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Updated: June 23, 2025
The special halted on a tongue of high ground flanking the bridge and extending upstream to where the river was gnawing at the long dike that held it off the approach. The delay was tedious. Doctor Lanning and Allen Harrison went forward to smoke. Gertrude Brock took refuge in a book and Mrs. Whitney, her aunt, annoyed her with stories.
They had heard Buck's talk earlier in the day, and they growled as they saw him turn tail. Two moments more and Buck would have been on his horse, but in those two moments luck took a hand. Around the corner came Andrew Lanning with his head bowed in thought. At once a roar went up from every throat in the saloon: "There's your man. Go to him!"
"Thanks. I want to find Allister and I'm in a hurry." "So you and him are goin' to team it? That'll be high times! Come here, Bud. Look at Andy Lanning. That's him on the horse right before you." A scared, round face peered out at Andrew from behind his mother. "All right, partner. I'll tell you where to find him pretty close. He'll be up the gulch along about now. You know the old shack up there?
He looked about among the rocks. Then he ran down the stream for some distance. He came back with a glum face. There was no sign of the body of Andrew Lanning among the rocks. Looking up to the top of the cliff, from the place where he stood, he figured that a man could have jumped clear of the rocks by a powerful leap and might have struck in the swift current of the stream.
"Who's there?" asked Andrew. "Allister. Take it easy." "I'm all right. I'll go down again to the boys." "That's what I'm here to talk to you about, kid. Are you sure your head's clear?" "Yep. Sure thing." "Then listen to me, Lanning, while I talk. It's important. Stay here till the morning, then ride on." "Where?" "Oh, away from Martindale, that's all." "Out of the desert? Out of the mountains?"
For Andy was a handsome fellow with his blue-black hair and his black, rather slanting eyes, after the Lanning manner. Yet Jasper saw, and his heart was sick. The face was a little too full; the square bone of the chin was rounded with flesh; and, above all, the mouth had never changed. It was the mouth of the child, soft too womanly soft. And Jasper blinked.
He had a smooth-shaven face as well, and a clear gray eye, which was known wherever men gathered in the mountain desert. There was no news to give him. A telephone message had already told him of the death of Bill Dozier. "But," said Charles Merchant, "there's one thing I can do. I can set you free to run down this Lanning." "How?"
But everyone felt that eventually Lanning would draw the deputy marshal away from his posse, and then the outlaw would turn, and there would follow a battle of the giants. The whole mountain desert waited for that time to come and bated its breath in hope and fear of it.
"You can't make me mad enough to shoot a man who's down. You can't make me murder you." The marshal closed his eyes again, while his breathing was beginning to grow fainter, and there was an unpleasant rattle in the hollow of his throat. Andrew went into the next room. "Scottie," he said, "will you let me have your flask?" Scottie smiled at him. "Not for what you'd use it for, Lanning," he said.
"We'll count you two times two," replied the leader. He added: "You boys play a game; I'm going to break in Lanning to our job." Taking his horse, he and Andrew rode at a walk up the ravine. On the way the leader explained his system briefly and clearly.
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