Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

48 scored the floor-boards, and one of these grazed Chuck’s cheek-bone as he was reach- ing for his rifle. He seized the weapon and tumbled backward behind the fallen mules, while the questing bullets sighed close above his head, tucked into the wagon and the mules or threw up spurts of dust on either hand. “This is shore some picnic,” growled Chuck, who had touched his cheek and got blood in his eye. “T’ll bet they’s three of on if they’s one. Ow-w! there goes my oot.” '- He rolled over and pulled up his leg. Every nerve in the foot tingled madly. But he found on examination that the flesh had not been touched. Merely a bit of the boot- toe and the sole had been shot away. Much relieved he snuggled down for a shot at his bushwhackers. He saw where the gray smoke curled and eddied above an outcrop beyond a cutbank a hundred yards away. The road paralleled the cutbank till it reached the hollow where it turned from it at a right angle. “She was just past the bend when they had a fine sight o’ the broad o’ my back an’ they cut loose,” said Chuck. ‘Nothin’ mean about ’em a-tall. Cutnose? I won- der.’ He fired into the thick of the smoke-puffs and then crawled round to the shoulder of the mule. He placed his hat on the animal’s hip. ‘Two bullets promptly perforated the hat and the hip, spattering his face with blood and hair. ““Yessir, this is shore real,’”’ he grumbled. “This has got beyond bein’ a joke—a mile beyond. Them fellers won’t be satisfied till they kill somebody, an’ me with only half a beltful for the rifle. I knowed I should ’a’ brought more. I knowed it, an’ . now I’m shore of it. I can stand ’em off all right if’— He turned his head, his eyes sweeping the landscape between him and Indian Ridge ten miles away—‘if they don’t take it into their fool heads to work round behind me to that old pine a-standin’ at the head o’ that draw. “The range ain’t more’n seventy or eighty yards, an’ they’d be shootin’ down-hill at that. This here is one reg’lar squeak, if it ain’t nothin’ else. That was close! I near went shy an ear that time. Seems like I’d ought to get one o’ them jiggers. Only one ain’t many. There goes another spoke. Hell’s bells, won’t Old Salt cuss. Adventure He only had that buckboard painted two months ago. An’ two mules! Oh, he’ll blister the grass.” At this juncture, from a little knoll three or four hundred yards to the right of Chuck, came the staccato drumming of a furiously worked rifle. But no bullets sang above Chuck’s head or drilled into the bodies of the dead mules. Instead the fire from the outcrop above the cutbank imme- diately ceased. Chuck, suspicious of a trick, remained below and behind his breastwork. He watched alternately the outcrop and the top of the knoll. But nothing moved in the vicinity of the former and there was only drifting smoke to be seen among the low bushes that crowned the latter. The firing from the knoll ceased. Ensued then a grateful silence. Chuck held up his hat on the blade of his knife. Nothing happened. He moved the hat slowly to and fro. Still not a shot was fired. Chuck arose slowly and looked about him warily. Presently, from the direction of the knoll where the opportune rifle had cracked its message, rode a lanky man ona buckskin pony. Chuck sat down on a mule and stared at the approaching rider. “It shore is Henderson,” he muttered perplexedly. “‘Well, stranger,” grinned the lanky one, checking his horse in front of Chuck, “yuh look kind o’ afoot.” “TI am—kind o’,” admitted Chuck rue- fully. ‘Myself, ’'m a heap obliged to yuh. Yore happenin’ in thisaway was almighty providential. Them fellers was gettin’ pretty close.” “‘D’juh know who they was?” The ques- tion came sharply, Henderson’s washed-out gray eyes bright with eagerness. But the light faded as Chuck shook his head. “I’d shore admire to know,” said the puncher. “T think I know,” observed Henderson. “But thinkin’ an’ knowin’ ain’t even on the same team. I couldn’t see nothin’ through that smoke, an’ I didn’t see nothin’ till after they’d done cut stick an’ rid outen a draw three miles over yonder on their way some’ers else. An’ I wouldn’t ’a’ seen that li’l *bit only I got one fine pair o’ field- glasses. Yeah’— nodding—‘that’s how I made out you was one o’ the Bar-S boys an’ no rustler like I thought at first.” And this man was one of the murderers for COMmicloo CO