Bar-20 Days by Clarence Edward Mulford (new reading TXT) 📗

If I took any help they'd reckon I was scared,” and the door slammed shut behind him.

“He's got sand a plenty,” Jackson remarked. “He'd try to push back a stampede by main strength if he reckoned it was his duty. It's his good luck that he wasn't killed long ago—I'd 'a' been.”

“They're a bunch of cowards,” replied Johnny. “As long as you ain't afraid of 'em, none of 'em wants to start anything. Bunch of sheep!” he snorted. “Didn't Jerry shoot me through his pocket?”

“Yes; an' yo're another lucky dog,” Jackson responded, having in mind that at first Johnny had been thought to be desperately wounded. “Why, yore friends have got the worst of this game; they're worse off than you are—out all day an' night in this cussed storm.”

While they talked Edwards made his way through the cold downpour to Harlan's saloon, alone and unafraid, and greatly pleased by the order he would give. At last he had proof enough to work on, to satisfy his conscience, for the inevitable had come as the culmination of continued and clever defiance of law and order.

He deliberately approached the front door of the Oasis and, opening it, stepped inside, his hands resting on his guns—he had packed two Colts for the last twenty-four hours. His appearance caused a ripple of excitement to run around the room. After what had taken place, a visit from him could mean only one thing—trouble. And it was entirely possible that he had others within call to help him out if necessary.

Harlan knew that he would be the one held responsible and he ceased wiping a glass and held the cloth suspended in one hand and the glass in the other. “Well?” he snapped, angrily, his eyes smouldering with fixed hatred.

“Mebby you think it's well, but it's going to be a blamed sight better before sundown to-morrow night,” evenly replied the marshal. “I just dropped in sort of free-like to tell you to pack up an' get out of town before dark—load yore wagon an' vamoose; an' take yore friends with you, too. If you don't—” he did not finish in words, for his tightening lips made them unnecessary.

“What!” yelled Harlan, red with anger. He placed his hands on the bar and leaned over it as if to give emphasis to his words. “Me pack up an' git! Me leave this shack! Who's going to pay me for it, hey? Me leave town! You drop out again an' go back to Kansas where you come from—they're easier back there!”

“Well, so far I ain't found nothing very craggy 'round here,” retorted Edwards, closely watching the muttering crowd by the bar. “Takes more than a loud voice an' a pack of sneaking coyotes to send me looking for something easier. An' let me tell you this: You stay away from Kansas—they hangs people like you back there. That's whatever. You pack up an' git out of this town or I'll start a burying plot with you on yore own land.”

The low, angry buzz of Harlan's friends and their savage, scowling faces would have deterred a less determined man; but Edwards knew they were afraid of him, and the men on whom he could call to back him up. And he knew that there must always be a start, there must be one man to show the way; and each of the men he faced was waiting for some one else to lead.

“You all slip over the horizon before dark to-night, an' it's dark early these days,” he continued. “Don't get restless with yore hands!” he snapped ominously at the crowd. “I means what I say—you shake the mud from this town off yore boots before dark—before that Bar-20 outfit gets back,” he finished meaningly.

Questions, imprecations, and threats filled the room, and the crowd began to spread out slowly. His guns came out like a flash and he laughed with the elation that comes with impending battle. “The first man to start it'll drop,” he said evenly. “Who's going to be the martyr?”

“I won't leave town!” shouted Harlan. “I'll stay here if I'm killed for it!”

“I admire yore loyalty to principle, but you've got damned little sense,” retorted the marshal. “You ain't no practical man. Keep yore hands where they are!”—his vibrant voice turned the shifting crowd to stone-like rigidity and he backed slowly toward the door, the poor light gleaming dully from the polished blue steel of his Colts. Rugged, lion-like, charged to the finger tips with reckless courage and dare-devil self-confidence, his personality overflowed and dominated the room, almost hypnotic in its effect. He was but one against many, but he was the master, and they knew it; they had known it long enough to accept it without question, and the training now stood him in good stead.

For a moment he stood in the open doorway, keenly scrutinizing them for signs of danger, his unwavering guns charged with certain death and his strong face made stronger by the shadows in its hollows. “Before dark!”—and he was gone.

He left behind him deep silence, which endured for several moments.

“By the Lord, I won't!” cried Harlan, still staring at the door.

The spell was broken and a babel of voices filled the room, threats mingling with excuses, hot, vibrant, profane. These men were not cowards all the way through, but only when face to face with the master. They had flourished in a way by their wits alone on the same range with the outfits of the C-80 and the Double-Arrow, for individually they were “bad,” and collectively they made a force of no mean strength. Edwards had landed among them like a thunderbolt and had proved his prowess, and they still held him in awesome respect. His reckless audacity and grim singleness of purpose had saved him on more than one occasion, for had he wavered once he would have been shot down without mercy. But gradually his enforcement of hampering laws became more and more intolerable, and their subordinated spirits were nearly on the point of revolt. When he faced them they resumed their former positions in relation to him—but once out of his sight they plotted to destroy him. Here was the crisis: it was now or never. They could not evade his ultimatum—it was obey or fight.

Submission was not to be thought of, for to flee would be to lose caste, and the story of such an act would follow them wherever they went, and brand them as cowards. Here they had lived, and here they would stay if possible, and to this end they discussed ways and means.

“Harlan's right!” emphatically announced Laramie Joe. “We can't pull out and have this foller us.”

“We should have started it with a rush when he was in here,” remarked Boston, regretfully.

Harlan stopped his pacing and faced them, shoving out a bottle of whiskey as an aid to his logic.

“That chance is past, an' I don't know but what it is a good thing,” he began. “He was primed an' looking fer trouble, an' he'd shore got a few of us afore he went under. What we want is strategy—that's the game. You fellers have got as much brains as him, an' if we thrash this thing out we can find a way to call his play—an' get him! No use of any of us getting plugged 'less we have to. But whatever we do we've got to start it