Free The Overlanders by Nelson Nye Page A

into its stride before Grete saw the tall blackness squarely set across his path. He pulled up with his nerves and his fears jerking at him. He caught the pale glint of gun steel and the motionless legs of a horse plain below it; all else was obscure against the smother of trees.
    There was nothing obscure about Idaho’s voice. “You won’t be needin’ no woman when you’re stone-cold dead!”

EIGHT
    While Farraday, growing wilder and angrier, was trying to catch up with the full import of this, a second blotch walked its horse out of the shadows and, coming up on Grete’s far side, revealed the scowling rage-roughened cheeks of Ben Hollis. But it was the gunfighter Farraday continued to watch while the tone of those echoing words carried alarm through every nerve in his body.
    He wrapped both hands over the pommel of his saddle. “So you’ve patched up your fences,” he said at last, gruffly.
    “Never mind about that!” Idaho’s voice held the twang of stretched wire. “Keep away from her — hear?”
    Farraday pressed his mouth together and something about this wicked calm seemed almost beyond bearing. “I hear you,” Grete said; and Hollis, breathing raggedly, suddenly backed his horse away from them.
    Although expecting trouble and braced for it ever since he’d hooked on with this drive, Farraday abruptly was left without speech. The gunfighter’s glance, aroused as the stalking hunger of a tiger left him nothing to get behind. Looking into that unwinking gaze it suddenly came over Grete that neither horses nor any damage which could have stemmed from the beating he had given the man was behind this. Loss of face at Grete’s hands had nothing to do with the gunfighter’s fury. Farraday was appalled.
    And yet, inexplicably mixed with his revulsion and shock, was a chastening humility, a reaching out, almost a compassion for this gaunt ox of a man, this hardcase spawned of chaparral and gunsmoke — in some weird way a kind of affinity. Something of this may have crept through his tone. “All right,” he said, “you can back off now. You’ve got no quarrel with me.”
    But the man, too wound up, couldn’t ease off the hook. His feelings were too powerful, too ravaged by suspicion and the ugly visions bred of it, to accept any easy assurance. Knowing what Grete had been to Crotton’s brawling empire, he read into Farraday’s tame reaction something which he could not brook. He had no faith in Grete’s sincerity. It was too alien, too contrary to personal experience.
    Grete, sensing this, gauging the futility of attempting to convince the man, picked up his reins. “When I go hungering after a petticoat —”
    “Never mind! You been warned. Get this straight,” Idaho growled harshly. “Long as your actions stay in line with her best interests I’ll back your play. When they don’t I’m comin’ after you.”
    Farraday reined his horse about, too bitterly furious to risk further words.
    • • •
    No light showed in the log house of the brothers, but this was a country that went early to bed. In the east the great orange disc of the moon was pushing its face above the black steeps of Knight Mountain, bathing in leprous ochers the roundabout knobs and ridges.
    He paused after a bit for a glance at his back trail, peering into the dark of trees, the deception of shadow patches, remembering Ben who might not be above taking his goose any way he could catch him. But he saw nothing which alarmed him and presently went on, walking the horse, hand by the butt of his holstered pistol.
    He reckoned he’d better get rid of that gunfighter. Sooner or later the man would breed trouble. Idaho wouldn’t like the Swallowfork end of this. He would consider that Grete had lied to the girl, bent the truth inexcusably, cheating her; he might force a showdown Grete wasn’t ready for.
    This made Grete shake his head. Getting rid of the man wasn’t in the cards. When they came up against Crotton Grete would