And while she breathed deeply the satisfaction of it, an
exploding rifle echo shattered the stillness. With excited
sputtering came the prompt answer of a fusillade. She was new to
the West; but some instinct stronger than reason told the girl
that here was no playful puncher shooting up the scenery to
ventilate his exuberance. Her imagination conceived something
more deadly; a sinister picture of men pumping lead in a grim,
close-lipped silence; a lusty plainsman, with murder in his
heart, crumpling into a lifeless heap, while the thin
smoke-spiral curled from his hot rifle.
So the girl imagined the scene as she ran swiftly forward through
the pines to the edge of the butte bluff whence she might look
down upon the coulee that nestled against it. Nor had she greatly
erred, for her first sweeping glance showed her the thing she had
dreaded.
In a semicircle, well back from the foot of the butte, half a
dozen men crouched in the cover of the sage-brush and a scattered
group of cottonwoods. They were perhaps fifty yards apart, and
the attention of all of them was focused on a spot directly
beneath her. Even as she looked, in that first swift moment of
apprehension, a spurt of smoke came from one of the rifles and
was flung back from the forked pine at the bottom of the mesa.
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