Ballard ready on his hip, the Tomcat, giving a nervous over-shoulder look, brought Shylock to a walk. The broken pony came stumbling down to the ford. Mr. Masterson, with his mighty buffalo gun, aroused himself for official business.
“Drop that rifle!” said Mr. Masterson.
It was like a bolt from the blue to the spent and shaken Tomcat. He caught his breath in a startled way. Then, despair standing in the stead of courage, he tossed the Ballard into his left hand and fired, point-blank, at Mr. Masterson’s face where it showed above the bank. The bullet tossed the dust a yard to the left. Mixed bloods and Indians at their best are but poor hands with a rifle, and the Tomcat was at his worst.
With the crack of the Ballard came the bellow of the Sharp’s. The great bullet, which would have torn its way through the vitals of a buffalo-bull at eight hundred yards, brought the Tomcat whirling from the saddle like a stricken wild duck. What with sheer weariness and an inadvertent yank at the Spanish bits as the Tomcat went overboard, poor Shylock crossed his tired forelegs, tripped, blundered, and fell. He came down on the Tomcat; in the scramble to get to his feet Shylock fell upon the Tomcat again.
Mr. Masterson slipped another cartridge into the buffalo gun. Then he warily approached the Tomcat, muzzle to the fore, finger on the trigger. A dying man will sometimes pull a six-shooter with the last flicker of his failing strength, and snatch a vengeance as he quits the earth.
Mr. Masterson seized the Tomcat by the shoulders and dragged him from under Shylock—still heaving and plunging to regain his feet. There was no call for a second look; the experienced Mr. Masterson could tell by the ash-colour struggling through the brown that the death-draw was on the Tomcat at the very moment.
The Tomcat, hiccoughing and bleeding, lay on the short stiff grass and rolled a hateful eye on his executioner. Mr. Masterson, thinking on the girl who died in Dodge, gave back a look as hateful. And this, in the midst of the lonesome plains, is what these two spoke to one another—these, the slayer and the slain, to show how bald is truth!
“You blank-blanked-blankety-blank! you ought to have made a better shot than that!” said the Tomcat. “Well, you blank-blanked murderer, I did the best I could,” said Mr. Masterson.
Mr. Masterson, as he walked his horse over the hill upon which he had first beheld the coming of the Tomcat, halted and looked back. Shylock of the empty saddle nosed up to Mr. Masterson’s horse in a friendly way. Five miles to the south, on the banks of the Medicine Lodge, a raven wheeled and stooped. Away to the west a coyote yelped; another yelped an answer, and then another. Mr. Masterson shrugged his wide shoulders. The coyote by daylight makes gruesome melody.
“The ground was too hard to dig a grave,” said Mr. Masterson, as he turned his horse’s head again towards Dodge, “even if I’d had the tools. Besides, I wasn’t elected undertaker, but sheriff.”