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The Seventh Man

by Max Brand · English · Gutenberg #1897 · 435,106 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Seventh Man

Author: Max Brand


        
Release date: September 1, 1999 [eBook #1897]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1897

Credits: Produced by Bill Brewer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEVENTH MAN ***




Produced by Bill Brewer





THE SEVENTH MAN

By Max Brand




Chapter I. Spring

A man under thirty needs neighbors and to stop up the current of his
life with a long silence is like obstructing a river--eventually the
water either sweeps away the dam or rises over it, and the stronger the
dam the more destructive is that final rush to freedom. Vic Gregg was on
the danger side of thirty and he lived alone in the mountains all
that winter. He wanted to marry Betty Neal, but marriage means money,
therefore Vic contracted fifteen hundred dollars' worth of mining for
the Duncans, and instead of taking a partner he went after that stake
single handed. He is a very rare man who can turn out that amount of
labor in a single season, but Gregg furnished that exception which
establishes the rule: he did the assessment work on fourteen claims and
almost finished the fifteenth, yet he paid the price. Week after week
his set of drills was wife and child to him, and for conversation he had
only the clangor of the four-pound single-jack on the drill heads, with
the crashing of the “shots” now and then as periods to the chatter
of iron on iron. He kept at it, and in the end he almost finished the
allotted work, but for all of it he paid in full.

The acid loneliness ate into him. To be sure, from boyhood he knew the
mountain quiet, the still heights and the solemn echoes, but towards the
close of the long isolation the end of each day found him oppressed by
a weightier sense of burden; in a few days he would begin to talk to
himself.

From the first the evening pause after supper hurt him most, for a
man needs a talk as well as tobacco, and after a time he dreaded these
evenings so bitterly that he purposely spent himself every day, so as
to pass from supper into sleep at a stride. It needed a long day to
burn out his strength thoroughly, so he set his rusted alarm-clock, and
before dawn it brought him groaning out of the blankets to cook a hasty
breakfast and go slowly up to the tunnel. In short, he wedded himself to
his work; he stepped into a routine which took the place of thought, and
the change in him was so gradual that he did not see the danger.

A mirror might have shown it to him as he stood this morning at the door
of his lean-to, for the wind fluttered the shirt around his labor-dried
body, and his forehead puckered in a frown, grown habitual. It was a
narrow face, with rather close-set eyes and a slanted forehead which
gave token of a single-track mind, a single-purposed nature with one
hundred and eighty pounds of strong sinews and iron-hard muscle to give
it significance. Such was Vic Gregg as he stood at the door waiting for
the coffee he had drunk to brush away the cobwebs of sleep, and then he
heard the eagle scream.

A great many people have never heard the scream of an eagle. The only
voice they connect with the kind of the air is a ludicrously feeble
squawk, dim with distance, but in his great moments the eagle has a
war-cry like that of the hawk, but harsher, hoarser, tenfold in volume.
This sound cut into the night in the gulch, and Vic Gregg started and
glanced about for echoes made the sound stand at his side; then he
looked up, and saw two eagles fighting in the light of the morning. He
knew what it meant--the beginning of the mating season, and these two
battling for a prize. They darted away. They flashed together with
reaching talons and gaping beaks, and dropped in a tumult of wings,
then soared and clashed once more until one of them folded his wings and
dropped bulletlike out of the morning into the night. Close over Gregg's
head, the wings flirted out--ten feet from tip to tip--beat down with
a great washing sound, and the bird shot across the valley in a level
flight. The conqueror screamed a long insult down the hollow. For a
while he balanced, craning his bald head as if he sought applause, then,
without visible movement of his wings, sailed away over the peaks. A
feather fluttered slowly down past Vic Gregg.

He looked down to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his
neck. All about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a
green-mottled face of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked
with veins of glittering silicate, and in this corner, still misted with
the last delicate shades of night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-pink.
The single-jack dropped from the hand of Gregg, and his frown relaxed.

When he stretched his arms, the cramps of labor unkinked and let the
warm blood flow, swiftly, and in the pleasure of it he closed his eyes
and drew a luxurious breath. He stepped from the door with his, head
high and his heart lighter, and when his hobnailed shoe clinked on the
fallen hammer he kicked it spinning from his path. That act brought a
smile into his eyes, and he sauntered to the edge of the little plateau
and looked down into the wide chasm of the Asper Valley.

Blue shadows washed across it, though morning shone around Gregg on the
height, and his glance dropped in a two-thousand-foot plunge to a single
yellow eye that winked through the darkness, a light in the trapper's
cabin. But the dawn was falling swiftly now, and while Gregg lingered
the blue grew thin, purple-tinted, and then dark, slender points pricked
up, which he knew to be the pines. Last of all, he caught the sheen of
grass.

Around him pressed a perfect silence, the quiet of night holding over
into the day, yet he cast a glance behind him as he heard a voice.
Indeed, he felt that some one approached him, some one for whom he had
been waiting, yet it was a sad expectancy, and more like homesickness
than anything he knew.

“Aw, hell,” said Vic Gregg, “it's spring.”

A deep-throated echo boomed back at him, and the sound went down the
gulch, three times repeated.

“Spring,” repeated Gregg more softly, as if he feared to rouse that
echo, “damned if it ain't!”

He shrugged his shoulders and turned resolutely towards the lean-to,
picking up the discarded hammer on the way. By instinct he caught it
at exactly the right balance for his strength and arm, and the handle,
polished by his grip, played with an oiled, frictionless movement
against the callouses of his palm. From the many hours of drilling,
fingers crooked, he could only straighten them by a painful effort. A
bad hand for cards, he decided gloomily, and still frowning over this he
reached the door. There he paused in instant repugnance, for the place
was strange to him.

In thought and wish he was even now galloping Grey Molly over the grass
along the Asper, and he had to wrench himself into the mood of the
patient miner. There lay his blankets, rumpled, brown with dirt, and
he shivered at sight of them; the night had been cold. Before he fell
asleep, he had flung the magazine into the corner and now the wind
rustled its torn, yellowed pages in a whisper that spoke to Gregg of the
ten-times repeated stories, tales of adventure, drifts of tobacco smoke
in gaming halls, the chant of the croupier behind the wheel, deep voices
of men, laughter of pretty girls, tatoo of running horses, shouts which
only redeye can inspire. He sniffed the air; odor of burned bacon and
coffee permeated the cabin. He turned to the right and saw his discarded
overalls with ragged holes at the knees; he turned to the left and
looked into the face of the rusted alarm clock. Its quick, soft ticking
sent an ache of weariness through him.

“What's wrong with me,” muttered Gregg. Even that voice seemed ghostly
loud in the cabin, and he shivered again. “I must be going nutty.”

As if to escape from his own thoughts, he stepped out into the sun
again, and it was so grateful to him after the chill shadow in the
lean-to, that he looked up, smiling, into the sky. A west wind urged a
scattered herd of clouds over the peaks, tumbled masses of white which
puffed into transparent silver at the edges, and behind, long wraiths of
vapor marked the path down which they had traveled. Such an old cowhand
as Vic Gregg could not fail to see the forms of cows and heavy-necked
bulls and running calves in that drift of clouds. About this season the
boys would be watching the range for signs of screw worms in the cattle,
and the bog-riders must have their hands full dragging out cows which
had fled into the mud to escape the heel flies. With a new lonesomeness
he drew his eyes down to the mountains.

Ordinarily, strange fancies never entered the hard head of Gregg, but
today it seemed to him that the mountains found a solemn companionship
in each other.

Out of the horizon, where the snowy forms glimmered in the blue, they
marched in loose order down to the valley of the Asper, where some
of them halted in place, huge cliffs, and others stumbled out into
foothills, but the main range swerved to the east beside the valley,
eastward out of his vision, though he knew that they went on to the town
of Alder.

Alder was Vic Gregg's Athens and Rome in one, its schoolhouse his
Acropolis, and Captain Lorrimer's saloon his Forum. Other people talked
of larger cities, but Alder satisfied the imagination of Vic; besides,
Grey Molly was even now in the blacksmith's pasture, and Betty Neal was
teaching in the school. Following the march of the mountains and the
drift of the clouds, he turned towards Alder. The piled water shook the
dam, topped it, burst it into fragments, and rushed into freedom; he
must go to Alder, have a drink, shake hands with a friend, kiss Betty
Neal, and come back again. Two days going, two days coming, three days
for the frolic; a week would cover it all. And two hours later Vic Gregg
had cached his heavier equipment, packed his necessaries on the burro,
and was on the way.

By noon he had dropped below the snowline and into the foothills, and
with every step his heart grew lighter. Behind him the mountains slid
up into the heart of the sky with cold, white winter upon them, but here
below it was spring indubitably. There was hardly enough fresh grass
to temper the winter brown into shining bronze, but a busy, awakening
insect life thronged through the roots. Surer sign than this, the
flowers were coming. A slope of buttercups flashed suddenly when the
wind struck it and wild morning glory spotted a stretch of daisies with
purple and dainty lavender. To be sure, the blossoms never grew thickly
enough to make strong dashes of color, but they tinted and stained the
hillsides. He began to cross noisy little watercourses, empty most of
the year, but now the melting snow fed them. From eddies and quiet pools
the bright watercress streamed out into the currents, and now and
then in moist ground under a sheltering bank he found rich patches of
violets.

His eyes went happily among these tokens of the glad time of the
year, but while he noted them and the bursting buds of the aspen,
reddish-brown, his mind was open to all that middle register of calls
which the human ear may notice in wild places. Far above his scale were
shrilling murmurs of birds and insects, and beneath it ran those ground
noises that the rabbit, for instance, understands so well; but between
these overtones and undertones he heard the scream of the hawk,
spiraling down in huge circles, and the rapid call of a grouse, far off,
and the drone of insects about his feet, or darting suddenly upon his
brain and away again. He heard these things by the grace of the wind,
which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and again shut off all
except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often whisked away every
murmur and left Gregg, in the center of a wide hush with only the creak
of the pack-saddle and the click of the burro's accurate feet among the
rocks.

At such times he gave his full attention to the trail, and he read it
as one might turn the pages of a book. He saw how a rabbit had scurried,
running hard, for the prints of the hind feet planted far ahead of those
on the forepaws. There was reason in her haste, for here the pads of a
racing coyote had dug deeply into a bit of soft ground. The sign of both
rabbit and coyote veered suddenly, and again the trail told the reason
clearly--the big print of a lobo's paw, that gray ghost which haunts
the ranges with the wisest brain and the swiftest feet in the West. Vic
Gregg grinned with excitement; fifty dollars' bounty if that scalp were
his! But the story of the trail called him back with the sign of some
small animal which must have traveled very slowly, for in spite of
the tiny size of the prints, each was distinct. The man sniffed with
instinctive aversion and distrust for this was the trail of the skunk,
and if the last of the seven sleepers was out, it was spring indeed. He
raised his cudgel and thwacked the burro joyously.

“Get on, Marne,” he cried. “We're overdue in Alder.”

Marne switched her tail impatiently and canted back a long ear to
listen, but she did not increase her pace; for Marne had only one
gait, and if Vic occasionally thumped her, it was rather by way of
conversation than in any hope of hurrying their journey.



Chapter II. Grey Molly

If her soul had been capable of enthusiasm, Marne could have made the
trip on schedule time, but she was a burro good for nothing except to
carry a pack well nigh half her own weight, live on forage that might
have starved a goat, and smell water fifteen miles in time of drought.
Speed was not in her vocabulary, and accordingly it was late afternoon
rather than morning when Gregg, pointing his course between the ears of
Marne, steered her through Murphy's Pass and came out over Alder.
There they paused by mutual consent, and the burro flicked one long
ear forward to listen to the rushing of the Doane River. It filled the
valley with continual murmur, and just below them, where the brown,
white-flecked current twisted around an elbow bend, lay Alder tossed
down without plan, here a boulder and there a house. They seemed
marvelously flimsy structures, and one felt surprise that the weight the
winter snow had not crushed them, or that the Doane River had not sent
a strong current licking over bank and tossed the whole village crashing
down the ravine. One building was very much like other, but Gregg's
familiar eye pierced through the roofs and into Widow Sullivan's
staggering shack, into Hezekiah Whittleby's hushed sitting-room, down
to the moist, dark floor of the Captain's saloon into that amazing
junkshop, the General Merchandise store; but first and last he looked to
the little flag which gleamed and snapped above the schoolhouse, and it
spelled “my country” to Vic.

Marne consented to break into a neat-footed jog-trot going down the last
slope, and so she went up the single winding street of Alder, grunting
at every step, with Gregg's whistle behind her. In town, he lived
with his friend, Dug Pym, who kept their attic room reserved for his
occupancy, so he headed straight for that place. What human face would
he see first?

It was Mrs. Sweeney's little boy, Jack, who raced into the street
whooping, and Vic caught him under the armpits and swung him dizzily
into the air.

“By God,” muttered Vic, as he strode on, “that's a good kid, that
Jack.” And he straightway forgot all about that knife which Jackie had
purloined from him the summer before. “Me and Betty,” he thought, “we'll
have kids, like Jack; tougher'n leather.”

Old Garrigan saw him next and cackled from his truck garden in the
backyard, but Vic went on with a wave of his arm, and on past Gertie
Vincent's inviting shout (Gertie had been his particular girl before
Betty Neal came to town), and on with the determination of a soldier
even past the veranda of Captain Lorrimier's saloon, though Lorrimer
himself bellowed a greeting and “Chick” Stewart crooked a significant
thumb over his shoulder towards the open door. He only paused at the
blacksmith shop and looked in at Dug, who was struggling to make the
print of a hot shoe on a hind foot of Simpson's sorrel Glencoe.

“Hey, Dug!”

Pym raised a grimy, sweating forehead.

“You, boy; easy, damn you! Hello, Vic!” and he propped that restless
hind foot on his inner thigh and extended a hand.

“Go an workin', Dug, because I can't stop; I just want a rope to catch
Grey Molly.”

“You red devil--take that rope over there, Vic. You won't have no work
catchin' Molly. Which she's plumb tame. Stand still, damn you. I never
seen a Glencoe with any sense!--Where you goin', Vic? Up to the school?”

And his sweaty grin followed Vic as the latter went out with the coil of
rope over his shoulder. When Gregg reached the house, Nelly Pym hugged
him, which is the privilege of fat and forty, and then she sat at the
foot of the stairs and shouted up gossip while he shaved with
frantic haste and jumped into his best clothes. He answered her with
monosyllables and only half his mind.

“Finish up your work, Vic?”

“Nope.”

“You sure worked yourself all thin. I hope somebody appreciates it.” She
chuckled. “Ain't been sick, have you?”

“Say, who d'you think's in town? Sheriff Glass!”

This information sank in on him while he tugged at a boot at least a
size and half too small.

“Pete Glass!” he echoed. Then: “Who's he after?”

“I dunno. Vic, he don't look like such a bad one.”

“He's plenty bad enough,” Gregg assured her. “Ah-h-h!”

His foot ground into place, torturing his toes.

'“Well,” considered Mrs. Pym, in a philosophic rumble, “I s'pose them
quiet gents is the dangerous ones, mostly; but looking at Glass you
wouldn't think he'd ever killed all those men. Know about the dance?”

“Nope.”

“Down to Singer's place. Betty goin' with you?”

He jerked open the door and barked down at her: “Who else would she be
goin' with?”

“Don't start pullin' leather before the horse bucks,” said Mrs. Pym. “I
don't know who else she'd be goin' with. You sure look fine in that red
shirt, Vic!”

He grinned, half mollified, half shame-faced, and ducked back into the
room, but a moment later he clumped stiffly down the stairs, frowning.
He wondered if he could dance in those boots.

“Feel kind of strange in these clothes. How do I look, Nelly?” And he
turned in review at the foot of the stairs.

“Slick as a whistle, I'll tell a man.” She raised her voice to a shout
as he disappeared through the outer door. “Kiss her once for me, Vic.”

In the center of the little pasture he stood shaking out the noose, and
the three horses raced in a sweeping gallop around the fence, looking
for a place of escape, with Grey Molly in the lead. Nothing up the Doane
River, or even down the Asper, for that matter, could head Molly when
she was full of running, and the eyes of Gregg gleamed as he watched
her. She was not a picture horse, for her color was rather a dirty white
than a dapple, and besides, there were some who accused her of “tucked
up belly.” But she had the legs for speed in spite of the sloping croup,
and plenty of chest at the girth, and a small, bony head that rejoiced
the heart of a horseman. He swung the noose, and while the others darted
ahead, stupidly straight into the range of danger, Grey Molly whirled
like a doubling coyote and leaped away.

“Good girl!” cried Vic, in involuntary approbation. He ran a few steps.
The noose slid up and out, opened in a shaky loop, and swooped down. Too
late the gray saw the flying danger, for even as she swerved the riata
fell over her head, and she came to a snorting halt with all fours
planted, skidding through the grass. The first thing a range horse
learns is never to pull against a rope.

A few minutes later she was getting the “pitch” out of her system, as
any self-respecting cattle horse must do after a session of pasture and
no work. She bucked with enthusiasm and intelligence, as she did all
things. Sun-fishing, sun-fishing is the most deadly form of bucking, for
it consists of a series of leaps apparently aimed at the sun, and the
horse comes down with a sickening jar on stiff front legs. Educated
“pitchers” land on only one foot, so that the shock is accompanied by
a terrible sidewise, downward wrench that breaks the hearts of the best
riders in the world. Grey Molly was educated, and Mrs. Pym stood in
the doorway with a broad grin of appreciation on her red face, she knew
riding when she saw it. Then, out of the full frenzy, the mare lapsed
into high-headed, quivering attention, and Gregg cursed her softly, with
deep affection. He understood her from her fetlocks to her teeth. She
bucked like a fiend of revolt one instant and cantered like an angel of
grace the next; in fact she was more or less of an equine counterpart of
her rider.

But now he heard shrill voices passing down the street and he knew that
school was out and that he must hurry if he wanted to ride home with
Betty, so he waved to Mrs. Pym and cantered away. For over two days he
had been rushing towards this meeting; all winter he had hungered for
it, but now that the moment loomed before him he weakened; he usually
did when he came close to the girl. Not that her beauty overwhelmed
him, for though she had a portion of energetic good-health and freckled
prettiness, he had chosen her as an Indian chooses flint for his steel;
one could strike fire from Betty Neal. When he was far away he loved
her without doubt or question and his trust ran towards her like a river
setting towards the ocean because he knew that her heart was as big and
as true as the heart of Grey Molly herself. Only her ways were fickle,
and when she came near, she filled him with uneasiness, suspicion.



Chapter III. Battle

On the road he passed Miss Brewster--for the Alder school boasted two
teachers!--and under her kindly, rather faded smile he felt a great
desire to stop and take her into his confidence; ask her what Betty Neal
had been doing all these months. Instead, he touched Grey Molly with the
spurs, and she answered like a watch-spring uncurling beneath him. The
rush of wind against his face raised his spirits to a singing pitch, and
when he flung from the saddle before the school he shouted: “Oh, Betty!”

Up the sharply angling steps in a bound, and at the door: “Oh, Betty!”

His voice filled the room with a thick, dull echo, and there was Betty
behind her desk looking up at him agape; and beside her stood Blondy
Hansen, big, good looking, and equally startled. Fear made the glance
of Vic Gregg swerve--to where little Tommy Aiken scribbled an arithmetic
problem on the blackboard--afterschool work for whispering in class, or
some equally heinous crime. The tingling voices of the other children
on their way home, floated in to Tommy, and the corners of his mouth
drooped.

To regain his poise, Vic tugged at his belt and felt the weight of the
holster slipping into a more convenient place, then he sauntered up
the aisle, sweeping off his sombrero. Every feeling in his body, every
nerve, disappeared in a crystalline hardness, for it seemed to him that
the air was surcharged by a secret something between Betty and young
Hansen. Betty was out from behind her desk and she ran to meet him and
took his hand in both of hers. The rush of her coming took his breath,
and at her touch something melted in her.

“Oh, Vic, are you all through?”

Gregg stiffened for the benefit of Hansen and Tommy Aiken.

“Pretty near through,” he said carelessly. “Thought I'd drop down
to Alder for a day or two and get the kinks out. Hello, Blondy. Hey,
Tommy!”

Tommy Aiken flashed a grin at him, but Tommy was not quite sure that the
rules permitted speaking, even under such provocation as the return of
Vic Gregg, so he maintained a desperate silence. Blondy had picked up
his hat as he returned the greeting.

“I guess I'll be going,” he said, and coughed to show that he was
perfectly at ease, but it seemed to Vic that it was hard for Blondy to
meet his eye when they shook hands. “See you later, Betty.”

“All right.” She smiled at Vic--a flash--and then gathered dignity of
both voice and manner. “You may go now, Tommy.”

She lapsed into complete unconsciousness of manner as Tommy swooped on
his desk, included hat and book in one grab, and darted towards the door
through which Hansen had just disappeared. Here he paused, tilting, and
his smile twinkled at them with understanding. “Good-night, Miss Neal.
Hope you have a good time, Vic.” His heel clicked twice on the steps
outside, and then the patter of his racing feet across the field.

“The little mischief!” said Betty, delightfully flushed. “It beats
everything, Vic, how Alder takes things for granted.”

He should have taken her in his arms and kissed her, now that she had
cleared the room, he very well knew, but the obvious thing was always
last to come in Gregg's repertoire.

“Why not take it for granted? It ain't going to be many days, now.”

He watched her eyes sparkle, but the pleasure of seeing him drowned the
gleam almost at once.

“Are you really almost through? Oh, Vic, you've been away so long, and
I--” She checked herself. There was no overflow of sentiment in Betty.

“Maybe I was a fool for laying off work this way,” he admitted, “but I
sure got terrible lonesome up there.”

Her glance went over him contentedly, from the hard brown hands to the
wrinkle which labor had sunk in the exact center of his forehead. He was
all man, to Betty.

“Come on along,” he said. He would kiss her by surprise as they reached
the door. “Come on along. It's sure enough spring outside. I been eating
it up, and--we can do our talking over things at the dance. Let's ride
now.”

“Dance?”

“Sure, down to Singer's place.”

“It's going to be kind of hard to get out of going with Blondy. He asked
me.”

“And you said you'd go?”

“What are you flarin' up about?”

“Look here, how long have you been traipsin' around with Blondy Hansen?”

She clenched one hand beside her in a way he knew, but it pleased him
more than it warned him, just as it pleased him to see the ears of Grey
Molly go back.

“What's wrong about Blondy Hansen?”

“What's right about him?” he countered senselessly.

Her voice went a bit shrill. “Blondy is a gentleman, I'll have you
know.”

“Is he?”

“Don't you sneer at me, Victor Gregg. I won't have it!”

“You won't, eh?”

He felt that he was pushing her to the danger point, but she was
perfectly, satisfyingly beautiful in her anger; he taunted her with the
pleasure of an artist painting a picture.

“I won't!” she repeated. Something else came to her lips, but she
repressed it, and he could see the pressure from within telling.

“Don't get in a huff over nothing,” he urged, in real alarm. “Only, it
made me kind of mad to see Blondy standing there with that calf-look.”

“What calf-look? He's a lot better to look at than you'll ever be.”

A smear of red danced before the vision of Gregg.

“I don't set up for no beauty prize. Tie a pink ribbon in Blondy's hair
and take him to a baby show if you want. He's about young enough to
enter.”

If she could have found a ready retort her anger might have passed away
in words, but no words came, and she turned pale. It was here that Gregg
made his crucial mistake, for he thought the pallor came from fear,
fear which his sham jealousy had roused in her, perhaps. He should have
maintained a discreet silence, but instead, he poured in the gall of
complacency upon a raw wound.

“Blondy's all right,” he stated beneficently, “but you just forget about
him tonight. You're going to that dance, and you're going with me. If
there's any explanations to be made, you leave 'em to me. I'll handle
Blondy.”

“You handle Blondy!” she whispered. Her voice came back; it rang: “You
couldn't if he had one hand tied behind him.” She measured him for
another blow. “I'm going to that dance and I'm going with Mr. Hansen.”

She knew that he would have died for her, and he knew that she would
have died for him; accordingly they abandoned themselves to sullen fury.

“You're out of date, Vic,” she ran on. “Men can't drag women around
nowadays, and you can't drag me. Not--one--inch.” She put a vicious
little interval between each of the last three words.

“I'll be calling for you at seven o'clock.”

“I won't be there.”

“Then I'll call on Blondy.”

“You don't dare to. Don't you try to bluff me. I'm not that kind.”

“Betty, d'you mean that? D'you think that I'm yaller?”

“I don't care what you are.”

“I ask you calm and impersonal, just think that over before you say it.”

“I've already thought it over.”

“Then, by God,” said Gregg, trembling, “I'll never take one step out of
my way to see you again.”

He turned, so blind with fury that he shouldered the door on his way out
and so, into the saddle, with Grey Molly standing like a figure of rock,
as if she sensed his mood. He swung her about on her hind legs with a
wrench on the curb and a lift of his spurs, but when she leaped into a
gallop he brought her back to the walk with a cruel jerk; she began to
sidle across the field with her chin drawn almost back to her breast,
prancing. That movement of the horse brought him half way around towards
the door and he was tempted mightily to look, for he knew that Betty
Neal was standing there, begging him with her eyes. But the great,
sullen pain conquered; he straightened out the mare for the gate.

Betty was indeed at the door, leaning against it in a sudden weakness,
and even in her pain she felt pride in the grace and skill of Vic's
horsemanship. The hearts of both of them were breaking, with this rather
typical difference: that Gregg felt her to be entirely at fault, and
that she as fully accepted every scruple of the blame. He had come
down tired out and nervous from work he had done for her sake, she
remembered, and if he would only glance back once--he must know that she
was praying for it--she would cry out and run down to him; but he went
on, on, through the gate.

A flash of her passion returned to her. “I shall go with Blondy--if it
kills me.” And she flung herself into the nearest seat and wept.

So when he reached the road and looked back at last, the doorway yawned
black, empty, and he set his teeth with a groan and spurred down the
road for Alder. He drew rein at Captain Lorrimer's and entered with curt
nods in exchange for the greetings.

“Red-eye,” he ordered, and seized bottle and glass as Lorrimer spun them
deftly towards him.

Captain Lorrimer picked up the bottle and gazed at it mournfully when
Vic had poured his drink.

“Son,” he murmured, “you've sure raised an awful thirst.”



Chapter IV. King Hol

There is a very general and very erroneous impression that alcohol
builds the mood of a man; as a matter of fact it merely makes his temper
of the moment fast--the man who takes his first drink with a smile ends
in uproarious laughter, and he who frowns will often end in fighting.
Vic Gregg did not frown as he drank, but the corners of his lips turned
up a trifle in a smile of fixed and acid pleasantry and his glance went
from face to face in the barroom, steadily, with a trifling pause at
each pair of eyes. Beginning with himself, he hated mankind in general;
the burn of the cheap whisky within served to set the color of that
hatred in a fixed dye. He did not lift his chaser, but his hand closed
around it hard. If some one had given him an excuse for a fist-fight or
an outburst of cursing it would have washed his mind as clean as a
new slate, and five minutes later he might have been with Betty Neal,
riotously happy. Instead, everyone overflowed with good nature, gossip,
questions about his work, and the danger in him crystallized. He
registered cold reasons for his disgust.

Beginning in the first person, he loathed himself as a thick-headed
ass for talking to Betty as he had done; as well put a burr under one's
saddle and then feel surprise because the horse bucks. He passed on
to the others with equal precision. Captain Lorrimer was as dirty as a
greaser; and like a greaser, loose-lipped, unshaven. Chick Stewart was a
born fool, and a fool by self-culture, as his never changing grin amply
proved. Lew Perkins sat in the corner on a shaky old apple barrel and
brushed back his long mustaches to spit at the cuspidor--and miss it. If
this were Vic Gregg's saloon he would teach the old loafer more accuracy
or break his neck.

“How are you, Gregg?” murmured some one behind him.

He turned and found Sheriff Pete Glass with his right hand already
spread on the bar while he ordered a drink for two. That was one of the
sheriff's idiosyncrasies; he never shook hands if he could avoid it, and
Gregg hated him senselessly, bitterly, for it. No doubt every one in the
room noticed, and they would tell afterwards how the sheriff had avoided
shaking hands with Vic Gregg. Cheap play for notoriety, thought Gregg;
Glass was pushing the bottle towards him.

“Help yourself,” said Gregg.

“This is on me, Vic.”

“I most generally like to buy the first drink.”

Pete Glass turned his head slowly, for indeed all his motions were
leisurely and one could not help wondering at the stories of his
exploits, the tales of his hair-trigger alertness. Perhaps these half
legendary deeds sent the thrill of uneasiness through Vic Gregg; perhaps
it was owing to the singular hazel eyes, with little splotches of red
in them; very mild eyes, but one could imagine anything about them.
Otherwise there was nothing exceptional in Glass, for he stood well
under middle height, a starved figure, with a sinewy crooked neck, as
if bent on looking up to taller men. His hair was sandy, his face tawny
brown, his shirt a gray blue, and every one knew his dusty roan horse;
by nature, by temperament and by personal selection he was suited to
blend into a landscape of sage-dotted plains or sand. Tireless as a lobo
on the trail, swift as a bobcat in fight, hunted men had been known to
ride in and give themselves up when they heard that Pete Glass was after
them.

“Anyway you want, partner,” he was saying, in his soft, rather husky
voice.

He poured his drink, barely enough to cover the bottom of his glass,
for that was another of Pete's ways; he could never afford to weaken his
hand or deaden his eye with alcohol, and even now he stood sideways at
the bar, facing Gregg and also facing the others in the room. But the
larger man, with sudden scorn for this caution, brimmed his own glass,
and poised it swiftly. “Here's how!” and down it went.

Ordinarily red-eye heated his blood and made his brain dizzy, it
loosened his tongue and numbed his lips, but today it left him cool,
confident, and sharpened his vision until he felt that he could see
through the minds of every one in the room. Captain Lorrimer, for
instance, was telling a jocular story to Chick Stewart in the hope that
Chick would set them up for every one; and old Lew Perkins was waiting
for the treat; and perhaps the sheriff was wondering how he could handle
Vic in case of need, or how long it would take to run him down. Not
long, decided Gregg, breathing hard; no man in the world could put him
on the run. Glass was treating in turn, and again the brimming drink
went down Vic's throat and left his brain clear, wonderfully clear. He
saw through Betty Neal now; she had purposely played off Blondy against
him, to make them both jealous.

“Won't you join us, Dad?” the sheriff was saying to Lew Perkins, and
Vic Gregg smiled. He understood. The sheriff wanted an excuse to order
another round of drinks because he had it in mind to intoxicate Gregg;
perhaps Glass had something on him; perhaps the manhunter thought that
Vic had had a part in that Wilsonville affair two years back. That was
it, and he wanted to make Vic talk when he was drunk.

“Don't mind if I do,” Lew said, slapping both hands on the bar as if he
owned it; and while he waited for his drink: “What are they going to do
with Swain?”

The doddering idiot! Swain was the last man Glass had taken, and Lew
Perkins should have known that the sheriff never talked about his work;
the old ass was in his green age, his second childhood.

“Swain turned state's evidence,” said Pete, curtly. “He'll go free, I
suppose. Fill up your glass, partner. Can see you're thirsty yet.”

This was to Gregg, who had purposely poured out a drink of the sheriff's
own chosen dimension to see if the latter would notice; this remark
fixed his suspicions. It was certain that the manhunter was after him,
but again, in scorn, he accepted the challenge and poured a stiff dram.

“That's right,” nodded the sheriff. “You got nothing on your shoulders.
You can let yourself go, Vic. Sometimes I wish”--he sighed--“I wish I
could do the same!”

“The sneaky coyote,” thought Gregg, “he's lurin' me on!”

“Turned state's evidence!” maundered Lew Perkins. “Well, they's a lot of
'em that lose their guts when they're caught. I remember way back in the
time when Bannack was runnin' full blast--”

Why did not some one shut off the old idiot before he was thoroughly
started? He might keep on talking like the clank of a windmill in
a steady breeze, endlessly. For Lew was old-seventy-five, eighty,
eighty-five--he himself probably did not know just how old--and he had
lived through at least two generations of pioneers with a myriad stories
about them. He could string out tales of the Long Trail: Abilene,
Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend, Newton, where eleven men were murdered
in one night; he knew the vigilante days in San Francisco, and early
times in Alder Gulch.

“Nobody would of thought Plummer was yaller, but he turned out that
way,” droned on the narrator. “Grit? He had enough to fit out twenty
men. When Crawford shot him and busted his right arm, he went right
on and learned to shoot with his left and started huntin' Jack again.
Packed that lead with him till he died, and then they found Jack's
bullet in his wrist, all worked smooth by the play of the bones.
Afterwards it turned out that Plummer ran a whole gang; but before
we learned that we'd been fools enough to make him sheriff. We got to
Plummer right after he'd finished hangin' a man, and took him to his own
gallows.”

“You'd of thought a cool devil like that would of made a good end, but
he didn't. He just got down on his knees and cried, and asked God to
help him. Then he begged us to give him time to pray, but one of the
boys up and told him he could do his prayin' from the cross-beam. And
that was Henry Plummer, that killed a hundred men, him an' his gang.”

“H-m-m,” murmured the sheriff, and looked uneasily about. Now that his
eyes were turned away, Vic could study him at leisure, and he wondered
at the smallness of the man. Suppose one were able to lay hands on him
it would be easy to--

“See you later, boys,” drawled Glass, and sauntered from the room.

Lew Perkins sighed as the most important part of his audience
disappeared, but having started talking the impetus carried him along,
he held Vic Gregg with his hazy eyes.

“But they didn't all finish like Plummer, not all the bad ones. No
sirree! There was Boone Helm.”

“I've heard about him,” growled Vic, but the old man had fixed his
glance and his reminiscent smile upon the past and his voice was soft
with distance when he spoke again.

“Helm was a sure enough bad one, son. They don't grow like him no more.
Wild Bill was a baby compared with Helm, and Slade wasn't no man at all,
even leavin' in the lies they tell about him. Why, son, Helm was just a
lobo, in the skin of a man--”

“Like Barry?” put in Lorrimer, drifting closer down the bar.

“Who's he?”

“Ain't you heard of Whistlin' Dan? The one that killed Jim Silent and
busted up his gang. Why, they say he's got a wolf that he can talk to
like it was a man.”

Old Lew chuckled.

“They say a lot of things,” he nodded, “but I'll tell a man that a wolf
is a wolf and they ain't nothin' that can tame 'em. Don't you let 'em
feed you up on lies like that, Lorrimer. But Helm was sure bad. He
killed for the sake of killin', but he died game. When the boys run him
down he swore on the bible that he's never killed a man, and they made
him swear it over again just to watch his nerve; but he never batted an
eye.”

The picture of that wild time grew up for Vic Gregg, and the thought of
free men who laughed at the law, strong men, fierce men. What would one
of these have done if the girl he intended to marry had treated him like
a foil?

“Then they got him ready for the rope,” went on Lew Perkins.

“'I've seen a tolerable lot of death,' says Helm. 'I ain't afraid of
it.'”

“There was about six thousand folks had come in to see the end of Boone
Helm. Somebody asked him if he wanted anything.

“'Whisky,' says Boone. And he got it.

“Then he shook his hand and held it up. He had a sore finger and it
bothered him a lot more than the thought of hangin'.

“'You gents get through with this or else tie up my finger,' he kept
sayin'.”

“Helm wasn't the whole show. There was some others bein' hung that day
and when one of them dropped off his box, Boone says: 'There's one gone
to hell.' Pretty soon another went, and hung there wiggling, and six
times he went through all the motions of pullin' his six-shooter and
firin' it. I counted. 'Kick away, old fellow,' says Boone Helm, 'I'll be
with you soon.' Then it came his turn and he hollered: 'Hurrah for Jeff
Davis; let her rip!' That was how Boone Helm--”

The rest of the story was blotted from the mind of Vic Gregg by the thud
of a heavy heel on the veranda, and then the broad shoulders of Blondy
Hansen darkened the doorway, Blondy Hansen dressed for the dance, with
the knot of his black silk handkerchief turned to the front and above
that the gleam of his celluloid collar. It was dim in the saloon,
compared with the brightness of the outdoors, and perhaps Blondy did
not see Vic. At any rate he took his place at the other end of the
bar. Three pictures tangled in the mind of Gregg like three bodies in
a whirlpool--Betty, Blondy, Pete Glass. That strange clearness of
perception increased and the whole affair lay plainly before him. Betty
had sent Hansen, dressed manifestly for the festival, to gloat over Vic
in Lorrimer's place. He was at it already.

“All turned out for the dance, Blondy, eh? Takin' a girl?”

“Betty Neal,” answered Blondy.

“The hell you are!” inquired Lorrimer, mildly astonished. “I
thought--why, Vic's back in town, don't you know that?”

“He ain't got a mortgage on what she does.”

Then, guided by the side-glance of Lorrimer, Hansen saw Gregg, and
he stiffened. As for Vic, he perceived the last link in his chain of
evidence. Hansen was going to a dance, and yet he wore a gun, and there
could be only one meaning in that: Betty had sent him down there to wind
up the affair.

“Didn't see you, Vic,” Blondy was saying, his flushed face seeming
doubly red against the paleness of his hair. “Have something?”

“I ain't drinkin',” answered Gregg, and slowly, to make sure that no one
could miss his meaning, he poured out a glass of liquor, and drank it
with his face towards Hansen. When he put his glass down his mind was
clearer than ever; and with omniscient precision, with nerveless calm,
he knew that he was going to kill Blondy Hansen; knew exactly where
the bullet would strike. It was something put behind him; his mind had
already seen Hansen fall, and he smiled.

Dead silence had fallen over the room, and in the silence Gregg heard a
muffled, ticking sound, the beating of his heart; heard old Lew Perkins
as the latter softly, slowly, glided back out of the straight line of
danger; heard the quick breathing of Captain Lorrimer who stood pasty
pale, gaping behind the bar; heard the gritted teeth of Blondy Hansen,
who would not take water.

“Vic,” said Blondy, “it looks like you mean trouble. Anyway, you just
now done something that needs explaining.”

He stood straight as a soldier, rigid, but the fingers of his right hand
twitched, twitched, twitched; the hand itself stole higher. Very calmly,
Vic hunted for his words, found them.

“A cattle rustler is bad,” he pronounced, “a hoss thief is worse, but
you're the lowest sneak of the lot, Blondy.”

Again that silence with the pulse in it, and Vic Gregg could feel the
chill which numbed every one except himself.

The lower jaw of Captain Lorrimer sagged, and his whisper came out in
jerking syllables: “God Almighty!” Then Blondy went for his gun, and Vic
waited with his hand on the butt of his own, waited with a perfect, cold
foreknowledge, heard Blondy moan as his Colt hung in the holster, saw
the flash of the barrel as it whipped out, and then jerked his own
weapon and fired from the hip. Blondy staggered but kept himself from
falling by gripping the edge of the bar with his left hand; the right,
still holding the gun, raised and rubbed across his forehead; he looked
like a sleeper awakening.

Not a sound from any one else, while Vic watched the tiny wraith of
smoke jerk up from the muzzle of his revolver. Then Blondy's gun flashed
down and clanked on the floor. A red spot grew on the breast of Hansen's
shirt; now he leaned as if to pick up something, but instead, slid
forward on his face. Vic stepped to him and stirred the body with his
toe; it wobbled, limp.



Chapter V. The Fight

There were three spots of white in the dim saloon, the faces of Stewart,
Lorrimer, and old Lew Perkins, and at the feet of Vic grew a spot of
red. Knowing with calm surety that no hand would lift against him even
if he turned his back, he walked out the door without a word and swung
into the saddle. There, for an instant, he calculated chances, for the
street stretched empty before and behind with not a sound of warning
stirring in the saloon. He was greatly tempted to ride to Dug Pym's
for his blanket roll and a few other traveling necessities, but he
remembered that the men of Alder rose to action with astonishing speed;
within five minutes a group of hard riders would be clattering up his
trail with Pete Glass at their head. An unlucky Providence had sent Pete
to Alder on this day of all days. There stood his redoubtable dusty
roan at the hitching rack, her head low, one ear back and one flopped
forward, her under lip pendulous--in a pasture full of horses one might
pick her last either for stout heart or speed. Even in spite of her
history Vic would have engaged Grey Molly to beat the roan at equal
weights, but since he outbulked the sheriff full forty pounds, he
weighed in nice balance the necessity of shooting the roan before he
left Alder. It was, he decided, unpleasant but vital, and his fingers
had already slid around the butt of his gun when a horse whinnied far
off and the roan twitched up her head to listen. She was no longer a
cloddish lump of horseflesh, but an individual, a soul; Gregg's hand
fell from his gun. Cursing his sentimental weakness, he lifted Molly
into a canter down the street. Still no signs of awakening behind him or
about; only little Jack Sweeney playing tag with a black-and-tan puppy,
the triumphant cackle of a hen somewhere to the left; but as he neared
the end of the street, where the trail swung into the rocks of the
slope, a door banged far off and a voice was screaming: “Pete! Pete
Glass!”

Grey Molly switched her tail nervously at the shout, but Vic was too
wise to let her waste strength hurrying up so sharp a declivity; that
dusty roan whose life he had spared would be spending it prodigally to
overtake him before long and Molly's power must be husbanded. So he kept
her at a quick walk by pressing the calf of one leg into her flank and
turned in the saddle to watch the town sink behind him. Sometime in the
vague, stupid past Marne had jog-trotted down this slope, but now he
was a new man with an eye which saw all things and a gun which could not
fail. Figures, singularly tiny and singularly distinct, swarmed into the
street from nowhere, men on horses, men swinging into saddles; here
and there the slant light of the afternoon twinkled on gun barrels, and
ludicrous thin voices came piping up the hill. As he reached the nether
lip of Murphy's Pass a small cavalcade detached itself from the main
mass before Captain Lorrimer's saloon and swept down the street, first a
dusty figure on a dusty horse, hardly visible; then a spot of red which
must be Harry Fisher on his blood-bay, with a long-striding sorrel
beside him that could carry no one except grim old Sliver Waldron.
Behind these rode one with the light glinting on his silver conchos--Mat
Henshaw, the town Beau Brummel--then the black Guss Reeve, and last of
all “Ronicky” Joe on his pinto; “Ronicky” Joe, handy man at all things,
and particularly guns. It showed how fast Pete Glass could work and how
well he knew Alder, for Vic himself could not have selected five cooler
fighters among the villagers or five finer mounts. The posse switched
around the end of the street and darted up the hill like the curling
lash of a whip.

“Good,” said Vic Gregg. “The damn fools will wind their horses before
they hit the pass.”

He put Grey Molly into an easy trot, for the floor of the pass dipped
up and down, littered with sharp-toothed rocks or treacherous, rolling
ones, as bad a place for speed as a stiff upslope. According to his
nicest calculation the posse could not reach the edge of the gulch
before he was at the farther side, out of range of everything except a
long chance shot, so he took note of things as he went and observed a
spot of pale silver skirting through the brush on the eastern ridge of
the gorge. There would be moonlight that night and another chance
in favor of Pete Glass. He remembered then, with quiet content, that
jogging in the holster was a power which with six words might stop those
six pursuers.

A long halloo came barking down the pass, now drawling out, now cut away
to silence as the angling cliffs sent on the echo, and Vic loosened the
rein. Grey Molly swung out with a snort of relief to a free-swinging
gallop and they swept down a great, gentle slope where new grass padded
the fall of her hoofs, yet even then he kept the mare checked and held
her in touch with an easily playing wrist. He did not imagine that even
the sheriff on the dusty roan would dream of trying to swallow up Grey
Molly in a short sprint but that assurance nearly cost Vic his life. The
roar of hoofs in the gulch belched out into the comparative silence
of the open space beyond and just as he gave the mare her head a gun
coughed and an angry humming darted past his ear.

Molly lengthened into full speed. He could not tell on account of the
muffling grass whether the pursuit was gaining or losing. He trusted
blindly to the mare and when he looked back they were already pulling
their mounts down to a hand gallop. That would teach them to match Molly
in a sprint, roan or no roan!

He slapped her below the withers, where the long, hard muscles rippled
back and forth. She was full of running, her gallop as light as the
toss of a bough in the wind, and now as he pulled her back to a swinging
canter her head went high, with pricking ears. Suddenly his heart went
out to her; she would run like that till she died, he knew.

“Good girl,” he whispered huskily.

The day was paling towards the end when he headed into the foothills of
the White Mountains. He drew up Molly for a breath on a level shoulder.
Already he was close to the snow line with ragged heads of white rearing
above him. Far below, a pale streak of moonlight was the Asper. Then,
out of that blacker night on the slopes beneath, he heard the clinking
hoofs of the posse; the quiet was so perfect, the air so clear, that he
even caught the chorus of straining saddle leather and then voices of
men. All this time the effects of the whisky had been wearing away by
imperceptible degrees and at that sound all his old self rushed back on
Vic Gregg. Why, they were his friends, his partners, these voices in the
night, and that clear laughter floated up from Harry Fisher who had been
his bunkie at the Circle V Bar ranch three years ago. He felt an insane
impulse to lean over the edge of the cliff and shout a greeting.



Chapter VI. The Rifle

Dawn found him over the first crest; at noon he was struggling up the
slope of the second range, whose rise was not half so sharp as the
upward plunge out of the Asper, but in spite of that easier ground Grey
Molly could not gain. She went with shorter steps, now, and her head
hung lower and lower, yet when a down stretch opened before her she went
at it with a gallop as light, almost, as her race out of Murphy's Pass.
Not once had she offered to stop; not once had she winced from the labor
of some sharp up-pitch; but still six horsemen hung behind her, and at
their head rode a little dusty man on a little dusty roan. It was the
lack of training as well as the rough going which held Molly back.

Beyond that second range, however, the down slope stretched smoothly,
evenly, for mile on mile and mile on mile; perfect going for Grey Molly
over easy hills with patches of forest here and there where he might
double, or where he might stop with the hunt sweeping past. All this the
sheriff must have known perfectly well, for he no longer kept back with
his pack of five, but skirted on ahead, hunting alone. Again and again
Vic heard the little shrill whistle with which Pete Glass encouraged the
roan. Vic used the spurs twice, and then he desisted from the useless
brutality for Molly was doing her best and no power on earth could
make her do more. After all, her best would be good enough, for now Vic
looked up and his heart leaped into his throat; there was only one more
rise above him, and beyond lay the easy ground and a running chance for
Molly's slender legs. Even as he raised his head something whined evilly
over him, followed by a sound like two heavy hammers swung together,
face to face, and shattered by the stroke. A rifle!

He looked back, saw the roan standing broadside towards him, watched the
sun waver and then flash in a straight steady line along the barrel of
the sheriff's gun. The line of light jerked up, and before the sound
reached him a blow on his right shoulder sent Vic lurching forward
against the pommel. Afterwards the voice of the rifle rang around him
and a sharp pain twitched up and down his side, then ran tingling to his
fingertips.

It was the stunning blow which saved him, for the sheriff had the range
and his third bullet would have clipped Vic between the shoulders, but
Glass had seen his quarry pitch forward in the saddle and he would not
waste ammunition. The thrift of his New England ancestry spoke in
Pete now and then and he could only grit his teeth when he saw Vic,
disappearing on the other side of the crest, straighten in the saddle;
the next instant the top of the hill shielded the fugitive.

Well and nobly, then, Grey Molly repaid all the praise, all the
tenderness and care which Vic had lavished upon her in the past years,
for with her legs shaking from the struggle of that last climb, with a
rider who wobbled crazily in his seat, with reins hanging loose on her
neck, with not even a voice to guide or to encourage her, she swept
straight across the falling ground, gaining strength and courage at
every stride. By the time Vic had regained his self-control and rallied
a little from that first terrible falling of the heart, the dusty roan
was over the crest and streaking after the game. Grey Molly gained
steadily, yet even when he gathered the reins in his left hand Vic knew
that the fight was done, in effect. How could he double or dodge when
his own blood spotted the trail he kept, and how long could he keep the
saddle with the agony which tore like saw teeth at his shoulder?

Grey Molly plunged straight into the shadow of pine trees, and the cool
gloom fell like a blessing upon Vic in his torment; it was heaven to
be sheltered even for a few moments from the eyes of the posse. At the
opposite edge of the wood he drew rein with a groan. Some devil had
prompted Gus Reeve and some devil had poured Reeve's horse full of
strength, for yonder down the valley, not a hundred yards away, galloped
a rider on a black horse; yet Vic could have sworn that when he looked
back from the crest he had seen Gus riding the very last in the posse.
An instant later the illusion vanished, for the black horse of Gus was
never an animal such as this, never had this marvelous, long gait. Its
feet flicked the earth and shot it along with a reaching stride so easy,
so flowing that only the fluttered mane and the tail stretching straight
behind gave token of the speed. For the rest, it carried its head high,
with pricking ears, the sure sign of a horse running well within his
strength, yet Grey Molly, fresh and keen for racing, could hardly have
kept pace with the black as it slid over the hills. God in heaven, if
such a horse were his a thousand sheriffs on a thousand dusty roans
could never take him; five minutes would sweep him out of sight and
reach.

Before the horseman ran a tall dog, wolfish in head and wolfish in the
gait which carried it like a cloud shadow over the ground, but it was
over-large for any wolf Vic had ever seen. It turned its head now, and
leaped aside at sight of the stranger, but the rider veered from his
course and swept down on Vic. He came to a halt close up without either
a draw at the reins or a spoken word, probably controlling his mount
with pressure of the knees, and Gregg found himself facing a delicately
handsome fellow. He was neither cowpuncher nor miner, Vic knew at a
glance, for that face had never been haggard with labor. A tenderfoot,
probably, in spite of his dress, and Vic felt that if his right arm were
sound he could take that horse at the point of his gun and leave the
rider thanking God that his life had been spared; but his left hand
was useless on the butt of a revolver, and three minutes away came the
posse, racing. There was only time for one desperate appeal.

“Stranger,” he burst out, “I'm follered. I got to have your hoss. Take
this one in exchange; it's the best I ever threw a leg over. Here's two
hundred bucks--” he flung his wallet on the ground and swung himself out
of the saddle.

The wolfish dog, which had growled softly all this time and roughed up
the hair of its neck, now slunk forward on its belly.

“Heel, Bart!” commanded the stranger sharply, and the dog whipped about
and stood away, whining with eagerness.

The moment Gregg's feet struck the ground his legs buckled like saplings
in a wind for the long ride had sapped his strength, and the flow of
blood told rapidly on him now. The hills and trees whirled around him
until a lean, strong hand caught him under either armpit. The stranger
stood close.

“You could have my hoss if you could ride him,” said he. His voice was
singularly unhurried and gentle. “But you'd drop out of the saddle in
ten minutes. Who's after you?”

A voice shouted far off beyond the wood; another voice answered, nearer,
and the whole soul of Gregg turned to the stallion. Grey Molly was
blown, she stood now with hanging head and her flanks sunk in alarmingly
at every breath, but even fresh from the pasture she was not a rag, not
a straw compared to the black.

“For God's sake,” groaned Vic, “loan me your hoss!”

“You couldn't stick the saddle. Come in here out of sight; I'm going to
take 'em off your trail.”

While he spoke, he led, half carried Vic, into a thicket of shrubs with
a small open space at the center. The black and the wolf-dog followed
and now the stranger pulled at the bridle rein. The stallion kneeled
like a trained dog, and lying thus the shrubbery was high enough to
hide him. Closer, sweeping through the wood, Vic heard the crash of the
pursuit, yet the other was maddeningly slow of speech.

“You stay here, partner, and sit over there. I'm borrowin' your gun”--a
swift hand appropriated it from Vic's holster and his own fingers were
too paralyzed to resist--“and don't you try to ride my hoss unless you
want them teeth in your throat. Lie quiet and tie up your hurt. Bart,
watch him!”

And there sat Gregg where he had slipped down in his daze of weakness
with the great dog crouched at his feet and snarling ominously every
time he raised his hand. The voices came closer; the crashing burst on
his very ears, and now, through the interstices of the shrubbery he
saw the stranger swing into the saddle on Grey Molly and urge her to a
gallop. He could follow them for only an instant with his eyes, but it
seemed to Vic that Molly cantered under her new rider with strange ease
and lightness. It was partly the rest, no doubt, and partly the smaller
burden.

A deep beat of racing hoofs, and then the dusty roan shot out of the
trees close by with the sheriff leaning forward, jockeying his horse.
It seemed that no living thing could escape from that relentless rider.
Then right behind Vic a horse snorted and grunted--as it leaped a fallen
log, perhaps--and he watched in alarm to see if the stallion would
answer that sound with start or whinney. The black lay perfectly still,
and instead of lifting up to answer or to look, the head lowered with
ears flat back until the long, outstretched neck gave the animal a snaky
appearance. The dog, too, though it showed murderous fangs whenever Vic
moved, did not stir from his place, but lay flattening into the ground.

“Cut to the right! Cut to the right, Harry!” came the voice of the
sheriff, already piping from the distance as the last of the posse
brushed out from the trees. “Yo hoi! Gus, take the left arroyo!”

Two answering yells, and then the rush of hoofs fell away. They were
cornering the stranger, no doubt, and Vic struggled to lift himself to
his feet and watch until a faint sound from the dog made him look down.
Bart lay with his haunches drawn up under him, his forepaws digging
into the soft loam, his eyes demoniac. Instinctively Vic reached for his
absent gun, and then, despairing, relaxed to his former position. The
wolf-dog lowered his head to his paws and there remained with the eyes
following each intake of Gregg's breath. A rattle of gunshots flung back
loosely from the hills, and among them Vic winced at the sound of the
sheriff's rifle, clear and ringing over the bark of the revolvers.

Had they nailed the stranger? The firing recommenced, more faintly and
prolonged, so that it was plain the posse maintained a running fusilade
after the fugitive. After that fear of his own growing weakness shut
out all else from the mind of Gregg as he felt his senses, his physical
strength, flowing out like an ebb tide to a sea which, he knew, was
death. He began to work desperately to bind up the wound and stop the
flow of blood and it was fear which gave him momentary strength to tear
away his shirt and then with his teeth and left hand rip it into strips.
After that, heedless of the pain, he constructed a rude bandage, very
clumsily, for he had to work over his shoulder. Here his teeth, once
more, were almost as useful as another hand, and as the bandage grew
tight the deadly, warm trickle along his side lessened and his fingers
fell away from the last knot. He fainted.



Chapter VII. Joan Disobeys

What he next knew was a fire of agony that wrapped his whole body and
consciousness flashed back on him. Strong arms lifted him up, up; above
him he sensed the eyes of his torturer, dim in moonlight, and he beat
his clubbed left fist into that face. After that he knew he was being
dragged onto a saddle, but a wave of pain rushed up his side and numbed
his brain. Thereafter his senses returned by fits and starts, vaguely.
Once he felt a steel cable that girdled his waist and breast and held
him erect, though his head flopped back and forth; once his eyes opened
and above him glittered the bright field of stars towards which he
drifted through space, a mind without a body; once a stab of torment
wakened him enough to hear: “Easy Satan; watch them stones. One more
jolt like that will send him clear to--” And the voice glided into an
eternity of distance. Yet again he swung tip from the pit of darkness
and became aware of golden hair around a woman's face, and a marvelous
soft, cool hand upon his forehead. Her voice reached him, too, and made
him think of all things musical, all things distant, like the sounds of
birds falling from the sky and though he understood not a syllable, a
sweet assurance of safety flooded through him. He slept.

When he woke again, it was from a dream of fleeing through empty air
swifter than the wind with a wolf-dog looming behind him out of space,
but presently he found that he was lying in a bed with a stream of
sunlight washing across a white coverlet. A door at his right swung
open and there in the entrance stood the wolf-dog of his vision with a
five-year-old girl upon its back.

“Don't go in there, Bart!” whispered the child. “Go on back!”

She took one of those pointed wolf-ears in her chubby fist and tugged to
swing him around, but Bart, with a speed which the eye could not follow,
twisted his head and the rows of great teeth closed over her hand.
It was so horrible that the cry froze in the throat of Gregg, yet the
child, with only a little murmur of anger, reached over with her other
hand and caught the wolf by the nose.

“Bad Bart!” she whispered, and raised the hand which he instantly
released. White marks showed on the pudgy tan. “Bad dog!” she repeated,
and beat his neck with an impotent little fist. The wolf-dog cringed,
and turned from the door.

“Come in,” invited Gregg. He was surprised to find his voice thin, apt
to swing up to a high pitch beyond his control. A shower of golden curls
tossed away from her face as she looked to him. “Oh!” she cried, still
with a guarded voice. She leaned far over, one hand buried in the ruff
of Bart's neck to secure her balance, and with the other she laid hold
of his right ear and drew him around facing the door once more. This
time he showed his teeth but submitted, only twitching the ear back and
forth a time or two when she relaxed her hold.

“Come in,” repeated Gregg.

She canted her head to one side and considered him with fearless blue
eyes.

“I want to,” she sighed.

“Why can't you, honey?”

“Munner says no.”

He attempted to turn further towards her, but the pain in his right
shoulder prevented. He found that his arm was bandaged to the elbow and
held close to his side by a complex swathing.

“Who is your mother?” asked Vic.

“Munner?” she repeated, frowning in wonder. “Why, munner is--my munner.”

“Oh,” smiled he, “and who's your pa?”

“What?”

“Who's your father? Who's your dad?”

“Daddy Dan. You ask a lot of things,” she added, disapprovingly.

“Come on in,” pleaded Vic Gregg, “and I won't ask nothin' more about
you.”

“Munner says no,” she repeated.

She employed the moment of indecision by plucking at the hair of Bart's
shoulders; he growled softly, terribly, but she paid not the slightest
heed.

“Your mother won't care,” asserted Vic.

“I know,” she nodded, “but Daddy will.”

“Spanking?”

She looked blankly at him.

“What will he do, then, if you come in to see me?”

“He'll look at me.” She grew breathless at the thought, and cast a
guilty glance over her shoulder.

“Honey,” chuckled Gregg, weakly, “I'll take all the blame. Just you come
along in and he'll do his lookin' at me.”

He thought of the slender fellow who had rescued him and his large,
gentle brown eyes, but to a child even those mild eyes might seem
terrible with authority.

“Will you, true?” said the child, wistfully.

“Honest and true.”

“All right.” She made up her mind instantly, her face shining with
excitement. “Giddap, Bart.” And she thumped the wolf-dog vigorously with
her heels.

He carried her in with a few gliding steps, soundless, except for the
light rattle of claws on the floor, but he stopped well out of reach of
the bed and when Vic held his left hand as far as he could across his
chest, Bart winced and gave harsh warning. Vic had seen vicious dogs in
his day, seen them fighting, seen them playing, but he had never heard
one of them growl like this. The upper lips of the animal twitched
dangerously back and the sound came from the very depths of his body.
It made the flesh crawl along Vic's back; one rip of those great teeth
could tear a man's throat open. The child thudded her heels against the
ribs of Bart again.

“Giddap!” she cried.

The wolf-dog shuddered but would not budge an inch.

“Naughty Bart!” She slipped off to the floor. “I'll make him come,” she
said.

“If it's the same to you,” said Vic, rather hastily, “I'd just as soon
he stayed where he is.”

“He's got to do what I want,” she answered. She shook a tiny forefinger
at him. “Bart, you just come here!”

The dog turned his blazing eyes on her and replied with a growl that
shook his sides.

“Stop!” she ordered, and struck him sharply on the nose. He blinked and
lowered his head under the blow, but though the snarling stopped his
teeth flashed. She caught him by both jowls and tugged him forward.

“Let him be!” urged Vic.

“He's got to come!”

And come he did, step by halting step, while she hauled him, and now
the snarling hoarse intakes of breath filled the room. Once she moved
a little to one side and Vic caught the glint of two eyes, red-stained,
which were fixed undeviatingly upon her face. Mixed with Vic's alarm
at the great fighting beast was a peculiar uneasiness, for there was
something uncanny in the determination, the fearlessness of this infant.
When she stepped away the wolf-dog stood trembling visibly but his eyes
were still not upon the man he hated or feared to approach but upon the
child's face.

“Can you pat him now?” she asked, not for an instant turning to Gregg.

“No, but it's close enough,” he assured her. “I don't want him any
closer.”

“He's got to come.” She stamped. “Bart, you come here!”

He flinched forward, an inch. “Bart!” Her hands were clenched and her
little body quivered with resolution; the snake-like head came to the
very edge of the bed.

“Now pat him!” she commanded.

By very unpleasant degrees, Vic stretched his hand towards that growling
menace.

“He'll take my arm off,” he complained. Shame kept him from utterly
refusing the risk.

“He won't bite you one bit,” declared the child. “But I'll hold his nose
if you're afraid.” And instantly she clasped the pointed muzzle between
her hands.

Even when Vic's hand hovered above his head Bart had no eye for him,
could not divert his gaze from the face of the child. Once, twice
and again, delicately as one might handle bubbles, Gregg touched that
scarred forehead.

“I made him come, didn't I?” she cried in triumph, and turned a tense
little face towards Vic, but the instant her eyes moved the wolf-dog
leaped away half the width of the room, and stood shivering, more
devilish than ever. She stamped again.

“Bad, bad, bad Bart,” she said angrily. “Shall I make him come again?”

“Leave him be,” muttered Vic, closing his eyes. “Leave him be where he
is. I don't want him.”

“Oh,” she said, “it's hard to make him do things, sometimes. But Daddy
Dan can make him do anything.”

“Humph!” grunted Vic. He was remembering how, at the master's order,
Bart had crouched at his feet in the wood, an unchained murderer
hungrily waiting for an excuse to kill. There was something very odd
about the people of this house; and it would be a long time before he
rid himself of the impression of the cold, steady eyes which had flashed
up to him a moment before out of that baby face.

“Joan!” called a voice from beyond, and the soft fiber of it made Vic
certain that it belonged to the rider of the black stallion. The little
girl ran a step towards the door, and then stopped and shrank back
against the bed.

“If you're afraid your Dad'll find you here,” said Vic, “just you run
along.”

She was nervously twisting her hands in her dress.

“Daddy Dan'll know,” she whispered without turning. “And--and--he won't
let me be afraid---even of him!”

A small hand slipped up, fumbled a bit, found the thumb of Vic Gregg,
and closed softly over it. With this to steady her, she waited, facing
the door.



Chapter VIII. Discipline

A light step crossed the outer room, with something peculiar in its
lightness, as if the heel were not touching the floor, with the effect
of the padded fall of the feet of some great cat; there was both
softness and the sense of weight. First the wolf-dog pricked his ears
and turned towards the door, the pudgy fist closed convulsively over
Vic's thumb, and then his rescuer stood in the entrance.

“Hello, partner,” called Vic. “I got company, you see. The door blew
open and I asked your little girl in.”

“I told you not to come here,” said the other. Vic felt the child
tremble, but there was no burst of excuses.

“She didn't want to come,” he urged. “But I kep' on askin' her.”

The emotionless eye of “Daddy Dan” held upon Joan. “I told you not to
come,” he said. Joan swallowed in mute agony, and the wolf-dog slipped
to the side of the master and licked his hand as though in dumb
intercession. The blood ran coldly in the veins of Gregg, as if he saw a
fist raised to strike the little girl.

“You go out.”

She went swiftly, at that, sidled past her father with her eyes lifted,
fascinated, and so out the door where she paused an instant to flash
back a wistful appeal. Nothing but silence, and then her feet pattering
off into the outer room.

“Maybe you better go keep her company, Bart,” said the father, and at
this sign of relenting Vic felt his tensed muscles relaxing; the wolf
whined softly and glided through the door.

“You feeling better?”

“Like a hoss off green feed. I been lyin' here drinkin' up the
sunshine.”

The other stood beside the open window and there he canted his head, his
glance far off and intent.

“D'you hear?” he asked, turning sharply.

There was a fierce eagerness in his face.

“Hear what?”

“It's spring,” he murmured, without answering more directly than this,
and Vic felt that the other had changed again, grown understandable.
Nevertheless, the shock of that sudden alteration at the window kept
him watching his host with breathless interest. Whatever it was that the
strange fellow heard, a light had gleamed in his eyes for a moment. As
he sauntered back towards the bed just a trace of it lingered about him,
a hint of sternness.

“Spring?” answered Gregg. “Yep, I smelled spring a few days back and I
started out to find some action. You can see for yourself that I found
it, partner.” He stirred, uneasily, but it was necessary that the story
should be told lest it reach the ears of this man from another source.
It was one thing to shelter a fugitive from justice whose crime was
unknown, perhaps trifling, but it might be quite another story if this
gentle, singular man learned that his guest was a new-made murderer.
Better that he should learn the tale now and form his prejudices in
favor of Gregg. “I'll tell you the whole story,” he began.

But the other shrugged his shoulders.

“You leave the story be,” he said, and there was something in the quiet
firmness of his manner which made it impossible for Vic to continue.
“You're here and you're hurt and you need a pile of rest. That's about
enough story for me.”

Vic put himself swiftly in the place of the other. Suppose that he and
Betty Neal should have a cabin off in the mountains like this, how would
they receive a wounded fugitive from justice? As unquestioningly as
this? In a surge of gratitude he looked mistily towards his host.

“Stranger,” he said, “you're white. Damned white. That's all. My name's
Vic Gregg and I come from--”

“Thanks,” cut in the other. “I'm glad to know your name but in case
anybody might be askin' me I wouldn't care to know where you come from.”
 He smiled. “I'm Dan Barry.”

It had to be a left-handed shake on the part of Vic, a thing of which
he often thought in the days that followed, but now he sent his memory
hunting.

“Seems like I've heard your name before,” he murmured. “I dunno where.
Were you ever around Alder, Barry?”

“No.” His manner suggested that the topic might as well be closed. He
reached over and dropped his hand lightly on the forehead of Vic. A
tingling current flowed from it into the brain of the wounded man. “Your
blood's still a bit hot,” he added. “Lie quiet and don't even think.
You're safe here. They ain't a thing goin' to get at you. Not a thing.
You'll stay till you get ready to leave. S'long. I'll see that you get
something to eat.”

He went out with that unusual, padding step which Vic had noticed before
and closed the door softly behind him. In spite of that barrier Gregg
could hear the noises from the next room quite clearly, as some one
brought in wood and dropped it on a stone hearth, rattling. He fell
into a pleasant doze, just stretching his body now and then to enjoy the
coolness of the sheets, the delicious sense of being cared for and the
returning strength in his muscles. Through that haze he heard voices,
presently, which called him back to wakefulness.

“That ought to be good for him. Take it in, Kate.”

“I shall. Dan, what has Joan done?”

“She went in there. I told her to leave him alone.”

“But she says he asked her to come in--said he would take the blame.”

“I told her not to go.”

“Poor baby! She's outside, now, weeping her eyes out on Bart's shoulder
and he's trying to comfort her.”

It was purer English than Vic was accustomed to hear even from his
schoolmistress, but more than the words, the voice surprised him, the
low, controlled voice of a woman of gentle blood. He turned his head and
looked out the window, baffled. Far above, shooting out of sight,
went the slope of a mountain, a cliff shining in the slant sun of the
afternoon here, a tumbled slide of rocks and debris there, and over the
shoulder of this mountain he saw white-headed monsters stepping back in
range beyond range. Why should a girl of refinement choose the isolation
of such a place as this for her home? It was not the only strange thing
about this household, however, and he would dismiss conjectures until he
was once more on his feet.

She was saying: “Won't you speak to her now?”

A little pause. Then: “No, not until evenin'.”

“Please, Dan.”

“She's got to learn.”

A little exclamation of unhappiness and then the door moved open; Vic
found himself looking up to the face with the golden hair which he
remembered out of his nightmare. She nodded to him cheerily.

“I'm so happy that you're better,” she said. “Dan says that the fever is
nearly gone.” She rested a large tray she carried on the foot of the bed
and Vic discovered, to his great content, that it was not hard to meet
her eyes. Usually girls embarrassed him, but he recognized so much of
Joan in the features of the mother that he felt well acquainted at once.
Motherhood, surely, sat as lightly on her shoulders as fatherhood did on
Dan Barry, yet he felt a great pity as he looked at her, this flowerlike
beauty lost in the rocks and snow with only one man near her. She was
like music played without an audience except senseless things.

“Yep, I'm a lot better,” he answered, “but it sure makes me terrible
sorry, ma'am, that I got your little girl in trouble. Mostly, it was my
fault.”

She waved away all need of apology.

“Don't think an instant about that, Mr. Gregg. Joan needs a great deal
of disciplining.” She laughed a little. “She has so much of her father
in her, you see. Now, are you strong enough to lift yourself higher in
the pillows?”

They managed it between them, for he was weaker than he thought and when
he was padded into position with cushions she laid the tray across his
knees. His head swam at sight of it. Forty-eight hours of fasting had
sharpened his appetite, and the loaded tray whetted a razor edge, for a
great bowl of broth steamed forth an exquisite fragrance on one side
and beside it she lifted a napkin to let him peek at a slice of venison
steak. Then there was butter, yellow as the gold for which he had been
digging all winter, and real cream for his coffee--a whole pitcher of
it--and snowy bread. Best of all, she did not stay to embarrass him with
her watching while he ate, since above all things in the world a hungry
man hates observation when the board is spread.

Afterwards, consuming sleep rippled over him from his feet to his eyes
to his brain. He partially roused when the tray was removed, and the
pillows slipped from under his back, but with a vague understanding that
expert hands were setting the bed in order his senses fled once more.

Hours and hours later he opened his eyes in utter darkness with a thin,
sweet voice still ringing in his ears. He could not place himself until
he turned his head and saw a meager, broken, rectangular line of light
which was the door, and immediately afterwards the voice cried: “Oh,
Daddy Dan! And what did the wolf do then?”

“I'm comin' to that, Joan, but don't you talk about wolves so loud or
old Black Bart'll think you're talkin' about him. See him lookin' at you
now?”

“But please go on. I won't say one little word.”

The man's voice began again, softly, so that not a word was audible to
Gregg; he heard the crackle of burning logs upon the hearth; saw the
rectangle of light flicker; caught a faint scent of wood smoke, and then
he slept once more.



Chapter IX. The Long Arm Of The Law

From the first the wound healed rapidly, for Vic's blood was perfectly
pure, the mountain air a tonic which strengthened him, and his food and
care of the best. The high-powered rifle bullet whipped cleanly through
his shoulder, breaking no bone and tearing no ligament, and the flesh
closed swiftly. Even Vic's mind carried no burden to oppress him in care
for the future or regret for the past, for if he occasionally remembered
the limp body of Hansen on the floor of Captain Lorrimer's saloon he
could shrug the picture into oblivion. It had been fair fight, man to
man, with all the odds in favor of Blondy, who had been allowed to pull
his gun first. If Vic thought about the future at all, it was with a
blind confidence that some time and in some unrevealed way he would get
back to Alder and marry Betty Neal. In the meantime, as the days of the
spring went mildly by, he was up and about and very soon there was only
a little stiffness in his right arm to remind him of Pete Glass and the
dusty roan.

He spent most of his time close to the cabin, for though he had
forgotten the world there was no decisive proof that the world would
forget him half so easily; that was not the way of the sheriff. He had
been known to spend years in the hunt for a single misdoer and Vic
had no care to wander out where he might be seen. Besides, it was very
pleasant about the cabin. The house itself was built solidly, roomily,
out of logs hewn on the timbered slopes above and dragged down to this
little plateau. Three mountains, to the north, south and west, rolled
back and up, cutting away the sunlight in the early afternoon, but at
this point the quick slopes put out shoulders and made, among them, a
comfortable bit of rolling ground, deep soiled and fertile. Here, so
Kate Barry assured him, the wild flowers came even earlier than they did
in the valley so far below them, and to be sure when Vic first walked
from the house he found the meadow aflame with color except for the
space covered by the truck-garden and the corral. In that enclosure he
found Grey Molly fenced away from the black with several other horses of
commoner blood, for the stallion, he learned, recognized no fraternity
of horseflesh, but killed what he could reach. Grey Molly was quite
recovered from her long run, and she greeted him in her familiar way,
with ears flattened viciously.

He might have stayed on here quite happily for any space of time, but
more and more Vic felt that he was an intruder; he sensed it, rather
than received a hint of word or eye. In the first place the three were
complete in themselves, a triangle of happiness without need of another
member for variety or interest. It was plain at a glance that the girl
was whole-heartedly happy, and whatever incongruity lay between her and
these rough mountains he began to understand that her love for Barry and
the child made ample amends. As for the other two, he always thought
of them in the same instant, for if the child had her eyes and her hair
from her mother, she had her nature from the man. They were together
constantly, on walks up the mountain, when she rode Black Bart up the
steep places: on dips into the valley, when he carried her before him on
the stallion. She had the same soft voice, the same quick, furtive
ways, the same soundless laughter, at times; and when Barry sat in the
evening, as he often did for hours, staring at empty air, she would
climb on his knee, place his unresisting arm around her, and she looking
up into his face, sharing his silences. Sometimes Vic wondered if the
young mother were not troubled, made a little jealous by this perfect
companionship, but he never found a trace of it. It was she, finally,
who made him determine to leave as soon as his shoulder muscles moved
with perfect freedom, for as the days slipped past he felt that she grew
more and more uneasy, and her eyes had a way of going from him to her
husband as though she believed their guest a constant danger to Barry.
Indeed, to some small extent he was a danger, for the law might deal
hardly with a man who took a fugitive out of the very grip of its hand.

By a rather ironical chance, on the very morning when he decided that
he must start his journey the next day but one, Vic learned that he
must not linger even so long as that. Pete Glass and the law had not
forgotten him, indeed, nearly so well as he had forgotten the law and
Pete Glass, for as he sat in his room filling a pipe after breakfast
the voice of Barry called him out, and he found his host among the rocks
which rimmed the southern end of the plateau, in front of the house. To
the north the ground fell away smoothly, rolled down to the side of the
mountain, and then dipped easily to the valley--the only direction from
which the cabin was accessible, though here the grade was possible for a
buckboard. To the south the plateau ended in a drop that angled sharply
down, almost a cliff in places, and from this point of vantage the eye
carried nameless miles down the river.

“Are them friends of yours?” asked Dan Barry, as he stood among those
rocks. “Take a long look.” And he handed a strong pair of field glasses
to Gregg.

The latter peered over the dizzy edge. Down there, in the very act
of fording the river to get to their side of it, he marked five
horsemen--no, six, for he almost missed the leader of the troop, a dusty
figure which melted into the background. All the terror of the first
flight rushed back on Vic. He stood palsied, not in fear of that posse
but at the very thought of pursuit.

“There's only one way,” he stammered at length. “I'll--Dan, give me a
hand to get a saddle on Grey Molly and I'll laugh at 'em yet. Damn 'em!”

“What you goin' to do?” It was the same unhurried voice which had spoken
to Vic on the day of the rescue and it irritated him in the same manner
now. Kate had come running from the house with her apron fluttering.

“I'm going down that slope to the north,” said Vic, “and I'll get by 'em
hell-bent-for-election. Once I show my heels to that lot they're done!”

He talked as much to restore his courage as from, confidence, for if
the posse sighted him going down that slope on the gray it would take a
super-horseman and a super-horse to escape before they closed the gap.
Barry considered the situation with a new gleam in his eye.

“Wait a minute,” he said, as Vic started towards the corral. “That way
you got planned is a good way--to die. You listen to me.”

But here Kate broke in on them. “Dan, what are you going to do?”

“I'm going to take the gray and go down the slope. I'm going to lead
'em off Vic's trail,” said Barry quietly, but it seemed to Vic that he
avoided his wife's eye.

The voice of Betty Neal, Vic knew, would have risen shrill at a time
like this. Kate spoke even more low than usual, but there was a thing
in her voice that struck a tremor through Gregg. “If it's death for him,
what is it for you?”

“Nothing at all. If they see me and head for me before the way's clear,
I'll let 'em come up and see they have the wrong man. If I get the
chance, I'll lead 'em away. And Vic, you'll hit between those two
mountains--see 'em?--and cut across country. No hoss could carry you
there, except Satan, and you couldn't ride him. You'll have to go on
foot but they'll never look for you on that side. When you get to the
easygoin', down in the valley, buy a hoss and hit for the railroad.”

Kate turned on Vic, trembling. “Are you going to let him do it?” she
asked. “Are you going to let him do it, again?”

He had seen a certain promise of escape held before him the moment
before, but pride made him throw that certainty away.

“Not in a million years,” he answered.

“You'll do what I say, and you'll start now. I got a better idea than
that. If you head just over the side of that north mountain you'll find
a path that a hoss can follow. It won't take you clear away from them
down below, but there ain't a chance in ten that they'll come that way.
Take my old brown hoss with the white face. He'll carry you safe.”

Vic hesitated. The fierce eyes of Kate were on him and with all his soul
he wanted to play the man, but liberty was sweet, sweeter than ever to
Vic. She seemed to give him up as he stood there with his heart, in his
throat; she turned back to Barry.

“Dan!” she pleaded.

She had not touched him, but he made a vague gesture as though brushing
away a restraining hand. She cried: “If you come close to them--if, they
start shooting--you might want to fight back--”

“They shot before,” he answered, “and I didn't fire once.”

“But the second time?”

To be sure, there would be danger in it, but as Barry himself had said,
if the way was closed to him he could surrender to them, and they could
not harm him. Vic tried in vain to understand this overmastering terror
in the girl, for she seemed more afraid of what Dan might do to the
posse than what the posse might do to Dan.

“This ain't a day for fightin',” said Dan, and he waved towards the
mountains. It was one of those misty spring days when the sun raises
a vapor from the earth and the clouds blow low around the upper peaks;
every ravine was poured full of blue shadow, and even high up the
slopes, where patches of snow had melted, grass glimmered, a tender
green among the white. “This ain't a day for fighting,” he repeated.

A shrill, quavering neigh, like the whinney of a galloping horse, rang
from beyond the house, and Vic saw the black stallion racing up and down
his corral. Back and forth he wove, then raced straight for the bars,
flashed above them, and stood free beyond, with the sunshine trembling
on him. He seemed to pause, wondering what to do with his new freedom,
then he came at a loose gallop for the master. Not Satan alone, for
now Black Bart slid across the plateau like a shadow, weaving among the
boulders, and came straight towards Barry. Vic himself felt a change, a
sort of uneasy happiness; he breathed it with the air. The very sunlight
was electric. He saw Kate run close to Barry.

“If you go this time, you'll never come back, Dan!”

The black stallion swung up beside them, and as he halted his hoofs
knocked a rattling spray of pebbles ahead. On the other side of the
woman and the man the wolf-dog ran uneasily here and there, trying to
watch the face of the master which Kate obscured.

“I ain't goin' far. I just want to get a hoss runnin' under me enough to
cut a wind.”

“Even Satan and Bart feel what I feel. They came without being called.
They never do that unless there's danger ahead. What can I do to
convince you? Dan, you'll drive me mad!”

He made no answer, and if the girl wished him to stay now seemed the
time for persuasion; but she gave up the argument suddenly. She turned
away, and Vic saw in her face the same desperate, helpless look as that
of a boy who cannot swim, beyond his depth in the river. There was no
sign of tears; they might come afterwards.

What had come over them? This desperation in Kate, this touch of anxiety
in the very horse and the wolf-dog? Vic forgot his own danger while
he stared and it seemed to him that the spark of change had come from
Barry. There was something in his eyes which Vic found hard to meet.

“The moment you came I knew you brought bad luck with you!” cried Kate.
“He brought you in bleeding. He saved you and came in with blood on his
hands and I guessed at the end. Oh, I wish you--”

“Kate!” broke in Barry.

She dropped upon one of the stones and buried her face in her hands and
Dan paid no more attention to her.

“Hurry up,” he said. “They're across the river.”

And Vic gave up the struggle, for the tears of Kate made him think
of Betty Neal and he followed Dan towards the corral. Around them the
stallion ran like a hunting dog eager to be off.



Chapter X. One Trail Ends

“You can trust Grey Molly to me, Vic,” said Dan, standing at the head of
the gray mare. “I'll keep her as safe as if she was Satan.”

Gregg watched her almost sadly. He had always taken a rather childish
pride in her fierceness. She knew him as a dog knows its master and he
had always been the only one who could handle her readily in the saddle.
But one who knew nothing of horses and their ways could see the entente
which had been instantly established between Barry and Grey Molly. When
he spoke her ears pricked. When he raised his hand she stretched her
nose inquisitively.

There was no pitch in her when Barry swung into the saddle and that
was a thing without precedent in Molly's history. She tried none of her
usual catlike side-steps and throwing of the head. Altogether, Vic was
troubled even as he would have been at the sight of Betty Neal in the
arms of another man. It was desertion.

“Dan,” he said, “I know what you've done for me and I know what you're
doin' now.” He took the slender hand of the other in his big paw.

“If the time comes when I can pay you back, so help me God--”

“Oaths don't do no good,” cut in Barry without a trace of emotion. He
added frankly: “It ain't altogether for your sake. Those gents down
there have played tag once with me and now I'd like to play with them.
Molly's fresh today.”

He was already looking over his shoulder while he spoke; as if his mind
were even then at work upon the posse.

“S'long.”

“S'long, partner. Good luck.”

So they parted and Vic, jogging slowly up the steep path, saw Grey Molly
wheeled and sent at a sweeping gallop over the meadow. His heart
leaped jealously and the next moment went out in a flood of gratitude,
admiration, as Barry swung off the shoulder of the mountain, waved his
hat towards Kate, and dipped at once out of sight.

The shelving ground along which Barry rode sometimes was a broad surface
like a spacious, graded road; again it shelved away and opened a view
of all the valley. When he reached the first of these places the rider
looked back and down and saw the posse skirting rapidly on his side of
the river, behind him and close to the cliff. They rode at an easy lope,
and he could see that their heads were bent to watch the ground. Even
at this casual gait they would reach the point at which he and the gray
must swing onto the floor of the valley before him unless he urged Molly
to top speed. He must get there at a sufficient distance from them
to escape close rifle fire, and certainly beyond point-blank revolver
range. Accordingly he threw his weight more into the stirrups and over
the withers of the mare. This brought greater poundage on her forehand
and made her apt to stumble or actually miss her step, but it increased
her running power.

There was no need of a touch of the spurs. The gathering of the reins
seemed to tell Molly everything. One ear flickered back, then she leaped
out at full speed. It was as though the mind of the man had sent an
electric current down the reins and told her his thought. Now she
floundered at her foot, struck a loose stone, now she veered sharply and
wide to escape a boulder, now she cleared a gulley with a long leap, and
riding high as he was, bent forward out of balance to escape observation
from below. It was only a miracle of horsemanship that kept her from
breaking her neck as they lurched down the pitch. Grey Molly seemed to
be carrying no weight, only a clinging intelligence.

At this speed he was sure to reach the valley safely in front unless the
posse caught sight of him on the way and gave chase, and Barry counted
on that instinct in hunting men which makes them keep their eyes
low--the same sense which leads a searcher to look first under the bed
and last of all at the wall and ceiling. Once more, as he neared his
goal, he looked back and down, and there came the six horsemen, their
quirts swinging, their hat-brims blown straight up they raced at full
speed. They had seen the gray and they rode for blood.

The outstretched neck of Grey Molly, her flattened ears, the rapid
clangor of her hoofs on the rocks, seemed to indicate that she already
was doing her uttermost, but after the glimpse of the pursuit, Barry
crouched a little lower, his hand gathering the reins just behind her
head, his voice was near her, speaking softly, quickly. She responded
with a snort of effort, as though she realized the danger and willingly
accepted it. One ear, as she rushed down the slope, was pricked and one
flagged back to the guiding, strengthening voice of the rider.

The path wound in leisurely curves now, but there was a straight
cut down a slide of gravel, a dangerous slope even in firm ground, a
terrible angle with those loose pebbles underfoot. Yet this was a time
for chance-taking. Already the dusty man on the roan rode with his
revolver balanced for the snap shot. The next instant his gun swung
down, he actually reined up in astonishment. The fugitive had flung
himself far back against the cantle and sent Grey Molly at the slide. It
was not a matter of running as the mare shot over the brink. Molly
sat back on her haunches, braced her forelegs, and went down like an
avalanche. Over the rush and roar of the pebbles, over the yell of
wonder from the pursuers, she heard the voice of her rider, a clear and
steady voice, and the tautened reins telegraphed to her bewildered mind
the wish of the man. She struck the level with stunning force, toppled,
nearly fell, and then straightened along her course in a staggering
gallop. Started from its nice balance by the rush of stones they
loosened, a ten-ton rock came toppling after, leaped up from the valley
floor like a live thing, and then thundered away towards the river.

Grey Molly, finding her legs once more, tried the level going. She
had beaten the same horses before under the crushing impost of Gregg's
weight. With this lighter rider who clung like a part of her, who gave
perfectly to the rhythm of her gallop, she fairly walked away from the
posse. Once, twice and again the gun spoke from the hand of Pete Glass,
but it was the taking of a long last chance rather than a sign of
closing on his chase. In ten minutes Grey Molly dipped out of sight
among the hills.

After the first hour Barry could have cut away across country with
little fear of discovery from the sheriff, but he was in no hurry to
escape. Sometimes he dismounted and looked to his cinches and talked to
the horse. Grey Molly listened with pricking ears and often canted her
head to one side as though she strove to understand the game.

It was a new and singular pleasure to Barry. He was accustomed to the
exhaustless, elastic strength of Satan, with the cunning brain of a
beast of prey and the speed of an antelope. On the black horse he could
have ridden circles around that posse all day. But Grey Molly was
a different problem. She was not a force to be simply directed and
controlled. She was something to be helped. Her very weakness, compared
with the stallion, appealed to him. And it was a thrilling pleasure to
feel his power over her grow until she, also, seemed to have entered the
game.

A game it was, as he had said to Vic when they parted, with the
rather essential difference that in this pastime one was tagged with a
forty-five caliber chunk of lead and was quite apt to remain “it”
 for the remainder of eternity. Barry dropped further and further back
towards the posse. The danger fascinated him. Once he whistled high
and shrill as a hawk's scream from the top of a bluff while the posse
labored through a ravine below. He saw the guns flash out, and waited.
He heard the sing of the bullets around him, and the splashing lead on a
solid-rock face just beneath him; he listened till the deep echoes spoke
from the gulch, then waved his hat and disappeared.

This was almost defeating the purpose of his play for if he came that
close again they would probably make out that they were following a
decoy. Accordingly, since he had now drawn them well away from Vic's
line of escape, he turned his back reluctantly on the posse and struck
across the hills.

He kept on for the better part of an hour before he doubled and swung in
a wide circle towards his cabin. He had laid out a course which the wise
sheriff could follow until dark and be none the wiser; and if Pete Glass
were the finest trailer who ever studied sign and would never be able to
read the tokens of the return ride. Accordingly, with all this well in
mind, he brought Grey Molly to a full halt and gazed around, utterly
stunned by surprise, when, half way up the valley, a rifle spoke small
but sharp from one side, and a bullet clipped the rocks not the length
of the horse away. He understood. When he cut straightaway across the
country he had indeed left a baffling trail, a trail so dim, in fact,
that Pete Glass had wisely given it up and taken the long chance by
cutting back to the point at which the hunt began. So their paths
crossed.

Barry spoke sharply to the mare and loosed the reins, but she started
into a full gallop too late. There came a brief hum, a thudding blow,
and Grey Molly pitched forward.



Chapter XI. A New Trail Begins

If he had been an ordinary rider, sitting heavily far back in the
saddle, at the end of a long ride, Barry would either have been flung
clear and smashed horribly against the rocks, or, more likely, he would
have been entangled in the stirrups and crushed to death instantly by
the weight of his horse; but he rode always lightly poised and when the
mare pitched forward his feet were already clear of the stirrups. He
landed, catlike, on hands and feet, unhurt.

It had been a long shot, a lucky hit even for a marksman of the
sheriff's caliber, and now the six horsemen streamed over a distant
hilltop and swept into the valley to take their quarry dead, or half
dead, from his fall. However, that approaching danger was nothing in the
eye of Barry. He ran to the fallen mare and caught her head in his arms.
She ceased her struggles to rise as soon as he touched her and whinneyed
softly. The left foreleg lay twisted horribly beneath her, broken. Grey
Molly had run her last race, and as Barry kneeled, holding the brave
head close to him, he groaned, and looked away from her eyes. It was
only an instant of weakness, and when he turned to her again he was
drawing his gun from its holster.

The beating hoofs of the posse as they raced towards him made a
growing murmur through the clear air. Barry glanced towards them with a
consummate loathing. They had killed a horse to stop a man, and to him
it was more than murder. What harm had she done them except to carry her
rider bravely and well? The tears of rage and sorrow which a child sheds
welled into the eyes of Dan Barry. Every one of them had a hand in this
horrible killing; was, to that half animal and half-childish nature, a
murderer.

His chin was on his shoulder; the quiver of pain in her nostrils ended
as he spoke; and while the fingers of his left hand trailed caressingly
across her forehead, his right carried the muzzle to her temple.

“Brave Molly, good girl,” he whispered, “they'll pay for you a death for
a death and a man for a hoss.” The yellow which had glinted in his eyes
during the run was afire now. “It ain't far; only a step to go; and
then you'll be where they ain't any saddles, nor any spurs to gall you,
Molly, but just pastures that's green all year, and nothin' to do but
loaf in the sun and smell the wind. Here's good luck to you, girl.”

His gun spoke sharp and short and he laid the limp head reverently on
the ground.

It had all happened in very few seconds, and the posse was riding
through the river, still a long shot off, when Barry drew his rifle from
its case on the saddle. Moreover, the failing light which had made the
sheriff's hit so much a matter of luck was now still dimmer, yet Barry
snapped his gun to the shoulder and fired the instant the butt lay in
the grove. For another moment nothing changed in the appearance of the
riders, then a man leaned out of his saddle and fell full length in the
water.

Around him his companions floundered, lifted and placed him on the bank,
and then threw themselves from their horses to take shelter behind the
first rocks they could find; they had no wish to take chances with a man
who could snap-shoot like this in such a light, at such a distance. By
the time they were in position their quarry had slipped out of sight and
they had only the blackening boulders for targets.

“God amighty,” cried Ronicky Joe, “are you goin' to let that murderin'
hound-dog get clear off, Pete? Boys, who's with me for a run at him?”

For it was Harry Fisher who had fallen and lay now on the wet bank with
his arms flung wide and a red spot rimmed with purple in the center of
his forehead; and Fisher was Ronicky Joe's partner.

“You lay where you are,” commanded the sheriff, and indeed there had
been no rousing response to Ronicky Joe's appeal.

“You yaller quitters,” groaned Joe. “Give me a square chance and I'll
tackle Vic Gregg alone day or night, on hoss or on foot. Are we five
goin' to lay down to him?”

“If that was Vic Gregg,” answered the sheriff, slipping over the insult
with perfect calm, “I wouldn't of told you to scatter for cover; but
that ain't Vic.”

“Pete, what in hell are you drivin' at?”

“I say it ain't Vic,” said the sheriff. “Vic is a good man with a hoss
and a good man with a gun, but he couldn't never ride like the gent over
there in the rocks, and he couldn't shoot like him.”

He pointed, in confirmation, at the body of Harry Fisher.

“You can rush that hill if you want, but speakin' personal, I ain't
ready to die.”

A thoughtful silence held the others until Sliver Waldron broke it with
his deep bass. “You ain't far off, Pete. I done some thinkin' along them
lines when I seen him standin' up there over the arroyo wavin' his hat
at the bullets. Vic didn't never have the guts for that.”

All the lower valley was gray, dark in comparison with the bright peaks
above it, before the sheriff rose from his place and led the posse
towards the body of Grey Molly. There they found as much confirmation of
Pete's theory as they needed, for Vic's silver-mounted saddle was known
to all of them, and this was a plain affair which they found on the dead
horse. Waldron pushed back his hat to scratch his head.

“Look at them eyes, boys,” he suggested. “Molly has been beatin' us all
day and she looks like she's fightin' us still.”

The sheriff was not a man of very many words, and surely of little
sentiment; perhaps it was the heat of the long chase which now made
him take off his hat so that the air could reach his sweaty forehead.
“Gents,” he said, “she lived game and she died game. But they ain't no
use of wastin' that saddle. Take it off.”

And that was Grey Molly's epitaph.


They decided to head straight back for the nearest town with the body of
Harry Fisher, and, fagged by the desperate riding of that day, they let
their horses go with loose rein, at a walk. Darkness gathered; the last
light faded from even the highest peaks; the last tinge of color dropped
out of the sky as they climbed from the valley. Now and then one of the
horses cleared its nostrils with a snort, but on the whole they went in
perfect silence with the short grass silencing the hoofbeats, and never
a word passed from man to man.

Beyond doubt, if it had not been for that same silence, if it had not
been for the slowness with which they drifted through the dark,
what follows could never have happened. They had crossed a hill, and
descended into a very narrow ravine which came to so sharp a point that
the horses had to be strung out in single file. The ravine twisted to
the right and then the last man of the procession heard the sheriff
call: “Halt, there! Up with your hands, or I'll drill you!” When they
swung from side to side, craning their heads to look, they made out a
shadowy horseman facing Pete head on. Then the sheriff's voice again:
“Gregg, I'm considerable glad to meet up with you.”

If that meeting had taken place in any other spot probably Gregg would
have taken his chance on escaping through the night, but in this narrow
pass he could swing to neither side and before he could turn the brown
horse entirely around the sheriff might pump him full of lead. They
gathered in a solemn quiet around him; the irons were already upon his
wrists.

“All right, boys,” he said, “you've got me, but you'll have to give in
that you had all the luck.”

A moment after that sharp command in the familiar, dreaded voice of Pete
Glass, Vic had been glad that the lone flight was over. Eventually this
was bound to come. He would go back and face the law, and three men
lived to swear that Blondy had gone after his gun first.

“Maybe luck,” said the sheriff. “How d' you come back this way?”

“Made a plumb circle,” chuckled Gregg. “Rode like a fool not carin'
where I hit out for, and the end of it was that it was dark before I'd
had sense to watch where the sun went down.”

“Kind of cheerful, ain't you?” cut in Ronicky Joe, and his voice was as
dry as the crisping leaves in an autumn wind.

“They ain't any call for me to wear crepe yet,” answered Gregg. “Worst
fool thing I ever done was to cut and run for it. The old Captain will
tell you gents that Blondy went for his gun first--had it clean out of
the leather before I touched mine.”

He paused, and the silence of those dark figures sank in upon him.

“I got to warn you,” said Pete Glass, “that what you say now can be used
again you later on before the jury.”

“My God, boys,” burst out Vic, “d'you think I'm a plain, low-down,
murderin' snake? Harry, ain't you got a word for me? Are you like the
rest of 'em?”

No voice answered.

“Harry,” said Ronicky, “why don't you speak to him?”

It was a brutal thing to do, but Ronicky was never a gentle sort in
his best moments; he scratched a match and held it so that under the
spluttering light Gregg found himself staring into the face of Harry
Fisher. And he could not turn his eyes away until the match burned
down to Ronicky's finger tip and then dropped in a streak of red to the
ground.

Then the sheriff spoke cold and hard.

“Partner,” he said, “in the old days, maybe your line of talk would do
some good, but not now. You picked that fight with Blondy. You knew you
was faster on the draw and Hansen didn't have a chance. He was the worst
shot in Alder and everybody in Alder knew it. You picked that fight and
you killed your man, and you're goin' to hang for it.”

Another hush; no murmur of assent or dissent.

“But they's one way out for you, Gregg, and I'm layin' it clear. We
wanted you bad, and we got you; but they's another man we want a lot
worse. A pile! Gregg, take me where I can find the gent what done for
Harry Fisher and you'll never stand up in front of a jury. You got my
word on that.”



Chapter XII. The Crisis

Those mountains above the Barry cabin were, as he told Vic Gregg,
inaccessible to men on horseback except by one path, yet there was a
single class of travelers who roamed at will through far more difficult
ground than this. Speaking in general, where a man can go a burro can
go, and where a burro can go he usually manages to carry his pack. He
crawls up a raged down-pitch of rocks that comes dangerously close to
the perpendicular; he walks securely along a crumbling ledge with half
his body over a thousand yards of emptiness. Therefore the prospectors
with their burros have combed the worst mountains of the West and it
was hardly a surprise to Kate Barry when she saw two men come down the
steepest slope above the cabin with two little pack animals scrambling
and sliding before them. It was still some time before nightfall, but
the sun had dropped out of sight fully an hour ago and now the western
mountains were blackening against a sky whose thin, clear blue grew
yellow towards evening.

Against that dark mass of the mountainside, she could not make out the
two travelers clearly, so she shaded her eyes and peered up, high up.
The slope was so sheer that if one of the four figures lost footing it
would come crashing to her very feet. When they saw her and shouted down
the sound fell as clearly as if they had called from the cabin, yet they
had a good half hour's labor between that greeting and the moment they
came out on the level before Kate. From the instant they called she
remained in motionless, deep thought, and when they came now into full
view, she cried out joyously: “Buck, oh Buck!” and ran towards them.
Even the burros stopped and the men stood statue-like; it is rarely
enough that one finds a human being in those mountains, almost an act
of Providence that lead to a house, and a miracle when the trail crosses
the path of a friend. The prospectors came out of their daze with a
shout and rushed to meet her. Each of them had her by a hand, wringing
it; they talked all together in a storm of words.

“Kate, I'm dreamin'!--Dear old Buck!--Have you forgotten me?--Lee
Haines! I should say not.--Don't pay any attention to him. Five
years. And I've been hungerin' to see you all that--.--Where have you
been?--Everywhere! but this is the best thing I've seen.--Come in.--Wait
till we get these packs off the poor little devils.--Oh, I'm so glad to
see you; so glad!--Hurry up, Lee. Your fingers asleep?--How long have
you been out?--Five months.--Then you're hungry.--We've just ate.--But a
piece of pie?--pie? I've been dreamin' of pie!”

A fire already burned in the big living-room of the cabin, for at this
season, at such an altitude, the shadows were always cold, and around
the fire they gathered, each of the men with half a huge pie before him.
They were such as one might expect that mountain region to produce, big,
gaunt, hard-muscled. They had gone unshaven for so long that their faces
were clothed not with an unsightly stubble but with strong, short beard
that gave them a certain grim dignity and made their eyes seem sunken.
They were opposite types, which is usually the case when two men strike
out together. Buck Daniels was black-haired, with an ugly, shrewd face
and a suggestion of rather dangerous possibilities of swift action; but
Lee Haines was a great bulk of a man, with tawny beard, handsome, in a
leonine fashion, more poised than Daniels, fitted to crush. The sharp
glance of Buck flitted here and there, in ten seconds he knew everything
in the room; the steady blue eye of Lee Haines went leisurely from place
to place and lingered; but both of them stared at Kate as if they could
not have enough of her. They talked without pause while they ate. A
stranger in the room would have sealed their lips in utter taciturnity,
but here they sat with a friend, five months of loneliness and labor
behind them, and they gossiped like girls.

Into the jangle of talk cut a thin, small voice from outside, a burst of
laughter. Then: “Bart, you silly dog!” and Joan stood at the open door
with her hand buried in the mane of the wolf-dog. The fork of Buck
Daniels stopped halfway to his lips and Lee Haines straightened until
the chair groaned.

They spoke together, hushed voices: “Kate!”

“Come here, Joan!” Her face glistened with pride, and Joan came forward
with wide eyes, tugging Black Bart along in a reluctant progress.

“It ain't possible!” whispered Buck Daniels. “Honey, come here and shake
hands with your Uncle Buck.” The gesture called forth deep throated
warning from Bart, and he caught back his hand with a start.

“It's always that way,” said Kate, half amused, half vexed; “Bart won't
let a soul touch her when Dan isn't home. Good old Bart, go away, you
foolish dog! Don't you see these are friends?”

He cringed a little under the shadow of the hand which waved him off but
his only answer was a silent baring of the teeth.

“You see how it is. I'm almost afraid to touch her myself when Dan's
away; she and Bart bully me all day long.”

In the meantime the glance of Joan had cloyed itself with sufficient
examination of the strangers, and now she turned back towards the door
and the meadow beyond.

“Bart!” she called softly. The sharp ears of the dog quivered; he came
to attention with a start. “Look! Get it for me!”

One loud scraping of his claws on the floor as he started, and Black
Bart went like a bolt through the door with Joan scrambling after him,
screaming with excitement; from the outside, they heard the cry of
a frightened squirrel, and then its angry chattering from a place of
safety up a tree.

“Shall I call her back again?” asked Kate.

“Not if Bart comes with her,” answered Lee Haines. “I've seen enough of
him to last me a while.”

“Well, we'll have her to ourselves when Dan comes; of course Bart leaves
her to tag around after Dan.”

“When is he comin' back?” asked Buck, with polite interest.

“Anytime. I don't know. But he's always here before it's completely
dark.”

The glance of Buck Daniels kicked over to Lee Haines, exchanged meanings
with him, and came back to Kate.

“Terrible sorry,” he said, “but I s'pose we'll have to be on our way
before it's plumb dark.”

“Go so soon as that? Why, I won't let you.”

“I--” began Haines, fumbling for words.

“We got to get down in the valley before it's dark,” filled in Buck.

Suddenly she laughed, frankly, happily.

“I know what you mean, but Dan is changed; he isn't the same man he used
to be.”

“Yes?” queried Buck, without conviction.

“You'll have to see him to believe; Buck, he doesn't even whistle any
more.”

“What?”

“Only goes about singing, now.”

The two men exchanged glances of such astonishment that Kate could not
help but notice and flush a little.

“Well,” murmured Buck, “Bart doesn't seem to have changed much from the
old days.”

She laughed slowly, letting her mind run back through such happiness as
they could not understand and when she looked up she seemed to debate
whether or not it would be worth while to let them in on the delightful
secret. The moment she dwelt on the burning logs they gazed at her and
then to each other with utter amazement as if they sat in the same room
with the dead come to life. No care of motherhood had marked her face,
but on the white, even forehead was a sign of peace; and drifting over
her hands and on the white apron across her lap the firelight pooled dim
gold, the wealth of contentment.

“If you'd been here today you would have seen how changed he is. We
had a man with us whom Dan had taken while he was running from a posse,
wounded, and kept him here until he was well, and--”

“That's Dan,” murmured Lee Haines. “He's gold all through when a man's
in trouble.”

“Shut up, Lee,” cut in Buck. He sat forward in his chair, drinking up
her story.

“Go on.”

“This morning we saw the same posse skirting through the valley and knew
that they were on the old trail. Dan sent Gregg over the hills and rode
Vic's horse down so that the posse would mistake him, and he could lead
them out of the way. I was afraid, terribly, I was afraid that if the
posse got close and began shooting Dan would--”

She stopped; her eyes begged them to understand.

“Go on,” said Lee Haines, shuddering slightly. “I know what you mean.”

“But I watched him ride down the slope,” she cried joyously, “and I saw
the posse close on him--almost on top of him when he reached the valley.
I saw the flash of their guns. I saw them shoot. I wasn't afraid that
Dan would be hurt, for he seems to wear a charm against bullets--I
wasn't much afraid of that, but I dreaded to see him turn and go back
through that posse like a storm. But--” she caught both hands to her
breast and her bright face tilted up--“even when the bullets must have
been whistling around him he didn't look back. He rode straight on and
on, out of view, and I knew”--her voice broke with emotion--“oh, Buck,
I knew that he had won, and I had won; that he was safe forever; that
there was no danger of him ever slipping back into that terrible other
self; I knew that I'd never again have to dream of that whistling in the
wind; I knew that he was ours--Joan's and mine.”

“By God,” broke out Buck, “I'm happier than if you'd found a gold mine,
Kate. It don't seem no ways--but if you seen that with your own eyes,
it's possible true. He's changed.”

“I've been almost afraid to be happy all these years,” she said, “but
now I want to sing and cry at the same time. My heart is so full that
it's overflowing, Buck.”

She brushed the tears away and smiled at them.

“Tell me all about yourselves. Everything. You first, Lee. You've been
longer away.”

He did not answer for a moment, but sat with his head fallen, watching
her thoughtfully. Women had been the special curse in Lee Haines' life;
they had driven him to the crime that sent him West into outlawry long
years before; through women, as he himself foreboded, he would come at
last to some sordid, petty end; but here sat the only one he had loved
without question, without regret, purely and deeply, and as he watched
her, more beautiful than she had been in her girlhood, it seemed, as he
heard the fitful laughter of Joan outside, the old sorrow came storming
up in him, and the sense of loss.

“What have I been doing?” he murmured at length. He shrugged away his
last thoughts. “I drifted about for a while after the pardon came down
from the governor. People knew me, you see, and what they knew about me
didn't please them. Even today Jim Silent and Jim Silent's crew isn't
forgotten. Then don't look at me like that, Kate; no, I played straight
all the time---then I ran into Buck and he and I had tried each other
out, we had at least one thing in common”--here he looked at Buck and
they both flushed--“and we made a partnership of it. We've been together
five years now.”

“I knew you could break away, Lee. I used to tell you that.”

“You helped me more than you knew,” he said quietly.

She smiled and then turned to escape him. “And now you, Buck?”

“Since then we've made a bit of coin punching cows and we've blown it in
again prospecting. Blown it in? Kate, we've shot enough powder to lift
that mountain yonder but all we've got is color. You could gild the sky
with what we've seen but we haven't washed enough dust to wear a hole in
a tissue-paper pocket. I'll tell you the whole story. Lee packs a jinx
with him. But--Haines, did you ever see a lion as big as that?”

The dimness of evening had grown rapidly through the room while they
talked and now the light from the door was far less than the glow of the
fire. The yellow flicker picked out a dozen pelts stretching as rugs on
the floor or hanging along the wall; that to which Buck pointed was an
enormous skin of a mountain lion stretched sidewise, for if it had been
hung straight up a considerable portion of the tail must have dragged on
the floor. Buck went to examine it. Presently he exclaimed in surprise
and he passed his fingers over it as though searching for something.

“Where was it shot, Kate? I don't find nothin' but this cut that looks
like his knife slipped when he was skinnin'.”

“It was a knife that killed it.”

“What!”

“Don't ask me about it; I see the picture of it in my dreams still. The
lion had dragged the trap into a cave and Bart followed it. Dan went in
pushing his rifle before him, but--when he tried to fire it jammed.”

“Yes?” they cried together.

“Don't ask me the rest!”

They would hardly have let her off so easily if it had not been for the
entrance of Joan who had come back on account of the darkness. Black
Bart went promptly to a corner of the hearth and lay down with his head
on his paws and the little girl sat beside him watching the fire, her
head leaning wearily on his shoulder. Kate went to the door.

“It's almost night,” she said. “Why isn't he here?”

“Buck, they couldn't have overtaken--”

She started. “Dan?”

Buck Daniels grinned reassuringly.

“Not unless his hoss is a pile of bones; if it has any heart in it,
Dan'll run away from anything on four legs. No call for worryin', Kate.
He's simply led 'em a long ways off and waited for evenin' before he
doubled back. He'll come back right enough. If they didn't catch him
that first run they'll never get the wind of him.”

It quieted her for a time, but as the minutes slipped away, as the
darkness grew more and more heavy until a curtain of black fell across
the open door, they could see that she was struggling to control her
trouble, they could see her straining to catch some distant sound. Lee
Haines began to talk valiantly, to beguile the waiting time, and Buck
Daniels did his share with stories of their prospecting, but eventually
more and more often silences came on the group. They began to watch the
fire and they winced when a log crackled, or when the sap in a green
place hissed. By degrees they pushed farther and farther back so that
the light would not strike so fully upon them, for in some way it became
difficult to meet each other's eyes.

Only Joan was perfectly at ease. She played for a time with the ears of
Black Bart, or pried open his mouth and made him show the great white
fangs, or scratched odd designs on the hearth with pieces of charcoal;
but finally she lost interest in all these things and let her head lie
on the rough pelt of the wolf-dog, sound asleep. The firelight made her
hair a patch of gold.

Black Bart slept soundly, too, that is, as soundly as one of his nature
could sleep, for every now and then one of his ears twitched, or he
stirred a paw, or an eyelid quivered up. Yet they all started when he
jumped from his sleep into full wakefulness; the motion made Joan sit
up, rubbing her eyes, and Black Bart reached the center of the room
noiselessly. He stood facing the door, motionless.

“It's Dan,” cried Kate. “Bart hears him! Good old Bart!”

The dog pointed up his nose, the hair about his neck bristled into a
ruff, and out of his quaking body came a sound that seemed to moan and
whimper from the distance at first, but drew nearer, louder, packed the
room with terror, the long drawn howl of a wolf.



Chapter XIII. Equal Payment

They knew what it meant; even Joan had heard the cry of the lone wolf
hunting in the lean time of winter, and of all things sad, all things
lonely, all things demoniacal, the howl of a wolf stands alone. Lee
Haines reached for his gun, little Joan stood up silent on the hearth,
but Kate and Buck Daniels sat listening with a sort of hungry terror,
as the cry sobbed away to quiet. Then out of the mountains and the night
came an answer so thin, so eerie, one might have said it was the voice
of the mountains and white stars grown audible; it stole on the ear as
the pulse of a heart comes to the consciousness.

Truly it was an answer to the cry of the wolf-dog, for in the slender
compass it carried the same wail, the same unearthly quality with this
great difference, that a thrilling happiness went through it, as if some
one walked through the mountains and rejoiced in the unknown terrors. A
sob formed in the throat of Kate and the wolf turned its head and looked
at her, and the yellow of things that see in the night swam in its eyes.
Lee Haines struck the arm of Buck Daniels.

“Buck, let's get clear of this. Let's start. He's coming.”

At the whisper Buck turned a livid face; one could see him gather his
strength.

“I stick,” he said with difficulty, as though his lips were numb.
“She'll need me now.”

Lee Haines stood in a moment's indecision but then settled back in his
chair and gripped his hands together. They both sat watching the door as
if the darkness were a magnet of inescapable horror. Only Joan, of
all in that room, showed no fear after the first moment. Her face was
blanched indeed, but she tilted it up now, smiling; she stole towards
the door, but Kate caught the child and gathered her close with
strangling force. Joan made no attempt to escape. “S-sh!” she cautioned,
and raised a plump little forefinger. “Munner, don't you hear? Don't you
like it?”

As if the sound had turned a corner, it broke all at once clearly over
them in a rain of music; a man's whistling. It went out; it flooded
about them again like beautiful, cold light. Once again it stopped, and
now they sensed, rather than heard, a light, rapid, padding step that
approached the cabin. Dan Barry stood in the door and in that shadowy
place his eyes seemed luminous. He no longer whistled, but a spirit went
from him which carried the same sense of the untamed, the wild happiness
which died out with his smile as he looked around the room. The brim
of his hat curved up, his neckerchief seemed to flutter a little. The
wolf-dog reached the threshold in the same instant and stood looking
steadily up into the face of the master.

“Daddy Dan!” cried Joan.

She had slipped from the nerveless arms of Kate and now ran towards her
father, but here she faltered, there she stopped with her arms slowly
falling back to her sides. He did not seem to see her, but looked past
her, far beyond every one in the room as he walked to the wall and took
down a bridle that hung on a peg. Kate laid her hands on the arms of the
chair, but after the first effort to rise, her strength failed.

“Dan!” she said. It was only a whisper, a heart-stopping sound. “Dan!”
 Her voice rang, then her arms gathered to her, blindly, Joan, who had
shrunk back. “What's happened?”

“Molly died.”

“Died.”

“They broke her leg.”

“The posse!”

“With a long shot.”

“What are you going to do!”

“Get Satan. Go for a ride.”

“Where?”

He looked about him, troubled, and then frowned. “I dunno. Out yonder.”

He waved his arm. Black Bart followed the turn of the master's body, and
switching around in front continued to stare up into Dan's face.

“You're going back after the posse?”

“No, I'm done with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They paid for Grey Molly.”

“You shot one of their--horses?”

“A man.”

“God help us!” Then life came to her; she sprang up and ran between him
and the door. “You shan't go. If you love me!” She was only inches from
Black Bart, and the big animal showed his teeth in silent hate.

“Kate, I'm goin'. Don't stand in the door.”

Joan, slipping around Bart, stood clinging to the skirts of her mother
and watched the face of Dan, fascinated, silent.

“Tell me where you're going. Tell me when you're coming back. Dan, for
pity!”

Loud as a trumpet, a horse neighed from the corral. Dan had stood with
an uncertain face, but now he smiled.

“D'you hear? I got to go!”

“I heard Satan whinney. But what does that mean? How does that make you
go?”

“Somewhere,” he murmured, “something's happening. I felt it on the wind
when I was comin' up the pass.”

“If you--oh, Dan, you're breaking my heart!”

“Stand out of the door.”

“Wait till the morning.”

“Don't you see I can't wait?”

“One hour, ten minutes. Buck--Lee Haines--”

She could not finish, but Buck Daniels stepped closer, trying to make a
smile grow on his ashen face.

“Another minute, Dan, and I'll tell a man you've forgotten me.”

Barry pivoted suddenly as though uneasy at finding something behind him,
and Daniels winced.

“Hello, Buck. Didn't see you was here. Lee Haines? Lee, this is fine.”

He passed from one to the other and his handshake was only the elusive
passage of his fingers through their palms. Haines shrugged his
shoulders to get rid of a weight that clung to him; a touch of color
came back to his face.

“Look here, Dan. If you're afraid that gang may trail you here and start
raising the devil--how many are there?”

“Five.”

“I'm as good with a gun as I ever was in the old days. So is Buck.
Partner, let's make the show down together. Stick here with Kate and
Joan and Buck and I will help you hold the fort. Don't look at me like
that. I mean it. Do you think I've forgotten what you did for me that
night in Elkhead? Not in a thousand years. Dan, I'd rather make my last
play here than any other place in the world. Let 'em come! We'll salt
them down and plant them where they won't grow.”

As he talked the pallor quite left him, and the fighting fire blazed
in his eyes, he stood lion-like, his feet spread apart as if to meet
a shock, his tawny head thrown back, and there was about him a
hair-trigger sensitiveness, in spite of his bulk, a nervousness of hand
and coldness of glance which characterizes the gun-fighter. Buck Daniels
stepped closer, without a word, but one felt that he also had walked
into the alliance. As Barry watched them the yellow which swirled in his
eyes flickered away for a moment.

“Why, gents,” he murmured, “they ain't any call for trouble. The posse?
What's that got to do with me? Our accounts are all squared up.”

The two stared dumbly.

“They killed Grey Molly; I killed one of them.”

“A horse--for a man?” repeated Lee Haines, breathing hard.

“A life for a life,” said Dan simply. “They got no call for
complainin'.”

Glances of wonder, glances of meaning, flashed back and forth from
Haines to Buck.

“Well, then,” said the latter, and he took in Kate with a caution from
the corner of his eye, “if that's the case, let's sit down and chin for
a minute.”

Dan stood with his head bowed a little, frowning; two forces pulled him,
and Kate leaned against the wall off in the shadow with her eyes closed,
waiting, waiting, waiting through the crisis.

“I'd like to stay and chin with you, Buck--but, I got to be off. Out
there--in the night--something may happen before mornin'.” Black Bart
licked the hand of the master and whined. “Easy, boy. We're startin'.”

“But the night's just beginnin',” said Buck Daniels genially. “You got a
world of time before you, and with Satan to fall back on you don't have
to count your minutes. Pull up a chair beside me, Dan, and--”

The latter shook his head, decided. “Buck, I can't do it. Just to sit
here”--he looked about him--“makes me feel sort of choked. Them walls
are as close--as a coffin.”

He was already turning; Kate straightened in the shadow, desperate.

“As a matter of fact, Dan,” said Lee Haines, suddenly, “we need your
help badly.”

“Help?”

The heart of Kate stood in her eyes as she looked at Lee Haines.

“Sit down a minute, Dan, and I'll tell you about it.”

Barry slipped into a chair which he had pulled to one side--so that the
back of it was towards the wall, and every one in the room was before
him.



Chapter XIV. Suspense

The help which Lee Haines wanted, it turned out, was guidance across
a difficult stretch of country which he and Buck Daniels wanted
to prospect, and while he talked Barry listened uneasily. It was
constitutionally impossible for him to say no when a favor was asked of
him, and Haines counted heavily on that characteristic; in the meantime
Black Bart lay on the hearth with his wistful eyes turned steadily up
to the master; and Buck Daniels went to Kate on the farther side of the
room. She sat quivering, alternately crushing and soothing Joan with the
strength of her caresses. Buck drew a chair close, with his back half
towards the fire.

“Turn around a little, Kate,” he cautioned. “Don't let Dan see your
face.”

She obeyed him automatically.

“Is there a hope, Buck? What have I done to deserve this? I don't want
to live; I want to die! I want to die!”

“Steady, steady!” he cut in, and his face was working. “If you keep on
like this you'll bust down in a minute or two. And you know what tears
do to Dan; he'll be out of this house like a scairt coyote. Brace up!”

She struggled and won a partial control.

“I'm fighting hard, Buck.”

“Fight harder still. You ought to know him better than I do. When he's
like this it drives him wild to have other folks thinkin' about him.”

He looked over to Dan. In spite of the bowed head of the latter as he
listened to Haines yarning he gave an impression of electric awareness
to all that was around him.

“Talk soft,” whispered Buck. “Maybe he knows we're talkin' about him.”

He raised his voice out of the whisper, breaking in on a sentence about
Joan, as if this were the tenor of their talk. Then he lowered his tone
again.

“Think quick. Talk soft. Do you want Dan kept here?”

“For God's sake, yes.”

“Suppose the posse gets him here?”

“We musn't dodge the law.”

They were gauging their voices with the closest precision. Talking like
this so close to Barry was like dancing among flasks of nitroglycerine.
Once, and once only, Lee Haines cast a desperate eye across to them,
begging them to come to his rescue, then he went back to his talk with
Dan, raising his voice to shelter the conference of the other two.

“If they come, he'll fight.”

“No, he isn't at the fighting pitch yet, I know!”

“If you're wrong they'll be dead men here.”

“He sees no difference between the death of a horse and the death of a
man. He feels that the law has no score against him. He'll go quietly.”

“And we'll find ways of fightin' the law?”

“Yes, but it needs money.”

“I've got a stake.”

“God bless you, Buck.”

“Take my advice.”

“What?”

“Let him go now.”

She glanced at him wildly.

“Kate, he's gone already.”

“No, no, no!”

“I say he's gone. Look at his eyes.”

“I don't dare.”

“The yaller is comin' up in 'em. He's wild again.” She shook her head in
mute agony. Buck Daniels groaned, softly.

“Then they's goin' to be a small-sized hell started around this cabin
before mornin'.”

He got up and went slowly back towards the fire. Lee Haines was talking
steadily, leisurely, going round and round his subject again and again,
and Barry listened with bowed head, but his eyes were fixed upon those
of the wolf-dog at his feet. When he grew restless, Haines chained him
to the chair with some direct question, yet it was a hard game to play.
All this time the posse might be gathering around the cabin; and the
forehead of Haines whitened and glistened with sweat. His voice was the
only living thing in the cabin, after a time, sketching his imaginary
plans for the benefit of Barry--his voice and the wistful eyes of Joan
which kept steadily on Daddy Dan. Something has come between them and
lifted a barrier which she could not understand, and with all her aching
child's heart she wondered at it.

For the second time that evening the wolf stood up on the hearth, but
he was not yet on his feet before Dan was out of his chair and standing
close to the wall, where the shadows swallowed him. Lee Haines sat with
his lips frozen on the next unspoken word. Two shadows, whose feet made
no sound, Black Bart and Dan glided to the door and peered into the
night--then Barry went back, step by step, until his back was once more
to the wall. Not until that instant did the others hear. It was a step
which approached behind the house; a loud rap at the back door.

It was the very loudness of the knock which made Kate draw a breath of
relief; if it had been a stealthy tap she would have screamed. He who
rapped did not wait for an answer; they heard the door creak open, the
sound of a heavy man's step.

“It's Vic,” said Dan quietly, and then the door opened which led into
the kitchen and the tall form of Gregg entered. He paused there.

“Here I am again, ma'am.”

“Good evening,” she answered faintly.

He cleared his throat, embarrassed.

“Darned if I didn't play a fool game today--hello, Dan.”

The other nodded.

“Rode in a plumb circle and come back where I started.” He laughed, and
the laughter broke off a little shortly. He stepped to the wall and
hung up his bridle on its peg, which is the immemorial manner of asking
hospitality in the mountain-desert. “Hope I ain't puttin' you out, Kate.
I see you got company.”

She started, recalled from her thoughts.

“Excuse me, Vic. Vic Gregg, Buck Daniels, Lee Haines.”

They shook hands, and Vic detained Haines a moment.

“Seems to me I've heard of you, Haines.”

“Maybe.”

Gregg looked at the big man narrowly, and then swung back towards Dan.
He knew many things, now. Lee Haines--yes, that was the name. One of the
crew who followed Jim Silent; and Dan Barry? What a fool he had been not
to remember! It was Dan Barry who had gone on the trail of Silent's gang
and hounded it to death; Lee Haines alone had been spared. Yes, half a
dozen years before the mountain-folk had heard that story, a wild and
improbable one. It fitted in with what Pete Glass had told him of the
shooting of Harry Fisher; it explained a great deal which had mystified
him since he first met Barry; it made the thing he had come to do at
once easier and harder.

“I s'pose Molly showed a clean pair of heels to the whole lot of 'em?”
 he said to Dan.

“She's dead.”

“Dead?” His astonishment was well enough affected. “God amighty, Dan,
not Grey Molly--my hoss?”

“Dead. I shot her.”

Vic gasped. “You?”

“They'd busted her leg. I put her out of pain.”

Gregg dropped into a chair. It was not altogether an affectation, not
altogether a piece of skilful acting now, for though the sheriff had
told him all that happened he had not had a chance to feel the truth;
but now it swept over him, all her tricks, all her deviltry, all that
long companionship. His head bowed.

No smile touched the faces of the others in the room, but a reverent
silence fell on the room. Then that figure among the shadows moved out,
stepped to the side of Vic, and a light hand rested on his shoulder. The
other looked up, haggard.

“She's gone, partner,” Dan said gently, “but she's paid for.”

“Paid for? Dan, they ain't any money could pay me back for Grey Molly.”

“I know; I know! Not that way, but there was a life given for a life.”

“Eh?”

“One man died for Molly.”

As the meaning came home to Gregg he blinked, and then, looking up, he
found a change in the eyes of Barry, for they seemed to be lighted from
within coldly, and his glance went down to the very bottom of Vic's
soul, probing. It was only an instant, a thing of which Gregg could not
make sure, and then Dan slipped back into his place among the shadows by
the wall. But a chill sense of guilt, a premonition of danger, stayed in
Gregg. The palms of his hands grew moist.



Chapter XV. Seven For One

Dangerous men were no novelty for Gregg. He had lived with them, worked
with them, as hard-fisted himself as any, and as ready for trouble, but
the man of the mountain-desert has a peculiar dread for the practiced,
known gun-fighter. In the days of the rapier when the art of fence grew
so complicated that half a life was needed for its mastery, men would as
soon commit suicide as ruffle it with an assured duellist; and the man
of the mountain-desert has a similar respect for those who are born, it
might be said, gun in hand. There was ample reason for the prickling in
his scalp, Vic felt, for here he sat on an errand of consummate danger
with three of these deadly fighters. Two of them he knew by name and
repute, however dimly, and as for Buck Daniels, unless all signs failed
the dark, sharp-eyed fellow was hardly less grim than the others. Vic
gauged the three one by one. Daniels might be dreaded for an outburst
of wild temper and in that moment he could be as terrible as any. Lee
Haines would fight coolly, his blue eyes never clouded by passion, for
that was his repute as the right hand man of Jim Silent, in the days
when Jim had been a terrible, half-legendary figure. One felt that same
quiet strength as the tawny haired man talked to Barry now; his voice
was a smooth, deep current. But as for Barry himself, Gregg could not
compute the factors which entered into the man. By all outward seeming
that slender, half-timid figure was not a tithe of the force which
either of the others represented, but out of the past Gregg's memory
gathered more and more details, clear and clearer, of the wolf-dog,
the black stallion, and the whistling man who tracked down
Silent--“Whistling Dan” Barry; that was what they called him, sometimes.
Nothing was definite in the mind of Gregg. The stories consisted of
patched details, heard here and there at third or fourth hand, but he
remembered one epic incident in which Barry had ridden, so rumor told,
into the very heart of Elkhead, taken from the jail this very man, this
Lee Haines, and carried him through the cordon of every armed man in
Elkhead. And there was another picture, dimmer still, which an eye
witness had painted: of how, at an appointed hour, Barry met Jim Silent
and killed him.

Out of these thoughts he glanced again at the man in the shadow, half
expecting to find his host swollen to giant size. Instead, he found the
same meager form, the same old suggestion of youth which would not age,
the same pale hands, of almost feminine litheness. Lee Haines talked
on--about a porphyry dyke somewhere to the north--a ledge to be found in
the space of ten thousand square miles--a list of vague clues--an appeal
for Barry to help them find it--and Barry was held listening though ever
seeming to drift, or about to drift, towards the door. Black Bart lay
facing his master, and his snaky head followed every movement. Kate
sat where the firelight barely touched on her, and in her arms she held
Joan, whose face and great bright eyes were turned towards Daddy Dan.
All things in the room centered on the place where the man sat by the
wall, and the sense of something impending swept over Gregg; then a wild
fear--did they know the danger outside? He must make conversation; he
turned to Kate, but at the same moment the voice of Buck Daniels beside
him, close.

“I know how you feel, old man. I remember an old bay hoss of mine, a
Morgan hoss, and when he died I grieved for near onto a year, mostly. He
wasn't much of a hoss to look at, too long coupled, you'd say, and his
legs was short, but he got about like a coyote and when he sat down on
a rope you couldn't budge him with a team of Percherons. That's how good
he was! When he was a four year old I was cutting out yearlin's with
him, and how--”

The loud, cheerful tone fell away to a confidential murmur, Daniels
leaned closer, with a smile of prospective humor, but the words which
came to Gregg were: “Partner, if I was you I'd get up and git and I
wouldn't stop till I put a hell of a long ways between me and this
cabin!”

It spoke well of Vic's nerve that no start betrayed him. He bowed his
head a little, as though to catch the trend of the jolly story better,
nodding.

“What's wrong?” he muttered back.

“Barry's watchin' you out of the shadow.”

Then: “You fool, don't look!”

But there was method in Vic's raising his head. He threw it back and
broke into laughter, but while he laughed he searched the shadow by the
wall where Dan sat, and he felt glimmering eyes fixed steadily upon him.
He dropped his head again, as if to hear more.

“What's it mean, Daniels?”

“You ought to know. I don't. But he don't mean you no good. He's lookin'
at you too steady. If I was you--”

Through the whisper of Buck, through the loud, steady talk of Lee
Haines, cut the voice of Barry.

“Vic!”

The latter looked up and found that Barry was standing just within the
glow of the hearth-light and something about him made Gregg's heart
shrink.

“Vic, how much did they pay you?”

He tried to answer; he would have given ten years of life to have his
voice under control for an instant; but his tongue froze. He knew that
every one had turned toward him and he tried to smile, look unconcerned,
but in spite of himself his eyes were wide, fixed, and he felt that they
could stare into the bottom of his soul and see the guilt.

“How much?”

Then his voice came, but he could have groaned when he heard its crazily
shaken, shrill sound.

“What d'you mean, Dan?”

The other smiled and Gregg added hastily: “If you want me to be movin'
along, Dan, of course you're the doctor.”

“How much did they pay?” repeated the quiet, inexorable voice.

He could have stood that, even without much fear, for no matter how
terrible the man might be in action his hands were tied in his own
house; but now Kate spoke: “Vic, what have you done?”

Then it came, in a flood. Hot shame rolled through him and the words
burst out:

“I'm a yaller houn'-dog, a sneakin' no-good cur! Dan, you're right. I've
sold you. They're out there, all of 'em, waitin' in the rocks. For God's
sake take my gun and pump me full of lead!”

He threw his arms out, clear of his holster and turned that Barry
might draw his revolver. Vaguely he knew that Haines and Buck had drawn
swiftly close to him from either side; vaguely he heard the cry of Kate;
but all that he clearly understood was the merciless, unmoved face of
Barry. It was pretense; with all his being he wanted to die, but when
Barry made no move to strike he turned desperately to the others.

“Do the job for him. He saved my life and then I used it to sell him.
Daniels, Haines, I got no use for livin'.”

“Vic,” he said, “take--this!--and march to your friends outside; and
when you get through them, plant a forty-five slug in your own dirty
heart and then rot.” Haines held out his gun with a gesture of contempt.

But Kate slipped in front of him, white and anguish.

“It was the girl you told me about, Vic?” she said. “You did it to get
back to her?”

He dropped his head.

“Dan, let him go!”

“I got no thought of usin' him.”

“Why not?” cried Vic suddenly. “I'll do the way Haines said. Or else let
me stay here and fight 'em off with you. Dan, for God's sake give me one
chance to make good.”

It was like talking to a face of stone.

“The door's open for you, and waitin'. One thing before you go. That's
the same gang you told me about before? Ronicky Joe, Harry Fisher, Gus
Reeve, Mat Henshaw, Sliver Waldron and Pete Glass?”

“Harry Fisher's dead, Dan, if you'll give me one fightin' chance to play
square now--”

“Tell 'em that I know 'em. Tell 'em one thing more. I thought Grey Molly
was worth only one man. But I was wrong. They've done me dirt and played
crooked. They come huntin' me--with a decoy. Now tell 'em from me that
Grey Molly is worth seven men, and she's goin' to be paid for in full.”

He stepped to the wall and took down the bridle which Vic had hung
there.

“I guess you'll be needin' this?”

It ended all talk; it even seemed to Gregg that as soon as he received
the bridle from the hand of Barry the truce ended with a sudden period
and war began. He turned slowly away.



Chapter XVI. Man-Hunting

As Vic Gregg left the house, the new moon peered at him over a black
mountain-top, a sickle of white with a half imaginary line rounding
the rest of the circle, and to the shaken mind of Vic it seemed as if a
ghostly spectator had come out to watch the tragedy among the peaks. At
the line of the rocks the sheriff spoke.

“Gregg, you've busted your contract. You didn't bring him out.”

Vic threw his revolver on the ground.

“I bust the rest of it here and now. I'm through. Put on your irons
and take me back. Hang me and be damned to you, but I'll do no more to
double-cross him.”

Sliver Waldron drew from his pocket something which jangled faintly, but
the sheriff stopped him with a word. He sat up behind his rock.

“I got an idea, Gregg, that you've finished up your job and
double-crossed us! Does he know that I'm out here? Sit down there out of
sight.”

“I'll do that,” said Gregg, obeying, “because you got the right to make
me, but you ain't got the right to make me talk, and nothin' this side
of hell can pry a word out of me!”

The sheriff drew down his brows until his eyes were merely cavities of
blackness. Very tenderly he fondled the rifle-butt which lay across his
knees, and never in the mountain-desert had there been a more humbly
unpretentious figure of a man.

He said: “Vic, I been thinkin' that you had the man-sized makin's of a
skunk, but I'm considerable glad to see I've judged you wrong. Sit quiet
here. I ain't goin' to put no irons on you if you give me your parole.”

“I'll see you in hell before I give you nothin'. I was a man, or a
partways man, till I met up with you tonight, and now I'm a houn'-dog
that's done my partner dirt! God amighty, what made me do it?”

He beat his knuckles against his forehead.

“What you've done you can't undo,” answered the sheriff. “Vic, I've seen
gents do considerable worse than you've done and come clean afterwards.
You're goin' to get off for what you've done to Blondy, and you're goin'
to live straight afterwards. You're goin' to get married and you're
goin' to play white. Why, man, I had to use you as far as I could. But
you think I wanted you to bring me out Barry? You couldn't look Betty
square in the face if you'd done what you set out to do. Now, I ain't
pressin' you, but I done some scouting while you was away, and I heard
four men's voices in the house. Can you tell me who's there?”

“You've played square, Pete,” answered Vic hoarsely, “and I'll do my
part. Go down and get on your hosses and ride like hell; because in ten
minutes you're goin' to have three bad ones around your necks.”

A mutter came from the rest of the posse, for this was rather more than
they had planned ahead. The sheriff, however, only sighed, and as
the moonlight increased Vic could see that he was deeply, childishly
contented, for in the heart of the little dusty man there was that
inextinguishable spark, the love of battle. Chance had thrown him on the
side of the law, but sooner or later dull times were sure to come and
then Pete Glass would cut out work of his own making go bad. The love of
the man-trail is a passion that works in two ways, and they who begin
by hunting will in the end be the hunted; the mountain-desert is filled
with such histories.

“Three to five,” said the sheriff, “sounds more interestin', Vic.”

A sudden passion to destroy that assured calm rose in Gregg.

“Three common men might make you a game,” he said, glowering, “but them
ain't common ones. One of 'em I don't know, but he has a damned nervous
hand. Another is Lee Haines!”

He had succeeded in part, at least. The sheriff sat bolt erect; he
seemed to be hearing distant music.

“Lee Haines!” he murmured. “That was Jim Silent's man. They say he was
as fast with a gun as Jim himself.” He sighed again. “They's nothing
like a big man, Vic, to fill your sights.”

“Daniels and Haines, suppose you count them off agin' the rest of your
gang, Pete. That leaves Barry for you.” He grinned maliciously. “D'you
know what Barry it is?”

“It's a kind of common name, Vic.”

“Pete, have you heard of Whistlin' Dan?”

No doubt about it, he had burst the confidence of the sheriff into
fragments. The little man began to pant and even in the dim light Vic
could see that his face was working.

“Him!” he said at length. And then: “I might of knowed! Him!” He leaned
closer. “Keep it to yourself, Vic, or you'll have the rest of the boys
runnin' for cover before the fun begins.”

He snuggled a little closer to his rock and turned his head towards the
house.

“Him!” he said again.

Columbus, when he saw the land of his dream wavering blue in the
distance, might have hailed it with such a heart-filling whisper, and
Vic knew that when these two met, these two slender, small men--with the
uneasy hands, there would be a battle whose fame would ring from range
to range.

“If they was only a bit more light,” muttered the sheriff. “My God, Vic,
why ain't the moon jest a mite nearer the full!”

After that, not a word for a long time until the lights in the house
were suddenly extinguished.

“So they won't show up agin no background when they make their run,”
 murmured the sheriff. He pushed up his hat brim so that it covered his
eyes more perfectly. “Boys, get ready. They're comin' now!”

Mat Henshaw took up the word, and repeated it, and the whisper ran
down the line of men who lay irregularly among the rocks, until at
last Sliver Waldron brought it to a stop with a deep murmur. Not even
a whisper could altogether disguise his booming bass. It seemed to Vic
Gregg that the air about him grew more tense; his arm muscles commenced
to ache from the gripping of his hands. Then a door creaked--they could
tell the indubitable sound as if there were a light to see it swing
cautiously wide.

“They're goin' out the back way,” interpreted the sheriff, “but they'll
come around in front. They ain't any other way they can get out of here.
Pass that down the line, Mat.”

Before the whisper had trailed out half its course, a woman screamed in
the house. It sent a jag of lightning through the brain of Vic Gregg; he
started up.

“Get down,” commanded the sheriff 'curtly. “Or they'll plant you.”

“For God's sake, Pete, he's killin' his wife--an'--he's gone mad--I seen
it comin' in his eyes!”

“Shut up,” muttered Glass, “an' listen.”

A pulse of sound floated out to them, and stopped the breath of Gregg;
it was a deep, stifled sobbing.

“She's begged him to stay with her; he's gone,” said the sheriff. “Now
it'll come quick.”

But the sheriff was wrong. There was not a sound, not a sign of a rush.

Presently: “What sort of a lass is she, Gregg?”

“All yaller hair, Pete, and the softes' blue eyes you ever see.”

The sheriff made no answer, but Vic saw the little bony hand tense about
the barrel of the rifle. Still that utter quiet, with the pulse of the
sobbing lying like a weight upon the air, and the horror of the waiting
mounted and grew, like peak upon peak before the eyes of the climber.

“Watch for 'em sneakin' up on us through the rocks. Watch for 'em close,
lads. It ain't goin' to be a rush.”

Once more the sibilant murmur ran down the line, and the voice of Sliver
Waldron brought it faintly to a period.

“Three of 'em,” continued the sheriff, “and most likely they'll come at
us three ways.”

Through the shadow Vic watched the lips of Glass work and caught the end
of his soft murmur to himself: “.... all three!”

He understood; the sheriff had offered up a deep prayer that all three
might fall by his gun.

Up from the farther end of the line the whisper ran lightly, swiftly,
with a stammer of haste in it: “To the right!”

Ay, there to the right, gliding from the corner of the house, went a
dark form, and then another, and disappeared among the rocks. They had
offered not enough target for even chance shooting.

“Hold for close range” ordered the sheriff, and the order was repeated.
However much he might wish to win all the glory of the fray, the sheriff
took no chances--threw none of his odds away. He was a methodical man.

A slight patter caught the ear of Vic, like the running of many small
children over a heavy carpet, and then two shades blew around the side
of the house, one small and scudding close to the ground, the other
vastly larger--a man on horseback. It seemed a naked horse at first, so
close to the back did the rider lean, and before Vic could see clearly
the vision burst on them all. Several things kept shots from being fired
earlier.

The first alarm had called attention to the opposite side of the house
from that on which the rider appeared; then, the moon gave only a
vague, treacherous light, and the black horse blended into it--the grass
lightened the fall of his racing feet.

Like a ship driving through a fog they rushed into view, the black
stallion, and Bart fleeting in front, and the surprise was complete. Vic
could see it work even in the sheriff, for the latter, having his rifle
trained towards his right jerked it about with a short curse and blazed
at the new target, again, again, and the line of the posse joined the
fire. Before the crack of their guns went from the ears of Vic, long
before the echoes bellowed back from the hills, Satan leaped high up.
Perhaps that change of position saved both it and its rider. Straight
across the pale moon drove the body with head stretched forth, ears
back, feet gathered close--a winged horse with a buoyant figure upon it.
It cleared a five foot rock, and rushed instantly out of view among
the boulders. The fugitive had fired only one shot, and that when the
stallion was at the crest of its leap.



Chapter XVII. The Second Man

The sheriff was on his feet, whining with eagerness and with the rest of
his men he sent a shower of lead splashing vainly into the deeper night
beside the mountain, where the path wound down.

“It's done! Hold up, lads!” called Pete Glass. “He's beat us!”

The firing ceased, and they heard the rush of the hoofs along the
graveled slope and the clanging on rocks.

“It's done,” repeated the sheriff. “How?”

And he stood staring blankly, with a touch or horror in his face.

“By God, Mat's plugged.”

“Mat Henshaw? Wha--?”

“Clean through the head.”

He lay in an oddly twisted heap, as though every bone in his body were
broken, and when they drew him about they found the red mark in his
forehead and even made out the dull surprise in his set face. There had
been no pain in that death, the second for the sake of Grey Molly.

“The other two!” said the sheriff, more to himself than to Vic, who
stood beside him.

“Easy, Pete,” he cautioned. “You got nothin' agin Haines and Daniels.”

The sheriff flashed at him that hungry, baffled glance.

“Maybe I can find something. You Gregg, keep your mouth shut and stand
back. Halloo!”

He sent a long call quavering between the lonely mountains.

“You yonder--Lee Haines! D'you give up to the law?”

A burst of savage laughter flung back at him, and then: “Why the hell
should I?”

“Haines, I give you fair warnin'! For resistin' the law and interferin',
I ask you, do you surrender?”

“Who are you?”

The big voice fairly swallowed the rather shrill tone of the sheriff.

“I'm sheriff Pete Glass.”

“You lie. Whoever heard of a sheriff come sneakin' round like a coyote
lookin' for dead meat?”

Pete Glass grinned with rage.

“Haines, you ain't much better'n spoiled meat if you keep back. I gave
you till I count ten--”

“Why, you bob-tailed skunk,” shouted a new voice. “You bone-spavined,
pink-eyed rat-catcher,” continued this very particular describer, “what
have you got on us? Come out and dicker and we'll do the same!”

The sheriff sighed, softly, deeply.

“I thought maybe they wouldn't get down to talk,” he murmured. But since
the last chance for a battle was gone, he stepped fearlessly from behind
his rock and advanced into the open. Two tall figures came to meet him.

“Now,” said Lee Haines, stalking forward. “One bad move, just the glint
of a single gun from the rest of you sheep thieves, and I'll tame your
pet sheriff and send him to hell for a model.”

They halted, close to each other, the two big men, Haines in the front,
and the sheriff.

“You're Lee Haines?”

“You've named me.”

“And you're Buck Daniels?”

“That's me.”

“Gents, you've resisted an officer of the law in the act of makin' an
arrest. I s'pose you know what that means?”

Big Lee Haines laughed.

“Don't start a bluff, sheriff. I know a bit about the law.”

“Maybe by experience?”

It was an odd thing to watch the three, every one of them a practiced
fighter, every one of them primed for trouble, but each ostentatiously
keeping his hands away from the holsters.

“What we might have done if we had come to a pinch,” said Haines, “is
one thing, and what we did do is another. Barry was started and off
before we had a chance to show teeth, my friend, and you never even
caught the flash of our guns. If he'd waited but he didn't. There's
nothing left for us to do except say good-by.”

The little dusty man stroked his moustaches thoughtfully. He had gone
out there hoping against hope that his chance might come--to trick the
two into violence, even to start an arrest for reasons which he knew his
posse would swear to; but it must be borne in mind that Pete Glass was a
careful man by instinct. Taking in probable speed of hand and a thousand
other details at a glance, Pete sensed the danger of these two and felt
in his heart of hearts that he was more than master of either of them,
considered alone; better than Buck Daniels by an almost safe margin of
steadiness; better than Lee Haines by a flickering instant of speed. Had
either of them alone faced him, he would have taken his chance, perhaps,
to kill or be killed, for the long trail and the escape had fanned that
spark within him to a cold, hungry fire; but to attempt a play with both
at the same time was death, and he knew it. Seeing that the game was up,
he laid his cards on the table with characteristic frankness.

“Gents,” he said, “I reckon you've come clean with me. You ain't my meat
and I ain't goin' to clutter up your way. Besides”--even in the dull
moonshine they caught the humorous glint of his eyes--“a friend is a
friend, and I'll say I'm glad that you didn't step into the shady side
of the law while Barry was gettin' away.”

No one could know what it cost Pete Glass to be genial at that instant,
for this night he felt that he had just missed the great moment which
he had yearned for since the day when he learned to love the kick of a
six-shooter against the heel of his hand. It was the desire to meet face
to face one whose metal of will and mind was equal to his own, whose
nerves were electric energies perfectly under command, whose muscles
were fine spun steel. He had gone half a lifetime on the trail of
fighters and always he had known that when the crisis came his hand
would be the swifter, his eyes the more steady; the trailing was a
delight always, but the actual kill was a matter of slaughter rather
than a game of hazard. Only the rider of the black stallion had given
him the sense of equal power, and his whole soul had risen for the
great chance of All. That chance was gone; he pushed the thought of it
away--for the time--and turned back to the business at hand.

“They's only one thing,” he went on. “Sliver! Ronicky! Step along,
gents, and we'll have a look at the insides of that house.”

“Steady!” broke in Haines. He barred the path to the front door.
“Sheriff, you don't know me, but I'm going to ask you to take my word
for what's in that house.”

Glass swept him with a look of a new nature.

“I got an idea your word might do. Well, what's in the house?”

“A little five-year-old girl and her mother; nothing else worth seeing.”

“Nothing else,” considered the sheriff, “but that's quite a lot. Maybe
his wife could tell me where he's going? Give me an idea where I might
call on him?”

“Partner, you can't see her.”

“Can't?”

“No, by God!”

“H-m-m!” murmured the sheriff. He watched the big man plant himself,
swaying a little on his feet as though poising for action, and beside
him a slightly smaller figure not less determined.

“That girl in there is old man Cumberlan's daughter,” said Daniels,
“and no matter what her--what Dan Barry may be, Kate Cumberland is white
folks.”

The sheriff remembered what Vic had said of yellow hair and soft blue
eyes.

“Leastways,” he said, “she seems to have a sort of way with the men.”

“Sheriff you're on a cold trail,” said Haines. “Inside that house is
just a heart-broken girl and her baby. If you want to see them--go
ahead!”

“She might know something,” mused the sheriff, “and I s'pose I'd ought
to pry it out of her right now: but I don't care for that sort of
pickin's.” He repeated softly: “A girl and a baby!” and turned on his
heel. “All right, boys, climb your hosses. Two of you take Mat. We'll
bury him where we put Harry. I guess we can pack him that far.”

“How's that?” This from Haines. “One of your gang dropped?”

“He is.”

They followed him and stood presently beside the body. Aside from the
red mark in the forehead he seemed asleep, and smiling at some pleasant
dream; a handsome fellow in the strength of first manhood, this man who
was the second to die for Grey Molly.

“It's the end of Dan Barry,” said Buck. “Lee, we'll never have Whistlin'
Dan for a friend again. He's wild for good.”

The sheriff turned and eyed him closely.

“He's got to come back,” said Haines. “He's got to come back for the
sake of Kate.”

“He'd better be dead for the sake of Kate,” answered Buck.

“Why, partner, this isn't the first time he's gone wild.”

“Don't you see, Lee?”

“Well?”

“He's fighting to kill. He's shooting to kill, and he ain't ever done
that before. He crippled his men; he put 'em out of the way with a
busted leg or a plugged shoulder; but now he's out to finish 'em. Lee,
he'll never come back.”

He looked to the white face of Vic Gregg, standing by, and he said
without anger; “Maybe it ain't your fault, but you've started a pile of
harm. Look at these gents around you, the sheriff and all--they're no
better'n dead, Gregg, and that's all along of you. Barry has started on
the trail of all of you. Look at that house back there. It's packed full
of hell, and all along of you. Lee, let's get back. I'm feelin' sick
inside.”



Chapter XVIII. Concerning The Strength Of Women

There were three things discussed by Lee Haines and Buck Daniels in the
dreary days which followed. The first was to keep on their way across
the mountains and cut themselves away from the sorrow of that cabin. The
second was to strike the trail of Barry and hunt until they found his
refuge and attempt to lead him back to his family. The third was
simply to stay on and where they found the opportunity, help Kate. They
discarded the first idea without much talk; it would be yellow, they
decided, and the debt they owed to the Dan Barry of the old days was too
great to be shouldered off so easily: they cast away the second thought
still more quickly, for the trail which baffled the shrewd sheriff, as
they knew, would be too much for them. It remained to stay with Kate,
making excursions through the mountains from day to day to maintain the
pretence of carrying on their own business, and always at hand in time
of need.

It was no easy part to play, for in the house they found Kate more and
more silent, more and more thoughtful, never speaking of her trouble,
but behind her eyes a ghost of waiting that haunted them. If the wind
shrilled down the pass, if a horse neighed from the corral, there was
always the start in her, the thrill of hope, and afterwards the pitiful
deadening of her smile. She was not less beautiful they thought, as she
grew paler, but the terrible silence of the place drove them away time
and again. Even Joan no longer pattered about the house, and when they
came down out of the mountains they never heard her shrill laughter. She
sat cross-legged by the hearth in her old place during the evenings with
her chin resting on one hand and her eyes fixed wistfully upon the fire;
and sometimes they found her on the little hillock behind the house,
from the top of which she could view every approach to the cabin. Of Dan
and even of Black Bart, her playmate she soon learned not to speak,
for the mention of them made her mother shrink and whiten. Indeed, the
saddest thing in that house was the quiet in which the child waited,
waited, waited, and never spoke.

“She ain't more'n a baby,” said Buck Daniels, “and you can leave it to
time to make her forget.”

“But,” growled Lee Haines, “Kate isn't a baby. Buck, it drives me damn
near crazy to see her fade this way.”

“Now you lay to this,” answered Buck. “She'll pull through. She'll never
forget, maybe, but she'll go on livin' for the sake of the kid.”

“You know a hell of a lot about women, don't you?” said Haines.

“I know enough, son,” nodded Buck.

He had, in fact, reduced women to a few distinct categories, and he
only waited to place a girl in her particular class before he felt quite
intimate acquaintance with her entire mind and soul.

“It'll kill her,” pronounced Lee Haines. “Why, she's like a flower,
Buck, and sorrow will cut her off at the root. Think of a girl like that
thrown away in these damned deserts! It makes me sick--sick! She ought
to have nothing but velvet to touch--nothing but a millionaire for a
husband, and never a worry in her life.” He grew excited. “But here's
the flower thrown away and the heel crushing it without mercy.”

Buck Daniels regarded him with pity.

“I feel kind of sorry for you, Lee, when I hear you talk about girls. No
wonder they make a fool of you. A flower crushed under the foot, eh? You
just listen to me, my boy. You and me figure to be pretty hard, don't
we? Well, soft pine stacked up agin' quartzite, is what we are compared
to Kate.”

Lee Haines gaped at him, too astonished to be angry. He suggested
softening of the brain to Buck, but the latter waved aside the
implications.

“Now, supposin' Kate was one of these dark girls with eyes like black
diamonds and a lot of snap and zip to her. If she was like that I s'pose
you'd figure her to forget all about Dan inside of a month--and maybe
marry you?”

“You be damned!”

“Maybe I am. Them hard, snappy lookin' girls are the ones that smash.
They're brittle, that's why; but you take a soft lookin' girl like Kate,
maybe she ain't a diamond point to cut glass, but she's tempered steel
that'll bend, and bend, and bend, and then when you wait for it to break
it flips up and knocks you down. That's Kate.”

Lee Haines rolled a cigarette in silence. He was too disgusted to
answer, until his first puff of smoke dissolved Buck in a cloud of thin
blue.

“You ought to sing to a congregation instead of to cows, Buck. You have
the tune, and you might get by in a church; but cows have sense.”

“Kate will buckle and bend and fade for a while,” went on Buck, wholly
unperturbed, “but just when you go out to pick daisies for her you'll
come back and find her singing to the stove. Her strength is down deep,
like some of these outlaw hosses that got a filmy, sleepy lookin' eye.
They save their hell till you sink the spurs in 'em. You think she loves
Dan, don't you?”

“I have a faint suspicion of it,” sneered Haines. “I suppose I'm wrong?”

“You are.”

“Buck, I may have slipped a nickel into you, but you're playing the
wrong tune. Knock off and talk sense, will you?”

“When you grow up, son, you'll understand some of the things I'm tryin'
to explain in words of one syllable.

“She don't love Dan. She thinks she does, but down deep they ain't a
damned thing in the world she gives a rap about exceptin' Joan. Men?
What are they to her? Marriage? That's simply an accident that's needed
so she can have a baby. Delicate, shrinkin' flower, is she? I tell you,
my boy, if it was necessary for Joan she'd tear out your heart and mine
and send Dan plumb to hell. You fasten on to them words, because they're
gospel.”

It was late afternoon while they talked, and they were swinging slowly
down a gulch towards the home cabin. At that very time Kate, from the
door of the house where she sat, saw a dark form slink from rock to
rock at the rim of the little plateau, a motion so swift that it flicked
through the corner of her eye, a thing to be sensed rather than seen.
She set up very stiff, her lips white as chalk, but nothing more
stirred. A few minutes later, when her heart was beating almost at
normal she heard Joan scream from behind the house, not in terror,
or pain, as her keen mother-ear knew perfectly well, but with a wild
delight. She whipped about the corner of the house and there she saw
Joan with her pudgy arms around the neck of Black Bart.

“Bart! Dear old Bart! Has he come? Has he come?”

And she strained her eyes against the familiar mountains around her as
if she would force her vision through rock. There was no trace of Dan,
no sign or sound when she would even have welcomed the eerie whistle.
The wolf-dog was already at play with Joan. She was on his back and he
darted off in an effortless gallop, winding to and fro among the rocks.
Most children would have toppled among the stones at the first of his
swerves, but Joan clung like a burr, both hands dug into his hair,
shrieking with excitement. Sometimes she reeled and almost slid at one
of those lightning turns, for the game was to almost unseat her, but
just as she was sliding off Bart would slacken his pace and let her find
a firm seat once more. They wound farther and farther away, and suddenly
Kate cried, terror-stricken: “Joan! Come back!”

A tug at the ear of the wolf-dog swung them around; then as they
approached, the fear left the mind of the mother and a new thought came
in its place. She coaxed Joan from Bart--they could play later on, she
promised, to their heart's desire--and led her into the house. Black
Bart followed to the door, but not all their entreaty or scolding could
make him cross the threshold. He merely snarled at Kate, and even Joan's
tugging at his ears could not budge him. He stood canting his head and
watching them wistfully while Kate changed Joan's clothes.

She dressed her as if for a festival, with a blue bonnet that let the
yellow hair curl out from the edges, and a little blue cloak, and shiny
boots incredibly small, and around the bonnet she laid a wreath
of yellow wild flowers. Then she wrote her letter, closed it in an
envelope, and fastened it securely in the pocket of the cloak.

She drew Joan in front of her and held her by both hands.

“Joan, darling,” she said, “munner wants you to go with Bart up through
the mountains. Will you be afraid?”

A very decided shake of the head answered her, for Joan's eyes were
already over her shoulder looking towards the big dog. And she was a
little sullen at these unnecessary words.

“It might grow dark,” she said. “You wouldn't care?”

Here Joan became a little dubious, but a whine from Bart seemed to
reassure her.

“Bart will keep Joan,” she said.

“He will. And he'll take you up through the rocks to Daddy Dan.”

The face of the child grew brilliant.

“Daddy Dan?” she whispered.

“And when you get to him, take this little paper out of your pocket and
give it to him. You won't forget?”

“Give the paper to Daddy Dan,” repeated Joan solemnly.

Kate dropped to her knees and gathered the little close, close,
until Joan cried out, but when she was eased the child reached up an
astonished hand, touched the face of Kate with awe, and then stared at
her finger tips.

A moment later, Joan stood in front of Black Bart, with the head of the
wolf-dog seized firmly between her hands while she frowned intently into
his face.

“Take Joan to Daddy Dan,” she ordered.

At the name, the sharp ears pricked; a speaking intelligence grew up in
his eyes.

“Giddap,” commanded Joan, when she was in position on the back of Bart.
And she thumped her heels against the furry ribs.

Towards Kate, who stood trembling in the door, Bart cast the departing
favor of a throat-tearing growl, and then shambled across the meadow
with that smooth trot which wears down all other four-footed creatures.
He was already on the far side of the meadow, and beginning the ascent
of the first slope when the glint of the sun on the yellow wild flowers
flashed on the eye of Kate. It had all seemed natural until that moment,
the only possible thing to do, but now she felt suddenly that Joan was
thrown away thought of the darkness which would soon come--remembered
the yellow terror which sometimes gleamed in the eyes of Black Bart
after nightfall.

She cried out, but the wolf-dog kept swiftly on his way. She began to
run, still calling, but rapidly as she went, Black Bart slid steadily
away from her, and when she reached the shoulder of the mountain, she
saw the dark form of Bart with the blue patch above it drifting up the
wall of the opposite ravine.

She knew where they were going now; it was the old cave upon which she
and Dan had come one day in their rides, and Dan had prowled for a long
time through the shadowy recesses.



Chapter XIX. The Venture

From the moment Joan gave the name of Daddy Dan, the wolf-dog kept to
the trail with arrowy straightness. Whatever the limitations of
Bart's rather uncanny intelligence, upon one point he was usually
letter-perfect, and even when a stranger mentioned Dan in the hearing of
the dog it usually brought a whine or at least an anxious look. He hewed
to his line now with that animal sense of direction which men can never
wholly understand. Boulders and trees slipped away on either side of
Joan; now on a descent of the mountain-side he broke into a lope that
set the flowers fluttering on her bonnet; now he prowled up the ravine
beyond, utterly tireless.

He was strictly business. When she slipped a little from her place as he
veered around a rock he did not slow up, as usual, that she might regain
her seat, but switched his head back with a growl that warned her into
position. That surprise was hardly out of her mind when she saw a gay
patch of wild-flowers a little from the line of his direction, and she
tugged at his ear to swing him towards it. A sharp jerk of his head
tossed her hand aside, and again she caught the glint of wild eyes as he
looked back at her. Then she grew grave, puzzled. She trusted Black Bart
with all her heart, as only a child can trust dumb animals, but now she
sensed a change in him. She had guessed at a difference on that night
when Dan came home for the last time; and the same thing seemed to be in
the dog today.

Before she could make up her mind as to what it might be, Black Bart
swung aside up a steep slope, and whisked her into the gloom of a cave.
Into the very heart of the darkness he glided and stopped.

“Daddy Dan!” she called.

A faint echo, after a moment, came back to her from the depths of the
cave, making her voice strangely deep. Otherwise, there was no answer.

“Bart!” she whispered, suddenly frightened by the last murmur of that
echo, “Daddy Dan's not here. Go back!”

She tugged at his ear to turn him, but again that jerk of the head freed
his ear. He caught her by the cloak, crouched close to the floor, and
she found herself all at once sitting on the gravelly floor of the cave
with Bart facing her.

“Bad Bart!” she said, scrambling to her feet.

“Naughty dog!”

She was still afraid to raise her voice in that awful silence, and in
the dark. When she glanced around her, she made out vague forms through
the dimness that might be the uneven walls of the cave, or might be
strange and awful forms of night.

“Take me home!”

A growl that went shuddering down the cave stopped her, and now she saw
that the eyes of Bart glowed green and yellow. Even then she could not
believe that he would harm her, and stretched out a tentative hand. This
time she made out the flash of his teeth as he snarled. He was no longer
the Bart she had played with around the cabin, but a strange wild thing,
and with a scream she darted past him toward the door. Never had those
chubby legs flown so fast, but even as the light from the mouth of the
cave glimmered around her, she heard a crunching on the gravel from
behind, and then a hand, it seemed, caught her cloak and jerked her to a
stop.

She fell sprawling, head over heels, and when she looked up, there sat
Bart upon his haunches above her, growling terribly, and gripping the
end of the cloak. No doubt about it now. Black Bart would have his teeth
in her throat if she made another movement toward the entrance. A city
child would have either gone mad with terror or else made that fatal
struggle to reach the forbidden place, but Joan had learned many things
among the mountains, and among others, she knew the difference between
the tame and the free. The old dappled cow was tame, for instance;
and the Maltese cat, which came too close to Bart the year before and
received a broken back for its carelessness, had been tame; and the
brown horse with the white face and the dreary eyes was tame. They
could be handled, and teased, and petted and bossed about at will. Other
creatures were different. For instance, the scream of the hawk
always made her shrink a little closer to the ground, or else run
helter-skelter for the house, and sometimes, up the gulches, she had
heard the wailing of a mountain lion on the trail, hunting swiftly, and
very hungry. There was even something about the dead eyes of certain
lynxes and coyotes and bobcats which Daddy Dan trapped that made Joan
feel these animals belonged to a world where the authority of man was
only the strength of his hand or his cunning. Not that she phrased
these thoughts in definite words, but Joan was very close to nature, and
therefore her instincts gave her a weird little touch of wisdom in such
matters.

And when she lay there tangled in her cloak and looked up into the
glowing eyes of Bart and heard his snarling roll around her, and pass in
creepy chills up her back, she nearly died of fear, to be sure, but she
lay as still as still, frozen into a part of the rock. Black Bart was
gone, and in his place was a terrible creature which belonged there
among the shadows, for it could see in the night.

Presently the bright eyes disappeared, and now she saw that Bart lay
stretched across the entrance to the cave, where the long shadow was now
creeping down the slope. Inches by inches she ventured to sit up, and
all it brought from Bart was a quick turn of the head and a warning
growl. It meant as plainly as though he had spoken in so many words:
“Stay where you are and I don't care in the least what you do, but don't
try to cross this entrance if you fear the length of my teeth and the
keenness thereof.” And she did fear them, very much, for she remembered
the gashes across the back and the terrible rips up the side, of the
dead Maltese cat.

She even took a little heart, after a time. A grownup cannot feel terror
or grief as keenly as a child, but neither does terror or grief pass
away a tithe as fast. She seemed at liberty to roam about in the cave
as long as she did not go near the entrance, and now the shadows and the
dimness no longer frightened her. Nothing was terrible except that long,
dark body which lay across the entrance to the cave, and she finally got
to her feet and began to explore. She came first on a quantity of dead
grass heaped in a corner that was where Satan was stalled, no doubt, and
it made all the cave seem almost homelike. She found, too, a number of
stones grouped together with ashes in the hollow circle-that was where
the fires were built, and there to the side lay the pile of dead wood. A
little down the cave and directly in the center of the top, she next
saw the natural aperture where the smoke must escape and last of all she
came on the bed. Boughs heaped a foot thick with the blankets on top,
neatly stretched out, and the tarpaulin over all, made a couch as soft
as down and fragrant with the pure scent of evergreens.

Joan tried the surface with a foot that sank to her ankle, then with her
hands, and finally sat down to think. The first fear was almost gone;
she understood that Bart was keeping her here until Dan came home, and
fear does not go hand in hand with understanding. She only wondered,
now, at the reason that kept Daddy Dan living in this cave so far from
the warm comfort of the cabin, and so far away from her mother; but
thinking makes small heads drowsy, and in five minutes Joan lay with her
head pillowed on her arm, sound asleep.

When she awoke, the evening-gray of the cave had given place to utter
blackness, alarming and thick. Joan sat up with a start; she would have
cried out, bewildered, but now she heard a noise on the gravel, and
turned to see Daddy Dan entering the cave with Satan behind him, quite
distinctly outlined by the sunset outside. Black Bart walked first,
looking back over his shoulder as though he led the way.

It was partly because the black, silhouetted figures awed her, somewhat,
and partly because she wished to give Daddy Dan a gay surprise, that
Joan did not run to him. And then, in the darkness, she heard Satan
munching the dried grass, and the squeak and rattle as the saddle was
drawn off and hung up, scraping against the rock.

“What you been doin', Bart?” queried the voice of Daddy Dan, and the
last of Joan's fears fell from her as she listened. “You act kind of
worried. If you been runnin' rabbits all day and got your pads full of
thorns I'll everlastin'ly treat you rough.”

The wolf-dog whined.

“Well, speak up. What you want? Want me over there?”

It would have been a trifle unearthly to most people, but Joan knew
the ways of Daddy Dan with Satan and Black Bart. She lay quite still,
shivering with pleasure as the footsteps approached her. Then a match
scratched--she saw by the blue spurt of flame that he was lighting a
pine torch, then whirling it until the flame ate down to the pitchy
knot. He held it above his head, and now she saw him plainly: the light
cascaded over his shoulders, glowed on his eyes, and then puffed out
sidewise in a draught.

Joan was upon her feet, and running toward him with a cry of joy, until
she remembered that he was not to be approached like her mother. There
were never any bear-hugs from him, no caresses, not much laughter. She
stopped barely in time, and stood with her fingers interlaced, staring
up at him, half delighted, half afraid. She read his mind by microscopic
changes in his eyes and lips.

“Munner sent me.”

That was wrong, she saw at once.

“And Bart brought me.” Much better, now. “And oh, Daddy Dan, I've been
lonesome for you!”

He continued to stare at her for another moment, and even Joan could not
tell whether he were angry or indifferent or pleased.

“Well,” he murmured at length, “I guess you're hungry, Joan?”

She knew it was complete acceptance, and she could hardly keep from a
shout of happiness. Daddy Dan had a great aversion to sudden outcries.

“I guess I am,” said Joan.



Chapter XX. Discipline

He made the preparation for supper with such easy speed that everything
seemed to be done by magic hands. When Joan's mother cooked supper there
was always much rattling of the stove, then the building of the fire, a
long preparation of food, and another interval when things steamed and
sizzled on the fire. There followed the setting of the table, and then
a long, aching time of hunger when the food was in sight, but one could
not eat until Daddy Dan had done this, and Munner had done that. Also,
when one did eat, half the taste was taken from things by the necessity
of various complicated evolutions of knife and fork. Instance the
absurdity of taking the fork under the thumb with the forefinger
pressing along the back of the wobbly instrument, when any one could see
that the proper, natural way of using a fork was to grasp it daggerwise
and drive it firmly through that skidding piece of meat. Not only this,
but a cup must be held in one hand, and bread must be broken into little
pieces before putting butter on it. Above all, no matter how terribly
hard one tried, there was sure to be a mistake, and then: “Now, Joan,
don't do that. This is the way--”

But how different everything was in this delightful house of Daddy Dan!

In an incredibly short time three torches flared about them and filled
the air with scents of freshness and the outdoors-scents that went
tingling up the nose and filled one with immense possibilities of
eating. At the very same time, a few motions caused a heap of wood
to catch fire and blaze among the stones while a steady stream of
blue-white smoke wavered up toward the top of the cave and disappeared
in the shadows. After this her father showed her a little stream of
water which must come from a spring far back in the cave, and the
current slipped noiselessly along one wall, and dipped of sight again
before it reached the entrance to the place. Here she discovered a
little bowl, made out of small stones nicely fitted together, and
allowing the water to pour over one edge and out at another with a
delicious purling--such crystal clear water that one actually wanted to
wash in it even if it was cold, and even if one had the many sore places
on fingers and nose and behind the ears.

Behold! no sooner did one turn from the washing of hands and face than
the table was miraculously spread upon the surface of a flat rock, with
other stones nearby to serve as chairs; and on the table steamed “pone,”
 warmed over; coffee with milk in it--coffee, which was so strictly
banned at home!--potatoes sliced to transparent thinness and fried to
crisp brown at the edges, and a great slab of meat that fairly shouted
to the appetite.

So far so good, but the realization was a thousand fold better than
anticipation. No cutting of one's own meat at this enchanted board!
The shining knife of Daddy Dan divided it into delectable bits with the
speed of light, and it needed only the slightest amount of experimenting
and cautious glances to discover that one could use a fork daggerwise,
and when in doubt even seize upon a morsel with one's fingers and wipe
the fingers afterwards on a bit of the dry grass. One could grasp the
cup by both sides, scorning the silly handle, and if occasionally one
sipped the coffee with a little noise--which added astonishingly to the
taste--there was no sharp warning, no frowning eye to overlook. Besides,
at Munner's table, there was never time to pay attention to Joan, for
there was talk about vague, abstract things--the price of skins,
the melting of the snows, the condition of the passes, the long and
troubling argument about the wicker chairs, with some remarkably foolish
asides, now and then, concerning happiness and love--when all the time
any one with half an eye could see that the thing to do was to eat
and eat and eat until that hollow place ceased to be. Talking came
afterwards.

In the house of Daddy Dan all these things were ordered as they should
be. Not a word was said; not a glance of criticism rested upon her; when
her tin plate was cleared she heard no reproofs for eating too greedily,
but she was furnished anew from the store of good things on the rock.

In place of conversation, there were other matters to occupy the mind
during the meal. For presently she observed the beautiful head of Satan
just behind his master--Satan, who could pass over noisy gravel with
the softness of a cat, and now loomed out of the deeper night down the
cavern. Inch by inch, with infinite caution and keenly pricked ears,
the head lowered beside Dan, and the quivering, delicate muzzle stole
towards a fragment of the “pone.” Joan watched breathlessly and then she
saw that in spite of the caution of that movement her father knew all
about it--just a glint of amusement in the corner of his eyes, just a
slight twitch at the corners of his mouth to tell Joan that he was as
delighted as a boy playing a trick. Barely in time to save the morsel
of pone, he spoke and the head was dashed up. Yet Satan was not entirely
discouraged. If he could not steal the bread he would beg for it. It
made Joan pause in her destruction of the edibles, not to watch openly,
for an instinct told her that the thing to do was to note these by-plays
from the corner of one's eye, as Daddy Dan did, and swallow the ripples
of mirth that came tickling in the throat. She knew perfectly well that
Satan would have it in the end, for of all living things not even Munner
had such power over Dan as the black stallion. He maneuvered adroitly.
First he circled the table and stood opposite the master, begging with
his eyes, but Dan looked fixedly down at the rock until an impatient
whinny called up his eyes. Then he pretended the most absolute surprise.

“Why, Satan, you old scoundrel, what are you doin' over there? Get back
where you belong?”

He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder and Satan glided around the
rock and stood once more behind Dan.

“Manners?” continued Dan. “You ain't got 'em. You'll be tryin' to sit
down at the table with me, pretty soon.” He concluded: “But I'll teach
you one of these days, and you'll smart for a week.”

Even at the mock menace Joan trembled a little, but to her astonishment
Satan paid not the slightest heed. Dan sat with his hat on his
head--which was a new and delightful event at the table--and now the
stallion took the hat by the crown, dexterously, and raised it just
an inch and put it back in place. Black Bart, having crept out of the
shadows sat down near Joan with his long red tongue lolling out. This
procedure called a growl from him, but the master continued eating
without the slightest interest, apparently, in Satan's insolence.

A velvety muzzle appeared, with the chin resting on the shoulder of Dan
and the great, luminous eyes above. He whinnied so softly that it was
not more than a human whisper, and meant almost as much.

“Oh,” said Dan, in all seeming just roused to attention, “hungry, old
boy?”

He raised the morsel of “pone” between thumb and forefinger, holding it
tightly. Then it was a joy to watch Satan. He tried to tug it all away
at once, but only a fragment broke off. He stamped in impatience,
and then went to work to nibble the bread away on all sides of Dan's
fingers, very fine work for such broad, keen chisels as Satan's teeth,
but he went about it with the skill of long practice, turning his
head this way and that and always watching the face of the master with
sidewise eyes, one ear forward and one ear back. Finally the tight
fingers opened out, and Satan gathered the last crumbs from the smooth
palm.

Two or three times during this performance Black Bart had half risen
from his haunches and a growl swelled almost inaudibly in his throat,
but now he stalked around the table and pushed his narrow head between
Dan's shoulder and the stallion. A snarl of incredible ferocity made
Satan turn, but without the slightest dread, apparently. For an instant
the two stood nose to nose, Black Bart a picture of snarling danger and
Satan with curiously pricking ears and bright eyes. The growling rose
towards a crescendo, a terrible sound; then a lean hand shot out with
that speed which Joan could never comprehend--and which always made
her think, rather breathlessly, of the strike of a snake. The fingers
settled around the muzzle of Bart.

“Of all the no-good houn'-dogs,” declared Dan, “you're the worst, and
the most jealousest. Lie down!”

Bart obeyed, slowly, but his evil eyes were fixed upwards upon the head
of Satan.

“If you got any manners,” remarked Dan, “you'll be sayin' that you're
sorry.”

The ears flattened along the snaky head; otherwise no answer.

“Sorry!” repeated the master.

Out of the deep throat of Black Bart, infinitely, ludicrously small,
came a whine which was more doglike than anything Joan had ever heard,
before, from the wolf.

“Now,” continued the implacable master, “you go over in that corner, and
lie down.”

Black Bart arose with a finally ugly look for Satan and sneaked with
hanging head and tail to the outer edge of the circle of light.

“Farther! Clear over there in the da

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