The Buckaroo of Blue Wells

by W. C. Tuttle

Jimmy was still in a daze—but a very determined sort of a daze. All night long he had stayed awake, guarding the ranch-house. Dawn was in sight when he dozed, only to be awakened by a knock on the back door.

“Is that you, Hashknife?” he had asked, and it seemed to him that an affirmative reply had been given. At any rate he had opened the door, only to find himself confronted by three masked men. And before he had time to move, one of the men struck him across the head with a gun barrel, knocking him down. But the blow was a glancing one, and did not knock him out.

Badly dazed he got to his feet, trying to fight, and one of the men drove several smashing blows to his head and face, knocking him out. He had little idea of what happened after that, until returning consciousness gave him a blurred vision of these men taking Marion out of the house. He had tried to get up, but his limbs refused to function.

He saw Nanah crawl to a window, where she managed to look out, before she crumpled to the floor. It seemed years to him before he could get to the window, but his vision had cleared sufficiently to enable him to see the riders going away.

Summoning up every bit of his courage, he secured the shotgun, and managed to stagger to the stable, where he bridled a horse, crawled on its back, and followed them. He was like a man riding through a fog. He had no idea of direction. With his right hand he tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes, but gave it up.

He remembered that there were three men. But that did not matter. He had two cartridges in that shotgun, and he could use the gun as a club, after those shots were gone, he decided. He was no longer the smiling James Eaton Legg, but Jimmy Legg—cowboy. The bookkeeper was gone entirely, and in his place was a bloody-faced young man, who wanted to kill somebody with a shotgun.

Jimmy did not know how long he had ridden. The sun was shining, and his head ached badly. He wanted to stop and lie down, but he kept on going, laughing grimly to himself. The horse stopped, and Jimmy realized that it was standing on the edge of a cañon. He did not know that this was Broken Cañon. Names meant nothing to him. The horse turned to the right and followed the cañon rim. At times they swung far to the right, passing around the head of tributary cañons, but always coming back to the main cañon rim.

Jimmy’s reason was coming back to him now, but it only made the incidents more vivid in his mind. He realized that he had left his six-shooter at the ranch, and that the two cartridges in his gun were all he had.

The horse picked its way among a piled-up mass of big rocks and tangled brush, and came out on sort of mesa. The cañon widened here, its depths purple and gold in the rising sun. On the far side of the cañon were sandstone minarets, gleaming gold-like at the top, banded with red, fading into a deep purple below the sun-line.

But Jimmy had no eyes for the beauties of the sunrise. He could see several people near the cañon rim, a quarter of a mile away, their horses etched in relief against the gray of a huge upthrust slab of gray stone. Then he saw two of the riders turn and ride directly away from the cañon, going at a swift gallop.