The Black Rider (17 page)

I
n the meantime Macdonald had waited until the night. Yet it was not wasted time. In anticipation he was turning over the danger in his mind, as a connoisseur turns over the thought of the expected feast. He had put his head into the jaws of the lion, as he was well aware. How those jaws would close was the fascinating puzzle. They might attack him by surprise, or in a crowd. They might wait for the night, and then they would be truly terrible, or else they might strike boldly in the day, when he would have a better fighting chance.

Such surmises filled his mind all the late morning. In the early afternoon he fell asleep and, the instant he closed his eyes, he was once more traveling up the river in the mountains, with the voice forming out of the sounding current: “Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!” in endless reiteration. Once more he climbed to the headwaters of the stream; he crossed the divide; and he saw before him the same sunny plain, exactly as it had been before.

He wakened suddenly; and that afternoon he slept no more, but went down into the lobby of the hotel and then onto the verandah in front, where there would be other men around him.

The evening came, and still there was no sign of the coming of the Gregorys. But word was brought to him
that the sheriff had left the town. And then new word came that the Gregorys were meeting that evening. For, wherever Macdonald went, though he had no friends and no companions, there was always a certain number of men, like the jackals who follow the king of beasts, ready to carry information to the great man, ready to cringe and cower before his greatness. He treated them, as they needed to be treated, with a boundless contempt; but on occasion they were invaluable to him. They were very necessary on this day, for instance, with their eager whispers to and fro. And it was one of these fellows who brought the word about Rory Moore.

“If anybody was to ask me where there was going to be trouble first,” said this sneak of an informant, “I’d say it would come right here in Sudeth. And the second place it’s going to come is to Rory Moore in his own town!”

“Rory Moore? Rory Moore?” asked Macdonald sharply “What the devil do you know about him?”

“Nothing but what everybody will know pretty
pronto.
I ain’t doing you no favor telling you this. Twenty men could tell it to you pretty soon. Rory Moore is telling folks around his home town that you stole his hoss, Sunset, from him!”

It brought a growl from Macdonald, and he dropped his cigarette to the floor and smashed it with his heel.

“I stole his hoss? It’s a lie! I bought it from a man who won Sunset from him in a gambling game.”

“It was a frame-up,” said the informer. “Moore swears it was a frame-up. He says that he’s found out that Jenkins, who won the hoss from him, was really a professional gambler, a crooked player whose real name is Vincent. Is that right, Macdonald?”

“Hang Jenkins and Moore both!” cried Macdonald. “Where does all this rot come from?”

“The telephones have been packed with it all morning. Seems that this fellow Vincent…was it really Vincent?”

“What if it were?”

“Nothing except that Vincent is an old hand. He was run out of Sudeth a couple of years back, and he’s been tarred and feathered a couple of times for his dirty work with the cards. And one of these days they’ll talk to him with a gun, they will! Anyway, it seems that this Jenkins, as he was calling himself, started right out of town after he’d cleaned Rory Moore up at the cards. But early the next morning Moore heard some talk about town that Jenkins was really Vincent, the crooked gambler. It took Moore about one second to see through everything, the way he’d lost the night before. He started on Jenkins’s trail. By noon he’d run him down. He put a gun on Jenkins, and the hound got down and crawled and said he’d confess everything, if Moore would let him live.

“So Moore let him live, and Jenkins told him a crazy yarn. Said that you’d come to Jenkins the night before and found him broke. You offered to stake him to five hundred dollars, if he’d use it to clean out Moore and make him put up his horse at the end of the game. The horse was what you wanted. You’d tried to buy it and, when Moore wouldn’t sell, you schemed to get Sunset this way. And the scheme worked, according to Jenkins. He got the money and hoss. He put the hoss in the stable, told you where it was, and then run for his life. And Moore swears that you rode out of town before morning, which shows that you were afraid to stay. Anyway he got all his money back from Jenkins, and now he’s hunting across country to find you and Sunset. I’m wondering if he’ll have a hard time finding you?”

Here the speaker laughed hugely at the poor jest, but Macdonald found the story no laughing matter. If this
story were out, if this story were proved—and who could doubt the confession of Jenkins, alias Vincent, the card shark?—then Macdonald would be established in the eyes of the men of the ranges not only as a man-slayer, but as a scheming rascal; and men who would never combine against one who merely took lives could immediately gather together to run to earth a crafty schemer. Decidedly it was tidings of the most serious import. Macdonald gritted his teeth, as he thought it over. If he could tear Vincent to small pieces and scatter the remnants to the dogs, there would be some satisfaction. But Vincent was a poor mongrel not worthy of a blow.

Meantime there was a pleasanter side to the story. Of all the men he had faced in the past half dozen years, there had been none to compare with Rory Moore in dash and spirit. He had not the slightest doubt that the young rancher was a warrior of parts. And a battle against him would be distinctly a pleasure worth a search of a thousand miles. If he came alive from this affair at Sudeth, he would be instantly back in Moore’s home town and await him there in the hotel. What could be better than that? And in wiping out Moore, he would wipe out the person chiefly interested in telling that ugly tale about the crooked gambler’s work.

It was evening, and he was back in the lobby before he came to all of those conclusions. And they were hardly formed, when his attention was sharply called by a silence which had fallen over the room. There was a soft and sudden shifting of positions. Macdonald, looking into a small mirror which was hanging on the wall in front of him—a little diamond-shaped affair meant to be a decoration—saw a big fellow striding through the door and into the room. He did not need more than one glance to make sure that this was a man come on desperate
business. The pale, rather drawn face, the glaring eyes, the jaw set hard and thrust out a little, were all the features of a man on the verge of meeting death itself!

“Macdonald!” called the stranger.

As Macdonald rose slowly from his chair, he stretched his arms.

“Look out!” gasped the voice of the human jackal who had brought him so much news that day. “Look out! It’s Jack Gregory, and he’s a fighting fool!”

But Macdonald turned with glorious unconcern.

“Calling me?” he asked cheerfully.

“I’m calling you! Macdonald, I want to talk to you outside the hotel!”

Macdonald hesitated. One who dreaded Macdonald’s speed and his accuracy with a gun often sought to equalize matters a little more by bringing him into the darkness. But, after all, he had fought a score of times in the light of the stars. He had made a point of doing as much target practice by night as by day, and the chances, which were heavy against any foe in the daylight, were even heavier against them in the dark. After that moment of delay he nodded and crossed the room to the other.

“I don’t think I remember meeting you,” he said.

“You don’t,” said the other. “My name is Jack Gregory!”

And, as he spoke, his body drew stiff and straight and his right hand trembled near to the butt of his gun. But such a killing was by no means in the mind of Macdonald. With the blandest of smiles he held out his hand.

“Very glad to meet you, Gregory,” he said.

His hand was disregarded.

“I want to talk with you outside. Will you come?”

“Certainly.”

They passed through the door and descended the steps. They stood in the street. Instantly the door of the hotel was packed with a blur of white faces, watching eagerly. Macdonald looked about him with infinite satisfaction. It was a moonless night, to be sure. The moon would not be up for another hour; but the sky was clear, and the stars were shining as clear as crystal. Certainly there was light enough for Macdonald to shoot almost as straight as by daylight, at such close range. But what was this Gregory saying?

“Macdonald,” he said, “I’ve come to beg you to leave the town.”

“Beg
me to leave it?” asked Macdonald with the slightest and most insulting emphasis.

“Just that,” said the other.

“And if I don’t go?”

“We fight!”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Macdonald, and in the starshine he smiled evilly upon Jack Gregory. “But as for leaving,” he continued, “you must admit that this is a free country and a free town. Why should I leave, if you please?”

“Because,” said Gregory, “my family has sworn that you cannot stay here.”

“Interesting,” said the mild, soft voice of the man-killer, “but unimportant, Gregory.”

“Macdonald,” pleaded the other, “it was some fool joking of mine that drove Bill Gregory, five years ago, to come in and have it out with you. I got his death on my conscience. Now some of the rest of the boys are going to try to get you out of town, but it ain’t their business. It’s mine. If you should kill them, their ghosts would haunt me! So I’ve come in to try to persuade you!”

“I’m listening,” said Macdonald.

“Everybody on the range knows that you’re a brave man, Macdonald. If you leave town, nobody’ll think any the worse of you, and I’ll let the folks know that I asked you to go and didn’t drive you out by threats.”

“Who’d believe you?” asked Macdonald grimly, as he saw the bent of the conversation. “You’d get a big reputation cheap. But what would I get?”

“A cold thousand. I’ve saved that much, and….”

“You fool!”

“Listen to me! I’m not trying to insult you, but I’m trying to think of everything in the world to persuade you. If you don’t want the money, forget that I mentioned it. But I’m desperate, Macdonald. I know that I can’t stand up to you, but if you won’t go by persuasion, I got to try my gun!”

It was a situation unique in the experience of Macdonald, and he hesitated. But what cause had he to love the world or trust or pity any man in it? From the very first his life had been a battle.

“If I gave way,” he explained coldly, “I’d have twenty men ready to bully me wherever I went. The story would go around that you’d bluffed me, Gregory. I’d rather be dead than be shamed.”

There was a groan from Gregory.

“You cold-hearted devil!” he cried. “If there’s no other way, I’ll try my luck!”

Gregory reached for his gun. Even then there was time for Macdonald to seem to protest—for the benefit of those who were jammed in the doorway of the hotel. He raised a hand in that protest, and he called loud enough for the spectators to hear: “Not that, Gregory!”

Macdonald saw the gun of the other flash. It was shooting at ten paces, and even a poor shot was not apt to miss him. He dropped his right hand on the butt
of his gun, making it swing up, holster and all, for the end of the holster was not steadied against his thigh. At the same instant he pulled the trigger. Jack Gregory spun and dropped. He had been shot squarely between the eyes.

N
o doubt, when all was said and done, it was as fair a fight as had ever been seen in the town of Sudeth. There was no shadow of a doubt that Jack Gregory had pressed home the battle. There was no doubt that he had reached first for his gun, and that the odium of beginning the fight rested entirely on him. But, in spite of this, there was a roar of anger from the spectators when they saw him fall.

They were out through the doorway in a rush, and every man had a drawn gun in his hand. A moment before they had been watching as spectators at a game. Suddenly they realized that in this game the prize was death, and that Jack Gregory had received it—Jack Gregory whom every man there, perhaps, had known from his boyhood. His life was wasted, and yonder was the man of fame, the cool slayer, who had conquered again. And the horror of it took them suddenly by the throat.

One section of that little mob spilled out toward the body of Gregory, lying face down in the dust. The other section swarmed toward the slayer.

“Finish the murdering dog!” some one was crying.

“Hold him for the sheriff!” called another.

“And see him get free on self-defense?” was the answer. “No, we’ll be our own law! Macdonald, put up your hands!”

There had been no chance to run. In that clear starlight with a dozen guns covering him, Macdonald knew that he could not get away. Therefore he stood his ground, and at the order he obediently thrust his arms above his head, not straining them high up, as men in fear will do, but holding them only a trifle above the height of his shoulders, standing at ease and facing the rush of the mob.

“He’s dead!” cried voices from the rear. “Poor old Jack is dead. He’ll never speak again. That murdering hound has sure got to pay for this!”

They joined the circle around Macdonald.

“Get iron on his wrists.”

“No irons here. A rope will do. Where’s a rope?”

“Here’s one!”

“Your sheriff will hunt you down,” said Macdonald.

“Do you think that a jury could be found in this country that would convict a man for helping to lynch you?” asked someone, and Macdonald felt the truth of the query.

“Put down your hands, one hand at a time,” commanded the man with the rope. “Jab a gun into his middle a couple of you, and kill him if he tries to move!”

Macdonald smiled down upon them. Perhaps this was a little more than he had bargained for, but it was not at all unpleasant. The old tingling joy in peril, which he had found so early in his life and loved so long, was thrilling in him now. They had his life upon the triggers of a dozen guns and yet, if he could strike suddenly enough, their very numbers….