Ernest Haycox - The Greatest Westerns of Ernest Haycox

Fearing that they would bring down his horse, Lin Ballou kicked his feet from the stirrups and bent very low. He shot past another alley, catching a momentary view of lantern light bobbing in the street. Behind him, other guns joined the argument, and for a moment the bullets fell away from him and took another target. At this, he knew that Offut's men were distracting the Double Jay fire. Reassured, he fled onward, left the protection of the buildings and cut directly across the eastern end of Powder's only street. Glancing down this thoroughfare, he saw many men running in one direction and another, crossing the beams of light from the restaurant, Stagg's store and, lastly, from Dan Rounds' office.

As he watched, he heard another gun fire nearby. Glass splintered and then a heavy body appeared in the outthrown lamp rays of the lawyers office. There was a final burst of guns, and after that silence descended over the town. Many lanterns began to swing through the darkness. Somebody began to shout. The street filled with running men. All seemed to be rushing in the direction of the livery stable.

Lin Ballou veered to the northeast on the road and spoke to the horse. "Steady now, boy. Settle down and stretch your legs. It's a long trip you've got to make."

The town and its excitement drifted behind him. The cool desert air ran by his body and the aromatic smell of sage was in his nostrils. Far away, the mesa bulked against the black velvet skyline.

The Chattos are probably still in town, he mused, but they won't be so very long. I judge that there'll be a general posse after me in five or ten minutes and if they aren't in that posse, they'll at least be making a run for the mesa. I'll find them in their old stamping grounds soon enough.

The posse was indeed getting under way within the time he guessed. But before the posse departed from town a final scene had to be acted out, unknown to Ballou. The splintering of glass he had heard was caused by a bullet passing through Dan Rounds' office window. The bullet ended its journey in the lawyer's chest. It had not killed him outright, for when Offut, Lestrade and several others reached him, he was bent over in the chair, pressing one hand against the slowly trickling blood.

Offut took hold of the lawyer's shoulder and pulled him upright. "Dan—Dan, do you hear me, boy? Who did this?"

The lawyer summoned the last fading breath of his life. He raised his head until he looked squarely into the face of James J. Lestrade. He smiled in his tired, cynical manner.

"What difference does it make?" he muttered, and died.

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The posse kept hard on his trail as he swept across that undulating sea of sand. Twice he spent a precious minute to stop and put an ear to the ground. Each time the faint throbbing of hoofs was borne through the earth to him and each time he swung to the saddle and changed his direction. The moon was young—a thin pale crescent that suffused the world with a dim silver glow. Under it sage and juniper were transformed into mysterious, fantastic shapes and the horizon on all sides of him seemed to march off to infinity. The night wind cooled him. Afar, a coyote sent forth its quivering challenge. He felt the rhythmic swell of the pony's muscles and the steady onward thudding of the pony's feet. This animal had been carefully chosen for tonight's work. It seemed to know what it had to do and where it had to go. The long, sleek head stretched well forward, pointing like a compass needle toward the mesa.

This race would not be to the swift. That Lin Ballou well understood. In the darkness he had the advantage. They could not follow his tracks, nor could they be sure which way he traveled. But that posse would be composed almost wholly of Double Jay men and more than probably the Chattos would also be along. The Chattos well knew his stamping ground and could guess too easily where he would try to hide. Therefore, as long as he kept his present course they were pretty certain to be on the right trail. It behooved him to change his methods and resort to subterfuge.

As a matter of fact, he did not want to throw the posse completely off the scent. As he rode he began to build certain plans that just might work out, with a fair degree of luck. They might take him as far as the mesa, or they might bring him to a stand a great deal short of that point. Anyhow, the less riding he had to do the better it would be and the less trouble he would have in getting back to town.

The thing for me to do, he decided, is to swing off and double back until I get in the rear of that bunch of thieves. They'll never suspect me of trailing them. Which is exactly the right course for me to follow. I can't accomplish much until I know how many's in that gang. If they should split up in bunches I might get somewhere.

On he went. To the right of him, a quarter mile, he saw the glimmer of W. W. Offut's ranch lights. Another hour of this steady gait passed and he swung to miss Lestrade's home fences. Still onward he proceeded until he saw, looming up in the dark like a misshapen ghost of the desert, the old, abandoned Twenty Mile homestead shacks. The land here began to swell and fall in sharper, more abrupt folds, affording him a greater measure of protection. Going fifty yards beyond the shanty he stopped the pony in a convenient hollow and left it. Then he climbed up to a commanding piece of ground and lay flat on his stomach.

The faint reverberation rose to a distinct thrumming and then died away entirely. In the silver gray shadows he saw three horesmen walking their animals around the corner of the shanty. The rest of the posse was nowhere to be seen or heard. At some point back on the trail they had turned off. The trio in front of him stopped. Two of them dismounted and seemed to hold a parley. Ballou could hear the rise and fall of their speech, but nothing else. A match flared and made a short, gleaming curve upward. By that instant's light he recognized the man in the saddle.

Lestrade.

He crawled forward, maneuvering so that he presently had the shack between him and the three. This accomplished, he rose and boldly walked forward until he stood in the protection of a wall. As he arrived, he heard Beauty Chatto's voice rumbling along, irate and threatening.

"Fine mess, ain't it? Long as this yahoo's floating free around these parts you and us has got trouble a-plenty and no mistake. What was all the delay about? You had him right where you wanted him. Why didn't you organize a necktie bee and yank him out of jail?"

"Violence," Lestrade responded, "ain't the best policy unless a man's got to come to it. Any jury would have took care of him proper. Even so, I did have it all planned to have the boys pull him out and get rid of him. But there was a little accident. I don't know exactly what Offut's got to do with Lin Ballou, but he's the man that helped him get away."

"Well, if old man Offut's stringing along with Ballou, you can bet your neck Ballou is exactly what I thought he was in the first place. A spy of the committee's. I wish I'd kept that hunch. Instead, he plays me for a sucker and I bite. Then you arrange that damnfool idea, and now we're all in a jackpot. Why, say, Nig and me is liable to get picked off the minute we put a foot in the mesa. Fine fix, ain't it?"

"He's got to be stopped," Lestrade announced decisively.

"Well, why didn't you stop him when you had it in your hands?" Beauty demanded, more and more belligerent.

"Hold onto yourself," Lestrade countered coldly. "If you boys won't do it, I'll go and fetch the crew from the ranch and we'll get a whole posse on his tracks again."

'"Now," Chatto growled, "that ain't a bright idea either. You know nothing about trailing. Want to scare him clean across the state line? Nig and me knows where he holes in. We'll get him. But just bear in mind that we won't fiddle around. We'll get him cold. That'll be an end of the trouble. If you'd give me the office to put him away in the first place all this'd been avoided. The trouble is, you want Ballou killed but you ain't never had the gizzard to come out and say so."