A Gunman Rode North

three guards climbed stiffly down and strode off toward the Pine Knot near the road, the settlement's only saloon.

Pete Orr licked his lips but had to wait and take the coach over to the old fort and unharness—and then wait some more.

Harrow had descended the folding step and now hastily helped Carlotta out of the opened doorway of the bright red coach. Thomas Harrow, Esq. Dalyville, Arizona Territory. As Harrow turned, a girl came running off the front porch, arms open and outstretched. A yellow-haired girl, blue-eyed and kitten-faced, who flung herself into Tom Harrow's arms with a little squeal of gladness.

'My dear,' Carlotta smiled warmly at Kitty Anderson's flushed face looking over Harrow's rigidly frozen shoulder, 'you do it as naturally as though you'd done it quite often. Thomas, have you forgotten your manners? Aren't you going to introduce me?'

CHAPTER EIGHT

Daybreak came uncomfortably to Lew Kerrigan in the September chill of the high country in northern Arizona. The pines around him stood tall and majestic as though through lordly green eyes they were surveying all of the vast wilderness; a panorama of broken-chested country, myriad colors of green and brown, amber and yellow, with, now and then, the pale-blue glint of distant water.

Kerrigan had devoted the remaining hours of darkness in cutting a careful circle in the blackness; almost a slow step at a time in the moccasins. He knew how desperate Tom Harrow must be. In so far as Kerrigan knew, Harrow had long since been waiting for his men to bring in the fugitive, and probably wondering at their silence.

He thought grimly, Well, he won't have to wonder much longer. I'll make Pirtman today and maybe Kitty will be there. He'd realized many times how much younger she was than himself, but she was beautiful and this was the frontier where almost any woman was a premium in a country preponderantly male and single. After two years of not seeing a woman, a man could forget subconscious misgivings and think only of seeing her again.

He didn't know exactly what his next step would be after that. He'd think of that when he got to Clara's place.

As for LeRoy and Jeb Donnelly and who else was with them, they had pushed him twice and each time it had cost them a man. He'd spared Donnelly's life in the Escondido Saloon. He'd ducked away from town to avoid meeting Ace Saunders again. He hadn't gone up to the prison with a rifle to pick off Wood Smith. And he'd spared LeRoy's life back there at the lava beds, shooting instead a man trained to trail like a hound on the scent of a big deer-killing mountain cat.

But he thought he knew LeRoy, the beaver hat and McClellan saddle a key to the pride and vanity of a man probably once a gentleman from the South. Kerrigan had been ordered brought in or killed, and Hannifer LeRoy had failed in his part of the unsavory job. He'd been trying again now for many days, and last night the red horse he had sold Kerrigan had proved the means of not letting Kerrigan be taken in camp.

They'd be coming in to play rough now. This was their final big chance!

Kerrigan lay in a thick brush clump atop a small ridge and waited, a cluster of green weeds tied to the top of his head. Kadoba had said that an Apache could flatten out within five feet of a White Eyes and not be seen, something that the officers and troopers of a hundred, a thousand patrols had at one time or another learned to their sorrow; and that bunch out there somewhere couldn't shoot a man when they couldn't see him.

Below dipped a sweeping view of a wide swale to his right, with well-worn game trails among the trees, the kind of trails riders traveling northward would instinctively follow. To his left was another, studded with a thick growth of evergreens.

Kerrigan continued to wait patiently, the words of Kadoba coming back to him: Time is nothing to the Indian. To the stalker of game or an enemy, an hour or a sun or a moon is nothing.

When the Indian hurries too much the game flees. When the Indian waits it comes to him.

The sun crept into view and showered the vast panorama with yellow light against green and brown. A lizard came out from behind a rock and regarded the strange object flat on its stomach. But impatience had begun to take its inevitable toll in worry. Those men had known during the night that he had not remained in camp, nor had he jumped on the red horse and risked their fire in a hard-running get-away; something Kerrigan now thought of with regret.

They probably had taken the horse and left Kerrigan to plod away on foot, certain he'd head straight for Pirtman. Hell, he thought impatiently, they probably hurried on to wait for me there.

He rose to his feet with a grunt of disgust at himself and tossed aside the head grass, in him the foolish feeling of a man who'd tried to play at being an Apache and, in so doing, had lost his only horse. Damned fool, he muttered, and went down into the small swale to his left. He threaded his way over the carpeting of dry mat and pine cones beneath the trees and climbed the opposite ridge, intending to work his way down its hogback under concealment of the thick brush.

He was still a bit disgusted with himself when he stepped noiselessly out on top and saw Stubb Holiday crouched behind a bush thirty feet distant, rifle in hand.

'Don't move, Holiday,' Lew Kerrigan warned, the repeater cocked and halfway to his shoulder.

Holiday came around slowly, rising at the same time, his chunky body stiff. The driver of Harrow's private coach spoke through bloodless lips.

'I gave Tom your message, Kerrigan,' he said, and exploded into lightning action.

With no time to raise rifles for aim, they shot simultaneously from hips, the twin reports rolling out across the country and then echoing back like thunderclaps presaging a storm. The .45-90 in Kerrigan's work-hardened hands jerked from recoil and, at the same time, Holiday's bullet cut a slash through the worn brim of the brown Stetson. Kerrigan leaped sidewise and snapped the weight of the weapon against the jacking lever to whip in a fresh cartridge, a right-handed action faster than working the lever.

But Stubb Holiday's rifle clattered against the rocks at his feet, making an odd, metallic sound. He threw up both hands and almost flung himself from the rocky perch, writhing from the shocking impact of 350 grains of lead fired into his body at close range.

The slope on the east side of the little hogback dropped down at an angle of about sixty degrees and Holiday fell feet down. He slid that way, on his face, hands outspread above him.

He came to a stop in a cloud of dust and a shower of small stones raining down from above. He lay with his round, almost cherubic face partly buried, yellow hair powdered, legs outspread, short arms still outflung.

Kerrigan watched stonily. A third man of Tom Harrow's was dead.

Three of them now, and he hadn't wanted to kill again after the Havers business. Holiday hadn't been with them in the beginning. He'd taken a message and a thin pistol back to Harrow in the hotel in Yuma and then driven the red coach on back to Pirtman and Dalyville.

Was Harrow now in the vicinity with still more men?

He had no time to conjecture that possibility. A quarter-mile away a bay horse with a frantically spurring rider bent low in the saddle broke at a dead run from a clump of timber. From another point, almost due south and below Kerrigan, at the point where the hogback descended into the ground, Jeb Donnelly's booming roar of warning came clearly. His big white horse, a color no hunter of men should have ridden, shot into view and headed toward the one spurred by the man wearing an odd-looking beaver hat with a low round crown.

'Git outa here!' the ex-marshal was bellowing to Hannifer LeRoy. 'That damned lobo circled around and got into us! He's killed Stubb Holiday up there in the brush on the ridge!'

Kerrigan snapped the repeater to his shoulder and lined up the sights on the man riding his white horse like a huge brown cockleburr stuck on its back. Four shots left. Many days previously, back there among the lava beds in the desert, it had been like this. Donnelly had half heard, half felt the waspish whistle of bullets from the .45-90 cutting the air past him and throwing up little sand spurts ahead of his running white horse.

Now he heard the slugs again, striking among the limbs his outflung arm was trying to ward off as he rode for cover and tried to protect his still partly bandaged jaw. But the four shots had missed their target, and Kerrigan