likely all."

"Lang is busy gloating over the fact that the Three Bar is sacked,"

Alden said. "Figuring that the whole country will be afraid of him now and that his friends will stand by--without a thought that his neck will maybe get stretched a foot long before night."

Harris turned up a side pocket and the men waited while he and the sheriff climbed a ridge on foot to investigate. Harris motioned to the girl.

"Come along up where you can see," he said and she followed them up the ridge. Two hundred yards from the horses they came out on a crest which afforded a view of the basin that sheltered Lang's stockade.

From behind a sage-clump Harris trained his gla.s.ses on the group a mile out across the shallow basin. Smoke rose from the chimney of the main building. Two men stood before a teepee near the stockade. There were two other tents inside the structure, with a number of men moving about them. Three sat on the ground with their backs against the log walls of the main house. Thirty or more horses fed in a pasture lot and a little band of eight or ten stood huddled together inside the stockade at the far end from the tents.

He handed his gla.s.ses to the girl.

"We'll be starting," he said. "By the time we get fixed the rest will be closing in. You stay here and watch the whole thing."

"I'm going along," she said.

The sheriff demurred.

"It will be dirty business down there--once we start," he said.

"Business for men; and you're a better man than most of us, girl; but you surely didn't reckon that Cal and me would let you go careening down in gunshot of that hornet's nest."

"I'm as good a shot as there is in the hills," she said. "And it was my ranch they burned."

The sheriff shoved back his hat and pushed his fingers through his mop of gray hair.

"Fact," he confessed. "Every word. But there's swarms of men in this country--and such a d.a.m.n scattering few of girls that we just can't take the risk. That's how it is. If you don't promise to stay out of it we'll have to detail a couple of the boys to ride guard on you till it's over with."

She knew that the other men would back Harris and Alden in their verdict. She nodded and watched them turn back toward the horses. She wanted to lead her men down in a wild charge on the stockade, shooting into it as she rode, avenging the sack of the Three Bar in a smas.h.i.+ng fight.

But there was nothing spectacular in the attack of Harris and the sheriff. They went about it as if hunting vermin, cautiously and systematically, taking every possible advantage of the enemy with the least possible risk to their men.

An hour after the two men had left her she saw a figure off to the right. She trained the gla.s.ses on it and saw that it was Alden moving toward the buildings. She swept the gla.s.ses round the edge of the circular basin. From all sides, from the mouth of every coulee that opened into it, dark specks were converging upon the stockade. Some of them stood erect, others crouched, while a few sprawled flat and crawled for short distances before rising and moving on.

From her point of vantage it seemed that those round the buildings must see them as clearly as she did herself; but she knew they were keeping well out of sight, taking advantage of every concealing wave of ground and all inequalities of surface. The advance was slower as they closed in on the stockade. There was a sudden commotion among the men at the buildings. They were moving swiftly under cover. Some of the attacking force had been seen. The majority of the rustlers took to the stockade. Four ran into the main cabin.

It was as if she gazed upon the activities of battling ants, the whole game spread out in the field of her gla.s.ses. There came a lull in the action and she knew that the sheriff had raised his voice to summon them to come out without their guns and go back as prisoners to stand trial for every crime under the sun.

Not a shot had been fired. One after another she picked up the men with her gla.s.ses. Occasionally one moved, hitching himself forward to some point which afforded a better view. One or two knelt in the bottom of shallow draws, peering from behind some sheltering bush.

Inside the stockade she could see Lang's men kneeling or flattened on the ground as they gazed through cracks in the walls.

She made out Harris, crouching in a draw. A thin haze of smoke spurted from his position. Three similar puffs showed along the face of the stockade. Then the sounds of the shots drifted to her,--faint, snappy reports. Harris had dropped flat and s.h.i.+fted his position the instant he fired. A dozen shots answered the smoke-puffs along the stockade.

Throughout the next half-hour there was not a shot fired in the flat; no general bombardment, no wild shooting, but guerilla warfare where every man held his fire for a definite human target. A man s.h.i.+fted his position in the stockade, raised to peer from a hole breast high, and she saw him pitch down on the ground before the sound of the shot reached her. One of her men had noted the darkening of the crack and had searched him out with a rifle shot. Three shots answered it from the main cabin.

The thud of hoofs on the trail below drew her eyes that way. Waddles was riding out into the basin. He had brought the pack string up to some point near at hand and deserted it to the care of the others while he rode on ahead to join in the fight. He was almost within gunshot of the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze. She watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot. He had discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white s.h.i.+rt and overalls giving him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a shallow ravine. The figures were small from distance, even when viewed through the gla.s.ses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and lessening the personal element and the grim reality of the scene.

Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest.

Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of gravel round it. The man who had fired the shot went down as the sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown.

She presently noted one of her men sitting under a sheltering bank and eating his lunch. She looked at her watch; it was after three,--the day more than half gone and less than a hundred shots had been fired.

Five men were down in the stockade.

The sun was sinking and the higher points along the west edge of the basin were sending long shadows out across the flats before there was further action except for an occasional s.h.i.+fting of positions. Those remaining alive in the stockade were saddling the bunch of horses kept inside. These were led close under the fence on her side where she could no longer see them.

The shadows lengthened rapidly and her view through the gla.s.ses was beginning to blur when the gates of the stockade swung back and five horses dashed out, running at top speed under the urge of the spurs. A rider leaned low upon the neck of each horse and they scattered wide as they fanned out across the basin, a wild stampede for safety, every man for himself.

She saw one man lurch sidewise and slip to the ground; another straightened in the saddle, swung for two jumps, and slid off backwards across the rump of his mount. She saw the great striped bug which was Waddles rise to his knees in the path of a third. The rider veered his mount and swung from the saddle, clinging along the far side of the running horse. Then man and horse went down together and neither rose.

Waddles had shot straight through the horse and reached the mark on the other side. The shooting ceased when six shots had been fired. Four riderless horses were careening round the basin. Five hits out of six, she reflected; perhaps six straight hits.

The stockade was empty, leaving only the four in the house to be accounted for. The dark specks in the brush were working closer to the house, effectually blocking escape. Then she could no longer make them out. The building showed only as a darker blot in the obscurity. A tiny point of light attracted her eye. It grew and spread. She knew that one of her men had crawled up under cover of night and fired the house. It was now but a question of minutes, but the sight oppressed her. She thought of the burning buildings on the Three Bar and rose to make her way back to the pocket where the horses had been left in the care of a deputy.

"It will be over in an hour," she told the horse guard.

All through the day she had scarcely moved and she was tired. The hours of inactivity had proved more wearing than a day in the saddle.

Harris and the sheriff came in with their detail.

There were no prisoners.

"So they wouldn't give up even when they was burnt out," the horse guard commented. "I thought maybe a few would march out and surrender."

"I'd sort of hoped we'd have one or two left over so we could put on a trial," the sheriff said. "There was three come out. But the light was poor and all. Maybe they did aim to surrender. It's hard to say.

But if they did--why, some of the Three Bar boys read the signs wrong.

Anyway, there won't be any trial."

They rode to the sheltered box canyon where Waddles had left the pack train. A little later Bentley's men rode up and five minutes behind them came Carp with the rest. The bed rolls were spread among the stunted cedars on the floor of the canyon and all hands turned in. At daylight the long return journey to the Three Bar was commenced. The horses were tired and the back trip was slow. They camped for the night twenty miles out from the ranch and before noon of the next day the sheriff and the marshals had split off with their men, leaving the Three Bar crew to ride the short intervening s.p.a.ce to the ranch alone.

As she neared the edge of the Crazy Loop valley the girl dreaded the first glimpse of the pillaged ranch. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder at the speed with which Harris had planned and executed the return raid while the Three Bar still burned.

"How did you get word to them all?" she asked. "Did you have it all planned before?"

"It was Carp," he said. "One of Lang's men rode down to inquire for Morrow and told Carp the cows were gathered for the run and held near the Three Bar. They figured Carp was a pal of Morrow's and all right.

It was near morning then. Carp sent Bentley fanning for Coldriver to see if the sheriff was back and to bring out the posse if he hadn't turned up. He started out for the Three Bar himself. The run was under way when he came in sight so he cut over and headed the mule teams at the forks and turned them back, then kept on after the boys at Brill's. Sent word to me by Evans to meet them where we did."

She did not hear the latter part of his explanation for they had reached the edge of the valley and she looked down upon the ruins of her ranch.

"Now I'm ready to go," she said. "I'll go and see what Judge Colton wants."

"He wanted you to get away before anything like this occurred," Harris said. "I knew that maybe we'd have tough going for a while at some critical time and wanted you to miss all of that--to come back and find the Three Bar booming along without having been through all the grief.

So I wrote him to urge you to come."

"Well, I'm going now," she said. "I don't need to be urged."

Three of the homesteaders had been detailed to stay at the ranch. They were putting up a temporary fence across the lower end to hold range stock back from the trampled crops until a permanent one could be built and linked up with the side fences which still stood intact. She showed no interest in this. The sight below turned her weak and sick.