2-Gun Western, November 1955 — page 69: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THROUGH GUNSIGHTS for a flanking maneuver, and with this in mind he turned his back on those men above him. Like a wounded animal slipping away from the hunt- er’s gun he crawled through tunnels between snow-laden clumps of brush, using each bit of cover, each slight depression on the hillside slope to aid him on his way. He got away without a shot being fired; two hundred yards and he was deep in brush and trees, and he pulled himself erect then and tried his weight on the bullet- torn leg. And gasped at the sudden stabbing pain that ran through his body, knowing then that the bullet had shattered a bone. Donnelly’s lips tightened in a twisted grin. “Nice,” he muttered. “Very nice, indeed.” ITH NO knowledge of when the first of that killer pack might break through the trees, calmly he took time Out to make a pair of crutches. They were nothing fancy; they were two cedar branches hacked off with a pocketknife, with limb crotches to serve as arm rests, but Donnelly tried them in a few hobbling steps and found they would suffice. He went on awkwardly, slipping and sliding on the frozen slope, stumbling, falling, climbing to his feet again, but always working deeper into the trees as he pushed steadily up the slope. How long it took to reach the top of the ridge Rod Donnelly didn’t know. On crutches it was a heart- breaking chore; but reach the top he did; and once across the ridge abrupt- ly he changed directions, pointing up canyon in a course which would lead him to the cabin. For the moment he had slipped away from his attackers. How long his luck would hold he didn’t know, In this game of life and death he was terribly handicapped, but he had also one slight advantage; he knew each foot of this lonely country as a man might know his own back yard. = Two hundred yards up canyon he cut back toward the top of the ridge. Discarding the crutches temporarily he crawled through snow on hands and knees, shoving the rifle before him. Atop the ridge he lay flat, sweep- ing the wintry waste below in slow and careful inspection. 69 He located one man first, and then another. They were far below, mere blurs of color against a white back- ground, moving cautiously from tree to tree as they sought to locate the man who had slipped away from them. If there was a third one in the party Rod Donnelly could not find him, al- though he gave ten minutes to the ef- fort. “He’s gone ahead,’ he decided. “He’s worked around the point.” Having placed the missing member of the murder pack to his own satis- faction Donnelly faced another prob- lem. Both men below were within rifle range but as a shot would be a gamble, and with his crippled leg the cowpuncher didn’t feel like trying to slip closer to the pair. And a shot now would reveal his position, undo all the advantage gained by the heart-break- ing effort on the crutches. He was not | very far from the cabin. . The sound of a _ snapping stick jerked Donnelly around, froze him into sudden rigidity there on the frozen ground. Off to his left and below him a man had come suddenly into view from behind a_ snow- blanketed clump of brush, a man who must have been resting there through all the time that Donnelly had tried to locate him. In corduroys and heavy sheepskin coat, with a rifle swinging in his hand, he was pushing . his way slowly up the slope. He was so close that Donnelly could hear the crusted snow crunching beneath his boots. And Donnelly’s lips moved sound- . lessly. “Galt!” he said. “Dave Galt!” Dave Galt he knew quite well. Galt owned a little one-cow spread beyond the mountain. Also, he owned a pack of hunting dogs, and in spare time Galt had built a rep hunting mountain lions. More than once, on the trail of a big cat, he had stayed overnight at the cabin with Donnelly and little Alec Brendle. That now Galt should reveal himself as one of the men who had ambushed little Alec and himself was for an instant unbelievable to big Rod Donnelly; and then, suddenly, it was not surprising at al. He could re- member nights when that dark and sullen man had sat around the cabin, asking questions about the mine the Oo Comilelooo S (©