Bar-20 Days by Clarence Edward Mulford (reading fiction .TXT) 📖

boosted Duke up, then Tim followed, and the pair on the roof pulled Charley to their side. Flat roofs were great institutions they decided as they crawled cautiously towards the other side. This roof was of hard, sun-baked adobe, over two feet thick, and they did not care if their friends shot up on a gamble.

“Fine place, all right,” thought Charley, grinning broadly. Then he turned an agonized face to Tim, his chest rising. “Hitch! Hitch!” he choked, fighting with all his will to master it. “Hitch-chew! Hitch-chew! Hitch-chew!” he sneezed, loudly. There was a scramble below and a ripple of mirth floated up to them.

“Hitch-chew?” jeered a voice. “What do we want to hit you for?”

“Look us over, children,” invited another.

“Wait until the moon comes up,” chuckled the third. “Be like knocking the nigger baby down for Red an' the others. Ladies and gents: We'll now have a little sketch entitled 'Shooting snipe by moonlight.'”

“Jack-snipe, too,” laughed Pete. “Will somebody please hold the bag?”

The silence on the roof was profound and the three on the ground tried again.

“Let me call yore attention to the trained coyotes, ladies an' gents,” remarked Johnny in a deep, solemn voice. “Coyotes are not birds; they do not roost on roofs as a general thing; but they are some intelligent an' can be trained to do lots of foolish tricks. These ani-mules were—”

“Step this way, people; on-ly ten cents, two nickels,” interrupted Pete. “They bark like dogs, an' howl like hell.”

“Shut up!” snapped Tim, angrily.

“After the moon comes up,” said Hopalong, “when you fellers get tired dodging, you can chuck us yore guns an' come down. An' don't forget that this side of the house is much the safest,” he warned.

“Go to hell!” snarled Duke, bitterly.

“Won't; they're laying for me down there.”

Johnny crawled to the north end of the wall and, looking cautiously around the corner, funnelled his hands: “On the roof, Red! On the roof!”

“Yes, dear,” was the reply, followed by gun-shots.

“Hey! Move over!” snapped Tim, working towards the edge furthest from the cheerful Red, whose bullets were not as accurate in the dark as they promised to become in a few minutes when the moon should come up.

“Want to shove me off?” snarled Charley, angrily. “For heaven's sake, Duke, do you want the whole earth?” he demanded of his second companion.

“You just bet yore shirt I do! An' I want a hole in it, too!”

“Ain't you got no sense?”

“Would I be up here if I had?”

“It's going to be hot as blazes up here when the sun gets high,” cheerfully prophesied Tim: “an' dry, too,” he added for a finishing touch.

“We'll be lucky if we're live enough to worry about the sun's heat—say, that was a close one!” exclaimed Duke, frantically trying to flatten a little more. “Ah, thought so—there's that blamed moon!”

“Wish I'd gone out the window instead,” growled Charley, worming behind Duke, to the latter's prompt displeasure.

“You fellers better come down, one at a time,” came from below. “Send yore guns down first, too. Red's a blamed good shot.”

“Hope he croaks,” muttered Duke. “That's closer yet!”

Tim's hand raised and a flash of fire singed Charley's hair. “Got to do something, anyhow,” he explained, lowering the Colt and peering across the plain.

“You damned near succeeded!” shouted Charley, grabbing at his head. “Why, they're three hundred, an' you trying for 'em with a—oh!” he moaned, writhing.

“Locoed fool!” swore Duke, “showing 'em where we are! They're doing good enough as it is! You ought—got you, too!”

“I'm going down—that blamed fool out there ain't caring what he hits,” mumbled Charley, clenching his hands from pain. He slid over the edge and Pete grabbed him.

“Next,” suggested Pete, expectantly.

Tim tossed his Colt over the edge. “Here's another,” he swore, following the weapon. He was grabbed and bound in a trice.

“When may we expect you, Mr. Duke?” asked Johnny, looking up.

“Presently, friend, presently. I want to—wow!” he finished, and lost no time in his descent, which was meteoric. “That feller'll kill somebody if he ain't careful!” he complained as Pete tied his hands behind his back.

“You wait till daylight an' see,” cheerily replied Pete as the three were led off to join their friends in the corral.

There was no further action until the sun arose and then Hopalong hailed the house and demanded a parley, and soon he and Boggs met midway between the shack and the line.

“What d'you want?” asked Boggs, sullenly.

“Want you to stop this farce so I can go on with my drive.”

“Well, I ain't holding you!” exploded the 4X foreman.

“Oh, yes; but you are. I can't let you an' yore men out to hang on our flanks an' worry us; an' I don't want to hold you in that shack till you all die of thirst, or come out to be all shot up. Besides, I can't fool around here for a week; I got business to look after.”

“Don't you worry about us dying with thirst; that ain't worrying us none.”

“I heard different,” replied Hopalong, smiling. “Them fellers in the corral drank a quart apiece. See here, Boggs; you can't win, an' you know it. Yo're not bucking me, but the whole range, the whole country. It's a fight between conditions—the fence idea agin the open range idea, an' open trails. The fence will lose. You closed a drive trail that's 'most as old as cow-raising. Will the punchers of this part of the country stand for it? Suppose you lick us,—which you won't—can you lick all the rest of us, the JD, Wallace's, Double-Arrow, C-80, Cross-O-Cross, an' the others! That's just what it amounts to, an' you better stop right now, before somebody gets killed. You know what that means in this section. Yo're six to our eight, you ain't got a drink in that shack, an' you dasn't try to get one. You can't do a thing agin us, an' you know it.”

Boggs rested his hands on his hips and considered, Hopalong waiting for him to reply. He knew that the Bar-20 man was right but he hated to admit it, he hated to say he was whipped.

“Are any of them six hurt?” he finally asked.

“Only scratches an' sore heads,” responded Hopalong, smiling. “We ain't tried to kill anybody, yet. I'm putting that up to you.”

Boggs made no reply and Hopalong continued: “I got six of yore twelve men prisoners, an' all yore cayuses are