When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

The sharp challenge of the clean-mouthed rifle, multiplied by its echo, dominated the muffled belching of revolvers like thunder crashing through the smother of winds, and upon the drunken mob of murderers, the effect was both immediate and appalling. To a savage lust for violence succeeded panic and an uncontrollable instinct of flight.

A very different performance had been rehearsed in advance. It had contemplated a pretense of mêlée in which Jerry Henderson was to be killed—and no one else was to suffer. What had been staged as a bar-room brawl with an incidental murder had been switched without prior notice into battle and siege, and as every head came about with eyes starting and jaws sagging, many dropped and lay prone on the floor to escape the scathe of flying lead. Utilizing the respite of diverted attention, Jerry Henderson overturned a heavy table, behind which he crouched. He was bleeding now from half a dozen wounds—and his only thought was to die fighting.

But that moment of terror-arrested inaction would not last, and before it was spent, Bear Cat Stacy had hurled himself with hurricane fury into the room, his rifle clubbed and flying, flail-like, about his head. The brief advantage of surprise must be utilized for the rush across the floor and, if it were to succeed, it must be accomplished before the boldest recovered their poise.

He must reach Henderson's side and the two must fight their way out shoulder to shoulder. Henderson must not die—just yet!

Turner Stacy covered half the distance by the sheer impetuosity of his onslaught, and reached the painted line of the state border, before a voice from the outskirts sought to rally the dismayed and disorganized forces with a rafter-rocking howl: "Bear Cat Stacy! Git him boys! Git 'em both!"

But the new arrival was not easy to "git." He seemed an indestructible spirit of devastation; a second Samson wielding the jaw bone of an ass and wreaking death among his adversaries. He hurled aside his rifle shattered against broken heads and caught up a heavy chair. He cast away the chair, carrying a man down with it as it flew, and fought with his hands.

The superstition of his charmed life seemed to have something more of verity, just then, than old wives' gossip.

Then the initial spell of panic broke and those who had neither fled nor fallen swarmed grimly upon him. The pistols broke out again in their ragged yelping, but Bear Cat seemed everywhere at once, and always at such close grips with one or more adversaries that lead could not reach him save through the flesh of his assailants. And while this deadly romp went forward, Henderson rose and ducked like a jack-in-the-box behind his massive obstruction, sniping at such as fell back from the core of the conflict.

But preponderating numbers must ultimately prevail and neither Stacy nor Henderson could have outlasted the minute in that inferno, had not Sam Carlyle undertaken to hurl himself on Bear Cat when, for a moment, the single combatant had wrenched himself free of the struggling mass.

Carlyle dived instead of standing off and shooting, and with the swiftness of a leopard's stroke Turner whipped out his pistol and received the Towers henchman on its muzzle.