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Updated: April 30, 2025
There among the sage-brush he got a fair chance for his life, according to the code of men who settle their differences at the business end of a six-shooter. But it wasn't Lessard's hour. Piegan Smith and I saw his hand flash to his pistol, saw it come to a level, heard the single report of MacRae's gun. It was a square deal which Lessard had not given us.
They were a well-matched pair; iron-nerved, both of them, the sort of men to face sudden death open-eyed and unafraid. A full minute they glared at each other across the desk corner. Then Lessard, without moving a muscle or altering his steady gaze, spoke to Dobson. "Call the orderly," he said quietly.
"D'you know that plunder can't be far away; those fellows haven't had much time to make their cache," he reflected, more to himself than to me. "I wonder how they accounted to Lessard for us.
And when we camped here, I had made up my mind. I told Lessard she must go back. That was a foolish move. I should have got the drop and killed him out of hand. While I argued with him, Hicks slipped a knife into my back, and as I turned on him Lessard shot me. Ah, well it'll be all the same a hundred years from now. But I'd like to put a spoke in their wheel for the sake of that blue-eyed girl.
We got nowhere near the Police camp; we failed to get a glimpse of any of our men; and so, for all we knew to the contrary, they might have loaded the plunder and decamped for other regions. When night again spread its concealing folds about us, we had only one tangible fact as a reward for our exertions Lessard had returned to Fort Walsh presumably.
Then he turned at the orderly's command and marched out of the room. When I again turned to Lessard he still stood at the end of the desk, industriously paring his fingernails. An amused smile wrinkled the corners of his mouth. Whereas Lessard had acted the martinet with MacRae, he took another tack and became the very essence of affability toward me.
I thanked the star of destiny then and there that no Mounted Police officer had a string attached to me, by which he could force me to speak or be silent at his will. It was a dirty piece of business on Lessard's part. Even Dobson eyed him wonderingly. "Why, damn it!" Lessard finally burst out, "you've handled this like a green one, fresh from over the water.
"There's a good deal more than that, according to Goodell's figures," MacRae commented. "Lessard must have got away with quite a sum from the post. I daresay the pockets of the combination hold the rest. But I don't hanker to search a dead man, and that can wait till we get to Walsh." "Yuh goin' t' lug this coyote bait t' Fort Walsh?" Piegan inquired.
"You lie, you !" MacRae spoke in a cold impersonal tone, and only the flat strained note betrayed his feeling; but the term applied to Lessard was one to make a man's ears burn; it was the range-riders' gauntlet thrown squarely in an enemy's face. "You lie when you say that, and you know you lie. I don't know your object, but I call your bluff you you blasted insect!"
He crumpled in the saddle; sprawled a moment on the neck of his horse, and dropped to the ground. MacRae sank behind the sage again, and we waited for the others. But they did not come. One of them must have seen Lessard fall, for at the crack of MacRae's gun men and horses, already half-hidden by the thickening smoke, vanished into the brush.
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