IN WHICH THERE IS SOME SHOOTING
Billy sat in a chair and boiled. He did not calm down until after daylight, and then he found that his depression had vanished. He was full of vigor. He went out and looked over the property very carefully. The entire lay-out, he found, had weighed on his spirits, and this last ungrateful episode had made him sick of the whole miserable business. He ought never to be tied down. He could see his mistake clearly enough now. If he was going to stick to gold hunting, it ought to be as a prospector, not as a miner. A prospector enjoyed the delight of new country, of wilderness life, of the chase, and then, when civilization came too near, he could sell his claims to the miner and move on to a virgin country. A miner, on the other hand, had to settle down in one place and attend to all manner of vexatious details. Billy felt a great impatience to shake himself free. With the thought came a wave of anger against the men of the town. After all, what had he to gain by staying? This outfit was a fizzle; nothing could be done with it in the future. He might save something of the wreck by grubbing about in the débris, but grubbing was exactly what he wanted to get away from.
He looked over the works again. He was astonished to find how little of it he cared for personally. There remained not much more than the Westerner's outfit, when it was winnowed—four good horses, the buckboard, his saddle, clothes, his weapons, and the beautiful trotting horse. Billy could not let that go. The camp outfit they could have and welcome. He kicked the rubber stamper into space, scattering potential literature about the landscape. Many things he hesitated over, but finally discarded. The heap was not very large when all was told.
He began to experiment with the buckboard. Billy was a master of the celebrated diamond hitch. After an hour's earnest work, he drew back triumphantly to observe to himself that all he wished to take with him was securely packed on the vehicle. Then he coupled in his grays, and led out the beautiful trotting horse. He was glad that he had lately paid the English groom his wages; which individual he remembered seeing, the night before, dead drunk in a corner. Billy made himself some coffee in the empty cookee's shack, and was ready to start.
He did not know exactly where he would go; that was a matter of detail, but somewhere West in all probability—somewhere in Wyoming, where Jim Buckley was hidden up in the mountains, living a sane sort of a life, removed from the corroding influences of civilization. He did not realize that in this impatient shaking off of responsibility, he was little better than a moral coward. Even Billy's worst enemies would have denied the justice of that epithet.
He climbed in, deliberately unwound the reins from the long brake handle, clucked to the horses, and took his way, whistling, down the narrow trail. The beautiful trotting horse followed gingerly, tossing his head. At the entrance to town, Billy's whistling suddenly ceased. The street was quite bare and silent. Not even from the Little Nugget saloon or the new dance hall came the faintest sound of human occupancy. A tenderfoot might have argued that this was indicative of deep sleep after last night's festivities, but Billy knew better. At seven o'clock in the morning, after excitement such as that of a few hours before, the normal ensuing pow-wow would still be raging unabated. He reached under the seat for his Winchester, the new 40-82 model of his prosperous days, and laid it softly across his lap, and caught the end of the long lash in his whip hand. Then he resumed his tune exactly where it had been broken off, looking neither to right nor left, and jogging along without the slightest appearance of haste or uneasiness. No one could have called Billy Knapp a coward at that moment.
Near the first cabin the whistling broke off again. A little figure stumbled out into the deserted street, weeping and afraid. Billy pulled up. It was the Kid.
"They're goin' to shoot you," he sobbed, "from behind the Little Nugget, without givin' you a chanst! I had to tell you, an' they'll most kill me!" he wailed. Billy's eyes began to sparkle. The Kid tried to hold within the other's reach his little 22 calibre rifle, his most precious possession. "Here, take this!" he begged.
Billy laughed outright, a generous, hearty laugh with just a shade of something serious in it. "Thank ye," said he, "I got one. And let me tell ye right yere, you Kid. Yore a white man, you are, and yore jest about the only white man in the place." He cast his eyes about him in the buckboard at his feet. "Yere ye be," he said, tugging at a pair of huge silver-ornamented Mexican spurs and leaning over to give them to the boy; "jest remember me by them thar; they has my name in 'em; and, look yere," he went on with a sudden inspiration, "you-all gets up gulch to my camp and takes what grub you finds and lies low until yo' paw an' th' rest gits over bein' mad. I don't know but what they does kill you, if you shows up afore that." And he laughed again to see the boy's face brighten at this prospect of escaping the immediate wrath to follow.
The little scene had been enacted in the middle of the silent street, so silent and so empty that the principal actors in it experienced an uncomfortable emotion of publicity, perhaps a little like that of an inexperienced speaker before the glare of footlights. The Kid, followed friskily by Peter, scuttled up the gulch, Billy stood up in his buckboard and faced the inscrutable row of houses.
"Yo' damn coyotes!" he yelled, "thar goes the only man in the whole outfit. Shoot! yo' Siwashes, shoot!" and he brought his long whip like a figure 8 across the flanks of all four horses at once.
Bang! reverberated a shot between the hills, and a bullet splashed white against the brake bar.
Billy dropped the reins to the floor of the buckboard, and planted his foot on them. He steadied his knee against the seat, and threw down and back the lever of his Winchester for a shot. The beautiful trotting horse was pulling back in an ecstasy of terror at the end of his long lariat, shaking his head and planting his forefeet. Billy cursed savagely, but jerked loose the knot, and the beautiful trotting horse, with a final snort of terror, turned tail and disappeared in the direction of the mine.
Bang! Bang! Bang! went other shots from behind puffs of white smoke. The hills caught up the sound and rolled it back, and then back again, until it was quite impossible to count the discharges.
There were perhaps a half-dozen men with rifles and a dozen or so with six-shooters, all pumping away at it as fast as they could. The buckboard was struck many times. One horse was hit, but only slightly—not enough to interfere with, but rather to encourage his speed. Billy fastened his eyes on the spot whence the first bullet had sped. Suddenly he threw his rifle to his shoulder.
Crack! it spoke, strangely flat out there in the open against the fuller reports of the other pieces.
The bullets which undershot kicked up little puffs of dust, like grasshoppers jumping, while those that passed above, ricochetted finally from rocks and went singing away into the distance. It was a wonder, with so large a mark, that neither the man nor the horses were hit. It must be remembered, however, that the marksmen were more or less drunk, and that Billy's speed was by now something tremendous.
Crack! went his Winchester again.
At the end of the straight road was, as has perhaps been mentioned, a turn of considerable sharpness, flanked by bold cliff-like rocks. In the best of circumstances, this bit of road requires careful driving. With a runaway four and a light buckboard, a smash up was inevitable. The hidden assailants and spectators of the strange duel realized this suddenly. In the interest of the approaching catastrophe, the fusillade ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Billy maintained his first attitude, one knee on the seat, the other foot braced against the floor, keenly expectant. The silence became breathless, and one or two men leaned forward the better to see.
"Crack!" spoke Billy's rifle for the third time. The man who had fired the first shot pitched suddenly forward from behind his sheltering corner, and lay still.
With one swift motion the scout dropped his Winchester in the seat, grasped the four reins, and threw his enormous weight against the bits. The grays had been ranch-bred. They bunched their feet, hunched their backs, and in three heavy buck jumps had slowed down from a breakneck run to a lumbering gallop. Billy Knapp gave vent to the wild shrill war cry of his foster parents, the Oglallah Sioux, and jogged calmly out of sight around the bend of the road.
A great crowd pressed about Tony Houston, prone on the ground. They discovered that the ball had passed through the point of the shoulder, not a dangerous place in itself, but resulting in a serious wound because of the smashing power of the express rifle.
"Damn fine shooting!" they said, looking at each other with admiration. "Damn fine."
They began to feel a little more kindly toward Billy on account of this evidence of his skill. They set about bandaging the wounded man.