“He's got some good boy at his back,” Weary reminded him, loyal to his Flying U comrade.
“You're dang right he has! I ain't sayin' he ain't, am I? Throw some more lead back at them skunks behind us, will ye, Lite? 'N' the rest of yuh save yore shells fer close-ups!” He grinned a little at the incongruity of a motion-picture phrase in such a situation as this. “'N' don't be so dang skeered uh hurtin' somebody!” he adjured Lite, drawing rein a little so as not to forge ahead of the other. “You'll have to kill off a few anyway 'fore you're through with 'em.”
Lite aimed at the man riding in the center of the half-circle, and the bullet he sent that way created excitement of some sort; but whether the Indian was badly hit, or only missed by a narrow margin, the four did not wait to discover. They had held their horses down to a pace that merely kept them well ahead of the Indians; and though the horses were sweating, they were holding their own easily enough—with a reserve fund of speed if their riders needed to call upon it.
Applehead, glancing often behind him, scowled over the puzzle of that fanlike formation of riders. They would hardly begin so soon to herd him and his men into that evil little rock basin with the sinister name, and there was no other reason he could think of which would justify those tactics, unless another party waited ahead of them. He squinted ahead uneasily, but the mesa lay parched and empty under the sky—
And then, peering straight into the glare of the sun, he saw, down the slope which they had climbed without realizing that it would have a crest, it was so low—Applehead saw the answer to the puzzle; saw and gave his funny little grunt of astonishment and dismay. Straight as a chalk line from the sandstone ledge on their right to the straight-walled butte on their left stretched that boundary line between the untamed wilderness and the tamed—a barbed wire fence; a four-wire fence at that, with stout cedar posts whereon the wire was stretched taut and true. From the look of the posts, it was not new—four or five years old, perhaps; not six years, certainly, for Applehead had ridden this way six years before and there had been not so much as a post-hole to herald the harnessing of the mesa.
Here, then, was the explanation of the fanlike spreading out of the line of Indians. They knew that the white men would be trapped by the fence, and they were cutting off the retreat—and keeping out of the hottest danger-zone of the white men's guns. Even while the four were grasping the full significance of the trap that they had ridden into unaware, the Indians topped the ridge behind them, yip-yip-yipping gleefully their coyotelike yells of triumph. The sound so stirred the slow wrath of Lite Avery that, without waiting for the word from Applehead he twisted half around in his saddle, glanced at the nearest Indian along his rifle-sights, bent his forefinger with swift deliberation upon the trigger, and emptied the saddle of one yelling renegade, who made haste to crawl behind a clump of rabbit weed.
“They howl like a mess uh coyotes,” Lite observed in justification of the shot, “and I'm getting sick of hearing 'em.”
“Mama!” Weary, exclaimed annoyedly, “that darn fence is on an up-slope, so it's going to be next to impossible to jump it! I guess here's where we do about an eight-hundred-foot scene of Indian Warfare, or Fighting For Their Lives. How yuh feel, Cadwalloper?”
“Me?” Pink's eyes were purple with sheer, fighting rage. “I feel like cleaning out that bunch back there. They'll have something to howl about when I get through!”
“Stay back uh me, boys!” Applehead's voice had a masterful sharpness that made the three tighten reins involuntarily. “You foller me and don't crowd up on me, neither. Send back a shot or two if them Injuns gits too ambitious.”