Ernest Haycox - Ultimate Collection: Western Classics & Historical Novels. Ernest Haycox

but I'd like to know if the population of Yellow Hill County is shiftin' across the Copperhead tonight. Stinger Dann has sort of put a bug in my bonnet."

      "It's an idea," mused Steve, "and might bear fruit."

      "Said fruit, if any, is for our own nourishment exclusively," warned Dave.

      "I heard yuh the first time," stated Steve. "Let's slope. And better hurry, or yuh won't get to show that shave."

      He spurred on down the trail. Denver cut around his ranch quarters, ascended a stiff pathway, and plunged into the sudden gloom of a pine belt. The lights from D Slash winked and were cut off; the pines spread away before an upland meadow swimming with fog, and this tilted into a narrow ravine that struck straight for leveler land to the south. Denver, with a comparatively free trail in front, urged a more rapid pace.

      As he traveled he reviewed the affair at Copperhead crossing. Ever since that remote boyhood day when he became conscious for the first time that the placid world held a thousand threats he had been fighting savagely against the dominant elements. His whole life had been fashioned and tempered by these struggles and so now in manhood David Denver looked on the wild forces of nature as a pagan would, endowing these forces almost with living personalities. He had been fighting them too long to regard them any other way. Thus he felt a grim sort of satisfaction in knowing that he had whipped the river and won another engagement in that everlasting skirmish with the earth. Yet when he considered that but for the swift accuracy of Lou Redmain's lariat he would now be nothing more than a bit of senseless rubbish rolling along the turbid stream, all the rebellious instincts in him rose up, and he scowled at the night.

      "No man can survive a thousand chances," he thought to himself, "and I've taken a great many already. Some day this country will get me. Like it got my dad. Like it's got others. I reckon I'll always be battling, and one of these times my foot is going to slip. When that happens I'm gone."

      But he knew he would never quit, never fail to throw his strength into the contest.

      He galloped down the incline with a slumbering shoulder of Starlight Canyon on his left. The stage road came sweeping past, and he turned into it, the gray gelding stretching out to a long free gallop. Below and beyond the prairie lay like a calm ocean, surface overlain with the misting fog. There was a moon somewhere above, but its pale light refracting against the heaving banks of atmosphere made only a shimmering corona that revealed nothing. The thick air cut through his shirt, and all the dampened incense of the countryside slid sluggishly across the highway. A coyote barked, and away below the road the bell of some homesteader's milk cow tinkled. Unconsciously Dave Denver's mood softened under the spell of a world fermenting with new life.

      He crossed an open bridge, the boom of his pony's shod hoofs echoing away. Down a long and level grade he traveled, and up another rise. At the throat of some dim gully he stopped, dismounted, and applied a match to the wet side trail. But it was blank of riding signs, and he went on; past Dead Axle Hill, along the hairpin descent into Sundown Valley, and beside the foreboding wall of Shoshone Dome. Somewhere in the distance he caught the tremor of hasting riders; instantly he left the road and paused in a black crevice of the dome. The sound swelled out of the western side of the valley and suddenly dropped off.

      "Comin' through the soft meadow stretch," he decided.

      Presently the party achieved the sharper underfooting of the road and swept forward. Denver leaned over and placed his hand across the gelding's muzzle. Shadow and shadow flashed by, a bare twenty feet removed; silent shadows riding two abreast and swaying with the speed of their passage. Fire glinted from a flailing hoof, and then these nocturnal birds of passage had melted into the distance, and the reverberation was absorbed by the vast night. Denver regained the road.

      "They started from the Wells," he reflected, "not from Sundown. And they're hell-bent for somewhere, as they usually are. My guess was wrong. Redmain's already pulled them out of the Sky Peak country. As always, when lightnin' strikes he's miles away. A wise man if not a good one." So plunged in thought, he let the gelding go and in a half hour picked up the lights of Sundown. Music came from the opera house; the show already had begun. He racked his horse in front of Grogan's and entered to find Steve at the bar.

      A GENTLEMAN'S GAME

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      "Nothin'," said Steve softly.

      "I had better luck," was Denver's rejoinder. Grogan himself, an overbearing man with a spurious smile of good humor, came down the bar, and Steve changed the subject.

      "Well, go see the show, and what do I care? I'll play poker." Then, remembering this was also one of those pastimes an engaged man should not participate in, he hastily qualified. "I mean I can spend a large evenin' lookin' on.

      "It certainly sounds violent," jeered Denver and strolled out. Instead of going directly across the street to the opera house, he mixed rather casually with the tide of aimless punchers and so was carried as far as the hotel porch. He stopped short of the strong light coming out of that hostelry and stepped into the mouth of an alley. A man drifted by, went up the hotel porch and inside. Presently he came out and halted to light his cigarette; by the glow of the match Denver saw puzzlement on the fellow's features.

      "I thought so," grunted Denver. "Same man that Stinger Dann had posted by the stable this afternoon. Don't know him. Red- main's got a lot of fresh blood in his band lately. Now what is the present idea?"

      The man crossed the street quickly and shouldered through the crowd, dropping out of sight somewhere near the Palace. On impulse Denver withdrew into obscurity, made a wide circle of town, and crept through the back lots of the north side. He found himself suddenly arrested by the half-open door of the opera house; Lola Monterey was singing, and her tempestuous, throbbing cadences swept away the years of her absence and brought him back once more to the days when he had watched her dancing in the Palace—a slim, scarlet figure cutting through the smoke haze of the hall. Always, he recalled, there had been in her songs something to remind him life was short and sad; always there was that haunting appeal to stir him profoundly and the direct glance of her dark, glowing eyes to set his own wild blood racing.

      Half angry, he drew himself away from the door. "Old times, old ways. She's changed in some ways. She's no longer a hungry little girl, half scared, half savage. She's fought her way up, she's sure and confident—she's a matured woman. But her heart is the same. Women like her never change that way."

      A murmur of sound put all this introspection out of his head. Somewhere in the farther blackness men were talking discreetly, hurriedly. Rising on his toes Denver advanced, skirted the blind wall of the Palace, paused beside the adjoining butcher shop, and slid quietly near the last building in the north line. Below was a harness shop; above was Colonel Fear Langdell's law office, reached by an outside stairway. Boots scuffed against the steps. There was more talk.

      "...how in hell do I know?"

      "Yuh ought to."

      "Well, I don't. And there's apt to be a bullet in this for somebody."

      "Will be if yuh keep on blattin' our location to the wide world. Now go on up there."

      "Bad business, I tell you!"

      "You do as I say or get out of the country, see? I thought you was tough..."

      Denver crouched to the ground, grimly amused; one of these nighthawks was shuffling up the stairway toward Langdell's dark office, prodded on by the taut sarcasm of the man below. "If they're tryin' to set a trap for Langdell," he reflected, "they're apt to find hard luck. He's had his eye teeth cut on trick stuff."

      The exploring one had arrived at the top landing. A knob squealed. Silence settled down. Denver grinned in the darkness, and his hand closed around a loose stone the size of a grape. Rising in his tracks he tossed the stone toward the building and dropped to the earth again as it struck and rattled down the stairway, sounding like an avalanche in the utter quiet. The man in Langdell's office ran out, made a clean jump, and hit