The pistol in his right hand was held close to his side, the muzzle directed at the rider.
But a change was coming over the man’s face. The color was slowly going out of it, the lips were loosening as his jaws dropped, his body began to sag, and his eyes began to widen with fear, stark and naked. At length, the rider now watching him with a gaze in which there began to glow recognition and contempt, the man dropped his hands to his sides and leaned against the rock.
“ ‘Drag’ Harlan!” he muttered hoarsely.
The rider watched, his eyes glittering coldly, his lips twisting in a crooked sneer. Amusement was his dominating emotion, but there was hate in his gaze, mingling with a malignant joy and triumph. The pistols in his hands became steady as his wrist muscles stiffened; and he watched the two men warily, apparently looking straight at the standing man, but seeing the sitting man also.
And now a silence fell—a strained, premonitory silence that had in it a hint of imminent tragedy. The sitting man stiffened, divining the promise of violence; the standing man shrank back a little and looked downward at the pistol in his right hand.
The rider saw the glance and laughed lowly.
“Keep her right where she is, Dolver,” he warned. “You lift her one little wee lift, an’ I bore you plumb in the brain-box. Sort of flabbergasted, eh? Didn’t expect to run into me again so soon?”
He laughed as the other cringed, his face dead white, his eyes fixed on the rider with a sort of dread fascination.
“Dolver, didn’t you know when you got my little partner, Davey Langan, that I’d be comin’ for you?” said the rider in a slow, drawling whisper. “In the back you got him, not givin’ him a chance. You’re gettin’ yours now. I’m givin’ you a chance to take it like a man—standin’, with your face to me. Lift her now—damn you!”
There was no change in his expression as he watched the man he had called Dolver. There came no change in the cold, steady gleam of his eyes as he saw the man stiffen and swing the muzzle of his pistol upward with a quick, jerky motion. But he sneered as with the movement he sent a bullet into the man’s chest; his lips curving with slight irony when Dolver’s gun went off, the bullet throwing up sand at Purgatory’s forehoofs.
His eyes grew hard as he saw Dolver stagger, drop his pistol, and clutch at his chest; and he watched with seeming indifference as the man slowly sank to his knees and stretched out, face down, in the dust at the base of the rock.
His lips were stiff with bitter rage, however, as he faced the other man, who had not moved.
“Get up on your hind legs, you yellow coyote!” he commanded.
For an instant it seemed that the other man was to share the fate of the first. The man seemed to think so, too, for he got up trembling, his hands outstretched along the rock, the fingers outspread and twitching from the paralysis of fear that had seized him.
“Shoot your gab off quick!” commanded the rider. “Who are you?”
“I’m Laskar,” the man muttered.
“Where you from?”
“Lamo.”
The rider’s eyes quickened. “Where did you meet up with that scum?” He indicated Dolver.
“In town.”
“Lamo?”
The man nodded.
“How long ago?” asked the rider.
“ ’Bout a week.”
The man’s voice was hoarse; he seemed reluctant to talk more, and he cast furtive, dreading glances toward the base of the rock where Dolver had stood before the rider had surprised the men.
Watching the man narrowly, the rider noted his nervous glance, and his shrinking, dreading manner. Harlan’s eyes gleamed with suspicion, and in a flash he was off the black and standing before Laskar, forbidding and menacing.
“Take off your gun-belt an’ chuck it under my horse!” he directed sharply. “There’s somethin’ goin’ on here that ain’t been mentioned. I’m findin’ out what it is.”
He watched while the man unbuckled his cartridge belt and threw it—the pistol still in the holster—into the sand at Purgatory’s hoofs. Then he stepped to the man, sheathed one of his pistols, and ran the free hand over the other’s clothing in search of other weapons. Finding none, he stooped and took up Dolver’s pistol and rifle that had fallen from the man’s hands when he had tumbled off the rock, throwing them near where the cartridge belt had fallen.
“You freeze there while I take a look around this rock!” he commanded, with a cold look at the man.
Half a dozen steps took him around the base of the rock. He went boldly, though his muscles were tensed and his eyes alert for surprises. But he had not taken a dozen steps in all when he halted and stiffened, his lips setting into straight, hard lines.
For, stretched out on his left side in the sand close to the base of the rock—under the flattened summit which had afforded him protection from the bullets the man with the rifle had been sending at him—was a man.
The man was apparently about fifty, with a seamed, pain-lined face. His beard was stained with dust, his hair was gray with it; his clothing looked as though he had been dragged through it. He was hatless, and one of his boots was off. The foot had been bandaged with a handkerchief, and through the handkerchief the dark stains of a wound appeared.
The man’s shirt was open in front; and the rider saw that another wound gaped in his chest, near the heart. The man had evidently made some attempt to care for that wound, too, for a piece of cloth from his shirt had been cut away, to permit him to get at the wound easily.
The man’s left side seemed to be helpless, for the arm was twisted queerly, the palm of the hand turned limply upward; but when the rider came upon him the man was trying to tuck a folded paper into one of the cylinders of a pistol.
He had laid the weapon in the sand, and with his right hand was working with the cylinder and the paper. When he saw the rider he sneered and ceased working with the pistol, looking up into the rider’s face, his eyes glowing with defiance.
“No chance for that even, eh?” he said, glancing at the paper and the pistol. “Things is goin’ plumb wrong!”
He sagged back, resting his weight on the right elbow, and looked steadily at the rider—the look of a wounded animal defying his pursuers.
“Get goin’!” he jeered. “Do your damnedest! I heard that sneak, Dolver, yappin’ to you. You’re ‘Drag’ Harlan—gun-fighter, outlaw, killer! I’ve heard of you,” he went on as he saw Harlan scowl and stiffen. “Your reputation has got all over. I reckon you’re in the game to salivate me.”
Harlan sheathed his gun.
“You’re talkin’ extravagant, mister man.” And now he permitted a cold smile to wreathe his lips. “If it’ll do you any good to know,” he added, “I’ve just put Dolver out of business.”
“I heard that, too,” declared the man, laughing bitterly. “I heard you tellin’ Dolver. He killed your partner—or somethin’. That’s personal, an’ I ain’t interested. Get goin’—the sooner the better. If you’d hand it to me right now, I’d be much obliged to you; for I’m goin’ fast. This hole in my chest—which I got last night while I was sleepin’—will do the business without any help from you.”
After a pause for breath, the man began to speak again, railing at his would-be murderers. He was talking ramblingly when there came a sound from the opposite side of the rock—a grunt, a curse, and, almost instantly, a shriek.
The wounded man raised himself and threw a glance