Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

LORETTA slanted, sp!ashing its light only on one of the stratified walls. Above on the canon rim in the blazing but cooler light, there was a rider galloping along. Chilton could see him far off at a dizzy height—a speck against the white sky. He looked across to the darker side. There on the rim was another rider, skirt- ing the granite battlements, galloping now in the open, disappearing now behind the pepperwoods, sycamores, giant bowlders. But the sound of the hoofbeats up there was lost before it came down to the base of the cliffs. The rhythmic clip-clop which Chilton heard came, he was certain, from the cafion itself. They were perhaps far away, for the sound was exaggerated by those walls as if through the horn of a phonograph. Chilton plunged down the alluvial fan, keeping away from the glaring white stretches of sand. If he stayed as much as possible in the sage patches, his tracks would be harder to follow—and he could not be so easily seen against the black back- ground by those pursuers up on the cliffs. Of course, his first intention was to give that ranch a wide berth, skirt around it, making for the open plain, and trusting to luck that night would fall before the horse- men got his trail. But something happened which made him change his mind. Far off toward what appeared to be the horizon, there were three black dots and a cloud of dun-colored dust following them. The cloud was moving—ever so slowly up toward the mouth of the canon. It was only because of the excellent vantage-point that Chilton had been able to see them. How far away they were he could not for the life of him tell. It takes years in that country of clear air, of distant sierras, of desert mirages, to gauge distance. It might have been five miles, it might have been twenty. Certain peculiarities in the strata of air have been known to magnify objects at a great distance so that they seem close at hand. Whatever the distance was, Chilton could see that those three dots were slowly taking on the shape of horsemen. And he had the impression that they were coming toward him as fast as they could. BRODELL. ‘Fo go out there on the flat desert on foot and try to flee from those horsemen when there was no chance to hide except behind a clump of sajuaro—that seemed utterly nonsensical. Besides Chilton was exhaust- ed. If he could not get a drink soon, he would drop before a gun touched him. There was the alternative of retreating into the cafion and hiding in some side draw. But those hoofbeats back there were now getting alarmingly loud. That was another point of distance which he could not cal- culate. The thin air and the steep rock walls played their tricks. Of course, he might crawl up into one of those narrow barrancas, where when cornered he could fight off a posse of men. But there was a very serious objection to that! How could he fight them off? He had a revolver—but what good did it do him? He might as well have been disarmed. He was in the position of a man who is pursued but who is unable to strike back at his pursuers. He could wound them —and fight them off that way, yes. But could he measure his shots with such ae- curacy? What if he killed some one? There was the one point that spoiled his whole game! He was not a desperado. He was not really fleeing the law. He was only playmg a2 game? kill him, he himself could kill no one! For some reason this made his flight all the more exciting. There was no pretense to the danger. The whole county would be chasing him before long, and any man who saw him could fire upon him without fear of the law, without fear of Chilton himself. In plain terms there was only one thing to do—and that was to flee! He decided immediately upon the next course. He would go into that cow-ranch, hide there until nightfall,-and then get a horse, hold up some one for a grub outfit, and hit for the border. He plunged into the mesquite brush, scrambled along down the banks of the al- luvial fan and discovered a deeply cut creek-bed which took him to the edge of the fan. Here he found himself on the open plain, while not a hundred yards away was the outermost corral of the ranch. — Eomichboo And one of the rules of - — the game was this: although any man could. SjalE@)