CHAPTER I
AT HALFMOON FLAT
The road wound ever upward through pines and spruce and several varieties of oak. Some of the latter were straight, some sprawling, all massive. Now and then a break in the timber revealed wooded hills beyond green pasture lands, and other hills covered with dense growths of buckhorn and manzanita. Poison oak grew everywhere, and, at this time of year – early spring – was most prolific, most beautiful in its dark rich green, most poisonous.
Occasionally the lone horseman crossed a riotous stream, plunging down from the snow-topped Sierras in the far distance. Rail fences, for the most part in a tumbledown condition, paralleled the dirt road here and there.
At long intervals they passed tall, old-fashioned ranch houses, with their accompanying stables, deciduous orchards and still dormant vineyards, wandering turkeys and mud-incrusted pigs. An air of decay and haphazard ambition pervaded all these evidences of the dwelling places of men.
"Well, Poche," remarked Oliver Drew, "it's been a long, hard trip, but we're getting close to home." The man spoke the word "home" with a touch of bitterness.
The rangy bay saddler slanted his left ear back at Oliver Drew and quickened his walking-trot.
"No, no!" laughed Oliver, tightening the reins. "All the more reason we should take it easy today, old horse. Don't you ever tire?"
For an hour Poche climbed steadily. Now he topped the summit of the miniature mountain, and Oliver stopped him to gaze down fifteen hundred feet into the timbered cañon of the American River. Even the cow-pony seemed enthralled with the grandeur of the scene – the wooded hills climbing shelf by shelf to the faraway mist-hung mountains; the green river winding its serpentine course far below. Far up the river a gold dredger was at work, the low rumble of its machinery carried on the soft morning breeze.
Half an hour later Poche ambled briskly into the little town of Halfmoon Flat, snuggled away in the pines and spruces, sunflecked, indolent, content. It suited Oliver's mood, this lazy old-fashioned Halfmoon Flat, with its one shady "business" street, its false-front, one-story shops and stores, redolent still of the glamorous days of '49.
He drew up before a saloon to inquire after the road he should take out of town to reach his destination. The loungers about the door of the place all proved to be French- or Spanish-Basque sheep herders; and their agglutinative language was as a closed book to the traveler. So he dropped the reins from Poche's neck and entered the dark, low-ceiled bar-room, with its many decorations of dusty deer antlers on fly-specked walls.
All was strangely quiet within. There were no patrons, no bartender behind the black, stained bar. He saw this white-aproned personage, however, a fat, wide, sandy-haired man, standing framed by the rear door, his back toward the front. Through a dirty rear window Oliver saw men in the back yard – silent, motionless men, with faces intent on something of captivating interest, some silent, muscle-tensing event.
With awakened wonder he walked to the fat bartender's back and looked out over his shoulder. Strange indeed was the scene that was revealed.
Perhaps twenty men were in an unfenced portion of the lot behind the saloon. Some of them had been pitching horseshoes, for two stood with the iron semicircles still in hand. Every man there gazed with silent intensity at two central figures, who furnished the drama.
The first, a squat, dark, slit-eyed man of about twenty-five, lazed in a big Western saddle on a lean roan horse. His left spurred heel stood straight out at right angles to the direction in which his horse faced. He hung in the saddle by the bend in his right leg, the foot out of the stirrup, the motionless man facing to the right, a leering grin on his face, half whimsical, half sardonic. That he was a fatalist was evidenced by every line on his swarthy, hairless face; for he looked sneering indifference into the wavering muzzle of a Colt .45, in the hand of the other actor in the pantomime. His own Colt lay passive against his hip. His right forearm rested across his thigh, the hand far from the butt of the weapon. A cigarette drooped lazily from his grinning lips. Yet for all his indifferent calm, there was in his glittering, Mongolic eyes an eagle watchfulness that bespoke the fires of hatred within him.
The dismounted man who had the drop on him was of another type. Tall, angular, countrified, he personified the popular conception of a Connecticut yankee. He boiled with silent rage as he stood, with long body bent forward, threatening the other with his enormous gun. Despite the present superiority of his position, there was something of pathos in his lean, bronzed face, something of a nature downtrodden, of the worm suddenly turned.
For seconds that seemed like ages the two statuesque figures confronted each other. Men breathed in short inhalations, as if fearful of breaking the spell. Then the threatened man in the saddle puffed out a cloud of cigarette smoke, and drawled sarcastically:
