Short Stories, - [books to read fiction .txt] 📗

hair of its wearer. “A miss!” he mentally remarks, as the figure disappears. “But better luck next time,” he thinks, as he pushes down the lever of his gun and throws out the empty shell, replacing it with a cartridge. “Short range;” he should have hit. It can’t be that he was losing his old cunning; that his aim was bad. “No;” he fired in haste and was “rattled.” “Another shot and he will show them” are the thoughts that flash through his mind as he peers cautiously ahead to discover his enemies.

None in sight.

For the first time he feels pain. Half numbness, half fire; how it tears as he raises his shirt and looks at a little blue hole hardly larger than a pea near the right side in the short ribs. “Only a scratch or it would bleed worse. Did it go through?” he asks himself, as he passes his hand up his back to find if there be an orifice of exit. “No.” “That is bad, for there is no surgeon to be had to cut the missile out. Pshaw, what matters it? Other men have lived with bullets in them—why could not he? Night would soon come and then with darkness he would go. He was not losing blood sufficient to weaken him much, and by morning he would be far away. After all, it would only be a close call, something to tell about. But poor Tom! he was gone,” and as he looked at the lifeless form of his partner he could hardly keep back the tears.

Crack! crack! go a couple of shots off to his left, and he sees the dust flying up from near his feet. He tries to draw his limbs up to get them in a safer position. Tries again, and the cold sweat breaks from him. He cannot move them!

They are dead—paralyzed!

Something like a sob breaks from him. It is all over. In the first flush of possible escape he had not thought of the spine being injured. He knew it now. The game was played. A few hours longer at the best. To-morrow and the next day, and the days and the years to come would find him there. The end was only a question of a short time. Yet he had only thought it a scratch.

With his arms he drags himself into a safer position. This done, he unbuckles his belt, and as he lays it before him to have it handier he thinks of the time away back on the Platte when he had first put one on. How proud he then felt, as a stripling boy, of the outfit. How bright the future had looked, and now it was all to end. After all, life with him had been a hard one. It had brought to him few of the treasures for which he had longed. For an instant he thought “why not take the sixshooter and end it all?”

“Suicide?”

“No,” he would die fighting.

He would take some of them with him. Yet, why kill at all. They were but savages—Apaches. Their deaths would mean nothing, would gain nothing. Better to kill himself and keep from them the satisfaction of doing it. No; relief might come. Some of the many scouting parties of cavalry always in the field, or, perhaps, a party of prospectors might hear the firing, and then with a good doctor all would yet be well. He could find one at any of the military posts.

All these thoughts and a thousand others crowded through his brain while he was placing himself in a better position for defense. Cautiously raising himself he glanced over the boulder in the direction from whence the last shots came. Crack! crack! crack! the bullets whiz surlily around him.

Bang! bang! bang! goes the rifle.

A new feeling takes possession of him. His nerves tighten like steel, and he pumps empty shells out of the rifle’s chamber and cartridges in with a fierce speed. Kill! kill! let him take one of those howling murderers with him, and he doesn’t care how soon after death comes. But what is the matter with his aim? He has not yet killed one, not even wounded one that he knows of. He refills the magazine of his rifle in nervous, feverish haste, and then peeps through the crevices of the boulders to see if there is an enemy in sight. None. They are there, though. They are waiting and he is dying. How hot it is! He is burning up with thirst and heat. How “it” hurts. He has got so that he thinks of his wound only as “it,” as if it were some terrible monster that he could not escape. The blood—small as the quantity—that flows from his wound has formed a pool, clotted and coagulated. It adds to his discomfort by its stickiness. He thinks, how strange that one’s own blood should annoy one so, and then wonders where so many flies could have come from, as he raises a swarm by the movement of his body. He looks across to where the burro has fallen with the canteen and sees that the vessel has been jammed by coming in contact with the boulder, and that the precious fluid has nearly all run out. How much he would give to have what little water remains! He feels almost tempted to try to reach it, but no; that would mean throwing his life away without a chance for revenge. Revenge. He will have it. Thirst is nothing; death is nothing now if he can only kill, kill!

If he could only kill them all, how happy he would die!

He looks over the boulder. Nothing in sight but boulders, lava, cacti, sand and gaete grass. “They are there, though.” He almost laughs in sarcasm as he catches himself scanning the horizon to see if any relief were in sight. Relief? For days he and the man that laid dead there had traveled without finding a trail made by a shod horse—without finding a trail of any kind. How childish to expect any help. Better brace up and die like a man.

He looked at the body of the dead man. How hideous the face looked with its swollen lips, open mouth, staring eyes. How black it had grown. What a vast quantity of blood had come from the wound in the head. His eye catches a movement in the tuft of grass to his left. Bang! bang! goes his rifle. “Nothing there,” he thinks, as he crouches closer to the ground to escape the shots that come in return.

So the hours go, but he hardly marks their flight. The sun is getting lower in the west, and the white heat of day gives way to the yellowish-purple haze that in Apache land is always the forerunner of night. How when he was first hit he had longed for night; how little he cared for it now. He could feel himself growing weaker. His Winchester was heavier than any he had ever before lifted. Even “it,” that terrible thing that chained him there, pained him less, but the thirst grew horrible. Anyhow night would give him a chance to reach the canteen. At times he felt almost drowsy, but fought off the feeling. He was merely waiting for the end. He thought it strange that he could face it so complacently. He hardly cared now how soon it came. Would he shoot all his cartridges away before it reached him? He would not waste them though. If he could only reach Tom’s gun and revolver and destroy them it would make those that killed him angry. It was for these things, worth perhaps $50, that he and Tom had been murdered. He was beginning to think of himself as already dead. At least how easy to ruin Tom’s rifle. It was only two or three paces away. He took his revolver and fired at it, aiming to hit it just in front and below the hammer, its most vulnerable part. Instead, the bullet hits the ground and ricocheting enters the breast of the dead man. He shudders as the body stirs from the force of the shot, although he knows that life has been gone for hours. Everything is plain to him now why his other shots had not taken effect. He was unnerved. How could a man with a hole through his body hope to hit anything. He had heard of men shot through the heart killing their assailants, and had often wondered if he could do it. Could Tom have done it? How far off and yet how short seemed the years that he and Tom had been together. How little there had been in them that seemed worth now recalling. Crack! a single shot off to the right, and he fires where he sees the smoke curling upward. Fires again. Nothing. He counts his cartridges and is astonished that he has fired so many. He must have lost some. No, there are the empty shells.

Another shot off to the right. One to the front. He fires at both. He feels that he is growing nervous, and brings all his remaining powers into play to secure better control of himself. He will put away the idea of death, of his wound, of everything but revenge. Only one and he will be satisfied, and for the first time in years he prays, prays without words though, that he may kill but one.

The sun is sinking lower, it has almost reached the far off western mountain tops. It would soon be night, and then what would “they” do? Steal up under cover of the darkness and shoot him from behind some boulder before he would be aware of it. He would keep a close lookout, and perhaps he might after all “get” one of them.

Crack! crack! to the right and left, and he glances in both directions, firing at each; and then right over him takes place a terrible explosion, and he feels as if something heavy and blunt had struck him in the back. He half raises himself, just enough to turn his face upward. Another explosion, another heavy, blunt blow, and through the smoke from a revolver he sees a dark young face, with black, glittering eyes, white teeth, across which the lips are tightly drawn. The face and the form of one almost a boy, and then he falls back while a dark hand and arm snatches his gun from his half-clinging clasp. He hears wild shouting and through his glazing eyes sees dark forms scrambling for his arms, for Tom’s. They are even quarreling in their eagerness to tear the pack from the dead burro, and then instinctively he sees one raise something in the air ... and when it falls there is no longer anything human in the face or the head of the man who has spent the afternoon in fight. Nothing but a bloody pulp of skull, hair, brains, broken teeth, crushed into a misshapen mass by the boulder cast upon it by an Apache.