A fight with four-ounce gloves can be a bloody affair enough, but with nature’s weapons, under London Prize Ring rules, it can be a shambles. Armed with the cestus or the mailed fist, Ellison might have wreaked havoc as a gladiator of old Rome punished his adversary to the death. As it was, Annister, his face a bloody mask, where that socking punch had landed, gave Rook and his supporters heart of grace.
“Take him, Bull!”
The screaming advice was in the high voice of Lunn; the others echoed it. But if Annister was in desperate case, the giant, sobbing now with the fury of his spent strength, was weaving on his feet.
Legs like iron columns upbore that mighty strength, but a pile-driving right, behind it the full weight of Annister’s two hundred pounds of iron-hard muscle, sinking with an audible “_plop!_” in his adversary’s midriff, brought from the giant a quick, gasping grunt.
Ellison’s endurance was almost done. He could “take it,” but, hog-fat from a protracted period of easy living, professional fighter as he had been, this amateur, with the arching chest of a greyhound and the stamina of a lucivee of the long trail, was wearing him down.
Trading punch for punch now, Annister abruptly cut loose with pile-driving right and lefts; they volleyed in from every angle; there was a cold grin on his lips now as he went round the giant like a cooper round a barrel, bombarding him with a bewildering crossfire of hooks and swings, jabs and uppercuts.
Annister, at the beginning of the fight, had expected the usual tricks of the professional: holding in the clinches; butting; the elbow; the heel of the hand against the face; but Ellison had fought fair.
Now, as the giant, boring in against that relentless attack, faltered, mouth open, labored breath sucked inward through clenched teeth, Annister stepped backward, hands dropping at his sides.
Ellison, almost out, stood, weaving on his feet, fronting his adversary, a queer look of surprise in his face, and a something more. Annister, strangely enough, as has been mentioned, had, in spite of his encounter with Ellison in the smoker, conceived something for the man that had been close to liking. Somehow, rough as the man was; crooked, by all the signs; the tool of Rook and of his minions, he had the blue eye of a fighter—the straight, level look of a man who, though an enemy, would yet fight fair.
Annister, breathing heavily, thrust out his hand.
“A draw, ha?” he said. “Well—suppose we let it go at that.”
For a moment Ellison appeared to hesitate; there came again the queer look in his eyes, as of surprise, wonder, and a something more. There came a grating curse from Lunn; a sudden movement from the onlookers roundabout.
Ellison’s great paw closed on the extended hand with a grip of iron, as Rook’s voice rose, strident, under the lights:
“Bull—are you crazy? This man—he’s just—a dam’ _dick_!”
_CHAPTER TEN_
“IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!”
It was out. Rook, his hand in a lightning stab for Annister’s coat, turned over the lapel, holding it forward for all to see.
On it was a small gold badge—the symbol of the Secret Service. The secret was a secret no longer.
How long Rook had known of it Annister could not be certain, but now, at the growling chorus of swift hate, he whirled. His pistol came up and out, as there came a startling interruption, or rather, two.
He heard Ellison’s voice, roaring in the narrow room:
“Hell’s bells, young fellow, I’m with you, and you can lay to that! For this once, anyway! You sure can handle yourself!”
He turned to Rook and the rest. “Now—you bums, get goin’! Dick or no dick, I’ll play this hand as she lays. Get goin’!”
The great hand, holding a heavy Colt, swung upward on a line with Annister’s as the door burst inward with a crash; and, framed in the opening, there showed on a sudden the flaming thatch of the bartender, Del Kane.
His cowboy yell echoed throughout the room, eyes blazing upon the hotel man where he sat.
In two strides, he had joined Annister and Bull; guns on a line, the three fronted the five who faced them, silent, tense. Kane’s voice came clear:
“I followed you, Mr. Annister; thought they’d try t’ run a whizzer on yuh; I’m pullin’ m’ freight after today, anyway; Mister Lunn can have his job, an’ welcome! Now—I ben keepin’ cases on Mister Rook, he’s a curly wolf, ain’t you, Rook? A real bad hombre, an’ you can lay to that! But he ain’t goin’ northwest of nothin’, he ain’t.... Now, you dam’ short-horns, show some speed!”
But there was no fight in Rook, Lunn and Company. Glowering, their hands in plain sight, weaponless, they sat in a sullen silence, as Annister, backing to the doorway, was followed by Ellison and Kane. Outside, under pale stars, the giant spoke:
“I don’t aim to be too all-fired honest, Mister Annister,” he said. “I throwed in with Mister Rook, that’s so, but he’s played it both ends against the middle with me, I guess.... I reckon I’ll be movin’ out o’ Dry Bone in two—three hours.”
He grinned, wryly, out of the corner of his mouth.
“You sure pack a hefty wallop, young fellow! I wish I could tell you somethin’, but that man Rook, he’s as close-mouthed as an Indian, and that’s whatever! His game—nobody knows what it is—Lunn, maybe—but they sure got a strangle-hold on th’ county; it won’t be healthy for me here after tonight.”
The three men separated at the hotel, Annister entering the lobby with a curious depression that abruptly deepened to a sudden, crawling fear as a call-boy brought him a note. The fear was not for himself, but for another, for, although he had never seen the handwriting before, he knew it upon the instant.
Ripping open the envelope with fingers that trembled, he read, and at what he saw his face paled slowly to a mottled, unhealthy gray:
“_Partner_:
“_If you get this in time, please hurry. I’m in the toils, at Dr. Elphinstone’s—it’s the stone house at the right of the road leading north from Dry Bone—twenty miles, I think. I’ve bribed a man to take this to you, and if he fails me, God help me!—God help us all! If you fail me, you’ll never see me again—as Mary Allerton, because the Devil’s in charge here, and they call him the Jailer of Souls. I’ll be watching for you, at the south window—you’ll know it by the red ribbon on the bars. And now—be careful. If you get here at night beware of the guards—there are three. And if it’s night there’ll be a rope hanging from the window—you can feel for it in the dark. Now hurry._
“_MARY ALLERTON (No. 33)._”
“_You’ll never see me again—as Mary Allerton._” Annister was aware again of that crawling fear. “_The red ribbon on the bars._” The place was in effect a prison, then.
But—“_No. 33_”! Annister’s heart leaped up. He knew the meaning of those numerals well enough; he had been blind not to have suspected it. But “_Dr. Elphinstone_,” and “_The Jailer of Souls_!”
Who could be the jailer of souls but the Devil? And Annister fancied that he had seen the Devil at the corner of that street under the moon, with his black, forking beard, and the cold eyes of death.
The trail was warm now, as he thought, but—if he were too late? He put the thought from him, turning to the perusal of a telegram in code which he had found waiting for him at the desk; translated, it read:
“With you Thursday with four, six, twenty-one, and the others. Look for thirty-three.
“CHILDERS.”
But there was no time to be lost. Thursday was tomorrow. He would have to take his chance of their finding him, for there was nobody whom he could trust. Ellison had gone, even if he might have chanced the giant in so delicate a matter; Del Kane, likewise. He must take his chance. Striding to the door, he stiffened abruptly at a drumming rap, and a hoarse voice in the corridor without:
“Open up in there; open up!”
Annister, a pulse in his temple beating to his hard-held breath, jerked back the door, to face—
Bristow, behind him three men whom he recognized as hangers-on at the hotel bar. They had something of the look of long-riders, villainous, hard-bitten; as one man, they grinned now, but without mirth, as the sheriff spoke:
“Annister—I arrest you for the murder of Tucson Charlie Westervelt and Bartley Pattison. In th’ name of th’ Law!”
Annister knew that if he resisted they would shoot him down; in fact, he knew, too, that was what they wanted; it would be the easiest way. Under the menace of the guns, he spread his hands, palms downward, preceding the four men down the stairs outward to the jail.
But as the heavy door clanged shut behind him, Annister, his gaze in a sightless staring into the north, groaned, in bitterness of spirit.
Mary was needing him: she was in peril, the greater because it was unknown—and—he would not be there.
_CHAPTER ELEVEN_
THE HOUSE OF FEAR
A house of silence, broken at times by a weird wailing as from the Pit; a house of dreams, gray in the moonlight, under the leprous-silvered finger of the moon, brooding now, a grim, gray fortress of the damned: the stronghold of the Beast.