“Stuck up on sticks.” Sliver criticized their wabbly motion.
After a real head appeared under them he waited. When the ridge suddenly broke out in a rush of mounted men he waited. While they rode down into the valley he waited. Not until they were involved in the labyrinth of sage, watercourses, pit-holes, brush, and boulders beneath him, did he draw his first bead. Then, so swiftly that it seemed to the revueltosos that they were facing the fire of several men, he emptied the three rifles into the kicking, struggling, plunging line of horses and men. Four saddles he made vacant there and then. He picked off two more as the revueltosos raced back over the opposite ridge.
“Six added to three I got makes nine!” Sliver grunted. “A few more an’ I kin afford to cash in.”
He could see from where he lay for miles along the ridge, and as he noted its front rising more steeply in both directions he chuckled his satisfaction.
“You ain’t a-going to try an’ pass through me ag’in,” he addressed the invisible foe. “An’ you ain’t going to leave me here. It’ll take you an hour to come around. Be that time Lady-girl will be ten miles away, with night fast coming on. Jest to encourage you—”
The shot he threw into the brush opposite was the first of a series designed to keep the revueltosos’ attention upon himself, and when, half an hour later, he glimpsed men without horses scaling the steep face of the ridge nearly a mile away he knew that he had succeeded.
“They reckon we’re all here, trying to stick it out till night,” he correctly interpreted the movement. “It ’ull take ’em another half-hour to find out.”
A glance in the other direction showed a second party emerging from the brush beyond rifle-shot. While it crossed the valley and scaled the face of the ridge he watched quietly. A little later he began throwing shots in both directions along the ridge.
“Not that I’m expecting to bag any of youse,” he addressed the unseen enemy. “But just to slow you up a bit an’ let you know I’m here. When you get there”—his glance took in scrub-clothed elevations that commanded his post on both sides—“good-by an’ good night.”
Of all ordeals, there can be none more severe than to be called upon to wait, wait, wait while an unseen enemy is closing in around. Yet Sliver stood the test. If he felt the passage of time, it was because he counted each minute, each second in yards—the hundreds, scores of yards Lee and his friends were gaining on the pursuit. He had fought all day in heat and dust and smoke; the grime of battle added to his grimness. While he waited the sun rolled down the west, transmuting the scorched slopes into a wonderland of cinnabar, sienna, crimson, ocher; a huge oven aglow with the hot slag of creation. But its rich lights showed neither fear nor softening in Sliver’s face when, from the spot he had long noted, a rifle spoke.