Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/132

128 The red alarm was spreading like wildfire, and faster than the fastest horse could gallop.

But Andrew, with the chestnut running like a red flash beneath him, shot down the tangle of paths on the same course as that by which he entered.

He would have been interested had he heard the quiet remark of the very old man with the bony hands, who sat under the awning by the watering trough of the store. "I knew that young gent was coming to town to raise blazes and there he goes with blazes roarin' after him." As the first rush of the pursuers came foaming around the nearest corner, the storekeeper darted out.

"What's up?" he asked.

"Nothin'," said the very old man, "but times is pickin' up. Oh, times is pickin' up amazin'!"

In the meantime the first squadron went down the lanes, five men like five thunderbolts, but they took care not to exceed the speed of the slowest of their comrades, for it was suicide obviously to get into a lonely lead behind a man who could drop his man at five hundred yards from horseback—from running horseback, the story had it.

However, these five were only one unit among many. Two more were pushing up the ravine, making good time into the heart of the mountains; others were angling out to the right and left, always on the lookout, and always warning man, woman, and child to take up the alarm and spread it. And not only were the telephone lines working busily, but that strange and swift messenger, rumor, was instantly at work, buzzing in strange places. It stopped the cow-puncher on the range. It stopped the plowman with his team, and made him think what one slug of lead would mean to his farm; it set the boys in school drawing up schedules of how they would