THE DUEL IN THE MALPAIS
For twelve days Lafe and his son followed the trail of the outlaw. Sometimes they lost trace of him, but Moffatt could never refrain from trifling displays of bravado which betrayed his identity everywhere he moved, so that Johnson was able to pick up his tracks without much loss of time. He was never more than three days behind Moffatt.
Evidently foreseeing that the telegraph of the entire continent would be put in service to capture him, Moffatt did not attempt to get out of the country by train or by any of the frequented roads of travel. He kept to the by-trails and the wildest regions. Instead of stealing over the Border, he headed north. Lafe heard of him one day in a mountain hamlet; the next at the home of a nester, in a deep valley thirty miles distant. So with his son he followed him along the Border, up into New Mexico and across it, over the San Andres Mountains and onward towards the Capitan range.
At the Bar W headquarters near Carrizozo he learned that a man like the one he sought had taken dinner there and had later ridden onward into the Malpais. Accordingly Johnson and his son followed into these bad lands.
When they started, the sun was glaring ferociously from a pale blue sky and the dust of the flats rose like fine powder under their horses' feet. On their one side was an expanse of baked clay, loose and flaky like a crust of pastry, that stretched away to the base of some foothills where were areas of green, dotted with grazing cattle. Beyond the hills a mountain gloomed, mist-capped. In the right foreground was a grove of trees with a red house nestling in the midst. A windmill rose beside the house, and not far off, standing naked on the parched plain, was an adobe structure, square, flat-roofed and with a single stove-pipe chimney. These were the Bar W headquarters.
Ahead of the two the level country terminated abruptly at a dull red line, and beyond that was a fit abode for lost souls—twisted, gnarled heaps of metal and rock, a torn land where nothing of life stayed voluntarily.
They had set out from the Bar W on Wednesday evening. On Thursday afternoon Johnson and Moffatt were taking pot shots at each other from behind heaps of lava far out in the Malpais. Near the sheriff was his son. Lafe, Jr., lay in a fissure behind a mound of slag-iron and endeavored conscientiously to shoot off the top of Moffatt's head as it bobbed for the fraction of a second from behind another mound a hundred yards away. They had abandoned their horses when they entered the Malpais, because the footing was so treacherous that they could make as good progress by walking. Moreover, there was nothing of sustenance for the beasts in all the forty miles of waste. Coming upon Moffatt unexpectedly as he was examining his jaded horse's feet, the sheriff had not been able to carry into execution his plan of hiding Lafe, Jr., in a position where he would be safe and could yet render assistance. So now Lafe, Jr., flattened out in his fissure in equal danger with his father, and exulting vastly. Of course, what the pursuers should have done, according to the best military tactics, was to separate and come upon the outlaw from two sides, thus exposing him to a shot. About the only objection that could be urged to this strategy was that they couldn't do it. Moffatt could see their every movement and they dare not budge from their shelter. Whatever the quality of his courage, nobody could deny that Steve was terrible with a rifle.
