CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE GUNFIGHTERS
Crack! Crack! Crack! the voices of the Winchesters drifted faintly down wind to the ears of Billy and Dawson. Billy, fearful that some one else had seen their quarry first, swore frankly.
"Cheer up," said Dawson. "It may be just the chance we're lookin' for. They've stopped shootin'."
Billy remained pessimistic. He had been disappointed so often. But it was the chance they were looking for, after all.
Five minutes later from the edge of a flat-topped hill, they were looking down upon a scene that has had many counterparts in the history of the West.
Below the flat-topped hill a wide stretch of rolling ground reached away to a semi-circle of low hills. A quarter-mile out from the base of the hills a tiny fire smoked fitfully. Beyond the fire lay a hog-tied calf. Beyond the calf, a man sprawled behind the body of a pony. He was aiming a rifle at another man ensconced below a cutbank bordering a small creek that meandered with many windings across the rolling country. This second man was not blatantly visible. Even with the glasses it was difficult to make him out. For cottonwoods grew above the cutbank and the man lay in deep shadow.
Between this man and the man behind the pony were three hundred yards of ground as flat as a floor. Billy swept the background of the cutbank man with his glasses. "There are two horses tied behind a windfall alongside those rocks. Where's the other man?"
"There's the other man," said Dawson, pointing toward a gap in the cottonwoods alongside the creek fifty yards down stream from the cutbank. "What's he doing—drinking?"
Billy turned his glasses on the spot indicated. "He ain't drinking," he said soberly. "His head's under water."