Chapter XX

Torrance hit the high spots streaking over to the King Cannon Ranch. But he got only about half way, to the top of that pine-and-oak studded knoll where some day the home was to be, when he rode into a sudden, unpresaged rain. It was a rain of bullets, and the streaks of light were orange-red flames from a rifle, and, like a man shot through the head, he spilled out of the saddle. As he went down, untouched by any of those flying leaden pellets, he snatched out a gun with one hand while with the other he gave his horse a resounding slap to send the animal racing straight on. And Torrance, striking earth and rolling adroitly, brought up standing behind a thick-boled oak.

He had hardly come up erect on his toes when he glimpsed the man shooting at him. His assailant was scarcely twenty steps away, sitting a black horse in the shadows and all but invisible, and yet the wonder remained that Torrance wasn’t killed and that he didn’t shoot the man dead at the first shot. It was just one of those odd happenings which so thickly besprinkle life wherever life is running strong and swift.

The heavy slug from Torrance’s forty-four, winged on its way by the several chances of haste, uncertain light and moving figures, slammed into the narrow margin of the other man’s rifle barrel, striking it so near the trigger guard that the flying wrath of the bullet came next door to raising a blister on the hardened trigger finger. It was like slugging the gun with a sledge hammer; anyhow the rifle flew out of the would-be killer’s hands and the man who thus relinquished his gun gave voice to an involuntary howl of rage, pain and fright commingled. For the fragment of a second he thought he had been shot--he didn’t quite know where.

And he wasn’t granted much time to think about things. Torrance saw, because of the star glint on steel, the flash of the weapon flying out of his attacker’s hands, and then asked no better than to get the man in his two hands. He had fired the one shot only; he had his gun up for the second; he was nicely balanced on his toes. Obeying impulse, a thing he did far more often than most men realized, he hurled himself forward across the few steps intervening between himself and the man who had just tried to kill him. And in some few seconds the two were gripped together like two wildcats.

There in the dark, shot through with starlight, with their horses snorting and stamping and watching and wanting to run away, yet not moving out of their tracks, the two men fought as two men will when there is only one thought in mind and heart and sinew, to win anyhow. To win with a blow of a clubbed fist, with a strangle grip, with a sudden knee or a brutal boot--to save your own life by beating the other fellow into insensibility or by the directer method of killing him. Yet, like a small bell beating in his brain, there was in Jim Torrance the urge: “Get him, but get him alive so he can talk!”

It was Jake LeSarge whom Jim Torrance jerked down off his horse, though at the time Torrance had not the least inkling of the man’s identity; and Jake LeSarge, half Cherokee and sinewy and slippery, was as hard to deal with as a young panther. He was like a snake for quick-darting elusiveness, like a driving rod on the new western locomotives for the blows he struck. Jim Torrance came to know all this within some ten seconds, during which the two gave and took some measure of each other.

It just happened that Jim Torrance had what no other man that Sundown ever knew had in the superlative degree, the something which made him what he was, the one Town Marshal of Sundown whose memory will linger a long, long time after so many other things mundane are forgotten. He had the indestructible spirit. He took a smashing blow in the jaw and reeled backward and tottered on his heels and took another blow under his heart and felt the living breath jolted out of him, and all he did was set his teeth and bore back into the tornado that had struck him. Head down, chin protected, arms flailing and driving hard fists like knobby clubs, he paid back in full for all he got.

He landed by chance, or luck, on LeSarge’s Adam’s apple, corded and tight and hard, and the blow was like that of a sledge beating on an anvil. Almost it broke young Jake LeSarge’s neck. It did knock him flat at the same time that it choked him up so that he thought he was dying for lack of breath. Before he could master his muscles and command them to jerk his lean, battling body upright, Jim Torrance was on top of him, battering him with merciless fists. Then Torrance’s hands, the fingers like steel hooks, shut down on his throat until LeSarge’s tongue lolled like a thirsty dog’s, and his eyes bulged. A tremor, which the other man could feel, ran through his body from head to foot.

“Got you, damn you!” panted Jim Torrance.

Then his own head cleared. He kept a strangle-hold on the other man’s throat, yet he no longer squeezed so hard; he remembered that he did not want to kill but to ask his questions and get them answered.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. “Quick, or I’ll put a bullet square between your eyes!”

The other man, in sudden fear of death, answered:

“Me, I’m LeSarge, Jake LeSarge. I made a mistake--got the wrong man--”

“Sure!” said Torrance. “Sure! Now, where’ve you been? Down at the King Cannon ranch, huh? Lie to me, and I’ll know it! I’ll batter your brains out!”

“Yes,” said LeSarge. “Yes. At the Cannon ranch. I just come from there!”

“Bordereau sent you?”

“No! I swear--”

“I tell you I’ll batter your brains out!”

“Leave up on my throat, will you? Yes, then. Bordereau sent me. He told me--”

He stopped there. Torrance eased up on him a bit, came into a squatting position over his captive and said:

“He sent you to get me, didn’t he? He told you to snoop around the King Cannon place, to ride over and meet up with me, or to get me over at my place or wherever you could find me. Am I right?”

“I don’t even know who you are! I tell you I made a mistake; I was looking for another man. Can’t you understand, pardner? I don’t even know who the hell you are right now!”

“That’s funny,” said Torrance. He withdrew his hands then entirely from the other man; balanced on his heels he was grinning the way a wolf grins at the kill. He said, “It’s mighty funny.” He had jammed his gun back into its leather; now he jerked it out and set its cylinder spinning with its small-voiced metallic clicks. He said, “Tell me what my name is and tell it fast, or so help me I’m going to kill you!”

Then, in all haste LeSarge, knowing the voice of fate when he heard it beating on his ear drums, gasped out:

“You--you’re Torrance, Jim Torrance!”

“Sure.” Torrance shoved his gun back into its holster. He stood up.

“You’re coming along with me, LeSarge,” he said. “_Sabe?_ You’re coming sweet and soft and willing, wherever I say. _Sabe?_”

“Yes,” said LeSarge. “Yes. I’ll come. You got me, Torrance.”

“You’re damn well right, I got you,” said Torrance. “Now watch your step.”

“All right,” said Jake LeSarge. “All right. I know when I’m licked. I’m playing good dog. Where do we go?”

“I don’t know!” said Torrance. “I don’t know. You see, I do know who you are now; I know you for a crook and a yellow dog. But I don’t know about you and Steve Bordereau. I don’t know how much he is paying you. I don’t know how easy it would be to buy you, to get you to double cross him. You ought to be cheap. Let me get you somewhere in the light where I can look at you.”

“I’m on the square, Torrance. I’ve always been on the level--”

“Shut your trap, you dirty liar! Climb on your horse. Let’s ride. Never mind about your rifle; I’ll take it for you.”

“Where’re we going?”

“It isn’t far to the King Cannon ranch house. We might as well look in there.”

There was a light in the bunk house and as they rode nearer the hushed and sentimental strains of a guitar floated out to them. Then a voice was raised in song, a doleful rendition, and thereafter something was thrown, no doubt at the musician; it sounded like a heavy piece of crockery crashing against the wall.

“Dry up, can’t you?” said the voice of the man who had been goaded into throwing things. “I’ve stood all I can.”

Torrance and his captive dismounted and went to the door.

“Here’s company, boys,” said Torrance.

Curly and Drennen and young Pardee--it had been Pardee strumming and vocalizing--looked at them curiously.

“Hello,” said Drennen. “This is LeSarge you’ve got with you, Torrance. What do you want him for?”

“I’m not sure. Is he any good for anything?”

“Absolutely not. Unless maybe we could chop him up and use him to poison coyotes with.”

LeSarge, sullen and vicious looking, strove also to look bold and defiant but remained furtive and couldn’t keep the apprehension out of his restless eyes.

“I wanted a look at him by lamp light,” said Torrance. “So I’d be sure and know him if I ever saw him again. Just now he tried to shoot me. He’s been snooping around the ranch here tonight, I don’t know what for. You boys wouldn’t know?”

No, they couldn’t figure it out. And they agreed there was no use asking him; he couldn’t tell the truth even if he tried, even if you played Indian with him and cut his hide into strips.

“What are you going to do with him?” asked Curly.

“I ought to have shot him while I had the chance,” said Torrance, and sounded regretful. “At the time, though, I was sort of curious and-- Oh, we’ll let him go. You can go now, LeSarge. And you’re to keep on going, _sabe_? And you’re never to come back this way. We’re asking men like you to keep out of Sundown for good. I’m town marshal now; it would be just a matter of duty to kill you on sight. Now, scat!”

LeSarge ducked out through the door, got onto his horse and was off like a streak. From some little distance he screamed something back, his voice high and breaking with rage.

“I don’t like his poking around here,” said Torrance. “He’s one of Bordereau’s men.” He looked at Curly and Drennen and Pardee. “Sally Dawn oughtn’t to be out after dark,” he said. “And whenever she is, can’t one of you boys always be on hand?”

The three young fellows glanced at one another and seemed anxious.

“She’s already gone somewhere tonight,” said Dick Pardee. But none of them knew where. “About half an hour ago.” They were of the opinion that she had ridden into Sundown for something.

“I’m going into Sundown now,” said Torrance. He set down LeSarge’s rifle and went to the door. “I’ll look for her. And it’s just as well to follow LeSarge a ways; he’s headed back toward town.”

“It might be an idea if we rode along?” suggested Dave Drennen.

“It might. I won’t wait, though, for you boys to saddle. You’ll most likely meet up with me.”