Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/74

70 comparatively speaking; he had been brought up between a blacksmith shop on the one hand and Uncle Jasper on the other, and the gaps in his knowledge of men were many and huge. The prime necessity now was speed to the northward. So Andy flung himself into the saddle and drove his horse to north at the jogging, rocking lope of the cattle pony.

He was in a shallow basin which luckily pointed in the right direction for him. The hills sloped down to it from either side in long fingers, with narrow gullies between, but as Andy passed the first of these pointing fingers a new thought came to him.

It might be—why not?—that the posse had made only a pretense of withdrawing at once with the body of the dead man. No doubt Bill Dozier had taken five hand-picked fellows from the crowd, and it seemed strange, indeed, if they would give up the battle when the odds were still five to one in their favor. Perhaps, then, they had only waited until they were out of sight and had then circled swiftly around, leaving one man with the body. They might be waiting now at the mouth of any of these gullies.

No sooner had the thought come to Andy than he whitened. The pinto had been worked hard that morning and all the night before, but now Andy sent the spurs home without mercy as he shot up the basin at full speed. Each spur of hills pointed at him accusingly. Each shadowy cañon yawned like a door of danger as he passed, and he went with his revolver drawn, ready for a snap shot and a drop behind the far side of his horse.

For half an hour he rode in this fashion with his heart beating at his teeth. And each cañon as he passed was empty, and each had some shrub, like a crouching man, to startle him and upraise the revolver. At length, with