PAGE 6
Billy’s Tenderfoot
by
Then the men against the wall grew rigid. Out of the film of smoke long, vivid streams of fire flashed toward them, now right, now left, like the alternating steam of a locomotive’s pistons. Smash, smash! Smash, smash! hit the bullets with regular thud. With the twelfth discharge the din ceased. Midway in the space between the heads of each pair of men against the wall was a round hole. No one was touched.
A silence fell. The smoke lightened and blew slowly through the open door. The horses, long since deserted by their guardians in favour of the excitement within, whinnied. The stranger dropped the smoking Colts, and quietly reproduced his own short-barrelled arms from his side-pockets, where he had thrust them. Billy broke the silence at last.
“That’s shootin’!” he observed, with a sigh.
“Them fifty thousand is outside,” clicked the stranger. “Do you want them?”
There was no reply.
“I aims to pull out on one of these yere hosses of yours,” said he. “Billy he’s all straight. He doesn’t know nothin’ about me.”
He collected the six-shooters from the floor.
“I jest takes these with me for a spell,” he continued. “You’ll find them, if you look hard enough, along on th’ trail–also yore broncs.”
He backed toward the door.
“I’m layin’ fer th’ man that sticks his head out that door,” he warned.
“Stranger,” said Black Hank as he neared the door.
The little man paused.
“Might I ask yore name?”
“My name is Alfred,” replied the latter.
Black Hank looked chagrined.
“I’ve hearn tell of you,” he acknowledged.
The stranger’s eye ran over the room, and encountered that of the girl. He shrank into himself and blushed.
“Good-night,” he said, hastily, and disappeared. A moment later the beat of hoofs became audible as he led the bunch of horses away.
For a time there was silence. Then Billy, “By God, Hank, I means to stand in with you, but you let that kid alone, or I plugs you!”
“Kid, huh!” grunted Hank. “Alfred a kid! I’ve hearn tell of him.”
“What’ve you heard?” inquired the girl.
“He’s th’ plumb best scout on th’ southern trail,” replied Black Hank.
The year following, Billy Knapp, Alfred, and another man named Jim Buckley took across to the Hills the only wagon-train that dared set out that summer.