No badger hole had tripped that sure-footed beast. A bullet had done the work. He lay on his side with scarcely a quiver, a convenient bulwark to which Rock hastily crawled, and, flat on his stomach, he laid his carbine across the sweat-warm body.
A most astonishing thing happened. As his forefinger sought the trigger, that squad of riders jerked their mounts, each back on his haunches. For a moment, the extended hands holding six-shooters, seemed poised and uncertain. Two or three began to reel in their saddles. One man slid off slowly, headfirst. Then the gunfire broke loose again. But they did not charge down on Rock. He pulled, saw a man fall, drew down on another, deliberately and unhurried—smiling, in spite of the hot rage in his heart. For he knew his own men were in the fight now. Behind and above him a staccato burst of firing resounded above the nearer shooting. Pow! Pow! Rifles. Pow! Pow! Another man down. A horse spinning around and around on his hind legs, squealing with pain.
And then out of Buck Walters’ group of hesitant horsemen, who were shooting still, their horses plunging this way and that, one rider bent his head and came like a quarter horse off the mark. He didn’t shoot, and his gun hand was held stiffly straight before him. He had no great way to come—less than a hundred yards. He rode a coal-black horse with a white face, the same horse he had ridden the day he led his men to Nona Parke’s to hang Doc Martin to a cottonwood limb.
For a second, Rock held his fire. He could hear hoofbeats coming down from the pines. He saw those who had pursued him break and turn tail, shooting over their shoulders.
And this frenzied fool was coming straight at him, at Rock, at a man entrenched behind a dead horse, with a rifle in his hands.
The hate on Buck Walters’ face, the passion, and the sudden pang! pang! of his six-shooter fascinated Rock, even as he let the tip of the carbine sight settle on Buck’s heaving breast.
At twenty yards he fired. Walters straightened in his saddle. His mouth opened, as if in one last incredulous “Oh!” and he toppled sidewise.
But the black horse kept on, like a charging lion, like a cougar launched on its spring, like anything animate or inanimate that has acquired momentum beyond control. The brute was either blind or mad, or both. For one instant Rock hesitated. It seemed childish to shoot down a riderless horse. Surely the brute would see where he was going and turn aside. He had never seen anything like that. The black’s eyeballs were staring, his mouth foam-flecked with blood. Crazy. Hit perhaps. Running amuck. Rock flung up his carbine and fired. But he had waited a fraction of a second too long. The black horse loomed in the air right over Rock, and, as the bullet paralyzed him, came down in a heap, with crimson spurting from the hole Rock had drilled in the white blaze of his face.
One flying hoof struck Rock, and a tremendous weight smashed down on him. For a second or so, he seemed to be gifted with a strange, magnified awareness of all that was taking place. He could see his own men sweeping by on either side with exultant yells, firing. He could see figures prone on the grass, a couple of saddle horses galloping aimlessly, with stirrups flapping. It was all illuminated with an unearthly radiance, a light brighter and whiter than any sun that ever shone on the plains. In the midst of this transfigured reality, very strangely—wondering how that could be—he could see Nona Parke’s face, sad and troubled, but very alluring.