XIV
THE MAXIM
Ballard and Blacklock ate supper at the contractor's table in thecommissary, and the talk, what there was of it, left the Kentuckianaside. The Arcadian summering was the young collegian's first plungeinto the manful realities, and it was not often that he came upon somuch raw material in the lump as the contractor's camp, and moreespecially the jovial Irish contractor himself, afforded.
Ballard was silent for cause. Out of the depths of humiliation for thepart he had been made to play in the plan for robbing Colonel Craigmileshe had promised unhesitatingly to prevent the robbery. But the means forpreventing it were not so obvious as they might have been. Force was theonly argument which would appeal to the cattle-lifters, and assuredlythere were men enough and arms enough in the Fitzpatrick camps to holdup any possible number of rustlers that Carson could bring into thevalley. But would the contractor's men consent to fight the colonel'sbattle?
This was the crucial query which only Fitzpatrick could answer; and atthe close of the meal, Ballard made haste to have private speech withthe contractor in the closet-like pay office.
"You see what we are up against, Bourke," he summed up when he hadexplained the true inwardness of the situation to the Irishman. "Barejustice, the justice that even an enemy has a right to expect, shoves usinto the breach. We've got to stop this raid on the Craigmiles cattle."
Fitzpatrick was shaking his head dubiously.
"Sure, now; _I'm_ with you, Mr. Ballard," he allowed, righting himselfwith an effort that was a fine triumph over personal prejudice. "Butit's only fair to warn you that not a man in any of the ditch camps willlift a finger in any fight to save the colonel's property. This shindywith the cow-boys has gone on too long, and it has been too bitter."
"But this time they've got it to do," Ballard insisted warmly. "They areyour men, under your orders."
"Under my orders to throw dirt, maybe; but not to shoulder the guns anddo the tin-soldier act. There's plinty of men, as you say; Polacks andHungarians and Eyetalians and Irish--and the Irish are the only ones youcould count on in a hooraw, boys! I know every man of them, Mr. Ballard,and, not to be mincin' the wor-rd, they'd see you--or me, either--in thehot place before they'd point a gun at anybody who was giving theCraigmiles outfit a little taste of its own medicine."
Fitzpatrick's positive assurance was discouraging, but Ballard would notgive up.
"How many men do you suppose Carson can muster for this cattleround-up?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know; eighteen or twenty at the outside, maybe."
"You've got two hundred and forty-odd here and at Riley's; in all thatnumber don't you suppose you could find a dozen or two who would standby us?"
"Honestly, then, I don't, Mr. Ballard. I'm not lukewarm, as ye mightthink: I'll stand with you while I can squint an eye to sight th' gun.But the minute you tell the b'ys what you're wantin' them to do, thatsame minute they'll give you the high-ball signal and quit."
"Strike work, you mean?"
"Just that."
Ballard went into a brown study, and Fitzpatrick respected it. After atime the silence was broken by the faint tapping of the tiny telegraphinstrument on the contractor's desk. Ballard's chair righted itself witha crash.
"The wire," he exclaimed; "I had forgotten that you had brought it downthis far on the line. I wonder if I can get Bromley?"
"Sure ye can," said the contractor; and Ballard sat at the desk to try.
It was during the preliminary key-clickings that Blacklock came to thedoor of the pay office. "There's a man out here wanting to speak to you,Mr. Fitzpatrick," he announced; and the contractor went out, returningpresently to break into Ballard's preoccupied effort to raise the officeat Elbow Canyon.
"One of the foremen came in to say that the Craigmiles men were comingback. For the last half-hour horsemen by twos and threes have beentrailing up the river road and heading for the ranch headquarters," wasthe information he brought.
"It's Carson's gang," said Ballard, at once.
"Yes; but I didn't give it away to the foreman. Their scheme is to makeas much of a round-up as they can while it's light enough to see.There'll be a small piece of a moon, and that'll do for the drive downthe canyon. Oh, I'll bet you they've got it all figured out to a dot.Carson's plenty smooth when it comes to plannin' any devilment."
Ballard turned back to the telegraph key and rattled it impatiently.Time was growing precious; was already temerariously short for carryingout the programme he had hastily determined upon in the few minutes ofbrown study.
"That you, Loudon?" he clicked, when, after interminable tappings, thebreaking answer came; and upon the heels of the snipped-out affirmativehe cut in masterfully.
"Ask no questions, but do as I say, quick. You said colonel hadmachine-gun at his mine: Rally gang stone-buckies, rush that gun, andcapture it. Can you do it?"
"Yes," was the prompt reply, "if you don't mind good big bill funeralexpenses, followed by labour riot."
"We've got to have gun."
"The colonel would lend it if--hold wire minute, Miss Elsa just crossingbridge in runabout. I'll ask her."
Ballard's sigh of relief was almost a groan, and he waited with goodhope. Elsa would know why he wanted the Maxim, and if the thing could bedone without an express order from her father to the Mexican mineguards, she would do it. After what seemed to the engineer like thelongest fifteen minutes he had ever endured, the tapping began again.
"Gun here," from Bromley. "What shall I do with it?"
The answer went back shot-like: "Load on engine and get it down to endof branch nearest this camp quick."
"Want me to come with it?"
"No; stay where you are, and you may be next Arcadian chiefconstruction. Hurry gun."
Fitzpatrick was his own telegrapher, and as he read what passed throughkey and sounder his smile was like that which goes with theprize-fighter's preliminary hand-shaking.
"Carson'll need persuading," he commented. "'Tis well ye've got theartillery moving. What's next?"
"The next thing is to get out the best team you have, the one that willmake the best time, and send it to the end of track to meet Bromley'sspecial. How far is it--six miles, or thereabouts?"
"Seven, or maybe a little worse. I'll go with the team myself, and pushon the reins. Do I bring the gun here?"
Ballard thought a moment. "No; since we're to handle this thing byourselves, there is no need of making talk in the camps. Do you know alittle sand creek in the hogback called Dry Valley?"
"Sure, I do."
"Good. Make a straight line for the head of that arroyo, and we'll meetyou there, Blacklock and I, with an extra saddle-horse."
Fitzpatrick was getting a duck driving-coat out of a locker.
"What's your notion, Mr. Ballard?--if a man might be asking?"
"Wait, and you'll see," was the crisp reply. "It will work; you'll seeit work like a charm, Bourke. But you must burn the miles with that teamof broncos. We'll be down and out if you don't make connections with theMaxim. And say; toss a coil of that quarter-inch rope into your wagon asyou go. We'll need that, too."
When the contractor was gone, Ballard called the collegian into the payoffice and put him in touch with the pressing facts. A raid was to bemade on Colonel Craigmiles's cattle by a band of cattle thieves; theraid was to be prevented; means to the preventing end--three men and aMaxim automatic rapid-fire gun. Would Blacklock be one of the three?
"Would a hungry little dog eat his supper, Mr. Ballard? By Jove! butyou're a good angel in disguise--to let me in for the fun! And you'vepressed the right button, too, by George! There's a Maxim in themilitary kit at college, and I can work her to the queen's taste."
"Then you may consider yourself chief of the artillery," was the promptrejoinder. "I suppose I don't need to ask if you can ride a range pony?"
Blacklock's laugh was an excited chuckle.
"Now you're shouting. What I don't know about cow-ponies would make thebiggest
book you ever saw. But I'd ride a striped zebra rather than beleft out of this. Do we hike out now?--right away?"
"There is no rush; you can smoke a pipe or two--as I'm going to.Fitzpatrick has to drive fourteen miles to work off his handicap."
Ballard filled his pipe and lighting it sat down to let the mentalpolishing wheels grind upon the details of his plan. Blacklock triedhard to assume the manly attitude of nonchalance; tried and failedutterly. Once for every five minutes of the waiting he had to jump upand make a trip to the front of the commissary to ease off the excesspressure; and at the eleventh return Ballard was knocking the ash out ofhis pipe.
"Getting on your nerves, Jerry?" he asked. "All right: we'll go and borea couple of holes into the night, if that's what you're anxious to bedoing."
The start was made without advertisement. Fitzpatrick's horse-keeper wassmoking cigarettes on the little porch platform, and at a word fromBallard he disappeared in the direction of the horse-rope. Giving himthe necessary saddling time, the two made their way around thecard-playing groups at the plaza fire, and at the back of the darkenedmess-tent found the man waiting with three saddled broncos, all withrifle holsters under the stirrup leathers. Ballard asked a singlequestion at the mounting moment.
"You haven't seen young Carson in the last hour or so, have you, Patsy?"
"Niver a hair av him: 'tis all day long he's been gone, wid MistherBourke swearing thremenjous about the cayuse he took."
Ballard took the bridle of the led horse and the ride down the line ofthe canal, with Fitzpatrick's "piece of a moon" to silver the darkness,was begun as a part of the day's work by the engineer, but with somelittle trepidation by the young collegian, whose saddle-strivingshitherto had been confined to the well-behaved cobs in his father'sstables.
At the end of the first mile Blacklock found himself growing painfullyconscious of every start of the wiry little steed between his knees, andwas fain to seek comfort.
"Say, Mr. Ballard; what do you do when a horse bucks under you?" heasked, wedging the inquiry between the jolts of the racking gallop.
"You don't do anything," replied Ballard, taking the pronoun in thegeneric sense. "The bronco usually does it all."
"I--believe this brute's--getting ready to--buck," gasped the tyro."He's working--my knee-holds loose--with his confoundedsh--shoulder-blades."
"Freeze to him," laughed Ballard. Then he added the word of heartening:"He can't buck while you keep him on the run. Here's a smooth bit ofprairie: let him out a few notches."
That was the beginning of a mad race that swept them down the canalline, past Riley's camp and out to the sand-floored cleft in thefoothills far ahead of the planned meeting with Fitzpatrick. But thistime the waiting interval was not wasted. Picketing the three horses,and arming themselves with a pair of the short-barrelled rifles, theadvance guard of two made a careful study of the ground, pushing thereconnaissance down to the mouth of the dry valley, and a little wayalong the main river trail in both directions.
"Right here," said Ballard, indicating a point on the river trail justbelow the intersecting valley mouth, "is where you will be posted withthe Maxim. If you take this boulder for a shield, you can command thegulch and the upper trail for a hundred yards or more, and still be outof range of their Winchesters. They'll probably shoot at you, but youwon't mind that, with six or eight feet of granite for a breastwork,will you, Jerry?"
"Well, I should say not! Just you watch me burn 'em up when you give theword, Mr. Ballard. I believe I could hold a hundred of 'em from thisrock."
"That is exactly what I want you to do--to hold them. It would becold-blooded murder to turn the Maxim loose on them from this shortrange unless they force you to it. Don't forget that, Jerry."
"I sha'n't," promised the collegian; and after some further study of thetopographies, they went back to the horses.
Thereupon ensued a tedious wait of an hour or more, with no sight orsound of the expected waggon, and with anxiety growing like a juggler'srose during the slowly passing minutes. Anyone of a dozen things mighthave happened to delay Fitzpatrick, or even to make his errand afruitless one. The construction track was rough, and the hurrying enginemight have jumped the rails. The rustlers might have got wind of the gundash and ditched the locomotive. Failing that, some of their round-upmen might have stumbled upon the contractor and halted and overpoweredhim. Ballard and Blacklock listened anxiously for the drumming ofwheels. But when the silence was broken it was not by waggon noises; thesound was in the air--a distant lowing of a herd in motion, and theshuffling murmur of many hoofs. The inference was plain.
"By Jove! do you hear that, Jerry?" Ballard demanded. "The beggars arecoming down-valley with the cattle, _and they're ahead of Fitzpatrick_!"
That was not strictly true. While the engineer was adding a hastycommand to mount, Fitzpatrick's waggon came bouncing up the dry arroyo,with the snorting team in a lather of sweat.
"Sharp work, Mr. Ballard!" gasped the dust-covered driver. "They're lessthan a mile at the back of me, drivin' a good half of the colonel's beefherd, I'd take me oath. Say the wor-rds, and say thim shwift!"
With the scantest possible time for preparation, there was no wasting ofthe precious minutes. Ballard directed a quick transference of men,horses, and gun team to the lower end of the inner valley, a planting ofthe terrible little fighting machine behind the sheltering boulder onthe main trail, and a hasty concealment of the waggon and harnessanimals in a grove of the scrub pines. Then he outlined his plan brisklyto his two subordinates.
"They will send the herd down the canyon trail, probably with a man ortwo ahead of it to keep the cattle from straying up this draw," hepredicted. "The first move is to nip these head riders; after which wemust turn the herd and let it find its way back home through the sandgulch where we came in. Later on----"
A rattling clatter of horse-shoes on stone rose above the muffled lowingand milling of the oncoming drove, and there was no time for furtherexplanations. As Ballard and his companions drew back among the treeshadows in the small inner valley, a single horseman galloped down thecanyon trail, wheeling abruptly in the gulch mouth to head off thecattle if they should try to turn back by way of the hogback valley.Before the echo of his shrill whistle had died away among the canyoncrags, three men rose up out of the darkness, and with business-likecelerity the trail guard was jerked from his saddle, bound, gagged, andtossed into the bed of an empty waggon.
"Now for the cut-out!" shouted Ballard; and the advance stragglers ofthe stolen herd were already in the mouth of the little valley when thethree amateur line-riders dashed at them and strove to turn the drive atright angles up the dry gulch.
For a sweating minute or two the battle with brute bewilderment hung inthe balance. Wheel and shout and flog as they would, they seemed ableonly to mass the bellowing drove in the narrow mouth of the turn-out.But at the critical instant, when the milling tangle threatened tobecome a jam that must crowd itself from the trail into the near-bytorrent of the Boiling Water, a few of the leaders found the open way tofreedom up the hogback valley, and in another throat-parching minutethere was only a cloud of dust hanging between the gulch heads to showwhere the battle had been raging.
This was the situation a little later when the main body of therustlers, ten men strong, ambled unsuspectingly into the valley-mouthtrap: dust in the air, a withdrawing thunder of hoof-beats, and apparentdesertion of the point of hazard. Carson was the first to grasp themeaning of the dust cloud and the vanishing murmur of hoof-tramplings.
"Hell!" he rasped. "Billings has let 'em cut back up the gulch! That'son you, Buck Cummin's: I told you ye'd better hike along 'ith Billings."
"You always _was_ one o' them 'I-told-ye-so' kind of liars," was thepessimistic retort of the man called Cummings; and Carson's right handwas flicking toward the ready pistol butt when a voice out of theshadows under the western cliff shaped a command clear-cut and incisive.
"Hands up out there--every man of you!" Then, by way of charit
ableexplanation: "You're covered--with a rapid-fire Maxim."
There were doubters among the ten; desperate men whose lawless days andnights were filled with hair's-breadth chance-takings. From these came ascattering volley of pistol shots spitting viciously at the cliffshadows.
"Show 'em, Jerry," said the voice, curtly; and from the shelter of agreat boulder at the side of the main trail leaped a sheet of flame witha roar comparable to nothing on earth save its ear-splitting,nerve-shattering self. Blacklock had swept the machine-gun in a shortarc over the heads of the cattle thieves, and from the cliff face andledges above them a dropping rain of clipped pine branches andsplintered rock chippings fell upon the trapped ten.
It is the new and untried that terrifies. In the group of rustlers therewere men who would have wheeled horse and run a gauntlet of spittingWinchesters without a moment's hesitation. But this hiddenmurder-machine belching whole regiment volleys out of the shadows...."Sojers, by cripes!" muttered Carson, under his breath. Then aloud: "Allright, Cap'n; what you say goes as it lays."
"I said 'hands up,' and I meant it," rasped Ballard; and when the palemoonlight pricked out the cattle-lifters in the attitude of submission:"First man on the right--knee your horse into the clump of treesstraight ahead of you."
It was Fitzpatrick, working swiftly and alone, who disarmed,wrist-roped, and heel-tied to his horse each of the crestfallen ones asBallard ordered them singly into the mysterious shadows of the pinegrove. Six of the ten, including Carson, had been ground through theneutralising process, and the contractor was deftly at work on theseventh, before the magnitude of the engineer's strategy began to dawnupon them.
"_Sufferin' Jehu!_" said Carson, with an entire world of disgust andhumiliation crowded into the single expletive; but when the man calledCummings broke out in a string of meaningless oaths, the leader of thecattle thieves laughed like a good loser.
"Say; how many of you did it take to run this here little bluff on us?"he queried, tossing the question to Fitzpatrick, the only captor insight.
"You'll find out, when the time comes," replied the Irishman gruffly."And betwixt and between, ye'll be keeping a still tongue in your head.D'ye see?"
They did see, when the last man was securely bound and roped to hissaddle beast; and it was characteristic of time, place, and the actorsin the drama that few words were wasted in the summing up.
"Line them up for the back trail," was Ballard's crisp command, whenFitzpatrick and Blacklock had dragged the Maxim in from its boulderredoubt and had loaded it into the waggon beside the rope-woundBillings.
"Whereabouts does this here back trail end up--for us easy-marks, Cap'nBallard?" It was Carson who wanted to know.
"That's for a jury to say," was the brief reply.
"You've et my bread and stabled yo' hawss in my corral," the chiefrustler went on gloomily. "But that's all right--if you feel called totake up for ol' King Adam, that's fightin' ever' last shovelful o' mudyou turn over in th' big valley."
Fitzpatrick was leading the way up the hoof-trampled bed of the dryvalley with the waggon team, and Blacklock was marshalling the line ofprisoners to follow in single file when Ballard wheeled his bronco tomount.
"I fight my own battles, Carson," he said, quietly. "You set a deadfallfor me, and I tumbled in like a tenderfoot. That put it up to me toknock out your raid. Incidentally, you and your gang will get what iscoming to you for blowing a few thousand yards of earth into our canal.That's all. Line up there with the others; you've shot your string andlost."
The return route led the straggling cavalcade through the arroyo mouth,and among the low hills back of Riley's camp to a junction with thecanal line grade half way to Fitzpatrick's headquarters. Approaching thebig camp, Ballard held a conference with the contractor, as a result ofwhich the waggon mules were headed to the left in a semicircular detouraround the sleeping camp, the string of prisoners following as theknotted trail ropes steered it.
Another hour of easting saw the crescent moon poising over the blacksky-line of the Elks, and it brought captors and captured to the end oftrack of the railroad where there was a siding, with a half-dozen emptymaterial cars and Bromley's artillery special, the engine hissing softlyand the men asleep on the cab cushions.
Ballard cut his prisoners foot-free, dismounted them, and locked theminto an empty box-car. This done, the engine crew was aroused, the Maximwas reloaded upon the tender, and the chief gave the trainmen theirinstructions.
"Take the gun, and that locked box-car, back to Elbow Canyon," hedirected. "Mr. Bromley will give you orders from there."
"Carload o' hosses?" said the engineman, noting the position of thebox-car opposite a temporary chute built for debarking a consignment ofFitzpatrick's scraper teams.
"No; jackasses," was Ballard's correction; and when the engine wasclattering away to the eastward with its one-car train, the waggon washeaded westward, with Blacklock sharing the seat beside Fitzpatrick,Ballard lying full-length on his back in the deep box-bed, and the longstring of saddle animals towing from the tailboard.
At the headquarters commissary Blacklock tumbled into the handiest bunkand was asleep when he did it. But Ballard roused himself sufficientlyto send a message over the wire to Bromley directing the disposal of thecaptured cattle thieves, who were to be transported by way of Alta Vistaand the D. & U. P. to the county seat.
After that he remembered nothing until he awoke to blink at the sunshining into the little bunk room at the back of the pay office; awokewith a start to find Fitzpatrick handing him a telegram scrawled upon abit of wrapping-paper.
"I'm just this minut' taking this off the wire," said the contractor,grinning sheepishly; and Ballard read the scrawl:
"D. & U. P. box-car No. 3546 here all O. K. with both side doors carefully locked and end door wide open. Nothing inside but a few bits of rope and a stale smell of tobacco smoke and corn whiskey.
"BROMLEY."