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  Webb started to turn when the girl screamed. Lute, his right hand streaking for his gun, reached out with his left to yank the girl in front of him. Webb’s gun shuttled up, and when hip-high, exploded deafeningly. He paused only long enough to note that Lute hunched in his chest and took a step back, dragging Martha with him, and then he whirled, to be greeted by the orange of gun blast that seemed to explode his head in a million pinwheels of stars.

  When he awakened, he was lying on the ground in front of a crowd of watching horsemen. The night was bright, and he turned his head to see what made it so. There, fifty yards ahead of him, the Tolleston house was in flames. He could hear voices and raised up on an elbow. Behind him stood Martha Tolleston, her face utterly dead and expressionless. Beside her was Mrs. Partridge, crying softly, and beside her was Charley, the cook.

  Mounted on a big bay beside and behind them sat Wake Bannister at the head of his riders.

  Webb slowly dragged himself to his feet and started toward Martha when he stumbled and pitched on his face. It was Lute and Shorty, both dead, who had tripped him. He looked up into the cold eyes of Martha Tolleston.

  Wake Bannister said, “So they didn’t get you?”

  Charley, the cook, looked murder at him.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he said grimly.

  Wake Bannister chuckled and said to Webb, “You’d have deserved it, friend, if they had.” And he added dryly, “Did you object to being left home tonight?”

  Meeker pulled his horse over to Webb.

  “I thought I told you men to guard the spread.”

  Webb, quietly amazed, looked over at Martha.

  “Perhaps he and his friends didn’t want to be left out of your picnic,” she said quietly. “They were fighting over which one would make me open dad’s safe.”

  Meeker raised his quirt and lashed it across Webb’s face.

  “You tinhorn,” he said quietly and wheeled his horse. To one of the riders he said, “Get this man’s horse and tie him on it.”

  Webb stood teetering there, unable at once to comprehend. And then he thought he understood. Martha Tolleston had naturally assumed that he and Shorty and Lute had come together. What Lute had said in greeting there in the house had confirmed this. What had stampeded the gunfight and what Lute had hoped would turn it to his advantage was the approach of Charley, who Lute thought was Shorty. Webb had shot Lute, and had been tagged in turn by Charley. And Charley’s reason for running to the house was to warn Martha that a band of riders—Bannister’s raiders—was approaching.

  Bannister’s voice interrupted his thoughts: “Well, boys, I guess the job is done. Let’s move on.” To Martha he said, “When Buck Tolleston comes back from his raid on Bull Foot—and I hope he doesn’t—just ask him whose idea this was, Miss Tolleston.” He made a mock bow, and gestured toward the burning house. “In this you have the heartfelt compliments of the Bannisters. Good night, ma’am.”

  A rider came up to Webb with one of the horses. Webb mounted it dizzily. His head was sticky with blood, and his ear numb where Charley’s bullet had creased him. The rider tied him to the saddle and Webb wearily submitted.

  His break for freedom had been futile, his attempt to warn Martha Tolleston of the raid had turned against him, and he was a prisoner again, and this time one who would merit any punishment that Hugo Meeker could think up.

  Maybe he had been unwise to try it in the first place, for she would have been unable to do anything to save the spread. But this quiet, grave girl who held so much courage and fire and womanliness deserved more than this—the betrayal of the man she was to marry, and the revenge of the man who hated all her family.

  The man who had tied him mounted. “Get on.”

  Webb rode past Martha. She spoke to him very quietly. “You dog,” she said.

  There was one consolation, Webb thought bitterly, as he fell in with the others. Lute and Shorty, the only two men who knew he had been ready to betray Bannister were dead. With them out of the way, perhaps escape next time would be easier.

  For escape he would. He had taken sides in this affair, whether he was wanted or not. He was a San Patricio man now, but due to be hated by them more than he was by his captors.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After the cattlemen’s meeting had broken up that afternoon, Mitch Budrow hunted out Tolleston, who was talking to some ranchers. He did not join the group on the bank steps, but waited patiently until he caught Tolleston’s attention.

  “You want me, Budrow?” Buck asked.

  “If you got a minute,” Mitch said diffidently. Tolleston excused himself from the group. “Well?” he said to Mitch.

  “I’d like to write a letter and get it out on tonight’s stage,” Mitch told him. “I wondered if you’d be around long enough for me to do it.”

  “Letter?” Tolleston asked, and then smiled slightly. “A girl, Mitch.”

  Mitch grinned. “Yes, sir. I got a letter from her the other day and somehow I ain’t had time to answer it.”

  “Go ahead,” Buck told him. “I’ll be in town a long while yet.” He turned to go, then paused. “Be careful, Mitch. No word to her about what we’ve planned.”

  “Sure. She lives in Tucson, anyway. It’s just about a few head of cattle we was aimin’ to buy—her and me. She needed a little money.”

  “You got it?” Buck asked.

  “I reckon.”

  Buck reached in his pocket and drew out a roll of bills. He peeled off some and handed them to Mitch. “Maybe that’ll buy you a few more head, Mitch. That’s for the work you’ve done.”

  Mitch looked at the money, speechless for the moment. Then he stammered, “I—I sure do thank you. That’ll please her.”

  Buck ignored the thanks and returned to his conversation. Mitch pocketed the money and went down the street to the Territorial House, fighting a feeling of self-loathing. On his way he stopped in and bought two drinks and then crossed to the hotel. He felt better.

  At the desk he got some stationery and some envelopes and went over to the writing table. In full detail he wrote down the plans that he had been listening to all afternoon. It included the date of the planned raid on Bull Foot, the time, the men who were leading the number to expect. the full plans of how the town would be burned. Finished, he folded the paper and put it in an envelope which he addressed to Tom Kean telegrapher and freight agent at Bull Foot. In this he was following Bannister’s orders. Then he addressed the second envelope to a fictitious name and address in Tuscon, stuffed the envelope with blank sheets of paper, and went out.

  At the post office in Samuelson’s Emporium, he bought stamps from Samuelson himself.

  “How long you reckon it’d take to get a saddle up here from Tucson?” he asked Samuelson.

  “A week,” the storekeeper replied.

  “That’s what the company said. They said I should have it by now.”

  “Maybe it’s been held up somewhere.”

  Mitch nodded and looked at his letter. “Is the name of that there freight agent in Bull Foot, Kean?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mitch stamped the letter then. “Maybe this’ll wake him up,” he said mildly. “I’ll bet it’s layin’ in his back room right now.”

  Samuelson said likely it was, and took Mitch’s two letters. Then he looked around him and said in a low voice, “That was mighty nice work, Budrow. You deserve a heap of credit for that.”

  Mitch said, “My fun is goin’ to come tomorrow night, I hope.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Samuelson said, and they shook hands on it. Mitch left and went down to the O. K. corral where he sat on a sack of oats and waited patiently for Tolleston. He figured his back trail was covered. He didn’t feel like talking to Iron Hat Petty, who sat in a back-tilted chair under the arch. Iron Hat didn’t feel like talking either, so they were both silent. Mitch felt as if he never wanted to talk again.

  He retained that feeling until the next afternoon. Two hour
s before dusk, the ten riders of the Broken Arrow, headed by Tolleston saddled up and headed in the direction of Wagon Mound. There was a rank smell of kerosene about them, which seemed to come from the fat slickers tied on the cantle of each saddle. It had to do with the Bull Foot raid. Every man was to carry a sack of coal-oil-soaked rags wrapped in his slicker.

  Until dark, the Broken Arrow riders avoided trails. Then they took them because it was faster going. Two hours after dark they had swung wide of Wagon Mound and were headed for Belly Butte, the huge landmark that lay almost on the county line.

  Arriving at the west side of its base, they found riders already gathered, and the stench of coal oil filled the air. The men stood quietly by their horses, and Mitch could not begin to count the number. But he figured roughly that seventy men were in this posse. The leaders were gathered together in the center of the band. Small diamonds of starlight glinted on carbines in saddle boots, on guns on hips, on rows and rows of belted cartridges. The talk was hushed, somber, and there was none of the usual joking and horseplay which is always present when cowboys meet.

  Tolleston was greeted quietly.

  “You timed it about right,” Hasker said.

  “Everybody here?”

  “They will be any time now. We had to leave some of the boys in town to yarn with the stage driver, so it wouldn’t look funny.”

  They reviewed their duties. Eventually part of the posse was to be split up into four groups of roughly ten men each. Each group was to enter town from a different direction. They were to travel the streets slowly, smothering any premature alarm that the townsfolk would give. The rest were divided up into small squads which would travel the alleys and fire the buildings. Eight men carefully picked—and Mitch was among those eight—were to cover the two barrooms, four men to a saloon. They were to hold the customers at bay until the fire had a start. By that time the town would be in flames, and panic would be in the streets. Then the four groups were to ride to the center of town and shoot up the long main street. Any man that fired on them was to be hunted down and exterminated, while the others were freeing saddle horses from the hitch-racks and driving them off.

  Then, once the limit of town was reached, the whole band would ride hell-for-leather for Wake Bannister’s Dollar spread. A few men would drop back to cover the back trail. The plan seemed reasonable, all the way around.

  When the last arrivals were present, everyone mounted and the long ride to Bull Foot began. Opinion was that, by ways of an old drive trail long in disuse but remembered by most of the older men present, it would take four hours to reach Bull Foot. This would put them in close to one o’clock. They did not miss it far. The ride was swift, businesslike, and these men kept the same grim silence, except to curse a horse now and then. As they traveled deeper into Wintering, the leaders went a little slower. The knowledge that discovery here would mean death tended to make them wary.

  Passing over a long bench where they clung to the shadow of the bordering trees, Miles Kindry said to Tolleston, “I used to brand down off yonder by the creek.”

  “It’s a nice range,” Tolleston said quietly. “If this goes through, you’ll get it back. Ted Bannister’s on it now, ain’t he?”

  “One of that coyote clan,” Miles replied. In spite of the fat which made him hulk awkwardly in the saddle, in spite of the years that had passed since he laid claim to this range, there was a passion in his speech that might have been a key to the feelings of all these old-timers tonight.

  Starlight and dust and horse lather and saddle creak enveloped Mitch, but he neither saw nor smelled nor heard them. In the note which he had sent to Kean yesterday he had added a footnote. It had told Bannister, almost apologetically, that he, Mitch Budrow, would be one of the men who were to hold up the Melodian. Would Bannister please inform the ambushers that he would be wearing a red neckerchief, so they might know him?

  Now, he didn’t know. He could almost feel fear creeping up on him, not to be banished. He knew his work for Bannister had been completed, and completed well. But now that Bannister had no more use for him, wouldn’t he plan to get rid of him? After all, Mitch was the sole man outside of Hugo Meeker who knew the part Bannister had played in manufacturing this ambush.

  To play safe, Bannister might wipe out all evidence, and Mitch bulked large as evidence—and the wrong kind. The longer he rode, the more insistent this thought became.

  When the posse reined up on the timbered hogbacks that lay to the east of Bull Foot, the lights of town were easily visible ahead and below. Bull Foot, since the day it was established, had been a tolerant as well as prosperous town. Settled in the wide fold of hills through which the railway managed to snake up from the south, it was larger than Wagon Mound. Its two main streets, crossing each other in the center of the town, were wider. The stores were more numerous, and they were painted. Behind the main street paralleling the tracks and on the shorter cross streets lay the courthouse, a two-story, white frame affair with jigsaw cupolas.

  The town itself, in spite of the hour, was lighted. Some of the stores still held customers. The saloons were booming, and there were lights at the feed corral two doors north of the Melodian.

  The leaders moved up in a circle for consultation.

  “It looks like we’ve done it,” Wes Anders said, quiet exultation in his voice. He had once been the largest stockholder in the solid-looking bank which squatted on the four corners below.

  “Yes,” Tolleston said, satisfaction in his voice. “Hasker, you’re taking your men around west and down past the courthouse. You better start now.”

  Hasker had his men grouped. They left and followed the hogbacks to the south and were swallowed by darkness. The others split up, too, until only the eight who were to hold up the two saloons were left.

  Mac said to them, “Well, my four, come along. And remember, boys, don’t gallop in and don’t sneak in. Just ride in.”

  Mitch joined his band. It was to ride in from the south. They sloped down to the road, crossed the tracks and turned up the main street. Mitch was alert for any sign that would give the ambush away, but he could find none. A scattering of people were on the streets, and the huge Bannister Mercantile was lighted and still held some customers. For a moment Mitch wondered if maybe Bannister hadn’t received his letter. His spine started to crawl at the thought.

  And then he looked up beneath his hat brim at the second story of the Wintering Hotel. Every window there was dark, every window open. Yes, Bannister had got the note all right.

  In front of the Melodian the four of them dismounted.

  “Watch your ties,” Mike Sutton, a Seven A cowboy and their leader, said.

  The din from the Melodian was loud and sustained, a commingling of talk, shrill laughter, glass clink, monotonous calls of the faro dealers, shuffling feet, and the insipid grind of a piano.

  Mitch’s hand fumbled as he tied his reins to the tie rail, so that the others had to wait for him.

  Once on the sidewalk, he said, “This is a mighty big place for four of us to take.”

  The puncher he addressed turned a cold, hard face to him.

  “You want to pull out?”

  Mitch shook his head and managed to return the man’s stare. “Did I say I did?”

  “All right,” Sutton said, and drew two six-guns. The others, including Mitch, did the same. As Sutton had his hand out to push open the batwing doors, a drunken cow-puncher staggered out the other half of the door.

  Sutton shoved him back into the room and stepped in, the others behind him. Mitch was last, and his face was plaster-gray. Sutton put a shot over the customers’ heads into the bar mirror, and the din stopped as suddenly as if it had been a thread cut by a knife.

  Sutton looked over the crowd, his guns covering them.

  “Back up from the bar, folks,” he drawled in the silence. “You barkeeps stay on deck and hoist your hands.”

  There was a general milling away from the bar. Suddenly somebody said i
n a low voice which carried clear over the room, “Ain’t them San Patricio cowboys?”

  “Right,” Sutton replied. “San Patricio cowboys just rode over for their pay check.”

  It was quiet again. Mitch’s hands were wet with sweat against his gun butts. He looked over the heads of the crowd. And then he saw something which yanked the breath out of his throat. On the back balcony, which was stacked with empty beer kegs, he saw a movement. Slowly, counting them, he saw the barrels of six shotguns nose through between the beer kegs and steady themselves.

  With a strangled cry, Mitch turned and ran the two steps to the door. Even as he turned, he saw the puncher nearest him grab for him, cursing.

  And then the shotguns blasted out in ragged peroration. Mitch felt a spatter of buckshot slap into the door, felt his ear snipped, and then he was outside, running upstreet.

  From far upstreet he heard a mighty blast of gunfire. That would be Mac’s outfit getting it at the Running Iron. Mitch paused, looking behind him.

  He could see a group of horsemen paused at the four corners. Even while he watched, another group joined them, and still a third. People began to pour out of the saloon. The horsemen let out a yell and started down the street.

  Suddenly a rifle cracked across the street and a slug buried itself in the board by Mitch’s head. He moaned and started to run.

  And then the heavens opened up. A furious concert of gunfire rolled out, and Mitch dived for an opening between two buildings. He paused just long enough to look back. All four groups of the San Patricio riders were galloping down the street, caught between two lines of gunfire. The whole town of Bull Foot seemed suddenly to appear from behind the false fronts of the stores and rain down leaden death into the street.

  Riderless horses galloped by. The vanguard of the raiders passed Mitch now, their guns booming. Miles Kindry’s big bulk was bent over his saddle horn, his reins trailing. Another rider slammed into his horse, and Miles toppled out of the saddle. A horse reared and five blind riders piled into it and they went down in a moil of dust and screams, and the fire was directed toward it.