The Sheriff of Badger: A Tale of the Southwest BorderlandPattullo, George
General
The Sheriff of Badger: A Tale of the Southwest Borderland
Pattullo, George
Sheriffs -- Fiction; Western stories
Steve Moffatt in Lost Springs mountains. Heading for the Jug.
Killed Pablo Jiminez to-day while running off bunch of horses.
Horne and I offer five hundred reward for him.
It was because of this wire that the sheriff rode up a canon in Lost
Springs on a cool October afternoon. The wind played through the
live-oaks and scrub-cedar and went whistling upward to be lost among the
solemn peaks. Some cattle were watering at a shallow hole. A ground
squirrel scurried across his front. From all about came the soft,
mournful cooing of wild doves.
All morning he had been climbing. Sometimes he traveled three miles to
gain a mile of distance; winding upward to high mesas, skirting them and
descending into another canon nearer the summits toward which Moffatt
was heading.
Presently he was confronted by a wall of rock. It was a sheer thirty
feet in height and water oozed down its face into a small pool. There
seemed no way out and Lafe scanned the cliffs in search of the trail.
While he lolled thus in the saddle, there came a shot from above his
head and his horse winced. Without hesitation he fell to the ground and
scrambled on hands and knees to the shelter of a tree.
"I near got you that time, Johnson," a clear voice called to him.
It came from behind the crags above the pool. Then he thought he heard
the ring of a horse's shoe on stone, but he was too cautious to expose
himself at once. For fully an hour he waited, listening for evidence of
his enemy and occasionally sighting along the barrel of his 30-30. Then,
persuaded Moffatt had seized the chance to increase his lead, he
remounted and continued the pursuit. A wale along his mount's shoulder
was the only injury.
"He's scared, or he could have got me then," said Lafe, examining this
with much satisfaction.
In late afternoon he threaded a broad canon and entered on a stretch of
brakes, perhaps six miles in length and one in width. The top of its
numberless bald hills overlooked the canon's sides. The track he
followed ran along a narrow plateau. At intervals, chalky cliffs dropped
sheer away on his right hand to a depth of two hundred feet, and there
were gaping cavities into which a mountain could have been dumped,
resembling in their formation the craters of extinct volcanoes. Giant
fissures showed in the mounds of salmon-colored clay, and, close beside
him, a yawning void threatened, whence a hundred thousand tons of shale
had slid. Of vegetation there was none here, save a tangle of
prickly-pear at the mouth of a gulch.
"There he goes now," said the sheriff, pricking his horse.
Moffatt was nearly a mile ahead and moving leisurely, as though he had
no fear. He topped a rise and waved his hand at Johnson before dipping
out of sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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