Gunsight Pass by William MacLeod Raine

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The man with the ore team gave information. It struck Dave that he had
run into a blind alley.

"If you're after a job, I reckon you can find one at some of the mines.
They're needin' hands," the teamster added.

Perhaps this was the best immediate solution of the problem. The puncher
nodded farewell and rode down into the town.

He left Chiquito at a livery barn, after having personally fed and
watered the pinto, and went himself to a hotel. Here he registered, not
under his own name, ate breakfast, and lay down for a few hours' sleep.
When he awakened he wrote a note with the stub of a pencil to Bob Hart.
It read:

Well, Bob, I done got Chiquito back though it sure looked like I wasn't
going to but you never can tell and as old Buck Byington says its a hell
of a long road without no bend in it and which you can bet your boots the
old alkali is right at that. Well I found the little pie-eater in Denver
O K but so gaunt he wont hardly throw a shadow and what can you expect
of scalawags like Miller and Doble who don't know how to treat a horse.
Well I run Chiquito off right under their noses and we had a little gun
play and made my getaway and I reckon I will stay a spell and work here.
Well good luck to all the boys till I see them again in the sweet by and
by.

Dave

P.S. Get this money order cashed old-timer and pay the boys what I
borrowed when we hit the trail after Miller and Doble. I lit out to
sudden to settle. Five to Steve and five to Buck. Well so long.

Dave

The puncher went to the post-office, got a money order, and mailed the
letter, after which he returned to the hotel. He intended to eat dinner
and then look for work.

Three or four men were standing on the steps of the hotel talking with
the proprietor. Dave was quite close before the Boniface saw him.

"That's him," the hotel-keeper said in an excited whisper.

A brown-faced man without a coat turned quickly and looked at Sanders. He
wore a belt with cartridges and a revolver.

"What's your name?" he demanded.

Dave knew at once this man was an officer of the law. He knew, too, the
futility of trying to escape under the pseudonym he had written on the
register.

"Sanders--Dave Sanders."

"I want you."

"So? Who are you?"

"Sheriff of the county."

"Whadjawant me for?"

"Murder."

Dave gasped. His heart beat fast with a prescience of impending disaster.
"Murder," he repeated dully.

"You're charged with the murder of George Doble last night in Denver."

The boy stared at him with horror-stricken eyes. "Doble? My God, did I
kill him?" He clutched at a porch post to steady himself. The hills were
sliding queerly up into the sky.

CHAPTER XIV

TEN YEARS

All the way back to Denver, while the train ran down through the narrow,
crooked canon, Dave's mind dwelt in a penumbra of horror. It was
impossible he could have killed Doble, he kept telling himself. He had
fired back into the night without aim. He had not even tried to hit the
men who were shooting at him. It must be some ghastly joke.

None the less he knew by the dull ache in his heart that this awful thing
had fastened on him and that he would have to pay the penalty. He had
killed a man, snuffed out his life wantonly as a result of taking the
law into his own hands. The knowledge of what he had done shook him to
the soul.

It remained with him, in the background of his mind, up to and through
his trial. What shook his nerve was the fact that he had taken a life,
not the certainty of the punishment that must follow.

West called to see him at the jail, and to the cattleman Dave told the
story exactly as it had happened. The owner of the Fifty-Four Quarter
Circle walked up and down the cell rumpling his hair.

"Boy, why didn't you let on to me what you was figurin' on pullin' off?
I knew you was some bull-haided, but I thought you had a lick o' sense
left."

"Wisht I had," said Dave miserably.

"Well, what's done's done. No use cryin' over the bust-up. We'd better
fix up whatever's left from the smash. First off, we'll get a lawyer, I
reckon."

"I gotta li'l' money left--twenty-six dollars," spoke up Dave timidly.
"Maybe that's all he'll want."

West smiled at this babe in the woods. "It'll last as long as a snowball
in you-know-where if he's like some lawyers I've met up with."

It did not take the lawyer whom West engaged long to decide on the line
the defense must take. "We'll show that Miller and Doble were crooks and
that they had wronged Sanders. That will count a lot with a jury," he
told West. "We'll admit the killing and claim self-defense."

The day before the trial Dave was sitting in his cell cheerlessly reading
a newspaper when visitors were announced. At sight of Emerson Crawford
and Bob Hart he choked in his throat. Tears brimmed in his eyes. Nobody
could have been kinder to him than West had been, but these were home
folks. He had known them many years. Their kindness in coming melted his
heart.

He gripped their hands, but found himself unable to say anything in
answer to their greetings. He was afraid to trust his voice, and he
was ashamed of his emotion.

"The boys are for you strong, Dave. We all figure you done right. Steve
he says he wouldn't worry none if you'd got Miller too," Bob breezed on.

"Tha's no way to talk, son," reproved Crawford. "It's bad enough right
as it is without you boys wantin' it any worse. But don't you get
downhearted, Dave. We're allowin' to stand by you to a finish. It ain't
as if you'd got a good man. Doble was a mean-hearted scoundrel if ever
I met up with one. He's no loss to society. We're goin' to show the jury
that too."

They did. By the time Crawford, Hart, and a pair of victims who had been
trapped by the sharpers had testified about Miller and Doble, these
worthies had no shred of reputation left with the jury. It was shown
that they had robbed the defendant of the horse he had trained and that
he had gone to a lawyer and found no legal redress within his means.

But Dave was unable to prove self-defense. Miller stuck doggedly to his
story. The cowpuncher had fired the first shot. He had continued to fire,
though he must have seen Doble sink to the ground immediately. Moreover,
the testimony of the doctor showed that the fatal shot had taken effect
at close range.

Just prior to this time there had been an unusual number of killings in
Denver. The newspapers had stirred up a public sentiment for stricter
enforcement of law. They had claimed that both judges and juries were too
easy on the gunmen who committed these crimes. Now they asked if this
cowboy killer was going to be allowed to escape. Dave was tried when this
wave of feeling was at its height and he was a victim of it.

The jury found him guilty of murder in the second degree. The judge
sentenced him to ten years in the penitentiary.

When Bob Hart came to say good-bye before Dave was removed to Canon City,
the young range-rider almost broke down. He was greatly distressed at the
misfortune that had befallen his friend.

"We're gonna stay with this, Dave. You know Crawford. He goes through
when he starts. Soon as there's a chance we'll hit the Governor for a
pardon. It's a damn shame, old pal. Tha's what it is."

Dave nodded. A lump in his throat interfered with speech.

"The ol' man lent me money to buy Chiquito, and I'm gonna keep the pinto
till you get out. That'll help pay yore lawyer," continued Bob. "One
thing more. You're not the only one that's liable to be sent up.
Miller's on the way back to Malapi. If he don't get a term for
hawss-stealin', I'm a liar. We got a dead open-and-shut case against
him."

The guard who was to take Dave to the penitentiary bustled in cheerfully.
"All right, boys. If you're ready we'll be movin' down to the depot."

The friends shook hands again.

CHAPTER XV

IN DENVER

The warden handed him a ticket back to Denver, and with it a stereotyped
little lecture of platitudes.

"Your future lies before you to be made or marred by yourself, Sanders.
You owe it to the Governor who has granted this parole and to the good
friends who have worked so hard for it that you be honest and industrious
and temperate. If you do this the world will in time forget your past
mistakes and give you the right hand of fellowship, as I do now."

The paroled man took the fat hand proffered him because he knew the
warden was a sincere humanitarian. He meant exactly what he said. Perhaps
he could not help the touch of condescension. But patronage, no matter
how kindly meant, was one thing this tall, straight convict would not
stand. He was quite civil, but the hard, cynical eyes made the warden
uncomfortable. Once or twice before he had known prisoners like this,
quiet, silent men who were never insolent, but whose eyes told him that
the iron had seared their souls.

The voice of the warden dropped briskly to business. "Seen the
bookkeeper? Everything all right, I suppose."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Well, wish you luck."

"Thanks."

The convict turned away, grave, unsmiling.

The prison officer's eyes followed him a little wistfully. His function,
as he understood it, was to win these men back to fitness for service to
the society which had shut them up for their misdeeds. They were not
wild beasts. They were human beings who had made a misstep. Sometimes he
had been able to influence men strongly, but he felt that it had not been
true of this puncher from the cow country.

Sanders walked slowly out of the office and through the door in the wall
that led back to life. He was free. To-morrow was his. All the to-morrows
of all the years of his life were waiting for him. But the fact stirred
in him no emotion. As he stood in the dry Colorado sunshine his heart was
quite dead.

In the earlier days of his imprisonment it had not been so. He had
dreamed often of this hour. At night, in the darkness of his cell,
imagination had projected picture after picture of it, vivid, colorful,
set to music. But his parole had come too late. The years had taken
their toll of him. The shadow of the prison had left its chill, had done
something to him that had made him a different David Sanders from the boy
who had entered. He wondered if he would ever learn to laugh again, if he
would ever run to meet life eagerly as that other David Sanders had a
thousand years ago.

He followed the road down to the little station and took a through train
that came puffing out of the Royal Gorge on its way to the plains.
Through the crowd at the Denver depot he passed into the city, moving
up Seventeenth Street without definite aim or purpose. His parole had
come unexpectedly, so that none of his friends could meet him even if
they had wanted to do so. He was glad of this. He preferred to be alone,
especially during these first days of freedom. It was his intention to go
back to Malapi, to the country he knew and loved, but he wished to pick
up a job in the city for a month or two until he had settled into a frame
of mind in which liberty had become a habit.

Early next morning he began his search for work. It carried him to a
lumber yard adjoining the railroad yards.

"We need a night watchman," the superintendent said. "Where'd you work
last?"

"At Canon City."

The lumberman looked at him quickly, a question in his glance.

"Yes," Dave went on doggedly. "In the penitentiary."

A moment's awkward embarrassment ensued.

"What were you in for?"

"Killing a man."

"Too bad. I'm afraid--"

"He had stolen my horse and I was trying to get it back. I had no
intention of hitting him when I fired."

"I'd take you in a minute so far as I'm concerned personally, but our
board of directors--afraid they wouldn't like it. That's one trouble in
working for a corporation."

Sanders turned away. The superintendent hesitated, then called after him.

"If you're up against it and need a dollar--"

"Thanks. I don't. I'm looking for work, not charity," the applicant said
stiffly.

Wherever he went it was the same. As soon as he mentioned the prison,
doors of opportunity closed to him. Nobody wanted to employ a man
tarred with that pitch. It did not matter why he had gone, under what
provocation he had erred. The thing that damned him was that he had been
there. It was a taint, a corrosion.

He could have picked up a job easily enough if he had been willing to lie
about his past. But he had made up his mind to tell the truth. In the
long run he could not conceal it. Better start with the slate clean.

When he got a job it was to unload cars of fruit for a commission house.
A man was wanted in a hurry and the employer did not ask any questions.
At the end of an hour he was satisfied.

"Fellow hustles peaches like he'd been at it all his life," the
commission man told his partner.

A few days later came the question that Sanders had been expecting.
"Where'd you work before you came to us?"

"At the penitentiary."

"A guard?" asked the merchant, taken aback.

"No. I was a convict." The big lithe man in overalls spoke quietly, his
eyes meeting those of the Market Street man with unwavering steadiness.

"What was the trouble?"

Dave explained. The merchant made no comment, but when he paid off the
men Saturday night he said with careful casualness, "Sorry, Sanders. The
work will be slack next week. I'll have to lay you off."

The man from Canon City understood. He looked for another place, was
rebuffed a dozen times, and at last was given work by an employer who had
vision enough to know the truth that the bad men do not all go to prison
and that some who go may be better than those who do not.

In this place Sanders lasted three weeks. He was doing concrete work on a
viaduct job for a contractor employed by the city.

This time it was a fellow-workman who learned of the Arizonan's record.
A letter from Emerson Crawford, forwarded by the warden of the
penitentiary, dropped out of Dave's coat pocket where it hung across
a plank.

The man who picked it up read the letter before returning it to the
pocket. He began at once to whisper the news. The subject was discussed
back and forth among the men on the quiet. Sanders guessed they had
discovered who he was, but he waited for them to move. His years in
prison had given him at least the strength of patience. He could bide
his time.

They went to the contractor. He reasoned with them.

"Does his work all right, doesn't he? Treats you all civilly. Doesn't
force himself on you. I don't see any harm in him."

"We ain't workin' with no jail bird," announced the spokesman.

"He told me the story and I've looked it up since. Talked with the lawyer
that defended him. He says the man Sanders killed was a bad lot and had
stolen his horse from him. Sanders was trying to get it back. He claimed
self-defense, but couldn't prove it."

"Don't make no difference. The jury said he was guilty, didn't it?"

"Suppose he was. We've got to give him a chance when he comes out,
haven't we?"

Some of the men began to weaken. They were not cruel, but they were
children of impulse, easily led by those who had force enough to push
to the front.

"I won't mix cement with no convict," the self-appointed leader announced
flatly. "That goes."

The contractor met him eye to eye. "You don't have to, Reynolds. You can
get your time."

"Meanin' that you keep him on the job and let me go?"

"That's it exactly. Long as he does his work well I'll not ask him to
quit."

A shadow darkened the doorway of the temporary office. The Arizonan
stepped in with his easy, swinging stride, a lithe, straight-backed
Hermes showing strength of character back of every movement.

"I'm leaving to-day, Mr. Shields." His voice carried the quiet power of
reserve force.

"Not because I want you to, Sanders."

"Because I'm not going to stay and make you trouble."

"I don't think it will come to that. I'm talking it over with the boys
now. Your work stands up. I've no criticism."

"I'll not stay now, Mr. Shields. Since they've complained to you I'd
better go."

The ex-convict looked around, the eyes in his sardonic face hard and
bitter. If he could have read the thoughts of the men it would have been
different. Most of them were ashamed of their protest. They would have
liked to have drawn back, but they did not know how to say so. Therefore
they stood awkwardly silent. Afterward, when it was too late, they talked
it over freely enough and blamed each other.

From one job to another Dave drifted. His stubborn pride, due in part to
a native honesty that would not let him live under false pretenses, in
part to a bitterness that had become dogged defiance, kept him out of
good places and forced him to do heavy, unskilled labor that brought the
poorest pay.

Yet he saved money, bought himself good, cheap clothes, and found energy
to attend night school where he studied stationary and mechanical
engineering. He lived wholly within himself, his mental reactions tinged
with morose scorn. He found little comfort either in himself or in the
external world, in spite of the fact that he had determined with all his
stubborn will to get ahead.

The library he patronized a good deal, but he gave no time to general
literature. His reading was of a highly specialized nature. He studied
everything that he could find about the oil fields of America.

The stigma of his disgrace continued to raise its head. One of the
concrete workers was married to the sister of the woman from whom he
rented his room. The quiet, upstanding man who never complained or asked
any privileges had been a favorite of hers, but she was a timid,
conventional soul. Visions of her roomers departing in a flock when they
found out about the man in the second floor back began to haunt her
dreams. Perhaps he might rob them all at night. In a moment of nerve
tension, summoning all her courage, she asked the killer from the cattle
country if he would mind leaving.

He smiled grimly and began to pack. For several days he had seen it
coming. When he left, the expressman took his trunk to the station. The
ticket which Sanders bought showed Malapi as his destination.

CHAPTER XVI

DAVE MEETS TWO FRIENDS AND A FOE

In the early morning Dave turned to rest his cramped limbs. He was in a
day coach, and his sleep through the night had been broken. The light
coming from the window woke him. He looked out on the opalescent dawn
of the desert, and his blood quickened at sight of the enchanted mesa.
To him came that joyous thrill of one who comes home to his own after
years of exile.

Presently he saw the silvery sheen of the mesquite when the sun is
streaming westward. Dust eddies whirled across the barranca. The prickly
pear and the palo verde flashed past, green splashes against a background
of drab. The pudgy creosote, the buffalo grass, the undulation of sand
hills were an old story, but to-day his eyes devoured them hungrily. The
wonderful effect of space and light, the cloud skeins drawn out as by
some invisible hand, the brown ribbon of road that wandered over the
hill: they brought to him an emotion poignant and surprising.

The train slid into a narrow valley bounded by hills freakishly eroded to
fantastic shapes. Pinon trees fled to the rear. A sheep corral fenced
with brush and twisted roots, in which were long, shallow feed troughs
and flat-roofed sheds, leaped out of nowhere, was for a few moments, and
vanished like a scene in a moving picture. A dim, gray mass of color on a
hillside was agitated like a sea wave. It was a flock of sheep moving
toward the corral. For an instant Dave caught a glimpse of a dog circling
the huddled pack; then dog and sheep were out of sight together.

The pictures stirred memories of the acrid smoke of hill camp-fires, of
nights under a tarp with the rain beating down on him, and still others
of a road herd bawling for water, of winter camps when the ropes were
frozen stiff and the snow slid from trees in small avalanches.

At the junction he took the stage for Malapi. Already he could see that
he was going into a new world, one altogether different from that he had
last seen here. These men were not cattlemen. They talked the vocabulary
of oil. They had the shrewd, keen look of the driller and the wildcatter.
They were full of nervous energy that oozed out in constant conversation.

"Jackpot Number Three lost a string o' tools yesterday. While they're
fishin', Steelman'll be drillin' hell-a-mile. You got to sit up all night
to beat that Coal Oil Johnny," one wrinkled little man said.

A big man in boots laced over corduroy trousers nodded. "He's smooth as a
pump plunger, and he sure has luck. He can buy up a dry hole any old time
and it'll be a gusher in a week. He'll bust Em Crawford high and dry
before he finishes with him. Em had ought to 'a' stuck to cattle. That's
one game he knows from hoof to hide."

"Sure. Em's got no business in oil. Say, do you know when they're
expectin' Shiloh Number Two in?"

"She's into the sand now, but still dry as a cork leg. That's liable to
put a crimp in Em's bank roll, don't you reckon?"

"Yep. Old Man Hard Luck's campin' on his trail sure enough. The banks'll
be shakin' their heads at his paper soon."

The stage had stopped to take on a mailsack. Now it started again, and
the rest of the talk was lost to Dave. But he had heard enough to guess
that the old feud between Crawford and Steelman had taken on a new phase,
one in which his friend was likely to get the worst of it.

At Malapi Dave descended from the stage into a town he hardly knew. It
had the same wide main street, but the business section extended five
blocks instead of one. Everywhere oil dominated the place. Hotels,
restaurants, and hardware stores jostled saloons and gambling-houses.
Tents had been set up in vacant lots beside frame buildings, and in them
stores, rooming-houses, and lunch-counters were doing business. Everybody
was in a hurry. The street was filled with men who had to sleep with one
eye open lest they miss the news of some new discovery.

The town was having growing-pains. One contractor was putting down
sidewalks in the same street where another laid sewer pipe and a third
put in telephone poles. A branch line of a trans-continental railroad was
moving across the desert to tap the new oil field. Houses rose overnight.
Mule teams jingled in and out freighting supplies to Malapi and from
there to the fields. On all sides were rustle, energy, and optimism,
signs of the new West in the making.

Up the street a team of half-broken broncos came on the gallop, weaving
among the traffic with a certainty that showed a skilled pair of hands
at the reins. From the buckboard stepped lightly a straight-backed,
well-muscled young fellow. He let out a moment later a surprised shout
of welcome and fell upon Sanders with two brown fists.

"Dave! Where in Mexico you been, old alkali? We been lookin' for you
everywhere."

"In Denver, Bob."

Sanders spoke quietly. His eyes went straight into those of Bob Hart to
see what was written there. He found only a glad and joyous welcome,
neither embarrassment nor any sign of shame.

"But why didn't you write and let us know?" Bob grew mildly profane in
his warmth. He was as easy as though his friend had come back from a week
in the hills on a deer hunt. "We didn't know when the Governor was goin'
to act. Or we'd 'a' been right at the gate, me or Em Crawford one. Whyn't
you answer our letters, you darned old scalawag? Dawggone, but I'm glad
to see you."

Dave's heart warmed to this fine loyalty. He knew that both Hart and
Crawford had worked in season and out of season for a parole or a pardon.
But it's one thing to appear before a pardon board for a convict in whom
you are interested and quite another to welcome him to your heart when he
stands before you. Bob would do to tie to, Sanders told himself with a
rush of gratitude. None of this feeling showed in his dry voice.

"Thanks, Bob."

Hart knew already that Dave had come back a changed man. He had gone in a
boy, wild, turbulent, untamed. He had come out tempered by the fires of
experience and discipline. The steel-gray eyes were no longer frank and
gentle. They judged warily and inscrutably. He talked little and mostly
in monosyllables. It was a safe guess that he was master of his impulses.
In his manner was a cold reticence entirely foreign to the Dave Sanders
his friend had known and frolicked with. Bob felt in him a quality of
dangerous strength as hard and cold as hammered iron.

"Where's yore trunk? I'll take it right up to my shack," Hart said.

"I've rented a room."

"Well, you can onrent it. You're stayin' with me."

"No, Bob. I reckon I won't do that. I'll live alone awhile."

"No, sir. What do you take me for? We'll load yore things up on the
buckboard."

Dave shook his head. "I'm much obliged, but I'd rather not yet. Got to
feel out my way while I learn the range here."

To this Bob did not consent without a stiff protest, but Sanders was
inflexible.

"All right. Suit yoreself. You always was stubborn as a Missouri mule,"
Hart said with a grin. "Anyhow, you'll eat supper with me. Le's go to the
Delmonico for ol' times' sake. We'll see if Hop Lee knows you. I'll bet
he does."

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