The Hair-Trigger Kid by Max Brand (best sci fi novels of all time TXT) 📕

get there!”

 

“The ravine! The ravine!” cried the Kid, his voice suddenly ringing out

with impatient joy. “What a fool I was not to think of that before!”

 

“The ravine?” echoed Bud. “You mean Hurry Creek’s ravine?”

 

“That’s what I mean, of course. Let’s go there and look the thing over!”

 

Bud gripped the rein of the mare.

 

“You’re clean crazy, Kid,” said he.

 

“Let me alone, Bud. You don’t have to go. I’ll do this alone!”

 

“I won’t let you go. Not before you listen a minute.”

 

“To what?”

 

“To that. Bend your ear a little to the north, and just listen, will

you?”

 

It came distinctly through the melancholy booming voices of the cows, a

deep and harsh roar which the Kid instantly made out.

 

“That’s the water of the creek. Is that what you mean?”

 

“Listen to it. Sounds like a lion, doesn’t it?”

 

“Let it be a lion. I’ll walk down its throat if I have to. I could drink

blood tonight, Bud.”

 

“You’re simply going crazy,” said the other. “You’ve never seen the

waters in the ravine. Come along with me to the edge of it. If we can’t

see ‘em, we’ll hear ‘em, at least, at close hand. And that’ll be enough

for you, if you’re in your right wits.”

 

“Very well. Come along then with me.”

 

They cantered their horses forward.

 

“Who’s there?” rang a voice from the darkness before them, and then they

made out the silhouette of a horseman, and the starlit glimmer of a

leveled rifle.

 

“Friends!” said the Kid, pulling up the mare.

 

“What friends?”

 

“Bud Trainor, and I’m the Kid.”

 

“Hey! Are you the Kid?”

 

The rifle took a crosswise, harmless slant, and the puncher came up.

 

“Hullo there, Kid,” said he. “I’d been hopin’ that I’d see you down here.

My name’s Bill Travis.”

 

They shook hands.

 

“Things is pretty bad with the cows,” said Travis. “They’s a lot laid

down that ain’t gonna get up in the morning,

 

“There are a lot who’ll get up in the morning and drop before noon, too,”

said the Kid.

 

“That’s a true thing. Any fool could tell that. Got a chaw with you?”

 

“I don’t carry it. Here’s the makings, though.”

 

He passed them over. Dexterously the puncher made his smoke in the dark

of the night.

 

“What are you fellows going to do about this, Travis?”

 

“Why, what can we do?”

 

“I don’t know. Any ideas among the boys?”

 

“Nothing except we might stampede the cows to break down the fences.”

 

“It wouldn’t work. They’d shoot the head off of any stampede.”

 

“That’s what we decided. It won’t work. Maybe the old man will have an

idea.”

 

“Are they keeping a sentry go along those fences tonight?”

 

“Sure they are. Three men along each fence. And the others ready to come

on the jump, I suppose.”

 

“Baby murder—that’s what it is!” said the Kid, his rage breaking out.

“Listen!”

 

He held up his hand in the darkness. The lowing of the cattle swept up

around them in waves, as though all the tormented souls from hell were

pouring up toward the stars, lamenting. “Aye, it’s pretty bad,” said

Travis. “Shay and Dixon—they’ll sweat for it some day.”

 

“Tonight, I hope,” said the Kid, muttering through his teeth.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Nothing. You boys are riding these rounds all night?”

 

“We’re riding ‘em all the night. If Dixon’s crowd starts out to do a

little foraging, we’ll teach them how the Milman crew can shoot. The boys

are pretty hot. Old Tar Yagers, over on the other side of the ranch, is

hankering after a scalp or two, and maybe the old man will get a chance,

before this fracas is finished.”

 

“Maybe he will,” agreed the Kid. “So long. You fellows keep your eyes

open, will you?”

 

“For what?”

 

“For a signal in the Dixon Camp.”

 

“What sort of a signal?”

 

“Fire,” said the Kid, and rode on without further speech.

 

Bud hurried the silver stallion up beside him.

 

“What’s that about fire, Kid?” he asked.

 

But he received no answer, for the Kid seemed lost in thought.

 

So they came, at last, to the edge of the ravine.

 

Three steps away the predominant sound was the voice of the cattle from

the hollow, but when they came to the verge and dismounted, they could

hear nothing except the heavy and continual roaring of the water, like a

constant cannonade.

 

“Listen to it!” said Bud Trainor. “How’d you like to be down there in

that, Kid?”

 

The Kid did not answer.

 

Presently he drew back from the verge of the cliff.

 

“You’ve seen that in the daytime, haven’t you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“How far is it to the bottom?”

 

“Forty—fifty feet, I reckon.”

 

“You’ve got a sixty-foot rope,” said the Kid. “Get it for me, will you?”

 

“What are you gonna do?”

 

“Bud, for heaven’s sake, stop asking questions. I have enough on my mind,

just now, without trying to answer you.”

 

“All right,” said Bud, “but it makes me pretty sick, even to think about

it.”

 

He went, however, to his horse, and took from the saddle bow the long,

heavy rope, for he had learned his punching in Montana when a boy, and

stuck to the fashion of the northern rope. This he brought back and the

Kid, taking the noose end of it, tied it fast about a jag of rock on the

very verge of the canyon wall.

 

Then he got to the end of the line and tested, tugging with all his

weight.

 

“It’s sound, if that’s what you want to know,” said Trainor. “It’s

sound,” agreed the Kid, and threw the other end down the height.

 

It disappeared in the darkness of the ravine, but for a moment the upper

end jerked and wriggled like a struggling snake. “Bud,” said the Kid,

“I’m going down there.”

 

“If you go,” said Bud, “I’ll go after you.”

 

“You’ll stay here,” commanded the Kid. “It’s my own game and my own

business that I’m after. I only want one thing out of you. Give me your

hand, and if I don’t come back, remember me!”

 

“If anything happens to you,” said Bud solemnly, “I’ll keep on the trail

of Dixon and Shay till they get me, or I get them. So long, Kid.”

 

“So long,” said the Kid, and slipped over the edge of the wall.

 

Chapter 31 - The Fifth Man Again

 

Youth Is proverbially cruel, whether in its trust or in its distrust. It

cannot halt. It will have no half measures. It is an absolute tyrant

which pushes all things to extremes.

 

Now, when Georgia Milman had heard the story of the Kid which inculpated

her father, she hesitated for a moment only. The description of her

father’s face, and the distinguishing little mark upon it, had determined

her that the Kid was right.

 

Yet something might be said.

 

Men appear in most guilty situations without actually possessing guilt,

and that might be true of her father also. So thought Georgia. She wanted

an explanation. She wanted it at once. But she went about the acquiring

of it in the typically youthful, cruel, headlong fashion.

 

She could have drawn John Milman aside, of course, but if she did this,

she would have to wait, for she found him in the house closely conferring

with her mother.

 

It was his habit when a crisis of any kind came to ask for advice, and

the advice which he had come to prize above all else was that which he

received from Elinore Milman herself. She was calm, keen-witted, and

understood as well as he did all the problems of the ranch and of the

affairs which had to do with it.

 

Accordingly, he was now talking over with her the possibilities of the

situation, and there Georgia found him.

 

He was walking up and down the room—the front room of the house where on

that other night so many years ago, she had sung him to sleep, and then

sung on to the open window and the soft, impalpable darkness beyond it,

not knowing that someone waited there, listening.

 

And the fact that this was the same room hardened the spirit of Georgia a

little.

 

In that story of the Kid’s, she had waited for the things which bore upon

her, but he had repressed all emotion, with the restraint of some old

Greek poet, preparing an inscription to be cut into stone. There was only

a line or two, but it pointed to a great thing, indeed. He had hardly

said so much, but most distinctly he had inferred that what had turned

his cunning and his anger three times aside from the head of her father

was the love of the Kid for her. And she remembered, as she stood there

by the door, looking blankly through the window toward the shimmer of the

sun on the hills beyond, how she had spoken to that ragged lad, those

years before. The bright blue of his eyes had remained in her memory. Now

the face itself was distinctly chiseled in her mind. It seemed monstrous

that she ever could have forgotten it.

 

“There are,” said Mrs. Milman, who was summing up precisely, “just two

alternatives. Either we pay for the cows by the head and send them in to

be watered, or else we hire a mob of gunmen and smash Dixon and his crowd

with a strong hand.”

 

Georgia opened her eyes. She never had heard her mild mother speak like

this before. Milman himself was amazed.

 

“Which do you advise?” said he.

 

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Milman, half closing her eyes, and by the

pucker of her brows seeming to attempt to read the future. “I really

don’t know.”

 

“It’s always foolish to break the law,” said Milman.

 

“It’s always foolish to break the law,” she echoed. “But it’s more

foolish to sit and wait—for sure ruin!”

 

She held up her hand.

 

“Listen, John!” she said.

 

And, through the window from the eastward, they could hear a long, dull

droning sound—a tremor of deep sorrow on the wind rather than an actual

noise.

 

Milman jumped up, with the sweat running as fast as tears down his face.

 

He gripped his hands hard together and dragged in a breath.

 

“I’m half mad with the waiting,” he said. “I feel like riding out there

and simply going blindly in at them—but there’s no use throwing oneself

away. The sheriff—my own neighbors—the law—everything is blind and

deaf to me. It looks almost like a hand from heaven striking me,

Elinore!”

 

“Well,” said the slender, mild woman, “it’s either the hard fist and a

crowd of hired guns—or else a miracle.”

 

“A miracle?” echoed Milman heavily.

 

“The Kid, I mean,” said she.

 

His face brightened for a moment.

 

“Aye, the Kid,” said he. “He’s like an answer to a prayer. But what can

even the Kid do? He’s brought in evidence in the shape of one of their

hired gunmen that ought to have been enough to establish our rights in

the law instantly—except that the sheriff won’t see it that way.”

 

“The sheriff was right,” said his wife. “We mustn’t throw stones at

honest Lew Walters.”

 

Milman made a wide gesture of despair. Then, resuming the subject of the

Kid, he exclaimed. “One never