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Updated: May 21, 2025
June asked no question, but from the low talk of Bub and Dave she made out what had happened in town that day and a wild elation settled in her heart that John Hale was alive and unhurt though Rufe was dead, her father wounded, and Bub and Dave both had but narrowly escaped the Falin assassins that afternoon.
And at daylight they saw the fugitive ride out of the woods at the back of the house and boldly around to the front of the house, where he left his horse in the yard and disappeared. "Now send three men to ketch him if he runs out the back way quick!" said the Falin. "Hit'll take 'em twenty minutes to git thar through the woods.
The police guard had little to do and, over in the mountains, the feud miraculously came to a sudden close. So pervasive, indeed, was the spirit of the times that the Hon. Sam Budd actually got old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver to sign a truce, agreeing to a complete cessation of hostilities until he carried through a land deal in which both were interested.
On down the trail they went, and at the top of the spur that overlooked Lonesome Cove, the Falin sheriff pulled in suddenly and got off his horse. There the tracks swerved again into the bushes. "He's goin' to wait till daylight, fer fear somebody's follered him. He'll come in back o' Devil Judd's." "How do you know he's going to Devil Judd's?" asked Hale.
Loretta got no comfort from her in her tentative efforts to talk of Buck Falin, and once, indeed, June gave her a scathing rebuke. With every day her feeling for her father and Bub was knit a little more closely, and toward Dave grew a little more kindly. She had her moods even against Hale, but they always ended in a storm of helpless tears.
"Quick!" he shouted, with a sweep of his hand right and left. "Up those hollows! Lead those horses up to the Pine and wait. Quick!" Already the men were running as he directed and Hale, followed by Bob and the Falin, rushed around the corner of the house. Old Judd's nostrils were quivering, and with his pistols dangling in his hands he walked to the gate, listening to the sounds of the pursuit.
By his side was Bob Berkley, and behind him was a red-headed Falin whom she well remembered. Within twenty feet, she was looking into that gray face, when the set lips of it opened in a loud command: "Hello!" She heard her father's bed creak again, again the rattle of the door-chain, and then old Judd stepped on the porch with a revolver in each hand. "Hello!" he answered sternly.
He was an officer and a friend of mine, but if he were a stranger we want him just the same. Is he here?" Judd looked at the red-headed man behind Hale. "So you're turned on the Falin side now, have ye?" he said contemptuously. "Is he here?" repeated Hale. "Yes, an' you can't have him."
The boy turned sullenly away with a dogged shake of his head. "I was beholden to you," he said with dignity, "an' I warned you 'bout them Falins to git even with you. We're quits now." Hale started to speak to say that the lad was not beholden to him that he would as quickly have protected a Falin, but it would have only made matters worse.
Swiftly her mind worked somebody had blabbed, her step-mother, perhaps, and what Rufe had said had reached a Falin ear and come to the relentless man in front of her. She remembered, too, now, what the deep voice was saying as she came into the door: "There must be deliberation, a malicious purpose proven to make the prisoner's crime a capital offence I admit that, of course, your Honour.
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