Beyond the Law

“A man that didn’t know would think it was all nonsense. But most men that live in the way-out places of the earth, and who’ve took men off, fair and square—or with a knife from behind; it makes no difference—would know what I know. I don’t know the why, pardner. And I don’t care why. You’ll be looking for a new side-kick before Summer dies.”

Dick stirred uneasily. Again he sought for a light, bantering reply. But the words did not come. A strange sense of fatality had crept slowly over him.

He tried to tell himself that he was listening to the expression of an old miner’s superstition, that the thing was an absurdity. And while he refused to give credence to a thing which he could not understand, he had an odd sense that he and Johnny Watson were not alone. Unconsciously he drew a bit closer to the fire and to the man who was “seeing things.”

“And this here the likeliest trail I ever set foot down on,” said the older man, with nothing but a vague regret in the even tones. “Just two more days and we’re there—maybe together and maybe you finish the trail alone, pardner. It’s a month ago I picked up that first big yellow lump. The whole mountainside is rotten with gold! And then I come back and picked you up like we’d said we would, you wearing your shoes out on flinty rocks where a man wouldn’t find a color in seven lifetime. And now we’re in two days of it, and——”

He didn’t finish, breaking off with a long-drawn, deep breath. His pipe had gone out and he leaned forward, picking up a blazing bit of dry pine which he held to the blackened bowl. Dick Farley noticed that the bronzed, lined face was very calm, the eyes somewhat wider opened than usual, the fingers upon the fagot as steady as should be the fingers of a man without nerves.

“Johnny—” Farley was speaking at last, with an effort, keeping his tones as steady as his partner’s—“you are right when you say that there are some things which we can’t explain. But it’s up to us to explain what we can, isn’t it? You haven’t thought of those men for a long time, and now they flash up before you all of a sudden, and clear. Can’t it be that I have happened to use some expression that Ben used, or that some sound from the woods about us, or some smell or even an odd color in the sunset——”

“That’s like you, Dickie. Fight until you’re in the last ditch, and then go on fighting!” Watson shook his head. “No, that ain’t the right explanation this trip. I’ve seen them three men today. I’ve seen Flash DeVine jerk up his head with a little funny sort of twist to the left like he always used to, and I’ve seen the red spot by Parker’s ear. I’d clean forgot them little things, Dick. No, pard’. There’s no use trying to explain. I got to thinking about it this noon while you was staking out the horses, and I made a little drawing you can use if I pass out before we get to the place. It’s on a cigareet paper, and I poked it inside old Shaggy’s saddle-blanket. And now, boy—” standing up, his shoulders lifted and squared—“good night. If it happens I don’t see you any more——”

He put out his hand suddenly. Young Dick Farley gulped down a lump in his throat as he gripped Johnny Watson’s fingers. For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes—then Watson turned away abruptly and with no other word went to his blankets.

It was Johnny Watson’s voice swearing at old Shaggy that awoke Dick Farley in the early dawn. Farley stared upward through the still tree-tops at the gray morning, his mind groping for the unpleasant something of last night. And when he remembered he smiled, thinking how he would chaff his partner about his night fears and his dead men.

But when he caught a swift glimpse of the deep-set eyes under the shaggy gray-sprinkled brows, the bantering remarks which were trooping to the end of his tongue were left unuttered. In a blind sort of way he realized that the thing which had come upon Johnny Watson yesterday had not left him. Those eyes were looking out upon death calmly, expectantly, a bit reluctantly, but not with fear and not with rebellion. Farley said nothing as he turned away and went down into the creek-bed to wash his hands and face.

Over their breakfast of coffee, bacon and flapjacks the two men talked lightly of this and that, with no mention of last night. When Watson had finished he began speaking of the day’s work into the cañon. He told briefly where they would leave the creek in three or four hours, where they would find water for the noon camp, where more water and grass for the evening camp.

“Tonight—we ought to be there by six—we get over the ridge and into the Devil’s Pocket country. There’s just one way to get out of that country, Dick, and that’s the way we’re going in. If a man looks for a short cut, if he goes skallyhooting east or west, north or south of the place where our trail is going to cut into the basin there, he’s a goner.

“If you leave this trail on the way back you’re going to run out of water first thing, and your horse is going to break his leg, if it ain’t his neck, the next thing; and then you die because you can’t pick up another waterhole. I was in that country more’n a dozen years ago. There was three of us. Me being lucky in them days, I got out. The others didn’t. And I ain’t never been back until I took a whirl at it last month.”

The morning sun had not yet peeped down into the steep-walled ravine in which their course lay when the two men led their pack-horses out of its shadows, along the higher bank upon the right, and upon the little bench land there. They moved swiftly, with long swinging strides, and as Watson had said, within three or four hours they left the creek entirely, moved eastward through a cut in the mountains which rose steeply against them, and found what might once have been a trail.

Conversation had died. Watson was in the lead, at times hidden from his companion a hundred yards in advance. Then came the two horses. And in the rear, his brain leaping from the talk of last night to Watson’s accounts of the place where “the whole side of the mountain was rotten with gold,” to wondering about this Devil’s Pocket, Dick Farley followed silently.

They camped a little at noon by a spring which Watson had marked upon his map, and rested for a couple of hours. The older man, unostentatiously and without effort at concealment, unlimbered the two heavy revolvers at his belt and looked to them as a man does when he expects he will use them.

“The cards ain’t played yet, Dick,” he said. “And if it don’t come too onexpected, we’re going to give ’em a run for their money, old timer.”

During the silent hours of the afternoon Farley strove to keep his partner always in sight, hurrying up the lagging horses, keeping them at Watson’s heels. And, although he still told himself that he did not and would not believe in this senseless superstition, he carried all day a forty-five-caliber Colt.