Page:The Black Cat v01no02 (1895-11).pdf/9

Rh God! but there is one thing no man can face the faith of a woman struck back into her heart!

Billy and the revolver wavered in one blindness, and the messenger sprang to his feet.

"Get him," he cried, and his bullet went wide of the mark.

Confusion came with the moment. Men leaped to their pockets for weapons and signaled the team coming up.

Billy wasted nothing of the aid Betty held for him. He plunged into the brush at the east with his brain and his heart in the thrall of his shock. About him spit, and crashed, and split a rain of bullets, and he knew there were men of them ready to follow him on the spot.

He swore himself into energy, and beat on through the thick, thorny underbrush with the hope of their disorder sustaining him. There was a small stone corral some one had told him of—Rudy had told him of! It was hemmed in with rocks, and buckeye, and chaparral. For a theater of war it was safest for a man inside it, and there was only one approach! Rudy had once found herb roots there.

He turned sharp to the south and trailed back again, conscious that his scent was strong and his arm was true,—and to the devil with men who had lived peaceful lives in the fields of their country!

Wet drops of something warm trickled down his back. There must be a wound there. Billy forced his way along, cutting through tangles, leaping the rocks, and scaling the boulders, only halting for seconds to separate insect noises from that of the hunt of men. If he might reach his corral there would be at least breathing space for further campaigning. They were after him, hot on his trail, he knew, but the resources of his race-people gave snap to his blood.

The long, slim shadows of the late afternoon had been swallowed in the monotone of twilight when Billy Owen sat on his heels behind the walls of a stone corral on the sheer slope of a Sierra hill. The fever from his wound was racking his head, but the keenest pain that he suffered was not from that. And there could be no moment of time given over to the undisturbed thought of it. It was only the ever present consciousness through the intensity of