Mac saw the unveiled hate in Campbell's eyes as he slouched silently out after the others, saw Bissett's eyes dwell burningly on the man. Bad blood there. Campbell feared Bissett less than the others, and was therefore the focus of the wolfish chief's suspicion.
As the men left the building, Bissett picked up a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked it.
"I don't know what your game is," he said between his teeth. "You must have a gang following you, or something. But whatever happens, I aim to get you!"
Mac appeared helpless, unarmed, his hands bound; but a wolf-like suspicion of appearances was at once Bissett's strength and his weakness.
"You're no outlaw," he snarled. "You didn't come here to join my gang. You knew I'd skin you alive, or stake you out on an ant-bed. What are you up to?"
Big Mac laughed in his face. A man who followed the herds up the long trail year after year learned to judge men as well as animals. Bissett was reacting exactly as Mac had expected him to. The Texan was playing that knowledge blindly, waiting for some kind of a break. A desperate game, but he was used to games where the Devil dealt for deadly stakes.
"You ain't got a very big gang, Bissett," he said.
"They're not all here," rapped the outlaw. "Some are out on a raid, toward the Border. Never mind. What's your game? If you talk, your finish will be easier."
Mac glanced again at Judith Ellis, cowering in a corner. The stark terror in her wide eyes hurt him. To this girl, unused to violence, her experience was like a nightmare.
"My game, Bissett?" asked Big Mac coolly. "What could it be? Nobody could get past Wilson in the tunnel, could they? Nobody could climb the cliffs, could they? What good would it do if I did have a gang followin' me, like you think?"
"You wouldn't come here without an ace in the hole," Bissett all but whispered.
"What about your own men?" Big Mac played his ace.
Bissett blanched. His suspicions crystalized, for the moment—suspisions of Big Mac's coming, suspicions of his own men, which forever gnawed at his brain. His eyes, glaring at Mac over the shotgun's black muzzles, were tinged with madness.
"You're trapped, Bissett!" jeered Big Mac, playing his hand from minute to minute, for whatever it might be worth. "Your own men have sold you out! For the loot you took from them and hid—"
And at that moment the break came. Outside Campbell had turned back toward the adobe, and Mac saw him and yelled: "Campbell! Help!" Bissett whirled like a flash, shifting the shotgun to cover his amazed follower. It was an instinctive movement. Even so he would not have pulled the triggers—would have seen through Mac's flimsy scheme, had he had time to think.
But Mac saw and took his desperate chance. He hurled himself headlong against Bissett, and at the impact the shotgun hammers, hung on hair-triggers, fell to the involuntary, convulsive jerk of Bissett's fingers. Both barrels exploded as Bissett went down under Mac's hurtling body, and buckshot blasted Stark Campbell's skull. He died on his feet without knowing why. That was chance; Mac did not, could not have planned his death.
As they went down together, Mac drove his knee savagely into Bissett's belly and rolled clear as the outlaw doubled in gasping agony. Mac heaved up on his feet somehow, roaring: "His knife, quick! Cut these cords!"
The impact of his voice jolted the terrified girl into action. She sprang blindly forward, snatched the knife from Bissett's boot, and sawed at the cords that held Mac's wrists, slicing skin as well as hemp. It had all happened in a stunning instant. Outside, Garrison and Emmett were running toward the house with guns in their hands. Some of the strands parted under the blade, and Mac snapped the others. He stooped and dragged Bissett to his feet. The half-senseless outlaw was clawing dazedly at his pistols. Mac jerked them from him and swung the limp frame around before him.
"Tell your men to get back!" he snarled, jamming a muzzle hard in Bissett's back. "They'll obey you! Tell 'em, quick!"
But the order was never given. The men outside did not know what had happened in the hut. They had only seen Campbell blasted down by a shot through the doorway, and they thought their leader was turning against them. Emmett caught a glimpse of Bissett through the door and fired. Mac felt Bissett's body jerk convulsively in his hands. The bullet had drilled through the outlaw's head.
Mac threw the corpse aside, and fired from the hip. Emmett, struck in the mouth, went down heavily on his back. Garrison, as he saw Emmett fall and Mac loom in the doorway, began to fall back, firing as he went. He was making for the protection of the corral. Once there, he might make a long fight of it. Wilson would be coming up from the tunnel. If it came to a siege, the girl would be endangered by the raking lead.
Mac sprang recklessly into the open, shooting two-handed. He felt hot lead rip through his shirt, burn the skin on his ribs. Garrison snarled, whirled, sprang for the wall. In mid-stride he staggered drunkenly, hard hit. He wheeled and started shooting again, even as he crumpled, holding his sixshooter in both hands. Hit again and yet again, he kept on pulling the trigger, his bullets knocking up the dirt in front of Big Mac's boots. His pistol snapped on an empty chamber before he lurched to the ground and lay still, in a spreading red puddle.
Mac heard Judith scream, and simultaneously came a report behind him and the impact of a blow that knocked him staggering. He came about in a drunken semi-circle, glimpsing Wilson's black-bearded face. The outlaw was straddling the wall, preparing to leap down inside before he fired again. Mac's last bullet broke his neck and dropped him at the foot of the wall, flopping for a dozen seconds like a beheaded chicken.
In the deafening silence that followed the roar of the guns, Mac turned back toward the hut, blood streaming down his shirt. The pale girl cowered in the door, still uncertain as to her fate. His first words reassured her.
"Don't be scairt, Miss. I come to take you back to your dad."
Then she was clinging to him, weeping in hysterical relief.
"Oh, you're hurt! You're bleeding!"
"Just a slug in my shoulder," he grunted, self-conscious. "Ain't nothin'."
"Let me dress it," she begged, and he followed her into the hut. She avoided looking at Bissett, sprawling in a red pool, as she bound up Mac's shoulder with strips torn from her dress, fumbling and clumsily.
"I—I misjudged you," she faltered. "I'm sorry. The Kid—he was a beast—my father—" She choked on the words.
"Your dad's all right," he assured her. "Just drilled through the shoulder, like me. Some rotten shootin' in these parts. Couple of horses saddled at the mouth of the tunnel. Go on out there and wait for me."
After she had gone, he began a hasty search. And presently he desisted, swearing. Neither the pockets of the dead chief nor a hasty ransacking of the rooms rewarded him with what he sought. The money taken from Ellis had gone to join the rest of Bissett's loot, in whatever crypt he had hidden it. Surely he had planned, some day, a flight to some other continent with his plunder. But whatever it was, it was well hidden; a man might hunt it for years, in vain. And Big Mac had not time for hunting. Bissett might have been lying when he said he had other men, out on a raid, but with the girl, Mac could not take the chance of being caught by returning outlaws. He hurried from the hut.
The girl had already mounted Campbell's roan. A few minutes later they were riding together down the outer canyon.
"I found that thousand Checotah took off your dad," he announced, handing her a wad of dingy greenbacks. "Next time don't tell nobody about it."
"You're a guardian angel," she said faintly. "It was all we had—we'd have starved without it—I don't know how I can ever thank you—"
"Aw, shucks, don't try!"
His shoulder hurt, but another, deeper sting was gone, and Big Mac grinned contentedly, even as he slapped his flat pocket, and reflected on the dusty miles back to the Lazy K in Texas where the job he had quit still awaited him; after all, he reckoned he could get along another year without a vacation.