Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1, 1922 — page 138: what you’re looking at

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

928 brutes, trotting his horse on the sand, lop- ing over the patches of rattleweed and sage, but walking the mount slowly when he traversed the big rockslabs, fearing that the striking of the hoofs would further ex- cite the steers. He passed one cow-puncher after another, instructing each one to sing. This more than anything else would pre- vent a sudden noise frightening the herd— and Scrub expected a sudden noise at any moment from the direction of the shack in the canon. The old cowman rounded the western edge of the herd, circled the bluffs which kept the mass from warping upwards to- ward the north, and by pressing his horse through the dense clouds of alkali, came around, entering the cafion. Then it was that a sound struck his ear. Scrub, well versed in cow psychology, detected the om- inous note of that sound, and he knew that a disaster was coming. The herd having slowed in its milling, had commenced to make that indescribable mutter, partly a moo, partly a snarl which cowboys call Scrub dug into his horse, covering the wavelets of sand at the cafion’s mouth with a few bounds. He reined in carefully as his mount struck the lava bed, and rode up to the first night herder he met. “ Keep them cow brutes milling!” he cried. “If you don’t you'll find yourself squashed on the rocks like a horned toad which a dray has rid over!” His face ashen with the new dread, Scrub rode to the next herder and to the next. But it was a futile ride. By the time he had circled again to the eastern side, he moticed that a marked difference had taken place in the milling. It was so slow that it could scarcely be called milling at all. While this herd madness was beginning to clutch the great sea of brutes at the mouth of the cafion, the meeting of the girl, Cal Triggers and Saul Meakin was ap- proaching its own climax in the little shake barn in the middle of the canon bed. Cal Triggers, disarmed, stood at one end of the little room, his tall-peaked sombrero brushing the cobwebs of the rafters. The girl, having come out of her swoon, was helped to a little box chair by Saul ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. Meakin. The latter stood in the doorway, his revolver replaced in the holster of which the flap was left unbuttoned. The churning thunder at the lower end of the canon died down and then stopped suddenly so that the three were left in a tense silence. The light of sunset coming over Saul Meakin’s shoulders reddened the gloom of the little hut. Meakin saw clearly—as any man could have seen in that situation—that he was about to irrevocably lose the girl. If he killed Triggers there in cold blood, and be- fore her eyes, he could not hope for another chance with her. The situation now was much more complex. Something had grown up in the girl’s heart during her travels with the gun fighter; and Meakin, although convinced that this could not pos- sibly be love—was not so blind as to over- look it. The game he decided to play was masterful—if a game can be called master- ful which is at once cunning and cowardly. “Mr. Triggers,” he said, “ you are trapped. If you don’t think I myself am powerful enough to trap you, then let me awaken you to a few facts. Perhaps I am not powerful enough, Mr. Triggers. Mind you, I am not a boastful man, and I don’t intend to boast now. With a gun in my hand—yes, I have you. But then great as the power of a six-gun is, I find it is as im- possible to pull on you—as impossible as if I had a paralyzed trigger finger! And it is paralyzed. The girl here has para- lyzed it. If she had stuck a needle into it and stopped the muscles and the nerves with a drug, it could not be more helpless than it is after 1 have seen the look on her face.” Meakin, discovering the new light in Cal’s eyes, hastened to warn him. “ But it’s only for the moment, Mr. Triggers. If you do not want to consider me as the win- ner—if you think I am good enough to trap you, then turn this over in your mind. There are men outside waiting to kill you as soon as you step out of that door. If they fail, the sheriff and his posse are wait- ing. Scrub Hazen and his herders are wait- ing—all ready with their six-guns to shoot you on sight.” “Then why should I be wasting my time talking to you, Meakin?” Cal asked. comicloool C©