'Drag' Harlan Read online

  "DRAG" HARLAN

  by

  CHARLES ALDEN SELTZER

  Author ofThe Boss of the Lazy Y,"Firebrand" Trevison,The Trail Horde,The Ranchman, Etc.

  Frontispiece by P. V. E. Ivory

  She laid her head on his shoulder, sobbing, and talkingincoherently. (Page 65)]

  Grosset & DunlapPublishers :: New York

  Made in the United States of America

  CopyrightA. C. McClurg & Co.1921

  Published May, 1921

  Copyrighted in Great Britain

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER PAGE I A Desert Rider 1 II A Man's Reputation 9 III A Girl Waits 31 IV His Shadow Before 38 V A Prison 48 VI Chain-Lightning 58 VII Single-Handed 66 VIII Barbara Is Puzzled 78 IX An Unwelcome Guest 88 X On Guard 96 XI The Intruder 107 XII Barbara Sees a Light 114 XIII Harlan Takes Charge 119 XIV Shadows 129 XV Linked 142 XVI Deep Water 153 XVII Forging a Letter 159 XVIII Harlan Rides Alone 169 XIX Harlan Joins the Gang 174 XX Left-Handed 191 XXI The Black-Bearded Man 206 XXII A Dead Man Walks 219 XXIII Deveny Secedes 225 XXIV Kidnapped 229 XXV Ambushed 238 XXVI Rogers Takes a Hand 242 XXVII A Dual Tragedy 248 XXVIII Converging Trails 252 XXIX World's End 258 XXX The Ultimate Treachery 263 XXXI Peace--and a Sunset 274

  "DRAG" HARLAN

  CHAPTER I

  A DESERT RIDER

  From out of the shimmering haze that veiled the mystic eastern space camea big black horse bearing a rider. Swinging wide, to avoid the featherydust that lay at the base of a huge sand dune, the black horse loped,making no sound, and seeming to glide forward without effort. Like asomber, gigantic ghost the animal moved, heroic of mold, embodying thespirit of the country, seeming to bear the sinister message of thedesert, the whispered promise of death, the lingering threat, the grimmockery of life, and the conviction of futility.

  The black horse had come far. The glossy coat of him was thicklysprinkled with alkali dust, sifted upon him by the wind of his passagethrough the desert; his black muzzle was gray with it; ropes of it mattedhis mane, his forelock had become a gray-tinged wisp which he fretfullytossed; the dust had rimmed his eyes, causing them to loom large andwild; and as his rider pulled him to a halt on the western side of thesand dune--where both horse and rider would not be visible on the skyline--he drew a deep breath, shook his head vigorously, and blew a thinstream of dust from his nostrils.

  With head and ears erect, his eyes flaming his undying courage and hiscontempt for distance and the burning heat that the midday sun pouredupon him, he gazed westward, snorting long breaths into his eager lungs.

  The rider sat motionless upon him--rigid and alert. His gaze also wentinto the west; and he blinked against the white glare of sun anddistance, squinting his eyes and scanning the featureless waste withappraising glances.

  In the breathless, dead calm of the desert there was no sound ormovement. On all sides the vast gray waste stretched, a yawning infernoof dead, dry sand overhung with a brassy, cloudless sky in which swam thehuge ball of molten silver that for ages had ruled that baked andshriveled land.

  A score of miles westward--twoscore, perhaps--the shadowy peaks of somemountains loomed upward into the mystic haze, with purple bases meltinginto the horizon; southward were other mountains, equally distant andmysterious; northward--so far away that they blurred in the vision--werestill other mountains. Intervening on all sides was the stretching,soundless, aching void of desolation, carrying to the rider its lurkingthreat of death, the promise of evil to come.

  The man, however, seemed unperturbed. In his narrowed, squinting eyes ashe watched the desert was a gleam of comprehension, of knowledge intimateand sympathetic. They glowed with the serene calm of confidence; and farback in them lurked a glint of grim mockery. It was as though theyvisualized the threatened dangers upon which they looked, answering thethreat with contempt.

  The man was tall. His slim waist was girded by a cartridge belt which wasstudded with leaden missiles for the rifle that reposed in the saddleholster, and for the two heavy pistols that sagged at his hips. A graywoolen shirt adorned his broad shoulders; a scarlet neckerchief at histhroat which had covered his mouth as he rode was now drooping on hischest; and the big, wide-brimmed felt hat he wore was jammed far downover his forehead. The well-worn leather chaps that covered his legscould not conceal their sinewy strength, nor could the gauntleted leathergloves on his hands hide the capable size of them.

  He was a fixture of this great waste of world in whose center he sat. Hebelonged to the country; he was as much a part of it as the sombermountains, the sun-baked sand, the dead lava, and the hardy, evil-lookingcacti growth that raised its spined and mocking green above the aridstretch. He symbolized the spirit of the country--from the slicker thatbulged at the cantle of the saddle behind him, to the capable glovedhands that were now resting on the pommel of the saddle--he representedthe force which was destined to conquer the waste places.

  For two days he had been fighting the desert; and in the serene calm ofhis eyes was the identical indomitability that had been in them when hehad set forth. As he peered westward the strong lines around his mouthrelaxed, his lips opened a trifle, and a mirthless smile wreathed them.He patted the shoulder of the black horse, and the dead dust balloonedfrom the animal's coat and floated heavily downward.

  "We're about halfway, Purgatory," he said aloud, his voice coming flatand expressionless in the dead, vacuum-like silence. He did not cease topeer westward nor to throw sharp glances north and south. He drew off aglove and pushed his hat back, using a pocket handkerchief to brush thedust from his face and running the fingers of the hand through hishair--thereby producing another ballooning dust cloud which splayedheavily downward.

  "What's botherin' me is that shootin'," he went on, still speaking to theblack horse. "We sure enough heard it--didn't we?" He laughed, againpatting the black's shoulder. "An' you heard it first--as usual--with metrailin' along about half a second behind. But we sure heard 'em, eh?"

  The black horse whinnied lowly, whereupon the rider dismounted, andstretched himself.

  From a water-bag at the cantle of the saddle he poured water into his bighat, watching sympathetically while the big horse drank. Some few dropsthat still remained in the hat after the horse had finished he playfullyshook on the animal's head, smiling widely at the whinny of delight thatgreeted the action. He merely wet his own lips from the water-bag. Thenfor an instant, after replacing the bag, he stood at the black'sshoulder, his face serious.

  "We'll hit the Kelso water-hole about sundown, I reckon, Purgatory," hesaid. "That's certain. There's only one thing can stop us--that shootin'.If it's Apaches, why, I reckon there's a long dry spell ahead of us; butif it's only Greasers----"

  He grinned with grim eloquence, patted the black again, and climbed intothe saddle. Again, as before, he sat silent upon his mount, scanning thesun-scorched waste; and then he rode forward.

  An hour later, during which he loped the black horse slowly, he againdrew the animal to a halt and gazed around him, frowning, his eyesgleaming with a savage intolerance.

  The shooting he had heard some time previous to his appearance at thebase of the big sand dune had not been done by Indians. He was almostconvinced of that now. Or, if Indians had done the shooting, they had notyet observed him. The fact that he had seen no smoke si
gnals proved that.

  Still, there was the deep silence on every hand to bring doubt into hismind; and he knew that Indians--especially Apaches--were tricky,sometimes foregoing the smoke signals to lie in ambush. And verylikely--if they had seen him coming--they were doing that very thing:waiting for him to ride into the trap they had prepared. He had not beenable to locate the point from which the reports had come. It had seemedto him that they had come from a point directly westward; but he couldnot be sure, for he had seen no smoke.

  He talked no more to the horse, sitting rigidly in the saddle, erect, hishead bent a little forward, his chin thrusting, his lips curving with abitterly savage snarl. He felt the presence of living things with him inthe desert; a presentiment had gripped him--a conviction that living menwere close and hostile.

  Reaching downward, he drew the rifle from the saddle holster and examinedits mechanism. Placing it across his knee, he drew out his heavy pistols,one after another, slowly twirling the cylinders. He replaced thepistols, making sure that the holster flaps were out of the way so thatthey would not catch or drag at the weapons when he wanted to usethem--and with the rifle resting across his legs near the saddle horn, herode slowly forward.

  He swung wide of even the small sand dunes as he passed them, and he kepta vigilant eye upon the dead rocks that dotted the level at infrequentintervals. Even the cactus clumps received flattering attention; and thelittle stretches of greasewood that came within range of his vision wereexamined closely.

  At the end of half an hour he had seen nothing unusual. Here and there hehad noticed a rattler lurking in the shade of a rock or partly concealedunder the thorny blade of a sprawling cactus; and he had seen a sage hennestling in the hot sand. But these were fixtures--as was also theMexican eagle that winged its slow way in mile-wide circles in theglaring, heat-pulsing sky.

  The rider again halted the black horse. The presentiment of evil hadgrown upon him, and he twisted around in the saddle, sweeping thedesolate vast level with cold, alert, puzzled eyes.

  There was no object near him behind which an enemy might lie concealed;the gray floor of the desert within many hundred miles of him was smoothand flat and obstructionless. Far away, half a mile, perhaps, he saw athrusting knob of rock, with some cactus fringing it. From where he satin the saddle it seemed that the rock might be the peak of a mountainreaching upward out of the sea of sand and desert waste--but it wasbarren on sides and top, and would afford no concealment for an enemy,except at its base. And even the base was not large enough to concealmore than a few men.

  The rider gazed long at the rock, but could detect no sign of movementnear it. He had turned from it, to look again into the western distance,when Purgatory whinnied lowly.

  Flashing around in the saddle, the rider again faced the rock. And he sawmovement there now. The distance was great, but the clarity of theatmosphere brought a moving object distinctly into his vision. The objectwas a man, and, like a huge fly, he was crawling rapidly up the slopingside of the rock, toward its peak, which flattened abruptly at thesummit.

  The man bore a rifle. The rider could see it dragging from the man'shand; and in a flash the rider was out of the saddle, throwing himselfflat behind a low ridge of sand, his own rifle coming to a rest on asmall boulder as he trained its muzzle upon the man, who by this time hadreached the summit of the rocks in the distance. The rider waited,nursing the stock of the rifle, his eyes blazing, while Purgatory,seemingly aware of an impending tragedy, moved slowly away as thoughunderstanding that he must not expose himself.

  The rider waited, anticipating the bullet that would presently whinetoward him. And then he heard the report of the man's rifle, saw that thesmoke streak had been directed downward, as though the man on the summitof the rock were shooting at something below him.

  The rider had been pressing the trigger of his own weapon when he saw thesmoke streak. He withheld his fire when he divined that the man was notshooting at him; and when he saw the man on the rock shoot again--downwardonce more--the rider frowned with embarrassment.

  "Don't even know I'm here!" he mused. "An' me gettin' ready to salivatehim!"

  He got to his knees and watched, curiosity gleaming in his eyes. He sawthe man on the rock fire again--downward--and he noted a smoke spurtanswer the shot, coming upward from the base of the rock. The rider gotto his feet and peered intently at the rock. And now he saw another mancrouching near its base. This man, however, was not the one the man onthe summit of the rock was shooting at, for smoke streaks were issuingfrom a weapon in that man's hand also, but they were horizontal streaks.

  Therefore the rider divined that the two men must be shooting at anotherwho was on the far side of the rock; and he ran to Purgatory, speaking noword until he had vaulted into the saddle. Then he spoke shortly.

  "They're white men, Purgatory, an' they're havin' a private rukus, lookslike. But we're doin' some investigatin' just to see if the game's on thelevel."