The Rifle.

Faintly, yet unmistakably, the sound of guns rode the night, insistent for a moment, then dying to an echoed mutter all but inaudible. Harper, in the lead and flanked by Pecos and Saygar and Whitey slumped over his saddle, stiffened as he caught the first of those far echoes. Blaze misread his change of posture and lifted his .45 from its holster. Then he, too, heard the faint thunder of the guns and his glance whipped around to find Joe, bringing his pony to a halt as his head c.o.c.ked to a listening att.i.tude. The quartet ahead had stopped now.

"We're too late," Joe said, low-voiced. "That's coming from Diamond, Blaze."

The silence ran on briefly, to be broken by a renewed and stronger rattling of gunfire as the breeze momentarily strengthened.

Joe's voice came over it crisply, urgently: "Take 'em on, Blaze." He had lifted his reins to turn away when Blaze's sharp- "You don't go down there alone, brother!"-stopped him.

"What about them?" Joe said, nodding to the three outlaws and Diamond's foreman, all three with boots roped to cinches and wrists tied to the horns of their saddles. Whitey, being severely wounded, hadn't needed to be bound. Joe went on to explain patiently, as to a child, knowing his friend's stubbornness: "You said yourself that Vanover and the girl ought to be in on this. I'll get them and bring them along to Workman's."

"How? By askin' them jaspers please not to shoot at you? h.e.l.l, they're playin' for keeps!"

"Then I'll just go down and take a look." Joe touched the bay with spurs, lifting the animal into a fast lope as he went away.

Blaze cursed soundly, for the moment considering leaving his four prisoners in his anxiety to know what was going on at Diamond. But in the end, hearing the guns no longer, he said dryly-"Ain't it a shame you boys can't be mixin' in that?"-and motioned them on with a lift of his gun.

Joe knew the lower basin well. He hit the timber at a point where the going was even and the trees grew spa.r.s.ely, traveling almost due south. But a mile below the basin he swung sharply east, crossed the trail leading to Diamond, and rode across a high ridge that put him into a more broken country. He crossed two small hill meadows, the lower one well-remembered because he had fenced it in and grazed his yearlings there the last summer he was on Diamond.

He struck a little-used wood road and followed its twisting course the better part of a mile. Then, leaving it, cresting a nearby flanking spur, he looked down on the big, cleared pasture that stretched to within a scant mile of Diamond.

He was leaving the trees to cross the pasture when a gun's hammering explosion ripped the night from the trees close to his left. That and a sharp, searing burn on his right side came simultaneously.

Fred Vanover and Jean had listened to the guns with a dull awareness of their helplessness and a feeling of dread. They had been prisoners since late afternoon, first at the house and now here at the edge of the trees bordering Diamond's big hill pasture less than a mile above the layout. Gentry, their guard, had been polite and considerate, but there had been no mistaking the dead seriousness in his threat when they had stopped here. "I ain't never had to put a gun on a woman. Don't make me now," he had said.

This afternoon Harper had neither explained nor apologized when letting them know that they weren't to leave the house. Since then, Vanover had repeatedly asked to see his foreman, but with no success. Some forty minutes ago Tillson had come to the house, unlighted since nightfall, and held a hurried, whispered conversation with Gentry. Directly afterward, father and daughter had been taken out, put on horses, and brought up here.

It was obvious to both Jean and her father that a trap had somehow been laid down at Diamond for the mesa ranchers. How that had been accomplished, Vanover couldn't even begin to guess. When the sound of the guns came, he said simply: "Jean, I wish we'd never come here. Men are dying down there and it'll be blamed on me."

"It won't in the end," Jean said and reached over to put a hand on his arm, giving it a firm pressure she hoped would ease the burden on his mind.

Gentry was somewhere behind them in the tree shadows near the horses. They themselves sat on saddle blankets close to the nearest trees at the pasture's edge. Time and again, after the guns fell silent, Vanover looked back there, trying to see the man. Only once did he make out Gentry's position, and that by the faint red glow of a burning cigarette end. They were waiting, for what they didn't know.

That waiting was becoming intolerable to them both when, at first faintly and then coming stronger, they heard the hoof mutter of a running pony echoing down from the near hill slope. As a rider came out of the trees barely 100 yards away, Vanover sensed Gentry's presence close beside him. The gunman breathed-"Not a move, you two!"-as the rider angled out from the trees, approaching.

Suddenly Vanover saw Gentry's hand lift and the gun in it fall in line with the rider. Recklessly, not considering the consequences, Vanover stepped sideward so that his shoulder jarred the gunman. At that same instant Gentry's Colt exploded deafeningly and close.

Afterward, Vanover couldn't piece together the violent action of those next seconds with any pattern of continuity. He heard Gentry's profane oath, saw the rider roll out of the saddle. Vanover tried to step clear of Gentry, but was struck down by a blow of the swinging gun that caught him on the right shoulder. As he went down, he heard Jean's cry: "Dad!"

His fall faced him toward the pasture at the moment the downed rider rolled onto his feet. He saw the rider's instinctive sideward lunge that took him out of the path of Gentry's second bullet. Then the rider's gun opened up in a prolonged and thunderous chant that drove Gentry over backward, his frame jerking rigidly three times at the impact of bullets before he hit the ground.

There was a moment in which none of them moved: Jean, Vanover, or the rider. Then the rider called sharply: "Sing out over there! Who is it?"

"Dad!" Jean cried. "It's Joe . . . Joe Bonnyman!"

She stood beside him a moment and he felt her uncertainty and hesitation. Then she left him and ran out to the man who had holstered his gun at the instant her voice sounded.

The thankfulness and gladness that had been in Jean's voice told her father as much as her leaving him to go out to Bonnyman. He knew something about his daughter he hadn't known until now. This afternoon, as she unhesitatingly told him of the reason for her absence, she had said once-"He isn't guilty, Dad. I . . . I know it."-and at the time he had detected a strangely intent note in her voice without understanding it. Now he understood both that and this other of a moment ago. Following her out to Bonnyman, he experienced a deep sadness, an aloneness in which he was strangely proud of the choice Jean had made.

When he came up to Joe and held out his hand, Fred Vanover had accepted something he had long dreaded. It wasn't as bad as his imagining had often pictured it would be. He said quite levelly: "We've got a lot to thank you for, Joe."

Over the next few minutes, he put his attention not so much to what was being said as to sizing up this lean, blond man with the bandaged head, the fatigue-lined but strong and clean face. He found that he liked Joe Bonnyman. He found, too, without knowing how he arrived at the decision, that he didn't believe Bonnyman guilty of the indictments laid against him these last three days.

They discussed the shooting down at Diamond, how they had been brought up here by Gentry, evidently to clear the way for the action below. And Vanover approved of Joe's directness when, explanations finished, the younger man said: "You and I could go down and take a look at things, Vanover. After that we head across to Anchor. You've got to talk with Yace."

The ragged remnants of the mesa crews pa.s.sed Yoke and rode on to Anchor, only a few pausing to look upon the fiery inferno of barn and house that represented Slim Workman's near ruin. Tonight's defeat had been so complete that this added disaster came almost as something expected, even though no man among them could offer an explanation for it.

As Workman himself put it to Yace Bonnyman and two other Anchor men who rode with him: "All I know is I'm lucky to be alive."

The yard at Anchor gradually filled as the stragglers came in. One rider led a horse packing a body roped across the saddle. Another supported a wounded Singletree crewman who rode double with him, bent over under the torturing pain of a bullet-smashed shoulder and his sleeve and side reddened by his lost blood. A third came in with his right leg hanging loosely and his boot clear of stirrup. He had to be helped down out of the saddle and carried to the bunkhouse; a bullet had splintered his s.h.i.+n and they had to cut his boot from his foot.

Hardly a man had come away without at least a superficial wound, so complete and utterly devastating had been the ambush made by the combined Diamond and Brush guns. There were those who didn't return at all, five, as they made the count after waiting a full hour.

Clark Dunne's arrival was a signal for the owners and foremen to go into the house. They lit the lamps in the cavernously big living room and began their talk. Clark was humble, almost in tears, as he told them his story. If he had looked for anger or hatred in these men, he was not to find it; they were too stunned, too completely bewildered to do more than listen.

When Blaze rode in with his four prisoners, the crews left the bunkhouse and ringed the five ponies, roused out of their apathy. The others came down from the house and for several minutes there was a welter of confused talk, until Blaze finally drawled: "Someone take care of Whitey there. The rest of you can get it when we're inside."

Whitey was lifted from his horse and carried to the bunkhouse, fainting as they laid him on a bunk. Mike Saygar remained cool and uncommunicative as he was taken to the house. Harper, following the outlaw, appeared genuinely afraid. Pecos seemed dazed.

Vanover and Jean were well into the yard before anyone noticed them. A Yoke man recognized Vanover and bawled: "Workman! Bonnyman! Get out here!"

His cry brought several men out onto the broad portal of the house. Vanover rode across there, Jean following and said a few quiet words to Yace Bonnyman and Blaze. Then he and Jean joined the group in the big living room.

From a distance out the lane, Joe watched their reception with a feeling that was a blend of admiration and uneasiness. It took nerve for Vanover to ride in and face his enemies. Joe hadn't been at all sure that someone wouldn't lose his head and take a shot at the Middle Arizona man, for what little they had seen at Diamond spoke eloquently of the complete defeat tonight of the Mesa Grande outfits. But Vanover had insisted on taking his part in all this. So had Jean.

Once the portal door swung shut on the men gathered there, Joe came out of the saddle, looped the bay's reins over the top rail of the meadow fence, and went on afoot. He was tired, as tired as he could ever remember being, and his body was sore to the touch in a dozen places. But his head was clear and no longer ached; he was thankful for that, for never had he felt the need for clear thinking more than he did now.

Joe knew he had several minutes before the beginning of the next step in the plan he'd outlined to Vanover. As he walked out the head of the lane and turned off toward the big corral, where he knew he'd find the horses, he was going back over that plan, wondering it he'd forgotten anything, wondering if it would net him what he hoped. In the end, he couldn't be sure.

This first step seemed to be going off all right. He had counted on the watchfulness of the crews being relaxed. As he walked in on the corral and made out the twenty-odd ponies tied outside it, he knew his hunch had been correct. Off there at the bunkhouse, men moved to and fro in the light of the door; doubtless they were busy with more important things than keeping a watch on their horses.

He started at the far end of the line and worked down it, examining each saddle gun. He would walk in on the horse, speak softly to it, lay a hand on the animal's neck, and then, with the other, feel the b.u.t.t plate of the rifle or carbine that was thrust in the scabbard. Several rifle boots were empty; many of the saddles didn't carry one. But each rifle Joe did find he examined carefully, his groping fingers feeling for a b.u.t.t plate scarred to the pattern Blaze had described.

The seventh gun he examined was a long-barreled .30-30 Winchester, on the saddle of a leggy mottled gray horse wearing Brush's jaw brand. Joe had never seen the horse before. His hand, running along the stock, felt the smooth walnut and he knew that the weapon was fairly new. His fingers ran up over the arced end of the b.u.t.t plate, down along its face. Suddenly his hand froze, his forefinger running along the deep channel of a straight indentation cutting obliquely across the steel. He found it hard to breathe and his heart didn't seem to want to keep on beating as he drew the rifle from its boot and, stock up, felt of the b.u.t.t plate again. Here was the gun that had fired the bullet at him up there in the basin three nights ago.

Joe rocked the rifle into the crook of his arm, went back away from the corral, and took nearly five minutes making a wide circle that brought him in at the back of the house, between the root cellar and the kitchen stoop. He pushed his way through a clump of barberry bushes toward a lighted window of the living room.

That window was open; Joe had asked Fred Vanover to be sure of that. Coming in on it, he heard the drone of voices. Joe leaned the rifle against the wall close to the window's edge, and drew his .45 from its holster.

The Accounting.

When the door closed, it was Yace Bonnyman who confronted Vanover with: "This had better be good, d.a.m.n' good! There are over twenty men out there who'd like to see you with a bullet through your guts, Vanover! Talk!"

Fred Vanover did talk. So did Jean, repeating once more Blaze's story of Joe's lying wounded in the cave for two nights and a day while she cared for him. She added more detail to her father's story of their being held prisoner by Harper's men since mid-afternoon, of Joe's killing Gentry in Diamond's hill pasture tonight.

A brief silence ran on after her words, a silence brought on by one more prop having been knocked from under these men. Slowly but surely they were losing the threads that had at first appeared to lead to a solution of this tangled mystery. In that silence Vanover walked across to the window, flanking the big center fireplace, and threw up the lower sash, saying briefly: "Let's have some air." This side of the big room was fogged with tobacco smoke and the stale, heavy air was hard to breathe.

Out of his sheer bewilderment and helplessness Yace said bitterly: "If only Clark hadn't gone in there!"

"Easy, Yace," Blaze drawled. "Clark wasn't to blame. Hadn't he said he'd rather be lyin' back there right now than facin' this? Hang it, it's dark as the inside of a hat tonight. Danged if I could have told Dennis's paint from Harper's. Clark was right for goin' in there and fortin' up when he found the place empty. It looked like a perfect chance to him. You and Workman were wrong to move in before you got some sort of a signal from him."

"That's right, Yace," Workman said lifelessly. "It was me, I'll admit. I was overanxious when I sent that man across to you and told you I was comin' in. I thought maybe they'd taken Clark's bunch without a shot fired."

Blaze saw the acute pain on Workman's face and, knowing the torture the man was undergoing in addition to having seen himself burned out, said quickly: "No one of you is to blame. The only thing that whips me is how them hardcases knew enough to let you fall into your own trap." His glance slowly traveled the faces of these men he had always known as his friends. "Saygar was in the hills during the fight, so was Harper, so was Joe Bonnyman. Vanover was a prisoner to his own men. So, gents, one of us, one of us right here is a stinkin', yellow-backed, double-crossin' coyote! Diamond had help layin' that trap for us tonight and this sidewinder I speak of helped 'em. He's the one who killed Ed Merrill. He bushwhacked Joe. But it didn't come off, thank G.o.d. He's responsible for the five men who cashed in tonight, for Shorty gettin' shot out of his saddle this mornin'. Who is he?"

Their glances turned involuntarily to Yace Bonnyman who had always been their leader. But he didn't have it in him to lead them now and his eyes refused to meet theirs. His look traveled slowly over toward the open window, evading their glances. He saw something that made him stiffen. Then they saw what he had-Joe Bonnyman stepping in through the window with a leveled Colt in his hand.

No one in the room made a move. The only sound that came at that moment was Jean Vanover's barely audible gasp.

Then Joe was leaning indolently back against the wall to one side of the window, drawling: "Go right ahead, Blaze. You're doin' fine."

Blaze gave a slow shake of the head, seemingly not as surprised as the rest. "That's as far as I can go."

"Anyone else want a try at makin' his guess?" Joe looked at Yace, seeing his father's face drained of color. He couldn't read the old man's look, couldn't decide whether it was anger, shame, or plain outright puzzlement that put the tight-lipped expression on that lined and rugged face. "How about you, Yace? Still think it was me?"

"Who said I ever did?" Yace blazed hotly, and now his face no longer lacked color.

Blaze Coyle's slow-drawled-"Don't try and back-water, Yace."-jerked Anchor's owner up just short ofan added outburst.

Joe smiled meagerly. Looking at the others, he said: "There's a dapple-gray horse with a Brush brand wanderin' around the yard loose. Whoever rode him in better go catch him up if he wants to fork his own saddle home tonight."

Clark Dunne stood up slowly out of a rawhide chair. "Mine," he said, and had half turned to the door when he suddenly stiffened and faced around again.

In that brief moment a change had come over Clark's face, making it handsome no longer, but thin-lipped and ugly. His hard stare settled on Joe and stayed there warily. Somehow he knew that he had stepped into a trap.

Joe was feeling the strength go out of his knees and his hand began trembling. So it was Clark! It had been Clark all along. The man who, next to Blaze, he counted as his best friend. Clark had tried to kill him. Clark had killed Ed Merrill. Of course, Clark would be the one who would have recognized the horsehair hatband. Slowly, relentlessly the full force of Clark's guilt struck home to Joe as a crus.h.i.+ng weight. A strong nausea hit him and the room wheeled before his eyes, so violent was the upheaval within him. Then, gradually, he got a hold on himself and faced this old friend who he saw now as no longer a friend, but a cold-blooded and merciless killer.

"So you're the one, Clark," he said evenly.

A light step crossed the planking of the portal and the heavy bolt of the door rattled. Joe's glance went across there, past Clark, as the door opened and Ruth Merrill came into the room.

She stopped dead still, her hand on the wrought-iron latch lift, taking in the scene before her. Her tawny, blonde hair was wind-blown and her face rosy with high color. At this moment she made a picture that brought back all the old hunger, the old wors.h.i.+pful feeling to Joe. He was a fraction of a second too late in lifting his gun. Clark's hand stab had become a smooth, fast uplift as he rocked his .38 into line. Joe pushed sideward and out from the wall and brought his gun around. But Clark's exploded as he was moving. A heavy blow struck him along the forearm; the heavy .45 fell from his convulsively opening hand.

He stood there, his numbed arm hanging at his side, staring into the round bore of Clark's Colt as Ruth Merrill screamed.

Clark wheeled in behind a chair, his move putting every man in the room well within his line of vision. His ordinarily smooth voice grated now as he rasped: "Reach! Every blasted one of you!"

As their hands lifted, Ruth Merrill said from the doorway in a breathless, bewildered voice: "Clark! What are you doing?"

Clark ignored her, taking two backward steps that brought her into view. "Mike, get that gun off the floor," he said tersely. "Harper, Pecos, grab guns!"

Saygar came lithely up off the horsehair sofa, stepped across, and picked up Joe's Colt. Harper wheeled in behind Slim Workman, yanked the man's gun from holster and pushed him roughly across to stand beside Yace Bonnyman. Pecos lifted Yace's gun.

Only then did the hard, wicked set of Clark's face break into a milder look. His glance going to Joe, he drawled: "Well, Ruth, you can have him. He's what you've been after, isn't he?" A twisted smile crossed his face. "I wonder if I'll let you have him. How would you like me to make sure this time, Joe?"

The arm was beginning to hurt now. Joe reached over with his good hand and took a hold on it, throttling the pain. "You're through, Clark," he said. "You can't get away."

"Can't I?" Clark taunted. "Can we, Mike?"

"It's been done before," Saygar said. "We can do it again." Clark laughed mirthlessly and softly and his glance ran over Joe to Blaze and Yace. Some thought, as he looked at Yace, made his smile fade. "It's too bad this couldn't have come off the way I planned it, Bonnyman. I'd have made you look like a ten-cow man. In the end, I'd either have bought you out or run you out. There was my own spread, then Brush and Singletree. Workman, you'd have sold out to me, wouldn't you? That fire I set tonight cut you off above the pockets, didn't it?"

Slim Workman's voice was awed. "So you did that, too?" he breathed.

"You must've had it all planned," Joe said, "as far back as the night you killed Merrill."

"You killed Dad?" Ruth's voice sounded across the room, hushed and lifeless.

"I meant Ed, Ruth," Joe said.

"Both," Clark corrected him. "Ask Doc Nesbit about it sometime. All I had to do was keep the old man from takin' his medicine."

Yace Bonnyman cursed softly time and time again. It seemed to amuse Clark, whose smile returned. "I'd have had you in less than a year," he drawled. "Maybe in a month. The basin along with the rest. If it hadn't been for Joe uncoverin' Saygar's men, they'd have deeded their homesteads over to me."

At the door, Ruth breathed: "You're a cur, Clark. No, not that. I have nothing against a dog. You're . . ." She stopped there, speechless in her anger and humiliation.

"Go ahead, say it," Clark taunted. His glance ran between Joe and Ruth. "I wonder if I ought to let you have him." He seemed intent on deciding that.

Strangely enough, Joe's look went to Jean Vanover at this moment. She stood beside her father, across from Clark. Her face was pale. She was looking at Joe and something in her eyes made him say, with near anger: "We'll decide that for ourselves, Clark."

A nod from Clark sent Harper to the door. The gunman pushed Ruth aside roughly. So concentrated was the girl's attention on Clark that she didn't seem to notice the gunman.

"Mike, cover my back," Clark said, and turned toward the door.

At that instant Joe let his knees buckle and his body fall backward. As his weight left his legs, he straightened them. He fell back out through the window in a twisting fall. Saygar's gun ripped away the silence inside, his bullet flicking loose a splinter from the window's sill at the exact moment Joe struck the ground, heavily, on his good shoulder.

He rolled out of line with the window, one turning boot knocking the rifle there aground. His groping hand s.n.a.t.c.hed it up as he come onto his knees, wheeling to face the window.

He levered a sh.e.l.l into the gun and shot with it at hip level as Saygar's sloping-shouldered frame blocked the opening. The outlaw gave a pulpy cough and an expression of utter surprise crossed his face. Then, as though too tired to stand, he fell out and across the window's wide sill, hanging there with his gun hand straight down along the outside wall.

Joe saw this as he was coming erect and turning from the window. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the outlaw's Colt from the hand's death grip and ran for the near corner of the house. Losing his footing, he fell headlong into the p.r.i.c.kly thicket of barberry. He rolled clear of the bushes, a lancing pain coursing up along his right forearm. The rifle forgotten, he got up and kept on.

Clark Dunne's vague, high shape was in the saddle of the gray, turning out from the shadows down by the corral. Joe halted, stood straddle-legged to steady his aim, and laid his sights on the gray's chest. He squeezed the trigger. The horse, beginning a lunging stride under spur, went down as his forelegs buckled. Joe saw the beginning of Clark's fall and started to run across there.

Over by the house a shot rang out and a man's hoa.r.s.e scream sounded briefly before a second explosion cut it off.

Joe ran past the cook shanty and was close to the bunkhouse when a stab of flame from the corral showed him Clark's position in the rank of horses. Joe didn't hear the sound of that shot, but felt the air whip of the bullet along the side of his face. He stopped short of the rectangle of light issuing from the bunk-house door, then wheeled back, and ran into the shadow along the side wall.