2-Gun Western, November 1955 — page 67: what you’re looking at

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

68 saddle Jike a jockey, had swung their mounts across a flat filled with new snow. They had covered forty miles since daybreak, the better part of it in silence. Alec Brendle was a Scotsman, frugal even with his words, and Don- nelly had picked up something of the old man’s habit; but as they turned their horses up slope toward the trees Donnelly put his head back and saw their cabin just ahead. Beyond the cabin, still hidden by the trees, was the prospect shaft they had gouged out of the rocky slope—the mine that was to make them rich. “She’s still there, Alec,” the young- er man said cheerfully. “Aye,” said Alec Brendle. It was the last word he ever spoke. The bullet hit the little Scotsman in the chest; it knocked him backward and out of saddle as his frightened horse plunged aside. Donnelly heard the blasting roar of the shot, the twin echoes of the two shots following; he felt the tug of the bullet that touched a sleeve of his bearskin coat. His horse was rearing frantically when hidden rifles on the hillside slope crashed in a second shattering volley. The shelter of the trees, and safety, was no more than twenty feet away, but there was little Alec Brendle on the ground. Deftly the big puncher slipped his carbine from the saddle boot. Unhesitatingly he quit the plunging horse to kneel beside the fallen man. With bullets whining overhead he turned Alec Brendle on his back; he looked at Brendle’s face and saw that the little Scotsman was beyond the need of help. Lead burned a path of fire across his ribs. As he threw himself toward the trees a bul- let cut his feet out under him and sent him pitching forward in a headlong dive. He landed on hands and knees, and still clutching the short rifle grimly, he crawled toward a snow-covered pinyon log. Back braced against the log, safe for the moment, Donnelly checked up on the damage done. One bullet had grazed his ribs quite harm- lessly ; a second had struck him in the leg, just above the ankle. It was this second wound which made Donnelly frown. Already his boot was filling up with blood. 2-GUN WESTERN He lifted his head for a hasty glance over that snow-covered slope, but saw no sign of the killers he knew were concealed somewhere above in rocks and trees. Calmly,. dispassionately, he considered the situation. Old Alec Brendle dead, killed by a cowardly bullet out of ambush. An unknown number of killers between himself and the cabin. In an empty, desolate land, winter-locked, with the nearest ranch- house almost twenty miles away, he was afoot and wounded and out- numbered by a murder pack. What motive might lie behind the treach- erous attack he did not know. It would be something about the mine, he thought. If he pulled out alive there would be time to consider motive later. Flat on his side behind the log he removed the blood-filled boot. Awk- wardly, but efficiently, he bandaged the ankle tightly with strips of cloth torn from his undershirt; that done, he set out to locate the men above him. Having lost his hat in his hasty dive for shelter he was forced to use his coat as a decoy. It was a good coat, a bearskin coat cut hip length for a man who spent time in the saddle. Don- nelly had killed the bear; he had tanned the hide himself, and had the garment tailored to his own particular specifications. Draping the bearskin coat over the barrel of his rifle, carefully the wounded man hoisted it above the level of the log. On the hillside a rifle crack. Donnelly lowered the decoy. “One,” he said. He worked patiently, crawling through the snow, sliding the fur coat along the snow-covered log. By the time he reached the end of the log he had drawn half a dozen shots, and had a fair picture of the problem ahead of him. Three men on that hill- side slope, he guessed; two hidden behind rocks close together, the third in trees and brush some fifty feet farther up the slope. Already this third man was working around the hillside to cut behind him. There was no pain in the wounded leg yet, but the blood in his boot was uncomfortable and he was dragging a crimson trail behind him through the snow. The situation seemed to call EOMmicboo S CO