Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 18, 1925 — page 127: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

IN THE EVENT OF DEATH. Yet it was Slade who insisted upon a brief halt for nourishment before they drove out to the Bar Nothing with the consciousness of the teeming mob they had left behind them. It was a spur to Cos- grove’s mind, a sharp irritant which urged him forward faster than the speeding car he drove, faster than the wind which, hav- ing arisen at sundown, now hummed through the coulees and filled the air with a whirling haze of dust. His eyes, already smarting with the weariness which he renounced and over- came, were further irritated by that flying dust, and the fine particles of it filled his nostrils, choking him. The men in the rear of the car, lacking the screening expanse of the windshield, coughed and swore as the gale lashed their faces. They arrived under the dark shadow of the high bank upen which stood the Bar Nothing ranch house in the full fury of the wind, and it seemed as though nature her- self in this manner invested their coming with the blast of a retributive justice. Cos- grove brought the car to a stop under the bank. “We'd best go up to the house on foot,” he explaimed. “ You, Gaines, can bring the car up after us, if you will. It wouldn’t do for the mob to lay hands on it; and if we run it up the hill it will sound its own warning.” They held a brief conference there be- side the car, and it was arranged that Cos- grove, Slade and Webb should ascend the roadway on foot, approach the house from each end, and have Farley and Lederer ready for delivery by the time the car reached the ranch house. “Tf they ain’t there?” said Slade. ‘Where else?” Cosgrove’s query seemed sufficient. The three men strode off to- gether for the roadway. It was a singular advance they made up that deep cut in the sandy bank; three fig- ures blindly striding in a swirling chaos of wind-blown sand. The cut, from road to summit, was only a matter of thirty rods or so. In the fury of the gale it seemed five-fold that distance. But it served the purpose of covering their approach. As he fought the gale, Cosgrove pon- 277 dered Slade’s question. What if they were not there? What if the two remaining beneficiaries of that iniquitous testament had fled separately to refuges unknown? But where else could they be? What other stronghold would they choose more logically to make their stand against attack? Slade and Webb had gone around to the. rear. They had agreed to enter with no show of violence; their mission was to save and to protect, to capture these men for no other reason than to save them from mob vio- lence. With this in his mind, Cosgrove threw open the door without the formality of knocking, and found himself face to face with Farley. | Cosgrove had expected Farley to greet him with rage and bluster. He had no il- lusions regarding the intensity of this man’s enmity; but he was not prepared for the mask of passion which confronted him in the likeness of Farley’s face. This baffled conspirator had obviously been pacing the room since his return from the courthouse, and the intensity with which he had flung himself into the prosecution, the bitter fury with which he had fought as he saw his vicious edifice crumble before Cosgrove’s attack, the soul shaking horror of the reve- lation Gaines had made, all had left their mark upon his face. He had ridden back to the ranch hardly conscious of the wind which whipped him as he rode, and he had paced this shabby room in a daze ef shattered hapes for an eternity, stopping only now and then to feed with bad whisky the chaotic, impotent fury which raged in his brain. His face was unshaven since the day before. The lines from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth were deeply furrowed, and his eyes were mad and wild, red-rimmed and bleared by the fumes of the drink, bloodshot and like an animal’s, ferocious. This was the mask that confronted Cos- grove when he threw open the door of the Bar Nothing ranch, and it was startling close upon him, for Farley, in his morbid pacing had just reached the doorway when Cosgrove entered. At the unexpected sight of this visitor, he cringed backward. ‘What d’ya want?” he snarled. Cosgrove, who had stood for a second in — —. EOmiIcbooks.