The Man of the Forest, Zane Grey [manga ebook reader txt] 📗

“I'm safer—here with this outlaw gang,” she replied.

“You won't come!” His color began to lighten then, and his face to distort. He dropped his hold on the saddles.

“Harve Riggs, I'd rather become a toy and a rag for these ruffians than spend an hour alone with you,” she flashed at him, in unquenchable hate.

“I'll drag you!”

He seized her, but could not hold her. Breaking away, she screamed.

“Help!”

That whitened his face, drove him to frenzy. Leaping forward, he struck her a hard blow across the mouth. It staggered her, and, tripping on a saddle, she fell. His hands flew to her throat, ready to choke her. But she lay still and held her tongue. Then he dragged her to her feet.

“Hurry now—grab that pack—an' follow me.” Again Riggs laid hold of the two saddles. A desperate gleam, baleful and vainglorious, flashed over his face. He was living his one great adventure.

The girl's eyes dilated. They looked beyond him. Her lips opened.

“Scream again an' I'll kill you!” he cried, hoarsely and swiftly. The very opening of her lips had terrified Riggs.

“Reckon one scream was enough,” spoke a voice, slow, but without the drawl, easy and cool, yet incalculable in some terrible sense.

Riggs wheeled with inarticulate cry. Wilson stood a few paces off, with his gun half leveled, low down. His face seemed as usual, only his eyes held a quivering, light intensity, like boiling molten silver.

“Girl, what made thet blood on your mouth?”

“Riggs hit me!” she whispered. Then at something she feared or saw or divined she shrank back, dropped on her knees, and crawled into the spruce shelter.

“Wal, Riggs, I'd invite you to draw if thet 'd be any use,” said Wilson. This speech was reflective, yet it hurried a little.

Riggs could not draw nor move nor speak. He seemed turned to stone, except his jaw, which slowly fell.

“Harve Riggs, gunman from down Missouri way,” continued the voice of incalculable intent, “reckon you've looked into a heap of gun-barrels in your day. Shore! Wal, look in this heah one!”

Wilson deliberately leveled the gun on a line with Riggs's starting eyes.

“Wasn't you heard to brag in Turner's saloon—thet you could see lead comin'—an' dodge it? Shore you must be swift!... DODGE THIS HEAH BULLET!”

The gun spouted flame and boomed. One of Riggs's starting, popping eyes—the right one—went out, like a lamp. The other rolled horribly, then set in blank dead fixedness. Riggs swayed in slow motion until a lost balance felled him heavily, an inert mass.

Wilson bent over the prostrate form. Strange, violent contrast to the cool scorn of the preceding moment! Hissing, spitting, as if poisoned by passion, he burst with the hate that his character had forbidden him to express on a living counterfeit. Wilson was shaken, as if by a palsy. He choked over passionate, incoherent invective. It was class hate first, then the hate of real manhood for a craven, then the hate of disgrace for a murder. No man so fair as a gun-fighter in the Western creed of an “even break”!

Wilson's terrible cataclysm of passion passed. Straightening up, he sheathed his weapon and began a slow pace before the fire. Not many moments afterward he jerked his head high and listened. Horses were softly thudding through the forest. Soon Anson rode into sight with his men and one of the strayed horses. It chanced, too, that young Burt appeared on the other side of the glade. He walked quickly, as one who anticipated news.

Snake Anson as he dismounted espied the dead man.

“Jim—I thought I heard a shot.”

The others exclaimed and leaped off their horses to view the prostrate form with that curiosity and strange fear common to all men confronted by sight of sudden death.

That emotion was only momentary.

“Shot his lamp out!” ejaculated Moze.

“Wonder how Gunman Riggs liked thet plumb center peg!” exclaimed Shady Jones, with a hard laugh.

“Back of his head all gone!” gasped young Burt. Not improbably he had not seen a great many bullet-marked men.

“Jim!—the long-haired fool didn't try to draw on you!” exclaimed Snake Anson, astounded.

Wilson neither spoke nor ceased his pacing.

“What was it over?” added Anson, curiously.

“He hit the gurl,” replied Wilson.

Then there were long-drawn exclamations all around, and glance met glance.

“Jim, you saved me the job,” continued the outlaw leader. “An' I'm much obliged.... Fellars, search Riggs an' we'll divvy.... Thet all right, Jim?”

“Shore, an' you can have my share.”

They found bank-notes in the man's pocket and considerable gold worn in a money-belt around his waist. Shady Jones appropriated his boots, and Moze his gun. Then they left him as he had fallen.

“Jim, you'll have to track them lost hosses. Two still missin' an' one of them's mine,” called Anson as Wilson paced to the end of his beat.

The girl heard Anson, for she put her head out of the spruce shelter and called: “Riggs said he'd hid two of the horses. They must be close. He came that way.”

“Howdy, kid! Thet's good news,” replied Anson. His spirits were rising. “He must hev wanted you to slope with him?”

“Yes. I wouldn't go.”

“An' then he hit you?”

“Yes.”

“Wal, recallin' your talk of yestiddy, I can't see as Mister Riggs lasted much longer hyar than he'd hev lasted in Texas. We've some of thet great country right in our outfit.”

The girl withdrew her white face.

“It's break camp, boys,” was the leader's order. “A couple of you look up them hosses. They'll be hid in some thick spruces. The rest of us 'll pack.”

Soon the gang was on the move, heading toward the height of land, and swerving from it only to find soft and grassy ground that would not leave any tracks.

They did not travel more than a dozen miles during the afternoon, but they climbed bench after bench until they reached the timbered plateau that stretched in sheer black slope up to the peaks. Here rose the great and gloomy forest of firs and pines, with the spruce overshadowed and thinned out. The last hour of travel was tedious and toilsome, a zigzag, winding, breaking, climbing hunt for the kind of camp-site suited to Anson's fancy. He seemed to be growing strangely irrational about