“You can’t always tell by looks,” said one of the men. “Now, you two fellows get started out of here. I don’t like the way you horned in on this party.”
“Don’t you, now?” said Pete.
The other man said in a low voice, “Make them give up their guns, Charlie. We can’t let them go out in the desert with their guns. They might ambush us.”
“Yes,” said Charlie. “You fellows will have to leave your guns here.”
“Now I’ll tell one,” I told him.
I saw grinning devils appear at the corners of Pete’s mouth, caught the glint of his blue eyes as he reached slowly to his gun, pulled it out of the holster and looked at it almost meditatively.
“You don’t want me to give this gun up?” he asked.
“That’s what we want,” said Charlie.
“This gun,” said Pete, “is a funny gun. It goes off accidentally, every once in a while.”
“Pete!” I cautioned him.
The warning came too late. There was a spurt of flame from Pete’s gun. I heard the impact of the heavy bullet as it struck the stock of the rifle in the hands of the man nearest Pete.
There was nothing to do but back his play, and so I made what speed I could snaking my six-gun from its holster.
The two men were taken completely by surprise. They had thought that their rifles were sufficient to command the situation. As a matter of fact, at close quarters a rifle is very likely to prove a cumbersome weapon, particularly when a man tries to take in too much territory with it.
“Drop it!” I told the man.
His eyes looked into the barrel of my Colt, and there was a minute when I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. Then the gun thudded to the sand. The bullet had jerked the other’s gun from his grasp.
“All right, Bob,” said Pete, “they’ll get their hands in the air, and you can unbuckle the belts and let their six-guns slip off.”
“First, let’s make sure they’ve got their hands in the air,” I told him.
Two pairs of hands came up slowly.
“You boys are making the mistake of your lives,” said Charlie. “You’re going to find yourselves in the pen for this.”
“Please don’t,” the girl pled with us. “I’ll go with them. It’s inevitable.”
“No,” said Pete, “I don’t like their manners — and I always play my hunches.”
I unbuckled the guns, let them drop to the ground.
“We’re officers,” Charlie started to explain, “and you—”
“Sure,” said Pete. “I knew you were officers as soon as I saw you. You’ve got that look about you — and your manners are so rotten. Now turn around and start walking back the way you came. I suppose you’ve got an automobile staked out around the edge of the slope, haven’t you?”
They didn’t say anything.
Pete shook his head. “Rotten manners,” he said. “You don’t answer courteous questions.”
“Please!” said the girl. “Don’t do this for me. He’s right in what he says. You’re going to get into serious trouble.”
“Miss,” said Pete, “getting into serious trouble is something that I’m accustomed to. I get into a new kind of trouble every day. Come on you two, let’s march.”
We turned them around, but it took a prod with the muzzle of my six-gun to get Charlie started. After they had started they moved along doggedly and steadily.
We rounded the slope and found their car parked in a little draw. Pete’s gun pointed the road to town.
“I’m going to be standing here,” he said, “until that car is just a little black spot in the middle of a dust cloud, ’way over on the desert there. And if you should hesitate or turn around and start back, something tells me that you’ll have tire trouble right away.”
The men didn’t say a word. They climbed into the automobile. The starting motor whirred, the engine responded, and the car crept along the sandy wash, struck the harder road, and rattled into speed. Pete and I stood there until the machine had vanished in the distance, leaving behind it nothing but a wisp of dust.
Pete looked at me and grinned. “Sore, Bob?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “I had to back your play, but I wish you’d use a little discretion sometimes.”
“Discretion, hell!” he said. “There’s no fun in discretion. Let’s go back and talk with the woman. You can figure it out for yourself, Bob. She’s okay. Those men were on the wrong track, that’s all.”
I wasn’t so certain, but I holstered my weapon. We started trudging back through the sand. When we rounded the edge of the slope and could look up the cañon, I could see dust settling in the afternoon sunlight.
“Two dust clouds,” I told him grimly.
Sure enough, the camp was still there; but the automobile, the young woman, and the police dog had gone.
Pete looked at me, and his face was ludicrous in its crestfallen surprise. “Hell!” he said.
“It’s going to take them about two hours to get to town,” I said. “Then they’ll get some more guns, a couple of others to help them, and start back. The next question is, where can we be in two hours?”
Pete’s eyes started to twinkle once more. “I know a swell bunch of country where there’s an old cabin,” he said, “and I don’t think the burros would leave much of a trail getting up there.”
“How far can we be on that trail in two hours?” I wanted to know.
“We can be pretty near there.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Let’s go.”
We climbed back up to the burros, got the string lined up, and started plodding up the slope toward the old cabin that Pete knew about.
After about an hour the country changed, and we began to run into stunted cedar, glimpsing pines up on the high slopes of the mountain country beyond. Another half-hour, and we were well up in the mountains, from where we could look back over the desert.
I paused and pointed back toward the place where I knew the little desert town was situated. “Pete,” I said, “you’ve got those binoculars. Take a look and see if you can see anything that looks like pursuit.”
He was focusing the binoculars on the road when I heard a peculiar throbbing sound which grew in volume. I raised my eyes and picked out a little speck against the blue sky — a speck that might have been a buzzard, except that it was moving forward across the sky with steady purpose.
I tapped Pete on the shoulder and pointed with my finger. He raised the binoculars, looked for a minute, and then twisted his face into a grimace.
“They’ll pick her up with that,” I said, “before she’s gone thirty miles.”
“There’s lots of places she could go inside of thirty miles,” Pete said.
“Not with that automobile,” I told him, “and not in this country.”
Pete shrugged his shoulders. “How the hell did we know they were going to get an airplane to chase her with?”
“How the hell did I know that you were going to start gun play?” I told him, with some irritation in my voice.
“You should have been able to tell that,” said Pete, “by looking at the woman. She was too pretty.”
I sighed. “Well,” I told him, “I always wanted to know what it felt like to be a fugitive from justice.”
“Hell!” said Pete from the depths of his experience. “There ain’t no novelty to it — not after the first time or two. It feels just like anything else.”
I didn’t say anything more. I merely watched the airplane as it diminished in the distance. I was still looking at it when I saw two other planes coming from the west. The plane I had seen first tilted from side to side, making signaling motions, and the other two planes swung in behind it. I focused the binoculars on them and saw them fly in formation, until suddenly they started down toward the desert.