Scott Burton on the Range

by Edward G. Cheyney

Scott realized that Jed had been to the cabin. He apparently had not in his drunken search noticed Dawson, but the injured man, helpless as he was, had been dreading his return. When Scott leaned over him he had thought that it was Jed and felt that his time had come. He held onto Scott now until the next flash could show him pointing to the dam. “Jed,” he tried to say between his closed teeth.

Scott understood. He leaned close to Dawson’s ear and shouted above the booming of the storm, “I saw him. I’m going after him now.”

He picked up the revolver from the table and started out of the cabin. The last of the daylight was gone now and the frequent flashes of blinding lightning were separated by short periods of Stygian darkness. The recurring echoes of one mighty crash of thunder never died away till there was another crash that seemed louder yet. The effect was cumulative. It was as though all the storms of the ages had been dumped into that little caldron in the midst of the mountain peaks.

If the ground had been more familiar it would have been an easy matter for Scott to have utilized the lightning flashes to locate the next patch of shelter and to have run to it in the ensuing darkness, but he had not been there long enough for that. The vivid flashes confused him and everything looked strange in the weird light. It did not matter how much noise he made for nothing would be heard above the storm but he had to keep under cover for the lightning made objects stand out with uncanny clearness.

He trembled to think what he was going to do. It seemed the irony of fate that he, who had always shunned the use of a revolver and shuddered at the thought of shooting a man even in the heat of action, should now be called upon to shoot a man in cold blood. But there was nothing else to do. The lives of women and children in the valley below hung on the chance of getting that maniac away from the sluice gates. Scott accepted the call of fate, closed his senses to his own feelings, and crept on with unwavering determination. His mind was made up. He would shoot this man as he would shoot a mad dog to save the lives of others.

He had made his way almost to the clump of bushes where he had first discovered Jed—he had to get close or he knew that he would miss—when a flash of lightning revealed another object crawling around that same clump of bushes. Surprised as he was he recognized it even in that brief flash. He recognized the cautious snake-like crawl, and that gleaming steel. It had been graven on his memory that evening at the cabin when he had sat in the shadow of the forest and watched that same snake-like object crawl toward his cabin window. He could recognize it instantly anywhere.

But what was Dugan doing there at this out-of-the-way dam in a raging storm, and crawling inch by inch with a gun in hand toward the man who had been his friend? Either he had not recognized Jed and thought that he was stalking Scott, or had some ulterior motive which Scott did not know anything about for disposing of Jed. It was probably the former. Scott noticed that Jed was no longer brandishing his guns and shouting curses in the teeth of the storm. A fit of sullen depression had apparently come over him and he was crouched in a heap so that it was difficult even to recognize him as a man, to say nothing of determining his identity.

Dugan evidently wanted to make sure. He could easily have picked the man off from where he was, but he wormed his way steadily nearer. He was beyond the last piece of cover now and was working his way across the narrow open space which separated him from the sluice gates of the dam.

The storm instead of abating seemed to be increasing in fury. Flash followed flash almost without cessation. The crashing of the thunder sounded like a barrage of hundreds of big guns. And through it all there sounded the rush of waters. There seemed to be but one inanimate object in the whole scene. Trees and rocks and mountain peaks seemed to be dancing in the fickle flashes of light. The man on the sluice gates only seemed motionless. Perhaps he had gone to sleep in that perilous position on those groaning sluice gates.

Scott watched with a curious fascination. It seemed to him that fate had thought better of her irony and was sending this special agent to relieve him of his odious task. He was perfectly willing to have it so. It was like a reprieve from a horrible sentence. It had but one disagreeable feature. It was so maddeningly slow. He dreaded lest he should hear the dam giving way almost any minute.