The Rangeland Avenger | Page 6

short steps like a drunken man, and
lowered himself down on it.
Sinclair had gone into the hotel, and doubtless that meant that he had
grown impatient. The fever to kill was burning in the big man. Then
Lowrie heard a steady step come regularly up the stairs. They creaked
under a heavy weight.
Lowrie drew his gun. It caught twice; finally he jerked it out in a frenzy.
He would shoot when the door opened, without waiting, and then trust
to luck to fight his way through the men below.
In the meantime the muzzle of the revolver wabbled crazily from side

to side, up and down. He clutched the barrel with the other hand. And
still the weapon shook.
Curling up his knee before his breast he ground down with both hands.
That gave him more steadiness; but would not this contorted position
destroy all chance of shooting accurately? His own prophecy, made
over the dead body of Hal Sinclair, that all three of them would see that
face again, came back to him with a sense of fatality. Some
forward-looking instinct, he assured himself, had given him that
knowledge.
The step upon the stairs came up steadily. But the mind of Lowrie,
between the steps, leaped hither and yon, a thousand miles and back.
What if his nerve failed him at the last moment? What if he buckled
and showed yellow and the shame of it followed him? Better a hundred
times to die by his own hand.
Excitement, foreboding, the weariness of the long trail--all were
working upon Lowrie.
Nearer drew the step. It seemed an hour since he had first heard it begin
to climb the stairs. It sounded heavily on the floor outside his door.
There was a heavy tapping on the door itself. For an instant the clutch
of Lowrie froze around his gun; then he twitched the muzzle back
against his own breast and fired.
There was no pain--only a sense of numbness and a vague feeling of
torn muscles, as if they were extraneous matter. He dropped the
revolver on the bed and pressed both hands against his wound. Then
the door opened, and there appeared, not Riley Sinclair, but Pop
Hansen.
"What in thunder--" he began.
"Get Riley Sinclair. There's been an accident," said Lowrie faintly and
huskily. "Get Riley Sinclair; quick. I got something to say to him."

3
Riley Sinclair rode over the mountain. An hour of stern climbing lay
behind him, but it was not sympathy for his tired horse that made him
draw rein. Sympathy was not readily on tap in Riley's nature.
"Hossflesh" to Riley was purely and simply a means to an end. Neither
had he paused to enjoy that mystery of change which comes over
mountains between late afternoon and early evening. His keen eyes

answered all his purposes, and that they had never learned to see blue
in shadows meant nothing to Riley Sinclair.
If he looked kindly upon the foothills, which stepped down from the
peaks to the valley lands, it was because they meant an easy descent.
Riley took thorough stock of his surroundings, for it was a new country.
Yonder, where the slant sun glanced and blinked on windows, must be
Sour Creek; and there was the road to town jagging across the hills.
Riley sighed.
In his heart he despised that valley. There were black patches of plowed
land. A scattering of houses began in the foothills and thickened toward
Sour Creek. How could men remain there, where there was so little
elbow room? He scowled down into the shadow of the valley. Small
country, small men.
Pictures failed to hold Riley, but, as he sat the saddle, hand on thigh,
and looked scornfully toward Sour Creek, he was himself a picture to
make one's head lift. As a rule the horse comes in for as much attention
as the rider, but when Riley Sinclair came near, people saw the man
and nothing else. Not because he was good-looking, but because one
became suddenly aware of some hundred and eighty pounds of lithe,
tough muscle and a domineering face.
Somewhere behind his eyes there was a faint glint of humor. That was
the only soft touch about him. He was in that hard age between thirty
and thirty-five when people are still young, but have lost the illusions
of youth. And, indeed, that was exactly the word which people in haste
used to describe Riley Sinclair--"hard."
Having once resigned himself to the descent into that cramped country
beneath he at once banished all regret. First he picked out his objective,
a house some distance away, near the road, and then he brought his
mustang up on the bit with a touch of the spurs. Then, having
established the taut