He did not know exactly where he would go; that was a matter of detail, but somewhere West in all probability—somewhere in Wyoming, where Jim Buckley was hidden up in the mountains, living a sane sort of a life, removed from the corroding influences of civilization. He did not realize that in this impatient shaking off of responsibility, he was little better than a moral coward. Even Billy's worst enemies would have denied the justice of that epithet.
He climbed in, deliberately unwound the reins from the long brake handle, clucked to the horses, and took his way, whistling, down the narrow trail. The beautiful trotting horse followed gingerly, tossing his head. At the entrance to town, Billy's whistling suddenly ceased. The street was quite bare and silent. Not even from the Little Nugget saloon or the new dance hall came the faintest sound of human occupancy. A tenderfoot might have argued that this was indicative of deep sleep after last night's festivities, but Billy knew better. At seven o'clock in the morning, after excitement such as that of a few hours before, the normal ensuing pow-wow would still be raging unabated. He reached under the seat for his Winchester, the new 40-82 model of his prosperous days, and laid it softly across his lap, and caught the end of the long lash in his whip hand. Then he resumed his tune exactly where it had been broken off, looking neither to right nor left, and jogging along without the slightest appearance of haste or uneasiness. No one could have called Billy Knapp a coward at that moment.
Near the first cabin the whistling broke off again. A little figure stumbled out into the deserted street, weeping and afraid. Billy pulled up. It was the Kid.
"They're goin' to shoot you," he sobbed, "from behind the Little Nugget, without givin' you a chanst! I had to tell you, an' they'll most kill me!" he wailed. Billy's eyes began to sparkle. The Kid tried to hold within the other's reach his little 22 calibre rifle, his most precious possession. "Here, take this!" he begged.
Billy laughed outright, a generous, hearty laugh with just a shade of something serious in it. "Thank ye," said he, "I got one. And let me tell ye right yere, you Kid. Yore a white man, you are, and yore jest about the only white man in the place." He cast his eyes about him in the buckboard at his feet. "Yere ye be," he said, tugging at a pair of huge silver-ornamented Mexican spurs and leaning over to give them to the boy; "jest remember me by them thar; they has my name in 'em; and, look yere," he went on with a sudden inspiration, "you-all gets up gulch to my camp and takes what grub you finds and lies low until yo' paw an' th' rest gits over bein' mad. I don't know but what they does kill you, if you shows up afore that." And he laughed again to see the boy's face brighten at this prospect of escaping the immediate wrath to follow.
The little scene had been enacted in the middle of the silent street, so silent and so empty that the principal actors in it experienced an uncomfortable emotion of publicity, perhaps a little like that of an inexperienced speaker before the glare of footlights. The Kid, followed friskily by Peter, scuttled up the gulch, Billy stood up in his buckboard and faced the inscrutable row of houses.
"Yo' damn coyotes!" he yelled, "thar goes the only man in the whole outfit. Shoot! yo' Siwashes, shoot!" and he brought his long whip like a figure 8 across the flanks of all four horses at once.
Bang! reverberated a shot between the hills, and a bullet splashed white against the brake bar.
Billy dropped the reins to the floor of the buckboard, and planted his foot on them. He steadied his knee against the seat, and threw down and back the lever of his Winchester for a shot. The beautiful trotting horse was pulling back in an ecstasy of terror at the end of his long lariat, shaking his head and planting his forefeet. Billy cursed savagely, but jerked loose the knot, and the beautiful trotting horse, with a final snort of terror, turned tail and disappeared in the direction of the mine.
Bang! Bang! Bang! went other shots from behind puffs of white smoke. The hills caught up the sound and rolled it back, and then back again, until it was quite impossible to count the discharges.