Free Collection 1989 - Long Ride Home (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

Who’d a thought it?”
    The morning wore on. Several times, he sized up the rocky slope behind him. That was the danger point. Yet he had built his log wall higher there, and he had a plan.
    Suddenly, rifles began to pop and shots were dusting the logs around him. He waited. Then he glimpsed, four hundred yards away, what seemed to be a man’s leg. He fired, and heard a yell of pain.
    Suddenly, a shot rang out from behind him and a bullet thudded into the log within an inch of his head. Hurriedly, he rolled over into the shelter of the log wall. No sooner there than getting to his knees he crawled into the willows away from camp, then slid into the streambed.
    Rising behind the shelter of the banks, he ran swiftly upstream. Rounding a bend, he crawled up behind some boulders, then drifted along the slope. Panting, he dropped into place behind a granite boulder and peered around the edge.
    A man he recognized as one of those who had come to the school with Pratt was lying thirty yards away, rifle in hand. Shan fired instantly, burning the sniper’s ribs with a bullet. The man let out a yell of alarm and scrambled to his feet and started to run.
    Lying still, Shan hazed the fellow downhill, cutting his clothes to ribbons, twice knocking him down with shots at his heels.
    â€œAll right!” The voice was cold, triumphant. “The fun’s over! Git up!”
    Turning, he saw Pete Ritter standing behind him, gun in hand. With him were Lefty Brooks and a man Brady recognized as Web Fancher from the Ewing ranch. “I figgered you might use that crickbed!” Pete sneered. “Figgered I might use it my ownself. Now we got you. Fust, you go back t’ the ranch an’ we let Neil get his evens with you. Then you start, for the state line.…You never get there!”
    It was now or never. Shan Brady knew that instantly. Once they got their hands on him he was through. Ritter had him covered, but…his hands were a blur as they swept down for the guns.
    Somebody yelled, and he saw Pete’s eyes blazing behind a red-mouthed gun. Something hit him in the shoulder, and he shot, and even as he triggered his first six-gun, he realized that what he had always feared was not happening…he was not losing his head!
    Coolly as though on exhibition, he was shooting. Ritter wavered in front of him, and suddenly he saw other Circle R riders appearing, and there seemed to be a roaring of guns behind him. Gunsmoke filled the air.
    Fancher was down on his hands and knees, a pool of blood forming under him; Ritter was gone; and Lefty Brooks was backing up, his shirt turning dark, his face pale.
    Then, suddenly as it began, it was over. He stepped back, and then a hand dropped on his shoulder. He turned. It was Magoon.
    â€œSome shootin’!” Magoon said, grinning. Curly Ward and big Frank Ewing were also closing in, all with ready guns. “You took Ritter an’ Brooks out of there! I got Fancher! That yeller belly of a traitor! Eatin’ our grub an’ working for Ritter!”
    Claire rode up the slope, her hair blowing in the wind. She carried a rifle. He looked up at her. “You, too? I didn’t’ know women ever fought in this man’s country?”
    â€œThey do when their men—!” Her face flushed. “I mean they do when their schools are in danger! After all, you’re our best teacher in years!”
    He turned and started down the slope with her. “Reckon that old Shanahan place could be fixed up?” he asked. “I think it’d be a good place t’ have the teachers live, don’t you? It could be mighty liveable.”
    â€œWhy, yes, but…,” she stopped.
    â€œOh, we’d get a preacher down from Hurston!” he said, grinning. “That would make it all sort of legal, and everything. Of course,” he added, remembering the biscuits, “you’d have to find time to cook, too!”
    She flushed. Then