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[Illustration: "Ride Low--They're Coming!"]




THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER

By G. W. OGDEN

WITH FRONTISPIECE

By FRANK E. SCHOONOVER

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers--New York

Published by Arrangement with A. C. McClurg & Company




Copyright

A. C. McClurg & Co.

1917

Published March, 1917




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                                         PAGE
        I Strange Bargainings                                        1
       II Beef Day                                                  11
      III The Ranchhouse by the River                               28
       IV The Man in the Plaid                                      41
        V If He was a Gentleman                                     55
       VI A Bold Civilian                                           66
      VII Throwing the Scare                                        81
     VIII Afoot and Alone                                           89
       IX Business, not Company                                    102
        X "Hell's a-goin' to Pop"                                  119
       XI The Señor Boss Comes Riding                              131
      XII "The Rustlers!"                                          147
     XIII The Trail at Dawn                                        160
      XIV When Friends Part                                        182
       XV One Road                                                 196
      XVI Danger and Dignity                                       215
     XVII Boots and Saddles                                        227
    XVIII The Trail of the Coffee                                  240
      XIX "I Beat Him to It"                                       252
       XX Love and Death                                           268
      XXI The Man in the Door                                      280
     XXII Paid                                                     298
    XXIII Tears in the Night                                       303
     XXIV Banjo Faces Into the West                                312
      XXV "Hasta Luego"                                            322




THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER


CHAPTER I

STRANGE BARGAININGS


When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as
the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five
cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that
Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers' Association, should sit there
at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit.

Usually Saul Chadron was a man who picked his companions, and was a
particular hand at the choosing. He could afford to do that, being of
the earth's exalted in the Northwest, where people came to him and put
down their tribute at his feet.

This stranger, whom Chadron treated like a long-wandering friend, had
come down the mountain trail that morning, and had been hanging about
the hotel all day. Buck Snellin, the proprietor--duly licensed for a
matter of thirty years past by the United States government to conduct
his hostelry in the corner of the Indian reservation, up against the
door of the army post--did not know him. That threw him among
strangers in that land, indeed, for Buck knew everybody within a
hundred miles on every side.

The stranger was a tall, smoky man, hollow-faced, grim; adorned with a
large brown mustache which drooped over his thin mouth; a bony man
with sharp shoulders, and a stoop which began in the region of the
stomach, as if induced by drawing in upon himself in times of poignant
hunger, which he must have felt frequently in his day to wear him down
to that state of bones; with the under lid of his left eye caught at a
point and drawn down until it showed red, as if held by a fishhook to
drain it of unimaginable tears.

There was a furtive look in his restless, wild-animal eyes, smoky like
the rest of him, and a surliness about his long, high-ridged nose
which came down over his mustache like a beak. He wore a cloth cap
with ear flaps, and they were down, although the heat of summer still
made the September air lively enough for one with blood beneath his
skin. He regaled himself with fierce defiance, like a captive eagle,
and had no word in return for the generous importunities of the man
who was host to him in what evidently was a long-deferred meal.

Chadron paid the bill when the man at last finished packing his
internal cavities, and they went together into the hotel office which
adjoined the dining-room.

The office of this log hotel was a large, gaunt room, containing a few
chairs along the walls, a small, round table under the window with the
register upon it, a pen in a potato, and a bottle of ink with trickled
and encrusted sides. The broad fireplace was bleak and black,
blank-staring as a blind eye, and the sun reached through the window
in a white streak across the mottled floor.

There was the smell of old pipes, old furs, old guns, in the place,
and all of them were present to account for themselves and dispel any
shadow of mystery whatever--the guns on their pegs set in auger-holes
in the logs of the walls, the furs of wild beasts dangling from like
supports in profusion everywhere, and the pipes lying on the mantel
with stems hospitably extended to all unprovided guests. Some of them
had been smoked by the guests who had come and gone for a generation
of men.

The stranger stood at the manteltree and tried the pipes' capacity
with his thick-ended thumb, finding one at last to his requirements.
Tall as Saul Chadron stood on his own proper legs, the stranger at his
shoulder was a head above him. Seven feet he must have towered, his
crown within a few inches of the smoked beams across the ceiling, and
marvelously thin in the running up. It seemed that the wind must break
him some blustering day at that place in his long body where hunger,
or pain, or mischance had doubled him over in the past, and left him
creased. The strong light of the room found pepperings of gray in his
thick and long black hair.

Chadron himself was a gray man, with a mustache and beard like a
cavalier. His shrewd eyes were sharp and bright under heavy brows, his
brown face was toughened by days in the saddle through all seasons of
weather and wind. His shoulders were broad and heavy, and even now,
although not dressed for the saddle, there was an up-creeping in the
legs of his trousers, and a gathering at the knees of them, for they
were drawn down over his tall boots.

That was Chadron's way of doing the nice thing when he went abroad in
his buckboard. He had saddle manners and buckboard manners, and even
office manners when he met the cattle barons in Cheyenne. No matter
what manners he chanced to be wearing, one remembered Saul Chadron
after meeting him, and carried the recollection of him to the sundown
of his day.

"We can talk here," said Chadron, giving the other a cigar.

The tall man broke the cigar and ground part of it in his palm,
looking with frowning thoughtfulness into the empty fireplace as the
tobacco crushed in his hard hand. He filled the pipe that he had
chosen, and sat with his long legs stretched out toward the
chimney-mouth.

"Well, go on and talk," said he.

His voice came smothered and hoarse, as if it lay beneath all the
oysters which he had rammed into his unseen hollow. It was a voice in
strange harmony with the man, such a sound as one would have expected
to come out of that surly, dark-lipped, thin mouth. There was nothing
committal about it, nothing exactly identifying; an impersonal voice,
rather, and cold; a voice with no conscience behind it, scarcely a
soul.

"You're a business man, Mark--"

"Huh!" said Mark, grunting a little cloud of smoke from the bowl of
his pipe in his sarcastic vehemence.

"And so am I," continued Chadron, unmoved. "Words between us would be
a waste of time."

"You're right; money talks," said Mark.

"It's a man's job, or I wouldn't have called you out of your hole to
do it," said Chadron, watching the man slyly for the effect.

"Pay me in money," suggested Mark, unwarmed by the compliment. "Is it
nesters ag'in?"

"Nesters," nodded the cattleman, drawing his great brows in a frown.
"They're crowdin' in so thick right around me that I can't breathe
comfortable any more; the smell of 'em's in the wind. They're runnin'
over three of the biggest ranches up here besides the Alamito, and the
Drovers' Association wants a little of your old-time holy scare
throwed into the cussed coyotes."

Mark nodded in the pause which seemed to have been made for him to
nod, and Chadron went on.

"We figger that if a dozen or two of 'em's cleaned out, quick and
mysterious, the rest'll tuck tail and sneak. It's happened that way in
other places more than once, as you and I know. Well, you're the man
that don't have to take lessons."

"Money talks," repeated Mark, still looking into the chimney.

"There's about twenty of them that counts, the rest's the kind you can
drive over a cliff with a whip. These fellers has strung their cussed
bob-wire fences crisscross and checkerboard all around there up the
river, and they're gittin' to be right troublesome. Of course they're
only a speck up there yet, but they'll multiply like fleas on a hot
dog if we let 'em go ahead. You know how it is."

There was a conclusiveness in Chadron's tone as he said that. It spoke
of a large understanding between men of a kind.

"Sure," grunted the man Mark, nodding his head at the chimney. "You
want a man to work from the willers, without no muss or gun-flashin',
or rough houses or loud talk."

"Twenty of them, their names are here, and some scattered in between
that I haven't put down, to be picked up as they fall in handy, see?"

"And you're aimin' to keep clear, and stand back in the shadder, like
you always have done," growled Mark. "Well, I ain't goin' to ram my
neck into no sheriff's loop for nobody's business but my own from now
on. I'm through with resks, just to be obligin'."

"Who'll put a hand on you in this country unless we give the word?"
Chadron asked, severely.

"How do I know who's runnin' the law in this dang country now? Maybe
you fellers is, maybe you ain't."

"There's no law in this part of the country bigger than the Drovers'
Association," Chadron told him, frowning in rebuke of Mark's doubt of
security. "Well, maybe there's a little sheriff here and there, and a
few judges that we didn't put in, but they're down in the farmin'
country, and they don't cut no figger at all. If you _was_ fool enough
to let one of them fellers git a hold on you we wouldn't leave you in
jail over night. You know how it was up there in the north."

"But I don't know how it is down here." Mark scowled in surly
unbelief, or surly simulation.

"There's not a judge, federal or state, that could carry a bale of hay
anywhere in the cattle country, I tell you, Mark, that we don't draw
the chalk line for."

"Then why don't you do the job yourselves, 'stead of callin' a
peaceable man away from his ranchin'?"

"You're one kind of a gentleman, Mark, and I'm another, and there's
different jobs for different men. That ain't my line."

"Oh hell!" said Mark, laying upon the words an eloquent stress.

"All you've got to do is keep clear of the reservation; don't turn a
card here, no matter how easy it looks. We can't jerk you out of the
hands of the army if you git mixed up with it; that's one place where
we stop. The reservation's a middle ground where we meet the
nesters--rustlers, every muddy-bellied wolf of 'em, and we can prove
it--and pass 'em by. They come and go here like white men, and nothing
said. Keep clear of the reservation; that's all you've got to do to be
as safe as if you was layin' in bed on your ranch up in Jackson's
Hole."

Chadron winked as he named that refuge of the hunted in the Northwest.
Mark appeared to be considering something weightily.

"Oh, well, if they're rustlers--nobody ain't got no use for a
rustler," he said.

"There's men in that bunch of twenty"--tapping the slip of paper with
his finger--"that started with two cows a couple of years ago that's
got fifty and sixty head of two-year-olds now," Chadron feelingly
declared.

"How much're you willin' to go?" Mark put the question with a
suddenness which seemed to betray that he had been saving it to shoot
off that way, as a disagreeable point over which he expected a
quarrel. He squinted his draggled left eye at Chadron, as if he was
taking aim, while he waited for a reply.

"Well, you have done it for fifty a head," Chadron said.

"Things is higher now, and I'm older, and the resk's bigger," Mark
complained. "How fur apart do they lay?"

"You ought to get around in a week or two."

"But that ain't figgerin' the time a feller has to lay out in the
bresh waitin' and takin' rheumatiz in his j'ints. I couldn't touch the
job for the old figger; things is higher."

"Look here, Mark"--Chadron opened the slip which he had wound round
his finger--"this one is worth ten, yes, all, the others. Make your
own price on him. But I want it _done_; no bungled job."

Mark took the paper and laid his pipe aside while he studied it.

"Macdonald?"

"Alan Macdonald," nodded Chadron. "That feller's opened a ditch from
the river up there on my land and begun to _irrigate!_"

"Irrigatin', huh?" said Mark, abstractedly, moving his finger down the
column of names.

"He makes a blind of buyin' up cattle and fattenin' 'em on the hay and
alfalfer he's raisin' up there on my good land, but he's the king-pin
of the rustlers in this corner of the state. He'll be in here tomorrow
with cattle for the Indian agent--it's beef day--and you can size him
up. But you've got to keep your belly to the ground like a snake when
you start anything on that feller, and you've got to make sure you've
got him dead to rights. He's quick with a gun, and he's sure."

"Five hundred?" suggested Mark, with a crafty sidelong look.

"You've named it."

"And something down for expenses; a feller's got to live, and livin's
high."

Chadron drew out his wallet. Money passed into Mark's hand, and he put
it away in his pocket along with the list of names.

"I'll see you in the old place in Cheyenne for the settlement, if you
make good," Chadron told him.

Mark waved his hand in lofty depreciation of the hint that failure for
him was a possible contingency. He said no more. For a little while
Chadron stood looking down on him as he leaned with his pipe over the
dead ashes in the fireplace, his hand in the breast of his coat, where
he had stored his purse. Mark treated the mighty cattleman as if he
had become a stranger to him, along with the rest of the world in that
place, and Chadron turned and went his way.




CHAPTER II

BEEF DAY


Fort Shakie was on its downhill way in those days, and almost at the
bottom of the decline. It was considered a post of penance by enlisted
men and officers alike, nested up there in the high plateau against
the mountains in its place of wild beauty and picturesque charm.

But natural beauty and Indian picturesqueness do not fill the place in
the soldierly breast of fair civilian lady faces, nor torrential
streams of cold mountain water supply the music of the locomotive's
toot. Fort Shakie was being crept upon by civilization, true, but it
was coming all too slow for the booted troopers and belted officers
who must wear away the months in its lonely silences.

Within the memory of officers not yet gray the post had been a hundred
and fifty miles from a railroad. Now it was but twenty; but even that
short leap drowned the voice of the locomotive, and the dot at the
rails' end held few of the endearments which make soldiering sweet.

Soon the post must go, indeed, for the need of it had passed. The
Shoshones, Arapahoes, and Crows had forgotten their old animosities,
and were traveling with Buffalo Bill, going to college, and raising
alfalfa under the direction of a government farmer. The Indian police
were in training to do the soldiers' work there. Soon the post must
stand abandoned, a lonely monument to the days of hard riding, long
watches, and bleak years. Not a soldier in the service but prayed for
the hastening of the day.

No, there was not much over at Meander, at the railroad's end, to
cheer a soldier's heart. It was an inspiring ride, in these autumn
days, to come to Meander, past the little brimming lakes, which seemed
to lie without banks in the green meadows where wild elk fed with the
shy Indian cattle; over the white hills where the earth gave under the
hoofs like new-fallen snow. But when one came to it through the
expanding, dusty miles, the reward of his long ride was not in keeping
with his effort.

Certainly, privates and subalterns could get drunk there, as speedily
as in the centers of refinement, but there were no gentlemanly
diversions at which an officer could dispel the gloom of his sour days
in garrison.

The rough-cheeked girls of that high-wind country were well enough for
cowboys to swing in their wild dances; just a rung above the squaws on
the reservation in the matter of loquacity and of gum. Hardly the sort
for a man who had the memory of white gloves and gleaming shoulders,
and the traditions of the service to maintain.

Of course there was the exception of Nola Chadron, but she was not of
Meander and the railroad's end, and she came only in flashes of summer
brightness, like a swift, gay bird. But when Nola was at the
ranchhouse on the river the gloom lifted over the post, and the sour
leaven in the hearts of unmarried officers became as sweet as manna in
the cheer of the unusual social outlet thus provided.

Nola kept the big house in a blaze of joy while she nested there
through the summer days. The sixteen miles which stretched between it
and the post ran out like a silver band before those who rode into the
smile of her welcome, and when she flitted away to Cheyenne,
champagne, and silk hats in the autumn, a grayness hovered again over
the military post in the corner of the reservation.

Later than usual Nola had lingered on this fall, and the social outlet
had remained open, like a navigable river over which the threat of ice
hung but had not yet fallen. There were not lacking those who held
that the lodestone which kept her there at the ranchhouse, when the
gaieties of the season beckoned elsewhere, was in the breast of Major
Cuvier King. Fatal infatuation, said the married ladies at the post,
knowing, as everybody knew in the service, that Major King was
betrothed to Frances Landcraft, the colonel's daughter.

No matter for any complications which might come of it, Nola had
remained on, and the major had smiled on her, and ridden with her, and
cut high capers in the dance, all pending the return of Frances and
her mother from their summering at Bar Harbor in compliance with the
family traditions. Now Frances was back again, and fortune had thrown
a sunburst of beauty into the post by centering her and Nola here at
once. Nola was the guest of the colonel's daughter, and there were
flutterings in uniformed breasts.

Beef day was an event at the agency which never grew old to the people
at the post. Without beef day they must have dwindled off to acidulous
shadows, as the Indians who depended upon it for more solid sustenance
would have done in the event of its discontinuation by a paternal
government.

There were phases of Indian life and character which one never saw
save on beef day, which fell on Wednesday of each week. Guests at the
post watched the bright picture with the keen interest of a pageant on
the stage; tourists came over by stage from Meander in the summer
months by the score to be present; the resident officers, and their
wives and families--such as had them--found in it an ever-recurring
source of interest and relief from the tedium of days all alike.

This beef day, the morning following the meeting between Saul Chadron
and his mysterious guest, a chattering group stood on the veranda of
Colonel Landcraft's house in the bright friendly sun. They were
waiting for horses to make the short journey to the agency--for one's
honesty was questioned, his sanity doubted, if he went afoot in that
country even a quarter of a mile--and gayest among them was Nola
Chadron, the sun in her fair, springing hair.

Nola's crown reached little higher than a proper soldier's heart, but
what she lacked in stature she supplied in plastic perfection of body
and vivacity of face. There was a bounding joyousness of life in her;
her eager eyes reflecting only the anticipated pleasures of today.
There was no shadow of yesterday's regret in them, no cloud of
tomorrow's doubt.

On the other balance there was Frances Landcraft, taller by half a
head, soldierly, too, as became her lineage, in the manner of lifting
her chin in what seemed a patrician scorn of small things such as a
lady should walk the world unconscious of. The brown in her hair was
richer than the clear agate of her eyes; it rippled across her ear
like the scroll of water upon the sand.

There was a womanly dignity about her, although the threshold of
girlhood must not have been far behind her that bright autumnal
morning. Her nod was equal to a stave of Nola's chatter, her smile
worth a league of the light laughter from that bounding little lady's
lips. Not that she was always so silent as on that morning, there
among the young wives of the post, at her own guest's side. She had
her hours of overflowing spirits like any girl, but in some company
she was always grave.

When Major King was in attendance, especially, the seeing ones made
note. And there were others, too, who said that she was by nature a
colonel among women, haughty, cold and aloof. These wondered how the
major ever had made headway with her up to the point of gaining her
hand. Knowing ones smiled at that, and said it had been arranged.

There were ambitions on both sides of that match, it was known--ambition
on the colonel's part to secure his only child a station of dignity, and
what he held to be of consequence above all achievements in the
world. Major King was a rising man, with two friends in the cabinet.
It was said that he would be a brigadier-general before he reached
forty.

On the major's side, was the ambition to strengthen his political
affiliations by alliance with a family of patrician strain, together
with the money that his bride would bring, for Colonel Landcraft was a
weighty man in this world's valued accumulations. So the match had
been arranged.

The veranda of the colonel's house gave a view of the parade grounds
and the long avenue that came down between the officers' houses,
cottonwoods lacing their limbs above the road. There was green in
the lawns, the flash of flowers between the leaves and shrubs,
white-gleaming walls, trim walks, shorn hedges. It seemed a pleasant
place of quiet beauty that bright September morning, and a pity to
give it up by and by to dust and desolation; a place where men and
women might be happy, but for the gnawing fire of ambition in their
hearts.

Mrs. Colonel Landcraft was not going. Indians made her sick, she said,
especially Indians sitting around in the tall grass waiting for the
carcasses to be cut up and apportioned out to them in bloody chunks.
But there seemed to be another source of her sickness that morning,
measuring by the grave glances with which she searched her daughter's
face. She wondered whether the major and Frances had quarreled; and if
so, whether Nola Chadron had been the cause.

They were off, with the colonel and a lately-assigned captain in the
lead. There was a keener pleasure in this beef day than usual for the
colonel, for he had new ground to sow with its wonders, which were
beginning to pale in his old eyes which had seen so much of the
world.

"Very likely we'll see the minister's wife there," said he, as they
rode forward, "and if so, it will be worth your while to take special
note of her. St. John Mathews, the Episcopalian minister over there at
the mission--those white buildings there among the trees--is a
full-blooded Crow. One of the pioneer missionaries took him up and
sent him back East to school, where in time he entered the ministry
and married this white girl. She was a college girl, I've been told,
glamoured by the romance of Mathews' life. Well, it was soon over."

The colonel sighed, and fell silent. The captain, feeling that it was
intended that he should, made polite inquiry.

"The trouble is that Mathews is an Indian out of his place," the
colonel resumed. "He returned here twenty years or so ago, and took up
his work among his people. But as he advanced toward civilization, his
wife began to slip back. Little by little she adopted the Indian ways
and dress, until now you couldn't tell her from a squaw if you were to
meet her for the first time. She presents a curious psychological
study--or perhaps biological example of atavism, for I believe there's
more body than soul in the poor creature now. It's nature maintaining
the balance, you see. He goes up; she slips back.

"If she's there, she'll be squatting among the squaws, waiting to
carry home her husband's allotment of warm, bloody beef. She doesn't
have to do it, and it shames and humiliates Mathews, too, even though
they say she cuts it up and divides it among the poorer Indians. She's
a savage; her eyes sparkle at the sight of red meat."

They rounded the agency buildings and came upon an open meadow in
which the slaughterhouses stood at a distance from the road. Here,
in the grassy expanse, the Indians were gathered, waiting the
distribution of the meat. The scene was barbarically animated. Groups
of women in their bright dresses sat here and there on the grass, and
apart from them in gravity waited old men in moccasins and blankets
and with feathers in their hair. Spry young men smoked cigarettes
and talked volubly, garbed in the worst of civilization and the
most useless of savagery.

One and all they turned their backs upon the visitors, the nearest
groups and individuals moving away from them with the impassive
dignity of their race. There is more scorn in an Indian squaw's back,
turned to an impertinent stranger, than in the faces of six matrons of
society's finest-sifted under similar conditions.

Colonel Landcraft led his party across the meadow, entirely
unconscious of the cold disdain of the people whom he looked down upon
from his superior heights. He could not have understood if any there
had felt the trespass from the Indians' side--and there was one, very
near and dear to the colonel who felt it so--and attempted to explain.
The colonel very likely would have puffed up with military consequence
almost to the bursting-point.

Feeling, delicacy, in those smeared, smelling creatures! Surliness in
excess they might have, but dignity, not at all. Were they not there
as beggars to receive bounty from the government's hand?

"Oh, there's Mrs. Mathews!" said Nola, with the eagerness of a child
who has found a quail's nest in the grass. She was off at an angle,
like a hunter on the scent. Colonel Landcraft and his guest followed
with equal rude eagerness, and the others swept after them, Frances
alone hanging back. Major King was at Nola's side. If he noted the
lagging of his fiancée he did not heed.

The minister's wife, a shawl over her head, her braided hair in front
of her shoulders like an Indian woman, rose from her place in startled
confusion. She looked as if she would have fled if an avenue had been
open, or a refuge presented. The embarrassed creature was obliged to
stand in their curious eyes, and stammer in a tongue which seemed to
be growing strange to her from its uncommon use.

She was a short woman, growing heavy and shapeless now, and there was
gray in her black hair. Her skin was browned by sun, wind, and smoke
to the hue of her poor neighbors and friends. When she spoke in reply
to the questions which poured upon her, she bent her head like a timid
girl.

Frances checked her horse and remained behind, out of range of
hearing. She was cut to the heart with shame for her companions, and
her cheek burned with the indignation that she suffered with the
harried woman in their midst. A little Indian girl came flying past,
ducking and dashing under the neck of Frances' horse, in pursuit of a
piece of paper which the wind whirled ahead of her. At Frances'
stirrup she caught it, and held it up with a smile.

"Did you lose this, lady?" she asked, in the very best of mission
English.

"No," said Frances, bending over to see what it might be. The little
girl placed it in her hand and scurried away again to a beckoning
woman, who stood on her knees and scowled over her offspring's dash
into the ways of civilized little girls.

It was a narrow strip of paper that she had rescued from the wind,
with the names of several men written on it in pencil, and at the head
of the list the name of Alan Macdonald. Opposite that name some crude
hand had entered, with pen that had flowed heavily under his pressure,
the figures "$500."

Frances turned it round her finger and sat waiting for the others to
leave off their persecution of the minister's wife and come back to
her, wondering in abstracted wandering of mind who Alan Macdonald
might be, and for what purpose he had subscribed the sum of five
hundred dollars.

"I think she's the most romantic little thing in the world!" Nola was
declaring, in her extravagant surface way as they returned to where
Frances sat her horse, her wandering eyes on the blue foothills, the
strip of paper prominent about her finger. "Oh, honey! what's the
matter? Did you cut your finger?"

"No," said Frances, her serious young face lighting with a smile,
"it's a little subscription list, or something, that somebody lost.
Alan Macdonald heads it for five hundred dollars. Do you know Alan
Macdonald, and what his charitable purpose may be?"

Nola tossed her head with a contemptuous sniff.

"They call him the 'king of the rustlers' up the river," said she.

"Oh, he _is_ a man of consequence, then?" said Frances, a quickening
of humor in her brown eyes, seeing that Nola was up on her high horse
about it.

"We'd better be going down to the slaughter-house if we want to see
the fun," bustled the colonel, wheeling his horse. "I see a movement
setting in that way."

"He's just a common thief!" declared Nola, with flushed cheek and
resentful eye, as Frances fell in beside her for the march against the
abattoir.

Frances still carried the paper twisted about her finger, reserving
her judgment upon Alan Macdonald, for she knew something of the feuds
of that hard-speaking land.

"Anyway, I suppose he'd like to have his paper back," she suggested.
"Will you hand it to him the next time you meet him?"

Frances was entirely grave about it, although it was only a piece of
banter which she felt that Nola would appreciate. But Nola was not in
an appreciative mood, for she was a full-blooded daughter of the
baronial rule. She jerked her head like a vicious bronco and reined
hurriedly away from Frances as she extended the paper.

"I'll not touch the thing!" said Nola, fire in her eyes.

Major King was enjoying the passage between the girls, riding at
Nola's side with his cavalry hands held precisely.

"If I'm not mistaken, the gentleman in question is there talking to
Miller, the agent," said he, nodding toward two horsemen a little
distance ahead. "But I wouldn't excite him, Miss Landcraft, if I were
you. He's said to be the quickest and deadliest man with a weapon on
this range."

Major King smiled over his own pleasantry. Frances looked at Nola with
brows lifted inquiringly, as if waiting her verification. Then the
grave young lady settled back in her saddle and laughed merrily,
reaching across and touching her friend's arm in conciliating caress.

"Oh, you delightful little savage!" she said. "I believe you'd like to
take a shot at poor Mr. Macdonald yourself."

"We never start anything on the reservation," Nola rejoined, quite
seriously.

Miller, the Indian agent, rode away and left Macdonald sitting there
on his horse as the military party approached. He spurred up to meet
the colonel, and to present his respects to the ladies--a hard matter
for a little round man with a tight paunch, sitting in a Mexican
saddle. The party halted, and Frances looked across at Macdonald, who
seemed to be waiting for Miller to rejoin him.

Macdonald was a supple, sinewy man, as he appeared across the few rods
intervening. His coat was tied with his slicker at the cantle of his
saddle, his blue flannel shirt was powdered with the white dust of the
plain. Instead of the flaring neckerchief which the cowboys commonly
favored, Macdonald wore a cravat, the ends of it tucked into the bosom
of his shirt, and in place of the leather chaps of men who ride
breakneck through brush and bramble, his legs were clad in tough brown
corduroys, and fended by boots to his knees. There were revolvers in
the holsters at his belt.

Not an unusual figure for that time and place, but something uncommon
in the air of unbending severity that sat on him, which Frances felt
even at that distance. He looked like a man who had a purpose in his
life, and who was living it in his own brave way. If he was a cattle
thief, as charged, thought she, then she would put her faith against
the world that he was indeed a master of his trade.

They were talking around Miller, who was going to give them places of
vantage for the coming show. Only Frances and Major King were left
behind, where she had stopped her horse to look curiously across at
Alan Macdonald, king of the rustlers, as he was called.

"It may not be anything at all to him, and it may be something
important," said Frances, reaching out the slip to Major King. "Would
you mind handing it to him, and explaining how it came into my
hands?"

"I'll not have anything to do with the fellow!" said the major,
flushing hotly. "How can you ask such a thing of _me?_ Throw it away,
it's no concern of yours--the memorandum of a cattle thief!"

Frances drew herself straight. Her imperious chin was as high as Major
King ever had carried his own in the most self-conscious moment of his
military career.

"Will you take it to him?" she demanded.

"Certainly not!" returned the major, haughtily emphatic. Then,
softening a little, "Don't be silly, Frances; what a row you make over
a scrap of blowing paper!"

"Then I'll take it myself!"

"Miss Landcraft!"

"_Major_ King!"

It was the steel of conventionality against the flint of womanly
defiance. Major King started in his saddle, as if to reach out and
restrain her. It was one of those defiantly foolish little things
which women and men--especially women--do in moments of pique, and
Frances knew it at the time. But she rode away from the major with a
hot flush of insubordination in her cheeks, and Alan Macdonald
quickened from his pensive pose when he saw her coming.

His hand went to his hat when her intention became unmistakable to
him. She held the little paper out toward him while still a rod away.

"A little Indian girl gave me this; she found it blowing along--they
tell me you are Mr. Macdonald," she said, her face as serious as his
own. "I thought it might be a subscription list for a church, or
something, and that you might want it."

"Thank you, Miss Landcraft," said he, his voice low-modulated, his
manner easy.

Her face colored at the unexpected way of this man without a coat, who
spoke her name with the accent of refinement, just as if he had known
her, and had met her casually upon the way.

"I have seen you a hundred times at the post and the agency," he
explained, to smooth away her confusion. "I have seen you from afar."

"Oh," said she, as lame as the word was short.

He was scanning the written paper. Now he looked at her, a smile
waking in his eyes. It moved in slow illumination over his face, but
did not break his lips, pressed in their stern, strong line. She saw
that his long hair was light, and that his eyes were gray, with sandy
brows over them which stood on end at the points nearest his nose,
from a habit of bending them in concentration, she supposed, as he had
been doing but a moment before he smiled.

"No, it isn't a church subscription, Miss Landcraft, it's for a
cemetery," said he.

"Oh," said she again, wondering why she did not go back to Major King,
whose horse appeared restive, and in need of the spur, which the major
gave him unfeelingly.

At the same time she noted that Alan Macdonald's forehead was broad
and deep, for his leather-weighted hat was pushed back from it where
his fair, straight hair lay thick, and that his bony chin had a little
croft in it, and that his face was long, and hollowed like a
student's, and that youth was in his eyes in spite of the experience
which hardships of unknown kind had written across his face. Not a
handsome man, but a strong one in his way, whatever that way might
be.

"I am indebted to you for this," said he, drawing forth his watch with
a quick movement as he spoke, opening the back cover, folding the
little paper carefully away in it, "and grateful beyond words."

"Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald," said she, wheeling her horse suddenly,
smiling back at him as she rode away to Major King.

Alan Macdonald sat with his hat off until she was again at the major's
side, when he replaced it over his fair hair with slow hand, as if he
had come from some holy presence. As for Frances, her turn of defiance
had driven her clouds away. She met the major smiling and radiant, a
twinkling of mischief in her lively eyes.

The major was a diplomat, as all good soldiers, and some very
indifferent ones, are. Whatever his dignity and gentler feelings had
suffered while she was away, he covered the hurt now with a smile.

"And how fares the bandit king this morning?" he inquired.

"He seems to be in spirits," she replied.

The others were out of sight around the buildings where the carcasses
of beef had been prepared. Nobody but the major knew of Frances'
little dash out of the conventional, and the knowledge that it was so
was comfortable in his breast.

"And the pe-apers," said he, in melodramatic whisper, "were they the
thieves' muster roll?"

"He isn't a thief," said she, with quiet dignity, "he's a gentleman.
Yes, the paper _was_ important."

"Ha! the plot deepens!" said Major King.

"It was a matter of life and death," said she, with solemn rebuke for
his levity, speaking a truer word than she was aware.




CHAPTER III

THE RANCHHOUSE BY THE RIVER


Saul Chadron had built himself into that house. It was a solid and
assertive thing of rude importance where it stood in the great plain,
the river lying flat before it in its low banks like a gray thread
through the summer green. There was a bold front to the house, and a
turret with windows, standing like a lighthouse above the sea of
meadows in which his thousand-numbered cattle fed.

As white as a dove it sat there among the cottonwoods at the
riverside. A stream of water led into its gardens to gladden them and
give them life. Years ago, when Chadron's importance was beginning to
feel itself strong upon its legs, and when Nola was a little thing
with light curls blowing about her blue eyes, the house had grown up
under the wand of riches in that barren place.

The post at Fort Shakie had been the nearest neighbor in those days,
and it remained the nearest neighbor still, with the exception of one
usurper and outcast homesteader, Alan Macdonald by name, who had
invaded the land over which Chadron laid his extensive claim. Fifteen
miles up the river from the grand white house Macdonald had strung his
barbed wire and carried in the irrigation ditch to his alfalfa field.
He had chosen the most fertile spot in the vast plain through which
the river swept, and it was in the heart of Saul Chadron's domain.

After the lordly manner of the cattle "barons," as they were called in
the Northwest, Chadron set his bounds by mountains and rivers.
Twenty-five hundred square miles, roughly measured, lay within his
lines, the Alamito Ranch he called it--the Little Cottonwood. He had
no more title to that great sweep of land than the next man who might
come along, and he paid no rental fee to nation nor state for grazing
his herds upon it. But the cattle barons had so apportioned the land
between themselves, and Saul Chadron, and each member of the Drovers'
Association, had the power of their mighty organization to uphold his
hand. That power was incontestable in the Northwest in its day; there
was no higher law.

This Alan Macdonald was an unaccountable man, a man of education, it
was said, which made him doubly dangerous in Saul Chadron's eyes. Saul
himself had come up from the saddle, and he was not strong on letters,
but he had seen the power of learning in lawyers' offices, and he
respected it, and handled it warily, like a loaded gun.

Chadron had sent his cowboys up the river when Macdonald first came,
and tried to "throw a holy scare into him," as he put it. The old
formula did not work in the case of the lean, long-jawed, bony-chinned
man. He was polite, but obdurate, and his quick gray eyes seemed to
read to their inner process of bluff and bluster as through tissue
paper before a lamp. When they had tried to flash their guns on him,
the climax of their play, he had beaten them to it. Two of them were
carried back to the big ranchhouse in blankets, with bullets through
their fleshy parts--not fatal wounds, but effective.

The problem of a fighting "nester" was a new one to the cattlemen of
that country. For twenty years they had kept that state under the
dominion of the steer, and held its rich agricultural and mineral
lands undeveloped. The herbage there, curing in the dry suns of summer
as it stood on the upland plains, provided winter forage for their
herds. There was no need for man to put his hand to the soil and
debase himself to a peasant's level when he might live in a king's
estate by roaming his herds over the untamed land.

Homesteaders who did not know the conditions drifted there on the
westward-mounting wave, only to be hustled rudely away, or to pay the
penalty of refusal with their lives. Reasons were not given, rights
were not pleaded by the lords of many herds. They had the might to
work their will; that was enough.

So it could be understood what indignation mounted in the breast of
tough old Saul Chadron when a pigmy homesteader put his firm feet down
on the ground and refused to move along at his command, and even
fought back to maintain what he claimed to be his rights. It was an
unprecedented stand, a dangerous example. But this nester had held out
for more than two years against his forces, armed by some invisible
strength, it seemed, guarded against ambuscades and surprises by some
cunning sense which led him whole and secure about his nefarious
ways.

Not alone that, but other homesteaders had come and settled near him
across the river on two other big ranches which cornered there against
Chadron's own. These nesters drew courage from Macdonald's example,
and cunning from his counsel, and stood against the warnings,
persecutions, and attempts at forceful dislodgment. The law of might
did not seem to apply to them, and there was no other source equal to
the dignity of the Drovers' Association--at least none to which it
cared to carry its grievances and air them.

So they cut Alan Macdonald's fences, and other homesteaders' fences,
in the night and drove a thousand or two cattle across his fields,
trampling the growing grain and forage into the earth; they persecuted
him in a score of harassing, quick, and hidden blows. But this
homesteader was not to be driven away by ordinary means. Nature seemed
to lend a hand to him, he made crops in spite of the cattlemen, and
was prospering. He had taken root and appeared determined to remain,
and the others were taking deep root with him, and the free, wide
range was coming under the menace of the fence and the lowly plow.

That was the condition of things in those fair autumn days when
Prances Landcraft returned to the post. The Drovers' Association, and
especially the president of it, was being defied in that section,
where probably a hundred homesteaders had settled with their families
of long-backed sons and daughters. They were but a speck on the land
yet, as Chadron had told the smoky stranger when he had engaged him to
try his hand at throwing the "holy scare." But they spread far over
the upland plain, having sought the most favored spots, and they were
a blight and a pest in the eyes of the cattlemen.

Nola had flitted back to the ranchhouse, carrying Frances with her to
bring down the curtain on her summer's festivities there in one last
burst of joy. The event was to be a masquerade, and everybody from the
post was coming, together with the few from Meander who had polish
enough to float them, like new needles in a glass of water, through
frontier society's depths. Some were coming from Cheyenne, also, and
the big house was dressed for them, even to the bank of palms to
conceal the musicians, in the polite way that society has of standing
something in front of what it cannot well dispense with, yet of which
it appears to be ashamed.

It was the afternoon of the festal day, and Nola sighed happily as she
stood with Frances in the ballroom, surveying the perfection of every
detail. Money could do things away off there in that corner of the
world as well as it could do them in Omaha or elsewhere. Saul Chadron
had hothouses in which even oranges and pineapples grew.

Mrs. Chadron was in the living-room, with its big fireplace and homely
things, when they came chattering out of the enchanted place. She was
sitting by the window which gave her a view of the dim gray road where
it came over the grassy swells from Meander and the world, knitting a
large blue sock.

Mrs. Chadron was a cow-woman of the unimproved school. She was a heavy
feeder on solids, and she liked plenty of chili peppers in them, which
combination gave her a waist and a ruddiness of face like a brewer.
But she was a good woman in her fashion, which was narrow, and
intolerant of all things which did not wear hoofs and horns, or live
and grow mighty from the proceeds of them. She never had expanded
mentally to fit the large place that Saul had made for her in the
world of cattle, although her struggle had been both painful and
sincere.

Now she had given it up, and dismissed the troubles of high life from
her fat little head, leaving Nola to stand in the door and do the
honors with credit to the entire family. She had settled down to her
roasts and hot condiments, her knitting and her afternoon naps, as
contentedly as an old cat with a singed back under a kitchen stove.
She had no desire to go back to the winter home in Cheyenne, with its
grandeur, its Chinese cook, and furniture that she was afraid to use.
There was no satisfaction in that place for Mrs. Chadron, beyond the
swelling pride of ownership. For comfort, peace, and a mind at ease,
give her the ranchhouse by the river, where she could set her hand to
a dish if she wanted to, no one thinking it amiss.

"Well, I declare! if here don't come Banjo Gibson," said she, her hand
on the curtain, her red face near the pane like a beacon to welcome
the coming guest. There was pleasure in her voice, and anticipation.
The blue sock slid from her lap to the floor, forgotten.

"Yes, it's Banjo," said Nola. "I wonder where he's been all summer? I
haven't seen him in an age."

"Who is he?" Frances inquired, looking out at the approaching figure,

"The troubadour of the North Platte, I call him," laughed Nola; "the
queerest little traveling musician in a thousand miles. He belongs
back in the days of romance, when men like him went playing from
castle to court--the last one of his kind."

Frances watched him with new interest as he drew up to the big gate,
which was arranged with weights and levers so that a horseman could
open and close it without leaving the saddle. The troubadour rode a
mustang the color of a dry chili pepper, but with none of its spirit.
It came in with drooping head, the reins lying untouched on its neck,
its mane and forelock platted and adorned fantastically with
vari-colored ribbons. Rosettes were on the bridle, a fringe of leather
thongs along the reins.

The musician himself was scarcely less remarkably than the horse. He
looked at that distance--now being at the gate--to be a dry little man
of middle age, with a thirsty look about his throat, which was long,
with a lump in it like an elbow. He was a slender man and short, with
gloves on his hands, a slight sandy mustache on his lip, and wearing a
dun-colored hat tilted a little to one side, showing a waviness almost
curly in his glistening black hair. He carried a violin case behind
his saddle, and a banjo in a green covering slung like a carbine over
his shoulder.

"He'll know where to put his horse," said Mrs. Chadron, getting up
with a new interest in life, "and I'll just go and have Maggie stir
him up a bite to eat and warm the coffee. He's always hungry when he
comes anywhere, poor little man!"

"Can he play that battery of instruments?" Prances asked.

"Wait till you hear him," nodded Nola, a laugh in her merry eyes.

Then they fell to talking of the coming night, and of the trivial
things which are so much to youth, and to watching along the road
toward Meander for the expected guests from Cheyenne, who were to come
up on the afternoon train.

Regaled at length, Banjo Gibson, in the wake of Mrs. Chadron, who
presented him with pride, came into the room where the young ladies
waited with impatience the waning of the daylight hours. Banjo
acknowledged the honor of meeting Miss Landcraft with extravagant
words, which had the flavor of a manual of politeness and a ready
letter-writer in them. He was on more natural terms with Nola, having
known her since childhood, and he called her "Miss Nola," and held her
hand with a tender lingering.

His voice was full and rich, a deep, soft note in it like a rare
instrument in tune. His small feet were shod in the shiningest of
shoes, which he had given a furbishing in the barn, and a flowing
cravat tied in a large bow adorned his low collar. There were stripes
in the musician's shirt like a Persian tent, but it was as clean and
unwrinkled as if he had that moment put it on.

Banjo Gibson--if he had any other christened name, it was unknown to
men--was an original. As Nola had said, he belonged back a few hundred
years, when musical proficiency was not so common as now. The
profession was not crowded in that country, happily, and Banjo
traveled from ranch to ranch carrying cheer and entertainment with him
as he passed.

He had been doing that for years, having worked his way westward from
Nebraska with the big cattle ranches, and his art was his living.
Banjo's arrival at a ranch usually resulted in a dance, for which he
supplied the music, and received such compensation as the generosity
of the host might fix. Banjo never quarreled over such matters. All he
needed was enough to buy cigarettes and shirts.

Banjo seldom played in company with any other musician, owing to
certain limitations, which he raised to distinguishing virtues. He
played by "air," as he said, despising the unproficiency of all such
as had need of looking on a book while they fiddled. Knowing nothing
of transposition, he was obliged to tune his banjo--on those rare
occasions when he stooped to play "second" at a dance--in the key of
each fresh tune. This was hard on the strings, as well as on the
patience of the player, and Banjo liked best to go it single-handed
and alone.

When he heard that musicians were coming from Cheyenne--a day's
journey by train--to play for Nola's ball, his face told that he was
hurt, but his respect of hospitality curbed his words. He knew that
there was one appreciative ear in the mansion by the river that no
amount of "dago fiddlin'" ever would charm and satisfy like his own
voice with the banjo, or his little brown fiddle when it gave out the
old foot-warming tunes. Mrs. Chadron was his champion in all company,
and his friend in all places.

"Well, sakes alive! Banjo, I'm as tickled to see you as if you was one
of my own folks," she declared, her face as warm as if she had just
gorged on the hottest of hot dishes which her Mexican cook, Maggie,
could devise.

"I'm glad to be able to make it around ag'in, thank you, mom," Banjo
assured her, sentiment and soul behind the simple words. "I always
carry a warm place in my heart for Alamito wherever I may stray."

Nola frisked around and took the banjo from its green cover, talking
all the time, pushing and placing chairs, and settling Banjo in a
comfortable place. Then she armed him with the instrument, making
quite a ceremony of it, and asked him to play.

Banjo twanged the instrument into tune, hooked the toe of his left
foot behind the forward leg of his chair, and struck up a song which
he judged would please the young ladies. Of Mrs. Chadron he was sure;
she had laughed over it a hundred times. It was about an adventure
which the bard had shared with his gal in a place designated in
Banjo's uncertain vocabulary as "the big cook-quari-um." It began:

    Oh-h-h, I stopped at a big cook-quari-um
      Not very long ago,
    To see the bass and suckers
      And hear the white whale blow.

The chorus of it ran:

    Oh-h-h-h, the big sea-line he howled and he growled,
      The seal beat time on a drum;
    The whale he swallered a den-vereel
      In the big cook-quari-um.

From that one Banjo passed to "The Cowboy's Lament," and from tragedy
to love. There could be nothing more moving--if not in one direction,
then in another--than the sentimental expression of Banjo's little
sandy face as he sang:

    I know you were once my true-lov-o-o-o,
      But such a thing it has an aind;
    My love and my transpo'ts are ov-o-o-o,
      But you may still be my fraind-d-d.

Sundown was rosy behind the distant mountains, a sea of purple shadows
laved their nearer feet, when Banjo got out his fiddle at Mrs.
Chadron's request and sang her "favorite" along with the moving tones
of that instrument.

    Dau-ling I am growing-a o-o-eld,
    Seel-vo threads a-mong tho go-o-ld--

As he sang, Nola slipped from the room. He was finishing when she sped
by the window and came sparkling into the room with the announcement
that the guests from far Cheyenne were coming. Frances was up in
excitement; Mrs. Chadron searched the floor for her unfinished sock.

"What was that flashed a-past the winder like a streak a minute ago?"
Banjo inquired.

"Flashed by the window?" Nola repeated, puzzled.

Frances laughed, the two girls stopping in the door, merriment
gleaming from their young faces like rays from iridescent gems.

"Why, that was Nola," Frances told him, curious to learn what the
sentimental eyes of the little musician foretold.

"I thought it was a star from the sky," said Banjo, sighing softly,
like a falling leaf.

As they waited at the gate to welcome the guests, who were cantering
up with a curtain of dust behind them, they laughed over Banjo's
compliment.

"I knew there was something behind those eyes," said Frances.

"No telling how long he's been saving it for a chance to work it off
on somebody," Nola said. "He got it out of a book--the Mexicans all
have them, full of _brindies_, what we call toasts, and silly soft
compliments like that."

"I've seen them, little red books that they give for premiums with the
Mexican papers down in Texas," Frances nodded, "but Banjo didn't get
that out of a book--it was spontaneous."

"I must write it down, and compare it with the next time he gets it
off."

"Give him credit for the way he delivered it, no matter where he got
it," Frances laughed. "Many a more sophisticated man than your desert
troubadour would have broken his neck over that. He's in love with
you, Nola--didn't you hear him sigh?"

"Oh, he has been ever since I was old enough to take notice of it,"
returned Nola, lightly.

"Oh, my luv's like a falling star," paraphrased Frances.

"Not much!" Nola denied, more than half serious. "Venus is ascendant;
you keep your eye on her and see."




CHAPTER IV

THE MAN IN THE PLAID


There was no mistaking the assiduity with which Major King waited upon
Nola Chadron that night at the ball, any more than there was a chance
for doubt of that lively little lady's identity. He sought her at the
first, and hung by her side through many dances, and promenaded her in
the garden walks where Japanese lanterns glimmered dimly in the soft
September night, with all the close attention of a farrier cooling a
valuable horse.

Perhaps it was punishment--or meant to be--for the insubordination of
Frances Landcraft in speaking to the outlawed Alan Macdonald on last
beef day. If so, it was systematically and faithfully administered.

Nola was dressed like a cowgirl. Not that there were any cowgirls in
that part of the country, or anywhere else, who dressed that way,
except at the Pioneer Week celebration at Cheyenne, and in the
romantic dramas of the West. But she was so attired, perhaps for the
advantage the short skirt gave her handsome ankles--and something in
silk stockings which approached them in tapering grace.

She was improving her hour, whether out of exuberant mischief or in
deadly earnest the ladies from the post were puzzled to understand,
and if headway toward the already pledged heart of Major King was any
indication of it, her star was indeed ascendant.

Frances Landcraft appeared at the ball as an Arabian lady, meaning in
her own interpretation of the masking to stand as a representation of
the "Thou," who is endearingly and importantly capitalized in the
verses of the ancient singer made famous by Irish-English Fitzgerald.
Her disguise was sufficient, only that her hair was so richly
assertive. There was not any like it in the cattle country; very
little like it anywhere. It was a telltale, precious possession, and
Major King never could have made good a plea of hidden identity
against it in this world.

Frances had consolation enough for his alienation and absence from her
side if numbers could compensate for the withdrawal of the fealty of
one. She distributed her favors with such judicial fairness that the
tongue of gossip could not find a breach. At least until the tall
Scotsman appeared, with his defiant red hair and a feather in his
bonnet, his plaid fastened across his shoulder with a golden clasp.

Nobody knew when he arrived, or whence. He spoke to none as he walked
in grave stateliness among the merry groups, acknowledging bold
challenges and gay banterings only with a bow. The ladies from the
post had their guesses as to who he might be, and laid cunning little
traps to provoke him into betrayal through his voice. As cunningly he
evaded

them, with unsmiling courtesy, his steady gray eyes only seeming to
laugh at them behind his green mask.

Frances had finished a dance with a Robin Hood--the slender one in
billiard-cloth green--there being no fewer than four of them,
variously rounded, diversely clad, when the Scot approached her where
she stood with her gallant near the musicians' brake of palms.

    A flask of wine, a book of verse--and Thou
    Beside me singing in the wilderness--

said the tall Highlandman, bending over her shoulder, his words low in
her ear. "Only I could be happy without the wine," he added, as she
faced him in quick surprise.

"Your penetration deserves a reward--you are the first to guess it,"
said she.

"Three dances, no less," said he, like a usurer demanding his toll.

He offered his arm, and straightway bore her off from the astonished
Robin Hood, who stood staring after them, believing, perhaps, that he
was the victim of some prearranged plan.

The spirit of his free ancestors seemed to be in the lithe, tall
Highlander's feet. There was no dancer equal to him in that room. A
thistle on the wind was not lighter, nor a wheeling swallow more
graceful in its flight.

Many others stopped their dancing to watch that pair; whisperings ran
round like electrical conjectures. Nola steered Major King near the
whirling couple, and even tried to maneuver a collision, which
failed.

"Who is that dancing with Frances Landcraft?" she breathed in the
major's ear.

"I didn't know it was Miss Landcraft," he replied, although he knew it
very well, and resolved to find out who the Scotsman was, speedily and
completely.

"My enchanted hour will soon pass," said the Scot, when that dance was
done, "and I have been looking the world over for you."

"Dancing all the way?" she asked him lightly.

"Far from it," he answered, his voice still muffled and low.

They were standing withdrawn a little from the press in the room after
their second dance, when Major King came by. The major was a cavalier
in drooping hat, with white satin cape, and sword by his side, and
well enough known to all his friends in spite of the little spat of
mustache and beard. As the major passed he jostled the Scot with his
shoulder with a rudeness openly intentional.

The major turned, and spoke an apology. Frances felt the Highlander's
muscles swell suddenly where her hand lay on his arm, but whatever had
sprung into his mind he repressed, and acknowledged the major's
apology with a lofty nod.

The music for another dance was beginning, and couples were whirling
out upon the floor.

"I don't care to dance again just now, delightfully as you carry a
clumsy one like me through--"

"A self-disparagement, even, can't stand unchallenged," he interrupted.

"Mr. Macdonald," she whispered, "your wig is awry."

They were near the door opening to the illumined garden, with its late
roses, now at their best, and hydrangea clumps plumed in foggy bloom.
They stepped out of the swirl of the dance like particles thrown from
a wheel, not missed that moment even by those interested in keeping
them in sight.

"You knew me!" said he, triumphantly glad, as they entered the
garden's comparative gloom.

"At the first word," said she.

"I came here in the hope that you would know me, and you alone--I came
with my heart full of that hope, and you knew me at the first word!"

There was not so much marvel as satisfaction, even pride for her
penetration, in it.

"Somebody else may have recognized you, too--that man who brushed
against you--"

"He's one of your officers."

"I know--Major King. Do you know him?"

"No, and he doesn't know me. He can have no interest in me at all."

"Very well; set your beautiful red wig straight and then tell me why
you wanted to come here among your enemies. It seems to me a hardy
challenge, a most unnecessary risk."

"No risk is unnecessary that brings me to you," he said, his voice
trembling in earnestness. "I dared to come because I hoped to meet you
on equal ground."

"You're a bold man--in more ways than one." She shook her head as in
rebuke of his temerity.

"But you don't believe I'm a thief," said he, conclusively.

"No; I have made public denial of it." She laughed lightly, but a
little nervously, an uneasiness over her that she could not define.

"An angel has risen to plead for Alan Macdonald, then!"

"Why should you need anybody to plead for you if there's no truth in
their charges? What is a man like you doing in this wild place,
wasting his life in a land where he isn't wanted?"

They had turned into a path that branched beyond the lanterns. The
white gravel from the river bars with which it was paved glimmered
among the shadowy shrubs. Macdonald unclasped his plaid from his
shoulders and transferred it to hers. She drew it round her, wrapping
her arms in it like a squaw, for the wind was coming chill from the
mountains now.

"It is soon said," he answered, quite willingly. "I am not hiding
under any other man's name--the one they call me by here is my own. I
was a 'son of a family,' as they say in Mexico, and looked for
distinction, if not glory, in the diplomatic service. Four years I
grubbed, an under secretary in the legation at Mexico City, then
served three more as consul at Valparaiso. An engineer who helped put
the railroad through this country told me about it down there when the
rust of my inactive life was beginning to canker my body and brain. I
threw up my chance for diplomatic distinction and came off up here
looking for life and adventure, and maybe a copper mine. I didn't find
the mine, but I've had some fun with the other two. Sometimes I'd like
to lose the adventure part of it now--it gets tiresome to be hunted,
after a while."

"What else?" she asked, after a little, seeing that he walked slowly,
his head up, his eyes far away on the purple distances of the night,
as if he read a dream.

"I settled in this valley quite innocently, as others have done,
before and after me, not knowing conditions. You've heard it said that
I'm a rustler--"

"King of the rustlers," she corrected.

"Yes, even that. But I am not a rustler. Everybody up here is a
rustler, Miss Landcraft, who doesn't belong to, or work for, the
Drovers' Association. They can't oust us by merely charging us with
homesteading government land, for that hasn't been made a statutory
crime yet. They have to make some sort of a charge against us to give
the color of justification to the crimes they practice on us, and
rustler is the worst one in the cattlemen's dictionary. It stands
ahead of murder and arson in this country. I'm not saying there are no
rustlers around the edges of these big ranches, for there are some.
But if there are any among the settlers up our way we don't know
it--and I think we'd pretty soon find out."

They turned and walked back toward the house.

"I don't see why you should trouble about it; this plainly isn't your
place," she said.

"First, I refused to be driven out by Chadron and the rest because the
thing got on my mettle. I knew that I was right, and that they were
simply stealing the public domain. Then, as I hung on, it became
apparent that there was a man's work cut out for somebody up here.
I've taken the ready-made job."

"Tell me about it."

"There's a monstrous injustice being practiced, systematically and
cruelly, against thousands of homeless people who come to this country
in innocent hope every year. They come here believing it's the great
big open-handed West they've heard so much about, carrying everything
with them that they own. They cut the strings that hold them to the
things they know when they face this way, and when they try to settle
on the land that is their inheritance, this copper-bottomed
combination of stockmen drives them out. If they don't go, they shoot
them. You've heard of it."

"Not just that way," said she, thoughtfully.

"No, they never shoot anybody but a rustler, the way the world hears
of it," said he, in resentment. "But they'll hear another story on the
outside one of these days. I'm in this fight up to the eyes to break
the back of this infernal combination that's choking this state to
death. It's the first time in my life that I ever laid my hand to
anything for anybody but myself, and I'm going to see it through to
daylight."

"But there must be millions behind the cattlemen, Mr. Macdonald."

"There are. It seems just about hopeless that a handful of ragged
homesteaders ever can make a stand against them. But they're usurping
the public domain, and they'll overreach themselves one of these days.
Chadron has title to this homestead, but that's every inch of land
that he's got a legal right over. In spite of that, he lays the claim
of ownership to the land fifteen miles north of here, where I've
nested. He's been telling me for more than two years that I must clear
out."

"You could give it up, and go back to your work among men, where it
would count," she said.

"There are things here that count. I couldn't put a state on the
map--an industrial and progressive one, I mean--back home in
Washington, or sitting with my feet on the desk in some sleepy
consulate. And I'm going to put this state on the map where it
belongs. That's the job that's cut out for me here, Miss Landcraft."

He said it without boast, but with such a stubborn note of determination
that she felt something lift within her, raising her to the plane of
his aspirations. She knew that Alan Macdonald was right about it,
although the thing that he would do was still dim in her perception.

"Even then, I don't see what a ranch away off up here from anywhere
ever will be worth to you, especially when the post is abandoned. You
know the department is going to give it up?"

"And then you--" he began in consternation, checking himself to add,
slowly, "no, I didn't know that."

"Perhaps in a year."

"It can't make much difference in the value of land up this valley,
though," he mused. "When the railroad comes on through--and that will
be as soon as we break the strangle hold of Chadron and men like
him--this country will develop overnight. There's petroleum under the
land up where I am, lying shallow, too. That will be worth something
then."

The music of an old-style dance was being played. Now the piping
cowboy voice of some range cavalier rose, calling the figures. The two
in the garden path turned with one accord and faced away from the
bright windows again.

"They'll be unmasking at midnight?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I'm afraid I can't go in again, then. The hour of my enchantment is
nearly at its end."

"You shouldn't have come," she chided, yet not in severity, rather in
subdued admiration for his reckless bravery. "Suppose they--"

"Mac! O Mac!" called a cautious, low voice from a hydrangea bush close
at hand.

"Who's there?" demanded Macdonald, springing forward.

"They're onto you, Mac," answered the voice from the shrub, "they're
goin' to do you hurt. They're lookin' for you now!"

There was a little rustling in the leaves as the unseen friend moved
away. The voice was the voice of Banjo Gibson, but not even the shadow
of the messenger had been seen.

"You should have gone before--hurry!" she whispered in alarm.

"Never mind. It was a risk, and I took it, and I'd take it again
tomorrow. It gave me these minutes with you, it was worth--"

"You must go! Where's your horse?"

"Down by the river in the willows. I can get to him, all right."

"They may come any minute, they--"

"No, they're dancing yet. I expected they'd find me out; they know me
too well. I'll get a start of them, before they even know I'm gone."

"They may be waiting farther on--why don't you go--go! There--listen!

"They're saddling," he whispered, as low sounds of haste came from the
barnyard corral.

"Go--quick!" she urged, flinging his plaid across his arm.

"I'm going--in one moment more. Miss Landcraft, I'll ride away from
you tonight perhaps never to see you again, and if I speak impetuously
before I leave you, forgive me before you hear the words--they'll not
hurt you--I don't believe they'll shame you."

"Don't say anything more, Mr. Macdonald--even this delay may cost your
life!"

"They'll kill me if they can; they've tried it more than once. I never
know when I ride away whether I'll ever return. It isn't a new
experience, just a little graver than usual--only that. I came here
tonight because I--I came to--in the hope--" he stammered, putting out
his hands as if supplicating her to understand, his plaid falling to
the ground.

"Go!" she whispered, her hand on his arm in appeal, standing near him,
dangerously near.

"I've got a right to love you--I've got a right!" he said, the torrent
of his passion leaping all curbing obstacles of delicacy, confusion,
fear. He flung the words from him in wild vehemence, as if they eased
a pang.

"No--no, you have no right! you--"

"I'll leave you in a minute, Frances, without the expectation of ever
seeing you again--only with the hope. It's mine to love you, mine to
have you if I come through this night. If you're pledged to another
man it can't be because you love him, and I'll tear the right away
from him--if I come through this night!"

He spoke rapidly, bending so near that his breath moved the hair on
her temple. She stood with arms half lifted, her hands clenched, her
breath laboring in her bosom. She did not know that love--she had not
known that love--could spring up that way, and rage like a flame
before a wind.

"If you're pledged to another man, then I'll defy him, man to man--I
do defy him, I challenge him!"

As he spoke he stooped, suddenly, like a wind-bent flame, clasped her,
kissed her, held her enfolded in his arms one moment against his
breast. He released her then, and stepped back, standing tall and
silent, as if he waited for her blast of scorn. It did not come. She
was standing with hands pressed to her face, as if to cover some shame
or sorrow, or ease the throbbing of a soul-deep pain.

The sound of men and horses came from the corral. He stood, waiting
for judgment.

"Go now," she said, in a sad, small voice.

"Give me a token to carry away, to tell me I have not broken my golden
hope," he said.

"No, I'll give you nothing!" she declared, with the sharpness of one
wronged, and helpless of redress. "You have taken too much--you have
taken--"

"What?" he asked, as if he exulted in what he heard, his blood singing
in his ears.

"Oh, go--go!" she moaned, stripping off one long white glove and
throwing it to him.

He caught it, and pressed it to his lips; then snatching off his
bonnet, hid it there, and bent among the shrubbery and was gone, as
swiftly and silently as a wolf. Frances flew to the house and up the
stairs to her room. There she threw up the window and sat panting in
it, straining, listening, for sounds from the river road.

From below the voices of the revelers came, and the laughter over the
secrets half-guessed before masks were snatched away around the
banquet table. There was a dash of galloping hoofs from the corral,
the clatter of the closing gate. The sound grew dimmer, was lost, in
the sand of the hoof-cut trail.

After a little, a shot! two! a silence; three! and one as if in reply.
Frances slipped to her knees beside the open window, a sob as bitter
as the pang of death rising from her breast. She prayed that Alan
Macdonald might ride fast, and that the vindictive hands of his
enemies might be unsteady that night by the gray riverside.




CHAPTER V

IF HE WAS A GENTLEMAN


"Don't you think we'd better drop it now, Frances, and be good?"

Major King reined his horse near hers as he spoke, and laid his hand
on the pommel of her saddle as if he expected to meet other fingers
there.

"You puzzle me, Major King," she returned, not willing to understand.

They were bringing up the rear of the tired procession which was
returning to the post from the ball. Already the east was quickening.
The stars near the horizon were growing pale; the morning wind was
moving, with a warmth in it from the low places, like a tide toward
the mountains.

"Oh, I mean this play acting of estrangement," said he, impatiently.
"Let's forget it--it doesn't carry naturally with either you or me."

"Why, Major King!" Her voice was lively with mild surprise; she was
looking at him as if for verification of his words. Then, slowly: "I
hadn't thought of any estrangement, I hadn't intended to bring you to
task for one flirtatious night. Be sure, sir, if it has given you
pleasure, it has brought me no pain."

"You began it," said he, petulantly. It is almost unbelievable how
boyishly silly a full-grown man can be.

"I began it, Major King? It's too early in the morning for a joke!"

"You were wilful and contrary; you would speak to the fellow that
day."

"Oh!" deprecatingly.

"Never mind it, though. Wilfulness doesn't become either of us,
Frances. I've tried my turn at it tonight, and it has left me cold."

"Poor man!" said she, in low voice, like a sigh. Perhaps it was not
all for Major King; perhaps not all assumed.

"Let's not quarrel, Frances."

"Not now, I'm too tired for a real good one. Leave it for tomorrow."

He rode on in silence, not sure, maybe, how much of it she meant.
Covertly she looked at him now and then, thinking better of him for
his ingenuous confession of failure to warm himself at little Nola
Chadron's heart-flame. She extended her hand.

"Forgive me, Major King," she said, very softly, not far removed,
indeed, from tenderness.

For a little while Major King left his horse to keep the road its own
way, his cavalry hands quite regardless of manuals, regulations, and
military airs. Both of them were enfolding her one. He might have held
it until they reached the post, but that she drew it away.

There were some qualms of uneasiness in her breast that hour, some
upbraidings of conscience for treason to Major King, of whom she had
been girlishly fond, girlishly proud, womanly selfish. That quick,
wild scene in the garden was not to be put away for all those
arraignments of her honest heart, although it seemed impossible,
recalled there in the thin hours of that long and eventful night, like
something remembered of another, not of herself.

Her cheeks grew hot, her heart leaped again, at the recollection of
that strong man's wild, bold words, his defiant kiss upon her lips.
She had yielded them in the recklessness of that moment, in the force
of his all-carrying demand, when she might have denied them, or sped
away from him, as innocence is believed to know from instinct when to
fly from a destructive lure.

Closing her eyes against the gray-creeping morning, she saw him again,
standing that moment with her glove to his lips; saw him bend and
speed away, the cunning of his hunted ancestors in his swift feet and
self-eliminating form. A wild fear struck her, a cold dread fell like
ashes into her heart, as she wondered how well he had ridden that
night, and how far.

Perhaps he was lying in his blood that hour, never to come back to her
again. Yet, why should it matter so much to her? Only that it was a
gallant life gone out, whatever its faults had been; only the interest
that she might have in any man who had danced with her, and told her
his story, and spoken of his designs. So she said, confessing with the
same breath that it was a poor, self-deluding lie.

Back again in her home at the post, the day awake around her, reveille
sounding in the barracks, she turned the key in her door as if to shut
the secret in with her, and bent beneath the strain of her long
suspense. She no longer tried to conceal, or to deny to her own heart,
the love she bore that man, which had come so suddenly, and so
fiercely sweet.

No longer past than the evening before her heart had ached with
jealous pain over the little triumph that Nola Chadron had thought she
was making of Major King. Now Nola might have Major King, and all the
world beside that her little head might covet. There was no
reservation in the surrender that she made of him in her conscience,
no regret.

She reproached herself for it in one breath, and glowed with a strange
new gladness the next, clasping the great secret fearfully in her
breast, in the world-old delusion that she had come into possession of
a treasure uniquely and singularly her own. One thing she understood
plainly now; she never had loved Major King. What a revolution it was
to overturn a life's plans thus in a single night! thought she.

How easily we are astounded by the eruptions in our own affairs, and
how disciplined in the end to find that the foundations of the world
have withstood the shock!

Chadron himself had not gone out after Macdonald. He had been merry
among his guests long after the shots had sounded up the river.
Frances believed that the old man had put the matter into the hands of
his cowboys and ranch foreman, having no sons, no near male relatives
of his own in that place. She did not know how many had gone in
pursuit of Macdonald, but several horses were in the party which rode
out of the gate. None had returned, she was certain, at the time the
party dispersed. The chase must have led them far.

There was no way of knowing what the result of that race had been. If
he had escaped, Frances believed that he would let her know in some
way; if he had fallen, she knew that the news of his death, important
as it would be to Chadron, would fly as if it had wings. There was
nothing to do but wait, and in any event hide away that warm sweet
thing that had unfolded in beautiful florescence in her soul.

She told herself that he must have escaped, or the pursuers would have
returned long before the party from the post left the Chadron house.
He had led them a long ride in his daring way, and doubtless was
laughing at them now in his own house, among his friends. She wondered
what his surroundings were, and what his life was like on that ranch
for which he risked it. In the midst of this speculation she fell
asleep, and lay wearily in dreamless repose for many hours.

Sleep is a marvelous clarifier of the mind. It is like the saleratus
which the pioneers used to cast into their barrels of Missouri River
water, to precipitate the silt and make it clear. Frances rose out of
her sleep with readjusted reasoning; in fear, and in doubt.

She was shocked by the surrender that she had made to that unknown
man. Perhaps he was nothing more than a thief, as charged, and this
story fixing his identification had been only a fabrication. An honest
man would have had no necessity for such haste, such wild insistence
of his right to love her. It seemed, in the light of due reflection,
the rude way of an outlawed hand.

Then there came the soft pleading of something deeper to answer for
Alan Macdonald, and to justify his rash deed. He had risked life to
see her and set himself right in her eyes, and he had doubled the risk
in standing there in the garden, defiantly proud, unbent, and
unrepentant, refusing to leave her without some favor to carry away.

There was only a sigh to answer it, after all; only a hope that time
would bring her neither shame nor regret for that romantic passage in
the dusky garden path. That she had neither shame nor regret in that
hour was her sweetest consolation. More, she was comfortable in the
security that the secret of that swift interlude was her own. Honest
man or thief, Alan Macdonald was not the man to speak of that.

Frances was surprised to find that she had slept into the middle of
the afternoon. Major King had called an hour ago, with inquiries, the
maid reported. There! that must be the major's ring again--she hoped
she might know it by this time, indeed. In case it was the major,
would miss--

Yes; miss would see him. Ask him to wait. The maid's ear was true; it
was the major's ring. She came bounding upstairs to report on it, her
breath short, her eyes big.

"Oh, miss! I think something must 'a' happened to him, he looks all
shook!" she said.

"Nonsense!" said Frances, a little flutter of apprehension,
indefinable, cold, passing through her nerves in spite of her bearing
and calm face.

Major King had remained standing, waiting her. He was handsome and
trim in his uniform, dark-eyed, healthy-skinned, full of the vigor of
his young manhood. The major's face was pale, his carriage stiff and
severe. He appeared as if something might have happened to him,
indeed, or to somebody in whom he was deeply concerned.

Frances knew that her face was a picture of the worriment and
straining of her past night, for it was a treacherous mirror of her
soul. She smiled as she made a little pause in the reception-room
door. Major King bowed, with formal, almost official, dignity. His
hand was in the bosom of his coat, and he drew it forth with something
white in it as she approached.

"I'm dreadfully indolent to belong to a soldiering family, Major
King," she said, offering her hand in greeting.

"Permit me," said he, placing the folded white thing in her
outstretched fingers.

"What is it? Not--it isn't--" she stammered, something deeper than
surprise, than foreboding, in her eyes and colorless cheeks.

"Unmistakably yours," he said; "your name is stamped in it."

"It must be," she owned, her spirits sinking low, her breath weak
between her lips. "Thank you, Major King."

The glove was soiled with earth-marks; it was wrinkled and drawn, as
if it had come back to her through conflict and tragedy. She rolled it
deliberately, in a compact little wad, her fingers as cold as her hope
for the life of the man who had borne it away. She knew that Major
King was waiting for a word; she was conscious of his stern eyes upon
her face. But she did not speak. As far as Major King's part in it
went, the matter was at an end.

"Miss Landcraft, I am waiting."

Major King spoke with imperious suggestion. She started, and looked
toward him quickly, a question in her eyes.

"I sha'n't keep you then," she returned, her words little more than a
whisper.

"Don't try to read a misunderstanding into my words," said he, his
voice shaking. Then he seemed to break his stiff, controlled pose as
if it had been a coating of ice, and expand into a trembling,
white-hot man in a moment. "God's name, girl! Say something, say
something! You know where that glove was found?"

"No; and I shall not ask you, Major King."

"But I demand of you to know how it came in that man's possession!
Tell me that--tell me!"

He stood before her, very near to her. His hands were shaking, his
eyes gleaming with fury.

"I might ask you with as much reason how it came in yours," she told
him, resentful of his angry demand.

"A messenger arrived with it an hour ago."

"For you, Major King?"

"For me, certainly."

She had no need to ask him whence the messenger came. She could see
the horsemen returning to the ranchhouse by the river in the gray
morning light, in the triumph of their successful hunt. Alan Macdonald
had fallen. It had been Nola's hand that had dispatched this evidence
of what she could but guess to be the disloyalty of Frances to her
betrothed. If Nola had hoped to make a case with the major, Frances
felt she had succeeded better than she knew.

"Then there is nothing more to be said, Major King," said she, after a
little wait.

"There is much more," he insisted. "Tell me that he snatched the glove
from you, tell me that you lost it--tell me anything, and I'll believe
you--but tell me something!"

"There is nothing to tell you," said she, resentful of the meddling of
Nola Chadron, which his own light conduct with her had in a manner
justified.

"Then I can only imagine the truth," he told her, bitterly. "But
surely you didn't give him the glove, surely you cannot love that wolf
of the range, that cattle thief, that murderer!"

"You have no right to ask me that," she said, flashing with
resentment.

"I have a right to ask you that, to ask you more; not only to ask, but
to demand. And you must answer. You forget that you are my affianced
wife."

"But you are not my confessor, for all that."

"God's name!" groaned King, his teeth set, his eyes staring as if he
had gone mad. "Will you shame us both? Do you forget you are _my
affianced wife?_"

"That is ended--you are free!"

"Frances!" he cried, sharply, as in despair of one sinking, whom he
was powerless to save.

"It is at an end between us, Major King. My 'necessity' of explaining
everything, or anything, to you is wiped away, your responsibility for
my acts relieved. Lift your head, sir. You need not blush before the
world for me!"

Sweat was springing on the major's forehead; he drew his breath
through open lips.

"I refuse to humor your caprice--you are irresponsible, you don't know
what you are doing," he declared. "You are forcing the issue to this
point, Frances, I haven't demanded this."

"You have demanded too much. You may go now, Major King."

"It's only the infatuation of a moment. You can't care for a man like
that, Frances," he argued, shaken out of his passion by her determined
stand.

"This is not a matter for discussion between you and me, sir."

Major King bowed his head as if the rebuke had crushed him. She stood
aside to let him pass. When he reached the door she turned to him. He
paused, expectantly, hopefully, as if he felt that a reconciliation
was dawning.

"If it hadn't been for you they wouldn't have discovered him last
night," she charged. "You betrayed him to his enemies. Can you tell
me, then--will you tell me--is Alan Macdonald--dead?"

Major King stood, his stern eyes on the glove, unrolled again, now
dangling in her hand.

"If he was a gentleman, as you said of him once, then he is dead,"
said he.

He turned and left her. She did not look after him, but stood with the
soiled glove spread in her hands, gazing upon it in sad tenderness.




CHAPTER VI

A BOLD CIVILIAN


Colonel Landcraft was a slight man, and short of stature for a
soldierly figure when out of the saddle. His gray hair was thinning in
front, and his sharp querulous face was seamed in frowning pattern
about the eyes. His forehead was fashioned on an intention of
massiveness out of keeping with his tapering face, which ran out in a
disappointing chin, and under the shadow of that projecting brow his
cold blue eyes seemed as unfriendly as a winter sky.

Early in his soldiering days the colonel had felt the want of inches
and pounds, a shortage which he tried to overcome by carrying himself
pulled up stiffly, giving him a strutting effect that had fastened
upon him and become inseparable from his mien. This air of superior
brusqueness was sharpened by the small fierceness of his visage, in
which his large iron-gray mustache branched like horns.

Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment,
and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a
military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the
grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian
days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling
only to himself. He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms.
He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts
within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as
officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.

If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was
Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant--he could figure it
out as straight as a bayonet--of the heavy-handed signer himself. His
years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass
of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope he grieved.

There he was in those Septembral days, galloping along toward the age
limit and retirement. Within a few weeks he would be subject to call
before the retiring board any day, and there was nothing in his
short-remaining time of service to shore up longer the hope of
advancement in rank as compensatory honor in his retirement. He was a
testy little old man, charged for instant explosion, and it was
generally understood by everybody but the colonel himself that the
department had sent him off to Fort Shakie to get him out of the way.

On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron's ball, when Major
King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried
away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail
stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official
business to the army post at Cheyenne. Instead of telegraphing to his
own post the intelligence of his return, and calling for a proper
equipage to meet him at the railroad end, he had chosen to come back
in this secret and unexpected way.

That was true to the colonel's manner. Perhaps he hoped to catch
somebody overstepping the line of decorum, regulations, forms, either
in the conduct of the post's business or his own household. For the
colonel was as much a tyrant in one place as the other. So he
eliminated himself, wrapped to the bushy eyebrows in his greatcoat,
for there was a chilliness in the afternoon, and clouds were driving
over the sun.

His austerity silenced the talkative driver, and when the stage
reached the hotel the colonel parted from him without a word and
clicked away briskly on his military heels--built up to give him
stature--to see what he might surprise out of joint at the post.

Perhaps it was a shock to his valuation of his own indispensability to
find everything in proper form at the post. The sentry paced before
the flagstaff, decorum prevailed. There was not one small particular
loose to give him ground for flying at the culpable person and raking
him with his blistering fire.

Colonel Landcraft turned into his own house with a countenance
somewhat fallen as a consequence of this discovery. It seemed to bear
home to him the fact that the United States Army would get along very
neatly and placidly without him.

The colonel occupied one wing of his sprawling, commodious, and
somewhat impressive house as official headquarters. This room was full
of stiff bookcases, letter files, severe chairs. The colonel's desk
stood near the fireplace in a strong light, with nothing ever
unfinished left upon it. It was one of the colonel's greatest
satisfactions in life that he always was ready to snap down the cover
of that desk at a moment's notice and march away upon a campaign to
the world's end--and his own--leaving everything clear behind him.

A private walk led up to a private door in the colonel's quarters,
where a private in uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder, made a
formal parade when the colonel was within, and accessible to the
military world for the transaction of business. This sentinel was not
on duty now, the return of the colonel being unlooked-for, and nobody
was the wiser in that household when the master of it let himself into
the room with his key.

The day was merging into dusk, or the colonel probably would have been
aware that a man was hastening after him along the leaf-strewn walk as
he passed up the avenue to his home. He was not many rods behind the
colonel, and was gaining on him rapidly, when the crabbed old
gentleman closed his office door softly behind him.

The unmilitary visitor--this fact was betrayed by both his gait and
his dress--turned sharply in upon the private walk and followed the
colonel to his door. He was turning through the letters and telegrams
which had arrived during his absence when the visitor laid hand to the
bell.

No sound of ringing followed this application to the thumbscrew
arrangement on the door, for the colonel had taken the bell away long
ago. But there resulted a clucking, which brought the colonel to the
portal frowning and alert, warming in the expectation of having
somebody whom he might dress down at last.

"Colonel Landcraft, I beg the favor of a word in private," said the
stranger at the door.

The colonel opened the door wider, and peered sharply at the visitor,
a frown gathering on his unfriendly face.

"I haven't the honor"--he began stiffly, seeing that it was an
inferior civilian, for all civilians, except the president, were
inferior to the colonel.

"Macdonald is my name. I am a rancher in this country; you will have
heard of me," the visitor replied.

"Nothing to your credit, young man," said the colonel, tartly. "What
do you want?"

"A man's chance," said Macdonald, earnestly. "Will you let me
explain?"

Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.

"I'll make a light," said the colonel, lowering the window-shades
before he struck the match. When he had the flame of the student's
lamp on top of his desk regulated to conform to his exactions, the
colonel faced about suddenly.

"I am listening, sir."

"At the beginning, sir, I want you to know who I am," said Macdonald,
producing papers. "My father, Senator Hampden Macdonald of Maine, now
lives in Washington. You have heard of him. I am Alan Macdonald, late
of the United States consular service. It is unlikely that you ever
heard of me in that connection."

"I never heard of you before I came here," said the colonel,
unfavorably, unfolding the credentials which the visitor had placed on
his desk, and skimming them with cursory eye. Now he looked up from
his reading with a sudden little jerk of the head, and stood at severe
attention. "And the purpose of this visit, sir?"

"First, to prove to you that the notorious character given me by the
cattlemen of this country is slanderous and unwarranted; secondly, to
ask you to give me a man's chance, as I have said, in a matter to
which I shall come without loss of words. I am a gentleman, and the
son of a gentleman; I do not acknowledge any moral or social superiors
in this land."

The colonel, drew himself up a notch, and seemed to grow a little at
that. He looked hard at the tall, fair-haired, sober-faced man in
front of him, as if searching out his points to justify the bold claim
upon respectability that he had made. Macdonald was dressed in almost
military precision; the colonel could find no fault with that. His
riding-breeches told that they had been cut for no other legs, his
coat set to his shoulders with gentlemanly ease. Only his rather
greasy sombrero, with its weighty leather band, and the bulging
revolvers under his coat seemed out of place in the general trimness
of his attire.

"Go on, sir," the colonel said.

"I had the honor of meeting Miss Landcraft last night at the
masquerade given by Miss Chadron--"

"How was that, sir? Did you have the effrontery to force yourself into
a company which despises you, at the risk of your life and the decorum
of the assemblage?"

"I was drawn there," Macdonald spoke slowly, meeting the colonel's
cold eye with steady gaze, "by a hope that was miraculously realized.
I did risk my life, and I almost lost it. But that is nothing
unusual--I risk it every day."

"You saw Miss Landcraft at the ball, danced with her, I suppose,
talked with her," nodded the colonel, understandingly. "Macdonald, you
are a bold, a foolishly bold, man."

"I saw Miss Landcraft, I danced with her, I talked with her, and I
have come to you, sir, after a desperate ride through the night to
save my life as the penalty of those few minutes of pleasure, to
request the privilege of calling upon Miss Landcraft and paying my
court to her. I ask you to give me a man's chance to win her hand."

The audacity of the request almost tied the colonel's sharp old
tongue. For a moment he stood with his mouth open, his face red in the
gathering storm of his sudden passion.

"Sir!" said he, in amazed, unbelieving voice.

"There are my credentials--they will bear investigation," Macdonald
said.

"Damn your credentials, sir! I'll have nothing to do with them, you
blackguard, you scoundrel!"

"I ask you to consider--"

"I can consider nothing but the present fact that you are accused of
deeds of outlawry and violence, and are an outcast of society, even
the crude society of this wild country, sir. No matter who you are or
whence you sprung, the evidence in this country is against you. You
are a brigand and a thief, sir--this act of barbaric impetuosity in
itself condemns you--no civilized man would have the effrontery to
force himself into my presence in such a manner and make this insane
demand."

"I am exercising a gentleman's prerogative, Colonel Landcraft."

"You are a vulture aspiring to soar among eagles, sir!"

"You have heard only the cattlemen's side of the story, Colonel
Landcraft," said Macdonald, with patience and restraint. "You know
that every man who attempts to build a fence around his cabin in this
country, and strikes a furrow in the ground, is a rustler according to
their creed."

"I am aware that there is narrowness, injustice even, on the drovers'
side," the colonel admitted, softening a little, it seemed. "But for
all that, even if you were an equal, and an honest man, the road to
Miss Landcraft's heart is closed to assault, no matter how wild and
sudden. She is plighted to another man."

"Sir--"

"It is true; she will be married in the Christmas holidays. Go your
way now, Macdonald, and dismiss this romantic dream. You build too
high on the slight favor of a thoughtless girl. A dance or two is
nothing, sir; a whispered word is less. If you were the broad man of
the world that you would have me believe, you have known this.
Instead, you come dashing in here like a savage and claim the right to
woo her. Preposterous! She is beyond your world, sir. Go back to your
wild riding, Macdonald, and try to live an honest man."

Macdonald stood with his head bent, brows gathered in stubborn
expression of resistance. Colonel Landcraft could read in his face
that there was no surrender, no acknowledgment of defeat, in that wild
rider's heart. The old warrior felt a warming of admiration for him,
as one brave man feels for another, no matter what differences lie
between them. Now Macdonald lifted his face, and there was that deep
movement of laughter in his eyes that Frances had found so marvelous
on the day of their first meeting.

"Perhaps her heart is untouched, sir, in spite of the barricade that
has been raised between it and the world," he said.

The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.

"Macdonald, you're a strange man, a stubborn man, and a strong one.
There is work for a man like you in this life; why are you wasting it
here?"

"If I live six months longer the world beyond these mountains will
know," was all that Macdonald said, taking up the papers which he had
submitted to the colonel, and placing them again in his pocket.

Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.

"Running off other men's cattle never will do it, Macdonald."

The door of the colonel's room which gave into the hall of the main
entrance opened without the formality of announcement. Frances drew
back in quick confusion, speaking her apology from behind the door.

"I ask your pardon, father. I heard voices here and wondered who it
could be--I didn't know you had come home."

"Your appearance is opportune, Miss Landcraft," her father told her,
with no trace of ill-humor. "Come in. Here is this wild Alan Macdonald
come bursting in upon us from his hills."

The colonel indicated him with a wave of the hand, and Macdonald
bowed, his heart shrinking when he saw how coldly she returned his
greeting from her place at the door.

"He has come riding," the colonel continued, "with a demand on me to
be allowed to woo you, and carry you off to his cave among the rocks.
Show him the door, and add your testimony to my assurance--which seems
inadequate to satisfy the impetuous gentleman--that his case is
hopeless."

The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his
jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not
meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had
entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the
hall from which Frances came, was the world's door for entering that
house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them
when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away.

"This way, Mr. Macdonald, please," said she, politely cold,
unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her
voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and
hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or
a hot hasty kiss given in it--and received.

In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made
her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea
blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street
door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a
small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man's
course and the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been
indorsed by her was evident, he believed.

"There was nothing for me to conceal," said he, as the door opened
upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; "I came in
a man's way, as I thought--"

"You came in a man's way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of
attempting to win a woman's hand, when you lack the man's strength or
the man's courage to defend even the glove that covers it," she said.
Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful.

Macdonald started. "Then it has come back to you?"

"It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the
hand that wore it"--she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered
like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his
eyes--"to have kept the knowledge from!"

"I lost it," said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow,
"and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his
life down for it."

"It might have been expected--of a man," said she.

"But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its
return to you, Miss Landcraft," he said, cold now in his word, and
lofty. "You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path,
and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as
evidence of a shadowy conquest, maybe, among my wild and lawless kind.
Beyond that you know nothing--you lost it, that was all."

In the door he turned.

"Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald," she said.

"If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a
vindication in this country," he said, "just go on thinking of me as a
thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss
Landcraft."

She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at
seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be
lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so
suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating
circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart
bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.

But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now
believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired,
for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing
that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in
the full knowledge that he was a _man!_ Only a man would have come,
bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would
have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too
proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to
explain.

She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at
his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of
pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his
hand.

"He is gone," she said.

"Very well," he nodded, shortly.

"I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my
engagement with Major King, to--"

"Impossible! nonsense!"

"To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him," she
concluded, unshaken.

The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that
boiled in his breast.

"I tell you, miss, you can't break your engagement to Major King! That
is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with
me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a
soldier's word and a soldier's honor in this matter, miss. It is
incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed."

"I'm in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I'm old enough."

"A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What's the occasion
of this change in the wind? Surely not--"

Colonel Landcraft's brows drew together over his thin nose, making
small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and
bristling hair. He held his words suspended while he searched her face
for justification of his pent arraignment.

"Nonsense!" said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as
if relief had come. "Put the notion out of your head, for you are
going to marry Major King."

"I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this
matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it
is final."

His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke.
But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his
right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to
the army and a glory to the nation.

"You'll marry Major King, or die a maid!" he declared.

"Very well, father," she returned, in ambiguous concession.

She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way
he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking,
as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold,
outlandish petition.




CHAPTER VII

THROWING THE SCARE


Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald's place the following day, from
Sam Hatcher's ranch across the river, bringing news that three
homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They
had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their
fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give
any further particulars; he did not know the victims' names.

Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the
slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new
procedure in the cattle barons' land; this scourge had been
fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given
him.

The word had gone out to them to be on guard. Now death had begun to
leap upon them from the roadside grass. Perhaps his own turn would
come tonight or tomorrow. He could not be more watchful than his
neighbors had been; no man could close all the doors.

The price of life in that country for such men as himself always had
been unceasing vigilance. When a man stood guard over himself day and
night he could do no more, and even at that he was almost certain,
some time or other, to leave a chink open through which the waiting
blow might fall. After a time one became hardened to this condition of
life. The strain of watching fell away from him; it became a part of
his daily habit, and a man grew careless about securing the safeguards
upon his life by and by.

"Them fellers," said Banjo, feeling that he had lowered himself
considerably in carrying the news involving their swift end to
Macdonald, "got about what was comin' to 'em I reckon, Mac. Why don't
a man like you hitch up with Chadron or Hatcher, or one of the good
men of this country, and git out from amongst them runts that's nosin'
around in the ground for a livin' like a drove of hogs?"

"Every man to his liking, Banjo," Macdonald returned, "and I don't
like the company you've named."

They never quarreled over the point, but Banjo never ceased to urge
the reformation, such as he honestly believed it to be, upon Macdonald
at every visit. The little troubadour felt that he was doing a
generous and friendly turn for a fallen man, and squaring his own
account with Macdonald in thus laboring for his redemption.

Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his
life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring
when the musician, heading for Chadron's after playing for a dance,
had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse
into it. On that occasion Banjo's wits had been mixed with liquor, but
his sense of gratitude had been perfectly clear ever since.
Macdonald's door was the only one in the nesters' colony that stress
or friendship ever had constrained him to enter. Even as it was, with
all the big debt of gratitude owing, his intimacy with a man who had
opened an irrigation ditch was a thing of which he did not boast
abroad.

Banjo made but a night's stop of it with Macdonald. Early in the
morning he was in the saddle again, with a dance ahead of him to play
for that night at a ranch twenty miles or more away. He lingered a
little after shaking hands with his host, trying the violin case as if
to see that it was secure, and fidgeting in his saddle, and holding
back on the start. Macdonald could see that there was something unsaid
in the little man's mind which gave him an uneasiness, like
indigestion.

"What is it, Banjo?" he asked, to let it be known that he understood.

"Mac, did you ever hear tell of a feller named Mark Thorn?" Banjo
inquired, looking about him with fearful caution, lowering his voice
almost to a whisper.

"Yes, I've heard of him."

"Well, he's in this country."

"Are you sure about that, Banjo?" Macdonald's face was troubled; he
moved nearer the musician as he made the inquiry, and laid his hand on
his arm.

"He's here. He's the feller you've got to watch out for. He cut
acrosst the road yisterday afternoon when I was comin' down here, and
when he seen me he stopped, for I used to know him up north and he
knew it wasn't no use to try to duck and hide his murderin' face from
me. He told me he was ranchin' up in Montany, and he'd come down here
to collect some money Chadron owed him on an old bill."

"Pretty slim kind of a story. But he's here to collect money from
Chadron, all right, and give him value received. What kind of a
looking man is he?"

"He's long and lean, like a rail, with a kind of a bend in him when he
walks, and the under lid of his left eye drawed like you'd pulled it
down and stuck a tack in it. He's wearin' a cap, and he's kind of
whiskered up, like he'd been layin' out some time."

"I'd know him," Macdonald nodded.

"You couldn't miss him in a thousand, Mac. Well, I must be rackin'
along."

Banjo scarcely had passed out of sight when three horsemen came
galloping to Macdonald's gate. They brought news of a fresh tragedy,
and that in the immediate neighborhood. A boy had been shot down that
morning while doing chores on a homestead a little way across the
river. He was the son of one of the men on the death-list, and these
men, the father among them, had come to enlist Macdonald's aid in
running down the slayer.

The boy's mother had seen the assassin hastening away among the scant
bushes on the slope above the house. The description that she gave of
him left no doubt in Macdonald's mind of his identity. It was Mark
Thorn, the cattlemen's contract killer, the homesteaders' scourge.

It was a fruitless search that day, seeking old Mark Thorn among the
hills which rose brokenly a few miles back from the river and climbed
to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil's
darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as
quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.

As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize
his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced
lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him
dead at the handles of his plow.

Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency
in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of
this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself
was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left
his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle
interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find
lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an institution of
destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power
strong enough to circumvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.

There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, bloody-muzzled great
beasts of dark forests, that struck deeper fear into the hearts of
primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and
hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was
a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings
out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on
facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer,
from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.

Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and
children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage,
combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by
one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides
Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five
remained on the evening of the third.

It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads.
When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse
predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the
backing of the Drovers' Association, which had an arm as long in that
land as the old Persian king's. He would strike there, like the ghost
of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows' blood,
and slink away as silently as a wolf out of the sheepfold at dawn when
his allotted task was done.

Better to go home and guard what was left, they said. All of them were
men for a fight, but it was one thing to stand up to something that a
man could see, and quite another to fight blindfolded, and in the
dark. Catching Mark Thorn was like trying to ladle moonlight with a
sieve. The country wasn't worth it, they were beginning to believe.
When Mark Thorn came in, it was like the vultures flying ahead of the
last, devastating plague.

The man whose boy had been shot down beside the little grass-roofed
barn was the last to leave.

"I'll stick to it for a year, Alan, if you think it's any use," he
said.

He was a gaunt man, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes; gray, worn,
unwashed, and old; one of the earth's disinherited who believed that
he had come into his rood of land at last. Now the driving shadow of
his restless fate was on him again. Macdonald could see that it was
heavy in his mind to hitch up and stagger on into the west, which was
already red with the sunset of his day.

Macdonald was moved by a great compassion for this old man, whose hope
had been snatched away from him by the sting of a bullet in the dawn.
He laid his hand on the old homesteader's sagging thin shoulder and
poured the comfort of a strong man's sympathy into his empty eyes.

"Go on back, Tom, and look after the others," he said. "Do your chores
by dark, morning and night, and stick close to cover all days and
watch for him. I'll keep on looking. I started to get that old hyena,
and I'll get him. Go on home."


The old man's eyes kindled with admiration. But it died as quickly as
it had leaped up, and he shook his long hair with a sigh.

"You can't do nothin' agin him all alone, Alan."

"I think I'll have a better chance alone than in a crowd, Tom. There's
no doubt that there were too many of us, crashing through the brush
and setting ourselves up against the sky line every time we rode up a
hill. I'll tackle him alone. Tell the neighbors to live under cover
till they hear I've either got him or he's got me. In case it turns
out against me, they can do whatever seems best to them."




CHAPTER VIII

AFOOT AND ALONE


Mark Thorn had not killed anybody since shooting the man at the plow.
There were five deaths to his credit on that contract, although none
of the fallen was on the cattlemen's list of desirables to be
removed.

Five days had passed without a tragedy, and the homesteaders were
beginning to draw breath in the open again, in the belief that
Macdonald must have driven the slayer out of the country. Nothing had
been seen or heard of Macdonald since the evening that he parted
company with Tom Lassiter, father of the murdered boy.

Macdonald, in the interval, was hard on the old villain's trail. He
had picked it up on the first day of his lone-handed hunt, and once he
had caught a glimpse of Thorn as he dodged among the red willows on
the river, but the sight had been too transitory to put in a shot. It
was evident now that Thorn knew that he was being hunted by a single
pursuer. More than that, there were indications written in the loose
earth where he passed, and in the tangled brushwood where he skulked,
that he had stopped running away and had turned to hunt the hunter.

For two days they had been circling in a constantly tightening ring,
first one leading the hunt, then the other. Trained and accustomed as
he was to life under those conditions, Thorn had not yet been able to
take even a chance shot at his clinging pursuer.

Macdonald was awake to the fact that this balance in his favor could
not be maintained long. As it was, he ascribed it more to luck than
skill on his part. This wild beast in human semblance must possess all
the wild beast's cunning; there would be a rift left open in this
straining game of hide and seek which his keen eyes would be sure to
see at no distant hour.

The afternoon of that day was worn down to the hock. Macdonald had
been creeping and stooping, running, panting, and lying concealed from
the first gleam of dawn. Whether by design on the part of Thorn, or
merely the blind leading of the hunt, Macdonald could not tell, the
contest of wits had brought them within sight of Alamito ranchhouse.

Resting a little while with his back against a ledge which insured him
from surprise, Macdonald looked out from the hills over the
wide-spanning valley, the farther shore of which was laved in a purple
mist as rich as the dye of some oriental weaving. He felt a surge of
indignant protest against the greedy injustice of that manorial
estate, the fair house glistening in the late sun among the
white-limbed cottonwoods. There Saul Chadron sat, like some distended
monster, his hands spread upon more than he could honestly use, or his
progeny after him for a thousand years, growling and snapping at all
whose steps lagged in passing, or whose weary eyes turned longingly
toward those grassy vales.

There had been frost for many nights past; the green of the summerland
had merged into a yellow-brown, now gold beneath the slanting
sunbeams. A place of friendly beauty and sequestered peace, where a
man might come to take up his young dreams, or stagger under the
oppression of his years to put them down, and rest. It seemed so, in
the light of that failing afternoon.

But the man who sat with his back against the ledge, his ears strained
to find the slightest hostile sound, his roaming eyes always coming
back with unconscious alertness and frowning investigation to the
nearer objects in the broken foreground, had tasted beneath the
illusive crust of that land, and the savor was bitter upon his lips.
He questioned what good there was to be got out of it, for him or
those for whom he had taken up the burden, for many a weary year to
come.

The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the
uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft:
"There must be millions behind the cattlemen." He felt that he never
had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that
hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never
to overturn.

There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and
hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a
lion for the bounty upon his head. And in the event that a lucky shot
should rid the earth of that foul thing, how much would it strengthen
his safety, and his neighbors', and fasten their weak hold upon the
land?

Little, indeed. Others could be hired out of those uncounted millions
of the cattlemen's resources to finish what Mark Thorn had begun. The
night raids upon their fields would continue, the slanders against
them would spread and grow. Colonel Landcraft believed him to be what
malicious report had named him; there was not a doubt of that. And
what Frances thought of him since that misadventure of the glove, it
was not hard to guess.

But that was not closed between them, he told himself, as he had told
himself before, times unnumbered. There was a final word to be said,
at the right time and place. The world would turn many times between
then and the Christmas holidays, when Frances was to become the bride
of another, according to the colonel's plans.

Macdonald was weary from his night vigils and stealthy prowlings by
day, and hungry for a hot meal. Since he had taken the trail of Mark
Thorn alone he had not kindled a fire. Now the food that he had
carried with him was done; he must turn back home for a fresh supply,
and a night's rest.

It did not matter much, anyway, he said, feeling the uselessness of
his life and strife in that place. It was a big and unfriendly land, a
hard and hopeless place for a man who tried to live in defiance of the
established order there. Why not leave it, with its despair and
heart-emptiness? The world was full enough of injustices elsewhere if
he cared to set his hand to right them.

But a true man did not run away under fire, nor a brave one block out
a task and then shudder and slink away, when he stood off and saw the
immensity of the thing that he had undertaken. Besides all these
considerations, which in themselves formed insuperable reasons against
retreat, there had been some big talk into the ear of Frances
Landcraft. There was no putting down what he had begun. His dream had
taken root there; it would be cruel cowardice to wrench it up.

He got up, the sun striking him on the face, from which the west wind
pressed back his hat brim as if to let the daylight see it. The dust
of his travels was on it, and the roughness of his new beard, and it
was harsh in some of its lines, and severe as an ashlar from the
craftsman's tool. But it was a man's face, with honor in it; the sun
found no weakness there, no shame concealed under the sophistries and
wiles by which men beguile the world.

Macdonald looked away across the valley, past the white ranchhouse,
beyond the slow river which came down from the northwest in toilsome
curves, whose gray shores and bars were yellow in that sunlight as the
sands of famed Pactolus. His breast heaved with the long inspiration
which flared his thin nostrils like an Arab's scenting rain; he
revived with a new vigor as the freedom of the plains met his eyes and
made them glad. That was his place, his land; its troubles were his to
bear, its peace his to glean when it should ripen. It was his
inheritance; it was his place of rest. The lure of that country had a
deep seat in his heart; he loved it for its perils and its pains. It
was like a sweetheart to bind and call him back. A man makes his own
Fortunate Isles, as that shaggy old gray poet knew so well.

For a moment Mark Thorn was forgotten as Macdonald repeated, in low
voice above his breath:

    Lo! These are the isles of the watery miles
    That God let down from the firmament.
    Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man's trust;
    Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust--

Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip
which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many
seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining
soul. Its fight was his fight, and there was gladness in the thought.

His alertness as he went down the slope, and the grim purpose of his
presence in that forbidden place, did not prevent the pleading of a
softer cause, and a sweeter. That rare smile woke in his eyes and
unbent for a moment the harshness of his lips as he thought of brown
hair sweeping back from a white forehead, and a chin lifted
imperiously, as became one born to countenance only the exalted in
this life. There was something that made him breathe quicker in the
memory of her warm body held a transitory moment in his arms; the
recollection of the rose-softness of her lips. All these were waiting
in the world that he must win, claimed by another, true. But that was
immaterial, he told his heart, which leaped and exulted in the memory
of that garden path as if there was no tomorrow, and no such shadow in
man's life as doubt.

Of course, there remained the matter of the glove. A man might have
been expected to die before yielding it to another, as she had said,
speaking out of a hot heart, he knew. There was a more comfortable
thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the
western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of
living to win the hand that it had covered.

Chadron's ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him,
although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light. He
cut his course to bring himself into the public highway--a government
road, it was--that ran northward up the river, the road along which
Chadron's men had pursued him the night of the ball. He meant to
strike it some miles to the north of Chadron's homestead, for he was
not looking for any more trouble than he was carrying that day.

He proceeded swiftly, but cautiously, watching for his man. But Mark
Thorn did not appear to be abroad in that part of the country. Until
sundown Macdonald walked unchallenged, when he struck the highway a
short distance south of the point where the trail leading to Fort
Shakie branched from it.

Saul Chadron and his daughter Nola came riding out of the Fort Shakie
road, their horses in that tireless, swinging gallop which the animals
of that rare atmosphere can maintain for hours. As he rode, Chadron
swung his quirt in unison with the horse's undulations, from side to
side across its neck, like a baton. He sat as stiff and solid in his
saddle as a carved image. Nola came on neck and neck with him, on the
side of the road nearer Macdonald.

Macdonald was carrying a rifle in addition to his side arms, and he
was a dusty grim figure to come upon suddenly afoot in the high road.
Chadron pulled in his horse and brought it to a stiff-legged stop when
he saw Macdonald, who had stepped to the roadside to let them pass.
The old cattleman's high-crowned sombrero was pinched to a peak; the
wind of his galloping gait had pressed its broad brim back from his
tough old weathered face. His white mustache and little dab of pointed
beard seemed whiter against the darkness of passion which mounted to
his scowling eyes.

"What in the hell're you up to now?" he demanded, without regard for
his companion, who was accustomed, well enough, to his explosions and
expletives.

Macdonald gravely lifted his hand to his hat, his eyes meeting Nola's
for an instant, Chadron's challenge unanswered. Nola's face flared at
this respectful salutation as if she had been insulted. She jerked her
horse back a little, as if she feared that violence would follow the
invasion of her caste by this fallen and branded man, her pliant waist
weaving in graceful balance with every movement of her beast.

Macdonald lowered his eyes from her blazingly indignant face. Her
horse was slewed across the narrow road, and he considered between
waiting for them to ride on and striking into the shoulder-high sage
which grew thick at the roadside there. He thought that she was very
pretty in her fairness of hair and skin, and the lake-clear blueness
of her eyes. She was riding astride, as all the women in that country
rode, dressed in wide pantaloonish corduroys, with twinkling little
silver spurs on her heels.

"What're you prowlin' down here around my place for?" Chadron asked,
spurring his horse as he spoke, checking its forward leap with rigid
arm, which made a commotion of hoofs and a cloud of dust.

"This is a public highway, and I deny your right to question my
motives in it," Macdonald returned, calmly.

"Sneakin' around to see if you can lay hands on a horse, I suppose,"
Chadron said, leaning a little in towering menace toward the man in
the road.

Macdonald felt a hot surge of resentment rise to his eyes, so suddenly
and so strongly that it dimmed his sight. He shut his mouth hard on
the words which sprang into it, and held himself in silence until he
had command of his anger.

"I'm hunting," said he, meeting Chadron's eye with meaning look.

"On foot, and waitin' for dark!" the cattleman sneered.

"I'm going on foot because the game I'm after sticks close to the
ground. There's no need of naming that game to you--you know what it
is."

Macdonald spoke with cutting severity. Chadron's dark face reddened
under his steady eyes, and again the big rowels of his spurs slashed
his horse's sides, making it bound and trample in threatening charge.

"I don't know anything about your damn low business, but I'll tell you
this much; if I ever run onto you ag'in down this way I'll do a little
huntin' on my own accord."

"That would be squarer, and more to my liking, than hiring somebody
else to do it for you, Mr. Chadron. Ride on--I don't want to stand
here and quarrel with you."

"I'm goin' to clear you nesters out of there up the river"--Chadron
waved his hand in the direction of which he spoke--"and put a stop to
your rustlin' before another month rolls around. I've stood your
fences up there on my land as long as I'm goin' to!"

"I've never had a chance to tell you before, Mr. Chadron"--Macdonald
spoke as respectfully as his deep detestation of the cattleman would
allow--"but if you've got any other charge to bring against me except
that of homesteading, bring it in a court. I'm ready to face you on
it, any day."

"I carry my court right here with me," said Chadron, patting his
revolver.

"I deny its jurisdiction," Macdonald returned, drawing himself up, a
flash of defiance in his clear eyes.

Chadron jerked his head in expression of lofty disdain.

"Go on! Git out of my sight!" he ordered.

"The road is open to you," Macdonald replied.

"I'm not goin' to turn my back on you till you're out of sight!"

Chadron bent his great owlish brows in a scowl, laid his hand on his
revolver and whirled his horse in the direction that Macdonald was
facing.

Macdonald did not answer. He turned from Chadron, something in his act
of going that told the cattleman he was above so mean suspicion on his
part. Nola shifted her horse to let him pass, her elbows tight at her
sides, scorn in her lively eyes.

Again Macdonald's hand went to his hat in respectful salute, and again
he saw that flash of anger spread in the young woman's cheeks. Her
fury blazed in her eyes as she looked at him a moment, and a dull
color mounted in his own face as he beheld her foolish and unjustified
pride.

Macdonald would have passed her then, but she spurred her horse upon
him with sudden-breaking temper, forcing him to spring back quickly to
the roadside to escape being trampled. Before he could collect himself
in his astonishment, she struck him a whistling blow with her
long-thonged quirt across the face.

"You dog!" she said, her clenched little white teeth showing in her
parted lips.

Macdonald caught the bridle and pushed her horse back to its haunches,
and she, in her reckless anger, struck him across the hand in sharp
quick blows. Her conduct was comparable to nothing but that of an
ill-bred child striking one whose situation, he has been told, is the
warrant of his inferiority.

The struggle was over in a few seconds, and Macdonald stood free of
the little fury, a red welt across his cheek, the back of his hand cut
until the blood oozed through the skin in heavy black drops. Chadron
had not moved a hand to interfere on either side. Only now that the
foolish display of Nola's temper was done he rocked in his saddle and
shook the empty landscape with his loud, coarse laugh.

He patted his daughter on the shoulder, like a hunter rewarding a dog.
Macdonald walked away from them, the only humiliation that he felt for
the incident being that which he suffered for her sake.

It was not so much that a woman had debased herself to the level of a
savage, although that hurt him, too, but that her blows had been the
expression of the contempt in which the lords of that country held him
and his kind. Bullets did not matter so much, for a man could give
them back as hot as they came. But there was no answer, as he could
see it in that depressing hour, for such a feudal assertion of
superiority as this.

It was to the work of breaking the hold of this hard-handed
aristocracy which had risen from the grass roots in the day of its
arrogant prosperity--a prosperity founded on usurpation of the rights
of the weak, and upheld by murder--that he had set his soul. The need
of hastening the reformation never had seemed greater to him than on
that day, or more hopeless, he admitted in his heart.

For hour by hour the work ahead of him appeared to grow greater.
Little could be expected, judging by the experiences of the past few
days, from those who suffered most. The day of extremest pressure in
their poor affairs was being hastened by the cattlemen, as Chadron's
threat had foretold. Would they when the time came to fight do so, or
harness their lean teams and drive on into the west? That was the big
question upon which the success or the failure of his work depended.

As he had come down from the hillside out of the sunshine and peace to
meet shadow and violence, so his high spirits, hopes, and intentions
seemed this bitter hour steeped in sudden gloom. In more ways than one
that evening on the white river road, Alan Macdonald felt that he was
afoot and alone.




CHAPTER IX

BUSINESS, NOT COMPANY


Saul Chadron was at breakfast next morning when Maggie the cook
appeared in the dining-room and announced a visitor for the señor
boss. Maggie's eyes were bulging, and she did a great deal of
pantomime with her shapely shoulders to express her combined fright,
disgust, and indignation.

Chadron looked up from his ham and eggs, with a considerable portion
of the eggs on the blade of his knife, handle-down in one fist, his
fork standing like a lightning rod in the other, and asked her who the
man was and what he wanted at that hour of the day. Chadron was eating
by lamplight, and alone, according to his thrifty custom of slipping
up on the day before it was awake, as if in the hope of surprising it
at a vast disadvantage to itself, after his way of handling men and
things.

"_Es un extranjero_," replied Maggie, forgetting her English in her
excitement.

"Talk white man, you old sow!" Chadron growled.

"He ees a es-trenger, I do not knowed to heem."

"Tell him to go to the barn and wait, I'll be out there in a minute."

"He will not a-goed. I told to heem--whee!" Maggie clamped her hands
to her back as if somebody had caught her in a ticklish spot, as she
squealed, and jumped into the room where the grand duke of the
cattlemen's nobility was taking his refreshment.

Chadron had returned to his meal after ordering her to send his
visitor to the barn. He was swabbing his knife in the fold of a
pancake when Maggie made that frightful, shivering exclamation and
jumped aside out of the door. Now he looked up to reprove her, and met
the smoky eyes of Mark Thorn peering in from the kitchen.

"What're you doin' around here, you old--come in--shut that door! Git
him some breakfast," he ordered, turning to Maggie.

Maggie hung back a moment, until Thorn had come into the room, then
she shot into the kitchen like a cat through a fence, and slammed the
door behind her.

"What in the hell do you mean by comin' around here?" Chadron demanded
angrily. "Didn't I tell you never to come here? you blink-eyed old
snag-shin!"

"You told me," Thorn admitted, putting his rifle down across a chair,
drawing another to the table, and seating himself in readiness for the
coming meal.

"Then what'd you sneak--"

"News," said Thorn, in his brief way.

"Which news?" Chadron brightened hopefully, his implements, clamped in
his hairy fists, inviting the first bolt from the heavens.


"I got him last night."

"You got--_him?_" Chadron lifted himself from his chair on his bent
legs in the excitement of the news.

"And I'm through with this job. I've come to cash in, and quit."

"The hell you say!"

"I'm gittin' too old for this kind of work. That feller chased me
around till my tongue was hangin' out so fur I stepped on it. I tell
you he was--"

"How did you do it?"

Thorn looked at him with a scowl. "Well, I never used a club on a man
yit," he said.

"Where did it happen at?"

"Up there at his place. He'd been chasin' me for two days, and when he
went back--after grub, I reckon--I doubled on him. Just as he went in
the door I got him. I left him with his damn feet stickin' out like a
shoemaker's sign."

"How fur was you off from him, Mark?"

"Fifty yards, more 'r less."

"Did you go over to him to see if he was finished, or just creased?"

"I never creased a man in my life!" Thorn was indignant over the
imputation.

Chadron shook his head, in doubt, in discredit, in gloomy disbelief.

"If you didn't go up to him and turn him over and look at the whites
of his eyes, you ain't sure," he protested. "That man's as slippery as
wet leather--he's fooled more than one that thought they had him, and
I'll bet you two bits he's fooled you."

"Go and see, and settle it yourself, then," Thorn proposed, in surly
humor.

Chadron had suspended his breakfast, as if the news had come between
him and his appetite. He sat in a study, his big hand curved round his
cup, his gaze on the cloth. At that juncture Maggie came in with a
platter of eggs and ham, which she put down before Mark Thorn
skittishly, ready to jump at the slightest hostile start. Thorn began
to eat, as calmly as if there was not a stain on his crippled soul.

Unlike the meal of canned oysters which he had consumed as Chadron's
guest not many days before, Thorn was not welcomed to this by friendly
words and urging to take off the limit. Chadron sat watching him, in
divided attention and with dark face, as if he turned troubles over in
his mind.

Thorn cleaned the platter in front of him, and looked round hungrily,
like a cat that has half-satisfied its stomach on a stolen bird. He
said nothing, only he reached his foul hand across the table and took
up the dish containing the remnant of Chadron's breakfast. This he
soon cleared up, when he rasped the back of his hand across his harsh
mustache, like a vulture preening its filthy plumage, and leaned back
with a full-stomached sigh.

"He makes six," said he, looking hard at Chadron.

"Huh!" Chadron grunted, noncommittally.

"I want the money, down on the nail, a thousand for the job. I'm
through."

"I'll have to look into it. I ain't payin' for anything sight 'nseen,"
Chadron told him, starting out of his speculative wanderings.

"Money down, on the nail," repeated Thorn, as if he had not heard. His
old cap was hovering over his long hair, its flaps down like the wings
of a brooding hen. There were clinging bits of broken sage on it, and
burrs, which it had gathered in his skulking through the brush.

"I'll send a man up the river right away, and find out about this last
one," Chadron told him, nodding slowly. "If you've got Macdonald--"

"If hell's got fire in it!"

"If you've got him, I'll put something to the figure agreed on between
you and me. The other fellers you've knocked over don't count."

"I'll hang around--"

"Not here! You'll not hang around here, I tell you!" Chadron cut him
off harshly, fairly bristling. "Snake along out of here, and don't let
anybody see you. I'll meet you at the hotel in the morning."

"Gittin' peticlar of your company, ain't you?" sneered Thorn.

"You're not company--you're business," Chadron told him, with stern
and reproving eyes.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Chadron found Mark Thorn smoking into the chimney in the hotel office
next morning, apparently as if he had not moved from that spot since
their first meeting on that peculiar business. The old man-killer did
not turn his head as Chadron entered the room with a show of caution
and suspicion in his movements, and closed the door after him.

He crossed over to the fire and stood near Thorn, who was slouching
low in his chair, his long legs stretched straight, his heels crossed
before the low ashy fire that smoldered in the chimney. For a little
while Chadron stood looking down on his hired scourge, a knitting of
displeasure in his face, as if he waited for him to break the silence.
Thorn continued his dark reverie undisturbed, it seemed, his pipestem
between his fingers.

"Yes, it was his damn hired hand!" said Chadron, with profound
disgust.

"That's what I heard you say," acknowledged Thorn, not moving his
head.

"You knew it all the time; you was tryin' to work me for the money, so
you could light out!"

"I didn't even know he had a hired hand!" Thorn drew in his legs,
straightened his back, and came with considerable spirit to the
defense of his evil intent.

"Well, he ain't got none now, but _he's_ alive and kickin'. You've
bungled on this job worse than an old woman. I didn't fetch you in
here to clean out hired hands and kids; we can shake a blanket and
scare that kind out of the country!"

"Well, put him in at fifty then, if he was only a hired hand," said
Thorn, willing to oblige.

"When you go ahead and do what you agreed to, then we'll talk money,
and not a red till then."

Thorn got up, unlimbering slowly, and laid the pipe on the mantel-shelf.
He seemed unmoved, indifferent; apathetic as a toothless old lion.
After a little silence he shook his head.

"I'm done, I tell you," he said querulously, as if raising the
question crossed him. "Pay me for that many, and call it square."

"Bring in Macdonald," Chadron demanded in firm tones.

"I ain't a-goin' to touch him! If I keep on after that man he'll git
_me_--it's on the cards, I can see it in the dark."

"Yes, you're lost your nerve, you old wildcat!" There was a taunt in
Chadron's voice, a sneer.

Thorn turned on him, a savage, smothered noise in his throat.

"You can say that because you owe me money, but you know it's a damn
lie! If you didn't owe me money, I'd make you swaller it with hot
lead!"

"You're talkin' a little too free for a man of your trade, Mark."
While Chadron's tone was tolerant, even friendly, there was an
undercurrent of warning, even threat, in his words.

"You're the feller that's lettin' his gab outrun his gumption. How
many does that make for me, talkin' about nerve, how many? Do you
know?"

"I don't care how many, it lacks one of bein' enough to suit me."

"Twenty-eight, and I've got 'em down in m' book and I can prove it!"

"Make it twenty-nine, and then quit if you want to."

"Maybe I will." Thorn leaned forward a little, a glitter in his smoky
eyes.

Chadron fell back, his face growing pale. His hand was on his weapon,
his eyes noting narrowly every move Thorn made.

"If you ever sling a gun on me, you old devil, it'll be--"

"I ain't a-goin' to sling no gun on you as long as you owe me money.
I ain't a-goin' to cut the bottom out of m' own money-poke, Chad;
you don't need to swivel up in your hide, you ain't marked for
twenty-nine."

"Well, don't throw out any more hints like that; I don't like that
kind of a joke."

"No, I wouldn't touch a hair of your head," Thorn ran on, following
a vein which seemed to amuse him, for he smiled, a horrible,
face-drawing contortion of a smile, "for if you and me ever had a
fallin' out over money I might git so hard up I couldn't travel, and
one of them sheriff fellers might slip up on me."

"What's all this fool gab got to do with business?" Chadron was
impatient; he looked at his watch.

"Well, I'd be purty sure to make a speech from the gallers--I always
intended to--and lay everything open that ever took place between me
and you and the rest of them big fellers. There's a newspaper feller
in Cheyenne that wants to make a book out of m' life, with m' pict're
in the inside of the lid, to be sold when I'm dead. I could git money
for tellin' that feller what I know."

"Go on and tell him then,"--Chadron spoke with a dare in his words,
and derision--"that'll be easy money, and it won't call for any nerve.
But you don't need to be plannin' any speech from the gallus--you'll
never go that fur if you try to double-cross me!"

"I ain't aimin' to double-cross no man, but you can call it that if it
suits you. You can call it whatever you purty damn well care to--I'm
done!"

Chadron made no reply to that. He was pulling on his great gloves,
frowning savagely, as if he meant to close the matter with what he had
said, and go.

"Do I git any money, or don't I?" Thorn asked, sharply.

"When you bring in that wolf's tail."

"I ain't a-goin' to touch that feller, I tell you, Chad. That man
means bad luck to me--I can read it in the cards."

"Maybe you call that kind of skulkin' livin' up to your big name?"
Chadron spoke in derision, playing on the vanity which he knew to be
as much a part of that old murderer's life as the blood of his
merciless heart.

"I've got glory enough," said Thorn, satisfaction in his voice; "what
I want right now's money."

"Earn it before you collect it."

"Twenty-eight 'd fill a purty fair book, countin' in what I could tell
about the men I've had dealin's with," Thorn reflected, as to himself,
leaning against the mantel, frowning down at the floor with bent
head.

"Talk till you're empty, you old fool, and who'll believe you? Huh!
you couldn't git yourself hung if you was to try!" Chadron's dark face
was blacker for the spreading flood of resentful blood; he pointed
with his heavy quirt at Thorn, as if to impress him with a sense of
the smallness of his wickedness, which men would not credit against
the cattlemen's word, even if he should publish it abroad. "You'll
never walk onto the scaffold, no matter how hard you try--there'll be
somebody around to head you off and give you a shorter cut than that,
I'm here to tell you!"

"Huh!" said Thorn, still keeping his thoughtful pose.

Man-killing is a trade that reacts differently on those who follow it,
according to their depth and nature. It makes black devils of some who
were once civil, smiling, wholesome men, whether the mischance of
life-taking has fallen to them in their duty to society or in outlawed
deeds. It plunges some into dark taciturnity and brooding coldness, as
if they had eaten of some root which blunted them to all common relish
of life.

There are others of whom the bloody trade makes gabbling fools,
light-headed, wild-eyed wasters of words, full of the importance of
their mind-wrecking deeds. Like the savage whose reputation mounts
with each wet scalp, each fresh head, these kill out of depravity,
glorying in the growing score. To this class Mark Thorn belonged.

There was but one side left to that depraved man's mind; his bloody,
base life had smothered the rest under the growing heap of his
horrible deeds. Thorn had killed twenty-eight human beings for hire,
of whom he had tally, but there was one to be included of whom he had
not taken count--himself.

As he stood here against the chimney-shelf he was only the outside
husk of a man. His soul had been judged already, and burned out of him
by the unholy passion which he had indulged. He was as simple in his
garrulous chatter of glory and distinction as a half-fool. His warped
mind ran only on the spectacular end that he had planned for himself,
and the speech from the gallows that was to be the black, damning seal
at the end of his atrocious life's record.

Thorn looked up from his study; he shook his head decisively.

"I ain't a-goin' to go back over there in your country and give you a
chance at me. If you git me, you'll have to git me here. I ain't
a-goin' to sling a gun down on nobody for the money that's in it, I
tell you. I'm through; I'm out of the game; my craw's full. It's a bad
sign when a man wastes a bullet on a hired hand, takin' him for the
boss, and I ain't a-goin' to run no more resks on that feller. When my
day for glory comes I'll step out on the gallers and say m' piece, and
they'll be some big fellers in this country huntin' the tall grass
about that time, I guess."

Chadron had taken up his quirt from the little round table where the
hotel register lay. He turned now toward the outer door, as if in
earnest about going his way and leaving Mark Thorn to follow his own
path, no matter to what consequences it might lead.

"If you're square enough to settle up with me for this job," said
Thorn, "and pay me five hundred for what I've done, I'll leave your
name out when I come to make that little speech."

Chadron turned on him with a sneer. "You seem to have your hangin' all
cut and dried, but you'll never go ten miles outside of this
reservation if you don't turn around and put that job through. You'll
never hang--you ain't cut out in the hangin' style."

"I tell you I will!" protested Thorn hotly. "I can see it in the
cards."

"Well, you'd better shuffle 'em ag'in."

"I know what kind of a day it's goin' to be, and I know just adzackly
how I'll look when I hold up m' hands for them fellers to keep still.
Shucks! you can't tell me; I've seen that day a thousand times. It'll
be early in the mornin', and the sun bright--"

The door leading to the dining-room opened, and Thorn left his
description of that great and final day in his career hanging like a
broken bridge. He turned to see who it was, squinting his old eyes up
sharply, and in watching the stranger he failed to see the whiteness
that came over Chadron's face like a rushing cloud.

"Grab your gun!" Chadron whispered.

"Just let it stay where it is, Thorn," advised the stranger, his quick
hand on his own weapon before Thorn could grasp what it was all about,
believing, as he did, in the safety of the reservation's neutral
ground. "Macdonald is my name; I've been looking for you." The
stranger came on as he spoke.

He was but a few feet away from Thorn, and the old man-killer had his
revolvers buckled around him in their accustomed place, while his
death-spreading rifle stood near his hand, leaning its muzzle against
the chimney-jamb. Thorn seemed to be measuring all the chances which
he had left to him in that bold surprise, and to conclude in the same
second that they were not worth taking.

Macdonald had not drawn his revolver. His hand was on the butt of it,
and his eye held Thorn with a challenge that the old slayer was in no
mind to accept.

Thorn was not a close-fighting man. He never had killed one of his
kind in a face-to-face battle in all his bloody days. At the bottom he
was a coward, as his skulking deeds attested, and in that moment he
knew that he stood before his master. Slowly he lifted his long arms
above his head, without a word, and stood in the posture of complete
surrender.

Nearer the outer door stood Chadron, to whom Macdonald seemed to give
little attention, as if not counting him in the game. The big
cattleman was "white to the gills," as his kind expressed that state.
Macdonald unbuckled Thorn's belt and hung his revolvers over his arm.

"I knowed you'd git me, Macdonald," the old scoundrel said.

Macdonald, haggard and dusty, and grim as the last day that old Mark
Thorn had pictured for himself, pushed his prisoner away from the
chimney, out of reach of the rifle, and indicated that he was to march
for the open door, through which the tables in the dining-room could
be seen. At Macdonald's coming Chadron had thrown his hand to his
revolver, where he still held it, as if undecided how far to go.

"Keep your gun where it is, Chadron," Macdonald advised. "This isn't
my day for you. Clear out of here--quick!"

Chadron backed toward the front door, his hand still dubiously on his
revolver. Still suspicious, his face as white as it would have been in
death, he reached back with his free hand to open the door.

"I told you he'd git me," nodded Thorn, with something near to
exultation in the vindication of his reading of the cards. "I give you
a chance--no man's money ain't a-goin' to shut my mouth now!"

"I'll shut it, damn you!" Chadron's voice was dry-sounding and far
up in his throat. He drew his revolver with a quick jerk that
seemed nothing more than a slight movement of the shoulder. Quick
as he was--and few in the cattlemen's baronies were ahead of him
there--Macdonald was quicker. The muzzle of Chadron's pistol was
still in the leather when Macdonald's weapon was leveled at his eyes.

"Drop that gun!"

A moment Chadron's arm hung stiffly in that half-finished movement,
while his eyes gave defiance. He had not bent before any man in many a
year of growing power. But there was no other way; it was either bend
or break, and the break would be beyond repair.

Chadron's fingers were damp with sudden sweat as he unclasped them
from the pistol-butt and let the weapon fall; sweat was on his
forehead, and a heaviness on his chest as if a man sat on him. He felt
backwards through the open door with one foot, like an old man
distrustful of his limbs, and steadied himself with his shoulder
against the jamb, for there was a trembling in his knees. He knew that
he had saved himself from the drop into eternal inconsequence by the
shading of a second, for there was death in dusty Alan Macdonald's
face. The escape left Chadron shaken, like a man who has held himself
away from death by his finger-ends at the lip of a ledge.

"I knowed you'd git me, Macdonald," Thorn repeated. "You don't need no
handcuffs nor nothin' for me. I'll go along with you as gentle as a
fish."

Macdonald indicated that Thorn might lower his arms, having taken
possession of the rifle. "Have you got a horse?" he asked.

Thorn said that he had one in the hotel stable. "But don't you try to
take me too fur, Macdonald," he advised. "Chadron he'll ride a streak
to git his men together and try to take me away from you--I could see
it in his eye when he went out of that door."

Macdonald knew that Thorn had read Chadron's intentions right. He
nodded, to let him know that he understood the cattleman's motives.

"Well, don't you run me off to no private rope party, neither,
Macdonald, for I can tell you things that many a man'd pay me big
money to keep my mouth shut on."

"You'll have a chance, Thorn."

"But I want it done in the right way, so's I'll git the credit and the
fame."

Macdonald was surprised to find this man, whose infamous career had
branded him as the arch-monster of modern times, so vain and
garrulous. He could account for it by no other hypothesis than that
much killing had indurated the warped mind of the slayer until the
taking of a human life was to him a commonplace. He was not capable of
remorse, any more than he had been disposed to pity. He was not a man,
only the blighted and cursed husk of a man, indeed, but doubly
dangerous for his irresponsibility, for his atrophied small
understanding.

Twenty miles lay between the prisoner and the doubtful security of the
jail at Meander, and most of the distance was through the grazing
lands within Chadron's bounds. On the other hand, it was not more than
twelve miles to his ranch on the river. He believed that he could
reach it before Chadron could raise men to stop him and take the
prisoner away.

Once home with Thorn, he could raise a posse to guard him until the
sheriff could be summoned. Even then there was no certainty that the
prisoner ever would see the inside of the Meander jail, for the
sheriff of that county was nothing more than one of Chadron's cowboys,
elevated to office to serve the unrighteous desires of the men who had
put him there.

But Macdonald was determined that there should be no private rope
party for Thorn, neither at the hands of the prisoner's employers nor
at those of the outraged settlers. Thorn must be brought to trial
publicly, and the story of his employment, which he appeared ready
enough to tell for the "glory" in it, must be told in a manner that
would establish its value.

The cruelly inhuman tale of his contracts and killings, his
engagements and rewards, must be sown by the newspapers far and wide.
Out of this dark phase of their oppression their deliverance must
rise.




CHAPTER X

"HELL'S A-GOIN' TO POP"


Chance Dalton, foreman of Alamito Ranch, was in charge of the
expedition that rode late that afternoon against Macdonald's homestead
to liberate Mark Thorn, and close his mouth in the cattlemen's
effective way upon the bloody secrets which he might in vainglorious
boast reveal. Chadron had promised rewards for the successful outcome
of the venture, and Chance Dalton rode with his three picked men in a
sportsman's heat.

He was going out on a hunt for game such as he had run down more than
once before in his many years under Chadron's hand. It was better
sport than running down wolves or mountain lions, for there was the
superior intelligence of the game to be considered. No man knew what
turn the ingenuity of desperation might give the human mind. The
hunted might go out in one last splendid blaze of courage, or he might
cringe and beg, with white face and rolling eyes. In the case of
Macdonald, Dalton anticipated something unusual. He had tasted that
unaccountable homesteader's spirit in the past.

Dalton was a wiry, tough man who rode with his elbows out, like an
Indian. His face was scarred by old knife-wounds, making it hard for
him to shave, in consequence of which he allowed his red beard to grow
to inch-length, where he kept it in subjugation with shears. The
gutters of his scars were seen through it, and the ends of them ran
up, on both cheeks, to his eyes. A knife had gone across one of these,
missing the bright little pupil in its bony cave, but slashing the
eyebrow and leaving him leering on that side.

The men who came behind him were cowboys from the Texas Panhandle,
lean and tough as the dried beef of their native plains. It was the
most formidable force, not in numbers, but in proficiency, that ever
had proceeded against Macdonald, and the most determined.

Chadron himself had bent to the small office of spy to learn
Macdonald's intention in reference to his prisoner. From a sheltered
thicket in the foothills the cattleman had watched the homesteader
through his field glasses, making certain that he was returning Thorn
to the scene of his latest crimes, instead of risking the long road to
the Meander jail.

Chadron knew that Macdonald would defend the prisoner's life with his
own, even against his neighbors. Macdonald would be as eager to have
Thorn tell the story of his transactions with the Drovers' Association
as they would be to have it shut off. The realization of this threw
Chadron into a state which he described to himself as the "fantods."
Another, with a more extensive and less picturesque vocabulary, would
have said that the president of the Drovers' Association was in a
condition of panic.

So he had despatched his men on this silencing errand, and now, as the
sun was dipping over the hills, all red with the presage of a frosty
night, Chance Dalton and his men came riding in sight of Macdonald's
little nest of buildings fronting the road by the river.

Macdonald had secured his prisoner with ropes, for there was no
compartment in his little house, built of boards from the mountain
sawmill, strong enough to confine a man, much less a slippery one like
Mark Thorn. The slayer had lapsed into his native taciturnity shortly
after beginning the trip from the reservation to Macdonald's
homestead, and now he lay on the floor trussed up like a hog for
market, looking blackly at Macdonald. Macdonald was considering the
night ride to Meander with his prisoner that he had planned, with the
intention of proceeding from there to Cheyenne and lodging him in
jail. He believed there might be a better chance of holding him for
trial there, and some slight hope of justice.

A hail from the gate startled Macdonald. It was the custom of the
homesteaders in that country, carried with them from the hills of
Missouri and Arkansas, to sit in their saddles at a neighbor's gate
and call him to the door with a long "hello-o-oh!" It was the password
of friendship in that raw land; a cowboy never had been known to stoop
to its use. Cowboys rode up to a homesteader's door when they had
anything to say to him, and hammered on it with their guns.

Macdonald went to the door and opened it unhesitatingly. The horseman
at the gate was a stranger to him. He wore a little derby hat, such as
the cowpunchers despised, and the trappings of his horse proclaimed
him as a newcomer to that country. He inquired loudly of the road to
Fort Shakie, and Macdonald shouted back the necessary directions,
moving a step away from his open door.

The stranger put his hand to his ear and leaned over.

"Which?" said he.

At that sound of that distinctly-cowboy vernacular, Macdonald sprang
back to regain the shelter of his walls, sensing too late the trap
that the cowboy's unguarded word had betrayed. Chance Dalton at one
corner of the rude bungalow, his next best man at the other, had been
waiting for the decoy at the gate to draw Macdonald away from his
door. Now, as the homesteader leaped back in sudden alarm, they closed
in on him with their revolvers drawn.

There was the sound of a third man trying the back door at the same
time, and the disguised cowboy at the gate slung his weapon out and
sent a wild shot into the lintel above Macdonald's head. The two of
them on the ground had him at a disadvantage which it would have been
fatal to dispute, and Macdonald, valuing a future chance more than a
present hopeless struggle, flung his hands out in a gesture of
emptiness and surrender.

"Put 'em up--high!" Dalton ordered.

Dalton watched him keenly as the three in that picture before the door
stood keyed to such tension as the human intelligence seldom is called
upon to withstand. Macdonald stood with one foot on the low threshold,
the door swinging half open at his back. He was bareheaded, his rough,
fair hair in wisps on temples and forehead. Dalton's teeth were
showing between his bearded lips, and his quick eyes were scowling,
but he held his companion back with a command of his free hand.

Macdonald lifted his hands slowly, holding them little above a level
with his shoulders.

"Give up your prisoner, Macdonald, and we'll deal square with you,"
Dalton said.

"Go in and take him," offered Macdonald, stepping aside out of the
door.

"Go ahead of us, and put 'em up higher!" Dalton made a little
expressive flourish with his gun, evidently distrustful of the
homesteader's quick hand, even at his present disadvantage.

The man at the back door was using the ax from Macdonald's wood pile,
as the sound of splintering timber told. Between three fires,
Macdonald felt his chance stretching to the breaking point, for he had
no faith at all in Chance Dalton's word. They had come to get him, and
it looked now as if they had won.

When Macdonald entered the house he saw Thorn sitting in the middle of
the floor, where he had rolled and struggled in his efforts to see
what was taking place outside.

"You've played hell now, ain't you? lettin' 'em git the drop on you
that way!" he said to Macdonald, angrily. "They'll swing--"

"Hand over that gun, Macdonald," Dalton demanded. They were standing
near him, one on either hand, both leveling their guns at his head.
Macdonald could see the one at the back door of his little two-roomed
bungalow through the hole that he had chopped.

"I don't hand my gun to any man; if you want it, come and take it,"
Macdonald said, feeling that the end was rushing upon him, and
wondering what it would be. A bullet was better than a rope, which
Chadron had publicly boasted he had laid up for him. There was a long
chance if Dalton reached for that gun--a long and desperate chance.

The man at the back door was shouting something, his gun thrust
through the hole. Dalton made a cross-reach with his left hand for
Macdonald's revolver. On the other side the cowboy was watching his
comrade's gun pointing through the kitchen door; Macdonald could see
the whites of his eyes as he turned them.

"Don't shoot in here! we've got 'em," he called.

His shifted eye told Macdonald that he was trusting to Dalton, and
Dalton at that moment was leaning forward with a strain, cautiously,
his hand near Macdonald's holster.

Macdonald brought his lifted arms down, like a swimmer making a mighty
stroke, with all the steam behind them that he could raise. His
back-handed blow struck the cowboy in the face; Macdonald felt the
flame of his shot as it spurted past his forehead. The other arm fell
short of the nimbler and more watchful Dalton, but the duck that he
made to escape it broke the drop that he had held over Macdonald.

Macdonald's hand flashed up with his own gun. He drove a disabling
shot through Dalton's wrist as the ranch foreman was coming up to
fire, and kicked the gun that he dropped out of reach of his other
hand. The cowboy who had caught Macdonald's desperate blow had
staggered back against the foot of the bed and fallen. Now he had
regained himself, and was crouching behind the bed, trying to cover
himself, and from there as he shrank down he fired. The next flash he
sprawled forward with hands outstretched across the blanket, as if he
had fallen on his knees to pray.

Macdonald caught Dalton by the shirt collar as he went scrambling on
his knees after the revolver. Dalton was splashing blood from his
shattered wrist over the room, but he was senseless to pain and blind
to danger. He sprang at Macdonald, cursing and striking.

"Keep off, Dalton! I don't want to kill you, man!" Macdonald warned.

Careless of his life Dalton fought, and as they struggled Mark Thorn
undoubled himself from his hunched position on the floor and snatched
Dalton's revolver in his bound hands from the floor. His long legs
free of his binding ropes, Thorn sprang for the door. He reached it at
the moment that the man in the disguise of a homesteader pushed it
open.

Macdonald did not see what took place there, for it was over by the
time he had struck Dalton into a limp quiet heap at his feet by a blow
with his revolver across the eyes. But there had been a shot at the
door, and Macdonald had heard the man from the back come running
around the side of the house. There were more shots, but all done
before Macdonald could leap to the door.

There, through the smoke of many quick shots that drifted into the
open door, he saw the two cowboys fallen with outflung arms. In the
road a few rods distant Mark Thorn was mounting one of Chadron's
horses. The old outlaw flung himself flat along the horse's neck, and
presented little of his vital parts as a target. As he galloped away
Macdonald fired, but apparently did not hit. In a moment Thorn rode
down the river-bank and out of sight.

Macdonald stood a little while in the middle of the disordered room
after re-entering the house, a feeling of great silence about him, and
a numbness in his ears and over his senses. It was a sensation such as
he had experienced once after standing for hours under the spell of
Niagara. Something seemed to have been silenced in the world.

He was troubled over the outcome of that treacherous assault. He felt
that the shadow of the resultant tragedy was already stretching away
from there like the penumbra of an eclipse which must soon engulf
those homesteads on the river, and exact a terrible, blasting toll.

Dalton was huddled there, his life wasting through the wound in his
wrist, blood on his face from the blow that had laid him still. The
dead man across the bed remained as he had fallen, his arms stretched
out in empty supplication. There was a pathos in the fellow's pose
that touched Macdonald with a pity which he knew to be undeserved. He
had not meant to take his life away in that hasty shot, but since it
had happened so, he knew that it had been his own deliverance.

Macdonald stripped the garment back and looked at Dalton's hurt. There
would be another one to take toll for in the cattlemen's list unless
the drain of blood could be checked at once. Dalton moved, opening his
eyes.

It seemed unlikely that Dalton ever would sling a gun with that member
again, if he should be so lucky, indeed, as to come through with his
life. The bone was shattered, the hand hung limp, like a broken wing.
Dalton sat up, yielding his arm to his enemy's ministrations, as
silent and ungracious as a dog. In a little while Macdonald had done
all that he could do, and with a hand under the hollow of Dalton's arm
he lifted him to his feet.

"Can you ride?" he asked. Dalton did not reply. He looked at the
figure on the bed, and stood turning his eyes around the room in the
manner of one stunned, and completely confounded by the failure of a
scheme counted infallible.

"You made a botch of this job, Dalton," Macdonald said. "The rest of
your crowd's outside where Thorn dropped them--he snatched your gun
from the floor and killed both of them."

Dalton went weakly to the door, where he stood a moment, steadying
himself with a hand on the jamb. Macdonald eased him from there to the
gate, and brought the horses which the gang had hidden among the
willows.

"Tell Chadron to send a wagon up here after these dead men," Macdonald
said, leading a horse to the gate.

He helped the still silent Dalton into the saddle, where he sat
weakly. The man seemed to be debating something to say to this
unaccountably fortunate nester, who came untouched through all their
attempts upon his life. But whatever it was that he cogitated he kept
to himself, only turning his eyes back toward the house, where his two
men lay on the ground. The face of one was turned upward. In the
draining light of the spent day it looked as white as innocence.

As Dalton drew his eyes away from the fearful evidence of his plan's
miscarriage, the sound of hard riding came from the direction of the
settlement up the river. Macdonald listened a moment as the sound
grew.

"That will be no friend of yours, Dalton. Get out of this!"

He cut Dalton's horse a sharp blow. The beast bounded away with a
start that almost unseated its dizzy rider; the two free animals
galloped after it. Chance Dalton was on his way to Chadron with his
burden of disgrace and disastrous news. It seemed a question to
Macdonald, as he watched him weaving in the saddle as the gloom closed
around him and shut him from sight, whether he ever would reach the
ranchhouse to recount his story, whatever version of the tragedy he
had planned.

Tom Lassiter drew up before Macdonald's gate while the dust of
Dalton's going was still hanging there. The gaunt old homesteader with
the cloud of sorrows in his eyes said that he had been on his way over
to see what had become of Macdonald in his lone hunt for Mark Thorn.
He had heard the shooting, and the sound had hurried him forward.

Macdonald told him what had happened, and took him in to see the
wreckage left after that sudden storm. Tom shook his head as he stood
in the yard looking down at the two dead men.

"Hell's a-goin' to pop now!" he said.

"I think you've said the word, Tom," Macdonald admitted. "They'll come
back on me hard for this."

"You'll never have to stand up to 'em alone another time, I'll give
you a guarantee on that, Mac."

"I'm glad to hear it," Macdonald replied, but wearily, and with no
warmth or faith in his words.

"And they let that old scorpeen loose to skulk and kill ag'in!"

"Yes, he got away."

"They sure did oncork a hornet's nest when they come here this time,
though, they sure did!" Tom stood in the door, looking into the
darkening room and at the figure sprawled across the bed. "He-ell's
a-goin' to pop now!" he said again, in slow words scarcely above his
breath.

He turned his head searchingly, as if he expected to see the cloud of
it already lowering out of the night.




CHAPTER XI

THE SEÑOR BOSS COMES RIDING


Nola Chadron had been a guest overnight at the post. She had come the
afternoon before, bright as a bubble, and Frances had met her with a
welcome as warm as if there never had been a shadow between them.

Women can do such things so much better than men. Balzac said they
could murder under the cover of a kiss. Perhaps somebody else said it
ahead of him; certainly a great many of us have thought it after.
There is not one out of the whole world of them but is capable of
covering the fire of lies in her heart with the rose leaves of her
smiles.

Nola had come into Frances' room to do her hair, and employ her busy
tongue while she plied the brush. She was a pretty bit of a figure in
her fancily-worked Japanese kimono and red Turkish slippers--harem
slippers, she called them, and thought it deliciously wicked to wear
them--as she sat shaking back her bright hair like a giver of
sunbeams.

Frances, already dressed in her soft light apparel of the morning,
stood at the window watching the activity of the avenue below,
answering encouragingly now and then, laughing at the right time, to
keep the stream of her little guest's words running on. Frances seemed
all softness and warmth, all youth and freshness, as fair as a
camellia in a sunny casement, there at the window with the light
around her. Above that inborn dignity which every line of her body
expressed, there was a domestic tranquillity in her subdued beauty
that moved even irresponsible Nola with an admiration that she could
not put into words.

"Oh, you soldiers!" said Nola, shaking her brush at Frances' placid
back, "you get up so early and you dress so fast that you're always
ahead of everybody else."

Frances turned to her, a smile for her childish complaint.

"You'll get into our soldiering ways in time, Nola. We get up early
and live in a hurry, I suppose, because a soldier's life is
traditionally uncertain, and he wants to make the most of his time."

"And love and ride away," said Nola, feigning a sigh.

"Do they?" asked Frances, not interested, turning to the window
again.

"Of course," said Nola, positively.

    "Like the guardsmen of old England,
    Or the beaux sabreurs of France--"

that's an old border song, did you ever hear it?"

"No, I never did."

"It's about the Texas rangers, though, and not real soldiers like you
folks. A cavalryman's wife wrote it; I've got it in a book."

"Maybe they do that way in Texas, Nola."

"How?"

"Love and ride away, as you said. I never heard of any of them doing
it, except figuratively, in the regular army."

Nola suspended her brushing and looked at Frances curiously, a deeper
color rising and spreading in her animated face.

"Oh, you little goose!" said she.

"Mostly they hang around and make trouble for people and fools of
themselves," said Frances, in half-thoughtful vein, her back to her
visitor, who had stopped brushing now, and was winding, a comb in her
mouth.

Nola held her quick hand at the half-finished coil of hair while she
looked narrowly at the outline of Frances' form against the window. A
little squint of perplexity was in her eyes, and furrows in her smooth
forehead. Presently she finished the coil with dextrous turn, and held
it with outspread hand while she reached to secure it with the comb.

"I can't make you out sometimes, Frances, you're so funny," she
declared. "I'm afraid to talk to you half the time"--which was in no
part true--"you're so nunnish and severe."

"Oh!" said Frances, fully discounting the declaration.

No wonder that Major King was hard to wean from her, thought Nola,
with all that grace of body and charm of word. Superiority had been
born in Frances Landcraft, not educated into her in expensive schools,
the cattleman's daughter knew. It spoke for itself in the carriage of
her head there against the light of that fair new day, with the
sunshine on the dying cottonwood leaves beyond the windowpane; in the
lifting of her neck, white as King David's tower of shields.

"Well, I _am_ half afraid of you sometimes," Nola persisted. "I draw
my hand back from touching you when you've got one of your soaring
fits on you and walk along like you couldn't see common mortals and
cowmen's daughters."

"Well, everybody isn't like you, Nola; there are some who treat me
like a child."

Frances was thinking of her father and Major King, both of whom had
continued to overlook and ignore her declaration of severance from her
plighted word. The colonel had brushed it aside with rough hand and
sharp word; the major had come penitent and in suppliance. But both of
them were determined to marry her according to schedule, with no
weight to her solemn denial.

"Mothers do that, right along," Nola nodded.

"Here's somebody else up early"--Frances held the curtain aside as she
spoke, and leaned a little to see--"here's your father, just turning
in."

"The señor boss?" said Nola, hurrying to the window.

Saul Chadron was mounting the steps booted and dusty, his revolvers
belted over his coat. "I wonder what's the matter? I hope it isn't
mother--I'll run down and see."

The maid had let Chadron in by the time Nola opened the door of the
room, and there she stood leaning and listening, her little head out
in the hall, as if afraid to run to meet trouble. Chadron's big voice
came up to them.

"It's all right," Nola nodded to Frances, who stood at her elbow, "he
wants to see the colonel."

Frances had heard the cattleman's loud demand for instant audience.
Now the maid was explaining in temporizing tones.

"The colonel he's busy with military matters this early in the day,
sir, and nobody ever disturbs him. He don't see nobody but the
officers. If you'll step in and wait--"

"The officers can wait!" Chadron said, in loud, assertive voice that
made the servant shiver. "Where's he at?"

Frances could see in her lively imagination the frightened maid's
gesture toward the colonel's office door. Now the girl's feet sounded
along the hall in hasty retreat as Chadron laid his hearty knock
against the colonel's panels.

Frances smiled behind her friend's back. The impatient disregard by
civilians of the forms which her father held in such esteem always was
a matter of humor to her. She expected now to hear explosions from
within her father's sacred place, and when the sound failed to reach
her she concluded that some subordinate hand had opened the door to
Chadron's summons.

"I'll hurry"--Nola dashed into her own room, finishing from the
door--"I want to catch him before he goes and find out what's wrong."

Frances went below to see about breakfast for her tardy guest, a
little fluttering of excitement in her own breast. She wondered what
could have brought the cattleman to the post so early--he must have
left long before dawn--and in such haste to see her father, all
buckled about with his arms. She trusted that it might not be that
Alan Macdonald was involved in it, for it was her constant thought to
hope well for that bold young man who had heaved the homesteaders'
world to his shoulders and stood straining, untrusted and uncheered,
under its weight.

True, he had not died in defense of her glove, but she had forgiven
him in her heart for that. A reasonable man would not have imperiled
his life for such a trifle, and a reasonable woman would not have
expected it. There was a great deal more sense in Alan Macdonald
living for his life's purpose than in dying for a foolish little
glove. So she said.

The white gossamer fichu about her throat moved as with a breath in
the agitation of her bosom as she passed down the stairs; her
imperious chin was lowered, and her strong brown eyes were bent like a
nun's before the altar. Worthy or unworthy, her lips moved in a prayer
for Alan Macdonald, strong man in his obscure place; worthy or
unworthy, she wished him well, and her heart yearned after him with a
great tenderness, like a south wind roaming the night in gentle
quest.

Major King, in attendance upon his chief, had opened the door to Saul
Chadron at the colonel's frowning nod. Without waiting for the
password into the mysteries of that chamber, Chadron had entered, his
heavy quirt in hand, gauntlets to his elbows, dusty boots to his
knees. Colonel Landcraft stood at his desk to receive him, his brows
bent in a disfavoring frown.

"I've busted in on you, colonel, because my business is business, not
a mess of reportin' and signin' up on nothing, like your fool army
doin's." Chadron clamped with clicking spurs across the severe bare
floor as he made this announcement, the frown of his displeasure in
having been stopped at the door still dark on his face.

"I'm waiting your pleasure, sir," Colonel Landcraft returned,
stiffly.

"I want twenty-five troopers and a cannon, and somebody that knows how
to use it, and I want 'em right away!"

Chadron gave the order with a hotness about him, and an impatience not
to be denied.

"Sir!" said Colonel Landcraft, throwing his bony shoulders back, his
little blue eyes growing very cold and unfriendly.

"Them damn rustlers of Macdonald's are up and standin' agin us, and I
tell you I want troopers, and I want 'em on the spot!"

Colonel Landcraft swallowed like an eagle gorging a fish. His face
grew red, he clamped his jaw, and held his mouth shut. It took him
some little time to suppress his flooding emotions, and his voice
trembled even when he ventured to trust himself to speak.

"That's a matter for your civil authorities, sir; I have nothing to do
with it at all."

"You ain't got--nothing--?" Chadron's amazement seemed to overcome
him. He stopped, his eyes big, his mouth open; he turned his head from
side to side in dumbfounded way, as if to find another to bear witness
to this incredible thing.

"I tell you they're threatenin' my property, and the property of my
neighbors!" protested Chadron, stunned, it seemed, that he should have
to stop for details and explanations. "We've got millions invested--if
them fellers gobbles up our land we're ruined!"

"Sir, I can sympathize with you in your unfortunate business, but if I
had millions of my own at stake under similar conditions I would be
powerless to employ, on my own initiative, the forces of the United
States army to drive those brigands away."

Chadron looked at him hard, his hat on his head, where it had remained
all the time, his eyes staring in unspeakable surprise.

"The hell you would!" said he.

"You and your neighbors surely can raise enough men to crush the
scoundrels, and hang their leader to a limb," the colonel suggested.
"Call out your men, Chadron, and ride against him. I never took you
for a man to squeal for help in a little affair like this."

"He's got as many as a hundred men organized, maybe twice that"--Chadron
multiplied on the basis of damage that his men had suffered--"and my
men tell me he's drillin' 'em like soldiers."

"I'm not surprised to hear that," nodded the colonel; "that man
Macdonald's got it in him to do that, and fight like the devil, too."

"A gang of 'em killed three of my men a couple of days ago when I sent
'em up there to his shack to investigate a little matter, and
Macdonald shot my foreman up so bad I guess he'll die. I tell you,
man, it's a case for troopers!"

"What has the sheriff and the rest of you done to restore order?"

"I took twenty of my men up there yisterday, and a bunch of Sam
Hatcher's from acrosst the river was to join us and smoke that wolf
out of his hole and hang his damn hide on his cussed bob-wire fence.
But hell! they was ditched in around that shack of his'n, I tell you,
gentlemen, and he peppered us so hard we had to streak out of there. I
left two of my men, and Hatcher's crew couldn't come over to help us,
for them damn rustlers had breastworks throwed up over there and drove
'em away from the river. They've got us shut out from the only ford in
thirty miles."

"Well, I'll be damned!" said the colonel, warming at this warlike
news.

"Macdonald's had the gall to send me notice to keep out of that
country up the river, and to run my cattle out of there, and it's my
own land, by God! I've been grazin' it for eighteen years!"

"It looks like a serious situation," the colonel admitted.

"Serious!" There was scorn for the word and its weakness in Chadron's
stress. "It's hell, I tell you, when a man can't set foot on his own
land!"

"Are they all rustlers up there in the settlement? are there no honest
homesteaders among them who would combine with you against this wild
man and his unlawful followers?" the colonel wanted to know.

"Not a man amongst 'em that ain't cut the brand out of a hide,"
Chadron declared. "They've been nestin' up there under that man
Macdonald for the last two years, and he's the brains of the pack. He
gits his rake-off out of all they run off and sell. Me and the other
cattlemen we've been feedin' and supportin' 'em till the drain's
gittin' more'n we can stand. We've got to put 'em out, like a fire, or
be eat up. We've got to hit 'em, and hit 'em hard."

"It would seem so," the colonel agreed.

"It's a state of war, I tell you, colonel; you're free to use your
troops in a state of war, ain't you? Twenty-five troopers, with a
little small cannon"--Chadron made illustration of the caliber that he
considered adequate for the business with his hands--"to knock 'em out
of their ditches so we could pick 'em off as they scatter, would be
enough; we can handle the rest."

"If there is anything that I can do for you in my private capacity, I
am at your command," offered Colonel Landcraft, with official
emptiness, "but I regret that I am powerless to grant your request for
troops. I couldn't lift a finger in a matter like this without a
department order; you ought to understand that, Chadron."

"Oh, if that's all that's bitin' you, go ahead--I'll take care of the
department," Chadron told him, with the relieved manner of one who had
seen a light.

"Sir!"

If Chadron had proposed treason the colonel could not have compressed
more censure into that word.

"That's all right," Chadron assured him, comfortably; "I've got two
senators and five congressmen back there in Washington that jigger
when I jerk the gee-string. You can cut loose and come into this thing
with a free hand, and go the limit, the department be damned if they
don't like it!"

Colonel Landcraft's face was flaming angrily. He snapped his dry old
eyelids like flints over the steel of his eyes, and stood as straight
as the human body could be drawn, one hand on his sword hilt, the
other pointing a trembling finger at Chadron's face.

"You cattlemen run this state, and one or two others here in the
Northwest, I'm aware of that, Chadron. But there's one thing that you
don't run, and that's the United States army! I don't care a damn how
many congressmen dance to your tune, you're not big enough to move
even one trooper out of my barracks, sir! That's all I've got to say
to you."

Chadron stood a little while, glowering at the colonel. It enraged him
to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This
he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and
importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in
that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or
three of the old states where the slipping heritage of individual
liberty was born. Now here was a colonel in his way; one little old
gray colonel!

"All right," Chadron said at length, charging his words with what he
doubtless meant to be a significant foreboding, measuring Colonel
Landcraft with contemptuous eye. "I can call out an army of my own. I
came to you because we pay you fellers to do what I'm askin' of you,
and because I thought it'd save me time. That's all."

"You came to me because you have magnified your importance in this
country until you believe you're the entire nation," the colonel
replied, very hot and red.

Chadron made no answer to that. He turned toward the military door,
but Colonel Landcraft would not permit his unsanctified feet, great as
they were and free to come and go as they liked in other places, to
pass that way. He frowned at Major King, who had stood by in silence
all the time, like a good soldier, his eyes straight ahead. Major King
touched Chadron's arm.

"This way, sir, if you please," he said.

Chadron started out, wrathfully and noisily. Half-way to the door he
turned, his dark face sneering in contemptuous scorn.

"Yes, you're one hell of a colonel!" he said.

Major King was holding the door open; Chadron swung his big body
around to face it, and passed out. Major King saluted his superior
officer and followed the cattleman into the hall, closing the sacred
door behind him on the wrathful little old soldier standing beside his
desk. King extended his hand, sympathy in gesture and look.

"If I was in command of this post, sir, you'd never have to ask twice
for troops," he said.

Chadron's sudden interest seemed to give him the movement of a little
start. His grip on the young officer's hand tightened as he bent a
searching look into his eyes.

"King, I believe you!" he said.

Nola came pattering down the stairs. Chadron stood with open arms, and
swallowed her in them as she leaped from the bottom tread. Major King
did not wait to see her emerge again, rosy and lip-tempting. There was
unfinished business within the colonel's room.

A few minutes later Nola, excited to her finger-ends, was retailing
the story of the rustlers' uprising to Frances.

"Mother's all worked up over it; she's afraid they'll burn us out and
murder us, but of course we'd clean them up before they'd ever get
_that_ far down the river."

"It looks to me like a very serious situation for everybody
concerned," Frances said. "If your father brings in the men that you
say he's gone to Meander to telegraph for, there's going to be a lot
of killing done on both sides."

"Father says he's going to clean them out for good this time--they've
cost us thousands of dollars in the past three years. Oh, you can't
understand what a low-down bunch of scrubs those rustlers are!"

"Maybe not," Frances said, giving it up with a little sigh.

"I've got to go back to mother this morning, right away, but that
little fuss up the river doesn't need to keep you from going home with
me as you promised, Frances."

"I shouldn't mind, but I don't believe father will want me to go out
into your wild country. I really want to go--I want to look around in
your garden for a glove that I lost there on the night of the ball."

"Oh, why didn't you tell me?" Nola's face seemed to clear of
something, a shadow of perplexity, it seemed, that Frances had seen in
it from time to time since her coming there. She looked frankly and
reprovingly at Frances.

"I didn't miss it until I was leaving, and I didn't want to delay the
rest of them to look for it. It really doesn't matter."

"It's a wonder mother didn't find it; she's always prowling around
among the flowers," said Nola, her eyes fixed in abstracted stare, as
if she was thinking deeply of something apart from what her words
expressed.

What she was considering, indeed, was that her little scheme of
alienation had failed. Major King, she told herself, had not returned
the glove to Frances. For all his lightness in the matter, perhaps he
cared deeply for Frances, and would be more difficult to wean than she
had thought. It would have to be begun anew. That Frances was ignorant
of her treachery, as she now fully believed, made it easier. So the
little lady told herself, surveying the situation in her quick brain,
and deceiving herself completely, as many a shrewder schemer than she,
when self-entangled in the devious plottings of this life.

On the other hand there sat Frances across the table--they were
breakfasting alone, Mrs. Landcraft being a strict militarist, and
always serving the colonel's coffee with her own hand--throwing up a
framework of speculation on her own account. Perhaps if she should go
to the ranch she might be in some manner instrumental in bringing this
needless warfare to a pacific end. Intervention at the right time, in
the proper quarter, might accomplish more than strife and bloodshed
could bring out of that one-sided war.

No matter for the justice of the homesteaders' cause, and the
sincerity of their leader, neither of which she doubted or questioned,
the weight of numbers and resources would be on the side of the
cattlemen. It could result only in the homesteaders being driven from
their insecure holdings after the sacrifice of many lives. If she
could see Macdonald, and appeal to him to put down this foolish, even
though well-intended strife, something might result.

It was an inconsequential turmoil, it seemed to her, there in that
sequestered land, for a man like Alan Macdonald to squander his life
upon. If he stood against the forces which Chadron had gone to summon,
he would be slain, and the abundant promise of his life wasted like
water on the sand.

"I'll go with you, Nola," she said, rising from the table in quick
decision.




CHAPTER XII

"THE RUSTLERS!"


"I've stood up for that man, and I've stood by him," said Banjo
Gibson, "but when a man shoots a friend of my friend he ain't no
friend of mine. I'm done with him; I won't never set a boot-heel
inside of his door ag'in."

Banjo was in Mrs. Chadron's south sitting-room, with its friendly
fireplace and homely things, including Mrs. Chadron and her apparently
interminable sock. Only now it was a gray sock, designed not for the
mighty foot of Saul, but for Chance Dalton, lying on his back in the
bunkhouse in a fever growing out of the handling that he had gone
through at Macdonald's place.

Banjo had arrived at the ranch the previous evening. He was sitting
now with his fiddle on his knee, having gone through the repertory
most favored by his hostess, with the exception of "Silver Threads."
That was an afternoon melody, Banjo maintained, and one would have
strained his friendship and shaken his respect if he had insisted upon
the musician putting bow to it in the morning hours.

"Yes," sighed Mrs. Chadron, "it was bad enough when he just shot
cowboys, but when it come to Chance we felt real grieved. Chance he
ain't much to look at, but he's worth his weight in gold on the
ranch."

"Busted his right arm all to pieces, they tell me?"

"Right here." Mrs. Chadron marked across her wrist with her knitting
needle, and shook her head in heavy sadness.

"That'll kind of spile him, won't it?"

"Well, Saul says it won't make so much difference about him not havin'
the use of his hand on that side if it don't break his nerve. A man
loses confidence in himself, Saul says, most always when he loses the
hand or arm he's slung his gun with all his life. He takes the notion
that everybody's quicker'n he is, and just kind of slinges back and
drops out of the game."

"Do you expect Saul he'll come back here with them soldiers he went
after?"

"I expect he'll more'n likely order 'em right up the river to clear
them rustlers out before he stops or anything," she replied, in high
confidence.

"The gall of them low-down brand-burners standin' up to fight a man on
his own land!" Banjo's indignation could not have been more pointed if
he had been a lord of many herds himself.

"There comes them blessed girls!" reported Mrs. Chadron from her
station near the window. Banjo crossed over to see, his fiddle held to
his bosom like an infant. Nola and Frances were nearing the gate.

"That colonel girl she's a up-setter, ain't she?" Banjo admired.

"She's as sweet as locus' blooms," Mrs. Chadron declared, unstintingly.

"But she's kind of distant; nothing friendly and warm-hearted like
your little Nola, mom."

"She's a little cool to strangers, but when she knows a body she comes
out."

Banjo nodded, drawing little whispers of melody from his fiddle-strings
by fingering them against the neck.

"I noticed when she smiles she seems to change," he said. "It's like
puttin' bow to the strings. A fiddle's a glum kind of a thing till you
wake it up; she's that way, I reckon."

"Well, git ready for dinner--or lunch, as Nola calls it--they'll be
starved by this time, ridin' all the way from the post in this chilly
wind. I'm mighty afraid we're goin' to have some weather before
long."

"Can't put it off much longer," Banjo agreed, thinking of the hardship
of being caught out in one of those sweeping blizzards, when the
sudden cold grew so sharp that a man's banjo strings broke in the
tense contraction. That had happened to him more than once, and it
only seemed to sharpen the pleasure of being snowed in at a place like
Alamito, where the kitchen was fat and the hand of the host free. He
smiled as he turned to the kitchen to wash his face and soap his
hair.

They passed a very pleasant afternoon at the ranchhouse, in spite of
Mrs. Chadron's uneasiness on account of their defenseless state. At
that season Chadron and his neighbors could not draw very heavily on
their scattered forces following the divided herds spread out over the
vast territory for the winter grazing.

The twenty men gathered in a hurry-call by Chadron to avenge the
defeat of Chance Dalton, who had in their turn been met and
unexpectedly repulsed by the homesteaders, as Chadron had related in
his own way to Colonel Landcraft, were lying in camp several miles up
the river. That is, all that were left of them fit for duty after the
fight. A good many of them were limping, and would limp for many a
day.

They were waiting the arrival of the troops, which they expected with
the same confidence Mrs. Chadron had held before Nola brought her an
explanation that covered the confusion of refusal.

Neither of the young women knew of the tiff between the colonel and
Chadron, for the colonel was a man who kept his family apart from his
business. Chadron had not seen fit to uncover his humiliation to his
daughter, but had told her that he was acting on the advice of Colonel
Landcraft in sending to his friends in Cheyenne for men to put down
the uprising of rustlers himself.

So there were comfortable enough relations between them all at the
ranch as the day bent to evening and the red sunset changed to gray.
Banjo played for them, as he had done that other afternoon, and sang
his sentimental songs in voice that quavered in the feeling passages.
Chadron had not left anybody to guard the house, because he knew very
well that Macdonald considered nothing beyond defense, and that he
would as quickly burn his own mother's roof above her head as he would
set torch to that home by the riverside.

"Sing us that dreamy one, Banjo," Nola requested, "the one that begins
'Come sit by my side little--' you know the one I mean."

A sentimental tenderness came into Banjo's face. He turned his head so
that he could look out of the window into the thickening landscape
beyond the corral gate, gray and mysterious and unfriendly now as a
twilight sea. Nola touched Frances' arm to prime her for the treat.

"Watch his face," she whispered, smiling behind her hand.

Banjo struck the chords of his accompaniment; the sentimental cast of
his face deepened, until it seemed that he was about to come to tears.
He sang:

    Come sit by my side litt-ul dau-ling,
      And lay your brown head on my breast,
    Whilse the angels of twilight o-round us
      Are singing the flow-ohs to rest.

Banjo must have loved many ladies in many lands, for that is the gift
and the privilege of the troubadour. Now he seemed calling up their
vanished faces out of the twilight as he sang his little song. What
feeling he threw into the chorus, what shaking of the voice, what soft
sinking away of the last notes, the whang of the banjo softened by
palm across the strings!

The chorus:

    O, what can be sweet-o than dreaming
      Tho dream that is on us tonight!
    Pre-haps do you know litt-ul dau-ling,
      Tho future lies hidded from sight.

There was a great deal more of that song, which really was not so bad,
the way Banjo sang it, for he exalted it on the best qualities that
lived in his harmless breast; not so bad that way, indeed, as it looks
in print. Frances could not see where the joke at the little
musician's expense came in, although Nola was laughing behind his
unsuspecting back as the last notes died.

Mrs. Chadron wiped her eyes. "I think it's the sweetest song that ever
was sung!" she said, and meant it, every word.

Banjo said nothing at all, but put away his instrument with reverent
hands, as if no sound was worthy to come out of it after that sweet
agony of love.

Mrs. Chadron got up, in her large, bustling, hospitable way,
sentimentally satisfied, and withal grossly hungry.

"Supper'll be about ready now, children," she said, putting her sock
away in its basket, "and while you two are primpin' I'll run down to
the bunkhouse and take some chicken broth to Chance that Maggie made
him."

"Oh, poor old Chance!" Nola pitied, "I've been sitting here enjoying
myself and forgetting all about him. I'll take it down to him,
mother--Banjo he'll come with me."

Banjo was alert on the proposal, and keen to go. He brought Nola's
coat at her mother's suggestion, for the evening had a feeling of
frost in it, and attended her to the kitchen after the chicken broth
as gallantly as if he wore a sword.

Mrs. Chadron came back from her investigations in the kitchen in a
little while to Frances, who waited alone before the happy little fire
in the chimney. She sighed as she resumed her rocking-chair by the
window, and crossed her seldom idle hands over her comfortably
inelegant front.

"It'll be some little time before supper's ready to set down to," she
announced regretfully. "Maggie's makin' stuffed peppers, and they're
kind of slow to bake. We can talk."

"Of course," Frances agreed, her mind running on the hope that had
brought her to the ranch; the hope of seeing Macdonald, and appealing
to him in pity's name for peace.

"That thievin' Macdonald's to blame for Chance, our foreman, losin'
the use of his right hand," Mrs. Chadron said, with asperity. "Did
Nola tell you about the fight they had with him?"

"Yes, she told me about it as we came."

"It looks like the devil's harnessed up with that man, he does so much
damage without ever gittin' hurt himself. He had a crowd of rustlers
up there with him when Chance went up there to trace some stock, and
they up and killed three of our cowboys. Ain't it terrible?"

"It is terrible!" Frances shuddered, withholding her opinion on which
side the terror lay, together with the blame.

"Then Saul went up there with some more of the men to burn that
Macdonald's shack and drive him off of our land, and they run into a
bunch of them rustlers that Macdonald he'd fetched over there, and two
more of our men was killed. It looks like a body's got to fight night
and day for his rights now, since them nesters begun to come in here.
Well, we was here first, and Saul says we'll be here last. But I think
it's plumb scan'lous the way them rustlers bunches together and
fights. They never was known to do it before, and they wouldn't do it
now if it wasn't for that black-hearted thief, Macdonald!"

"Did you ever see him?" Frances asked.

"No, I never did, and don't never want to!"

"I just asked you because he doesn't look like a bad man."

"They say he sneaked in here the night of Nola's dance, but I didn't
see him. Oh, what 'm I tellin' you? Course you know _that_--you danced
with him!"

"Yes," said Frances, neither sorry nor ashamed.

"But you wasn't to blame, honey," Mrs. Chadron comforted, "you didn't
know him from Adamses off ox."

Frances sat leaning forward, looking into the fire. The light of the
blaze was on her face, appealingly soft and girlishly sweet. Mrs.
Chadron laid a hand on her hair in motherly caress, moved by a
tenderness quite foreign to the vindictive creed which she had
pronounced against the nesters but a little while before.

"I'm afraid you're starved, honey," she said, in genuine solicitude,
thus expressing the nearest human sympathy out of her full-feeding
soul.

"I'm hungry, but far from starving," Frances told her, knowing that
the confession to an appetite would please her hostess better than a
gift. "When do you expect Mr. Chadron home?"

"I don't know, honey, but you don't need to worry; them rustlers can't
pass our men Saul left camped up the valley."

"I wasn't thinking of that; I'm not afraid."

Mrs. Chadron chuckled. "Did I tell you about Nola?" she asked. Then,
answering herself, before Frances could more than turn her head
inquiringly; "No, of course, I never. It was too funny for anything!"

"What was it?" Frances asked, in girlish eagerness. Mrs. Chadron's
smile was reflected in her face as she sat straight, and turned
expectantly to her hostess.

"The other evening when she and her father was comin' home from the
postoffice over at the agency they run acrosst that sneak Macdonald,
afoot in the road, guns so thick on him you couldn't count 'em. Saul
asked him what he was skulkin' around down this way for, and the
feller he was kind of sassy about it, and tried to pass Nola and go
on. He had the gall to tip his hat to her, just like she was low
enough to notice a brand-burner! Well, she give him a larrup over the
face with her whip that cut the hide! He took hold of her bridle to
shove her horse out of the way so he could run, I reckon, and she
switched him till he squirmed like a puppy-dog! I laughed till I
nearly split when Saul told me!"

Mrs. Chadron surrendered again to her keen appreciation of the humor
in that situation. Frances felt now that she understood the attitude
of the cattlemen toward the homesteaders as she never had even sensed
it before. Here was this motherly woman, naturally good at heart and
gentle, hardened and blinded by her prejudices until she could discuss
murder as a thing desired, and the extirpation of a whole community as
a just and righteous deed.

There was no feeling of softness in her breast for the manful
strivings of Alan Macdonald to make a home in that land, not so much
for himself--for it was plain that he would grace a different world to
far better advantage--but for the disinherited of the earth. To Mrs.
Chadron he was a thing apart from her species, a horrible, low, grisly
monster, to whom the earth should afford no refuge and man no
hiding-place. There was no virtue in Alan Macdonald; his fences had
killed his right to human consideration.

In a moment Mrs. Chadron was grave again. She put out her hand in that
gentle, motherly way and touched Frances' hair, smoothing it from her
forehead, pleased with the irrepressible life of it which sprung it
back after the passage of her palm like water in a vessel's wake.

"I let on to you a little while ago that I wasn't uneasy, honey," she
said, "but I ain't no hand at hidin' the truth. I am uneasy, honey,
and on pins, for I don't trust them rustlers. I'm afraid they'll hear
that Saul's gone, and come sneakin' down here and burn us out before
morning, and do worse, maybe. I don't know why I've got that feelin',
but I have, and it's heavy in me, like raw dough."

"I don't believe they'd do anything like that," Frances told her.

"Oh, you don't know 'em like we do, honey, the low-down thieves! They
ort to be hunted like wolves and shot, wherever they're found."

"Some of them have wives and children, haven't they?" Frances asked,
thinking aloud, as she sat with her chin resting in her hand.

"Oh, I suppose they litter like any other wolves," Mrs. Chadron
returned, unfeelingly.

"_Si a tu ventana llega una paloma_," sang Maggie in the kitchen, the
snapping of the oven door coming in quite harmoniously as she closed
it on the baking peppers. Mrs. Chadron sighed.

"_Tratala con cariña que es mi persona_," sounded Maggie, a degree
louder. Mrs. Chadron sat upright, with a new interest in life apart
from her uneasy forebodings about the rustlers. Maggie was in the
dining-room, spreading the cloth. The peppers were coming along.

Somebody burst into the kitchen; uncertain feet came across it; a cry
broke Maggie's song short as she jingled the silver in place on the
cloth. Banjo Gibson stumbled into the room where the low fire twinkled
in the chimney, reeling on his legs, his breath coming in groans.

Maggie was behind him, holding the door open; the light from the big
lamp on the dining-table fell on the musician, who weaved there as if
he might fall. His hat was off, blood was in his eyes and over his
face from a wound at the edge of his hair.

"Nola--Nola!" he gasped.

Mrs. Chadron, already beside him, laid hold of him now and shook him.

"Tell it, you little devil--tell it!" she screamed.

Frances, with gentler hand, drew Banjo from her.

"What's happened to Nola?" she asked.

"The rustlers!" he said, his voice falling away in horror.

"The rustlers!" Mrs. Chadron groaned, her arms lifted above her head.
She ran in wild distraction into the dining-room, now back to the
chimney to take down a rifle that hung in its case on a deer prong
over the mantel.

"Nola, Nola!" she called, running out into the garden. Her wild voice
came back from there in a moment, crying her daughter's name in
agony.

Banjo had sunk to the floor, his battered face held in his hands.

"My God! they took her!" he groaned. "The rustlers, they took her, and
I couldn't lift a hand!"

Frances beckoned to Maggie, who had followed her mistress to the
kitchen door.

"Give him water; stop the blood," she ordered sharply.

In a moment she had dashed out after Mrs. Chadron, and was running
frantically along the garden path toward the river.




CHAPTER XIII

THE TRAIL AT DAWN


Frances stopped at the high wire fence along the river bank. It was
dark there between the shrubs of the garden on one hand and the tall
willows on the other, but nothing moved in them but her own leaping
heart. She called Mrs. Chadron, running along the fence as she cried
her name.

Mrs. Chadron answered from the barn. Frances found her saddling a
horse, while Maggie's husband, an old Mexican with a stiff leg,
muttered prayers in his native tongue as he tightened the girths on
another.

Mrs. Chadron was for riding in pursuit of Nola's abductors, although
she had not mounted a horse in fifteen years. There was no man about
the place except crippled old Alvino, and wounded Dalton lying in the
men's quarters near at hand. Neither of them was serviceable in such
an emergency, and Banjo, willing as he would be, seemed too badly hurt
to be of any use.

Frances pressed her to dismiss this intention. Even if they knew which
way to ride, it would be a hopeless pursuit.

"There's only one way to go--towards the rustlers' settlement," Mrs.
Chadron grimly returned.

She was over her hysterical passion now, and steadied down into a
state of desperate determination to set out after the thieves and
bring Nola back. She did not know how it was to be accomplished, but
she felt her strength equal to any demand in the pressure of her
despair. She was lifting her foot to the stirrup, thinly dressed as
she was, her head bare, the rifle in her hand, when Frances took her
by the arm.

"You can't go alone with Alvino, Mrs. Chadron."

"I've got to go, I tell you--let loose of me!"

She shook off Frances' restraining hand and turned to her horse again.
With her hand on the pommel of the saddle she stopped, and turned to
Alvino.

"Go and fetch me Chance's guns out of the bunkhouse," she ordered.

Alvino hitched away, swinging his stiff leg, with laborious, slow
gait.

"You couldn't do anything against a crowd of desperate men--they might
kill you!" Frances said.

"Let 'em kill me, then!" She lifted her hand, as if taking an oath.
"They'll pay for this trick--every man, woman, and child of them'll
bleed for what they've done to me tonight!"

"Let Alvino go to the camp up the river where Mr. Chadron left the
men, and tell them; they can do more than you."

"You couldn't drive him alone out of sight of the lights in the house
with fire. He'd come back with some kind of a lie before he'd went a
mile. I'll go to 'em myself, honey--I didn't think of them."

"I'll go with you."

"Wait till Alvino comes with them guns--I can use 'em better than I
can a rifle. Oh, why don't the man hurry!"

"I'll run down and see what--"

But Alvino came around the corral at that moment. He had stopped to
light a lantern, in his peculiar Mexican mode of estimating the
importance of time and occasion, and came flashing it in short,
violent arcs as he swayed to swing his jointless leg.

Frances led out the other horse and was waiting to mount when Alvino
came panting up, the belt with its two revolvers over his arm. Mrs.
Chadron jerked it from him with something hard and sharp on her tongue
like a curse. Banjo Gibson came into the circle of light, a bandage on
his head.

"I didn't even see 'em. They knocked me down, and when I come to she
was gone!"

Banjo's voice was full of self-censure, and his feet were weak upon
the ground. He began to talk the moment the light struck him, and when
he had finished his little explanation he was standing beside Mrs.
Chadron's saddle.

"Go to the house and lie down, Banjo," Mrs. Chadron said; "I ain't
time to fool with you!"

"Are you two aimin' to go to the post after help?" Banjo steadied
himself on his legs by clinging to the horse's mane as he spoke.

"We're goin' up the river after the men," Mrs. Chadron told him.

"No, I'll go after the men; that's a man's job," Banjo insisted. "I
know right where they're camped at, you couldn't find 'em between now
and morning."

There was no arguing Banjo out of it, no brushing the little man
aside. He was as firm as a man three times his weight, and he took
Mrs. Chadron by the arm, like a son, and led her away from the horse
with a manner at once so firm and yet considerate that it softened her
stern heart and plunged her into tears.

"If you bring Nola back to me I'll give her to you, Banjo! I'll give
her to you!" she sobbed, as she belted him with Chance Dalton's guns.

"If any reward in this world could drive me through hell fire to lay
my hands on it, you've named it," he said.

Frances saw that Mrs. Chadron could be reasoned with now, and she was
grateful to Banjo for his opportune arrival. For the night was vast
and unfriendly over that empty land, and filled with a thousand
shudderful dangers. She was afraid of it, afraid to leave the lights
of the house behind her and ride out into it, no matter for all the
peril that poor little Nola might be facing in that cruel hour.

Banjo rode away. They stood clinging to each other in the dim circle
of Alvino's lantern-light, listening to his horse until the distance
muffled its feet on the road.

Frances was chilled with the horror of that brigandish act. Every
movement of the wind in the bushes made her skin crinkle and creep;
every sound of animals in barn and corral was magnified into some new
danger. Mrs. Chadron was in far worse state, with reason, certainly,
for being so. Now that the stimulation of her first wild outburst had
been exhausted, she stood wilted and weak, shivering with her hands
over her eyes, moaning and moaning in piteous low wail.

Frances took the lantern from old Alvino's shaking hand.

"Let's go and look for their tracks," she suggested, forcing a note of
eagerness into her words, "so we can tell the men, when they come back
to pick up the trail, how many there were and which way they went."

"Oh, if Chance was only able to go after them, if he was only able!"
Mrs. Chadron wailed, following Frances as she hurried along the wire
fence that cut the garden from the river.

"It was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron said,
"for that gate down there back of the house is open. That's the way
they come and went--somebody that knowed the lay of the land."

Frances felt her heart die within her as the recollection of another
night in that garden flashed like red fire in her mind. There was a
picture, as she stopped with closed eyes, struck cold and shuddering
by a fear she dared not own, of one flying, bent into the shadows,
along the garden path toward that gate. Someone who knew the "lay of
the land!"

"Did you hear something?" Mrs. Chadron whispered, leaning close to her
where she had stopped, stock-still, as if she had struck a wall.

"I thought I--I--saw something," Frances answered, in faint, sick
voice.

The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the
soft ground beyond it they found tracks.

"Only one man!" said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.

"There's only one track," said Frances, her breath so feeble, her
heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.

Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for
that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the
farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he
led them to the willows where the ravisher's horse had been
concealed.

"One shoe was lost," said he, pointing, "left one, hind foot."

Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone
with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.

"Oh, if I'd 'a' come down here place of saddlin' that horse!" she
lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.

"He'd have been gone, even then--I was past here and didn't hear him,"
Frances said.

Still the vision persisted in her disturbed imagination of that other
night, of one leaning low in the saddle, his fleet horse stretching
its neck in desperation for the distant refuge; the dash of pursuing
hoofs; the sound of shots up the river; the prayer that she sent to
heaven in his behalf.

"Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron
was repeating, with accusing conviction.

They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was
doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her
capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason
for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as
a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola
herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the
thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful
thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must
leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs,
binding her as if her feet were set in lava.

Somebody that knew the "lay of the land." Great God! could he fight
that way, was it in Alan Macdonald to make a hawk's dash like that? It
was hard to admit the thought, to give standing to the doubtful
accusation. But those whom they called "rustlers" must have borne Nola
away. Beyond the homesteaders up the river were the mountains and the
wild country where no man made his home; except them and the cattlemen
and the cowboys attending the herds, that country was unpeopled. There
was nobody to whom the deed could be charged but the enemies that
Chadron had made in his persecution of the homesteaders.

Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the
cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and
skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that
common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words,
and his association with them, seemed to convict him there in the
silence of that black-walled court of night.

It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his associates
by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel
that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a
sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his
blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree
the blame, even passive knowledge of the intent, of that base
offense.

At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together,
she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the
deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was
preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses.
They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own
immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify
them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.

She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own
mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she
should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.

The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road
up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that
might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an
infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then
she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she
imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the
road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate
by and by on Frances' arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow
of her life.

Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming
day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would
ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen
girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every
side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and
Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic
night.

Frances was in the saddle at daybreak. She had left Mrs. Chadron in an
uneasy sleep, watched over by Maggie. Banjo had not returned; no word
had reached them from any source. Alvino let Frances out through the
gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the
abductor's trail as far as possible without being led into strange
country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pass that
way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there.

The tracks of the raider's horse were deep in the soft soil. She
followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road,
angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a
trampling in the lose earth--testimony of the fight that Nola had made
to get away--Frances started at the sight of something caught on a
clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object
cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning.
Presently assured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with
it in her hand.

Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were
so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther.
But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was
heading for the homesteaders' settlement, and that he had taken the
road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence
picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and
place.

She felt again that surge of indignation that had fired her heart
early in the sad night past. The man who had lurked in the garden
waiting his chance to snatch Nola away, was certain of the protection
to which he fled. It was the daring execution of one man, but the
planning of many, and at the head of them one with fire in his wild
soul, quick passion in his eyes, and mastery over his far-riding band.
It could be no other way.

When she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse
and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode
forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post.

She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the
homesteaders' settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald's claim to lie
somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by
tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade
of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old
man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching
great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.

She halted when she saw them, and they jerked up their horses also,
with startled suddenness, like men riding in the expectation of danger
and surprise. Macdonald came forward in a moment, with respectful
salute, a look amounting almost to frightened questioning in his face.
For the sun was not up yet, although its flame was on the heavens, and
it was a strange, wild place to meet a woman of Frances Landcraft's
caste unattended, and with the shadow of a trouble in her face that
made it old, like misery.

But there was no question of the unfriendliness of that face for Alan
Macdonald and the men who came riding at his back. It was as cold as
the gray earth beneath her horse's hoofs, and its severity was
reflected in the very pose of her body, even in the grip of her
slender thighs as they clasped her saddle, sitting there like a
dragoon outrider who had appeared to bar their way.

Frances was wearing the brown corduroy riding-habit that she had worn
on the day when she first spoke to him. Her brown hair had fallen down
until it hid her ears, for she had ridden hard, and a strand of it
blew from beneath her cowboy hat in unheeded caress across her cheek.

Macdonald saw her stiffen in the saddle and lift herself a little from
her seat as he drew near, his companions stopping a little distance
back. Her eyes were stern and reproachful; a little frown troubled her
white forehead.

"I was starting out to find you, Mr. Macdonald," she said, severely.

"If there is any service, Miss Landcraft--"

"Don't talk emptiness, and don't pretend!" she said, a flash of anger
in her face. "It isn't a man's way to fight, it's a coward's! Bring
her back home!"

"I don't know what you mean." There was such an astonished helplessness
in his manner that it would have convinced any unprejudiced mind of
his innocence in itself.

"Oh!"--impatiently--"I can't hurt you, I'm alone. You'd just as well
tell me how much money you're going to demand, so I can set their
minds at rest."

Macdonald's face was hot; his eyes felt as if they swam in fire. He
put out his hand in a gesture almost a command, his heavy eyebrows
gathered in a frown, an expression of sternness in his homely face
that made it almost majestic.

"If you'll be good enough to tell me what your veiled accusations
point to, Miss Landcraft, then I can answer you by either yes or no."

She unbent so far as to relate briefly what she believed they knew
better than herself already. But behind her high air as she talked
there was a secret warm feeling for the strength of this man. It was a
quality of fine steel in the human mind and body such as she never had
seen so beautifully blended before. In her own father there was
something of it, but only a reflection on water compared to this. It
seemed the temper of the desert, she thought, like that oriental
spirit which spread Islam's dark creed over half the world.

When she had finished the relation of Nola's ravishment, he sat with
head drooped in dusty silence a moment. Then he looked her in the eyes
with such a steady blaze of indignation that she felt her own rage
kindle to meet it. His clear, steady gaze was an arraignment, an
accusation on the ugly charge of perversion of the truth as she knew
it to be in the bottom of her conscience when she had laid the crime
at the homesteaders' hands. If he saw her at all, she thought, it was
as some small despicable thing, for his eyes were so unflinching, as
they poured their steady fire into her own, that he seemed to be
summing up the final consequences which lay behind her, along the
dusty highway to the ranchhouse by the river.

"In the first place," said he, speaking slowly, "there are no cattle
thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss
Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some
of them, and judge for yourself."

He beckoned to Tom Lassiter and the three with him, and they joined
him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the
news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it.

"These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this
deed, but there's not one among us that wouldn't put down his life to
keep that young woman from harm and give her back to her home. We have
our grievances against Saul Chadron, God knows! and they are grave
enough. But we don't fight that way, Miss Landcraft."

"If you're innocent, then prove it by forcing the men that carried her
off, or the man, if there was only one, to bring her back home. Then
I'll believe you. Maybe others will, too. What are you riding the road
so early for, all armed and suspicious, if you're such honest men?"

"We're goin' to the agency after ammunition to defend our homes, and
our wives and children--such of us as Saul Chadron and his hired
hounds has left children to, colonel's daughter," Tom Lassiter
answered, reproof in his kind old eyes.

Frances had unrolled the bit of evidence that she had picked up from
the bushes, and was holding it on the horn of her saddle now, quite
unconscious of what her hands were doing, for she had forgotten the
importance of her find in the heat of that meeting. Macdonald spurred
forward, pointing to the thing in her hand.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, a sharp note of concern in his
voice that made her start.

She told him. He took it from her and turned to his comrades.

"It's Mark Thorn's cap!" he said, holding it up, his fingers in the
crown.

Tom Lassiter nodded his slow head as the others leaned to look.

"Saul Chadron's chickens has come home to roost," he said.

Frances understood nothing of the excitement that sprung out of the
mention of the outlaw's name, for Mark Thorn and his bloody history
were alike unknown to her. Her resentment mounted at being an outsider
to their important or pretended secret.

"Well, if you know whose cap it is, it ought to be easy for you to
find the owner," she said, unable to smother the sneer in her words.

"He isn't one of us," said a homesteader, with grim shortness.

"Oh!" said she, tossing her lofty head.

There was a pallor in Macdonald's weathered face, as if somebody near
and dear to himself was in extreme peril.

"She may never see home again," he said. Then quickly: "Which way did
he go, do you know?"

She told him what she knew, not omitting the lost horseshoe. Tom
Lassiter bent in his saddle with eagerness as she mentioned that
particular, and ran his eyes over the road like one reading the pages
of a book.

"There!" he said, pointing, "I've been seein' it all the way down,
Alan. He was headin' for the hills."

Frances could not see the print of the shoeless hoof, nor any
peculiarity among the scores of tracks that would tell her of Nola's
abductor having ridden that far along the road. She flushed as the
thought came to her that this was a trick to throw her attention from
themselves and the blame upon some fictitious person, when they knew
whose hands were guilty all the time. The men were leaning in their
saddles, riding slowly back on their trail, talking in low voices and
sharp exclamations among themselves. She spurred hotly after them.

"Mr. Chadron hasn't come home yet," she said, addressing Macdonald,
who sat straight in his saddle to hear, "but they expect him any hour.
If you'll say how much you're going to demand, and where you want it
paid, I'll carry the word to him. It might hurry matters, and save her
mother's life."

"I'm sorry you repeated that," said Macdonald, touching his hat in
what he plainly meant a farewell salute. He turned from her and drew
Tom Lassiter aside. In a moment he was riding back again the way that
he had come.

Frances looked at the unaccountable proceeding with the eyes of doubt
and suspicion. She did not believe any of them, and had no faith in
their mysterious trackings and whisperings aside, and mad gallopings
off to hidden ends. As for Tom Lassiter and his companions, they
ranged themselves preparatory to continuing their journey.

"If you're goin' our way, colonel's daughter," said Tom, gathering up
his bridle-reins, "we'll be proud to ride along with you."

Frances was looking at the dust-cloud that rose behind Macdonald. He
was no longer in sight.

"Where has he gone?" she inquired, her suspicion growing every
moment.

"He's gone to find that cowman's child, young lady, and take her home
to her mother," Tom replied, with dignity. He rode on. She followed,
presently gaining his side.

"Is there such a man as Mark Thorn?" she asked after a little, looking
across at Lassiter with sly innuendo.

"No, there ain't no man by that name, but there's a devil in the shape
of a human man called that," he answered.

"Is he--what does he do?" She reined a little nearer to Lassiter,
feeling that there was little harm in him apart from the directing
hand.

"He hires out to kill off folks that's in the way of the cattlemen at
so much a head, miss; like some hires out to kill off wolves. The
Drovers' Association hires him, and sees that he gits out of jail if
anybody ever puts him in, and fixes it up so he walks safe with the
blood of no knowin' how many innocent people on his hands. That's what
Mark Thorn does, ma'am. Chadron brought him in here a couple of weeks
ago to do some killin' off amongst us homesteaders so the rest 'd take
a scare and move out. He give that old devil a list of twenty men he
wanted shot, and Alan Macdonald's got that paper. His own name's at
the top of it, too."

"Oh!" said she, catching her breath sharply, as if in pain. Her face
was white and cold. "Did he--did he--kill anybody here?"

"He killed my little boy; he shot him down before his mother's eyes!"

Tom Lassiter's guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw
knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road
ahead of him.

"Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!"

"He was a little tow-headed feller, and he had his mother's eyes, as
blue as robins' eggs," said Tom, his reminiscent sorrow so poignant
that tears sprung to her eyes in sympathy and plashed down unheeded
and unchecked. "He'd 'a' been fifteen in November. Talkin' about
fightin', ma'am, that's the way some people fights."

"I'm sorry I said that, Mr. Lassiter," she confessed, hanging her head
like a corrected child.

"He can't hear you now," said Tom.

They rode on a little way. Tom told her of the other outrages for
which Thorn was accountable in that settlement. She was amazed as
deeply as she was shocked to hear of this, for if any word of it had
come to the post, it had been kept from her. Neither was it ever
mentioned in Chadron's home.

"No," said Tom, when she mentioned that, "it ain't the kind of news
the cattlemen spreads around. But if we shoot one of them in defendin'
our own, the news runs like a pe-rairie fire. They call us rustlers,
and come ridin' up to swipe us out. Well, they's goin' to be a
change."

"But if Chadron brought that terrible man in here, why should the
horrible creature turn against him?" she asked, doubt and suspicion
grasping the seeming fault in Lassiter's tale.

"Chadron refused to make settlement with him for the killin' he done
because he didn't git Macdonald. Thorn told Alan that with his own
bloody tongue."

Lassiter retailed to her eager ears the story of Macdonald's capture
of Thorn, and his fight with Chadron's men when they came to set the
old slayer free, as Lassiter supposed.

"They turned him loose," said he, "and you know now what I meant when
I said Chadron's chickens has come home to roost."

"Yes, I know now." She turned, and looked back. Remorse was heavy on
her for the injustice she had done Macdonald that day, and shame for
her sharp words bowed her head as she rode at old Tom Lassiter's
hand.

"He'll run the old devil down ag'in," Tom spoke confidently, as of a
thing that admitted no dispute, "and take that young woman home if he
finds her livin'. Many thanks he'll git for it from them and her. Like
as not she'll bite the hand that saves her, for she's a cub of the old
bear. Well, let me tell you, colonel's daughter, if she was to live a
thousand years, and pray all her life, she wouldn't no more than be
worthy at the end to wash that man's feet with her tears and dry 'em
on her hair, like that poor soul you've read about in the Book."

Frances slowed her horse as if overcome by a sudden indecision, and
turned in her saddle to look back again. Again she had let him go away
from her misunderstood, his high pride hurt, his independent heart too
lofty to bend down to the mean adjustment to be reached through
argument or explanation. One must accept Alan Macdonald for what his
face proclaimed him to be. She knew that now. He was not of the
mean-spirited who walk among men making apology for their lives.

"He's gone on," said Lassiter, slowing his horse to her pace.

"I'm afraid I was hasty and unjust," she confessed, struggling to hold
back her tears.

"Yes, you was," said Lassiter, frankly, "but everybody on the outside
is unjust to all of us up here. We're kind of outcasts because we
fence the land and plow it. But I want to tell you, Macdonald's a man
amongst men, ma'am. He's fed the poor and lifted up the afflicted, and
he's watched with us beside our sick and prayed with us over our dead.
We know him, no matter what folks on the outside say. Well, we'll have
to spur up a little, ma'am, for we're in a hurry to git back."

They approached the point where the road to the post branched.

"There's goin' to be fightin' over here if Chadron tries to drive us
out," Tom said, "and we know he's sent for men to come in and help him
try it. We don't want to fight, but men that won't fight for their
homes ain't the kind you'd like to ride along the road with, ma'am."

"Maybe the trouble can be settled some other way," she suggested,
thinking again of the hope that she had brought with her to the ranch
the day before.

"When we bring the law in here, and elect officers to see it put in
force for every man alike, then this trouble it'll come to an end.
Well, if you ever feel like we deserve a good word, colonel's
daughter, we'd be proud to have you say it, for the feller that stands
up for the law and the Lord and his home agin the cattlemen in this
land, ma'am, he's got a hard row to hoe. Yes, we'll count any good
words you might say for us as so much gold. 'And the Levite, thou
shalt not forsake him, for he hath no part nor inheritance with
thee.'"

Tom's voice was slow and solemn when he quoted that Mosaic injunction.
The appeal of the disinherited was in it, and the pain of lost years.
It touched her like a sorrow of her own. Tears were on her cheeks
again as she parted from him, giving him her hand in token of trust
and faith, and rode on toward the ranchhouse by the river.




CHAPTER XIV

WHEN FRIENDS PART


Banjo had returned, with fever in his wound. Mrs. Chadron was putting
horse liniment on it when Frances entered the sitting-room where the
news of the tragedy had visited them the night past.

"I didn't go to the post--I saw some men in the road and turned back,"
Frances told them, sinking down wearily in a chair before the fire.

"I'm glad you turned back, honey," Mrs. Chadron said, shaking her head
sadly, "for I was no end worried about you. Them rustlers they're
comin' down from their settlement and gatherin' up by Macdonald's
place, the men told Banjo, and no tellin' what they might 'a' done if
they'd seen you."

Mrs. Chadron's face was not red with the glow of peppers and much food
this morning. One night of anxiety had racked her, and left hollows
under her eyes and a flat grayness in her cheeks.

Banjo had brought no other news. The men had scattered at daybreak to
search for the trail of the man who had carried Nola away, but Banjo,
sore and shaken, had come back depressed and full of pains. Mrs.
Chadron said that Saul surely would be home before noonday, and urged
Frances to go to her room and sleep.

"I'm steadier this morning, I'll watch and wait," she said, pressing
the liniment-soaked cloth to Banjo's bruised forehead.

Banjo contracted his muscles under the application, shriveling up on
himself like a snail in a fire, for it was hot and heroic liniment,
and strong medicine for strong beasts and tougher men. Banjo's face
was a picture of patient suffering, but he said nothing, and had not
spoken since Frances entered the room, for the treatment had been
under way before her arrival and there was scarcely enough breath left
in him to suffice for life, and none at all for words. Frances had it
in mind to suggest some milder remedy, but held her peace, feeling
that if Banjo survived the treatment he surely would be in no danger
from his hurt.

The door of Nola's room was open as Frances passed, and there was a
depression in the counterpane which told where the lost girl's mother
had knelt beside it and wet it with her tears. Frances wondered
whether she had prayed, lingering compassionately a moment in the
door.

The place was like Nola in its light and brightness and surface
comfort and assertive color notes of happiness, hung about with the
trophies of her short but victorious career among the hearts of men.
There were photographs of youths on dressing-table, chiffonier, and
walls, and flaring pennants of eastern universities and colleges.
Among the latter, as if it was the most triumphant trophy of them all,
there hung a little highland bonnet with a broken feather, of the
plaid Alan Macdonald had worn on the night of Nola's mask.

Frances went in for a nearer inspection, and lifted the little saucy
bit of headgear from its place in the decorations of Nola's wall.
There could be no doubting it; that was Alan Macdonald's bonnet, and
there was a bullet hole in it at the stem of the little feather. The
close-grazing lead had sheared the plume in two, and gone on its
stinging way straight through the bonnet.

An exclamation of tender pity rose above her breath. She fondled the
little headdress and pressed it to her bosom; she laid it against her
cheek and kissed it in consolation for its hurt--the woman's balsam
for all sufferings and heartbreaks, and incomparable among the
panaceas of all time.

In spite of her sympathy for Nola in her grave situation, facing or
undergoing what terrors no one knew, there was a bridling of
resentment against her in Frances' breast as she hung the marred
bonnet back in its place. It seemed to her that Nola had exulted over
both herself and Alan Macdonald when she had put his bonnet on her
wall, and that she had kept it there after the coming of Frances to
that house in affront to friendship and mockery of the hospitality
that she professed to extend.

Nola had asked her to that house so that she might see it hanging
there; she had arranged it and studied it with the cunning intent of
giving her pain. And how close that bullet had come to him! It must
have sheared his fair hair as it tore through and dashed the bonnet
from his head.

How she suffered in picturing his peril, happily outlived! How her
heart trembled and her strong young limbs shook as she lived over in
breathless agony the crisis of that night! He had carried her glove in
his bonnet--she remembered the deft little movement of stowing it
there just the moment before he bent and flashed away among the
shadows. Excuse enough for losing it, indeed!

But he had not told her of his escape to justify the loss; proudly he
had accepted the blame, and turned away with the hurt of it in his
unbending heart.

She went back and took down the jaunty little cap again, and kissed it
with compensatory tenderness, and left a jewel trembling on its crown
from the well of her honest brown eye. If ever amends were made to any
little highland bonnet in this world, then Alan Macdonald's was that
bonnet, hanging there among the flaring pennants and trivial little
schoolgirl trophies on Nola Chadron's wall.

Chadron came home toward evening at the head of sixty men. He had
raised his army speedily and effectively. These men had been gathered
by the members of the Drovers' Association and sent to Meander by
special train, horses, guns, ammunition, and provisions with them,
ready for a campaign.

The cattlemen had made a common cause of this sectional difficulty.
Their indignation had been voiced very thoroughly by Mrs. Chadron when
she had spoken to Frances with such resentment of the homesteaders
standing up to fight. That was an unprecedented contingency. The "holy
scare," such as Mark Thorn and similar hired assassins spread in
communities of homesteaders, had been sufficient up to that day. Now
this organized front of self-defense must be broken, and the bold
rascals involved must be destroyed, root and branch.

Press agents of the Drovers' Association in Cheyenne were sowing
nation-wide picturesque stories of the rustlers' uprising. The ground
was being prepared for the graver news that was to come; the
cattlemen's justification was being carefully arranged in advance.

Frances shuddered for the homesteaders when she looked out of her
window upon this formidable force of lean-legged, gaunt-cheeked
gun-fighters. They were men of the trade, cowboys who had fought their
employers' battles from the Rio Grande to the Little Missouri. They
were grim and silent men as they pressed round the watering troughs at
the windmill with their horses, with flapping hats and low-slung
pistols, and rifles sheathed in leather cases on their saddles.

She hurried down when she saw Chadron dismount at the gate. Mrs.
Chadron was there to meet him, for she had stood guard at her window
all day watching for his dust beyond the farthest hill. Frances could
hear her weeping now, and Chadron's heavy voice rising in command as
she came to the outer door.

Chadron was in the saddle again, and there was hurrying among his men
at barn and corral as they put on bridles which they had jerked off,
and tightened girths and gathered up dangling straps. Chadron was
riding among them, large and commanding as a general, with a cloud in
his dark face that seemed a threat of death.

Mrs. Chadron was hurrying in to make a bundle of some heavy clothing
for Nola to protect her against the night chill on her way home, which
the confident soul believed her daughter would be headed upon before
midnight. Saul the invincible was taking the trail; Saul, who smashed
his way to his desires in all things. She gave Frances a hurried word
of encouragement as they passed outside the door.

Chadron was talking earnestly to his men. "I'll give fifty dollars
bonus to the man that brings him down," she heard him say as she drew
near, "and a hundred to the first man to lay eyes on my daughter."

Frances was hurrying to him with the information that she had kept for
his ear alone. She was flushed with excitement as she came among the
rough horsemen like a bright bloom tossed among rusty weeds. They fell
back generously, not so much to give her room as to see her to better
advantage, passing winks and grimaces of approval between themselves
in their free and easy way. Chadron gave his hand in greeting as she
spoke some hasty words of comfort.

"Thank you, Miss Frances, for your friendship in this bad business,"
he said, heartily, and with the best that there was in him. "You've
been a great help and comfort to her mother, and if it wouldn't be
askin' too much I'd like for you to stay here with her till we bring
my little girl back home."

"Yes, I intended to stay, Mr. Chadron; I didn't come out to tell you
that." She looked round at the admiring faces, too plainly expressive
of their approbation, some of them, and plucked Chadron's sleeve.
"Bend down--I want to tell you something," she said, in low, quick
voice.

Chadron stooped, his hand lightly on her shoulder, in attitude of
paternal benediction.

"It wasn't Macdonald, it was Mark Thorn," she whispered.

Chadron's face displayed no surprise, shadowed no deeper concern. Only
there was a flitting look of perplexity in it as he sat upright in his
saddle again.

"Who is he?" he asked.

"Don't you know?" She watched him closely, baffled by his unmoved
countenance.

"I never heard of anybody in this country by that name," he returned,
shaking his head with a show of entire sincerity. "Who was tellin' you
about him--who said he was the man?"

A little confused, and more than a little disappointed over the
apparent failure of her news to surprise from Chadron a betrayal of
his guilty connection with Mark Thorn, she related the adventure of
the morning, the finding of the cap, the meeting with Macdonald and
his neighbors. She reserved nothing but what Lassiter had told her of
Thorn's employers and his bloody work in that valley.

Chadron shook his head with an air of serious concern. There was a
look of commiseration in his eyes for her credulity, and shameful
duping by the cunning word of Alan Macdonald.

"That's one of Macdonald's lies," he said, something so hard and
bitter in his voice when he pronounced that name that she shuddered.
"I never heard of anybody named Thorn, here or anywheres else. That
rustler captain he's a deep one, Miss Frances, and he was only
throwin' dust in your eyes. But I'm glad you told me."

"But they said--the man he called Lassiter said--that Macdonald would
find Nola, and bring her home," she persisted, unwilling yet to accept
Chadron's word against that old man's, remembering the paper with the
list of names.

"He's bald-faced enough to try even a trick like that!" he said.

Chadron looked impatiently toward the house, muttering something about
the slowness of "them women," avoiding Frances' eyes. For she did not
believe Saul Chadron, and her distrust was eloquent in her face.

"You mean that he'd pretend a rescue and bring her back, just to make
sympathy for himself and his side of this trouble?"

"That's about the size of it," Chadron nodded, frowning sternly.

"Oh, it seems impossible that anybody could be so heartless and low!"

"A man that'd burn brands is low enough to go past anything you could
imagine in that little head of yours, Miss Frances. Do you mind
runnin' in and tellin'--no, here she comes."

"Couldn't this trouble between you and the homesteaders--"


"Homesteaders! They're cattle thieves, born in 'em and bred in 'em,
and set in the hide and hair of 'em!"

"Couldn't it be settled without all this fighting and killing?" she
went on, pressing her point.

"It's all over now but the shoutin'," said he. "There's only one way
to handle a rustler, Miss Frances, and that's to salt his hide."

"I'd be willing--I'd be glad--to go up there myself, alone, and take
any message you might send," she offered. "I think they'd listen to
reason, even to leaving the country if you want them to, rather than
try to stand against a ga--force like this."

"You can't understand our side of it, Miss Frances,"--Chadron spoke
impatiently, reaching out for the bundle that his wife was bringing
while she was yet two rods away--"for you ain't been robbed and
wronged by them nesters like we have. You've got to live it to know
what it means, little lady. We've argued with 'em till we've used up
all our words, but their fences is still there. Now we're goin' to
clear 'em out."

"But Macdonald seemed hurt when I asked him how much money they wanted
you to pay as Nola's ransom," she said.

"He's deep, and he's tricky--too deep and too slick for you." Chadron
gathered up his reins, leaned over and whispered: "Don't say anything
about that Thorn yarn to her"--a sideways jerk of the head toward his
wife--"her trouble's deep enough without stirrin' it."

Chadron had the bundle now, and Mrs. Chadron was helping him tie it
behind his saddle, shaking her head sadly as she handled the
belongings of her child with gentle touch. Tears were running down her
cheeks, but her usually ready words seemed dead upon her tongue.

From the direction of the barn a little commotion moved forward among
the horsemen, like a wave before a breeze. Banjo Gibson appeared on
his horse as the last thong was tied about Nola's bundle, his hat
tilted more than its custom to spare the sore place over his eye.

The cowboys looked at his gaudy trappings with curious eyes. Chadron
gave him a short word of greeting, and bent to kiss his wife
good-bye.

"I'm with you in this here thing, Saul," said Banjo; "I'll ride to
hell's back door to help you find that little girl!"

Chadron slewed in his saddle with an ugly scowl.

"We don't want any banjo-pickers on this job, it's men's work!" he
said.

Banjo seemed to droop with humiliation. Chuckles and derisive words
were heard among Chadron's train. The little musician hung his
bandaged head.

"Oh, you ortn't be hard on Banjo, he means well," Mrs. Chadron
pleaded.

"He can stay here and scratch the pigs," Chadron returned, in his
brutal way. "We've got to go now, old lady, but we'll be back before
morning, and we'll bring Nola. Don't you worry any more; she'll be all
right--they wouldn't dare to harm a hair of her head."

Mrs. Chadron looked at him with large hope and larger trust in her
yearning face, and Banjo slewed his horse directly across the gate.

"Before you leave, Saul, I want to tell you this," he said. "You've
hurt me, and you've hurt me _deep_! I'll leave here before another
hour passes by, and I'll never set a boot-heel inside of your door
ag'in as long as you live!"

"Oh hell!" said Chadron, spurring forward into the road.

Chadron's men rode away after him, except five whom he detailed to
stay behind and guard the ranch. These turned their horses into the
corral, made their little fire of twigs and gleaned brush in their
manner of wood-scant frugality, and over it cooked their simple
dinner, each man after his own way.

Banjo led his horse to the gate in front of the house and left it
standing there while he went in to get his instruments. Mrs. Chadron
was moved to a fresh outburst of weeping by his preparations for
departure, and the sad, hurt look in his simple face.

"You stay here, Banjo; don't you go!" she begged. "Saul he didn't mean
any harm by what he said--he won't remember nothing about it when he
comes back."

"I'll remember it," Banjo told her, shaking his head in unbending
determination, "and I couldn't be easy here like I was in the past. If
I was to try to swaller a bite of Saul Chadron's grub after this it'd
stick in my throat and choke me. No, I'm a-goin', mom, but I'm
carryin' away kind thoughts of you in my breast, never to be forgot."

Banjo hitched the shoulder strap of the instrument from which he took
his name with a jerking of the shoulder, and settled it in place; he
took up his fiddle box and hooked it under his arm, and offered Mrs.
Chadron his hand. She was crying, her face in her apron, and did not
see. Frances took the extended hand and clasped it warmly, for the
little musician and his homely small sentiments had found a place in
her heart.

"You shouldn't leave until your head gets better," she said; "you're
hardly able to take another long ride after being in the saddle all
night, hurt like you are."

Banjo looked at her with pain reflected in his shallow eyes.

"The hurt that gives me my misery is where it can't be seen," he
said.

"Where are you goin', Banjo, with the country riled up this way, and
you li'ble to be shot down any place by them rustlers?" Mrs. Chadron
asked, looking at him appealingly, her apron ready to stem her gushing
tears.

"I'll go over to the mission and stay with Mother Mathews till I'm
healed up. I'll be welcome in that house; I'd be welcome there if I
was blind, and had m' back broke and couldn't touch a string."

"Yes, you would, Banjo," Mrs. Chadron nodded.

"She's married to a Injun, but she's as white as a angel's robe."

"She's a good soul, Banjo, as good as ever lived."

Frances took advantage of Banjo's trip to the reservation to send a
note to her father apprising him of the tragedy at the ranch. Banjo
buttoned it inside his coat, mounted his horse, and rode away.

Mrs. Chadron watched him out of sight with lamentations.

"I wish he'd 'a' stayed--it 'd 'a' been all right with Saul; Saul
didn't mean any harm by what he said. He's the tender-heartedest man
you ever saw, he wouldn't hurt a body's feelin's for a farm."

"I don't believe Banjo is a man to hold a grudge very long," Frances
told her, looking after the retreating musician, her thoughts on him
but hazily, but rather on a little highland bonnet with a bullet hole
in its crown.

"No, he ain't," Mrs. Chadron agreed, plucking up a little brightness.
"But it's a bad sign, a mighty bad sign, when a friend parts from you
with a hurt in his heart that way, and leaves your house in a huff and
feels put out like Banjo does."

"Yes," said Frances, "we let them go away from us too often that way,
with sore hearts that even a little word might ease."

She spoke with such wistful regret that the older woman felt its note
through her own deep gloom. She groped out, tears blinding her, until
her hand found her young friend's, and then she clasped it, and stood
holding it, no words between them.




CHAPTER XV

ONE ROAD


Twenty-four hours after Banjo's departure a messenger arrived at the
ranchhouse. It was one of the cowboys attached to the ranch, and he
came with his right arm in a sling. He was worn, and beaten out by
long hours in the saddle and the pain of his wound.

He said they had news of Nola, and that Chadron sent word that she
would be home before another night passed. This intelligence sent Mrs.
Chadron off to bedroom and kitchen to make preparations for her
reception and restoration.

As she left the room Frances turned to the messenger, who stood
swinging his big hat awkwardly by the brim. She untied the sling that
held his wounded arm and made him sit by the table while she examined
his injury, concerning which Mrs. Chadron, in her excitement, had not
even inquired.

The shot had gone through the forearm, grazing the bone. When Frances,
with the aid of Maggie, the Mexican woman with tender eyes, had
cleansed and bound up the wound, she turned to him with a decisive air
of demand.

"Now, tell me the truth," she said.

He was a bashful man, with a long, sheepish nose and the bluest of
harmless eyes. He started a little when she made that demand, and
blushed.

"That's what the boss told me to say," he demurred.

"I know he did; but what's happening?"

"Well, we ain't heard hide nor hair of her"--he looked round
cautiously, lest Mrs. Chadron surprise him in the truth--"and them
rustlers they're clean gone and took everything but their houses and
fences along--beds and teams and stock, and everything."

"Gone!" she repeated, staring at him blankly; "where have they gone?"

"Macdonald's doin' it; that man's got brainds," the cowboy yielded,
with what he knew to be unlawful admiration of the enemy's parts.
"He's herdin' 'em back in the hills where they've built a regular
fort, they say. Some of us fellers caught up to a few of the
stragglers last night, and that's when I got this arm put on me."

"Have any of the rustlers been killed?"

"No," he admitted, disgustedly, "they ain't! We've burnt all the
shacks we come to, and cut their fences, but they all got slick and
clean away, down to the littlest kid. But the boss's after 'em," he
added, with brisk hopefulness, "and you'll have better news by
mornin'."

Chadron himself was the next rider to arrive at that anxious house,
and he came as the messenger of disaster. He arrived between midnight
and morning, his horse spur-gashed, driven to the limit, himself
sunken-eyed from his anxiety and hard pursuit of his elusive enemy.

Mrs. Chadron was asleep when he entered the living-room where Frances
was keeping lonely watch before the chimney fire.

"What's happened?" she asked, hastening to meet him.

Chadron stood there gray and dusty, his big hat down hard on his head,
his black eyes shooting inquiry into the shadowed room.

"Where is she?" he whispered.

"Upstairs, asleep--I've only just been able to persuade her to lie
down and close her eyes."

"Well, there's no use to wake her up for bad news."

"You haven't found Nola?"

"I know right where she is. I could put my hand on her if I could
reach her."

"Then why--?"

"Hell!" said Chadron, bursting into a fire of passion, "why can't I
fly like an eagle? Young woman, I've got to tell you I've been beat
and tricked for the first time in my life! They've got my men hemmed
in, I tell you--they've got 'em shut up in a cañon as tight as if they
was nailed in their coffins!"

If Chadron had been clearer of sight and mind in that moment of his
towering anger, he would have seen her cheeks flush at his words, and
her nostrils dilate and her breath come faster. But he was blind; his
little varnish of delicacy was gone. He was just a ranting, roaring,
dark-visaged brute with murder in his heart.

"That damned Macdonald done it, led 'em into it like they was blind!
He's a wolf, and he's got the tricks of a wolf, he skulked ahead of
'em with a little pack of his rustlers and led 'em into his trap, then
the men he had hid there and ready they popped up as thick as grass.
They've got fifty of my men shut up there where they can't git to
water, and where they can't fight back. Now, what do you think of
that?"

"I'll tell you what I think," she said, throwing up her head, her eyes
as quick and bright as water in the sun, "I think it's the judgment of
God! I glory in the trick Alan Macdonald played you, and I pray God he
can shut your hired murderers there till the last red-handed devil
dies of thirst!"

Chadron fell back from her a step, his eyes staring, his mouth open,
his hand lifted as if to silence her. He stood so a moment, casting
his wild look around, fearful that somebody else had heard her
passionate denunciation.

"What in the hell do you mean?" he asked, crouching as he spoke, his
teeth clenched, his voice smothered in his throat.

"I mean that I know you're a murderer--and worse! You hired those men,
like you hired Mark Thorn, to come here and murder those innocent men
and their families!"

"Well, what if I did?" he said, standing straight again, his composure
returning. "They're thieves; they've been livin' off of my cattle for
years. Anybody's got a right to kill a rustler--that's the only cure.
Well, they'll not pen them men of mine up there till they crack for
water, I'll bet you a purty on that! I'm goin' after soldiers, and
this time I'll git 'em, too."

"Soldiers!" said she, in amazement. "Will you ask the United States
government to march troops here to save your hired assassins? Well,
you'll not get troops--if there's anything that I can say against you
to keep you from it!"

"You keep out of it, my little lady; you ain't got no call to mix up
with a bunch of brand-burnin' thieves!"

"They're not thieves, and you know it! Macdonald never stole an animal
from you or anybody else; none of the others ever did."

"What do you know about it?" sharply.

"I know it, as well as I know what's in your mind about the troops.
You'll go over father's head to get them. Well, by the time he wires
to the department the facts I'm going to lay before him, I'd like to
see the color of the trooper you'll get!"

"You'll keep your mouth shut, and hold your finger out of this pie
before you git it burnt!"

"I'll not keep my mouth shut!" She began moving about the room,
picking up her belongings. "I'm going to saddle my horse and go to the
post right now, and the facts of your bloody business will be in
Washington before morning."

"You're not goin'--to the--post!" Chadron's words were slow and hard.
He stood with his back to the door. "This house was opened to you as a
friend, not as a traitor and a spy. You're not goin' to put your foot
outside of it into any business of mine, no matter which way you
lean."

All day she had been dressed ready to mount and ride in any emergency,
her hat, gloves and quirt on the table before the fireplace. In that
sober habit she appeared smaller and less stately, and Saul Chadron,
with his heavy shoulders against the closed door, towered above her,
dark and angrily determined.

"I'm going to get my horse," said she, standing before him, waiting
for him to quit the door.

"You're goin' to stay right in this house, there's where you're goin'
to stay; and you'll stay till I've cleaned out Macdonald and his gang,
down to the last muddy-bellied wolf!"

"You'll answer for detaining me here, sir!"

"There ain't no man in this country that I answer to!" returned
Chadron, not without dignity, for power undisputed for so long, and in
such large affairs, had given him a certain manner of imperialism.

"You'll find out where your mistake is, to your bitter cost, before
many days have gone over your head. Your master is on the way; you'll
meet him yet."

"You might as well ca'm down, and take that hat off and make yourself
easy, Miss Frances; you ain't goin' to the post tonight."

"Open that door, Mr. Chadron! For the memory of your daughter, be a
man!"

"I'm actin' for the best, Miss Frances." Chadron softened in speech,
but unbent in will. "You must stay here till we settle them fellers. I
ain't got time to bring any more men up from Cheyenne--I've got to
have help within the next twenty-four hours. You can see how your
misplaced feelin's might muddle and delay me, and hold off the
troopers till they've killed off all of my men in that cañon back
yonder in the hills. It's for the best, I tell you; you'll see it that
way before daylight."

"It's a pity about your gallant cutthroats! It's time the rest of this
country knew something about the methods of you cattlemen up here, and
the way you harass and hound and murder honest men that are trying to
make homes!"

"Oh, Miss Frances! ca'm down, ca'm down!" coaxed Chadron, spreading
his hands in conciliatory gesture, as if to smooth her troubled
spirits, and calm her down by stroking her, like a cat.

"Now you want to call out the army to rescue that pack of villains,
you want to enlist the government to help you murder more children!
Well, I'm a daughter of the army; I'm not going to stand around and
see you pull it down to any such business as yours!"

"You'd better make up your mind to take it easy, now, Miss Frances.
Put down your hat and things, now, and run along off to bed like a
good little girl."

She turned from him with a disdainful toss of the head, and walked
across to the window where Mrs. Chadron's great chair stood beside her
table.

"Do you want it known that I was forced to leave your house by the
window?" she asked, her hand on the sash.

"It won't do you any good if you do," Chadron growled, turning and
throwing the door open with gruff decision. He stood a moment
glowering at her, his shoulders thrust into the room. "You can't leave
here till I'm ready for you to go--I'm goin' to put my men on the
watch for you. If you try it afoot they'll fetch you back, and if you
git stubborn and try to ride off from 'em, they'll shoot your horse.
You take my word that I mean it, and set down and be good."

He closed the door. She heard his heavy tread, careless, it seemed,
whether he broke the troubled sleep of his wife, pass out by way of
the kitchen. She returned to the fire, surging with the outrage of it,
and sat down to consider the situation.

There was no doubt that Chadron meant what he had said. This was only
a mild proceeding to suppress evidence compared to his usual methods,
as witnessed by the importation of Mark Thorn, and now his wholesale
attempt with this army of hired gunslingers. But above the anger and
indignation there was the exultant thought of Macdonald's triumph over
the oppressor of the land. It glowed like a bright light in the
turmoil of her present hour.

She had told Chadron that his master was on the way, and she had seen
him swell with the cloud of anger that shrouded his black heart. And
she knew that he feared that swift-footed man Macdonald, who had
outgeneraled him and crippled him before he had struck a blow. Well,
let him have his brutal way until morning; then she would prevail on
Mrs. Chadron to rescind his order and let her go home.

There being nothing more to be hoped or dreaded in the way of news
that night, Frances suppressed her wrath and went upstairs and to bed.
But not to sleep; only to lie there with her hot cheeks burning like
fever, her hot heart triumphing in the complete confidence and
justification of Macdonald that Chadron's desperate act had
established. She glowed with inner warmth as she told herself that
there would be no more doubting, no more swaying before the wind of
her inclination. Her heart had read him truly that night in the garden
close.

She heard Chadron ride away as she watched there for the dawn, and saw
the cowboy guard that he had established rouse themselves while the
east was only palely light and kindle their little fires. Soon the
scent of their coffee and bacon came through her open window. Then she
rose and dressed herself in her saddle garb again, and went tiptoeing
past Mrs. Chadron's door.

Since going to bed Mrs. Chadron bad not stirred. She seemed to have
plunged over the precipice of sleep and to be lying stunned at the
bottom. Frances felt that there was no necessity for waking her out of
that much-needed repose, for the plan that she had formulated within
the past few minutes did not include an appeal for Mrs. Chadron's
assistance in it.

Experience told her that Mrs. Chadron would accept unquestioningly the
arrangements and orders of her husband, in whom her faith was
boundless and her confidence without bottom. She would advance a
hundred tearful pleas to take the edge off Frances' indignant anger,
and weep and implore, but ten to one remain as steadfast as a ledge in
her fealty to Saul. So Frances was preparing to proceed without her
help or hindrance.

She went softly into the room where she had faced Chadron a few hours
before, and crossed to the fireplace, where the last coals of the fire
that had kept her company were red among the ashes. It was dark yet,
only a little grayness, like murky water, showing under the rim of the
east, but she knew where the antlers hung above the mantel, with the
rifle in its case, and the two revolvers which Alvino had brought to
his mistress from the wounded foreman in the bunkhouse.

But the antlers were empty. She felt them over with contracting heart,
then struck a match to make sure. The guns were gone. Saul Chadron had
removed them, foreseeing that they might stand her in the place of a
friend.

She lit a lamp and began a search of the lower part of the house for
arms. There was not a single piece left in any of the places where
they commonly were a familiar sight. Even the shotgun was gone from
over the kitchen door. She returned to the sitting-room and laid some
sticks on the coals, and sat leaning toward the blaze in that sense of
comradeship that is as old between man and fire as the servitude of
that captive element.

Her elbows were on her knees, and her gloved hands were clasped, and
the merry little fire laughed up into her fixed and thoughtful eyes.

Fire has but one mood, no matter what it cheers or destroys. It always
laughs. There is no melancholy note in it, no drab, dull color of
death such as the flood comes tainted with. Even while it eats away
our homes and possessions, it has a certain comfort in its touch and
glow if we stand far enough away.

Dawn broadened; the watery light came in like cold. Frances got up,
shivering a little at the unfriendly look of the morning. She thought
she heard a cautious foot stealing away from the window, and turned
from it with contemptuous recollection of Chadron's threat to set
spies over her.

Frances left the house with no caution to conceal her movements, and
went to the barn. Alvino was hobbling about among the horses with his
lantern. He gave her an open and guileless good-morning, and she told
him to saddle her horse.

She was determined to ride boldly out of the gate and away, hardly
convinced that even those seasoned ruffians would take a chance of
hitting her by firing at her horse. None of the imported shooters was
in sight as she mounted before the barn door, but two of them lounged
casually at the gate as she approached.

"Where was you aimin' to go so early?" asked one of them, laying hand
on her bridle.

"I'm the daughter of Colonel Landcraft, commanding officer at
Fort Shakie, and I'm going home," she answered, as placidly and
good-humoredly as if it might be his regular business to inquire.

"I'm sorry to have to edge in on your plans, sissy," the fellow
returned, familiarly, "but nobody goes away from this ranch for some
little time to come. That's the boss's orders. Don't you know them
rustlers is shootin' up the country ever' which way all around here?
Shucks! It ain't safe for no lady to go skylarkin' around in."

"They wouldn't hurt me--they know there's a regiment of cavalry at the
post standing up for me."

"I don't reckon them rustlers cares much more about them troopers than
we do, sis."

"Will you please open the gate?"

"I hate to refuse a lady, but I dasn't do it." He shook his head in
exaggerated gravity, and his companion covered a sputtering laugh with
his hand.

Frances felt her resolution to keep her temper dissolving. She shifted
her quirt as the quick desire to strike him down and ride over his
ugly grinning face flashed through her. But the wooden stock was light
under the braided leather; she knew that she could not have knocked a
grunt out of the tough rascal who barred her way with his insolent
leer in his mean squint eyes. He was a man who had nothing to lose,
therefore nothing to fear.

"If it's dangerous for me to go alone, get your horse and come with
me. I'll see that you get more out of it than you make working for
Chadron."

The fellow squinted up at her with eyes half-shut, in an expression of
cunning.

"Now you trot along back and behave you'self, before I have to take
you down and spank you," he said.

The other three men of the ranch guard came waddling up in that
slouching gait of saddle-men, cigarettes dangling from their lips.
Frances saw that she would not be allowed to pass that way. But they
were all at that spot; none of them could be watching the back gate.
She wheeled her long-legged cavalry horse to make a dash for it, and
came face to face with Mrs. Chadron, who was hurrying from the house
with excited gesticulations, pointing up the road.

"Somebody's comin', it looks like one of the boys, I saw him from the
upstairs winder!" she announced, "Where was you goin', honey?"

"I was starting home, Mrs. Chadron, but these men--"

"There he comes!" cried Mrs. Chadron, hastening to the gate.

A horseman had come around the last brush-screened turn of the road,
and was drawing near. Frances felt her heart leap like a hare, and a
delicious feeling of triumph mingle with the great pride that swept
through her in a warm flood. Tears were in her eyes, half-blinding
her; a sob of gladness rose in her breast and burst forth a little
happy cry.

For that was Alan Macdonald coming forward on his weary horse, bearing
something in his arms wrapped in a blanket, out of which a shower of
long hair fell in bright cascade over his arm.

Mrs. Chadron pressed her lips tight. Neither cry nor groan came out of
them as she stood steadying herself by a straining grip on the gate,
watching Macdonald's approach. None of them knew whether the burden
that he bore was living or dead; none of them in the group at the gate
but Frances knew the rider's face.

One of the cowboys opened the gate wide, without a word, to let him
enter. Mrs. Chadron lifted her arms appealingly, and hurried to his
side as he stopped. Stiffly he leaned over, his inert burden held
tenderly, and lowered what he bore into Mrs. Chadron's outstretched
arms.

With that change of position there was a sharp movement in the
muffling blanket, two arms reached up with the quick clutching of a
falling child, and clasped him about the neck. Then a sharp cry of
waking recognition, and Nola was sobbing on her mother's breast.

Alan Macdonald said no word. The light of the sunrise was strong on
his face, set in the suffering of great weariness; the stiffness of
his long and burdened ride was in his limbs. He turned his dusty
horse, with its head low-drooping, and rode out the way that he had
come. No hand was lifted to stop him, no voice raised in either
benediction or curse.

Mrs. Chadron was soothing her daughter, who was incoherent in the joy
of her delivery, holding her clasped in her arms. Beyond that bright
head there was no world for that mother then; save for the words which
she crooned in the child's ears there was no message in her soul.

Frances felt tears streaking her face in hot rivulets as she sat in
her saddle, struck inactive by the great admiration, the boundless
pride, that this unselfish deed woke in her. She never had, in her
life of joyousness, experienced such a high sense of human admiration
before.

The cowboy who had opened the gate still held it so, the spell of
Macdonald's dramatic arrival still over him. With his comrades he
stood speechless, gazing after the departing horseman.

Frances touched her horse lightly and rode after him. Mother and
daughter were so estranged from all the world in that happy moment of
reunion that neither saw her go, and the guards at the gate, either
forgetful of their charge or softened by the moving scene, did not
interpose to stop her.

Macdonald raised his drooping head with quick start as she came
dashing to his side. She was weeping, and she put out her hand with a
motion of entreaty, her voice thick with sobs.

"I wronged you and slandered you," she said, in bitter confession,
"and I let you go when I should have spoken! I'm not worthy to ride
along this road with you, Alan Macdonald, but I need your protection,
I need your help. Will you let me go?"

He checked his horse and looked across at her, a tender softening
coming into his tired face.

"Why, God bless you! there's only one road in the world for you and
me," said he. His hand met hers where it fluttered like a dove between
them; his slow, translating smile woke in his eyes and spread like a
sunbeam over his stern lips.

Behind them Mrs. Chadron was calling. Frances turned and waved her
hand.

"Come back, Frances, come back here!" Mrs. Chadron's words came
distinctly to them, for they were not more than a hundred yards from
the gate, and there was a note of eagerness in them, almost a command.
Both of them turned.

There was a commotion among the men at the gate, a hurrying and loud
words. Nola was beckoning to Frances to return; now she called her
name, with fearful entreaty.

"That's Chance Dalton with his arm in a sling," said Macdonald,
looking at her curiously. "What's up?"

"Chadron has made them all believe that you stole Nola for the sole
purpose of making a pretended rescue to win sympathy for your cause,"
she said. "Even Nola will believe it--maybe they've told her. Chadron
has offered a reward of fifty dollars--a bonus, he called it, so maybe
there is more--to the man that kills you! Come on--quick! I'll tell
you as we go."

Macdonald's horse was refreshed in some measure by the diminishing of
its burden, but the best that it could do was a tired, hard-jogging
gallop. In a little while they rounded the screen of brush which hid
them from the ranchhouse and from those who Frances knew would be
their pursuers in a moment. Quickly she told him of her reason for
wanting to go to the post, and Chadron's reason for desiring to hold
her at the ranch.

Macdonald looked at her with new life in his weary eyes.

"We'll win now; you were the one recruit I lacked," he said.

"But they'll kill you--Mrs. Chadron can't hold them back--she doesn't
want to hold them back--for she's full of Chadron's lies about you.
Your horse is worn out--you can't outrun them."

"How many are there besides the five I saw?"

"Only Dalton, and he's supposed to be crippled."

"Oh, well," he said, easily, as if only five whole men and a cripple
didn't amount to so much, taken all in the day's work.

"Your men up there need your leadership and advice. Take my horse and
go; he can outrun them."

He looked at her admiringly, but with a little reproving shake of the
head.

"There's neither mercy nor manhood in any man that rides in Saul
Chadron's pay," he told her. "They'd overtake you on this old plug
before you'd gone a mile. The one condition on which I part company
with you is that you ride ahead, this instant, and that you put your
horse through for all that's in him."

"And leave you to fight six of them!"

"Staying here would only put you in unnecessary danger. I ask you to
go, and go at once."

"I'll not go!" She said it finally and emphatically.

Macdonald checked his horse; she held back her animal to the slow pace
of his. Now he offered his hand, as in farewell.

"You can assure them at the post that we'll not fire on the
soldiers--they can come in peace. Good-bye."

"I'm not going!" she persisted.

"They'll not consider you, Frances--they'll not hold their fire on
your account. You're a rustler now, you're one of us."

"You said--there--was--only--one--road," she told him, her face turned
away.

"It's that way, then, to the left--up that dry bed of Horsethief
Cañon." He spoke with a lift of exultation, of pride, and more than
pride. "Ride low--they're coming!"




CHAPTER XVI

DANGER AND DIGNITY


"Did you carry her that way all the way home?"

Frances asked the question abruptly, like one throwing down some
troublesome and heavy thing that he has labored gallantly to conceal.
It was the first word that she had spoken since they had taken refuge
from their close-pressing pursuers in the dugout that some old-time
homesteader had been driven away from by Chadron's cowboys.

Macdonald was keeping his horse back from the door with the barrel of
his rifle, while he peered out cautiously again, perplexed to
understand the reason why Dalton had not led his men against them in a
charge.

"Not all the way, Frances. She rode behind me till she got so cold and
sleepy I was afraid she'd fall off."

"Yes, I'll bet she put on half of it!" she said, spitefully. "She
looked strong enough when you put her down there at the gate."

This unexpected little outburst of jealousy was pleasant to his ears.
Above the trouble of that morning, and of the future which was charged
with it to the blackness of complete obscuration, her warrant of
affection was like a lifting sunbeam of hope.

"I can't figure out what Dalton and that gang mean by this," said he,
the present danger again pressing ahead of the present joy.

"I saw a man dodge behind that big rock across there a minute ago,"
she said.

"You keep back away from that door--don't lean over out of that
corner!" he admonished, almost harshly. "If you get where you can see,
you can be seen. Don't forget that."

He resumed his watch at the little hole that he had drilled beside the
weight-bowed jamb of the door in the earth front of their refuge. She
sat silent in her dark corner across from him, only now and then
shaking her glove at the horses when one of them pricked up his ears
and shewed a desire to dodge out into the sunlight and pleasant
grazing spread on the hillside.

It was cold and moldy in the dugout, and the timbers across the roof
were bent under the weight of the earth. It looked unsafe, but there
was only one place in it that a bullet could come through, and that
was the open door. There was no way to shut that; the original battens
of the homesteader lay under foot, broken apart and rotting.

"Well, it beats me!" said he, his eye to the peephole in the wall.

"If I'd keep one of the horses on this side it wouldn't crowd your
corner so," she suggested.

"It would be better, only they'll cut loose at anything that passes
the door. They'll show their hand before long." He enlarged the hole
to admit his rifle barrel. She watched him in silence. Which was just
as well, for she had no words to express her admiration for his
steadiness and courage under the trying pressure of that situation.
Her confidence in him was so entire that she had no fear; it did not
admit a question of their safe deliverance. With him at her side, this
dangerous, grave matter seemed but a passing perplexity. She left it
to him with the confidence and up-looking trust of a child.

While she understood the peril of their situation, fear, doubt, had no
place in her mind. She was under the protection of Alan Macdonald, the
infallible.

No matter what others may think of a man's infallibility, it is only a
dangerous one who considers himself endowed with that more than human
attribute. Macdonald did not share her case of mind as he stood with
his eye to the squint-hole that he had bored beside the rotting jamb.

"How did you find her? where was she?" she asked, her thoughts more on
the marvel of Nola's return than her own present danger.

"I lost Thorn's trail that first day," he returned, "and then things
began to get so hot for us up the valley that I had to drop the search
and get those people back to safety ahead of Chadron's raid. Yesterday
afternoon we caught a man trying to get through our lines and down
into the valley. He was a half-breed trapper who lives up in the
foothills, carrying a note down to Chadron. I've got that curious
piece of writing around me somewhere--you can read it when this blows
by. Anyway, it was from Thorn, demanding ten thousand dollars in gold.
He wanted it sent back by the messenger, and he prescribed some
picturesque penalties in case of failure on Chadron's part."

"And then you found her?"

"I couldn't very well ask anybody else to go after her," he admitted,
with a modest reticence that amounted almost to being ashamed. "After
I made sure that we had Chadron's raiders cooped up where they
couldn't get out, I went up and got her. Thorn wasn't there, nobody
but the Indian woman, the 'breed's wife. She was the jailer--a regular
wildcat of a woman."

That was all there was to be told, it seemed, as far as Macdonald was
concerned. He had the hole in the wall--at which he had worked as he
talked--to his liking now, and was squinting through it like a
telescope.

"Nola wasn't afraid to come with you," she said, positively.

"She didn't appear to be, Frances."

"No; she _knew_ she was safe, no matter how little she deserved any
kindness at your hands. I know what she did--I know how she--how
she--_struck_ you in the face that time!"

"Oh," said he, as if reminded of a trifle that he had forgotten.

"Did she--put her arms around your neck that way _many_ times while
you were carrying her home?"

"She did _not_! Many times! why, she didn't do it even once."

"Oh, at the gate--I saw her!"

He said nothing for a little while, only stood with head bent, as if
thinking it over.

"Well, she didn't get very far with it," he said, quite seriously.
"Anyway, she was asleep then, and didn't know what she was doing. It
was just the subconscious reaching up of a falling, or dreaming,
child."

She was not a little amused, in a quick turn from her serious bent of
jealousy, at his long and careful explanation of the incident. She
laughed, and the little green cloud that had troubled her blew away on
the gale of her mirth.

"Oh, well!" said she, from her deep corner across the bright oblong of
the door, tossing it all away from her. "Do you think they'll go away
and let us come out after a while?"

"I don't believe they've got any such intention. If it doesn't come to
a fight before then, I believe we'll have to drive the horses out
ahead of us after dark, and try to get away under the confusion. You
should have gone on, Frances, when I told you."

The horses were growing restive, moving, stamping, snorting, and
becoming quarrelsome together. Macdonald's little range animal had a
viciousness in it, and would not make friends with the chestnut
cavalry horse. It squealed and bit, and even tried to use its heels,
at every friendly approach.

Macdonald feared that so much commotion might bring the shaky, rotten
roof down on them. A hoof driven against one of the timbers which
supported it might do the trick, and bring them to a worse end than
would the waiting bullets of Dalton and his gang.

"I'll have to risk putting that horse of yours over on your side," he
told her. "Stand ready to catch him, but don't lean a hair past the
door."

He turned the horse and gave it a slap. As it crossed the bar of light
falling through the door, a shot cracked among the rocks. The bullet
knocked earth over him as it smacked in the facing of the door. The
man who had fired had shot obliquely, there being no shelter directly
in front, and that fact had saved the horse.

Macdonald peered through his loophole. He could not see the smoke, but
he let them know that he was primed by answering the shot at random.
The shot drew a volley, a bullet or two striking the rear wall of the
cave.

After that they waited for what might come between then and night.
They said little, for each was straining with unpleasant thoughts and
anxieties, and put to constant watchfulness to keep the horses from
slewing around into the line of fire. Every time a tail switched out
into the streak of light a bullet came nipping in. Sometimes Macdonald
let them go unanswered, and again he would spring up and drive away at
the rocks which he knew sheltered them, almost driven to the point of
rushing out and trying to dislodge them by storm.

So the day wore by. They had been in the dugout since a little after
sunrise. Sunset was pale on the hilltops beyond them when Macdonald,
his strained and tired eyes to the loophole, saw Dalton and two of his
men slipping from rock to rock, drawing nearer for what he expected to
be the rush.

"Can you shoot?" he asked her, his mouth hot and dry as if his blood
had turned to liquid fire.

"Yes, I can shoot," she answered, steadily.

He tossed one of his revolvers across to her, dimly seen now in the
deepening gloom of the cave, and flung a handful of cartridges after
it.

"They're closing in on us for the rush, and I'm going to try to stop
them. Keep back there where you are, and hold your horse under cover
as long as you hear me shooting. If I stop first, call Dalton and tell
him who you are. I believe in that case he'll let you go."

"I'm going to help you," she said, rising resolutely. "When you--stop
shooting--" she choked a little over the words, her voice caught in a
dry little sob--"then I'll stop shooting, too!"

"Stay back there, Frances! Do you hear--stay back!"

Somebody was on the roof of the dugout; under his weight clods of
earth fell, and then, with a soft breaking of rotten timber, a booted
foot broke through. It was on Frances' side, and the fellow's foot
almost touched her saddle as her frightened horse plunged.

The man was tugging to drag his foot through the roof now, earth and
broken timber showering down. Macdonald only glanced over his
shoulder, as if leaving that trapped one to her. He was set for their
charge in front. She raised her revolver to fire as the other leg
broke through, and the fellow's body dropped into the enlarged hole.
At that moment the men in front fired a volley through the gaping
door. Frances saw the intruder drop to the ground, torn by the heavy
bullets from his companions' guns.

The place was full of smoke, and the turmoil of the frightened horses,
and the noise of quick shots from Macdonald's station across the door.
She could not make anything out in the confusion as she turned from
the dead man to face the door, only that Macdonald was not at his
place at the loophole now.

She called him, but her voice was nothing in the sound of firing. A
choking volume of smoke was packing the cave. She saw Macdonald's
horse lower its head and dash out, with a whip of its tail like a
defiance of her authority. Then in a moment everything was still out
there, with a fearful suddenness.

She flung herself into the cloud of smoke that hung in the door,
sobbing Macdonald's name; she stumbled into the fresh sweet air,
almost blind in her anxiety, and the confusion of that quickly enacted
scene, her head bent as if to run under the bullets which she
expected.

She did not see how it happened, she did not know that he was there;
but his arm was supporting her, his cool hand was on her forehead,
stroking her face as if he had plucked her drowning from the sea.

"Where are they?" she asked, only to exclaim, and shrink closer to him
at the sight of one lying a few rods away, in that sprawling limp
posture of those who fall by violence.

"There were only four of them--there the other two go." He pointed
down the little swale where the tall grass was still green.
Macdonald's horse had fallen to grazing there, his master's perils and
escapes all one to him now. It threw its head up and stood listening,
trotted a little way and stopped, ears stiff, nostrils stretched.

"There's somebody coming," she said.

"Yes--Chadron and a fresh gang, maybe."

He sprang to the dugout door, where Frances' horse stood with its head
out inquiringly.

"Jump up--quick!" he said, bringing the horse out. "Go this time,
Frances; don't hang back a second more!"

"Never mind, Alan," she said, from the other side of the horse, "it's
the cavalry--I guess they've come after me."

Major King was at the head of the detail of seven men which rode up,
horses a lather of sweat. He threw himself from the saddle and hurried
to Frances, his face full of the liveliest concern. Macdonald stepped
around to meet him.

"Thank heaven! you're not hurt," the major said.

"No, but we thought we were in for another fight," she told him,
offering him her hand in the gratefulness of her relief. He almost
snatched it in his eagerness, and drew her toward him, and stood
holding it in his haughty, proprietary way. "Mr. Macdonald--"

"The scoundrels heard us coming and ran--we got a glimpse of them down
there. Chadron will have to answer for this outrage!" the major said.

"Major King, this is Mr. Macdonald," said she, firmly, breaking down
the high manner in which the soldier persisted in overlooking and
eliminating the homesteader.

Major King's face flushed; he drew back a hasty step as Macdonald
offered his hand, in the frank and open manner of an equal man who
raised no thought nor question on that point.

"Sir, I've been hearing of the gallant _rescue_ that you made of
another young lady this morning," he said, with sneering emphasis.
"You are hardly the kind of a man I shake hands with!"

The troopers, sitting their blowing horses a rod away, made their
saddles creak as they shifted to see this little dash of melodrama.
Macdonald's face was swept by a sudden paleness, as if a sickness had
come over him. He clenched his lean jaw hard; the firmness of his
mouth was grimmer still as his hand dropped slowly to his side.
Frances looked her indignation and censure into Major King's hot
eyes.

"Mr. Macdonald has defended me like a gallant gentleman, sir! Those
ruffians didn't run because they heard you coming, but because he
faced them out here in the open, single-handed and alone, and drove
them to their horses, Major King!"

The troopers were looking Macdonald over with favor. They had seen the
evidence of his stand against Chadron's men.

"You're deceived in your estimation of the fellow, Miss Landcraft,"
the major returned, red to the eyes in his offended dignity. "I
arrived at the ranch not an hour ago, detailed to escort you back to
the post. Will you have the kindness to mount at once, please?"

He stepped forward to give her a hand into the saddle. But Macdonald
was before him in that office, urged to it by the quick message of her
eyes. From the saddle she leaned and gave him her warm, soft hand.

"Your men need you, Mr. Macdonald--go to them," she said. "My prayers
for your success in this fight for the right will follow you."

Macdonald was standing bareheaded at her stirrup. Her hand lingered a
moment in his, her eyes sounded the bottom of his soul. Major King,
with his little uprising of dignity, was a very small matter in the
homesteader's mind just then, although a minute past he had fought
with himself to keep from twisting the arrogant officer's neck.

She fell in beside Major King, who was sitting grim enough in his way
now, in the saddle, and they rode away. Macdonald stood, hat in hand,
the last sunbeams of that day over his fair tangled hair, the smoke of
his conflict on his face, the tender light of a man's most sacred fire
in his eyes.




CHAPTER XVII

BOOTS AND SADDLES


When Major King delivered Frances--his punctilious military observance
made her home-coming nothing less--to Colonel Landcraft, they found
that grizzled warrior in an electrical state of excitement. He was
moving in quick little charges, but with a certain grim system in all
of them, between desk and bookcases, letter files, cabinets, and back
to his desk again. He drew a document here, tucked one away there,
slipped an elastic about others assembled on his desk, and clapped a
sheaf of them in his pocket.

Major King saluted within the door.

"I have the honor to report the safe return of the detachment
dispatched to Alamito Ranch for the convoy of Miss Landcraft," he
said.

Colonel Landcraft returned the salute, and stood stiffly while his
officer spoke.

"Very well, sir," said he. Then flinging away his official stiffness,
he met Frances half-way as she ran to meet him, and enfolded her to
his breast, just as if his dry old heart knew that she had come to him
through perils.

Breathlessly she told him the story, leaving no word unsaid that would
mount to the credit of Alan Macdonald. Colonel Landcraft was as hot as
blazing straw over the matter. He swore that he would roast Saul
Chadron's heart on his sword, and snatched that implement from the
chair where it hung as he spoke, and buckled it on with trembling
hand.

King interposed to tell him that Chadron was not at the ranch, and
begged the colonel to delegate to him the office of avenger of this
insult and hazard that Frances had suffered at the hands of his men.
For a moment Colonel Landcraft held the young officer's eye with
thankful expression of admiration, then he drew himself up as if in
censure for wasted time, saluted, took a paper from his desk, and said
with grave dignity:

"It must fall to you, Major King, to demand the reparation for this
outrage that I shall not be here to enforce. I am ordered to
Washington, sir, to make my appearance before the retiring board. The
department has vested the command of this post in you, sir--here is
the order. My soldiering days are at an end."

He handed the paper to Major King, with a salute. With a salute the
young officer took it from his hand, an eager light in his eyes, a
flush springing to his pale face. Frances clung to her father's arm, a
little trembling moan on her lips as if she had received a mortal
hurt.

"Never mind, never mind, dear heart," said the old man, a shake in his
own voice. Frances, looking up with her great pity into his stern, set
face, saw a tear creeping down his cheek, toughened by the fires of
thirty years' campaigns.

"I'll never soldier any more," he said, "the politicians have got me.
They've been after me a long time, and they've got me. But there is
one easement in my disgrace--"

"Don't speak of it on those terms, sir!" implored Major King, more a
man than a soldier as he laid a consoling hand on the old man's arm.

"No, no!" said Frances, clinging to her father's hand.

Colonel Landcraft smiled, looking from one to the other of them, and a
softness came into his face. He took Major King's hand and carried it
to join Frances', and she, in her softness for her father, allowed it
to remain in the young soldier's grasp.

"There is one gleam of joy in the sundown of my life," the colonel
said, "and that is in seeing my daughter pledged to a soldier. I must
live in the reflection of your achievements, if I live beyond this
disgrace, sir."

"I will try to make them worthy of my mentor, sir," Major King
returned.

Frances stood with bowed head, the major still holding her hand in his
ardent grasp.

"It's a crushing blow, to come before the preferment in rank that I
have been led to expect would be my retiring compensation!" The
colonel turned from them sharply, as if in pain, and walked in
marching stride across the room. Frances withdrew her hand, with a
little struggle, not softened by the appeal in the major's eyes.

"My poor wife is bowed under it," the colonel spoke as he marched back
and forth. "She has hoped with me for some fitting reward for the
years of service I have unselfishly given to my country, sir, for the
surrender of my better self to the army. I'll never outlive it, I feel
that I'll never outlive it!"

Colonel Landcraft had no thought apart from what he felt to be his
hovering disgrace. He had forgotten his rage against Chadron,
forgotten that his daughter had lived through a day as hazardous as
any that he had experienced in the Apache campaigns, or in his bleak
watches against the Sioux. He turned to her now, where she stood
weeping softly with bowed head, the grime of the dugout on her habit,
her hair, its bonds broken, straying over her face.

"I had counted pleasurably on seeing you two married," he said, "but
something tells me I shall never come back from this journey, never
resume command of this post." He turned back to his marching, stopped
three or four paces along, turned sharply, a new light in his face.
"Why shouldn't it be before I leave--tonight, within the hour?"

"Oh, father!" said Frances, in terrified voice, lifting her face in
its tear-wet loveliness.

"I must make the train that leaves Meander at four o'clock tomorrow
morning, I shall have to leave here within--" he flashed out his watch
with his quick, nervous hand--"within three-quarters of an hour. What
do you say, Major King? Are you ready?"

"I have been ready at any time for two years," Major King replied, in
trembling eagerness.

Frances was thrown into such a mental turmoil by the sudden proposal
that she could not, at that moment, speak a further protest. She stood
with white face, her heart seeming to shrivel, and fall away to
laboring faintness. Colonel Landcraft was not considering her. He was
thinking that he must have three hours' sleep in the hotel at Meander
before the train left for Omaha.

"Then we shall have the wedding at once, just as you stand!" he
declared. "We'll have the chaplain in and--go and tell your mother,
child, and--oh, well, throw on another dress if you like."

Frances found her tongue as her danger of being married off in that
hot and hasty manner grew imminent.

"I'm not going to marry Major King, father, now or at any future
time," said she, speaking slowly, her words coming with coldness from
her lips.

"Silence! you have nothing to say, nothing to do but obey!" Colonel
Landcraft blazed up in sudden explosion, after his manner, and set his
heel down hard on the floor, making his sword clank in its scabbard on
his thigh.

"I have not had much to say," Frances admitted, bitterly, "but I am
going to have a great deal to say in this matter now. Both of you have
gone ahead about this thing just as if I was irresponsible, both of
you--"

"Hold your tongue, miss! I command you--hold your tongue!"

"It's the farthest thing from my heart to give you pain, or disappoint
you in your calculations of me, father," she told him, her voice
gathering power, her words speed, for she was a warrior like himself,
only that her balance was not so easily overthrown; "but I am not
going to marry Major King."

"Heaven and hell!" said Colonel Landcraft, stamping up and down.

"Heaven _or_ hell," said she, "and not hell--if I can escape it."

"I'll not permit this insubordination in a member of my family!"
roared the colonel, his face fiery, his rumpled eyebrows knitted in a
scowl. "I'll have obedience, with good grace, and at once, or damn my
soul, you'll leave my house!"

"Major King, if you are a gentleman, sir, you will relieve me of this
unwelcome pressure to force me against my inclination. It is quite
useless, sir, I tell you most earnestly. I would rather die than marry
you--I would rather die!"

"Sir, I have no wish to coerce the lady"--Major King's voice shook,
his words were low--"as she seems to have no preference for me, sir.
Miss Landcraft perhaps has placed her heart somewhere else."

"She has no right to act with such treachery to me and you, sir," the
colonel said. "I'll not have it! Where else, sir--who?"

"Spare me the humiliation of informing you," begged Major King, with
averted face, with sorrow in his voice.

"Oh, you slanderous coward!" Frances assailed him with scorn of word
and look. Colonel Landcraft was shaking a trembling finger at her, his
face thrust within a foot of her own.

"I'll not have it! you'll not--who is the fellow, who?"

"There is nothing to conceal, there is no humiliation on my part in
speaking his name, but pride--the highest pride of my heart!"

She stood back from them a little, her lofty head thrown back, her
face full of color now, the strength of defense of the man she loved
in her brave brown eyes.

"Some low poltroon, some sneaking civilian--"

"He is a man, father--you have granted that. His name is--"

"Stop!" thundered the colonel. "Heaven and hell! Will you disgrace me
by making public confession of your shame? Leave this room, before you
drive me to send you from it with a curse!"

In her room Frances heard the horses come to the door to carry her
father away. She had sat there, trembling and hot, sorry for his
foolish rage, hurt by his narrow injustice. Yet she had no bitterness
in her heart against him, for she believed that she knew him best.
When his passion had fallen he would come to her, lofty still, but
ashamed, and they would put it behind them, as they had put other
differences in the past.

Her mother had gone to him to share the last moments of his presence
there, and to intercede for her. Now Frances listened, her hot cheek
in her hand, her eyes burning, her heart surging in fevered stroke.
There was a good deal of coming and going before the house; men came
up and dismounted, others rode away. Watching, her face against the
cool pane, she did not see her father leave. Yet he had not come to
her, and the time for his going was past.

Her heart was sore and troubled at the thought that perhaps he had
gone without the word of pacification between them. It was almost
terrifying to her to think of that. She ran down the stairs and stood
listening at his closed door.

That was not his voice, that heavy growl, that animal note. Saul
Chadron's; no other. Her mother came in through the front door,
weeping, and clasped Frances in her arms as she stood there, shadowy
in the light of the dim hall lamp.

"He is gone!" she said.

Frances did not speak. But for the first time in her life a feeling of
bitterness against her father for his hardness of heart and unbending
way of injustice lifted itself in her breast. She led her mother to
her own room, giving her such comfort as she could put into words.

"He said he never marched out to sure defeat before," Mrs. Landcraft
told her. "I've seen him go many a time, Frances, but never with such
a pain in my heart as tonight!"

And Saul Chadron was the man who had caused his going, Frances knew, a
new illumination having come over the situation since hearing his
voice in the colonel's office a few minutes past. Chadron had been at
Meander, telegraphing to the cattlemen's servants in Washington all
the time. He had demanded the colonel's recall, and the substitution
of Major King, because he wanted a man in authority at the post whom
he could use.

This favoritism of Chadron made her distrustful at once of Major King.
There must be some scheming and plotting afoot. She went down and
stood in the hall again, not even above bending to listen at the
keyhole. Chadron was talking again. She felt that he must have been
talking all the time that she had been away. It must be an unworthy
cause that needed so much pleading, she thought.

"Well, he'll not shoot, I tell you, King; he's too smart for that.
He'll have to be trapped into it. If you've got to have an excuse to
fire on them--and I can't see where it comes in, King, damn my neck if
I can--we've got to set a trap."

"Leave that to me," returned Major King, coldly.

"How much force are you authorized to use?"

"The order leaves that detail to me. 'Sufficient force to restore
order,' it says."

"I think you ort to take a troop, at the least, King, and a
cannon--maybe two."

"I don't think artillery will be necessary, sir."

"Well, I'll leave it to you, King, but I'd hate like hell to take you
up there and have that feller lick you. You don't know him like I do.
I tell you he'd lay on his back and fight like a catamount as long as
he had a breath left in him."

"Can you locate them in the night?"

"I think we'd have to wait up there somewheres for daybreak. I'm not
just sure which cañon they are in."

There was silence. Frances peeped through the keyhole, but could see
nothing except thick smoke over bookcases and files.

"Well, we'll not want to dislodge them before daylight, anyway," said
King.

"If Macdonald can back off without a fight, he'll do it," Chadron
declared, "for he knows as well as you and I what it'd mean to fire on
the troops. And I want you to git him, King, and make sure you've got
him."

"It depends largely on whether the fellow can be provoked into firing
on us, Chadron. You think he can be; so do I. But in case he doesn't,
the best we can do will be to arrest him."

"What good would he be to me arrested, King? I tell you I want his
scalp, and if you bring that feller out of there in a sack you'll come
back a brigadier. I put you where you're at. Well, I can put you
higher just as easy. But the purty I want for my trouble is that
feller's scalp."

There was the sound of somebody walking about, in quick, nervous
strides. Frances knew that Major King had got up from his usurped
place at the desk--place unworthily filled, this low intrigue with
Chadron aside, she knew--and was strutting in the shadow of his
promised glory.

"Leave it to me, Chadron; I've got my own account to square with that
wolf of the range!"

A sharp little silence, in which Frances could picture Chadron looking
at King in his covert, man-weighing way. Then Chadron went on:

"King, I've noticed now and then that you seemed to have a soft spot
in your gizzard for that little girl of mine. Well, I'll throw her in
to boot if you put this thing through right. Is it a go?"

"I'd hesitate to bargain for the young lady without her being a party
to the business," King replied, whether from wisdom born of his recent
experience, or through lack of interest in the proposal Frances could
not read in his even, well-pitched voice.

"Oh, she'd jump at you like a bullfrog at red flannel," Chadron
assured him. "I could put your uniform on a wooden man and marry him
off to the best girl in seven states. They never think of lookin'
under a soldier's vest."

"You flatter me, Mr. Chadron, and the uniform of the United States
army," returned King, with barely covered contempt. "Suppose we allow
events to shape themselves in regard to Miss Chadron. She'll hardly be
entertaining marriage notions yet--after her recent experience."

Chadron got up so quickly he overturned his chair.

"By God, sir! do you mean to intimate you wouldn't have her after what
she's gone through? Well, I'll put a bullet through any man that
says--"

"Oh, hold yourself in, Chadron; there's no call for this."

King's cold contempt would have been like a lash to a man of finer
sensibilities than Saul Chadron. As it was, Frances could hear the
heavy cattleman breathing like a mad bull.

"When you talk about my little girl, King, go as easy as if you was
carryin' quicksilver in a dish. You told me she was all right a little
while ago, and I tell you I don't like--"

"Miss Chadron was as bright as a redbird when I saw her this
afternoon," King assured him, calmly. "She has suffered no harm at the
hands of Macdonald and his outlaws."

"He'll dance in hell for that trick before the sun goes down on
another day!"

"His big play for sympathy fell flat," said King, with a contemptuous
laugh. "There wasn't much of a crowd on hand when he arrived at the
ranch."

Silence. A little shifting of feet, a growl from Chadron, and a
curse.

"But as for your proposal involving Miss Chadron, I am honored by it,"
said King.

"Any man would be!" Chadron declared.

"And we will just let it stand, waiting the lady's sanction."

That brightened Chadron up. He moved about, and there was a sound as
if he had slapped the young officer on the back in pure comradeship
and open admiration.

"What's your scheme for drawin' that feller into firin' on your men?"
he asked.

"We'll talk it over as we go," said King.

A bugle lifted its sharp, electrifying note in the barracks.

"Boots and saddles!" Chadron said.

"Yes; we march at nine o'clock."




CHAPTER XVIII

THE TRAIL OF THE COFFEE


"You done right to come to the mission after me, for I'd ride to the
gatepost of hell to turn a trick agin Saul Chadron!"

Banjo's voice had a quaver of earnestness in it that needed no
daylight to enforce. The pitchy night made a bobbing blur of him as he
rode his quick-stepping little horse at Frances Landcraft's side.

"Yes, you owe him one," Frances admitted.

"And I'll pay him before mornin' or it won't be no fault of mine. That
there little ten-cent-size major he'd 'a' stopped you if he'd 'a'
known you was goin', don't you suppose?"

"I'm sure he would have, Mr. Gibson."

"Which?" said Banjo.

"Banjo," she corrected.

"Now, that sounds more comfortabler," he told her. "I didn't know for
a minute who you meant, that name's gittin' to be a stranger to me."

"Well, we don't want a stranger along tonight," said she, seriously.

"You're right, we don't. That there horse you're ridin' he's a good
one, as good as any in the cavalry, even if he ain't as tall. He was
an outlaw till Missus Mathews tamed him down."

"How did she do it--not break him like a bronco-buster?"

"No, she done it like she tames Injuns and other folks, by gentle
words and gentler hands. Some they'll tell you she's sunk down to the
ways of Injuns, clean out of a white man's sight in the dirt and
doin's of them dead-horse eatin' 'Rapahoes. But I know she ain't. She
lets herself down on a level to reach 'em, and git her hands under 'em
so she can lift 'em up, the same as she puts herself on my level when
she wants to reach me, or your level, or anybody's level, mom."

"Her eyes and her soft ways tell you that, Banjo, as plain as any
words."

"She's done ten times as much as that big-backed buffalo of a preacher
she's married to ever done for his own people, or ever will. He's clim
above 'em with his educated ways; the Injun's ironed out of that man.
You can't reach down and help anybody up, mom, if you go along through
this here world on stilts."

"Not very well, Banjo."

"You need both of your hands to hold your stilts, mom; you ain't got
even a finger to spare for a low-down feller like me."

"You're not a low-down fellow, Banjo. Don't be calling yourself
names."

"I was low-down enough to believe what they told me about Macdonald
shootin' up Chance Dalton. I believed it till Missus Mathews give me
the straight of it. One of them Injun police fellers told her how that
job was put up, and how it failed to work."

"A man named Lassiter told me about it."

They rode along in silence a long time after that. Then Banjo--

"Well, I hope we don't bust out onto them cavalry fellers too sudden
and meet a flock of bullets. I'd never forgive the man that put a
bullet through my fiddle."

"We'll go slowly, and keep listening; I can tell cavalry from cowboys
as far as I can hear."

"I bet a purty you can, brought up with 'em like you was."

"They'll not be able to do anything before daylight, and when we
overtake them we'll ride around and get ahead while they're waiting
for morning. I don't know where the homesteaders are, but they'll be
sending out scouts to locate them, and we can watch."

They were following the road that the cavalry had taken an hour in
advance of them. Listening now, they rode on without words. Now and
then a bush at the roadside flipped a stirrup, now and again Banjo's
little horse snorted in short impatience, as if expressing its
disapproval of this journey through the dark. Night was assertive in
its heaviness, but communicative of its mysteries in its wild
scents--the silent music of its hour.

There are those who, on walking in the night, can tell the hour by the
smell, the taste, the elusive fine aroma of the quiet air. Before
midnight it is like a new-lit censer; in the small hours the smell of
old camp fires comes trailing, and the scent of rain upon embers.

But Frances Landcraft was not afraid of the night as she rode silently
through it with Banjo Gibson at her side. There was no shudder in it
for her as there had been on the night that Nola was stolen; it could
not have raised up a terror grim enough to turn her back upon the
road.

Her one thought was that she must reach Macdonald before Chadron and
King could find him, and tell him that the troops were coming, and
that he was to be trapped into firing upon them. She knew that many
lives depended upon her endurance, courage, and strategy; many lives,
but most of all Alan Macdonald's life. He must be warned, at the cost
of her own safety, her own life, if necessary.

To that end the troops must be followed, and a desperate dash at
daylight must be made into Macdonald's camp. Perhaps it would be a
race with the cavalry at the last moment.

Banjo said it was beginning to feel like morning. An hour past they
had crossed the river at the ford near Macdonald's place, and the
foothills stood rough and black against the starry horizon. They were
near them now, so near that the deeper darkness of their timbered
sides fell over them like a cold shadow.

Suddenly she checked Banjo with a sharp word.

"I heard them!" she whispered.

Banjo's little horse, eager for the fellowship of its kind as his
master was for his own in his way, threw up its head and whinnied.
Banjo churned it with his heels, slapped it on the side of the head,
and shut off the shrill call in a grunt, but the signal had gone
abroad. From the blackness ahead it was answered, and the slow wind
prowling down from the hills ahead of dawn carried the scent of
cigarettes to them as they waited breathlessly for results.

"They're dismounted, and waiting for daylight," she said. "We must
ride around them."

They were leaving the road, the low brush rasping harshly on their
stirrups--as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances--when a dash
of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate.
Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to
know what they should do.

"Keep that little fool horse still!" she said.

Now the patrol, which had stopped to hail, was coming on again.
Banjo's horse was not to be sequestered, nor his craving for
companionship in that lonesome night suppressed. He lifted his shrill
nicker again, and a shot from the outriders of cavalry was the
answer.

"Answer them, tell them who you are Banjo--they all know you--and I'll
slip away. Good-bye, and thank you for your brave help!"

"I'll go with you, they'll hear one as much as they'll hear two."

"No, no, you can help me much better by doing as I tell you. Tell them
that a led horse got away from you, and that's the noise of it running
away."

She waited for no more words, for the patrol was very near, and now
and then one of them fired as he rode. Banjo yelled to them.

"Say, you fellers! Stop that fool shootin' around here, I tell you!"

"Who are you?" came the answer.

"Banjo, you darned fool! And I tell you right now, pardner, the first
man that busts my fiddle with a bullet'll have to mix with me!"

The soldiers came up laughing, and heard Banjo's explanation of the
horse, still dimly heard, galloping off. Frances stopped to listen.
Presently she heard them coming on again, evidently not entirely
satisfied with Banjo's story. But the parley with him had delayed
them; she had a good lead now.

In a little swale, where the greasewood reached above her head, she
stopped again to listen. She heard the troopers beating the bushes
away off to one side, and knew that they soon would give it up. When
they passed out of her hearing, she rode on, slowly, and with
caution.

She was frontiersman enough to keep her direction by the north
star--Colonel Landcraft had seen to that particular of her education
himself--but Polaris would not tell her which way to go to find Alan
Macdonald and his dusty men standing their vigil over their cooped-up
enemies. Nothing but luck, she knew, could lead her there, for she was
in a sea of sage-brush, with the black river valley behind her, the
blacker hills ahead, and never a mark of a trail to follow anywhere.

She had rounded the cavalry troop and left it far behind; the silence
which immersed the sleeping land told her this. No hoof but her own
mount's beat the earth within sound, no foot but hers strained
saddle-leather within reach of her now, she believed.

There was only one thing to do; ride slowly in the direction that she
had been holding with Banjo, and keep eyes, ears, and nose all on the
watch. The ways of the range were early; if there was anybody within a
mile of her to windward she would smell the smoke of his fire when he
lit it, and see the wink of it, too, unless he built it low.

But it was neither the scent of fire nor the red eye of it winking on
the hill that at length gave her despairing heart a fresh handful of
hope--nothing less indeed than the aroma of boiling coffee. It had
such a feeling of comfort and welcome, of domesticity and peace in it
that she felt as if she approached a door with a friend standing ready
to take her horse.

Her horse was not insensible to the cheer that somebody was brewing
for himself in that wild place. She felt him quicken under her, and
put up his head eagerly, and go forward as if he was nearing home. She
wondered how far the smell of coffee would carry, and subsequent
experience was a revelation on that point.

She had entered the hills, tracking back that wavering scent of
coffee, which rose fresh and sudden now, and trailed away the next
moment to the mere color of a smell. Now she had it, now she lost it,
as she wound over rugged ridges and through groves of quaking-asp and
balm of Gilead trees, always mounting among the hills, her eager horse
taking the way without guidance, as keen on the scent as she.

It must have taken her an hour to run down that coffee pot. Morning
was coming among the fading stars when she mounted a long ridge, the
quick striding of her horse indicating that there was something ahead
at last, and came upon the camp fire, the coffee, and the cook, all
beside a splintered gray rock that rose as high as a house out of the
barrenness of the hill.

The coffee-maker was a woman, and her pot was of several gallons'
capacity. She was standing with the cover of the boiler in one hand, a
great spoon in the other, her back half bent over her beverage, in the
position that the sound of Frances' coming had struck her. She did not
move out of that alert pose of suspicion until Frances drew rein
within a few feet of her and gave her good-morning. When the poor
harried creature saw that the visitor was a woman, her fright gave
place to wonder.

Frances introduced herself without parley, and made inquiry for
Macdonald.

"Why, bless your heart, you don't aim to tell me you rode all the way
from the post in the night by yourself?" the simple, friendly creature
said. "Well, Mr. Macdonald and most of the men they've left to take
them scoun'rels sent in here by the cattlemen to murder all of us over
to the jail at Meander."

"How long have they been gone?"

"Why, not so very long. I reckon you must 'a' missed meetin' 'em by a
hair."

"I've got to catch up with them, right away! Is there anybody here
that can guide me?"

"My son can, and he'll be glad. He's just went to sleep back there in
the tent after guardin' them fellers all night. I'll roust him out."

The pioneer woman came back almost at once, and pressed a cup of her
coffee upon Frances. Frances took the tin vessel eagerly, for she was
chilled from her long ride. Then she dismounted to rest her horse
while her guide was getting ready, and warm her numb feet at the fire.
She told the woman how the scent of her coffee had led her out of her
groping like a beacon light on the hill.

"It's about three miles from here down to the valley," the woman said.
"Coffee will carry on the mornin' air that way."

"Do you think your son--?"

"He's a-comin'," the woman replied.

The boy came around the rock, leading a horse. He was wide awake and
alert, bare-footed, bareheaded, and without a coat. He leaped nimbly
onto his bare-backed beast, and Frances got into her saddle as fast as
her numb limbs would lift her.

As she road away after the recklessly riding youth, she felt the hope
that she had warmed in her bosom all night paling to a shadow. It
seemed that, circumstances were ranging after a chart marked out for
them, and that her own earnest effort to interfere could not turn
aside the tragedy set for the gray valley below her.

Morning was broadening now; she could see her guide distinctly even
when he rode many rods ahead. Dawn was the hour for treacherous men
and deeds of stealth; Chadron would be on the way again before now,
with the strength of the United States behind him to uphold his
outlawed hand.

When they came down into the valley there was a low-spreading mist
over the gray sage, which lent a warmth to the raw morning wind. There
was a sense of indistinctness through the mist which was an ally to
Chadron. Ten rods away, even in the growing morning, it would have
been impossible to tell a cowboy from a cavalryman.

Here a haystack smoldered in what had been a farmstead yard; its thin
blue smoke wavered up in the morning, incense over the dead hope of
the humble heart that had dreamed it had found a refuge in that spot.
At the roadside a little farther on the burned ruins of a cabin lay.
It had stood so near the wheel track that the heat of its embers was
warm on Frances' face as she galloped by. The wire fence was cut
between each post, beyond splicing or repair; the shrubs which some
home-hungry woman had set in her dooryard were trampled; the well curb
was overthrown.

Over and over again as they rode that sad picture was repeated.
Destruction had swept the country, war had visited it. Side by side
upon the adjoining lines many of the homesteaders had built their
little houses, for the comfort of being near their kind. In the corner
of each quarter section on either side of the road along the fertile
valley, a little home had stood three days ago. Now all were gone,
marked only by little heaps of embers which twinkled a dying glow in
the breath of the morning wind.

Day was spreading now. From the little swells in the land as she
mounted them Frances could see the deeper mist hovering in the low
places, the tops of tall shrubs and slender quaking-asp showing above
it as if they stood in snow. The band of sunrise was broadening across
the east; far down near the horizon a little slip of lemon-rind moon
was faltering out of sight.

But there was no sight, no sound, of anybody in the road ahead. She
spurred up beside her guide and asked him if there was any other way
that they might have taken. No, he said; they would have to go that
way, for there was only one fordable place in the river for many
miles. He pointed to the road, fresh-turned by many hoofs, and clamped
his lean thighs to his bare horse, galloping on.

"We'll take a cut acrosst here, and maybe head 'em off," he said,
dashing away through the stirrup-high sage, striking close to the
hills again, and into rougher going.

The ache of the most intense anxiety that she ever had borne was upon
Frances; hope was only a shred in her hand. She believed now that all
her desperate riding must come to nothing in the end.

She never had been that long in the saddle before in her life. Her
body was numb with cold and fatigue; she felt the motion of her horse,
heard its pounding feet in regular beat as it held to its long,
swinging gallop, but with the detached sense of being no party to it.
All that was sharp in her was the pain of her lost struggle. For she
expected every moment to hear firing, and to come upon confusion and
death at the next lift of the hill.

In their short cut across the country they had mounted the top of a
long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger.
Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on
stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale.

"You'd better go back--there's goin' to be a fight!" he said, a look
of shocked concern in his big wild eyes.

"Do you see them? Where--"

"There they are!"--he clutched her arm, leaning and pointing--"and
there's a bunch of fellers comin' to meet 'em that they don't see! I
tell you there's goin' to be a fight!"




CHAPTER XIX

"I BEAT HIM TO IT"


The last dash of that long ride was only a whirlwind of emotions to
Frances. It was a red streak. She did not know what became of the boy;
she left him there as she lashed her horse past him on the last
desperate stretch.

The two forces were not more than half a mile apart, the cavalry just
mounting at the ruins of a homestead where she knew they had stopped
for breakfast at the well. A little band of outriders was setting off,
a scouting party under the lead of Chadron, she believed. Macdonald's
men, their prisoners under guard between two long-strung lines of
horsemen, were proceeding at a trot. Between the two forces the road
made a long curve. Here it was bordered by brushwood that would hide a
man on horseback.

When Frances broke through this screen which had hidden the cavalry
from Macdonald, she found the cavalcade halted, for Macdonald had seen
her coming down the hill. She told him in few words what her errand to
him was, Tom Lassiter and those who rode with him at the head of the
column pressing around.

The question and mystification in Macdonald's face at her coming
cleared with her brisk words. There was no wonder to him any more in
her being there. It was like her to come, winging through the night
straight to him, like a dove with a message. If it had been another
woman to take up that brave and hardy task, then there would have been
marvel in it. As it was, he held out his hand to her, silently, like
one man to another in a pass where words alone would be weak and
lame.

"I was looking for Chadron to come with help and attempt a rescue, and
I was moving to forestall him, but we were late getting under way.
They"--waving his hand toward the prisoners--"held out until an hour
ago."

"You must think, and think fast!" she said. "They're almost here!"

"Yes. I'm going ahead to meet them, and offer to turn these prisoners
over to Major King. They'll have no excuse for firing on us then."

"No, no! some other way--think of some other way!"

He looked gravely into her anxious, pleading eyes. "Why, no matter,
Frances. If they've come here to do that, they'll do it, but this way
they'll have to do it in the open, not by a trick."

"I'll go with you," she said.

"I think perhaps--"

"I'll go!"

Macdonald turned to Lassiter in a few hurried words. She pressed to
his side as the two rode away alone to meet the troops, repeating as
if she had been denied:

"I'll go!"

There was a dash of hoofs behind them, and a man who rode like a sack
of bran came bouncing up, excitement over his large face.

"What's up, Macdonald--where're you off to?" he inquired.

Macdonald told him in a word, riding forward as he spoke. He
introduced the stranger as a newspaper correspondent from Chicago, who
had arrived at the homesteaders' camp the evening past.

"So they got troops, did they?" the newspaper man said, riding forward
keenly. "Yes, they told me down in Cheyenne they'd put that trick
through. Here they come!"

Macdonald spurred ahead, holding up his right hand in the Indian sign
of peace. Major King was riding with Chadron at the head of the
vanguard. They drew rein suddenly at sight of what appeared to be such
a formidable force at Macdonald's back, for at that distance, and with
the dimness of the scattering mist, it appeared as if several hundred
horsemen were approaching.

Distrustful of Chadron, fearing that he might induce Major King to
shoot Macdonald down as he sat there making overtures of peace,
Frances rode forward and joined him, the correspondent coming jolting
after her in his horn-riding way. After a brief parley among
themselves Chadron and King, together with three or four officers,
rode forward. One remained behind, and halted the column as it came
around the brushwood screen at the turn of the road.

Major King greeted Frances as he rode up, scowling in high dignity.
Chadron could not cover his surprise so well as Major King at seeing
her there, her horse in a sweat, her habit torn where the brambles had
snatched at her in her hard ride to get ahead of the troops. He gave
her a cold good-morning, and sat in the attitude of a man pricking up
his ears as he leaned a little to peer into the ranks of the force
ahead.

The homesteaders had come to a halt a hundred yards behind Macdonald;
about the same distance behind Major King and his officers the cavalry
had drawn up across the road. Major King sat in brief silence, as if
waiting for Macdonald to begin. He looked the homesteader captain over
with severe eyes.

"Well, sir?" said he.

"We were starting for Meander, Major King, to deliver to the sheriff
fifty men whom we have taken in the commission of murder and arson,"
Macdonald replied, with dignity. "Up to a few minutes ago we had no
information that martial law had superseded the civil in this troubled
country, but since that is the case, we will gladly turn our prisoners
over to you, with the earnest request that they be held, collectively
and individually, to answer for the crimes they have committed here."

"Them's my men, King--they've got 'em there!" said Chadron, boiling
over the brim.

"This expedition has come to the relief of certain men, attacked and
surrounded in the discharge of their duty by a band of cattle thieves
of which you are the acknowledged head," replied Major King.

"Then you have come on a mistaken errand, sir," Macdonald told him.

"I have come into this lawless country to restore order and insure the
lives and safety of property of the people to whom it belongs."

"The evidence of these hired raiders' crimes lies all around you,
Major King," Macdonald said. "These men swept in here in the employ of
the cattle interests, burned these poor homes, and murdered such of
the inhabitants as were unable to fly to safety in the hills ahead of
them. We are appealing to the law; the cattlemen never have done
that."

"Say, Mr. Soldier, let me tell you something"--the newspaper
correspondent, to whom one man's dignity was as much as another's,
kicked his horse forward--"these raiders that bloody-handed Chadron
sent in here have murdered children and women, do you know that?"

"Who in the hell are you?" Chadron demanded, bristling with rage,
whirling his horse to face him.

"This is Chadron," Macdonald said, a little flash of humor in his eyes
over Chadron's hearing the truth about himself from an unexpected
source.

"Well, I'm glad I've run into you, Chadron; I've got a little list of
questions to ask you," the correspondent told him, far from being
either impressed or cowed. "Neel is my name, of the _Chicago Tribune_,
I've--"

"You'd just as well keep your questions for another day--you'll send
nothing out of here!" said Major King, sharply.

Neel looked across his nose at King with triumphant leer.

"I've sent out something, Mr. Soldier-man," said he; "it was on the
wire by midnight last night, rushed to Meander by courier, and it's
all over the country this morning. It's a story that'll give the other
side of this situation up here to the war department, and it'll make
this whole nation climb up on its hind legs and howl. Murder? Huh,
murder's no name for it!"

Chadron was growling something below his breath into King's ear.

"Forty-three men and boys--look at them, there they are--rounded up
fifty of the cutthroats the Drovers' Association rushed up here from
Cheyenne on a special train to wipe the homesteaders out," Neel
continued, rising to considerable heat in the partisanship of his new
light. "Five dollars a day was the hire of that gang, and five dollars
bonus for every man, woman, or baby that they killed! Yes, I've got
signed statements from them, Chadron, and I'd like to know what you've
got to say, if anything?"

"Disarm that rabble," said Major King, speaking to a subordinate
officer, "and take charge of the men they have been holding."

"Sir, I protest--" Macdonald began.

"I have no words to waste on you!" Major King cut him off shortly.

"I'd play a slow hand on that line, King, and a careful one, if I were
you," advised Neel. "If you take these men's guns away from them
they'll be at the mercy of Chadron's brigands. I tell you, man, I know
the situation in this country!"

"Thank you," said King, in cold hauteur.

Chadron's eyes were lighting with the glitter of revenge. He sat
grinding his bridle-reins in his gloved hand, as if he had the bones
of the nesters in his palm at last.

"You will proceed, with the rescued party under guard, to Meander,"
continued Major King to his officer, speaking as if he had plans for
his own employment aside from the expedition. "There, Mr. Chadron will
furnish transportation to return them whence they came."

"I'll furnish--" began Chadron, in amazement at this unexpected turn.

"Transportation, sir," completed Major King, in his cold way.

"These men should be held to the civil authorities for trial in this
county, and not set free," Macdonald protested, indignant over the
order.

Major King ignored him. He was still looking at Chadron, who was
almost choking on his rage.

"Hell! Do you mean to tell me the whole damn thing's goin' to fizzle
out this way, King? I want something done, I tell you--I want
something done! I didn't bring you up here--"

"Certainly not, sir!" snapped King.

"My orders to you--" Chadron flared.

"It happens that I am not marching under your orders at--"

"The hell you ain't!" Chadron exploded.

"It's an outrage on humanity to turn those scoundrels loose, Major
King!" Neel said. "Why, I've got signed statements, I tell you--"

"Remove this man to the rear!" Major King addressed a lieutenant, who
communicated the order to the next lowest in rank immediately at hand,
who passed it on to two troopers, who came forward briskly and rode
the protesting correspondent off between them.

Other troopers were collecting the arms of the homesteaders, a
proceeding which Macdonald witnessed with a sick heart. Frances,
sitting her horse in silence through all that had passed, gave him
what comfort and hope she could express with her eyes.

"Detail a patrol of twenty men," Major King continued his instructions
to his officer, "to keep the roads and disarm all individuals and
bands encountered."

"That don't apply to my men!" declared Chadron, positively. In his
face there was a dark threat of disaster for Major King's future hopes
of advancement.

"It applies to everybody as they come," said King. "Troops have come
in here to restore order, and order will be restored."

Chadron was gaping in amazement. That feeling in him seemed to smother
every other, even his hot rage against King for this sudden shifting
of their plans and complete overthrow of the cattlemen's expectations
of the troops. The one little comfort that he was to get out of the
expedition was that of seeing his raiders taken out of Macdonald's
hands and marched off to be set free.

Macdonald felt that he understood the change in King. The major had
come there full of the intention of doing Chadron's will; he had not a
doubt of that. But murder, even with the faint color of excuse that
they would have contrived to give it, could not be done in the eyes of
such a witness as Frances Landcraft. Subserviency, a bending of
dignity even, could not be stooped to before one who had been schooled
to hold a soldier's honor his most precious endowment.

Major King had shown a hand of half-fairness in treating both sides
alike. That much was to his credit, at the worst. But he had not done
it because he was a high-souled and honorable man. His eyes betrayed
him in that, no matter how stern he tried to make them. The coming of
that fair outrider in the night had turned aside a great tragedy, and
saved Major King partly to himself, at least, and perhaps wholly to
his career.

Macdonald tried to tell her in one long and earnest look all this. She
nodded, seeming to understand.

"You've double-crossed me, King," Chadron accused, in the flat voice
of a man throwing down his hand. "I brought you up here to throw these
nesters off of our land."

"The civil courts must decide the ownership of that," returned King,
sourly. "Disarm that man!" He indicated Macdonald, and turned his
horse as if to ride back and join his command.

The lieutenant appeared to feel that it would be no lowering of his
dignity to touch the weapons of a man such as Macdonald's bearing that
morning had shown him to be. He approached with a smile half
apologetic. Chadron was sitting by on his horse watching the
proceeding keenly.

"Pardon me," said the officer, reaching out to receive Macdonald's
guns.

A swift change swept over Macdonald's face, a flush dyeing it to his
ears. He sat motionless a little while, as if debating the question,
the young officer's hand still outstretched. Macdonald dropped his
hand, quickly, as if moved to shorten the humiliation, to the buckle
of his belt, and opened it with deft jerk. At that moment Chadron, ten
feet away, slung a revolver from his side and fired.

Macdonald rocked in his saddle as Frances leaped to the ground and ran
to his side. He wilted forward, his hat falling, and crumpled into her
arms. The lieutenant relieved her of her bloody burden, and eased
Macdonald to the ground.

Major King came riding back. At his sharp command troopers surrounded
Chadron, who sat with his weapon still poised, like one gazing at the
mark at which he had fired, the smoke of his shot around him.

"In a second he'd 'a' got me! but I beat him to it, by God! I beat him
to it!" he said.

Macdonald's belt had slipped free of his body. With its burden of
cartridges and its two long pistols it lay at Frances' feet. She
stooped, a little sound in her throat between a sob and a cry, jerked
one of the guns out, wheeled upon Chadron and fired. The lieutenant
struck up her arm in time to save the cattleman's life. The blow sent
the pistol whirling out of her hand.

"They will go off that way, sometimes," said the young officer, with
apology in his soft voice.

The soldiers closed around Chadron and hurried him away. A moment
Major King sat looking at Macdonald, whose blood was wasting in the
roadside dust from a wound in his chest. Then he flashed a look into
Frances' face that had a sneer of triumph in it, wheeled his horse and
galloped away.

In a moment the lieutenant was summoned, leaving Frances alone between
the two forces with Macdonald. She did not know whether he was dead.
She dropped to her knees in the dust and began to tear frantically at
his shirt to come to the wound. Tom Lassiter came hurrying up with
others, denouncing the treacherous shot, swearing vengeance on the
cowardly head that had conceived so murderous a thing.

Lassiter said that he was not dead, and set to work to stem the blood.
It seemed to Frances that the world had fallen away from her, leaving
her alone. She stood aside a little, her chin up in her old imperious
way, her eyes on the far hills where the tender sunlight was just
striking among the white-limbed aspen trees. But her heart was bent
down to the darkness of despair.

She asked no questions of the men who were working so earnestly after
their crude way to check that precious stream; she stood in the
activity of passing troopers and escorted raiders insensible of any
movement or sound in all the world around her. Only when Tom Lassiter
stood from his ministrations and looked at her with understanding in
his old weary eyes she turned her face back again, slowly resolute, to
see if he had died.

Her throat was dry. It took an effort to bring a sound from it, and
then it was strained and wavering.

"Is he--dead?"

"No, miss, he ain't dead," Tom answered. But there was such a shadow
of sorrow and pain in his eyes that tears gushed into her own.

"Will--will--"

Tom shook his head. "The Lord that give him alone can answer that," he
said, a feeling sadness in his voice.

The troops had moved on, save the detail singled for police duty.
These were tightening girths and trimming for the road again a little
way from the spot where Macdonald lay. The lieutenant returned
hastily.

"Miss Landcraft, I am ordered to convey you to Alamito Ranch--under
guard," said he.

Banjo Gibson, held to be harmless and insignificant by Major King, had
been set free. Now he came up, leading his horse, shocked to the
deepest fibers of his sensitive soul by the cowardly deed that Saul
Chadron had done.

"It went clean through him!" he said, rising from his inspection of
Macdonald's wound. And then, moved by the pain in Frances' tearless
eyes, he enlarged upon the advantages of that from a surgical view.
"The beauty of a hole in a man's chest like that is that it lets the
pizen dreen off," he told her. "It wouldn't surprise me none to see
Mac up and around inside of a couple of weeks, for he's as hard as old
hick'ry."

"Well, I'm not going to Alamito Ranch and leave him out here to die of
neglect, orders or no orders!" said she to the lieutenant.

The young officer's face colored; he plucked at his new mustache in
embarrassment. Perhaps the prospect of carrying a handsome and
dignified young lady in his arms for a matter of twenty-odd miles was
not as alluring to him as it might have been to another, for he was a
slight young man, only a little while out of West Point. But orders
were orders, and he gave Frances to understand that in diplomatic and
polite phrasing.

She scorned him and his veneration for orders, and turned from him
coldly.

"Is there no doctor with your detachment?" she asked.

"He has gone on with the main body, Miss Landcraft. They have several
wounded."

"Wounded murderers and burners of homes! Well, I'm not going to
Alamito Ranch with you, sir, unless you can contrive an ambulance of
some sort and take this gentleman too."

The officer brightened. He believed it could be arranged. Inside of an
hour he had Tom Lassiter around with a team and spring wagon, in which
the homesteaders laid Macdonald tenderly upon a bed of hay.

Banjo waited until they were ready to begin their slow march to the
ranch, when he led his little horse forward.

"I'll go on to the agency after the doctor and send him over to
Alamito as quick as he can go," he said. "And I'll see if Mother
Mathews can go over, too. She's worth four doctors when it comes to
keep the pizen from spreadin' in a wound."

Frances gave him her benediction with her eyes, and farewell with a
warm handclasp, and Banjo's beribboned horse frisked off on its long
trip, quite refreshed from the labors of the past night.

Frances was carrying Macdonald's cartridge belt and revolvers, the
confiscation of which had been overlooked by Major King in the
excitement of the shooting. The young lieutenant hadn't the heart to
take the weapons from her. Orders had been carried out; Macdonald had
been disarmed. He let it go at that.

Frances rode in the wagon with Macdonald, a canteen of water slung
over her shoulders. Now and then she moistened his lips with a little
of it, and bathed his eyes, closed in pathetic weariness. He was
unconscious still from the blow of Saul Chadron's big bullet. As she
ministered to him she felt that he would open his eyes on this world's
pains and cruel injustices nevermore.

And why had Major King ordered her, virtually under arrest, to Alamito
Ranch, instead of sending her in disgrace to the post? Was it because
he feared that she would communicate with her father from the post,
and discover to him the treacherous compact between Chadron and King,
or merely to take a mean revenge upon her by humiliating her in Nola
Chadron's eyes?

He had taken the newspaper correspondent with him, and certainly would
see that no more of the truth was sent out by him from that
flame-swept country for several days. With her at the ranch, far from
telegraphic communication with the world, nothing could go out from
her that would enlighten the department on the deception that the
cattlemen had practiced to draw the government into the conflict on
their side. In the meantime, the Drovers' Association would be at
work, spreading money with free hand, corrupting evidence with the old
dyes of falsehood.

Major King had seen his promised reward withdrawn through her
intervention, and had made a play of being fair to both sides in the
controversy, except that he kept one hand on Chadron's shoulder, so to
speak, in making martyrs of those bloody men whom he had sent there to
burn and kill. They were to be shipped safely back to their place,
where they would disperse, and walk free of all prosecution
afterwards. For that one service to the cattlemen Major King could
scarcely hope to win his coveted reward.

She believed that Alan Macdonald would die. It seemed that the fever
which would consume his feeble hope of life was already kindling on
his lips. But she had no tears to pour out over him now. Only a great
hardness in her heart against Saul Chadron, and a wild desire to lift
her hand and strike him low.

Whether Major King would make her attempt against Chadron's life, or
her interference with his military expedition his excuse for placing
her under guard, remained for the future to develop. She turned these
things in her mind as they proceeded along the white river road toward
the ranch.

It came noontime, and decline of sun; the shadow of the mountains
reached down into the valley, the mist came purple again over the
foothills, the fire of sunset upon the clouds. Alan Macdonald still
lived, his strong harsh face turned to the fading skies, his tired
eyelids closed upon his dreams.




CHAPTER XX

LOVE AND DEATH


Maggie and Alvino had the ranch to themselves when the military party
from the upper valley arrived, Mrs. Chadron and Nola having driven to
Meander that morning. It had been their intention to return that
evening, Maggie said. Mrs. Chadron had gone after chili peppers, and
other things, but principally chili peppers. There was not one left in
the house, and the mistress could not live without them, any more than
fire could burn without wood.

Dusk had settled when they reached the ranch, and night thickened
fast. The lieutenant dropped two men at the corral gate--her guard,
Frances understood--and went back to his task of watching for armed
men upon the highroads.

Under the direction of Frances, Maggie had placed a cot in Mrs.
Chadron's favored sitting-room with the fireplace. There Macdonald lay
in clean sheets, a blaze on the hearth, and Maggie was washing his
wound with hot water, groaning in the pity which is the sweetest part
of the women of her homely race.

"I think that he will live, miss," she said hopefully. "See, he has a
strong breath on my damp hand--I can feel it like a little wind."

She spoke in her native tongue, which Frances understood thoroughly
from her years in Texas and Arizona posts. Frances shook her head
sorrowfully.

"I am afraid his breath will fail soon, Maggie."

"No, if they live the first hour after being shot, they get well,"
Maggie persisted, with apparent sincerity. "Here, put your hand on his
heart--do you feel it? What a strong heart he has to live so well!
what a strong, strong heart!"

"Yes, a strong, strong heart!" Tears were falling for him now that
there was none to see them, scalding their way down her pale cheeks.

"He must have carried something sacred with him to give him such
strength, such life."

"He carried honor," said Frances, more to herself than to Maggie,
doubting that she would understand.

"And love, maybe?" said Maggie, with soft word, soft upward-glancing
of her feeling dark eyes.

"Who can tell?" Frances answered, turning her head away.

Maggie drew the sheet over him and stood looking down into his severe
white face.

"If he could speak he would ask for his mother, and for water then,
and after that the one he loves. That is the way a man's mind carries
those three precious things when death blows its breath in his face."

"I do not know," said Frances, slowly.

There was such stress in waiting, such silence in the world, and such
emptiness and pain! Reverently as Maggie's voice was lowered, soft and
sympathetic as her word, Frances longed for her to be still, and go
and leave her alone with him. She longed to hold the dear spark of his
faltering life in her own hands, alone, quite alone; to warm it back
to strength in her own lone heart. Surely her name could not be the
last in his remembrance, no matter for the disturbing breath of
death.

"I will bring you some food," said Maggie. "To give him life out of
your life you must be strong."

                  *       *       *       *       *

Frances started out of her sleep in the rocking-chair before the fire.
She had turned the lamp low, but there was a flare of light on her
face. Her faculties were so deeply sunk in that insidious sleep which
had crept upon her like a bindweed upon wheat that she struggled to
rise from it. She sprang up, her mind groping, remembering that there
was something for which she was under heavy responsibility, but unable
for a moment to bring it back to its place.

Nola was in the door with a candle, shading the flame from her eyes
with her hand. Her hair was about her shoulders, her feet were bare
under the hem of her long dressing-robe. She was staring, her lips
were open, her breath was quick, as if she had arrived after a run.

"Is he--alive?" she whispered.

"Why should you come to ask? What is his life to you?" asked Frances,
sorrowfully bitter.

"Oh, Maggie just woke and came up to tell me, mother doesn't
know--she's just gone to bed. Isn't it terrible, Frances!"

Nola spoke distractedly, as if in great agony, or great fear.

"He can't harm any of you now, you're safe." Frances was hard and
scornful. She turned from Nola and laid her hand on Macdonald's brow,
drawing her breath with a relieved sigh when she felt the warmth of
life still there.

"Oh, Frances, Frances!" Nola moaned, with expression of despair,
"isn't this terrible!"

"If you mean it's terrible to have him here, I can't help it. I'm a
prisoner, here against my will. I couldn't leave him out there alone
to die."

Nola lowered her candle and stared at Frances, her eyes big and blank
of everything but a wild expression that Frances had read as fear.

"Will he die?" she whispered.

"Yes; you are to have your heartless way at last. He will die, and his
blood will be on this house, never to be washed away!"

"Why didn't you come back when we called you--both of you?" Nola drew
near, reaching out an appealing hand. Frances shrank from her, to bend
quickly over Macdonald when he groaned and moved his head.

"Put out that light--it's in his eyes!" she said.

Nola blew out the candle and came glimmering into the room in her soft
white gown.

"Don't blame me, Frances, don't blame any of us. Mother and I wanted
to save you both, we tried to stop the men, and we could have held
them back if it hadn't been for Chance. Chance got three of them to
go, the others--"

"They paid for that!" said Frances, a little lift of triumph in her
voice.

"Yes, but they--"

"Chance didn't do it, I tell you! If he says he did it he lies! It
was--somebody else."

"The soldiers?"

"No, not the soldiers."

"I thought maybe--I saw one of them on guard in front of the house as
we came in."

"He's guarding me, I'm under arrest, I tell you. The soldiers have
nothing to do with him."

Nola stood looking down at Macdonald, who was deathly white in the
weak light of the low, shaded lamp. With a little timid outreaching, a
little starting and drawing back, she touched his forehead, where a
thick lock of his shaggy hair fell over it, like a sheaf of ripe wheat
burst from its band.

"Oh, it breaks my heart to see him dying--it--breaks--my--heart!" she
sobbed.

"You struck him! You're not--you're not fit to touch him--take your
hand away!"

Frances pushed her hand away roughly. Nola drew back, drenched with a
sudden torrent of penitential tears.

"I know it, I know it!" she confessed in bitterness, "I knew it when
he took me away from those people in the mountains and brought me
home. He carried me in his arms when I was tired, and sang to me as we
rode along there in the lonesome night! He sang to me, just like I was
a little child, so I wouldn't be afraid--afraid--of him!"

"Oh, and you struck him, you struck him like a dog!"

"I've suffered more for that than I hurt him, Frances--it's been like
fire in my heart!"

"I pray to God it will burn up your wicked pride!"

"We believed him, mother and I believed him, in spite of what Chance
said. Oh, if you'd only come back then, Frances, this thing wouldn't
have happened!"

"I can't see what good that would have done," said Frances, wearily;
"there are others who don't believe him. They'd have got him some
time, just like they got him--in a coward's underhanded way, never
giving him a chance for his life."

"We went to Meander this morning thinking we'd catch father there
before he left. We wanted to tell him about Mr. Macdonald, and get him
to drop this feud. If we could have seen him I know he'd have done
what we asked, for he's got the noblest heart in the world!"

Whatever Frances felt on the noble nature of Saul Chadron she held
unexpressed. She did not feel that it fell to her duty to tell Nola
whose hand had struck Macdonald down, although she believed that the
cattleman's daughter deserved whatever pain and humiliation the
revelation might bring. For it was as plain as if Nola had confessed
it in words that she had much more than a friendly feeling of
gratitude for the foeman of her family.

Her heart was as unstable as mercury, it seemed. Frances despised her
for her fickleness, scorned her for the mean face of friendship over
the treachery of her soul. Not that she regretted Major King. Nola was
free to take him and make the most of him. But she was not to come in
as a wedge to rive her from this man.

Let her pay her debt of gratitude in something else than love. Living
or dead, Alan Macdonald was not for Nola Chadron. Her penance and her
tears, her meanings and sobs and her broken heart, even that, if it
should come, could not pay for the humiliation and the pain which that
house had brought upon him.

"When did it happen?" asked Nola, the gust of her weeping past.

"This morning, early."

"Who did it--how did it happen? You got away from Chance--you said it
wasn't Chance."

"We got away from that gang yesterday; this happened this morning,
miles from that place."

"Who was it? Why don't you tell me, Frances?"

They were standing at Macdonald's side. A little spurt of flame among
the ends of wood in the chimney threw a sudden illumination over them,
and played like water over a stone upon Macdonald's face, then sank
again, as if it had been plunged in ashes. Frances remained silent,
her vindictiveness, her hardness of heart, against this vacillating
girl dying away as the flame had died. It was not her desire to hurt
her with that story of treachery and cowardice which must leave its
stain upon her name for many a year.

"The name of the man who shot him is a curse and a blight on this
land, a mockery of every holy human thought. I'll not speak it."

Nola stared at her, horror speaking from her eyes. "He must be a
monster!"

"He is the lowest of the accursed--a coward!" Frances said.

Nola shuddered, standing silently by the couch a little while. Then:
"But I want to help you, Frances, if you'll let me."

"There's nothing that you can do. I'm waiting for Mrs. Mathews and the
doctor from the agency."

"You can go up and rest until they come, Frances, you look so tired
and pale. I'll watch by him--you can tell me what to do, and I'll call
you when they come."

"No; I'll stay until--I'll stay here."

"Oh, please go, Frances; you're nearly dead on your feet."

"Why do you want me to leave him?" Frances asked, in a flash of
jealous suspicion. She turned to Nola, as if to search out her hidden
intention.

"You were asleep in your chair when I came in, Frances," Nola chided
her, gently.

Again they stood in silence, looking down upon the wounded man.
Frances was resentful of Nola's interest in him, of her presence in
the room. She was on the point of asking her to leave when Nola
spoke.

"If he hadn't been so proud, if he'd only stooped to explain things to
us, to talk to us, even, this could have been avoided, Frances."

"What could he have said?" Frances asked, wondering, indeed, what
explanation could have lessened his offense in Saul Chadron's eyes.

"If I had known him, I would have understood," Nola replied, vaguely,
in soft low voice, as if communing with herself.

"You! Well, perhaps--perhaps even you would have understood."

"Look--he moved!"

"Sh-h-h! your talking disturbs him, Nola. Go to bed--you can't help me
any here."

"And leave him all to you!"

The words flashed from Nola, as if they had sprung out of her mouth
before her reason had given them permission to depart.

"Of course with me; he's mine!"

"If he's going to die, Frances, can't I share him with you till the
end--can't I have just a little share in the care of him here with
you?"

Nola laid her hand on Frances' arm as she pleaded, turning her white
face appealingly in the dim light.

"Don't talk that way, girl!" said Frances, roughly; "you have no part
in him at all--he is nothing to you."

"He is all to me--everything to me! Oh, Frances! If you knew, if you
knew!"

"What? If I knew what?" Frances caught her arm in fierce grip, and
shook her savagely.

"Don't--don't--hurt me, Frances!" Nola cringed and shrank away, and
lifted her arms as if to ward a blow.

"What did you mean by that? Tell me--tell me!"

"Oh, the way it came to me, the way it came to me as he carried me in
his arms and sang to me so I wouldn't be afraid!" moaned Nola, her
face hidden in her hands. "I never knew before what it was to care for
anybody that way--I never, never knew before!"

"You can't have this man, nor any share in him, living or dead! I gave
up Major King to you; be satisfied."

"Oh, Major King!"

"Poor shadow that he is in comparison with a man, he'll have to serve
for you. Living or dead, I tell you, this man is mine. Now go!"

Nola was shaking again with sudden gust of weeping. She had sunk to
the floor at the head of the couch, a white heap, her bare arms
clasping her head.

"It breaks my heart to see him die!" she moaned, rocking herself in
her grief like a child.

And child Frances felt her to be in her selfishness, a child never
denied, and careless and unfeeling of the rights of others from this
long indulgence. She doubted Nola's sincerity, even in the face of
such demonstrative evidence. There was no pity for her, and no
softness.

"Get up!" Frances spoke sternly--"and go to your room."

"He must not be allowed to die--he must be saved!" Nola reached out
her hands, standing now on her knees, as if to call back his
struggling soul.

"Belated tears will not save him. Get up--it's time for you to go."

Nola bent forward suddenly, her hair sweeping the wounded man's face,
her lips near his brow. Frances caught her with a sound in her throat
like a growl, and flung her back.

"You'll not kiss him--you'll never kiss him!" she said.

Nola sprang up, not crying now, but hot with sudden anger.

"If you were out of the way he'd love me!"

"Love _you!_ you little cat!"

"Yes, he'd love me--I'd take him away from you like I've taken other
men! He'd love me, I tell you--he'd love _me!_"

Frances looked at her steadily a moment, contempt in her eloquent
face. "If you have no other virtue in you, at least have some respect
for the dying," she said.

"He's not dying, he'll not die!" Nola hotly denied. "He'll live--live
to love me!"

"Go! This room--"

"It's my house; I'll go and come in it when I please."

"I'm a prisoner in it, not a guest. I'll force you out of the room if
I must. This disgraceful behavior must end, and end this minute. Are
you going?"

"If you were out of the way, he'd love me," said Nola from the door,
spiteful, resentful, speaking slowly, as if pressing each word into
Frances' brain and heart; "if you were out of the way."




CHAPTER XXI

THE MAN IN THE DOOR


When the doctor from the agency arrived at dawn, hours after Mrs.
Mathews, he found everything done for the wounded man that skill and
experience could suggest. Mrs. Mathews had carried instruments,
antiseptics, bandages, with her, and she had no need to wait for
anybody's directions in their use. So the doctor, who had been
reinforced by the same capable hands many a time before, took a cup of
hot coffee and rode home.

Mrs. Mathews moved about as quietly as a nun, and with that humility
and sense of self-effacement that comes of penances and pains, borne
mainly for others who have fallen with bleeding feet beside the way.

She was not an old woman, only as work and self-sacrifice had aged
her. Her abundant black hair--done up in two great braids which hung
in front of her shoulders, Indian-wise, and wrapped at their ends with
colored strings--was salted over with gray, but her beautiful small
hands were as light and swift as any girl's. Good deeds had blessed
them with eternal youth, it seemed.

She wore a gray dress, sprinkled over with twinkling little Indian
gauds and bits of finery such as the squaws love. This barbaric
adornment seemed unaccountable in the general sobriety of her dress,
for not a jewel, save her wedding-ring alone, adorned her. Frances did
not marvel that she felt so safe in this gentle being's presence, safe
for herself, safe for the man who was more to her than her own soul.

When the doctor had come and gone, Mrs. Mathews pressed Frances to
retire and sleep. She spoke with soft clearness, none of that
hesitation in her manner that Frances had marked on the day that they
rode up and surrounded her where the Indians were waiting their
rations of beef.

"You know how it happened--who did it?" Frances asked. She was willing
to leave him with her, indeed, but reluctant to go until she had given
expression to a fear that hung over her like a threat.

"Banjo told me," Mrs. Mathews said, nodding her graceful little head.

"I'm afraid that when Chadron comes home and finds him here, he'll
throw him out to die," Frances whispered. "I've been keeping Mr.
Macdonald's pistols ready to--to--make a fight of it, if necessary.
Maybe you could manage it some other way."

Frances was on her knees beside her new friend, her anxiety speaking
from her tired eyes, full of their shadows of pain. Mrs. Mathews drew
her close, and smoothed back Frances' wilful, redundant hair with
soothing touch. For a little while she said nothing, but there was
much in her delicate silence that told she understood.

"No, Chadron will not do that," she said at last. "He is a violent,
blustering man, but I believe he owes me something that will make him
do in this case as I request. Go to sleep, child. When he wakes he'll
be conscious, but too weak for anything more than a smile."

Frances went away assured, and stole softly up the stairs. The sun was
just under the hill; Mrs. Chadron would be stirring soon. Nola was up
already, Frances heard with surprise as she passed her door, moving
about her room with quick step. She hesitated there a moment, thinking
to turn back and ask Mrs. Mathews to deny her the hospital room. But
such a request would seem strange, and it would be difficult to
explain. She passed on into the room that she had lately occupied.
Soothed by her great confidence in Mrs. Mathews, she fell asleep, her
last waking hope being that when she stood before Alan Macdonald's
couch again it would be to see him smile.

Frances woke toward the decline of day, with upbraidings for having
yielded to nature's ministrations for so long. Still, everything must
be progressing well with Alan Macdonald, or Mrs. Mathews would have
called her. She regretted that she hadn't something to put on besides
her torn and soiled riding habit to cheer him with the sight of when
he should open his eyes to smile.

Anxious as she was, and fast as her heart fluttered, she took time to
arrange her hair in the way that she liked it best. It seemed warrant
to her that he must find her handsomer for that. People argue that
way, men in their gravity as well as women in their frivolity, each
believing that his own appraisement of himself is the incontestable
test, none rightly understanding how ridiculous pet foibles frequently
make us all.

But there was nothing ridiculous in the coil of serene brown hair
drawn low against a white neck, nor in the ripples of it at the
temples, nor in the stately seriousness of the face that it shadowed
and adorned. Frances Landcraft was right, among thousands who were
wrong in her generation, in her opinion of what made her fairer in the
eyes of men.

Her hand was on the door when a soft little step, like a wind in
grass, came quickly along the hall, and a light hand struck a signal
on the panel. Frances knew that it was Mrs. Mathews before she flung
the door open and disclosed her. She was dressed to take the road
again, and Frances drew back when she saw that, her blood falling away
from her heart. She believed that he stood in need of her gentle
ministrations no longer, and that she had come to tell her that he was
dead.

Mrs. Mathews read her thought in her face, and shook her head with an
assuring smile. She entered the room, still silent, and closed the
door.

"No, he is far from dead," she said.

"Then why--why are you leaving?"

"The little lady of the ranch has stepped into my place--but you need
not be afraid for yours." Mrs. Mathews smiled again as she said that.
"He asked for you with his first word, and he knows just how matters
stand."

The color swept back over Frances' face, and ran down to hide in her
bosom, like a secret which the world was not to see. Her heart leaped
to hear that Maggie had been wrong in her application of the rule that
applies to men in general when death is blowing its breath in their
faces.

"But that little Nola isn't competent to take care of him--she'll kill
him if she's left there with him alone!"

"With kindness, then," said Mrs. Mathews, not smiling now, but shaking
her head in deprecation. "A surgeon is here, sent back by Major King,
he told me, and he has taken charge of Mr. Macdonald, along with Miss
Chadron and her mother. I have been dismissed, and you have been
barred from the room where he lies. There's a soldier guarding the
door to keep you away from his side."

"That's Nola's work," Frances nodded, her indignation hot in her
cheek, "she thinks she can batter her way into his heart if she can
make him believe that I am neglecting him, that I have gone away."

"Rest easy, my dear, sweet child," counseled Mrs. Mathews, her hand on
Frances' shoulder. "Mr. Macdonald will get well, and there is only one
door to his heart, and somebody that I know is standing in that."

"But he--he doesn't understand; he'll think I've deserted him!"
Frances spoke with trembling lips, tears darkling in her eyes.

"He knows how things stand; I had time to tell him that before they
ousted me. I'd have taken time to tell him, even if I'd had to--pinch
somebody's ear."

The soft-voiced little creature laughed when she said that. Frances
felt her breath go deeper into her lungs with the relief of this
assurance, and the threatening tears came falling over her fresh young
cheeks. But they were tears of thankfulness, not of suspense or pain.

Frances did not trouble the soldier at the door to exercise his
unwelcome and distasteful authority over her. But she saw that he was
there, indeed, as she went out to give Mrs. Mathews farewell at the
door.

Nola came pattering to her as she turned back in the house again to
find Maggie, for her young appetite was clamoring. Nola's eyes were
round, her face set in an expression of shocked protest.

"Isn't this an outrage, this high-handed business of Major King's?"
She ran up all flushed and out of breath, as if she had been wrestling
with her indignation and it had almost obtained the upper hand.

"What fresh tyranny is he guilty of?" Frances inquired, putting last
night's hot words and hotter feelings behind her.

"Ordering a soldier to guard the door of Mr. Macdonald's room, with
iron-clad instructions to keep you away from him! He sent his orders
back by Doctor Shirley--isn't it a petty piece of business?"

"Mrs. Mathews told me. At least you could have allowed her to stay."

"I?" Nola's eyes seemed to grow. She gazed and stared, injury,
disbelief, pain, in her mobile expression. "Why, Frances, I didn't
have a thing to do with it, not a thing! Mother and I protested
against this military invasion of our house, but protests were
useless. The country is under martial law, Doctor Shirley says."

"How did Major King know that Mr. Macdonald had been brought here? He
rode away without giving any instructions for his disposal or care. I
believe he wanted him to die there where he fell."

"I don't know how he came to hear it, unless the lieutenant here sent
a report to him. But I ask you to believe me, Frances"--Nola put her
hand on Frances' arm in her old wheedling, stroking way--"when I tell
you I hadn't anything to do with it. In spite of what I said last
night, I hadn't. I was wild and foolish last night, dear; I'm sorry
for all of that."

"Never mind," Frances said.

"Don't you worry, we'll take care of him, mother and I. Major King's
orders are that you're not to leave this house, but I tell you,
Frances, if I wanted to go home I'd go!"

"So would I," returned Frances, with more meaning in her manner of
speaking than in her words. "Does Major King's interdiction extend to
the commissary? Am I going to be allowed to eat?"

"Maggie's got it all ready; I ran up to call you." Nola slipped her
arm round Frances' waist and led her toward the kitchen, where Maggie
had the table spread. "You'll not mind the kitchen? The house is so
upset by those soldiers in it that we have no privacy left."

"Prisoners and pensioners should eat in the kitchen," Frances
returned, trying to make a better appearance of friendliness for Nola
than she carried in her heart.

Maggie was full of apologies for the poor service and humble
surroundings. "It is the doings of miss," she whispered, in her native
sibilant Mexican, when Nola found an excuse to leave Frances alone at
her meal.

"It doesn't matter, Maggie; you eat in the kitchen, both of us are
women."

"Yes, and some saints' images are made of lead, some of gold."

"But they are all saints' images, Maggie."

"The kitchen will be brighter from this day," Maggie declared, in the
extravagant way of her race, only meaning more than usually carries in
a Castilian compliment.

She backed away from the table, never having it in her delicate nature
to be so rude as to turn her back upon her guest, and admired Frances
from a distance. The sun was reaching through a low window, moving
slowly up the cloth as if stealing upon the guest to give her a
good-night kiss.

"Ah, miss!" sighed Maggie, her hands clasped as in adoration, "no
wonder that he lives with a well in his body. He has much to live for,
and that is the truth from a woman's lips."

"It is worth more because of its rarity, then, Maggie," Frances said,
warming over with blushes at this ingenuous praise. "Do they let you
go into his room?"

"The door is open to the servant," Maggie replied, with solemn nod.

"It is closed to me--did you know?"

"I know. Miss tells you it is orders from some captain, some general,
some soldier I do not know what"--a sweeping gesture to include all
soldiers, great and small and far away--"but that is a lie. It came
out of her own heart. She is a traitor to friendship, as well as a
thief."

"Yes, I believed that from the beginning, Maggie."

"This house of deceit is not a place for me, for even servant that I
am, I am a true servant. But I will not lie for a liar, nor be traitor
for one who deceives a friend. I shall go from here. Perhaps when you
are married to Mr. Macdonald you will have room in your kitchen for
me?"

"We must not build on shadows, Maggie."

"And there is that Alvino, a cunning man in a garden. You should see
how he charms the flowers and vegetables--but you have seen, it is his
work here, all this is his work."

"If there is ever a home of my own--if it ever comes to that
happiness--"

"God hasten the day!"

"Then there will be room for both of you, Maggie."

Frances rose from the table, and stood looking though the window where
the sun's friendly hand had reached in to caress her a few minutes
gone. There was no gleam of it now, only a dull redness on the horizon
where it had fallen out of sight, the red of iron cooling upon the
anvil.

"In four weeks he will be able to kneel at the altar with you," said
Maggie, making a clatter with the stove lids in her excitement, "and
in youth that is only a day. And I have a drawn piece of fine linen,
as white as your bosom, that you must wear over your heart on that
day. It will bring you peace, far it was made by a holy sister and it
has been blessed by the bishop at Guadalupe."

"Thank you, Maggie. If that day ever comes for me, I will wear it."

Maggie came nearer the window, concern in her homely face, and stood
off a little respectful distance.

"You want to be with him, you should be there at his side, and I will
open the door for you," she said.

"You will?" Frances started hopefully.

"Once inside, no man would lift a hand to put you out."

"But how am I going to get inside, Maggie, with that sentry at the
door?"

"I have been thinking how it could be done, miss. Soon it will be
dark, and with night comes fear. Miss is with him now; she is there
alone."

Frances turned to her, such pain in her face as if she had been
stabbed.

"Why should you go over that again? I know it!" she said, crossly.
"That has nothing to do with my going into the room."

"It has much," Maggie declared, whispering now, treasuring her plot.
"The old one is upstairs, sleeping, and she will not wake until I
shake her. Outside the soldiers make their fires and cook, and Alvino
in the barn sings 'La Golondrina'--you hear him?--for that is sad
music, like his soul. Very well. You go to your room, but leave the
door open to let a finger in. When it is just creeping dark, and the
soldiers are eating, I will run in where the one sits beside the door.
My hair will be flying like the mane of a wild mare, my eyes
bi-i-i-g--so. In the English way I will shout 'The rustlers, the
rustlers! He ees comin'--help, help!' When you hear this, fly to me,
quick, like a soul set free. The soldier at the door will go to see;
miss will come out; I will stand in the door, I will draw the key in
my hand. Then you will fly to him, and lock the door!"

"Why, Maggie! what a general you are!"

"Under the couch where he lies," Maggie hurried on, her dark eyes
glowing with the pleasure of this manufactured romance, "are the
revolvers which he wore, just where we placed them last night. I
pushed them back a little, quite out of sight, and nobody knows. Strap
the belt around your waist, and defy any power but death to move you
from the man you love!"

"Maggie, you are magnificent!"

"No," Maggie shook her head, sadly, "I am the daughter of a peon, a
servant to bear loads. But"--a flash of her subsiding grandeur--"I
would do that--ah, I would have done that in youth--for the man of my
heart. For even a servant in the back of a house has a heart, dear
miss."

Frances took her work-rough hands in her own; she pressed back the
heavy black hair--mark of a vassal race--from the brown forehead and
looked tenderly into her eyes.

"You are my sister," she said.

Poor Maggie, quite overcome by this act of tenderness, sank to her
knees, her head bowed as if the bell had sounded the elevation of the
host.

"What benediction!" she murmured.

"I will go now, and do as you have said."

"When it is a little more dark," said Maggie, softly, looking after
her tenderly as she went away.

Frances left her door ajar as Maggie had directed, and stood before
the glass to see if anything could be done to make herself more
attractive in his eyes. It did not seem so, considering the lack of
embellishments. She turned from the mirror sighing, doubtful of the
success of Maggie's scheme, but determined to do her part in it, let
the result be what it might. Her place was there at his side, indeed;
none had the right to bar her his presence.

The joy of seeing him when consciousness flashed back into his shocked
brain had been stolen from her by a trick. Nola had stood in her place
then. She wondered if that slow smile had kindled in his eyes at the
sight of her, or whether they had been shadowed with bewilderment and
disappointment. It was a thing that she should never know.

She heard Mrs. Chadron leave her room and pass heavily downstairs.
Hope sank lower as she descended; it seemed that their simple plot
must fail. Well, she sighed, at the worst it could only fail. As she
sat there waiting while twilight blended into the darker waters of
night, she reflected the many things which had overtaken her in the
two days past. Two incidents stood out above all the haste, confusion,
and pain which gave her sharp regret. One was that her father had
parted from her to meet his life's heaviest disappointment with anger
and unforgiving heart; the other that the shot which she had aimed at
Saul Chadron had been cheated of its mark.

There came a trampling of hoofs from the direction of the post,
unmistakably cavalry. She strained from the window to see, but it was
at that period between dusk and dark when distant objects were
tantalizingly indefinite. Nothing could be made of the number, or who
came in command. But she believed that it must be Major King's troops
returning from escorting the raiders to Meander.

Of course there would be no trying out of Maggie's scheme now. New
developments must come of the arrival of Major King, perhaps her own
removal to the post. Surely he could not sustain an excuse that she
was dangerous to his military operations now.

Doors opened, and heavy feet passed the hall. Presently all was a
tangle of voices there, greetings and warm words of welcome, and the
sound of Mrs. Chadron weeping on her husband's breast for joy at his
return.

Nola's light chatter rose out of the sound of the home-coming like a
bright thread in a garment, and the genteel voice of Major King
blended into the bustle of welcome with its accustomed suave
placidity. Frances felt downcast and lonely as she listened to them,
and the joyous preparations for refreshing the travelers which Mrs.
Chadron was pushing forward. They had no regard, no thought it seemed,
for the wounded man who lay with only the thickness of a door dividing
him from them.

She was moved with concern, also, regarding Chadron's behavior when he
should learn of Macdonald's presence in that house. Would Nola have
the courage to own her attachment then, and stand between the wrath of
her father and his wounded enemy?

She was not to be spared the test long. There was the noise of Chadron
moving heavily about, bestowing his coat, his hat, in their accustomed
places. He came now into the dining-room, where the sentinel kept
watch at Macdonald's door. Frances crept softly, fearfully, into the
hall and listened.

Chadron questioned the soldier, in surprise. Frances heard the man's
explanation of his presence before the door given in low voice, and in
it the mention of Macdonald's name. Chadron stalked away, anger in the
sound of his step. His loud voice now sounded in the room where the
others were still chattering in the relief of speech after long
silence. Now he came back to the guarded door, Nola with him; Mrs.
Chadron following with pleading words and moanings.

"Dead or alive, I don't care a damn! Out of this house he goes this
minute!" Chadron said.

"Oh, father, surely you wouldn't throw a man at death's door out in
the night!"

It was Nola, lifting a trembling voice, and Frances could imagine her
clinging to his arm.

"Not after what he's done for us, Saul--not after what he's done!"
Mrs. Chadron sounded almost tearful in her pleading. "Why, he brought
Nola home--didn't you know that, Saul? He brought her home all safe
and sound!"

"Yes, he stole her to make that play!" Chadron said, either still
deceived, or still stubborn, but in any case full of bitterness.

"I'll never believe that, father!" Nola spoke braver than Frances had
expected of her. "But friend or enemy, common charity, common decency,
would--"

"Common hell! Git away from in front of that door! I'm goin' to throw
his damned carcass out of this house--I can't breathe with that man in
it!"

"Oh, Saul, Saul! don't throw the poor boy out!" Mrs. Chadron begged.

"Will I have to jerk you away from that door by the hair of the head?
Let me by, I tell you!"

Frances ran down stairs blindly, feeling that the moment for her
interference, weak as it might be, and ineffectual, had come. Now
Major King was speaking, his voice sounding as if he had placed
himself between Chadron and the door.

"I think you'd better listen to your wife and daughter, Chadron. The
fellow can't harm anybody--let him alone."

"No matter for the past, he's our guest, father, he's--"

"Hell! Haven't they told you fool women the straight of it yet? I tell
you I had to shoot him to save my own life--he was pullin' a gun on
me, but I beat him to it!"

"Oh Saul, my Saul!" Mrs. Chadron moaned.

"Was it you that--oh, was it you!" There was accusation, disillusionment,
sorrow--and more than words can define--in Nola's voice. Frances waited
to hear no more. In a moment she was standing in the open door beside
Nola, who blocked it against her father with outstretched arms.

Chadron was facing his wife, his back to Frances as she passed.

"Yes, it was me, and all I'm sorry for is that I didn't finish him on
the spot. Here, you fellers"--to some troopers who crowded about the
open door leading to the veranda--"come in here and carry out this
cot."

But it wasn't their day to take orders from Chadron; none of them
moved. Frances touched Nola's arm; she withdrew it and let her pass.

Macdonald, alone in the room, had lifted himself to his elbow,
listening. Frances pressed him back to his pillow with one hand,
reaching with the other under the cot for his revolvers. Her heart
jumped with a great, glad bound, as if it had leaped from death to
safety, when she touched the weapons. A cold steadiness settled over
her. If Saul Chadron entered that room, she swore in her heart that
she would kill him.

"Don't interfere with me, King," said Chadron, turning again to the
door, "I tell you he goes, alive or dead. I can't breathe--"

"Stop where you are!" Frances rose from her groping under the cot, a
revolver in her hand.

Chadron, who had laid hold of Nola to tear her from the door, jumped
like a man startled out of his sleep. In the heat of his passion he
had not noticed one woman more or less.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said, catching himself as his hand reached
for his gun.

"Frances will take him away as soon as he's able to be moved," said
Nola, pleading, fearful, her eyes great with the terror of what she
saw in Frances' face.

"Yes, she'll go with him, right now!" Chadron declared. "I'll give you
just ten seconds to put down that gun, or I'll come in there and take
it away from you! No damn woman--"

A loud and impatient summons sounded on the front door, drowning
Chadron's words. He turned, with an oath, demanding to know who it
was. Frances, still covering him with her steady hand, heard hurrying
feet, the door open, and Mrs. Chadron exclaiming and calling for Saul.
The man at the door had entered, and was jangling his spurs through
the hall in hasty stride. Chadron stood as if frozen in his boots, his
face growing whiter than wounded, blood-drained Macdonald's on his cot
of pain.

Now the sound of the newcomer's voice rose in the hall, loud and
stern. But harsh as it was, and unfriendly to that house, the sound of
it made Frances' heart jump, and something big and warm rise in her
and sweep over her; dimming her eyes with tears.

"Where's my daughter, Chadron, you cutthroat! Where's Miss Landcraft?
If the lightest hair of her head has suffered, by God! I'll burn this
house to the sills!"




CHAPTER XXII

PAID


Colonel Landcraft stood before Chadron in his worn regimentals, his
old campaign hat turned back from his forehead as if he had been
riding in the face of a wind. Macdonald, looking up at Frances from
his couch, spoke to her with his eyes. There was satisfaction in them,
a triumphant glow. She moved a step toward the door, and the colonel,
seeing her there, rushed to her and clasped her against his dusty
breast.

"Standing armed against you in your own house, before your own wife
and daughter!" said he, turning like the old tiger that he was upon
Chadron again. "And in the presence of an officer of the United States
Army--my daughter, armed to protect herself! By heaven, sir! you've
disgraced the uniform you wear!"

Major King, scowling darkly, dropped his hand in suggestive gesture to
his sword. Colonel Landcraft, his slight, bony old frame drawn up to
its utmost inch, marched to him, fire in his eye.

"Unbuckle that sword! You're not fit to wear it," said he.

Chadron had drawn away from the door of Macdonald's room a little, and
stood apart from Major King with his wife and daughter. The cattleman
had attempted no defense, had said no word. In the coming of Colonel
Landcraft, full of authority, strong and certain of hand, Chadron
appeared to know that his world was beginning to tumble about his
ears.

Now he stepped forward to interpose in behalf of his tool and
co-conspirator, in one last big bluff. Major King fell back a stride
before the charge of the infuriated old colonel, which seemed to have
a threat of personal violence in it, the color sinking out of his
face, his hand still on his sword.

"What authority have you got to come into my house givin' orders?"
Chadron wanted to know. "Maybe your bluffin' goes with some people,
but it don't go with me. You git to hell out of here!"

"In your place and time I'll talk to you, you sneaking hound!" Colonel
Landcraft answered, throwing Chadron one blasting look. "Take off that
sword, surrender those arms! You are under arrest." This to Major
King, who stood scowling, watching the colonel as if to ward an
attack.

"By whose authority do you make this demand?" questioned Major King,
insolently. "I am not aware that any command--"

Colonel Landcraft turned his back upon him and strode to the open
door, through which the dismounted troopers could be seen standing
back a respectful distance in the shaft of light that fell through it.
At his appearance there, at the sight of that old battered hat and
familiar uniform, the men lifted a cheer. Little tyrant that he was,
hard-handed and exacting, they knew him for a soldier and a man. They
knew, too, that their old colonel had not been given a square deal in
that business, and they were glad to see him back.

The colonel acknowledged the greeting with a salute, his old head held
prouder at that moment than he ever had carried it in his life.

"Sergeant Snow!" he called.

The sergeant hurried forward, stepped out into the light, came up at
salute with the alacrity of a man who found pleasure in the service to
be demanded of him.

"Bring a detail of six men into this room, disarm Major King, and
place him under guard."

The colonel wheeled again to face Chadron and King.

"I am not under the obligation of explaining my authority to enter
this house to any man," said he, "but for your satisfaction, madam,
and in deference to you, Miss Chadron, I will tell you that I was
recalled by the department on my way to Washington and sent back to
resume command of Fort Shakie."

Chadron was biting his mustache like an angry horse mouthing the bit.
In the background a captain and two lieutenants, who had arrived with
Chadron and King, stood doubtful, it seemed, of their part in that
last act of the cattleman's rough melodrama.

Frances had returned to Macdonald's side, fearful that the excitement
might bring on a hemorrhage in his wound. She stood soothing him with
low, soft, and unnecessary words, unconscious of their tenderness,
perhaps, in the stress of her anxiety. But that they were appreciated
was evident in the slow-stealing smile that came over his worn, rugged
face like a breaking sun.

Major King surrendered his arms to the sergeant with a petulant, lofty
shrug of his shoulders.

"I'm not through with you yet, you old cuss!" said Chadron. "I never
started out to git a man but what I got him, and I'll git you.
I'll--"

Chadron's voice caught in his throat. He stood there looking toward
the outside door, drawing his breath like a man suffocating.
Stealthily his hand moved toward his revolver, while his wife and
daughter, even Frances, struck by a thrill of some undefined terror,
leaned and looked as Chadron was looking, toward the open door.

A tall, gaunt, dark shaggy man was standing there, an old flapping hat
drooping over his scowling eyes. He was a man with a great branching
mustache, and the under lid of one eye was drawn down upon his cheek
in a little point, as if caught by a surgical hook and held ready for
the knife; a man who bent forward from the middle, as if from long
habit of skulking under cover of low-growing shrubs; an evil man,
whose foul soul cried of bloody deeds through every feature of his
leering face.

"Oh, that man! that man!" cried Nola, in fearful, wild scream.

Mrs. Chadron clasped her in her arms and turned her defiant face
toward the man in the door. He was standing just as he had stood when
they first saw him, silent, still; as grim as the shadow of Saul
Chadron's sins.

The soldiers who stood around Major King looked on with puzzled eyes;
Colonel Landcraft frowned. Macdonald from his cot could not see the
door, but he felt the sharp striking of those charged seconds. Chadron
moved to one side a little, his fixed eyes on the man in the door, his
hand nearer his revolver now; so near that his fingers touched it, and
now it was in his hand with a sudden bright flash into the light.

Two shots in that quiet room, one following the other so closely that
they seemed but a divided one; two shots, delivered so quickly after
Nola's awful scream that no man could whip up his shocked nerves to
obedience fast enough to interpose. Saul Chadron pitched forward, his
hands clutching, his arms outspread, and fell dead, his face groveling
upon the floor. Outside, the soldiers lifted Mark Thorn, a bullet
through his heart.




CHAPTER XXIII

TEARS IN THE NIGHT


They buried Saul Chadron next day in a corner of the garden by the
river. And there was the benediction of tender autumn sunshine over
the place where they laid him down, away from the turmoil of his life,
and the tangle of injustices that he left behind.

But there was none to come forward and speak for the body of Mark
Thorn. The cowboys hid him in the sage at the foot of a butte, as men
go silently and shadow-like to bury away a shame.

There seemed to be a heart-soreness over the ranchhouse by the river
as night fell upon it again. Saul Chadron had been a great and noble
man to some who wept in its silent rooms as the gloaming deepened into
darkness over the garden, where the last leaves of autumn were tugging
at their anchorage to sail away. Even Frances Landcraft in her vigil
beside Macdonald's cot felt pity for Chadron's fall. She regretted, at
least, that he had not gone out of life more worthily.

Colonel Landcraft had gone up the river to carry a new message to the
homesteaders whose houses lay in ashes. He had ridden to tell them
that they could build in security and live in peace. The surgeon had
returned to the post, but was coming again tomorrow. Behind him he had
left the happy assurance that Macdonald would live.

Macdonald himself had added his own brave word to bear out the
doctor's prediction, as far as Frances would permit him to speak. That
was not above ten words, whispered into her ear, inclined low to hear.
When he attempted to go beyond that, soft warm fingers made a latch
upon his lips.

Mrs. Chadron came down a little after dark, and whispered at the door.
Macdonald was sleeping, and Frances went softly to tell her.

"Nola's askin' for you," Mrs. Chadron told her, "she's all heartbroke
and moanin' in her bed. If you'll go to her, and comfort her a little,
honey, I'll take as good care of him as if he was my own."

Frances was touched by the appeal for sympathy. She could picture
Nola, little fashioned by nature or her life's experiences to bear
grief, shuddering and sobbing alone in the dark, and her heart went
out to her in all its generosity and large forgivingness.

Nola's room was dark for all except the night sky at her window.
Frances stood a moment in her door, listening, believing from the
silence that she must have gone to sleep.

"Nola," she whispered, softly.

A little shivering sob was the answer. Frances went in, and closed the
door. Nola was lying face downward on her pillow, like a child, and
Frances found on putting out her comforting hand that the fickle
little lady's bolster was wet with tears. She sat on the bedside and
tried gently to turn Nola's face toward her. That brought on a storm
of tears and moanings, and agonized burrowing of her face into the
pillow.

"Oh, I feel so mean and wicked!" she cried. "If I hadn't been so
deceitful and treacherous and--and--and everything, maybe all this
sorrow wouldn't have come to us!"

Frances said nothing. She had found one hot hand, tear-wet from lying
under Nola's cheek, and this she held tenderly, feeling it best to let
the tears of penitence purge the sufferer's soul in their world-old
way. After a time Nola became quieter. She shifted in the bed, and
moved over to give Frances more room, and put up her arms to draw her
friend down for the kiss of forgiveness which she knew would not be
denied.

Afterwards she sat up in bed, and brushed her hair back from her
throbbing forehead with her palms.

"Oh, it aches and aches--_so!_" she said.

"I'll bind a cold towel around it, dear; that always used to ease it,
you remember?"

"Not my head, Frances--my heart, my heart!"

It was better so, Frances understood. Penitence that brings only a
headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the
baseness of the thing that lies beneath.

"Time is the only remedy for that, Nola," she said, her own words slow
and sad.

"Do you think I've sinned past forgiveness because I--because--I love
him?" Nola's voice trembled with earnestness.

"He is free, to love and be loved as it may fall, Nola. I told you he
was mine, but I thought then that I was claiming him from death. He
will live. He never has asked me to marry him; maybe he never will.
When he recovers, he may turn to you--who can tell?"

"No, it's only you that he thinks of, Frances. When I was watching by
him he opened his eyes, and you should have seen the look in them when
he saw me instead of you. He struggled to sit up and look for you, and
he called your name, sharp and frightened, as if he thought somebody
had taken you away from him forever."

Frances did not need that assurance to quiet any fear of his loyalty.
She had spoken the truth, only because it was the truth, but not to
give Nola hope. For hope she knew there was not any, nor any love, to
come to Nola out of that man's heart.

"We'll not talk of it," Frances said.

"I must, I can't let anything stand between us, Frances. If I'd been
fair, all the way through--but I wasn't. I wasn't fair about Major
King, and I wasn't fair this time. I was fool enough to think that if
you were out of the way for a little while I could make him love me!
He'd never love me, never in a million years!"

Frances said nothing. But she was beginning to doubt the sincerity of
Nola's repentance. There, under the shadow of her bereavement, she
could think of nothing but the hopelessness of love.

"But I didn't want you to come up just to pet me and be good to me,
Frances--I wanted to give you something."

Nola felt under her pillow, and groped for Frances' hand, in which she
placed a soft something with a stub of a feather in it.

"I have no right to keep it," said Nola. "Do you know what it is?"

"Yes, I know."

Much of the softness which Frances had for the highland bonnet was in
her voice as she replied, and the little bonnet itself was being
nestled against her cheek, as a mother cuddles a baby's hand.

"The best that's in me goes out to that man," said Nola solemnly--and
truthfully, Frances knew--"but I wouldn't take him from you now,
Frances, even if I could. I don't want to care for him, I don't want
to think of him. I just want to think of poor father lying out there
under the ground."

"It's best for you to think of him."

"Only a day ago he was alive and warm, like you and me, and now he's
dead! Mother never will want to leave this place again now, and I
don't feel like I want to either. I just want to lie down and die--oh,
I just want to die!"

Pity for herself brought Nola's tears gushing again, and her choking
sobs into her throat. Her voice was hoarse from her lamentations;
there seemed to be only sorrow for her in every theme. Frances held
her shivering slim body in her supporting arm, and Nola's face bent
down upon her shoulder. It seemed that her renunciation was complete,
her regeneration undeniable. But Frances knew that a great flood of
tears was required to put out the fire of passion in a woman's heart.
One spark, one little spark, might live through the deluge to spring
into the heat of the past under the breath of memory.

Again the heaving breast grew calm, and the tear-wet face was lifted
to shake back the fallen hair.

"This has emptied everything out for me," Nola sighed. "I'm going to
be serious in everything, with everybody, after this. Do you suppose
Mrs. Mathews would let me help her over at the mission--if I went to
her meek and humble and asked her?"

"If she saw that it would help _you_, she would, Nola."

"Just think how lonesome it will be here when the post's abandoned and
everybody but the Indians gone! You'll be away--maybe long before
that--and I'll not see anybody but Indians and cowboys from year's
beginning to year's end. Oh, it will be so dreary and lonesome here!"

"There's work up the river in the homesteaders' settlement, Nola;
there's suffering to be relieved, and bereaved hearts to be comforted.
There's your work, it seems to me, for you and those nearest to you
are to blame for the desolation of those poor homes, excuse it as
charitably as we may."

Frances felt a shudder run through the girl's body as her arm clasped
the pliant waist.

"Why, Frances! You can't mean that! They're terrible--just think what
they've done--oh, the underhanded thieves! By the law of the range
it's my fight now, instead of my work to help them!"

"The law of the range isn't the law any longer here, Nola, and it
never will be again. Alan Macdonald has done the work that he put his
lone hand to. You have no quarrel with anybody, child, no feud to
carry on to a bloody end. Put it out of your mind. If you are sincere
in your heart, and truly penitent, you can prove it best by beginning
to do good in the place where your house has done a terrible, sad
wrong."

"They started it!" said Nola, vindictively, the lifelong hatred for
those who encroached upon the range so deep in her breast, it seemed,
that the soil of her life must come away on its roots.

"There's no use talking to you about it, then," said Frances, coldly.

Nola seemed hurt by her tone. She began to cry again, and plead her
cause in moaning, broken words. "It's our country, we were here
first--father always said that!"

"I know."

"But I don't blame Mr. Macdonald, they deceived him, the rustlers
deceived him and told him lies. He didn't belong to this country, he
couldn't know at first, or understand. Frances"--she put her hand on
her friend's shoulder, and lifted her head as if trying to pierce the
dark and look into her eyes--"don't you know how it was with him? He
was too much of a man to turn his back on them, even when he found he
was on the wrong side. A man like him _must_ have understood it our
way."

"What he has done in this country calls for no excuse," returned
Frances, loftily.

"In your eyes and mine he wouldn't need any excuse for anything he
might do," said Nola, with a sagacity unexpected. "We love him, and
we'd love him, right or wrong. Well"--a sigh--"you've got a right to
love him, and I haven't. I wouldn't try to make him care for me now if
I could, for I'm different; I'm all emptied out."

"It takes more than you've gone through to empty a human life, Nola.
But you have no right to love him; honor and honesty are in the way,
friendship not considered at all. You'll spring up in the sun again
after a little while, like fresh grass that's trodden on, just as
happy and light-hearted as before. Let me have this one without any
more interference--there are plenty in the world that you would stand
heart-high to with your bright little head, just as well as Alan
Macdonald."

"I can't give him up, the thought of him, and the longing for him,
without regret, Frances; I can't!"

"I wouldn't have you do it. I want you to have regret, and pain--not
too deep nor too lasting, but some corrective pain. Now, go to
sleep."

Frances pressed her back to the pillow, and touched her head with
light caress.

"Frances," she whispered, a new gladness dawning in her voice, "I'll
go and see those poor people, and try to help them--if they'll let me.
Maybe we _were_ wrong--partly, anyhow."

"That's better," Frances encouraged.

"And I'll try not to care for him, or think about him, even one little
bit."

Frances bent and kissed her. Nola's arms clung to her neck a little,
holding her while she whispered in her ear.

"For I'm going to be different, I'm going to be good--abso-_lutely_
good!"




CHAPTER XXIV

BANJO FACES INTO THE WEST


"You don't tell me? So the old colonel's got what his heart's been
pinin' for many a year. Well, well!"

Mrs. Chadron was beside her window in her favored rocker again, less
assertive of bulk in her black dress, not so florid of face, and with
lines of sadness about her mouth and eyes. A fire was snapping in the
chimney, for the gray sky was driving a bitter wind, and the first
snowflakes of winter were straying down.

Banjo Gibson was before the fire, his ears red, his cheeks redder,
just in from a brisk ride over from the post. His instruments lay
beside him on the floor, and he was limbering his fingers close to the
blaze.

"Yes, he's a brigamadier now," said he.

"Brigadier-General Landcraft," said she, musingly, looking away into
the grayness of the day; "well, maybe he deserves it. Fur as I'm
concerned, he's welcome to it, and I'm glad for Frances' sake."

"He's vinegar and red pepper, that old man is! Takin' him up both
sides and down the middle, as the feller said, I reckon the
colonel--or brigamadier, I guess they'll call him now--he's about as
good as they make 'em. I always did have a kind of a likin' for that
old feller--he's something like me."

"It was nice of you to come over and tell me the news, anyhow, Banjo;
you're always as obligin' and thoughtful as you can be."

"It's always been a happiness and a pleasure, mom, and I've come a
good many times with news, sad and joyful, to your door. But I reckon
it'll be many a long day before I come ridin' to Alamito with news
ag'in; many a long, long day."

"What do you mean, Banjo? You ain't goin'--"

"To Californy; startin' from here as soon as my horse blows a spell
and eats his last feed at your feed box, mom. I've got to make it to
Meander to ketch the mornin' train."

"Oh, Banjo! you don't tell me!" Tears gushed to Mrs. Chadron's eyes,
used to so much weeping now, and her lips trembled as she pressed them
hard to keep back a sob. "You're the last friend of the old times, the
last face outside of this house belongin' to the old days. When you're
gone my last friend, the very last one I care about outside of my own,
'll be gone!"

Banjo cleared his throat unsteadily, and looked very hard at the fire
for quite a spell before he spoke.

"The best of friends must part," he said.

"Yes, they must part," she admitted, her handkerchief pressed to her
eyes, her voice muffled behind it.

"But they ain't no use of me stayin' around in this country and pinin'
for what's gone, and starvin' on the edge," said Banjo, briskly.
"Since you've sold out the cattle and the boys is all gone, scattered
ever-which-ways and to Texas, and the homesteaders is comin' into this
valley as thick as blackbirds, it ain't no place for me. I don't mix
with them kind of people, I never did. You've give it all up to 'em,
they tell me, but this homestead, mom?"

"All but the homestead," she sighed, her tears checked now, her eyes
on the farthest hill, where she had watched the crest many and many a
time for Saul to rise over it, riding home from Meander.

"You hadn't ort to let it go," said he, shaking his sad head.

"I couldn't'a'held it, the lawyers and Mr. Macdonald told me that.
It's public land, Banjo, it belongs to them folks, I reckon. But we
was here first!" A futile sigh, a regretful sigh, a sigh bitter with
old recollections.

"I reckon that's so, down to the bottom of it, but you folks made this
country what it was, and by rights it's yourn. Well, I stopped in to
say good-bye to the old brigamadier-colonel over at the post as I come
through. He tells me Alan and that little girl of hisn that stuck to
him and stood up for him through thick and thin 're goin' to be
married at Christmas time."

"Then they'll be leavin', too," she said.

"No, they're goin' to build on his ranch up the river and stay here,
and that old brigamadier-colonel he's goin' to take up land next to
'em, or has took it up, one of the two, and retire from the army when
they're married. He says this country's the breath of his body and he
couldn't live outside of it, he's been here so long."

"Well, well!" said she, her face brightening a little at the news.

"How's Alan by now?"

"Up and around--he's goin' to leave us in the morning."

"Frances here?" he asked.

"No, she went over home this morning--I thought maybe you met her--but
she's comin' back for him in the morning."

Banjo sat musing a little while. Then--

"Yes, you'll have neighbors, mom, plenty of 'em. A colony of nesters
is comin' here, three or four hundred of 'em, they tell me, all ready
to go to puttin' up schoolhouses and go to plowin' in the spring. And
they're goin' to run that hell-snortin' railroad right up this valley.
I reckon it'll cut right along here somewheres a'past your place."

"Yes, changes'll come, Banjo, changes is bound to come," she sighed.

"All over this country, they say, the nesters'll squat now wherever
they want to, and nobody won't dast to take a shot at 'em to drive 'em
off of his grass. They put so much in the papers about this rustlers'
war up here that folks has got it through 'em the nesters ain't been
gittin' what was comin' to 'em. The big ranches 'll all be split up to
flinders inside of five years."

"Yes, the cattle days is passin', along with the folks that was
somebody in this country once. Well, Banjo, we had some good times in
the old days; we can remember them. But changes will come, we must
expect changes. You don't need to pack up and go on account of that. I
ain't goin' to leave."

"I've made up my mind. I'm beginnin' to feel tight in the chist
already for lack of air."

Both sat silent a little while. Banjo's elbows were across his knees,
his face lifted toward the window. The wind was falling, and there was
a little breaking among the low clouds, baring a bit of blue sky here
and there. Banjo viewed this brightening of the day with gladness.

"I guess it's passin'," he said, going to the window and peering round
as much of the horizon as he could see, "it wasn't nothing but a
little shakin' out of the tablecloth after breakfast."

"I'm glad of it, for I don't think it's good luck to start out on a
trip in a storm. That there Nola she's out in it, too."

"Gone up the river?"

"Yes. It beats all how she's takin' up with them people, and them with
her. She's even bought lumber with her own money to help some of 'em
build."

"She's got a heart like a dove," he sighed.

"As soft as a puddin'," Mrs. Chadron nodded.

"But I never could git to it." Banjo sighed again.

Mrs. Chadron shook her head, with an expression of sadness for his
failure which was deeper than any words she knew.

"The loss of her pa bore down on her terrible; she's pinin' and
grievin' too hard for a body so young. I hear her cryin' and moanin'
in the night sometimes, and I know it ain't no use goin' to her, for
I've tried. She seems to need something more than an old woman like me
can give, but I don't know what it is."

"Maybe she needs a change--a change of air," Banjo suggested, with
what vague hope only himself could tell.

"Maybe, maybe she does. Well, you're goin' to take a change of air,
anyhow, Banjo. But what're you goin' to do away out there amongst
strangers?"

"I was out there one time, five years ago, and didn't seem to like it
then. But since I've stood off and thought it over, it seems to me
that's a better place for me than here, with my old friends goin' or
gone, and things changin' this a-way. Out there around them hop and
fruit ranches they have great times at night in the camps, and a man
of my build can keep busy playin' for dances. I done it before, and
they took to me, right along."

"They do everywheres, Banjo."

"Some don't," he sighed, watching out of the window in the direction
that Nola must come.

"She's not likely to come back before morning--I think she aims to go
to the post tonight and stay with Frances," she said, reading his
heart in his face.

"Maybe it's for the best," said Banjo.

"I guess everything that comes to us is for the best, if we knew how
to take it," she said. "Well, you set there and be comfortable, and
I'll stir Maggie up and have her make you something nice for dinner.
After that I want you to play me the old songs over before you go.
Just to think I'll never hear them songs no more breaks my heart,
Banjo--plumb breaks my heart!"

As she passed Banjo she laid her hand on his head in a manner of
benediction, and tears were in her eyes.

The sun was out again when they had finished lunch, coaxing autumn on
into November at the peril of frosted toes. Mrs. Chadron had
brightened considerably, also. Even bereavement and sorrow could not
shake her fealty to chili, and now it was rewarding her by a rubbing
of her old color in her face as she sat by the window and waited for
Banjo to tune his instruments for the parting songs.

Her workbasket was beside her, the bright knitting-needles in the
unfinished sock. It never would be completed now, she knew, but she
kept it by her to cry over in the twilight hours, when thoughts of
Saul came over her with their deep-harrowing pangs.

Banjo sang the touching old ballads over to her appreciative ear,
watching the shadows outside, as he played, for three o'clock. That
was the hour set for him to go. "Silver Threads" was saved for the
end, and when its last strain died Mrs. Chadron's face was hidden in
her hands. She was rocking gently, her handkerchief fallen to the
floor.

Banjo put his bow in its place in the lid of the case, the rosin in
its little box. But the fiddle he still held on his knee, stroking its
smooth back with loving hand, as if he would soothe Mrs. Chadron's
regrets and longings and back-tugging pains by that vicarious caress.
So he sat petting his instrument, and after a little she looked at
him, her eyes red, and tear-streaks on her face.

"Don't put it away just yet, Banjo," she requested; "there's another
one I want you to sing, and that will be the last. It's the saddest
one you play--one that I couldn't stand one time--do you remember?"
Banjo remembered; he nodded. "I can stand it now, Banjo; I want to
hear it now."

Banjo drew bow again, no more words on either side, and began his
song:

    All o-lone and sad he left me,
      But no oth-o's bride I'll be;
    For in flow-os he bedecked me,
      In tho cottage by tho sea.

When he finished, Mrs. Chadron's head was bent upon her arm across the
little workstand where her basket stood. Her shoulders were moving in
piteous convulsions, but no sound of crying came from her. Banjo knew
that it was the hardest kind of weeping that tears the human heart.

He put away his fiddle, and strapped the case. Then he went to her and
laid his hand on her shoulder.

"I'll have to be saddlin' up, mom," said he, his own voice thick, "and
I'll say _adios_ to you now."

"Good-bye, Banjo, and may God bless you in that country you're goin'
to so fur away from the friends you used to know!"

Banjo's throat moved as he gulped his sorrow. "I'll not come back in
the house, but I'll wave you good-bye from the gate," said he.

"I had hopes you might change your mind, Banjo," she said, as she took
his hand and held it a little while.

"If I could'a'got to somebody's heart that I've pined for many a day,
I would'a'changed my mind, mom. But it wasn't to be."

"It wasn't to be, Banjo," she said, shaking her head. "I don't think
she'll ever marry--she's changed, she's so changed!"

"Well, _adios_ to you, mom, and the best of luck."

"_Adios_, Banjo, boy; good-bye!"

She waited at the window for him to pass the gate. He appeared there
leading his horse, and bent to examine the girths before putting foot
to the stirrup. She hoped that he was coming back, to tell her that he
could not find it in his heart to go. But no; the change that was
coming over the cattle country was like an unfriendly wind to the
little troubadour. His way was staked into the west where new ties
waited him, where new hearts were to be won. He mounted, turned to the
window, waved his hat and rode away.

Mrs. Chadron sat in her old place and watched him until he passed
beyond the last hill line and out of her sight. Her last glimpse of
him had been in water lines through tears. Now she reached for her
basket and took out her unfinished knitting. Broken off there, like
her own life it was, she thought, never to be completed as designed.
The old days were done; the promise of them only partly fulfilled. She
was bidding farewell to more than Banjo, parting with more than
friends.

"Good-bye, Banjo," she murmured, looking dimly toward the farthest
hill; "_adios!_"




CHAPTER XXV

"HASTA LUEGO"


Frances came into the room as fresh as a morning-glory. Her cheeks
were like peonies, and the fire of her youth and strength danced in
her happy eyes. Macdonald rose to greet her, tall, gaunt, and pale
from the drain that his wound had made upon his life. He had been
smoking before the fireplace, and he reached up now to put his pipe
away on the manteltree.

"And how are things at the post?" he asked, as she stood before him in
her saddle dress, her sombrero pressing down her hair, her quirt
swinging by its thong from her gloved wrist.

Before replying she intercepted the hand that was reaching to stow the
pipe away, pressed it firmly back, inserted the stem between his close
lips.

"In this family, the man smokes," she said.

His slow smile, which was reward enough to her for all the trouble
that it took to wake it, twinkled in his eyes like someone coming to
the window with a light.

"Then the piece of a man will go ahead and smoke," said he, drawing a
chair up beside his own and leading her to it with gentle pressure
upon her hand.

"Has Mrs. Chadron been overfeeding you while I was gone? Did she give
you chili?"

"She _offered_ me chili, in five different dishes, which I,
remembering the injunction, regretfully put aside."

"Well, they're coming with the ambulance, I rode on ahead, and you'll
soon be beyond the peril of chili." She smiled as she looked up into
his face, and the smile broadened into an outright laugh when she saw
the little flitting cloud of vexation there.

"I could well enough ride," said he.

"The doctor says you could not."

"I'm as fit for the saddle this minute as I ever was in my life," he
declared.

She made no reply to that in words. But there was tender pity in her
caressing eyes as they measured the weakness of his thin arms, wasted
down to tendon and bone now, it seemed. He would ride to the post, she
knew very well, if permitted, and come through it without a murmur.
But the risk would be foolish, no matter what his pride must suffer by
going in a wagon.

"Have you heard the news from Meander?" she inquired.

"No, news comes slowly to Alamito Ranch, and will come slower now that
Banjo is gone, Mrs. Chadron says. What's been happening at Meander?"

"They held their conventions there last week to nominate county
officers, and what do you think? They've nominated you for something,
for--for _what_ do you suppose?"

"Nominated me? Who's nominated me?"

"Oh, one party or the other began it, and the other indorsed you,
for--oh, it's--"

"For what, Frances?" he asked, laughter in his eyes at her unaccountable
way of holding back on the secret.

"Why, for _sheriff!_" said she, with magnificent scorn.

Macdonald leaned back in his chair and laughed, the first audible
sound of merriment that she ever had heard come from those stern lips.
She looked at him with reproach.

"It should have been governor, the very least they could have done,
decently!" She was full of feeling on the subject of what she believed
to be his undervaluation.

Macdonald took her hand, the laughter dying out of his sober face.

"That's all in the different ways of looking at a man, _palomita_," he
said to her.

"But you look bigger than _sheriff_ to anybody!" she replied,
indignation large in her heart.

"In this country, Frances, a sheriff is a pretty sizable man," he
said, his thoughtful eyes on the fire, "about the biggest man they can
conceive, next only to the president himself. Up here in the cattle
country the greatness of men is dimmed, their magnitude being measured
by appreciable results. The offices of lawmaker, governor, and such as
the outside world invest with their peculiar dignity, are incidental,
indefinite--all but negative, here. It's different with a sheriff.
He's the man who comes riding with his guns at his side; they can see
him perform. All the law that they know centers in him; all branches
of government, as they understand his powers. Yes, a sheriff is
something of a figure in this county, Frances, and to be nominated for
that office by one party and indorsed by another is just about the
biggest compliment a man can receive."

"But surely, Alan, you'll not accept it?"

"Why, I think so," he returned, thoughtfully. "I think I'd be worth
more to this county as sheriff than I would be as--as governor, let us
say."

"Yes, but they go shooting sheriffs," she protested.

"They'll not be doing so much careless and easy shooting around here
since Colonel--Brigadier-General Landcraft--and that sounds more like
his size, too--gave them a rubdown with the iron hand. The cattle
barons' day is over; their sun went down when Mark Thorn brought the
holy scare to Saul Chadron's door."

"Father is of the same opinion. Do you know, Alan, the whole story
about that horrible old man Thorn is in the eastern papers?"

"Is it possible?"

"With a Cheyenne date-line," she nodded, "the whole story--who hired
him to skulk and kill, and a list of his known crimes. Father says if
there was anything lacking in the fight you made on the cattlemen,
this would finish them. It's a terrible story--poor Nola read it, and
learned for the first time her father's connection with Thorn. She's
humiliated and heartbroken over it all."

"With sufficient reason," he nodded.

"She's afraid her mother will hear of it in some way."

"She'll find it out in time, Frances; a thing like that walks on a
man's grave."

"It will not matter so much after a while, after her first grief
settles."

"Did Nola come back with you?"

"No, she went on to take some things to poor old Mrs. Lassiter. She
never has recovered from the loss of her son--it's killing her by
inches, Tom says. And you considering that office of sheriff!" She
turned to him with censorious eyes as she spoke, as if struck with a
pain of which he was the cause. "I tell you, you men don't know, you
don't know! It's the women that suffer in all this shooting and
killing--we are the ones that have to bear the sorrows in the night
and watch through the uncertain days!"

"Yes," said he gently, "the poor women must bear most of this world's
pain. That is why God made them strong above all his created things."

They sat in silence, thinking it over between them. Outside there was
sunshine over the brown rangeland; within there dwelt the lifting
confidence that their feet had passed the days of trouble and were
entering the bounds of an enlarging peace.

"And Major King?" said he.

"Father has relented, as I knew he would, out of regard for their
friendship of the past, and will not bring charges based on Major
King's plottings with Chadron."

"It's better that way," he nodded. "Do you suppose there's nothing
between him and Nola?"

"I think she'll have him after her grief passes, Alan."

"Better than he deserves," said he. "There's a lump of gold in that
little lady's heart, Frances."

"There is, Alan; I'm glad to hear you say that." There was moisture in
her tender eyes.

"There was something in that man, too," he reflected. "It's
unfortunate that he allowed his desire to humiliate you and me to
drive him into such folly. If he'd only have held those brigands here
for the civil authorities, as I requested, we could have forgotten the
rest."

"Yes, father says that would have saved him in his eyes, in spite of
his scheming with Chadron against your life, and against father's
honor and all that he holds sacred. But it's done, and he's genuinely
despised in the service for it. And there's the ambulance coming over
the hill."

"Ambulance for me!" said he, in disgust of his slow mending.

"Be glad that it isn't--oh, I shouldn't say that!"

"I am," said he, nodding his slow, grave head.

"We'll have to say good-bye to Mrs. Chadron," said she, bustling
around, or making a show of doing so to hide the tears which had
sprung into her eyes at the thought that it might have been a
different sort of conveyance coming to Alamito to take Alan Macdonald
away.

"And to Alamito," said he, looking out into the frost-stricken garden
with a tenderness in his eyes. "I shall always have a softness in my
heart for Alamito, because it gave me you. That garden out there
yielded me the dearest flower that any garden ever gave a man"--he
took her hands, and folded them above his heart--"a flower with a soul
in it to keep it alive forever."

She bowed her head as he spoke, as if receiving a benediction.

"I hate saying good-bye to Mrs. Chadron," she said, her voice
trembling, "for she'll cry, and I'm afraid I'll cry, too."

"It will not be farewell, only _hasta luego_[A] we can assure her of
that. We'll be neighbors to her, for this is home, dear heart, this is
our _val paraiso_."

"Our valley of paradise," she nodded, her hands reaching up to his
shoulders and clinging there a moment in soft caress, "our home!"

His arm about her shoulders, he faced her to the window, and pointed
to the hills, asleep now in their brown winter coat behind a clear
film of smoky blue.

"I stood up there one evening, weighted down with guns and ammunition,
hunting and hunted in the most desperate game I ever played," he said.
"The sun was low over this valley, and Alamito was a gleam of white
among the autumn gold. I was tired, hungry, dusty, thirsty and sore,
and my heart was all but dead in its case. That was after you had sent
me away from the post, scorned and half despised."

"Don't rebuke me for that night now, Alan," she pleaded, turning her
pained eyes to his. "I have suffered for my injustice."

"It wasn't injustice, it was discipline, and it was good for both of
us. We must come to confidence through misunderstandings and false
charges very frequently in this life. Never mind that; I was telling
you about that evening on the side of the hill. I had been sitting
with my back to a rock, watching the brush for Mark Thorn, but I was
thinking more of you than of him. For he meant only death, and you
were life. But I thought that I had lost you that day."

She drew nearer to him as they stood, in the unequivocal consolation
of her presence, in the most comforting refutation of that sad hour's
dark forebodings.

"I thought that, until I stood up and started down the slope to go my
lone-handed way. The sun struck me in the face then, and it was yellow
over the valley, and the wind was glad. I knew then, when I looked out
over it, that it held something for me, that it was my country, and my
home. The lines of gray old Joaquin Miller came to me, and lifted my
heart in a new vision. I said them over to myself:

    Lo! these are the isles of the watery miles
    That God let down from the firmament.
    Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man's trust;
    Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust--

only, there were two lines which I did not repeat, I dared not repeat,
even in my heart. My vision halted short of their fulfillment."

"What are the words--do you remember them?" she asked.

"Yes; I can repeat them now, for my vision is broader, it is a better
dream:

    Lo! Duty and Love, and a sweet babe's smiles,
    And there, O friend, are the Fortunate Isles."

He pressed her closer, and kissed her hair. They stood, unmindful of
the waiting ambulance, their vision fusing in the blue distances of
the land their hearts held dear. It was home.

"Come on, Alan"--she started from her reverie and drew him by the
hand--"there's Mrs. Chadron on the porch, waiting for _hasta luego_."

"For _hasta luego_," said he.

-----
[A] For a little while.






End of Project Gutenberg's The Rustler of Wind River, by G. W. Ogden