He smiled at her. “If all that happened,
you are quite right; he would be about due to arrive.
I suppose, being a Westerner, that the first thing
he would do in the village would be to hire a horse
to take him out here, and he would come galloping
yonder, where you see that white road tossing over
the hills.”
“And what if he does come?” she asked.
“Then,” said John Mark very gravely, “he
will indeed be in serious danger. It will be
the third time that he has threatened me. And
the third time—”
“You’ve prepared even for his coming here?”
she asked, the thought tightening the muscles of her
throat.
“When you have such a man as Ronicky Doone on
your hands,” he confessed, “you have to
be ready for anything. Yes, I have prepared.
If he comes he’ll come by the straightest route,
certain that we don’t expect him. He’ll
run blindly into the trap. Yonder—you
see where the two hills almost close over the road—yonder
is Shorty Kruger behind the rocks, waiting and watching.
A very good gunman is Shorty. Know him?”
“Yes,” she said, shuddering. “Of
course I know him.”
“But even suppose that the he passes Kruger—down
there in the hollow, where the road bends in toward
us, you can see Lefty himself. I wired him to
come, and there he is.”
“Lefty?” asked the girl, aghast.
“Lefty himself,” said John Mark.
“You see how much I respect Ronicky Doone’s
fighting properties? Yes, Lefty himself, the great,
the infallible Lefty!”
She turned her back on the white road which led from
the village and faced the sea.
“If we are down here long enough,” he
said, “I’ll have a little wharf built
inside that cove. You see? Then we can bring
up a motor boat and anchor it in there. Do you
know much about boats?”
“Almost nothing.”
“That’s true, but we’ll correct
it. Between you and me, if I had to choose between
a boat and a horse I don’t know which I should—”
Two sharp detonations cut off his words. While
he raised a startled hand for silence they remained
staring at one another, and the long, faint echoes
rolled across the hills.
“A revolver shot first, far off,” he said,
“and then a rifle shot. That metallic clang
always means a rifle shot.”
He turned, and she turned with him. Covering
their eyes from the white light of the sun they peered
at the distant road, where, as he had pointed out,
the two hills leaned together and left a narrow footing
between.
“The miracle has happened,” said John
Mark in a perfectly sober voice. “It is
Ronicky Doone!”
The Last Stand
At the same instant she saw what his keener eye had
discerned the moment before. A small trail of
dust was blowing down the road, just below the place
where the two hills leaned together. Under it
was the dimly discernible, dust-veiled form of a horseman
riding at full speed.
