AMBUSHED
“DRAG” HARLAN
CHAPTER I
A DESERT RIDER
From out of the shimmering haze that veiled the mystic eastern space came a big black horse bearing a rider. Swinging wide, to avoid the feathery dust that lay at the base of a huge sand dune, the black horse loped, making no sound, and seeming to glide forward without effort. Like a somber, gigantic ghost the animal moved, heroic of mold, embodying the spirit of the country, seeming to bear the sinister message of the desert, the whispered promise of death, the lingering threat, the grim mockery of life, and the conviction of futility.
The black horse had come far. The glossy coat of him was thickly sprinkled with alkali dust, sifted upon him by the wind of his passage through the desert; his black muzzle was gray with it; ropes of it matted his mane, his forelock had become a gray-tinged wisp which he fretfully tossed; the dust had rimmed his eyes, causing them to loom large and wild; and as his rider pulled him to a halt on the western side of the sand dune—where both horse and rider would not be visible on the sky line—he drew a deep breath, shook his head vigorously, and blew a thin stream of dust from his nostrils.
With head and ears erect, his eyes flaming his undying courage and his contempt for distance and the burning heat that the midday sun poured upon him, he gazed westward, snorting long breaths into his eager lungs.
The rider sat motionless upon him—rigid and alert. His gaze also went into the west; and he blinked against the white glare of sun and distance, squinting his eyes and scanning the featureless waste with appraising glances.
In the breathless, dead calm of the desert there was no sound or movement. On all sides the vast gray waste stretched, a yawning inferno of dead, dry sand overhung with a brassy, cloudless sky in which swam the huge ball of molten silver that for ages had ruled that baked and shriveled land.
A score of miles westward—twoscore, perhaps—the shadowy peaks of some mountains loomed upward into the mystic haze, with purple bases melting into the horizon; southward were other mountains, equally distant and mysterious; northward—so far away that they blurred in the vision—were still other mountains. Intervening on all sides was the stretching, soundless, aching void of desolation, carrying to the rider its lurking threat of death, the promise of evil to come.
The man, however, seemed unperturbed. In his narrowed, squinting eyes as he watched the desert was a gleam of comprehension, of knowledge intimate and sympathetic. They glowed with the serene calm of confidence; and far back in them lurked a glint of grim mockery. It was as though they visualized the threatened dangers upon which they looked, answering the threat with contempt.
The man was tall. His slim waist was girded by a cartridge belt which was studded with leaden missiles for the rifle that reposed in the saddle holster, and for the two heavy pistols that sagged at his hips. A gray woolen shirt adorned his broad shoulders; a scarlet neckerchief at his throat which had covered his mouth as he rode was now drooping on his chest; and the big, wide-brimmed felt hat he wore was jammed far down over his forehead. The well-worn leather chaps that covered his legs could not conceal their sinewy strength, nor could the gauntleted leather gloves on his hands hide the capable size of them.
He was a fixture of this great waste of world in whose center he sat. He belonged to the country; he was as much a part of it as the somber mountains, the sun-baked sand, the dead lava, and the hardy, evil-looking cacti growth that raised its spined and mocking green above the arid stretch. He symbolized the spirit of the country—from the slicker that bulged at the cantle of the saddle behind him, to the capable gloved hands that were now resting on the pommel of the saddle—he represented the force which was destined to conquer the waste places.
For two days he had been fighting the desert; and in the serene calm of his eyes was the identical indomitability that had been in them when he had set forth. As he peered westward the strong lines around his mouth relaxed, his lips opened a trifle, and a mirthless smile wreathed them. He patted the shoulder of the black horse, and the dead dust ballooned from the animal’s coat and floated heavily downward.
“We’re about halfway, Purgatory,” he said aloud, his voice coming flat and expressionless in the dead, vacuum-like silence. He did not cease to peer westward nor to throw sharp glances north and south. He drew off a glove and pushed his hat back, using a pocket handkerchief to brush the dust from his face and running the fingers of the hand through his hair—thereby producing another ballooning dust cloud which splayed heavily downward.
“What’s botherin’ me is that shootin’,” he went on, still speaking to the black horse. “We sure enough heard it—didn’t we?” He laughed, again patting the black’s shoulder. “An’ you heard it first—as usual—with me trailin’ along about half a second behind. But we sure heard ’em, eh?”
The black horse whinnied lowly, whereupon the rider dismounted, and stretched himself.
From a water-bag at the cantle of the saddle he poured water into his big hat, watching sympathetically while the big horse drank. Some few drops that still remained in the hat after the horse had finished he playfully shook on the animal’s head, smiling widely at the whinny of delight that greeted the action. He merely wet his own lips from the water-bag. Then for an instant, after replacing the bag, he stood at the black’s shoulder, his face serious.
“We’ll hit the Kelso water-hole
