But with his usual sagacity Jake had already picked the spot for the stand. The next ridge rose so precipitously that Bull, Lee, and Gordon were having difficulty in getting up its face. North and south, too, it loomed even more inaccessible.
“’Twill take them hours to go around it with you planted square in the middle.”
Sliver’s glance had gone to Lee, scrambling up the steep face of the ridge, leading her horse. His hard face softened. “Don’t tell Lady-girl—that is, not jes’ now. Let her think I’ll make my getaway to the northward. But some day, after she’s safe in El Paso, you kin tell her—that Sliver was on’y too damn glad to give his life for her’n.” He went on, dreamily: “’Course I knew it ’u’d be all off after I’d hit the city. But I’d sorter thought, now an’ then, that if the rangers didn’t get me too quick, some day I’d come back to Arboles, when her kids was about hip-high, an’ teach ’em to ride an’ shoot. But that was jes’ a dream.”
Jake’s glance had gone back to the cover that sheltered the revueltosos, and, judged by the casuality of his nod, Sliver’s request might have concerned the purchase of a silk handkerchief or other trifle. But he swallowed hard, spat viciously several times before he could command speech; blushed, even then, at the softness of his tone.
“Funny, ain’t it? But that’s just what I’d often thought myself. Sure I’ll tell her—if them devils don’t down me on the next run. They’re damn close now, and they’ll be up here before we’re half-way across. Against that limestone front we’ll make some mark, an’ with fifty of ’em cracking at us it ’ull be the luck of hell if they don’t down one or both.”
Again he was right. While, ten minutes later, they struggled among the boulders and brush at the foot of the ridge, the rifles began sputtering behind them. Right and left, above and below, bullets chipped the rocks or plumped in the dust; and just as their beasts rushed on a breathless scramble up the last steep two found their mark—one through Sliver’s knee, the other dropped Jake’s horse.
Almost fainting from shock and pain, Sliver still clung to the neck of his beast while, with Jake hanging on to a stirrup leather, it carried him to safety. Lee, with the pack-animals, had already moved on, was a full quarter-mile down the slope that fell easily to the great plain traversed by the railroad. Miles away they could see—not the tracks; it was too far away for that—a dark-velvet plume, smoke from an engine. Bull and Gordon still lay answering the revueltosos’ fire. But Sliver and Jake had ascended up a watercourse a hundred yards to the right, in which the dead horse lay out of sight.
“Hey!” Sliver hastily stopped Jake from calling Bull. “Let ’em go! You’ll never be able to tear Lady-girl away if she knows I’m hurt. You kin take my horse; on’y lift me down first an’ prop me up among the rocks where I kin lie comfortable an’ pump a gun.”
Having complied, Jake stood looking down upon him. For once in his rough, hard life he was shaken out of his cold, gray self. Sliver, well and hearty, fighting his lone fight was one thing. To leave him, painfully wounded, was quite another. The memory of many a wild ride with the dogs of the law hard on their heels; of desperate stands, shoulder to shoulder, the rifle of each protecting the other; of daring raids in the dark; of midnight diversions shared together; ay, even the memory of many a drunken quarrel in which they had beaten each other beyond identification and awakened next morning just as good friends; all that had gone into the making of the rough loyalty which had bound the “Three Bad Men of Las Bocas” closer than brothers—all this combined in an emotion that revolted at desertion.
“My God, hombre!” he broke out in protest. “I kain’t leave you here, wounded, to fall in the han’s of them wolves!”