The Man From Bar-20, Clarence E. Mulford [distant reading TXT] 📗

get ready; and then a bowlder south of the sandpuff said spat!

2Johnny lowered his rear sight and cuddled the stock of the heavy Sharp’s to his cheek. Slowly a red dot moved up in front of his sights and he again squeezed the trigger, and again missed. But he had no way of knowing that Art Fleming was spitting sand and that his eyes had not escaped the little shower.

“I got to guess too much,” swore Johnny. “That front sight hides him. I wonder how many times I was goin’ to file it sharp?”

As he reloaded, his sombrero suddenly tugged at his scalp and a flat report sounded behind him. He quickly rolled into a shallow depression and another bullet sprayed him with sand.

“Repeater,” he growled. “I got as much sense as a sheep-herder!”

There now was plenty of cover between him and Repeater, but there was still too little distance between him and Fleming; and the latter was a disconcertingly good shot. Two quick reports sounded from the house and Johnny smiled; the man at the door was seeing things, and backing his imagination with lead.

Johnny was watching a ridge behind him. “Me an’ Repeater are goin I to argue,” he remarked, and almost fired when a sombrero slowly arose on the skyline.

“Cussed near bit,” he chuckled; “but you got to have yore head in that bonnet before I lets drive.”

A matted tuft of grass on the top of the ridge moved so gently that only a very observant eye would have detected it. Johnny’s Sharp’s roared, and instantly was answered from a point a yard away from the stirring clump of grass, the bullet fanning his face.

“Yo’re too cussed tricky,” grunted Johnny; “but I got a few of my own.”

Leaving his rifle lying so that its barrel barely projected into sight, he slipped into a gulley and crept toward the west, a Colt in his hand.

Repeater again stirred the grass tuft, and then he found a rock about the size of a man’s head and pushed it up to the skyline of the ridge. Nothing happened “If my hair wasn’t so red,” he murmured, “I’d take a peek. It’s an awful cross for a man to bear.”

He was a cheerful cattle-thief and did not get easily discouraged. Also, he was something of a genius, as he proved by putting his sombrero on the rock and raising the decoy high enough in the grass for the hat brim to show.

“Shoot, cuss you!” he grunted, leveling his rifle; and then as the uneventful seconds passed he grew fault-finding and used bad language. Suddenly a suspicion flashed across his mind.

“That would fool a man with second sight,” he muttered. “Somethin’s plumb wrong; an’ I think I better move. That bowlder over there looks good.”

And as he crawled behind it a pair of keen eyes barely caught sight of his disappearing heel.

“That man’s got th’ right to wear expensive hats,” grinned Johnny, squatting behind a great mass of lava; and his grin widened as he glimpsed the sombrerotopped rock. “Yes, sir: he’s got a head worth ‘em; an’ if I don’t watch him close I’ll grab holt of th’ wrong end of somethinV

Across the valley Fleming, having cleared his eyes of sand, was rapidly recovering his normal vision and was preparing with cheerful optimism to bombard everything which looked capable of sheltering his enemy, when a movement north of and far behind the suspected area acted upon him galvanically. He threw the rifle to his shoulder without elevating the sight, raised it instinctively to the angle of maximum range and squeezed the trigger. He did not expect a hit, and he did not get one; but he caused his friendship to be strongly doubted.

Repeater ducked, and when his face bobbed up again it wore an expression of outraged trust, and he raised a belligerent fist and muttered profanely in hot censure of the distant experimenter. Fleming, chuckling at his friend Sanford’s anxiety, raised his sombrero and waved it, seeming to regard this as ample reparation.

“He’s gettin’ as bad as Gates,” grovled Sanford, eying a leaden splotch on a bowlder a foot above his head; “but he can shoot like th’ hinges of h—l with that blasted Sharp’s.”

He suddenly leaped closer to the bowlder and behind its sheltering bulge, for Fleming, having apologized, fired again. The marksman was frantically waving his sombrero, seemingly indicating a southerly direction’

Sanford scowled at him. “Does he want me to go south, or does he mean that that feller is south of me?”

Fleming, with no regard for the cost of Sharp’s Specials, fired again and Sanford heard the slobbering, wheezing hum of a nearly spent bullet turning end over end in the air and trying to ricochet after it struck.

“He’s shootin’ south of me,” said Sanford; “an r I stays here. Somethin’ tells me that th’ feller that does th’ movin’ is goin’ to die. No red-head ever made a handsome corpse, an’ bein’ th’ red-head which I mentions, I’m goin’ to stick to this hunk of granite like a tick to a cow.”

Johnny, hands on hips, was glaring defiance at the cheerful spendthrift, sorry that he had left his rifle behind. He regarded Fleming as a meddlesome busybody who took delight in revealing his every movement. Also, the optimist was a good shot; but her derived no satisfaction from the fact that the closest bullet had been < ricochet, for a key-holing slug makes an awful mess if it lands.

“I’ll bust yore neck!” quoth Johnny, shaking a fist at the persistent nuisance; and then he jumped aside as a sudden sharp spat! came from the bowlder. “You can shoot near as good as Red Connors’ but if he was here he’d show you what that little difference means.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Repeater! Who is that fool?”

Sanford laughed softly and made no answer; but he carelessly showed a shirt sleeve, and when he jerked it back under cove’ It needed a patch.

“What th’ h—l you doin’?” demanded Sanford heatedly.

“Who’s Red Shirt?”

“Ackerman.”

“Then he’s better with a Sharp’s than a Colt”

“That’s a Spencer carbine.”

Johnny laughed derisively: “If it is he’ll strain it.”

“It’s a Winchester,” chuckled Sanford

“Yo’re a liar!”

“Yo’re another! She’s a single-shot, .40-90.”

“Then he’s changed guns. He had a Winchester repeater in Hastings. I saw it.”

“You’ll see too much some day. You’ll see a slug in yore eye.”

“I’m waitin’,” replied Johnny, and ducked. Fleming was getting good again, and Johnny was glad that he could not see where his bullets were landing, for as it was he was shooting by guess.

“He’ll get you yet,” encouraged Sanford.

“Think I’m goin’ to wait for it?” indignantly demanded Johnny.

“Gimme a look at you,” urged Sanford genially.

“Stand up an’ take it,” retorted Johnny.

“Reckon I’m scared to?”

There was no rply, for Johnny had slipped away and was running at top speed along a gully, where he was out of sight of the hard-working Fleming. A few minutes later he had reachec his rifle and was cuddling it against his cheek; and he was causing Sanford a great amount of mental anguish and wriggling progress.

“Some people calls this strategy,” muttered Johnny, “but I calls it common sense—”

Raising his head cautiously he looked across the valley but saw no sign of Fleming; and he figured that it would be an hour before that interesting person could cross the valley and get close enough to be a menace. What concerned him most were the two rustlers’ friends, who must certainly have heard the shooting. Out of deference to the curiosity of those individuals he crawled into a partly filled-in crevice, whose sides were steep rock and whose floor was several feet below the level of the surrounding plateau.

Peering out from between two rocks he saw Sanford’s sombrero disappear from the ridge, and then it cautiously arose again; and Johnny’s eyes narrowed, for he knew the numerous uses of sombreros.

“Keep stickin’ it up,” he muttered. “An when I get tired shootin’ at it you’ll stick yore head in it an’ get a good look around. Most generally when a man pokes up an empty hat th’ crown don’t tip back as it rises; it just comes up level. An honest hat slants back more an’ more as it comes up. ‘Cause why? Why, ‘cause. ‘Cause a man uses his neck to raise his head with. Now, if he kept his neck stiff an’ raised his whole body, from th’ knees up, plumb straight in th’ air, then th’ hat would come up leveL An’ I asks you, Ladies an’ Gents, if a man layin’ down behind a little ridge can raise his whole body stiff an’ straight, plumb up an’ down? No, ma’am; he can’t. He raises his soiled an’ leathery neck, an’ th’ top of th’ useful sombrero just naturally leans backward; just like that.

“Look, Mister; there it comes again; an’ it don’t tip back at all. I shall ignore it, deliberate an’ cold. But when it tips back, lifelike an’ natural, like a’ honest hat should, then I’ll pay attention to it, me an’ my little Sharp’s Special.

“Oh, I’ve done made a study of appearin’ hats. I’m a reg’lar he-milliner. It was Red Connors an’ Hoppy that directed my great intelligence to that important science. Tex Ewalt knowed about it, too. Tex was eddicated, he was. He said it is in th’ little things that genius showed. He said somethin’ about genius payin’ attention to details, an I havin’ infernal patience. Now, Ladies an’ Gents, a hat is a detail; an’ right now I’ve got th’ infernal patience. Lookee! There she comes again! Level as a table. So, you see; I’m a genius. An’ ain’t he a persistent cuss? He’s got infernal patience, too; but he ain’t no genius. He ain’t strong on details.”

He looked around and grinned. Another hat, to the west of him, was in plain sight.

“Huh! Two hats in sight are two corners of a triangle; an’ sometimes th’ most dangerous corner is th’ third, where there ain’t no hat. Somewhere east of me there’s a feller sneakin’ up; an’ he’s th’ feller I got to ventilate with my long-distance ventilator. An’ mebby th’ second hat’s boss is circlin’ around bareheaded; but it is still a triangle. Mebby it’s a four or five or six cornered triangle. An’ me, I’m all alone; so I’ll crawl east an’ hunt for company.”

He dropped the monologue and took up the science of wriggling swiftly and silently; and when he stopped he was in the middle of a nest of rocks and bowlders at the base of a great pile of them.

The second hat still could be seen, but he gave most of his attention to the opposite direction.

“If I’m wrong, why did Number Two stick up his hat? I’ll bet a peso that him, or Red Shirt, or their friends are stalkin’ me from th’ east. An’ I’ll bet two pesos that I’ll cure him of such pranks. There’s only two ways of explainin’ that second hat. One is that th’ owner is loco. Th’ other is that he left his sign hangin’ up to show me where he ain’t. Th’ other is that he left it so I’d think he wasn’t there, but he is. An’ th’ other is that he figgered I’d think he left it to show me where he ain’t an’ that I’d think he was, so he moved on an’ ain’t there at all. Jumpin’ mavericks I It makes my head ache. Havin’ settled it with only four ways left to guess, I’ll stay pat, right here, an’ let them do th’ openin’.”

The shadows were growing longer and reaching out from bowlders and brush like dark