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Updated: August 28, 2024
His outcries died in his throat, the loudest of them not reaching Marcia's ears above the creaking of her rocking-chair. Lee still held Hampton's tied hands gripped in his own. So the two men went out the back door, down toward the corrals. Seeing men hurrying from the bunk-house to the stables under Carson's snapping orders. Lee called out for Tommy Burkitt.
Burkitt grinned at him by way of greeting, and then pointed across the plateau to a ravine leading to a still higher, smaller, shut-in valley. Hampton galloped on and a quarter of an hour later came up with Lee. The horse foreman was sitting still in his saddle, his eyes taking stock of a fresh bit of pasture into which he planned turning his horses a little later.
Little used to travelling save on a horse's back he was shot through with odd little pains when at last he came to the border-line fenced and the waiting horse. Tommy Burkitt held it for him while Lee mounted. "Somebody up on the cliffs, head of the cañon," panted Lee at Tommy's amazed expression when Lee came running into sight. "Killed my horse. Go after him, Tommy. Tell the other boys."
He had said what he had to say and, cursing when his shoulder struck a form near him, made his way down to the stables. Burkitt was ahead of him, going for the team. "Well, Lee," said Judith sharply, "where do you get off? Do you want to stick? Or shall I count you out?" "I guess," said Bud very gently, "you'd better count me out." "You're going with that crook?" "No. I'm going on my own." "Why?
Men yes, and a girl were shooting, not at just wooden and paper targets, but at other men! At men who shot back, and shot to kill. "Listen," said Burkitt. "Somebody's in the old cabin; somebody's outside. Which is which? We got to be awful careful."
He turned promptly from the work in hand, ran to his horse, swung up and sped back to his cabin, to telephone to the nearest station, passing the word. Then with axe and shovel, he began his slow way toward the beacon. Bud Lee, from the mountain-top where he and Burkitt had taken Hampton, saw it.
Carson snatched eagerly at her hand and squeezed it and looked inexpressible things from his one useful eye. He gave his saddled horse to her, watched her and Lee ride on to the ranch, and sent Tommy to the old cabin for another rope, while he rounded up some more horses in a narrow cañon for Burkitt and Hampton. "You damn' fool," he said growlingly to Hampton, "look what you've done."
And there's only one way to beat a royal flush, and that's with a gun. But I can't quite see the whole play, Trevors; I can't quite see it." There were enough men to do the night's work without him and Tommy Burkitt, and Lee gave no thought now to Carson, swearing in the darkness of some shadow-filled gorge.
Then he slipped from his place and, though each single movement gave an impression of great leisureliness, it was but a flash of time until he stood beside Burkitt. "Stick around a wee bit, laddie," he said gently, a lean brown hand resting lightly on the boy's square shoulder.
Riding down a long, winding trail, out through a patch of chaparral into a rocky gorge, Hampton turned east again toward the higher plateau. Taking the roundabout way which led from the far side of the lake and along the flank of the mountain to the table-land, he came to a scattering band of horses and Tommy Burkitt. "Where's Lee?" called Hampton.
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