The Plunderer. Norton Roy
The man in the seat made no movement, but sat there with a hard smile on his firm lips. The partners stepped to the top of a convenient rock, where they could overlook the meeting, and watched, perturbed.
“I don’t know about this,” the elder said doubtfully. “Looks to me like there’s too many against one, and I ain’t sure whether he deserves hangin’. What do you think?”
“Let’s wait and see. Then, if they get too ugly, we’ll give them a talk and try to find out,” the younger man answered.
Even as he spoke, a man came running from the door of the road house with a coil in his hand, and began to assert drunkenly: “Here it is! I’ve got it! A rope!”
The partners were preparing to jump forward and protest, when a most astonishing change took place. The man in the wagon suddenly stood up, stretched his hand commandingly to the men holding the horses’ heads, and ordered: “Let go of my horses there, you drunken idiots! Let go of them, I say, or I’ll come down there and make you! Understand?”
The men at the horses’ heads wavered under that harsh, firm command, but did not release their hold. Without any further pause, the man jumped from his buckboard squarely into the road, struck the man holding the rope a sweeping side blow that toppled him over like a sprawling dummy, jerked the coil from his hands, and tore toward his horses’ heads. As if each feared to bar his advance, the men of the mob made way for him, taken by surprise. He brought the coil of rope with a stinging, whistling impact into the face of the nearest man, who, blinded, threw his hands upward across his eyes and reeled back. The man at the other horse’s head suddenly turned and dove out of reach, but the whistling coils again fell, lashing him across his head and shoulders.
Without any appearance of haste, and as if scornful of the mob that had so recently been threatening to hang him, the man walked back to his buckboard, climbed in, and stood there on his feet with the reins in one hand, and the rope in the other. “You get away from in front of me there,” he said, in his harsh, incisive voice; “I’m tired of child’s play. If you don’t let me alone, I’ll kill a few of you. Now, clear out!”
The men around him were already backing farther away, and at this threat they opened the road in such haste that one or two of them nearly ran over others.
“Say,” admiringly commented the big observer on the rock, “we’d play hob helpin’ him out. He don’t need help, that feller don’t. If I ever saw a man that could take care of himself–”
“He certainly is the one!” his companion finished the sentence.
“Who does this rope belong to?” demanded the hard-faced victor in the buckboard, looking around him.
No one appeared eager to claim proprietorship. He gave a loud, contemptuous snort, and threw the rope far over toward the road house.
“Keep it!” he called, in his cold, unemotional voice. “Some of you might want to cheat the sheriff by hanging yourselves. After this, any or all of you had better keep away from me. I might lose my temper.”
He sat down in the seat with a deliberate effort to show his scorn, picked the reins up more firmly, glanced around at the rear of his buckboard to see that his parcels were safe, ignored the cowed men, and without ever looking at them started his horses forward. As they began a steady trot and passed the partners, he swept over them one keen, searching look, as if wondering whether they had been of the mob, turned back to observe their loaded burros, apparently decided they had taken no part in the affair, and bestowed on them a faint, dry smile as he settled himself into his seat. At the bend of the road he had not deigned another look on the men who had been ravening to lynch him. He drove away as carelessly as if he alone were the only human being within miles, and the partners gave a gasp of enjoyment.
“Good Lord! What a man!” exclaimed the elder, and his companion answered in an equally admiring tone: “Isn’t he, though! Just look at these desperadoes, will you!”
With shuffling feet some of them were turning back toward the inviting door in which the bartender stood with his dirty apron knotted into a string before him. Some of the more voluble were accusing the others of not having supported them, and loudly expounding the method of attack that would have been successful. The man with red welts across his face was swearing that if he ever got a chance he would “put a rifle ball through Bully.” The young man by the rock grinned and said: “That’s just about as close as he would ever dare come to that fellow. Shoot him through the back at a half-mile range!”
The bartender suddenly appeared to remember the travelers, and ran across the road.
“I’m sorry, gents,” he said, “that I can’t do more to show you the way, but you see how it is. Go up there to that big rock that looks like a bear’s head, then angle off south-east, and you’ll find a trail. When you come to any crossin’s, don’t take ’em, but keep straight on, and bimeby, about to-morrer, if you don’t camp too long to-night, you’ll see a peak–high it is–with a yellow mark on it, like a cross. Can’t miss it. Right under it’s the Croix Mine. You leave the trail to cross a draw, look down, and there you are. So long!”
He turned and ran back across the road in response to brawling shouts from the men whose thirst seemed to have been renewed by their encounter with the masterful man they called “Bully,” and the partners, glad to escape from such a place, headed their animals upward into the hills.
CHAPTER II
THE CROIX D’OR
It was the day after the halt at the road house. Half-obliterated by the débris of snowslide and melting torrents, the trail was hard to follow. In some places the pack burros scrambled for a footing or skated awkwardly with tiny hoofs desperately set to check their descent, to be steadied and encouraged by the booming voice, deep as a bell, of the man nearest them. Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside the burros, pushed the stained white Stetson to the back of his head, exposing a white forehead which had been protected from the sun, and ran the sleeve of his blue-flannel shirt across his face from brow to chin to wipe away the moisture.
“Hell’s got no worse roads than this!” he exclaimed. “Next time anybody talks me into takin’ a cut-off over a spring trail to save a day and a half’s time, him and me’ll have an argument!”
Ahead, and at the moment inspecting a knot in a diamond hitch, the other man grinned, then straightened up, and, shading his eyes from the sun with his hat, looked off into the distance. He was younger than his partner, whose hair was grizzled to a badger gray, but no less determined and self-reliant in appearance. He did not look his thirty years, while the other man looked more than his forty-eight.
“Well, Bill,” he said slowly, “it seems to me if we can get through at all we’ve saved a day and a half. By the way, come up here.”
The grizzled prospector walked up until he stood abreast, and from the little rise stared ahead.
“Isn’t that it?” asked the younger man. “Over there–through the gap; just down below that spike with a snow cap.” He stretched out a long, muscular arm, and his companion edged up to it and sighted along its length and over the index finger as if it were the barrel of a rifle, and stared, scowling, at the distant maze of mountain and sky that seemed upended from the green of the forests below.
“Say, I believe you’re right, Dick!” he exclaimed. “I believe you are. Let’s hustle along to the top of this divide, and then we’ll know for sure.”
They resumed their progress, to halt at the top, where there was abruptly opened below them a far-flung panorama of white and gray and purple, stretched out in prodigality from sky line to sky line.
“Well, there she is, Dick,” asserted the elder man. “That yellow, cross-shaped mark up there on the side of the peak. I kept tellin’ you to keep patient and we’d get there after a while.”
His partner did not reply to