Big Mac laughed. "Myself!"
"Are you crazy?" There was a snarl in the voice.
"No. Take me to Bissett. If he don't thank you, he'll be crazy."
"Well, he ain't!" growled the bushwhacker. "Get off yore horse! Now unbuckle yore gun-belt and let 'er drop. Now step back away from it—further back, blast you! Keep yore hands up. I got a .45-70 trained on yore heart all the time."
Big Mac did exactly as he was told. He was standing there, unarmed, his hands in the air, when the man came from behind the rocks, a tall man, who walked with the springy tread of a cougar. Mac knew him instantly.
"Stark Campbell!" he said softly. "So this is why they never got you!"
"And they never will, neither!" retorted the outlaw with an oath. "They can't git to us, up here in the Guadalupes. But a man has to pay high to git in." Bitter anger vibrated in his voice as he said that. "What you done, that you want in?"
"Never mind that. You just lead me to Bissett."
"I'll have to take you to the hang-out, if you see him," said Campbell. "He just taken a girl there. He don't let nobody see the hang-out and live, unless they're in his gang. If he don't let you join us, he'll kill you. You can go back, though, if you want to, now. I won't stop you. You ain't no law."
"I want to see Bissett," replied the Texan. Campbell shrugged his shoulders and drew a pistol, laying aside the rifle. He ordered Big Mac to turn around and put his hands behind him, and the outlaw then bound his wrists—awkwardly, with one hand, for he kept the pistol muzzle jammed in Mac's back with the other, but when the Texan's hands were partly confined, he completed the job with both hands. Then Campbell led his own horse, a rangy roan, from behind the rocks, and hung Mac's gun-belt over the roan's saddle-horn.
"Git on yore horse," he growled. "I'll help you up."
They started on, Campbell leading the big bay. For three or four miles they threaded a precarious path through as wild and broken a country as Big Mac had ever seen, until they entered a steep-walled canyon which, apparently, came to a blind in ahead of them, as the walls pinched together. But as they neared it Big Mac saw a cleft in the angle, fifty feet above the canyon floor, and reached by a narrow, winding trail. A man hailed them from above.
"It's me, Campbell!" shouted his captor, and a growling voice bade them advance. "This is the only way into our hang-out," said Campbell. "You see how much chance a posse'd have of gittin' in, even if they found it. One man with plenty of shells could hold that cleft agen a army."
They went up the trail, single file. The horses crowded against the wall, fearful of the narrow footing. Mac knew that Campbell spoke the truth when he said no posse could charge up that trail, raked by fire from above.
As they entered the cleft a black-whiskered man rose from behind a ledge of rock and glared suspiciously at them.
"All right, Wilson. I'm takin' this fellow to Bissett."
"Ain't that Big Mac?" asked Wilson, in whom Mac recognized another "lost outlaw." "What's he got for Bissett? You searched him?"
"You know damn' well I ain't, only for guns," snarled Campbell. "You know the rule, well as me. Nobody takes money off 'em except Bissett." He spat. "Come on, Mac. If you got somethin' Bissett'll accept, I'll take yore ropes off. If you ain't, you won't be carin' anyway, not with a bullet through yore head."
The cleft was like a tunnel in the rock. It ran for forty feet and then widened out into a space that was like a continuation of the canyon they had left. It formed a bowl, its floor higher than the floor of the canyon outside by fifty feet, walled by unbroken cliffs three hundred feet high, and apparently unscalable. Campbell confirmed this.
"Can't nobody git at us from them cliffs," he snarled. "They're steep outside as inside. It's jest like somebody scooped a holler in the middle of a rock mesa. The holler's this bowl. Gwan. Git down."
Big Mac managed it, with his hands bound, and Campbell left the horses standing in the shade of the wall, reins hanging. He drove Big Mac before him toward the adobe hut that stood in the middle of the bowl, surrounded by a square rock wall, breast-high to a tall man.
"Last line of defense, Bissett says," growled Campbell. "Even if a posse was to git into the bowl—which ain't possible—we could fight 'em off indefinite behind that wall. There's a spring inside the stockade, and we got provisions and ca'tridges enough for a year."
The renegade marshal had always been a master of strategy. Big Mac did not believe the outlaw hangout would ever fall by a direct attack, regardless of the numbers assailing it—if it were ever discovered by the lawmen.
A man Campbell addressed as Garrison came from the corral, adjoining the wall, where a dozen horses grazed, and another met them at the heavy plank gate, built to turn bullets.
"Why, hell!" ejaculated the latter. "That's Big Mac! Where'd you catch him?"
"He rode in with a flag of truce, Emmett," answered Campbell. "Bissett in the shack?"
"Yeah; with the girl," grunted Emmett. "By God, I dunno what to make of this!"
Evidently Emmett knew something of Bissett's former life. The three men followed Mac as he strode across the yard toward the hut. Stark Campbell, John Garrison, Red Emmett; Wolf Wilson, back there at the tunnel. He had indeed come into the last haunt of the hunted, last retreat of these, the most desperate of all the Border renegades, to whom all other doors were barred, against whom the hands of all men were raised. Only in this lost canyon of the Guadalupes could they find sanctuary—the refuge of the wolf's lair, for which they had forfeited all their blood-tinged gains.
Theirs could be only a wolf-pack alliance. Bissett dominated them by virtue of keener wits and swifter gun-hand. They hated him for the brutal avarice that stripped from them their last shred of plunder, in return for a chance of bare life; but they feared him too, and recognized his superiority, knew that without his leadership the pack must perish, despite all natural advantages.
Campbell pushed the door open. As Big Mac loomed in the doorway, the man in the room turned with the blurring speed of a wolf, his hand streaking to an ivory-handled gun even in the instant it took him to see the stranger was a captive, with his hands bound behind him.
"You!" It was the ripping snarl of a timber wolf. Bissett was as tall as Big Mac, but not so heavy. He was wiry, rangy; yellow mustaches drooped below a mouth thin as a knife gash. His pale eyes glittered with an icy, blood-chilling fire.
"What the hell!" He seemed stunned with surprize. Big Mac looked past him to the girl who cringed in the corner, her eyes wide with terror. There was no hope in them when they met his. To her he was but another beast of prey.
Big Mac grinned at Bissett, without mirth.
"Come to join your gang, Garth," he said calmly. "Heard you had to have a gift. Well, I'm it! I've heard you'd bid high for my hide!"
He was gambling on his knowledge of Bissett's nature—on the chance that the outlaw would not instantly shoot him down. They faced each other, the big dark Texan smiling, a trifle grimly, but calm; Bissett snarling, tense, suspicious as a wolf.
"Where'd you get him, Campbell?" he snapped.
"He come in under a flag of truce," growled Campbell. "Same as any man that wants to join up with us. Said you'd be glad to see him."
Bissett turned on Mac, his eyes shining like a wolf's that scents a trap. "Why did you come here?" he ripped out. "You're no fool. You wouldn't put yourself in my power unless you had a damned good reason—some edge—" He whirled on his men, in a frenzy of suspicion.
"Get out to the wall, damn you! Watch the cliffs! Watch everything! This devil wouldn't come in here alone unless he had something up his sleeve—"
"Well, I—" began Campbell, but Bissett's voice cut his sullen drawl like the slash of a whip.
"Shut up, damn you! Get out there! I do the thinking for the gang!"