Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/313

 He rode with his gun in his hand, swinging it up and down, up and down with a little movement of his bent arm, as if he held himself calculatively in reserve.

On the hotel sidewalk Louise Gardner and Myron stood watching the riders charge the cattle pens, the dust their horses flung up cutting them off for a moment now and then in a cloud. Myron turned to the door.

"There's goin' to be bullets flyin' around here in a minute; you'd better come in," he said.

Myron went in, pausing at the door to knock the ashes out of his pipe on the arm of the green bench. He was not concerned that Louise did not follow him. She heard the screen door slam, dimly conscious that Myron had gone.

Withers gathered speed as he rode, his dust rising thicker behind him. There was nobody in sight but that fool Tom Laylander, sitting like a crow on the fence, lifted up a fair mark, a contemptuous defiance in his attitude, it seemed. This got under Withers's hide. The sight of Laylander sitting on the gatepost, his rifle across his thighs in a restful posture of security, just as if he had no need for it that moment, nor expected to have for some peaceful time to come, roiled the old man up to such a pitch of anger that he forgot his lifelong rule, threw down his gun and fired the first shot. It was too long a shot to do him any good, or Laylander any harm, but it tumbled Withers into the trap that the crafty conductor-general of McPacken's bulldog forces had set for him.