2 Gun Western, May 1957 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

24 2-GUN WESTERN your kind when I was a kid? They took a bullwhip to them,” Curt Little’s frown was one of puz- zlement. There was no deep concern in the frown, however, as though Curt were accustomed to unexpected vio- lence in the attitudes of others toward him, “Yes sir,” he said.... FPHE O-X MOVED out at dawn two days later. The boss saw Miss Dooley off first, but he was so full of finding his new cut through the mountains that he quickly shed his unease over her abrupt departure. It was why he hadn’t done anything about Curt Little certainly too; the back of his mind never forgot that he wanted to put a good-sized herd of tough, old animals on the trail for this maiden drive, and for that he’d need every hand he could get—it was no time to be acting fancy about them. But if the boss was bubbling with triumphant expectation over the laugh he was going to have on penurious old Ted Tollant, the wily graybeard ex-guide was, in his turn, slapping his knob knees in unrestrained glee. The mountain men grapevine had brought him knowledge of the loca- tion of the O-X chief’s great “find,” and every trapper two years out of his cradle knew that wagon trains had once used this pass, but long since marked it verbofen on their maps be- cause it skirted a snarling nest of warlike Indians east of the rugged range, and the hole-in-the-wall hide- out of a band of renegade whites be- Fou... When, however, a week later, short- ly before a hot, still noon, Gus Ball pointed to the smoke signal up ahead, rising from an out-jut of the first foothills, the boss simply said, “So we're bumping into some Comanches, or Apaches, or whatever the hell they are. We got guns. The hell with ’em.” The big herd milled suddenly at that moment, and the rumble of their twelve thousand hooves rose in an ominous-sounding crescendo, like the voice of thunderheads on the horizon. This sufficed to quickly and com- pletely prepossess everybody from the ramrod down to Curt Little, and the Indian sign was lost in the billowing dust clouds, and concern over it blasted from the minds of the crew by the need for fast and hard and effective riding on their part to turn the exploding edges of the herd in again. Nobody, though, two hours later, ignored the first crackle of rifle-fire. And it was no more than a crackle, coming from the ledges above them as the O-X crew aimed the rumbling cattle in a neat wedge at the moun- tains, and might well have been ignored if one of the men had not suddenly jerked in the saddle and toppled like a ragdoll to the ground. Sight of this brought the boss up even more sharply than the men. “Them damn Injuns!” he yelled, Riding with him, Gus Ball went silent, searching the rimrock. His voice was grim when he said, “We're going to have to let the cews run on their own, and go up and dig those sons out of there, you know it?” Because if we don’t, Gus elaborated, they can follow us like that all the way through the pass. If the boss was at first impatient with taking time for such thorough measures, another rider plunging lifeless into the dust narrowed his thinking to complete agreement with his foreman. “Okay, dig ’em out!” he shouted, as though addressing the widely deployed O-X crew instead of just Gus Ball. ‘HE INDIANS, however, were not amenable to such easy disposition. They chose, quite on the other hand, this same moment to show their full strength. War-painted like crazy, they suddenly blossomed along the whole face of the rock-ribbed slope, looking like gaudy desert flowers against the grey and brown of the ledges, At least two hundred of them. “You know what we’re going to have to do, boss?” Gus Ball abruptly amended his suggestion of an instant before. “We’re going to have to ditch the cattle and ride hell-for- leather out of here. We haven’t got a chance against that horde.” The boss had involuntarily yanked his six-gun and emptied it noint-blank _