Zowie! A bullet spinged off my rifle-barrel and almost knocked it out of my hands.
“Watch the hall,” says I. “I’ll tend to our neighbor before he spoils our Alaska trip for good.”
I crawls in behind the old shed. Behind us is nothing but mesquite brush, which don’t make very good cover, especially for the first fifty yards.
Willer Crick is still trying to annihilate that pile of lumber, so I takes a chance and crawls like a snake. None of ’em seen me and I reached the heavy brush in safety. I hears this feller shoot again, and all to once I see him. He ain’t over fifty feet from me. There’s kind of a high piece of ground, with some rocks on it and a lot of mesquite clumps.
He’s having quite a nice time all by his lonesome and ain’t expecting visitors. He has to lift up real high to send his lead anywhere near Hashknife. He’s shooting one of them old 1876 models of Winchester, the kind we calls “grasshopper” action.
He rises up on his toes, squints down the sights, but seems to kinda get dissatisfied and relaxes. I could almost throw my gun and hit him, and shooting him thataway would be murder; so I waits until he lines up his sights again and then I slams a bullet into the loading-gate of his rifle.
I reckon a .45-70 hits kinda hard, cause it knocked him loose from that gun and he sat down hard. Some of the busted mechanism must ’a’ dented the primer of one of the shells in the magazine, ’cause that rifle sure raised —— for a few seconds. The owner of the gun wagged his head and looks down at the barrel of my rifle, which was poking into his belt.
“Get up!” says I.
He got up kinda slow-like, shaking his head and then he grabbed for his six-gun. I’m too close to him to shoot with the rifle, so I uppercuts him under the chin with the barrel, and he lost interest in everything.
I took his belt and six-gun back with me. Willer Crick seen me as I came back, but they must ’a’ hurried their aim. I got back to the shed, with my eyes, ears and nose full of dirt and a hole in my sleeve. Hashknife is doubled up, covering the doorway from that slot in the lumber pile.