The Trail Horde by Charles Alden Seltzer (i read book .TXT) 📖

last night?"

The smaller man grinned. "We wasn't aimin' to get caught."

"Expected there'd be line riders here, eh?"

The other did not answer. Lawler watched both men derisively.

"Then, when you saw no one was here, and that it was likely the norther would keep anyone from coming, you cut the fence. That's it, eh?"

The two men did not answer, regarding him sullenly.

Lawler smiled. This time there was a cold mirth in his smile that caused the two men to look quickly at each other. They paled and scowled at what they saw in Lawler's eyes.

Half a dozen bunks ranged the side walls of the cabin, four on one side, two on the other, arranged in tiers, upper and lower. A rough, square table stood near the center of the room, with a low bench on one side of it and several low chairs on the other. A big chuck-box stood in a corner near the fireplace, its top half open, revealing the supplies with which the receptacle was filled; some shelves on the other side of the fireplace were piled high with canned foods and bulging packages. The bunks were filled with bedclothing; and an oil-lamp stood on a triangular shelf in a corner near the door. The walls were bare with the exception of some highly colored lithographs that, evidently, had been placed there by someone in whom the love of art still flourished.

It was cold in the cabin. A window in the north wall, with four small panes of glass in it, was slowly whitening with the frost that was stealing over it. In the corners of the mullions were fine snow drifts; and through a small crevice in the roof a white spray filtered, ballooning around the room. The temperature was rapidly falling.

During the silence which followed Lawler's words, and while the two fence cutters watched each other, and Lawler, all caught the voice of the storm, raging, furious, incessant.

With his free hand Lawler unbuttoned his coat, tossed his cap into a bunk and ran a hand through his hair, shoving it back from his forehead. His movements were deliberate. It was as though catching fence cutters was an everyday occurrence.

Yet something in his eyes—the thing the two men had seen—gave the lie to the atmosphere of deliberate ease that radiated from him. In his eyes was something that warned, that hinted of passion.

As the men watched him, noting his muscular neck and shoulders; the slim waist of him, the set of his head—which had that hint of conscious strength, mental and physical, which marks the intelligent fighter—they shrank a little, glowering sullenly.

Lawler stood close to the door, the pistol dangling from his right hand. He had hooked the thumb of the left hand into his cartridge belt, and his eyes were gleaming with feline humor.

"There's a heap to be told," he said. "I'm listening."

A silence followed his words. Both men moistened their lips; neither spoke.

"Get going!" commanded Lawler.

"We was headin' south," said the small man. "We cut the fence to git through."

Lawler's eyelids flickered slightly. The heavy pistol swung upward until the dark tube gaped somberly into the small man's eyes.

"I've got loads of time, but I don't feel like wasting it," said Lawler. "You've got one minute to come clean. Keep your traps shut for that time and I bore you—both—and chuck you outside!"

His smile might have misled some men, but the small man had correctly valued Lawler.

"Gary Warden hired us to cut the fence."

The man's voice was a placative whine. His furtive eyes swept Lawler's face for signs of emotion.

There were no signs. Lawler's face might have been an expressionless mask. Not a muscle of his body moved. The offense was a monstrous one in the ethics of the country, and the fence cutter had a right to expect Lawler to exhibit passion of some kind.

"Gary Warden, eh?" Lawler laughed quietly. "If you're lying——"

The man protested that he was telling the truth.

At this point the tall man sneered.

"Hell," he said; "quit your damn blabbin'!"

"Yes," grinned Lawler, speaking to the small man. "You're quitting your talk. From now on your friend is going to do it. I'm asking questions a heap rapid, and the answers are going to jump right onto the tails of the questions. If they don't, I'm going to see how near I can come to boring a hole in the place where he has his brains cached."

The man glared malignantly at Lawler; but when the first question came it was answered instantly:

"How much did Warden pay you?"

"A hundred dollars."

"When were you to cut the fence?"

"When the norther struck."

"You saw us cache grub in the cabin?"

The man nodded.

"What if you had found a couple of line riders here? What were you told to do if you found line riders here? I'm wanting the truth—all of it!"

The man hesitated. Lawler's pistol roared, the concussion rocking the air of the cabin. The man staggered back, clapping a hand to his head, where, it seemed to him, the bullet from the pistol had been aimed.

The man brought up against the rear wall of the cabin, beside the fireplace; and he leaned against it, his face ghastly with fright, his lips working soundlessly. The little man cowered, plainly expecting Lawler would shoot him, too. And Lawler's gun did swing up again, but the voice of the tall man came, blurtingly:

"Warden told us to knife any men we found here."

Lawler's lips straightened, and his eyes glowed with a passion so intense that the men shrank, gibbering, in the grip of a mighty paralysis.

Lawler walked to the table and sat beside it, placing the gun near his right hand. The men watched him, fascinated; noting his swift movements as he plunged a hand into a pocket and drew out a small pad of paper and a pencil. He wrote rapidly upon a leaf of the pad; then got up, stepped back and ordered the tall man to approach the table.

"Write your name below what I have written—and date it."

When both men had signed the paper, Lawler folded it, stuck it between some leaves of the pad, and replaced pad and pencil in his pocket.

"That's all," he said. "You'll hang out here until the norther blows itself out; then you'll hit the trail to town and tell your story to the sheriff. I'll be doing the honors."

He sheathed his gun and flung open the door, stepping back as a white avalanche rushed in; grinning broadly as he saw the men shrink from it. He divined that the men thought he was going to force them out into the storm immediately, and he grinned coldly.

"You can be tickled that I'm not sending you out into it, to drift with the cattle you tried to kill," he said. "You'd deserve that, plenty. You'll find wood beside the dugout. Get some of it in here and start a fire. Move; and don't try any monkey business!"

He closed the door as the men went out. He had no fear that they would try to escape—even a threat of death could not have forced them to leave the cabin.

When they came in they kindled a fire in the big fireplace, hovering close to it after the blaze sprang up, enjoying its warmth, for the interior of the cabin had become frigid.

Lawler, however, did not permit the men to enjoy the fire. He sent them out for more wood, and when they had piled a goodly supply in a corner, and had filled a tin water pail from a water hole situated about a hundred feet straight out from the door of the cabin, he sent them again to the dugout after their ropes. With the ropes, despite the sullen objections of the men, he bound their hands and feet tightly, afterward picking the men up and tossing them ungently into upper bunks on opposite sides of the room.

He stood, after watching them for a time, his face expressionless.

"That's just so you won't get to thinking you are company," he said. "We're holed up for a long time, maybe, and I don't want you to bother me, a heap. If you get to bothering me—disturbing my sleep trying to untangle yourselves from those ropes, why——"

He significantly tapped his pistol. Then he pulled a chair close to the fire, dropped into it, rolled a cigarette, and calmly smoked, watching the white fleece trail up the chimney.

CHAPTER XVIII STORM-DRIVEN

For an hour there was no sound in the cabin. Lawler smoked several cigarettes. Once he got up and threw more wood upon the fire, standing in front of the blaze for several minutes stretching his long legs, watching the licking tongues as they were sucked up the chimney by the shrieking wind.

Then, for a time, he lounged in the chair, gazing meditatively at the north window, noting how the fine, frozen snow meal clung to the glass; watching the light fade, listening to the howling white terror that had seized the world in its icy grip.

At the end of an hour it grew dark in the cabin. Lawler got up, lighted the kerosene lamp, placed it on the table, seated himself on a bench and again meditatively watched the leaping flames in the fireplace.

Satisfaction glowed in his eyes as he thought of what would have happened had he not decided to substitute for Davies and Harris. Undoubtedly by this time the two men were on their way to the camp. They would certainly have noticed the warning bleak northern sky and other indications of the coming storm. And undoubtedly, if they had started toward the camp, they were by this time being punished for their dereliction. They would make the camp, though, he was sure, for they had the wind at their backs, and they knew the trail. He expected, any minute, to hear them at the door. He grinned, his face a trifle grim as he anticipated their astonishment at finding him there, with the two fence cutters occupying the bunks.

He had not followed the herd to the Circle L shelters because he had had small hope of keeping close to the fence cutters in the storm. And he had brought them back to the cabin to make sure of them. As he sat at the table he drew out the paper the men had signed and read their names:

"Lay Givens."

"Ben Link."

Their confession would convict Gary Warden of a crime that—if it did not open the doors of the penitentiary to him—would bring upon him the condemnation of every honest man in the state. In his anxiety to inflict damage upon Lawler, Warden had overstepped himself.

Lawler had betrayed no passion that day when he had got off the train at Willets with his men and Blondy Antrim. He had not permitted any of them to suspect that the incident of the attempted theft of a portion of the trail herd had affected him. But it had affected him. It had aroused him as he never had been aroused before; it had filled him with a passionate hatred of Gary Warden so intense that when his thoughts dwelt upon the man he felt a lust to destroy him. Not even Lafe Corwin, watching him that day at Willets, knew how he had fought to overcome the driving desire to kill Warden, Singleton, and Antrim, as they had stood there on the platform.

His eyes chilled now, as he thought of Warden and the others. He got up, his blood pulsing heavily, and started toward the fire. He had reached it, and was standing before it, when he heard a sound at the door—a faint knocking, and a voice.

Davies and Harris were coming now. They were cold, he supposed, had seen the light in the window—perhaps had tried the door; the wind drowning the noise so that he had not heard it before. They were in a hurry to get in, to the warmth the cabin afforded.

He was in no hurry to let them in, and he walked deliberately