When Lefever rode up to him, he saw the story that Elpaso was reading in the roadway. It told of a man shot in his tracks as he was running 365 toward the house––and, in the judgment of these men, fatally shot––for, while his companions spread like a fan in front of him, Lefever got off his horse and, bending intently over the sudden page torn out of a man’s life, recast the scene that had taken place, where he stood, half an hour earlier. Some little time Lefever spent patiently deciphering the story printed in the rutted road, and marked by a wide crimson splash in the middle of it. He rose from his study at length and followed back the trail of the running feet that had been stricken at the pool. He stopped in front of a fragment of rock jutting up beside the road, studied it a while and, looking about, picked up a number of empty cartridge-shells, examined them, and tossed them away. Then he straightened up and looked searchingly across the Gap. Only the great, silent face of El Capitan confronted him. It told no tales.
“If this was Henry de Spain,” muttered Elpaso, when Lefever rejoined his companions, “he won’t care whether you join him now, or at ten o’clock, or never.”
“That is not Henry,” asserted Lefever with his usual cheer. “Not within forty rows of apple-trees. It’s not Henry’s gun, not Henry’s heels, not Henry’s hair, and thereby, not Henry’s head that was hit that time. But it was to a 366 finish––and blamed if at first it didn’t scare me. I thought it might be Henry. Hang it, get down and see for yourselves, boys.”
Elpaso answered his invitation with an inquiry. “Who was this fellow fighting with?”
“That, also, is a question. Certainly not with Henry de Spain, because the other fellow, I think, was using soft-nosed bullets. No white man does that, much less de Spain.”
“Unless he used another rifle,” suggested Kennedy.
“Tell me how they could get his own rifle away from him if he could fire a gun at all. I don’t put Henry quite as high with a rifle as with a revolver––if you want to split hairs––mind, I say, if you want to split hairs. But no man that’s ever seen him handle either would want to try to take any kind of a gun from him. Whoever it was,” Lefever got up into his saddle again, “threw some ounces of lead into that piece of rock back there, though I don’t understand how any one could see a man lying behind it.
“Anyway, whoever was hit here has been carried down the road. We’ll try Sassoon’s ranch-house for news, if they don’t open on us with rifles before we get there.”
In the sunshine a man in shirt sleeves, and leaning against the jamb, stood in the open doorway 367 of Sassoon’s shack, watching the invaders as they rode around the hill and gingerly approached. Lefever recognized Satt Morgan. He flung a greeting to him from the saddle.
Satt answered in kind, but he eyed the horsemen with reserve when they drew up, and he seemed to Lefever altogether less responsive than usual. John sparred with him for information, and Satterlee gave back words without any.