“Even East with you?” asked the marshal still dryly. “And do you agree with this infernal nonsense?”
“I think Andrew knows best,” said Anne gravely.
XI
The existence of Martindale was peaceful enough, but it contained citizens who habitually slept with only one eye closed. Some of these men were wakened in the middle of the night by a dull, muffled noise, as if a vast volume of tightly compressed air had suddenly expanded to its full limits. The sound was strange enough to bring them out of bed, and among them was Hal Dozier, buckling on his gun as he ran. Other figures scurried down the street, and presently an outcry guided him through the moonlight to the bank.
The door was open, and a dozen people were gathered in the room around the wrecked safe. The empty steel drawers were scattered here and there. The marshal cast one glance at it.
“Neat work,” he murmured. “If it weren’t for facts, I’d say Allister had a hand there. What’ve you found, boys?”
“This!” They threw a coat to him. “We found this in the corner.”
The marshal looked it over carelessly, then stiffened. “This!” he exclaimed chokingly.
“That’s Andy Lanning’s coat,” said Si Hulan importantly. “Murder will out, Hal. We’ve got your fine bird at last.”
“Go look in his shack,” said the marshal, sick at heart.
He could not understand it. More than once he had seen the impulse to break the law, dammed up in a man like water swelling in the banks of a stream, burst forth at the most unlooked-for moment. But Andrew Lanning had nothing in common with the criminally inclined lawbreaker. All the man’s impulses were for honesty, and the marshal knew that Anne Withero alone, in any case, should have been a sufficient motive to have held the boy to his self-imposed discipline of moral regeneration. He shook his head in sad perplexity.
Two or three in the crowd had run down the street toward the Lanning house. The marshal trotted across to his office, firing orders that sent the rest of the crowd in haste for saddles and horses. It was the newly installed telephone that brought the marshal to his office, but with his hand on the receiver, he was stopped by a shouting farther up the street. The outcries shot down on the far side of the town and then veered up the valley.
Hal Dozier ran to his door to be met there by half a dozen excited men.
“We found him sitting on his bunk, pretending he’d just heard the noise and was dressing to go out to see what was the matter. Cool, eh? Hulan shoved a gun under his nose, and he put up his hands and looked dazed. Good actor, he is. Then we told him what had happened … that we’d found his coat, and that we had him dead to rights. He looks over at a chair by the window, as if he’d just missed the coat that minute.
“‘That’s what they’ve done to get even,’ he says.
“We told him to lead us to the money first.
“‘All right,’” he said. “‘Right outside.’”
“Looked as though he was going along easy and peaceable. Then, as he turned for the door, he made a flick of his hand and knocked the gun out of Hulan’s hand and dived into the rest of us. He went through us like an eel through water. I got my hands on him, but he busted loose, strong as steel.
“He ran out, and we jumped our hosses and started after. Looked easy to run him down while he was on foot, but he let out a whistle, and that mare of his come tearing out of the shed and run alongside of him. Up he jumps on her back, as easy as you please, and away down the valley. Two or three of the boys headed after him.”
Dozier heard this with the pain slowly dying out of his face and a red rage coming in its place.
“Boys,” he said at the conclusion of the tale, “this is the end of the great Andrew Lanning. He’s taken the valley road with the fastest horse that ever ran in the mountains, but they’s one thing faster than horseflesh.” He tapped the shoulder of Si Hulan. “Hulan, you’ve got sense. Use it now. Get onto that telephone and ring Long Bridge. Tell them what’s happened. Tell them that I’m chasing Lanning with a half dozen men. I want Long Bridge to send me men if they please. Above all, I want good horses, and I want them ready and waiting before the morning, on the other side of the hills. They’ll have lots of time to get them together. I want horses more’n I want men. You make sure you tell them that. I’m going to run Lanning down with relays.
“After we get the fresh horses from Long Bridge, we’ll send a man with the played-out horses back to Long Bridge to wire on to Glenwood. He can tell them where the hunt is heading and where to meet us with a second relay. Sally is a great horse, but she can’t outlast three sets of horses. We’ll catch her this side of the Cumberlands. Now, the rest of you that want to follow, come along. We got to ride tonight as we never rode before, and the end of our trail is the end of Lanning.”
The marshal had spoken the truth when he said that there was no horse in the mountains that could pace with Sally, and it was never shown so clearly as on this night. With her master riding bareback and without bridle, guided only by the touch of his hand on one side of her neck or the other, she went down the only easy way out of Martindale, the long, narrow gorge that shot north into the mountains. She flew along well within her strength, but it was a dizzy pace for the three staunch little cow ponies that followed, and they dropped rapidly to the rear. Lanning became a flickering shape in the moon haze ahead, and finally that shape went out.
After that, they drew their horses back to a canter to wait for the main body of the pursuit to overtake them. They were courageous men enough, but three-to-one was not sufficient odds when one man was Andrew Lanning.
The clatter of many hoofs down the ravine announced the coming of the marshal. The thick of the posse overtook the forerunners on a rise in the floor of the valley, and they told briefly of what they had seen and done.
The marshal cursed briefly and effectively. They should have pressed boldly on, for the respite they gave Lanning would enable him to pause at the first ranch house for a saddle and bridle and, worst of all, a rifle. When the first house loomed out of the night, Dozier urged his men on ahead and dropped back himself to exchange a word with the people of the house. He was well enough mounted to overtake the rest.
He had hardly tapped at the door without dismounting, when the rancher appeared, revolver in hand.
“And who now?” he asked furiously.
“Dozier,” said the marshal. “Who’s passed this way?”
“Lanning and four men ahead of him.”
“Four men ahead of him! Who were they?”
“Don’t know. They didn’t stop, and they rode as if they was careless about what become of the horseflesh. But Lanning stopped long enough to grab my best saddle. Stuck me up with a gun and stood over me while I done the saddling for him, and then he got my rifle.”
The marshal waited to hear no more, but rode on with a groan. Mounted on Sally bareback, with a revolver strapped to his hip, Lanning was formidable enough, but with a rifle in addition and a comfortable saddle beneath him, the difficulties of the task were doubled and redoubled.
Who the four men might be, he had no idea. It was not common for four men to be riding furiously through the night and the mountains, but he had no time to juggle ideas. Lanning rode ahead, and Lanning was his goal.
When he regained the posse, Lanning had still not been sighted. The mountains on either side of the ravine now dwindled away and grew small, and it was possible that Andrew might have turned aside at almost any place. But something told Dozier that the fugitive would hold on due north. That was the easiest way, and in that direction Sally’s dazzling speed would most avail the rider. Accordingly the marshal urged his men to the fullest speed of their horses.