Fighting Edge — Chapters 45 and 46
THE OUTLAW GETS A BAD BREAK
Houck crawled through the barbed-wire fence and looked back into the park from which he had just fled.
June was kneeling beside the man he had shot.
Some one was running across the grass toward her.
Soon the pursuit would be at his heels.
He dared not lose a second.
He plunged into the sage, making for the hills which rose like a saw-toothed wall on the horizon.
If he could reach them he might find there a precarious safety.
Some wooded pocket would give him shelter until the pursuit had swept past.
He was hungry, but if he must he could do without food for a day.
The bandit was filled with a furious, impotent rage at the way fortune had tricked him.
Thirty-five miles from Bear Cat, well back from the river, three horses were waiting for him and his dead companions in a draw.
Unless somebody found them they would wait a long time.
The way that led to them was barred for him.
He would have to try to reach Glenwood or Rifle.
From there he could perhaps catch a freight east or west.
His one chance was to get clear out of the country.
After this day's work it would be too small to hold him.
Nothing had come out as he had planned it.
The farthest thing from his hopes had been that he would have to fight his way out.
He had not killed that fool Dillon of set purpose.
He knew now that if his anger had not blazed out he might have made his getaway and left the fellow alive.
But he had been given no time to think.
It was a bad break of the luck.
The White River settlers would not forgive him that.
They would remember that Dillon had saved him from the Indians in the Ute campaign, and they would reason--the thickheaded idiots--that the least he could have done was to let the boy go.
He plunged through the sand of the sage hills at a gait that was half a run and half a walk.
In his high-heeled boots fast travel was difficult.
The footgear of the cattleman is not made for walking.
The hill riders do most of their travel in a saddle.
Houck's feet hurt.
His toes were driven forward in the boots until each step became torture.
From his heels the skin peeled from sliding up and down against the hard leather.
But he dared not stop.
Already he could hear the pursuers.
In the still night there came to him the shout of one calling to another, the ring of a horse's hoof striking on a stone.
They were combing the mesa behind him.
Houck stumbled forward.
Vaguely there rose before him a boulder-strewn slope that marked the limit of the valley.
Up this he scrambled in a desperate hurry to reach the rocks.
For the pursuit was almost upon him now.
Two outcroppings of sandstone barred the way.
They leaned against each other, leaving a small cave beneath.
Into this Houck crawled on hands and knees.
He lay crouched there, weapon in hand, like a cornered wolf, while the riders swept up and past.
He knew one palpitating moment when he thought himself about to be discovered.
Two of the posse stopped close to his hiding-place.
"Must be close to him," one said.
"Got the makin's, Jim?"
"Sure."
Evidently the tobacco pouch was passed from one to the other.
"Right in these rocks somewhere, I shouldn't wonder."
"Mebbeso.
Mebbe still hot-footin' it for the hills.
He's in one heluva hurry if you ask me."
"Killed Bob Dillon in the park, I heard."
"If he did he'll sure hang for it, after what Dillon did for him."
There came the faint sound of creaking leather as their horses moved up the hill.
The outlaw waited till they were out of hearing before he crept into the open.
Across the face of the slope he cut obliquely, working always toward higher ground.
His lips were drawn back so that the tobacco-stained teeth showed in a snarl of savage rage.
It would go ill with any of the posse if they should stumble on him.
He would have no more mercy than a hunted wild beast.
With every minute now his chances of safety increased.
The riders were far above him and to the left.
With luck he should reach Piceance Creek by morning.
He would travel up it till he came to Pete Tolliver's place.
He would make the old man give him a horse.
Not since the night he had been ridden out of Bear Cat on a rail had he seen the nester.
But Pete always had been putty in his hands.
It would be easy enough to bully him into letting him have whatever he wanted.
All he needed was a saddled mount and provisions.
Houck was on unfamiliar ground.
If there were settlers in these hills he did not know where they were.
Across the divide somewhere ran Piceance Creek, but except in a vague way he was not sure of the direction it took.
It was possible he might lay hold of a horse this side of Tolliver's. If so, he would not for a moment hesitate to take it.
All night he traveled.
Once he thought he heard a distant dog, but though he moved in the direction from which the barking had come he did not find any ranch.
The first faint glimmer of gray dawn had begun to lighten the sky when he reached the watershed of Piceance.
It had been seventeen hours since he had tasted water and that had been as a chaser after a large drink of whiskey.
He was thirsty, and he hastened his pace to reach the creek.
Moving down the slope, he pulled up abruptly.
He had run into a cavvy grazing on the hill.
A thick growth of pine and pinon ran up to the ridge above.
Back of a scrub evergreen Houck dropped to consider a plan of action.
He meant to get one of these horses, and to do this he must have it and be gone before dawn.
This was probably some round-up.
If he could drift around close to the camp and find a saddle, there would likely be a rope attached to it.
He might, of course, be seen, but he would have to take a chance on that.
Chance befriended him to his undoing.
As he crept through the brush something caught his ankle and he stumbled.
His groping fingers found a rope.
One end of the rope was attached to a stake driven into the ground.
The other led to a horse, a pinto, built for spirit and for speed, his trained eye could tell.
He pulled up the stake and wound up the rope, moving toward the pinto as he did so.
He decided it would be better not to try to get a saddle till he reached Tolliver's place.
The rope would do for a bridle at a pinch.
The horse backed away from him, frightened at this stranger who had appeared from nowhere.
He followed, trying in a whisper to soothe the animal.
It backed into a small pinon, snapping dry branches with its weight.
Houck cursed softly.
He did not want to arouse anybody in the camp or to call the attention of the night jinglers to his presence.
He tried to lead the pinto away, but it balked and dug its forefeet into the ground, leaning back on the rope.
The outlaw murmured encouragement to the horse.
Reluctantly it yielded to the steady pull on its neck.
Man and beast began to move back up the hill.
As soon as he was a safe distance from the camp, Houck meant to make of the rope a bridle.
In the pre-dawn darkness he could see little and that only as vague outlines rather than definite shapes.
But some instinct warned the hunted man that this was no round-up camp.
He did not quite know what it was.
Yet he felt as though he were on the verge of a discovery, as though an unknown but terrible danger surrounded him.
Unimaginative he was, but something that was almost panic flooded up in him.
He could not wait to mount the horse until he had reached the brow of the hill.
Drawing the rope close, he caught at the mane of the horse and bent his knees for the spring.
Houck had an instant's warning, and his revolver was half out of its scabbard when the rush of the attack flung him against the startled animal.
He fought like a baited bear, exerting all his great strength to fling back the figures that surged up at him out of the darkness.
From all sides they came at him, with guttural throat cries, swarming over each other as he beat them down.
The struggling mass quartered over the ground like some unwieldy prehistoric reptile.
Houck knew that if he lost his footing he was done for.
Once, as the cluster of fighters swung downhill, the outlaw found himself close to the edge of the group.
He got his arms free and tried to beat off those clinging to him.
Out of the melee he staggered, a pair of arms locked tightly round his thighs.
Before he could free himself another body flung itself at his shoulder and hurled him from his feet.
His foes piled on him as ants do on a captured insect.
His arms were tied behind him with rawhide thongs, his feet fastened together rather loosely.
He was pulled to a sitting posture.
In the east the sky had lightened with the promise of the coming day.
His clothes torn from arms and body, his face bleeding from random blows, Houck looked round on the circle of his captors defiantly.
In his glaring eyes and close-clamped, salient jaw no evidence was written of the despair that swept over him in a wave and drowned hope.
He had in this bleak hour of reckoning the virtue of indomitable gameness.
"All right.
You got me.
Go to it, you red devils," he growled.
The Utes gloated over him in a silence more deadly than any verbal threats.
Their enemy had been delivered into their hands.
CHAPTER XLVI THE END OF A CROOKED TRAIL
In the grim faces of the Utes Houck read his doom.
He had not the least doubt of it.
His trail ended here.
The terror in his heart rose less out of the fact itself than the circumstances which surrounded it.
The gray dawn, the grim, copper-colored faces, the unknown torment waiting for him, stimulated his imagination.
He could have faced his own kind, the cattlemen of the Rio Blanco, without this clutching horror that gripped him.
They would have done what they thought necessary, but without any unnecessary cruelty.
What the Utes would do he did not know.
They would make sure of their vengeance, but they would not be merciful about it.
He repressed a shudder and showed his yellow teeth in a grin of defiance.
"I reckon you're right glad to see me," he jeered.
Still they said nothing, only looked at their captive with an aspect that daunted him.
"Not dumb, are you?
Speak up, some of you," Houck snarled, fighting down the panic within him.
A wrinkled old Ute spoke quietly.
"Man-with-loud-tongue die.
He kill Indian--give him no chance.
Indians kill him now."
Houck nodded his head.
"Sure I killed him.
He'd stolen my horse, hadn't he?"
The old fellow touched his chest.
"Black Arrow my son.
You kill him.
He take your horse mebbe.
You take Ute horse."
He pointed to the pinto.
"Ute kill Man-with-loud-tongue."
"Black Arrow reached for his gun.
I had to shoot.
It was an even break."
Houck's voice pleaded in spite of his resolution not to weaken.
The spokesman for the Indians still showed an impassive face, but his voice was scornful.
"Is Man-with-loud-tongue a yellow coyote?
Does he carry the heart of a squaw?
Will he cry like a pappoose?"
Houck's salient jaw jutted out.
The man was a mass of vanity.
Moreover, he was game.
"Who told you I was yellow?
Where did you get that?
I ain't scared of all the damned Utes that ever came outa hell."
And to prove it--perhaps, too, by way of bolstering up his courage--he cursed the redskins with a string of blistering oaths till he was out of breath.
The captive needed no explanation of the situation.
He knew that the soldiers had failed to round up and drive back to the reservation a band of the Utes that had split from the main body and taken to the hills.
By some unlucky chance or evil fate he had come straight from Bear Cat to their night camp.
The Utes left Houck pegged out to the ground while they sat at a little distance and held a pow-wow.
The outlaw knew they were deciding his fate.
He knew them better than to expect anything less than death.
What shook his nerve was the uncertainty as to the form it would take.
Like all frontiersmen, he had heard horrible stories of Apache torture.
In general the Utes did not do much of that sort of thing.
But they had a special grudge against him.
What he had done to one of them had been at least a contributory cause of the outbreak that had resulted so disastrously for them.
He would have to pay the debt he owed.
But how?
He sweated blood while the Indians squatted before the fire and came to a decision.
The council did not last long.
When it broke up Houck braced his will to face what he must.
It would not be long now.
Soon he would know the worst.
Two of the braves went up the hill toward the cavvy.
The rest came back to their captive.
They stood beside him in silence.
Houck scowled up at them, still defiant.
"Well?"
he demanded.
The Utes said nothing.
They stood there stolid.
Their victim read in that voiceless condemnation an awful menace.
"Onload it," he jeered.
"I'm no squaw.
Shoot it at me.
Jake Houck ain't scared."
Still they waited, the father of Black Arrow with folded arms, a sultry fire burning in his dark eyes.
The two men who had gone to the cavvy returned.
They were leading a horse with a rope around its neck.
Houck recognized the animal with a thrill of superstitious terror.
It was the one about the possession of which he had shot Black Arrow.
The old chief spoke again.
"Man-with-loud-tongue claim this horse.
Utes give it him.
Horse his.
Man-with-loud-tongue satisfied then maybe."
"What are you aimin' to do, you red devils?"
Houck shouted.
Already he guessed vaguely at the truth.
Men were arranging a kind of harness of rope and rawhide on the animal.
Others stooped to drag the captive forward.
He set his teeth to keep back the shriek of terror that rose to his throat.
He knew now what form the vengeance of the savages was to take.
CHAPTER XLVII
