The Best Western Novels of William MacLeod Raine. William MacLeod Raine

dropped from his hand.

      Benson seized the opportunity to duck behind his desk and drag open a drawer, but before his fingers had closed on the weapon within, two crashing blows descended with stunning force on his head. The outlaw covering him had reversed his heavy revolver and clubbed him with the butt.

      "That'll hold him for a while," the bandit remarked, and dragged the unconscious man across the floor to where the president lay huddled.

      One of the masked men, a lithe, sinuous fellow with a polka-dot bandanna round his neck, took command.

      "Keep these men covered, Irwin, while we get the loot," he ordered the unmasked man.

      With that he and the boyish-looking fellow who had ridden into town with him, the latter carrying three empty sacks, followed the trembling teller to the vault.

      No sound broke the dead silence except the loud ticking of the bank clock and an occasional groan from the cashier, who was just beginning to return to consciousness. Twice the man left on guard called down to those in the vault to hurry.

      There was need of haste. Somebody, attracted by the sound of firing, had come running to the bank, peered in the big front window, and gone flying to spread the alarm.

      Outside a shot and then another shattered the sultry stillness of the day. The man left on guard ran to the door and looked out. An upper window down the street was open, and from it a man with a rifle was firing at the outlaw left in charge of the horses.

      The wrangler had taken refuge behind a bulwark of horseflesh, and was returning the fire.

      "Hurry the boys, Brad! Hell's broke loose!" he called to his companion.

      The town was alarmed and buzzing like a hornet's nest. Soon they would feel the sting of the swarm unless they beat an immediate retreat. One sweep of his eyes told the bandy-legged fellow as much. He could hear voices crying the alarm, could see men running to and fro farther down the street. Even in the second he stood there a revolver began potting at him.

      "Back in a moment," he cried to the wrangler, and disappeared within to shout an urgent warning to the looters.

      Three men came up from the vault, each carrying a sack. The teller was pushed into the street first, and the rest followed. A scattering fire began to converge at once upon them. The roan with the white stockings showed a red ridge across its flank where a bullet had furrowed a path.

      The teller dropped, wounded by his friends. Two of the robbers loaded the horses, while the others answered the townsmen. In the inevitable delay of getting started, every moment seemed an hour to the harassed outlaws.

      But at last they were in the saddle and galloping down the street, firing right and left as they went. At the next street crossing two men, one fat and the other lean, came running, revolvers in hands, to intercept them. They were too late. Before they reached the corner the outlaws had galloped past in a cloud of white dust, still flinging bullets at the invisible they were escaping.

      The big lean cow-puncher stopped with an oath as the riders disappeared. "Nothing doing, Budd," he called to the fat man. "The show's moved on to a new stand."

      Jim Budd, puffing heavily and glistening with perspiration, nodded the answer he could not speak. Presently he got out what he wanted to say.

      "Notice that leading hawss on the nigh side, Slim?" he asked.

      "So you noticed it, too, Jim. I could swear to that roan with the four stockings. It's the hawss Mr. Larrabie Keller mavericks around on, durn his forsaken hide! And the man on it wore a polka-dot bandanna. So does Keller. He'll have to go some to explain away that. I reckon the others must be nesters from Bear Creek, too."

      "We've got 'em where the wool's short this time," Budd agreed. "They been shootin' around right promiscuous. If anybody's dead, then Keller has put a rope round his own neck."

      Men were already saddling and mounting for the first unorganized pursuit. Slim and his friend joined these, and cantered down the dusty street scarce ten minutes after the robbers.

      The suburbs of the town fell to the rear, and left them in the fall and rise of the foothills that merged to the left in the wide, flat, shimmering plain of the Malpais, and on the other side in the saw-toothed range that notched the horizon from north to south. Somewhere in that waste of cow-backed hills, in that swell of endless land waves, the trail of the robbers vanished.

      Men rode far and wide, carrying the pursuit late into the night, but the lost trail was not to be picked up again. So one by one, or in pairs, under the yellow stars, they drifted back to Noches, leaving behind the black depths of blue-canopied hills that had swallowed the fleeing quartette.

      Chapter XVIII

       Brill Healy Airs His Sentiments

       Table of Contents

      To Phyllis, riding from school near the close of a hot Friday afternoon along the old Fort Lincoln Trail, came the voice of Brill Healy from the ridge above. She waved to him the broad-brimmed hat she was carrying in her hand, and he guided his pony deftly down the edge of the steep slope.

      "Been looking for some strays down at Three Pines," he explained. "Awful glad I met you."

      "Where were you going now?" she asked.

      "Home, I reckon; but I'll ride with you to Seven Mile if you don't mind."

      She looked at her watch. "It's just five-thirty. We'll be in time for supper, and you can ride home afterward."

      "I guess you know that will suit me, Phyllis," he answered, with a meaning look from his dark eyes.

      "Supper suits most healthy men so far as I've noticed," she said carelessly, her glance sweeping keenly over him before it passed to the purple shadowings that already edged the mouth of a distant cañon.

      "I'll bet it does when they can sit opposite Phyl Sanderson to eat it."

      She frowned a little, the while he took her in out of half-shut, smoldering eyes, as one does a picture in a gallery. In truth, one might have ridden far to find a living picture more vital and more suggestive of the land that had cradled and reared her.

      His gaze annoyed her, without her quite knowing why. "I wish you wouldn't look at me all the time," she told him with the boyish directness that still occasionally lent a tang to her speech.

      "And if I can't help it?" he laughed.

      "Fiddlesticks! You don't have to say pretty things to me, Brill Healy," she told him.

      "I don't say them because I have to."

      "Then I wish you wouldn't say them at all. There's no sense in it when you've known a girl eighteen years."

      "Known and loved her eighteen years. It's a long time, Phyl."

      Her eyes rained light derision on him. "It would be if it were true. But then one has to forget truth when one is sentimental, I reckon."

      "I'm not sentimental. I tell you I'm in love," he answered.

      "Yes, Brill. With yourself. I've known that a long time, but not quite eighteen years," she mocked.

      "With you," he made answer, and something of sullenness had by this time crept into his voice. "I've got as much right to love you as any one else, haven't I? As much right as that durned waddy, Keller?"

      Fire flashed in her eyes. "If you want to know, I despise you when you talk that way."

      The anger grew in him. "What way? When I say anything against the rustler, do you mean? Think I'm blind? Think I can't see how you're running after him, and making a fool of yourself about him?"

      "How dare you talk that way to me?" she flamed, and gave her surprised pony a sharp stroke with the quirt.

      Five minutes later the bronchos fell again to a walk, and Healy took up the conversation