The Fighting Four by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand [Brand, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4989-2
Publisher: Prologue Books
Published: 1960-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

XIV — HAND TO HAND

WAYLAND got out his revolver. He found his fingers gripping it so hard that the whole gun shook in his grasp.

First he grabbed the burro and pulled it back a little farther inside the trees, for through them he could see that the stranger was amusing himself by putting his mustang through its paces, racing it back and forth, taking the air, and riding cruelly with whip and spur to get the most out of the gelding.

When Wayland saw the face of the man, he was sure that the stranger could not have been a member of the bank-robbing gang. He looked too much like a little rat; all the features ran out to a point. The eyes were set in close to the long nose. Those eyes glittered and shone uneasily. To be sure, the fellow looked like a beast of prey, but he seemed too small, too weak, too sneaking to have associated with such a man as Phil Bray.

So Wayland held his hand and watched the other put the mustang through figure eights, and every time the man rode toward him, Wayland was sure that it was not the fellow he wanted, and every time the back of the man was turned, Wayland was confident that this was the fugitive he had followed before.

In the midst of the evolutions of the horse, a rabbit jumped up from a big tuft of grass and started kiting across the green open ground. At this, the stranger jerked his mustang to a halt so suddenly that it almost squatted on the ground, and, while it was still down, before it could rise, the man snatched out a revolver and fired.

The rabbit landed against the stump of a tree with a heavy thump and fell back to the ground, dead, and blurred over with red.

The mind of Wayland changed again. He had thought the little man too inoffensive to be a bank robber; now he felt that the stranger was certainly too formidable with guns to be tackled by a novice like himself.

He watched his quarry dismount and pick up the rabbit in one hand. Wayland, in the meantime, slipped down the edge of the woods and came suddenly out behind the other. He was not five yards away as he said:

“Hands up!”

The bleeding rabbit dropped out of the hand of the stranger. His whole body wilted. He sagged at the knees. Then, by degrees, his head jerked around until he could look over his shoulder at Wayland.

“Up with them!” shouted. Wayland, relief at his first step of success putting strength into his voice, strength into his body and his spirit. “I don’t want to shoot you through the back, but — get those hands up!”

He came slowly closer as he spoke. He was not two strides away by this time, and now the hands of the stranger rose gradually, unevenly, to a level with his head.

At the same time he turned little by little, until he was facing Wayland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.