Argonaut Stories

$500 Reward will be paid for the arrest and delivery of Rube White to the sheriff of Yavapai County. He is about twenty-five years old, six feet tall, and slim, with light complexion, and has a big scar on the right side of his face. He is wanted for robbery and other crimes. If killed in resisting arrest the reward will be paid on satisfactory proof of his identity. When last heard from was making for the Tonto Basin country.

By the time the reader had finished, a crowd of half a dozen or more men surrounded him.

“Now, if that feller is headed for the Tonto Basin country, it wouldn’t be much of a trick to take him,” said the first speaker, reflectively, as if debating with himself the advisability of making the attempt.

“If you hear me, he ain’t going to be taken in, and the feller that tries it is going to have his hands full. They have been after him for two or three years and aint got him yet. They say he’s right on the shoot,” remarked another of the crowd.

“Well, a feller ought to know him as soon as he sees him, from that description,” hazarded the first speaker, “if he got up close enough to see the scar; and then all he’d have to do would be to turn loose at him if he didn’t throw up his hands when you told him. Besides, nobody but him would try to cross over the mountains into the basin with this snow on the ground. Blamed if I don’t think I’ll go after him.”

“Well, somebody ought to round him up,” asserted some one in the crowd; “he’s been foolin’ roun’ hyah long enough, jes havin’ his own way, sorter as if the country belonged to him. Durned if I wouldn’t go with you, Hi, if I didn’t have to take this grub over to the boys in camp.”

“Well, if any of you want to go, all right. I’m going,” replied the man addressed as Hi.

It was not the first time that Hi Lansing had been on such expeditions. He was one of those men for whom danger seems to have a fascination. At his remark, Frank Crandall, a young fellow who had been standing quietly by, volunteered to accompany him. The crowd turned toward him with more interest than they had thus far evinced during the entire proceedings. It was but a few months since he had come among them, fresh from the East, to take charge of one of the mines which had been closed down by the winter’s storms. For weeks he had been cooped up in the isolated settlement, and he longed for something to break its monotony.

“Well, get your horse and gun, and come,” replied Hi, and, in an instant, the two men had left the room to arm and equip themselves for the chase, while the loungers gathered around the stove to discuss the probabilities of their success. In a few minutes, the two men rode past the door, each armed with a rifle and six-shooter, and the crowd, stepping out, bade them good-by, with the oft-repeated warning: “Be keerful and don’t let him get the drop on ye.”

The crust of the unbroken snow cracked crisply under foot as the two rode on fast, leaving the little settlement in their rear. For some time neither spoke; but, at last, the silence was broken by Lansing, asking his young companion: “Did you ever try this kind of thing before?”