V
At ten o’clock next morning the town lay still and shimmering in the blistering sun of a summer day. There were one or two men in Brady’s, and here and there along Main Street other figures lounged in the shade. Jack Mills rode in from the south on a strange horse, wearing new overalls and an indistinguishable hat. There was a red bandanna loosely knotted about his neck. He encountered no one within recognizing distance. In front of the bank he dropped off, hitched the horse, lifted the handkerchief so that it hid his mouth and nose, and stepped into the building. Two or three people at some distance saw him go in, and idly wondered who the stranger was.
He had hoped to find Loupel alone in the bank; but Jim Paine was there. Paine had just cashed a check and stood with his back toward the door, talking to Bud. When Bud saw the masked man he turned pale, and Jim marked the change in his countenance and whirled around. But Jack’s gun was leveled, so Bud and Jim Paine reached for the ceiling.
Mills, with some attempt to disguise his voice, said harshly to Bud: “Paper money. All of it. Quick!”
Loupel, hands still in the air, started toward the safe. Jack looked that way and saw that the safe door was open. He changed his mind.
“Wait,” he commanded. With a gesture he bade Paine face the wall. Then he leaped the counter, motioned Loupel aside, and himself approached the safe. Paine, watching sidewise, saw the masked man drag out half a dozen packets of bills and stuff them into the front of his shirt. Mills did this with his left hand; his right hand held the gun, and his eyes covered Paine and Loupel almost constantly. Loupel, backed into a corner, watched in silence.
When Mills had taken what he came for, he rose and turned toward the counter again. At that instant a gun roared behind him, and something tugged at his shirt, under the left arm. He whirled, saw Rand standing in the back door of the bank building. Rand’s gun was going. Jack fanned his hammer twice, and the banker fell.
Paine had not moved. Mills swung, half crouching, toward Loupel. Loupel had double-crossed him. That was the thought that tightened his finger on the trigger. But—Jeanie! That was the thought which made his trigger finger relax. He slid across the counter, made the door in one jump. Five seconds after his shot, his horse was galloping out of town. And as he passed the last house a rifle spoke, somewhere behind him.
Half a mile from town he looked back and saw three or four horsemen just emerging from Main Street. On their heels others appeared. He laughed a grim little laugh, and slid forward in his stirrups to help his horse to greater speed. But when he reached the hills, some half a dozen miles south of town, they were close behind him, and their rifles were reaching out for him. He knew a certain cave, a narrow, shallow cover. Poor refuge, but better than none.
In this cave they brought him to bay. He lay prone behind the bowlder that screened and half closed the entrance, and watched them draw off and circle to inclose him. “Got a little while,” he said to himself. “Fireworks won’t start right away.”
Satisfied of this, he rolled a little on his side and drew from the front of his shirt the packages he had taken from the safe. Strictly in line with Bud Loupel’s well-laid plan, these were simply dummy packets of waste paper, with a genuine bill on the outside of each bundle. Mills laid them on the ground and studied them thoughtfully, considering their significance.
His situation was sufficiently desperate. Rand was dead. He had no doubt of that, and he regretted it. He had always liked Rand, but there had been no choice at the moment. The question was, what next! These fake bundles of money had their place in the scheme of things. If he kept them, told the true story, they might well save his life. Frontier justice was swift, but it was also tempered by considerations not accepted under a more rigid system of law. If he proved Bud Loupel’s part in this, Bud would be damned, and he might himself be saved. And the dummy bundles would prove Bud’s guilty foreknowledge of the robbery.
A rifle bullet spattered on the rock above him, and he postponed decision. “Needs thinking over,” he told himself. “We’ll see what we will see.”
They held him in siege all that afternoon, and toward sunset brought a barrel of kerosene from town. Men climbed the hill above the cave, where the bullets could not reach them, and poured this oil so that it ran down into a pool just in front of his retreat. Then they set fire to it. He saw at once that he could not endure the smoke and gas, and after some preparations shouted his surrender.
They bade him come out with his hands in the air, and he did so. His boots were somewhat scorched by the flames. Then they tied his hands behind his back and his ankles beneath the horse’s belly, and took him back to town. Toward dusk he was lodged in the calaboose there, and Nick Russ, the deputy, went on guard outside.