George W. Ogden - Ogden Westerns - Boxed Set

Macdonald went to the door and opened it unhesitatingly. The horseman at the gate was a stranger to him. He wore a little derby hat, such as the cowpunchers despised, and the trappings of his horse proclaimed him as a newcomer to that country. He inquired loudly of the road to Fort Shakie, and Macdonald shouted back the necessary directions, moving a step away from his open door.

The stranger put his hand to his ear and leaned over.

“Which?” said he.

At that sound of that distinctly-cowboy vernacular, Macdonald sprang back to regain the shelter of his walls, sensing too late the trap that the cowboy’s unguarded word had betrayed. Chance Dalton at one corner of the rude bungalow, his next best man at the other, had been waiting for the decoy at the gate to draw Macdonald away from his door. Now, as the homesteader leaped back in sudden alarm, they closed in on him with their revolvers drawn.

There was the sound of a third man trying the back door at the same time, and the disguised cowboy at the gate slung his weapon out and sent a wild shot into the lintel above Macdonald’s head. The two of them on the ground had him at a disadvantage which it would have been fatal to dispute, and Macdonald, valuing a future chance more than a present hopeless struggle, flung his hands out in a gesture of emptiness and surrender.

“Put ’em up—high!” Dalton ordered.

Dalton watched him keenly as the three in that picture before the door stood keyed to such tension as the human intelligence seldom is called upon to withstand. Macdonald stood with one foot on the low threshold, the door swinging half open at his back. He was bareheaded, his rough, fair hair in wisps on temples and forehead. Dalton’s teeth were showing between his bearded lips, and his quick eyes were scowling, but he held his companion back with a command of his free hand.

Macdonald lifted his hands slowly, holding them little above a level with his shoulders.

“Give up your prisoner, Macdonald, and we’ll deal square with you,” Dalton said.

“Go in and take him,” offered Macdonald, stepping aside out of the door.

“Go ahead of us, and put ’em up higher!” Dalton made a little expressive flourish with his gun, evidently distrustful of the homesteader’s quick hand, even at his present disadvantage.

The man at the back door was using the ax from Macdonald’s wood pile, as the sound of splintering timber told. Between three fires, Macdonald felt his chance stretching to the breaking point, for he had no faith at all in Chance Dalton’s word. They had come to get him, and it looked now as if they had won.

When Macdonald entered the house he saw Thorn sitting in the middle of the floor, where he had rolled and struggled in his efforts to see what was taking place outside.

“You’ve played hell now, ain’t you? lettin’ ’em git the drop on you that way!” he said to Macdonald, angrily. “They’ll swing—”

“Hand over that gun, Macdonald,” Dalton demanded. They were standing near him, one on either hand, both leveling their guns at his head. Macdonald could see the one at the back door of his little two-roomed bungalow through the hole that he had chopped.

“I don’t hand my gun to any man; if you want it, come and take it,” Macdonald said, feeling that the end was rushing upon him, and wondering what it would be. A bullet was better than a rope, which Chadron had publicly boasted he had laid up for him. There was a long chance if Dalton reached for that gun—a long and desperate chance.

The man at the back door was shouting something, his gun thrust through the hole. Dalton made a cross-reach with his left hand for Macdonald’s revolver. On the other side the cowboy was watching his comrade’s gun pointing through the kitchen door; Macdonald could see the whites of his eyes as he turned them.

“Don’t shoot in here! we’ve got ’em,” he called.

His shifted eye told Macdonald that he was trusting to Dalton, and Dalton at that moment was leaning forward with a strain, cautiously, his hand near Macdonald’s holster.

Macdonald brought his lifted arms down, like a swimmer making a mighty stroke, with all the steam behind them that he could raise. His back-handed blow struck the cowboy in the face; Macdonald felt the flame of his shot as it spurted past his forehead. The other arm fell short of the nimbler and more watchful Dalton, but the duck that he made to escape it broke the drop that he had held over Macdonald.

Macdonald’s hand flashed up with his own gun. He drove a disabling shot through Dalton’s wrist as the ranch foreman was coming up to fire, and kicked the gun that he dropped out of reach of his other hand. The cowboy who had caught Macdonald’s desperate blow had staggered back against the foot of the bed and fallen. Now he had regained himself, and was crouching behind the bed, trying to cover himself, and from there as he shrank down he fired. The next flash he sprawled forward with hands outstretched across the blanket, as if he had fallen on his knees to pray.

Macdonald caught Dalton by the shirt collar as he went scrambling on his knees after the revolver. Dalton was splashing blood from his shattered wrist over the room, but he was senseless to pain and blind to danger. He sprang at Macdonald, cursing and striking.

“Keep off, Dalton! I don’t want to kill you, man!” Macdonald warned.

Careless of his life Dalton fought, and as they struggled Mark Thorn undoubled himself from his hunched position on the floor and snatched Dalton’s revolver in his bound hands from the floor. His long legs free of his binding ropes, Thorn sprang for the door. He reached it at the moment that the man in the disguise of a homesteader pushed it open.

Macdonald did not see what took place there, for it was over by the time he had struck Dalton into a limp quiet heap at his feet by a blow with his revolver across the eyes. But there had been a shot at the door, and Macdonald had heard the man from the back come running around the side of the house. There were more shots, but all done before Macdonald could leap to the door.

There, through the smoke of many quick shots that drifted into the open door, he saw the two cowboys fallen with outflung arms. In the road a few rods distant Mark Thorn was mounting one of Chadron’s horses. The old outlaw flung himself flat along the horse’s neck, and presented little of his vital parts as a target. As he galloped away Macdonald fired, but apparently did not hit. In a moment Thorn rode down the river-bank and out of sight.

Macdonald stood a little while in the middle of the disordered room after re-entering the house, a feeling of great silence about him, and a numbness in his ears and over his senses. It was a sensation such as he had experienced once after standing for hours under the spell of Niagara. Something seemed to have been silenced in the world.

He was troubled over the outcome of that treacherous assault. He felt that the shadow of the resultant tragedy was already stretching away from there like the penumbra of an eclipse which must soon engulf those homesteads on the river, and exact a terrible, blasting toll.

Dalton was huddled there, his life wasting through the wound in his wrist, blood on his face from the blow that had laid him still. The dead man across the bed remained as he had fallen, his arms stretched out in empty supplication. There was a pathos in the fellow’s pose that touched Macdonald with a pity which he knew to be undeserved. He had not meant to take his life away in that hasty shot, but since it had happened so, he knew that it had been his own deliverance.

Macdonald stripped the garment back and looked at Dalton’s hurt. There would be another one to take toll for in the cattlemen’s list unless the drain of blood could be checked at once. Dalton moved, opening his eyes.