Under His Shirt/Chapter 10

HERE was blackest gloom in the gang of Joe Daly, gloom so utter that he himself felt the shadow to some degree. But they made one great mistake in which he did not share. They felt that because three old and trusted members of the gang had recently died, their loss could not be replaced. But Joe knew this was not true. Now that his fame had grown, he had only to give a call, and he could take his pick of a hundred desperate men. In fact he could assemble fellows far more formidable than his present outfit.

But the others could not appreciate this fact. All they knew was that from eight men they had shrunk suddenly to five, and that very day one of the five had been torn away from one of their most secured haunts. It reduced them to four and the chief, Joe Daly himself.

He was now in his most favored and least used retreat, the old mine which had been sunk into the side of the mountain. But, instead of occupying the deserted shaft itself, he had insisted on bringing them this night to the shack which stood at the mouth of the mine, ready to collapse with age and weather. And in this shack he recklessly showed his lanterns, as though there were nothing in the world to fear. To be sure one of the men kept guard before the shack, but it was not because they might be captured. The real danger was simply that this excellent hiding place might be located, and every hiding place which was discovered, narrowed their resources for escape and hiding when they should next be pressed by the man hunters. And it seemed that from now oh they could never have any surety of peace. If one rancher could by his own unassisted efforts cause so much havoc and distress, what could not be done by a league of ranchers, each with his hired posse, and each working with a wholehearted desire. to end the rule of the rustlers?

These thoughts were in the minds of the most careless of the men, but Joe Daly was unperturbed. Perhaps he had come to believe in his destiny. All great criminals come to that point sooner or later. And such good fortune had favored Joe that it was little wonder if he felt that some kindly deity presided over his affairs. He dated his good luck, in fact, from that day in Manhattan when he discovered the bullet-proof breastplate and stole it away to his room. That was the strange foundation on which he had built.

When he found it, he had been a poor exile, hungry for his home country, and kept from it by the mortal dread of terrible Pete Burnside. With that bit of armor he had dared the most famous gun fighters time and again since his battle with Pete, and he had always been victorious. His fame had spread. There was no man in his band who dared to raise hand or voice against him. He was considered on all sides a hero of the first water!

But in the meantime he had outgrown that breastplate. It had saved his life to be sure, but it was by no means all that it should be. Fine steel it was, or it would never have turned the slug from a Colt pistol fired at close range. But it was by no means the sort of steel which had been invented later on to turn the cutting noses of armor-piercing bullets. And the outlaw determined that he must make a change for the better. So he had sent away to have a new piece of body armor forged for him. Far away in Philadelphia he had a friend who executed the commission and saw that the corselet was made. And it was far more safe than the original plate. That slab of steel had insured him against the slug of a revolver fired at any closeness; but the new corselet, made of the very finest quality of armor steel, with a diamond-hard surface, weighed hardly any more than the breastplate, but it was so much larger that it fitted over his entire breast and abdomen and then curved under his arms. There was another very clever contrivance, also: a steel lining for his sombrero, which was strung enough to turn the slug from a Colt revolver. So equipped, he felt that he was the only man who had ever lived with so many enemies, and with so much surety of triumphing over them all!

With three of his men he sat this night in the crazy little shanty, playing poker and sipping throat-scorching moonshine from time to time, and listening to the singing of a rising storm through the boards of the shack. The old cast-iron stove, so sadly cracked that it spouted smoke and filled the cabin with a blue-white vapor twisted in wisps about the card players, they packed with wood until it roared with a crowding mass of flames. It shivered and shook with the rushing of the draft, and it managed to keep the windy hut warm enough for comfort, assisted by the moonshine whisky.

Not much of that whisky, however, was passing the lips of Joe Daly. To be sure, his glass was often in his hand, and he pretended to drink to every man who made a winning. But in reality few drops of the liquor found their way down his throat. Daly needed a clear head for his business.

In reality the poker games in his camp were the most important source of his revenue. Out of them he drew the many thousands which went to recruit his bank accounts. His scheme was admirable. He gave his men a very large portion of the proceeds of the crimes which he planned and organized. He was not one of those who took a third or a half of the profits as a return for the brain work which he expended upon them. Instead he merely took two shares, and out of his own shares he paid for the food, the guns, and the ammunition of the entire party. What could have been more generous? It was plain that such an openhanded leader was working as much for the happiness of his men as for his own fame and profit. At least so thought the followers of the bandit. The other side of the picture was never exposed to their eyes. But had they kept track they might have found that what they made in their raids they quickly paid back into the pockets of the leader at the poker games. For Joe Daly was no common manipulator of the cards. He did not know many tricks, but he had his own system of marking the cards with his finger nails, a method ancient as the very hills and a million times discovered, but it was never discovered by Joe's gang. It never occurred to the worst of them that any one could be so base as to cheat the very men with whom he had been adventuring that same day, perhaps. But Joe was not bothered by the scruples of an active conscience. And, indeed, as the time went on, and his bank accounts swelled, and he saw himself becoming a rich man, he decided that it was as good to have an armor-clad conscience as it was to have an armor-clad body.

Daly had just won five hundred, and seeing his left-hand neighbor take down a wretched little bet of thirty dollars on the next hand, he poured generous doses of the moonshine into each of the tin cups. "Here's to Harry, boys," he said. "Old Harry sure ain't had his luck tonight. Here's where his luck changes!"

Immediately the cups flashed up to do the proper honor to Harry. Before they went down, there was a clamor of voices on the outside of the cabin.

"Nobody's got a right—you must be crazy to bring him up here where"

"Shut up! He's an old friend of the chief. Don't you suppose that I'd be sure of that before I went this far?"

And on the heels of this outburst of noise, in came the guard on a rush.

"Here's 'Bud' come back," he began.

"Bud got loose from 'em!" shouted the gamblers, springing up in joyous forgetfulness of their game.

"And he's brought up a stranger."

Bud himself here pushed into the cabin.

"Come on, Pete," he said. "Step up and meet the chief and see if he ain't glad to see you."

"Hello, Joe!" called Pete Burnside, pausing at the door of the cabin.

At his voice there was a gasp from Joe Daly. The rustler leaped away from the table until his shoulders crashed against the wall. And at the same time the other members of the gang crowded back so as to make a passage which would be clear from one of them to the other.

"By guns," breathed Daly, "it's you—Pete!"

The men of the gang turned in utter bewilderment to their chief. They found that their hero had turned the gray of ashes and was staring at the square-jawed man in the doorway, as though the latter were a ghost.

"I come up to pay you a call, Joe," said Burnside.

"Pete" began the other.

"Well?"

"I got something to say to you."

"I ain't come up here just to talk."

"You dunno what you're saying, partner. All I want is to try to explain to you"

The rustlers gaped at one another. It could not be that they were hearing aright; it could not be that their dauntless commander was knuckling down to this stranger. And Bud, with the picture of Red Stanton and the Peters house, was the most astonished of them all.

"Joe," said the other, "I got something to say that the rest of 'em might as well hear. Boys, my name's Pete Burnside!"

It sent a shock through two of them, who had heard of that not obscure name.

"I was the gent that run Joe out of the mountains last year. He went away because he was afraid to face me. Then he come back all at once and sent out the word that he was just waiting for me. And when I went to meet him I got my gun first; I sent in the first shot—I could have swore that I seen him stagger—but he sure enough didn't drop. Like a sneaking hound he was wearing this right over his heart!"

Pete tossed onto the floor of the cabin the breastplate. It landed softly on its quilted back, and the rustlers stared down at it. Every one of them knew about the strange method which their chief used to make himself invulnerable. They only wondered how he could endure dressing in iron during the furious heat of the summer, or the biting cold of the winter. Yet it had not seemed to them that there was anything particularly dishonorable in his proceedings.

"Boys," said Pete Burnside, "when he'd stopped two of my bullets with this here plate of steel, he got his own gun on me at last and sent me down for the count. And when I got well I was a no-good hound. Bud, here, will tell you what I was. I didn't put no trust in myself. I'd seen my bullets go right into the mark and miss! It took all my nerve. I wasn't no more good than a hound dog!"

He paused, his face white, breathing hard.

"Then all at once I found out what had happened. It hadn't been my fault. I'd shot straight, but that hound was wearing armor when he sent to ask me to fight! And when I heard that, I got my nerve back. I come up here with Bud, letting him think that what I wanted was to join the gang. But what I really wanted was to get a crack at Joe Daly. Understand, boys, I ain't up here to spy on you. I don't have no care what you do in rustling cows. I want to rustle Joe Daly. Joe, are you ready?"

The face of Joe Daly was a study. The certainty of death was before him. But in another moment his courage returned. Like a traitor Bud had told that his chief at one time had worn the breastplate; but he could not have told about the new armor, for the simple reason that Bud did not know of it. Pete had come to strike down a man whose unfair advantage was removed; he could not know that a still greater advantage was still on the side of the chief of the rustlers. And, as the surety returned to Joe, he laughed aloud.

"Pete," he said, "I'm ready when you are—get your gun!"

As he spoke he went for his own with all the speed at his command. But slow, slow was his fastest motion compared with the sudden flash which brought the Colt into the hand of Pete Burnside. And the breast was not the target at which Pete fired. The muzzle of his revolver twitched higher than that, and the bullet drove squarely between the eyes of Joe. He spun around and dropped on his face. Then Pete leaped aside and backed through the door.

They followed him at once. In vain he shouted to them that he would do them no harm if they would let him alone. They rushed out through the door. The bright shaft of the lamplight illumined each one as he came. And the revolver spoke—and spoke again and again, where Pete Burnside had dropped upon one knee in the dark and emptied his six-shooter.