← catalogue

The Quirt

by B. M. Bower · English · Gutenberg #19166 · 347,330 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Quirt
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Quirt

Author: B. M. Bower

Illustrator: Anton Otto Fischer


        
Release date: September 3, 2006 [eBook #19166]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19166

Credits: Produced by Kathryn Lybarger, Joseph R. Hauser and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUIRT ***




Produced by Kathryn Lybarger, Joseph R. Hauser and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





[Illustration: Cover]




THE QUIRT




=By B.M. Bower=

  GOOD INDIAN

  LONESOME LAND

  THE UPHILL CLIMB

  THE GRINGOS

  THE RANCH AT THE WOLVERINE

  THE FLYING U'S LAST STAND

  JEAN OF THE LAZY A

  THE PHANTOM HERD

  THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX

  STARR, OF THE DESERT

  THE LOOKOUT MAN

  CABIN FEVER

  SKYRIDER

  THE THUNDER BIRD

  RIM O' THE WORLD

  THE QUIRT




[Illustration: Al's gun spoke, and Warfield sagged at the knees and the
shoulders, and slumped to the ground.
  FRONTISPIECE. _See page 294._]



THE QUIRT


BY
B.M. BOWER



WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
ANTON OTTO FISCHER



[Illustration]



BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1920




_Copyright, 1920,_

BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

       *       *       *       *

_All rights reserved_

Published May, 1920
Reprinted, May, 1920
Reprinted, July, 1920
Reprinted, October, 1920




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                      PAGE

  I. LITTLE FISH                                  1

  II. THE ENCHANTMENT OF LONG DISTANCE           12

  III. REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING      22

  IV. "SHE'S A GOOD GIRL WHEN SHE AIN'T CRAZY"   38

  V. A DEATH "BY ACCIDENT"                       54

  VI. LONE ADVISES SILENCE                       68

  VII. THE MAN AT WHISPER                        85

  VIII. "IT TAKES NERVE JUST TO HANG ON"        100

  IX. THE EVIL EYE OF THE SAWTOOTH              115

  X. ANOTHER SAWTOOTH "ACCIDENT"                126

  XI. SWAN TALKS WITH HIS THOUGHTS              144

  XII. THE QUIRT PARRIES THE FIRST BLOW         158

  XIII. LONE TAKES HIS STAND                    168

  XIV. "FRANK'S DEAD"                           178

  XV. SWAN TRAILS A COYOTE                      192

  XVI. THE SAWTOOTH SHOWS ITS HAND              200

  XVII. YACK DON'T LIE                          216

  XVIII. "I THINK AL WOODRUFF'S GOT HER"        233

  XIX. SWAN CALLS FOR HELP                      245

  XX. KIDNAPPED                                 255

  XXI. "OH, I COULD KILL YOU!"                  264

  XXII. "YACK, I LICK YOU GOOD IF YOU BARK"     277

  XXIII. "I COULDA LOVED THIS LITTLE GIRL"      284

  XXIV. ANOTHER STORY BEGINS                    296




THE QUIRT




CHAPTER ONE

LITTLE FISH


Quirt Creek flowed sluggishly between willows which sagged none too
gracefully across its deeper pools, or languished beside the rocky
stretches that were bone dry from July to October, with a narrow channel
in the center where what water there was hurried along to the pools
below. For a mile or more, where the land lay fairly level in a
platter-like valley set in the lower hills, the mud that rimmed the
pools was scored deep with the tracks of the "TJ up-and-down" cattle, as
the double monogram of Hunter and Johnson was called.

A hard brand to work, a cattleman would tell you. Yet the TJ up-and-down
herd never seemed to increase beyond a niggardly three hundred or so,
though the Quirt ranch was older than its lordly neighbors, the Sawtooth
Cattle Company, who numbered their cattle by tens of thousands and
whose riders must have strings of fifteen horses apiece to keep them
going; older too than many a modest ranch that had flourished awhile and
had finished as line-camps of the Sawtooth when the Sawtooth bought
ranch and brand for a lump sum that looked big to the rancher, who
immediately departed to make himself a new home elsewhere: older than
others which had somehow gone to pieces when the rancher died or went to
the penitentiary under the stigma of a long sentence as a cattle thief.
There were many such, for the Sawtooth, powerful and stern against
outlawry, tolerated no pilfering from their thousands.

The less you have, the more careful you are of your possessions. Hunter
and Johnson owned exactly a section and a half of land, and for a mile
and a half Quirt Creek was fenced upon either side. They hired two men,
cut what hay they could from a field which they irrigated, fed their
cattle through the cold weather, watched them zealously through the
summer, and managed to ship enough beef each fall to pay their grocery
bill and their men's wages and have a balance sufficient to buy what
clothes they needed, and perhaps pay a doctor if one of them fell ill.
Which frequently happened, since Brit was becoming a prey to rheumatism
that sometimes kept him in bed, and Frank occasionally indulged himself
in a gallon or so of bad whisky and suffered afterwards from a badly
deranged digestion.

Their house was a two-room log cabin, built when logs were easier to get
than lumber. That the cabin contained two rooms was the result of
circumstances rather than design. Brit had hauled from the mountain-side
logs long and logs short, and it had seemed a shame to cut the long ones
any shorter. Later, when the outside world had crept a little closer to
their wilderness--as, go where you will, the outside world has a way of
doing--he had built a lean-to shed against the cabin from what lumber
there was left after building a cowshed against the log barn.

In the early days, Brit had had a wife and two children, but the wife
could not endure the loneliness of the ranch nor the inconvenience of
living in a two-room log cabin. She was continually worrying over
rattlesnakes and diphtheria and pneumonia, and begging Brit to sell out
and live in town. She had married him because he was a cowboy, and
because he was a nimble dancer and rode gallantly with silver-shanked
spurs ajingle on his heels and a snakeskin band around his hat, and
because a ranch away out on Quirt Creek had sounded exactly like a story
in a book.

Adventure, picturesqueness, even romance, are recognized and appreciated
only at a distance. Mrs. Hunter lost the perspective of romance and
adventure, and shed tears because there was sufficient mineral in the
water to yellow her week's washing, and for various other causes which
she had never foreseen and to which she refused to resign herself.

Came a time when she delivered a shrill-voiced, tear-blurred ultimatum
to Brit. Either he must sell out and move to town, or she would take the
children and leave him. Of towns Brit knew nothing except the
post-office, saloon, cheap restaurant side,--and a barber shop where a
fellow could get a shave and hair-cut before he went to see his girl.
Brit could not imagine himself actually _living_, day after day, in a
town. Three or four days had always been his limit. It was in a
restaurant that he had first met his wife. He had stayed three days when
he had meant to finish his business in one, because there was an
awfully nice girl waiting on table in the Palace, and because there was
going to be a dance on Saturday night, and he wanted his acquaintance
with her to develop to the point where he might ask her to go with him,
and be reasonably certain of a favorable answer.

Brit would not sell his ranch. In this Frank Johnson, old-time friend
and neighbor, who had taken all the land the government would allow one
man to hold, and whose lines joined Brit's, profanely upheld him. They
had planned to run cattle together, had their brand already recorded,
and had scraped together enough money to buy a dozen young cows.
Luckily, Brit had "proven up" on his homestead, so that when the irate
Mrs. Hunter deserted him she did not jeopardize his right to the land.

Brit was philosophical, thinking that a year or so of town life would be
a cure. If he missed the children, he was free from tears and nagging
complaints, so that his content balanced his loneliness. Frank proved up
and came down to live with him, and the partnership began to wear into
permanency. Share and share alike, they lived and worked and wrangled
together like brothers.

For months Brit's wife was too angry and spiteful to write. Then she
wrote acrimoniously, reminding Brit of his duty to his children. Royal
was old enough for school and needed clothes. She was slaving for them
as she had never thought to slave when Brit promised to honor and
protect her, but the fact remained that he was their father even if he
did not act like one. She needed at least ten dollars.

Brit showed the letter to Frank, and the two talked it over solemnly
while they sat on inverted feed buckets beside the stable, facing the
unearthly beauty of a cloud-piled Idaho sunset. They did not feel that
they could afford to sell a cow, and two-year-old steers were out of the
question. They decided to sell an unbroken colt that a cow-puncher
fancied. In a week Brit wrote a brief, matter-of-fact letter to Minnie
and enclosed a much-worn ten-dollar banknote. With the two dollars and a
half which remained of his share of the sale, Brit sent to a mail-order
house for a mackinaw coat, and felt cheated afterwards because the coat
was not "wind and water proof" as advertised in the catalogue.

More months passed, and Brit received, by registered mail, a notice that
he was being sued for divorce on the ground of non-support. He felt
hurt, because, as he pointed out to Frank, he was perfectly willing to
support Minnie and the kids if they came back where he could have a
chance. He wrote this painstakingly to the lawyer and received no reply.
Later he learned from Minnie that she had freed herself from him, and
that she was keeping boarders and asking no odds of him.

To come at once to the end of Brit's matrimonial affairs, he heard from
the children once in a year, perhaps, after they were old enough to
write. He did not send them money, because he seemed never to have any
money to send, and because they did not ask for any. Dumbly he sensed,
as their handwriting and their spelling improved, that his children were
growing up. But when he thought of them they seemed remote, prattling
youngsters whom Minnie was forever worrying over and who seemed to have
been always under the heels of his horse, or under the wheels of his
wagon, or playing with the pitchfork, or wandering off into the sage
while he and their distracted mother searched for them. For a long
while--how many years Brit could not remember--they had been living in
Los Angeles. Prospering, too, Brit understood. The girl,
Lorraine--Minnie had wanted fancy names for the kids, and Brit
apologized whenever he spoke of them, which was seldom--Lorraine had
written that "Mamma has an apartment house." That had sounded
prosperous, even at the beginning. And as the years passed and their
address remained the same, Brit became fixed in the belief that the Casa
Grande was all that its name implied, and perhaps more. Minnie must be
getting rich. She had a picture of the place on the stationery which
Lorraine used when she wrote him. There were two palm trees in front,
with bay windows behind them, and pillars. Brit used to study these
magnificences and thank God that Minnie was doing so well. He never
could have given her a home like that. Brit sometimes added that he had
never been cut out for a married man, anyway.

Old-timers forgot that Brit had ever been married, and late comers never
heard of it. To all intents the owners of the Quirt outfit were old
bachelors who kept pretty much to themselves, went to town only when
they needed supplies, rode old, narrow-fork saddles and grinned
scornfully at "swell-forks" and "buckin'-rolls," and listened to all the
range gossip without adding so much as an opinion. They never talked
politics nor told which candidates received their two votes. They kept
the same two men season after season,--leathery old range hands with
eyes that saw whatever came within their field of vision, and with the
gift of silence, which is rare.

If you know anything at all about cattlemen, you will know that the
Quirt was a poor man's ranch, when I tell you that Hunter and Johnson
milked three cows and made butter, fed a few pigs on the skim milk and
the alfalfa stalks which the saddle horses and the cows disdained to
eat, kept a flock of chickens, and sold what butter, eggs and pork they
did not need for themselves. Cattlemen seldom do that. More often they
buy milk in small tin cans, butter in "squares," and do without eggs.

Four of a kind were the men of the TJ up-and-down, and even Bill
Warfield--president and general manager of the Sawtooth Cattle Company,
and of the Federal Reclamation Company and several other companies,
State senator and general benefactor of the Sawtooth country--even the
great Bill Warfield lifted his hat to the owners of the Quirt when he
met them, and spoke of them as "the finest specimens of our old,
fast-vanishing type of range men." Senator Warfield himself represented
the modern type of range man and was proud of his progressiveness. Never
a scheme for the country's development was hatched but you would find
Senator Warfield closely allied with it, his voice the deciding one when
policies and progress were being discussed.

As to the Sawtooth, forty thousand acres comprised their holdings under
patents, deeds and long-time leases from the government. Another twenty
thousand acres they had access to through the grace of the owners, and
there was forest-reserve grazing besides, which the Sawtooth could have
if it chose to pay the nominal rental sum. The Quirt ranch was almost
surrounded by Sawtooth land of one sort or another, though there was
scant grazing in the early spring on the sagebrush wilderness to the
south. This needed Quirt Creek for accessible water, and Quirt Creek,
save where it ran through cut-bank hills, was fenced within the section
and a half of the TJ up-and-down.

So there they were, small fish making shift to live precariously with
other small fish in a pool where big fish swam lazily. If one small fish
now and then disappeared with mysterious abruptness, the other small
fish would perhaps scurry here and there for a time, but few would leave
the pool for the safe shallows beyond.

This is a tale of the little fishes.




CHAPTER TWO

THE ENCHANTMENT OF LONG DISTANCE


Lorraine Hunter always maintained that she was a Western girl. If she
reached the point of furnishing details she would tell you that she had
ridden horses from the time that she could walk, and that her father was
a cattle-king of Idaho, whose cattle fed upon a thousand hills. When she
was twelve she told her playmates exciting tales about rattlesnakes.
When she was fifteen she sat breathless in the movies and watched
picturesque horsemen careering up and down and around the thousand
hills, and believed in her heart that half the Western pictures were
taken on or near her father's ranch. She seemed to remember certain
landmarks, and would point them out to her companions and whisper a
desultory lecture on the cattle industry as illustrated by the picture.
She was much inclined to criticism of the costuming and the acting.

At eighteen she knew definitely that she hated the very name Casa
Grande. She hated the narrow, half-lighted hallway with its "tree"
where no one ever hung a hat, and the seat beneath where no one ever sat
down. She hated the row of key-and-mail boxes on the wall, with the bell
buttons above each apartment number. She hated the jangling of the hall
telephone, the scurrying to answer, the prodding of whichever bell
button would summon the tenant asked for by the caller. She hated the
meek little Filipino boy who swept that ugly hall every morning. She
hated the scrubby palms in front. She hated the pillars where the paint
was peeling badly. She hated the conflicting odors that seeped into the
atmosphere at certain hours of the day. She hated the three old maids on
the third floor and the frowsy woman on the first, who sat on the front
steps in her soiled breakfast cap and bungalow apron. She hated the
nervous tenant who occupied the apartment just over her mother's
three-room-and-bath, and pounded with a broom handle on the floor when
Lorraine practised overtime on chromatic scales.

At eighteen Lorraine managed somehow to obtain work in a Western
picture, and being unusually pretty she so far distinguished herself
that she was given a small part in the next production. Her glorious
duty it was to ride madly through the little cow-town "set" to the
post-office where the sheriff's posse lounged conspicuously, and there
pull her horse to an abrupt stand and point excitedly to the distant
hills. Also she danced quite close to the camera in the "Typical Cowboy
Dance" which was a feature of this particular production.

Lorraine thereby earned enough money to buy her fall suit and coat and
cheap furs, and learned to ride a horse at a gallop and to dance what
passed in pictures as a "square dance."

At nineteen years of age Lorraine Hunter, daughter of old Brit Hunter of
the TJ up-and-down, became a real "range-bred girl" with a real Stetson
hat of her own, a green corduroy riding skirt, gray flannel shirt,
brilliant neckerchief, boots and spurs. A third picture gave her further
practice in riding a real horse,--albeit an extremely docile animal
called Mouse with good reason. She became known on the lot as a real
cattle-king's daughter, though she did not know the name of her father's
brand and in all her life had seen no herd larger than the thirty head
of tame cattle which were chased past the camera again and again to make
them look like ten thousand, and which were so thoroughly "camera
broke" that they stopped when they were out of the scene, turned and
were ready to repeat the performance _ad lib_.

Had she lived her life on the Quirt ranch she would have known a great
deal more about horseback riding and cattle and range dances. She would
have known a great deal less about the romance of the West, however, and
she would probably never have seen a sheriff's posse riding twenty
strong and bunched like bird-shot when it leaves the muzzle of the gun.
Indeed, I am very sure she would not. Killings such as her father heard
of with his lips drawn tight and the cords standing out on the sides of
his skinny neck she would have considered the grim tragedies they were,
without once thinking of the "picture value" of the crime.

As it was, her West was filled with men who died suddenly in gobs of red
paint and girls who rode loose-haired and panting with hand held over
the heart, hurrying for doctors, and cowboys and parsons and such. She
had seen many a man whip pistol from holster and dare a mob with lips
drawn back in a wolfish grin over his white, even teeth, and kidnappings
were the inevitable accompaniment of youth and beauty.

Lorraine learned rapidly. In three years she thrilled to more
blood-curdling adventure than all the Bad Men in all the West could have
furnished had they lived to be old and worked hard at being bad all
their lives. For in that third year she worked her way enthusiastically
through a sixteen-episode movie serial called "The Terror of the Range."
She was past mistress of romance by that time. She knew her West.

It was just after the "Terror of the Range" was finished that a great
revulsion in the management of this particular company stopped
production with a stunning completeness that left actors and actresses
feeling very much as if the studio roof had fallen upon them. Lorraine's
West vanished. The little cow-town "set" was being torn down to make
room for something else quite different. The cowboys appeared in
tailored suits and drifted away. Lorraine went home to the Casa Grande,
hating it more than ever she had hated it in her life.

Some one up-stairs was frying liver and onions, which was in flagrant
defiance of Rule Four which mentioned cabbage, onions and fried fish as
undesirable foodstuffs. Outside, the palm leaves were dripping in the
night fog that had swept soggily in from the ocean. Her mother was
trying to collect a gas bill from the dressmaker down the hall, who
protested shrilly that she distinctly remembered having paid that gas
bill once and had no intention of paying it twice.

Lorraine opened the door marked LANDLADY, and closed it with a slam
intended to remind her mother that bickerings in the hall were less
desirable than the odor of fried onions. She had often spoken to her
mother about the vulgarity of arguing in public with the tenants, but
her mother never seemed to see things as Lorraine saw them.

In the apartment sat a man who had been too frequent a visitor, as
Lorraine judged him. He was an oldish man with the lines of failure in
his face and on his lean form the sprightly clothing of youth. He had
been a reporter,--was still, he maintained. But Lorraine suspected
shrewdly that he scarcely made a living for himself, and that he was
home-hunting in more ways than one when he came to visit her mother.

The affair had progressed appreciably in her absence, it would appear.
He greeted her with, a fatherly "Hello, kiddie," and would have kissed
her had Lorraine not evaded him skilfully.

Her mother came in then and complained intimately to the man, and
declared that the dressmaker would have to pay that bill or have her gas
turned off. He offered sympathy, assistance in the turning off of the
gas, and a kiss which was perfectly audible to Lorraine in the next
room. The affair had indeed progressed!

"L'raine, d'you know you've got a new papa?" her mother called out in
the peculiar, chirpy tone she used when she was exuberantly happy. "I
knew you'd be surprised!"

"I am," Lorraine agreed, pulling aside the cheap green portieres and
looked in upon the two. Her tone was unenthusiastic. "A superfluous gift
of doubtful value. I do not feel the need of a papa, thank you. If you
want him for a husband, mother, that is entirely your own affair. I hope
you'll be very happy."

"The kid don't want a papa; husbands are what means the most in her
young life," chuckled the groom, restraining his bride when she would
have risen from his knee.

"I hope you'll both be very happy indeed," said Lorraine gravely. "Now
you won't mind, mother, when I tell you that I am going to dad's ranch
in Idaho. I really meant it for a vacation, but since you won't be
alone, I may stay with dad permanently. I'm leaving to-morrow or the
next day--just as soon as I can pack my trunk and get a Pullman berth."

She did not wait to see the relief in her mother's face contradicting
the expostulations on her lips. She went out to the telephone in the
hall, remembered suddenly that her business would be overheard by half
the tenants, and decided to use the public telephone in a hotel farther
down the street. Her decision to go to her dad had been born with the
words on her lips. But it was a lusty, full-voiced young decision, and
it was growing at an amazing rate.

Of course she would go to her dad in Idaho! She was astonished that the
idea had never before crystallized into action. Why should she feed her
imagination upon a mimic West, when the great, glorious real West was
there? What if her dad had not written a word for more than a year? He
must be alive; they would surely have heard of his death, for she and
Royal were his sole heirs, and his partner would have their address.

She walked fast and arrived at the telephone booth so breathless that
she was compelled to wait a few minutes before she could call her
number. She inquired about trains and rates to Echo, Idaho.

Echo, Idaho! While she waited for the information clerk to look it up
the very words conjured visions of wide horizons and clean winds and
high adventure. If she pictured Echo, Idaho, as being a replica of the
"set" used in the movie serial, can you wonder? If she saw herself, the
beloved queen of her father's cowboys, dashing into Echo, Idaho, on a
crimply-maned broncho that pirouetted gaily before the post-office while
handsome young men in chaps and spurs and "big four" Stetsons watched
her yearningly, she was merely living mentally the only West that she
knew.

From that beatific vision Lorraine floated into others more entrancing.
All the hairbreadth escapes of the heroine of the movie serial were
hers, adapted by her native logic to fit within the bounds of
possibility,--though I must admit they bulged here and there and
threatened to overlap and to encroach upon the impossible. Over the
hills where her father's vast herds grazed, sleek and wild and
long-horned and prone to stampede, galloped the Lorraine of Lorraine's
dreams, on horses sure-footed and swift. With her galloped strong men
whose faces limned the features of her favorite Western "lead."

That for all her three years of intermittent intimacy with a
disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance, proved
that Lorraine had still the unclouded innocence of her girlhood
unspoiled.




CHAPTER THREE

REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING


Still dreaming her dreams, still featuring herself as the star of many
adventures, Lorraine followed the brakeman out of the dusty day coach
and down the car steps to the platform of the place called Echo, Idaho.
I can only guess at what she expected to find there in the person of a
cattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. No father,
of any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite of her
"Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least a
street car. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the
clang of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off the track.

After the train had hooted and gone on around an absolutely
uninteresting low hill of yellow barrenness dotted with stunted sage, it
was the silence that first impressed Lorraine disagreeably. Echo, Idaho,
was a very poor imitation of all the Western sets she had ever seen.
True, it had the straggling row of square-fronted, one-story buildings,
with hitch rails, but the signs painted across the fronts were
absolutely common. Any director she had ever obeyed would have sent for
his assistant director and would have used language which a lady must
not listen to. Behind the store and the post-office and the blacksmith
shop, on the brow of the low hill around whose point the train had
disappeared, were houses with bay windows and porches absolutely out of
keeping with the West. So far as Lorraine could see, there was not a log
cabin in the whole place.

The hitch rails were empty, and there was not a cowboy in sight. Before
the post-office a terribly grimy touring car stood with its
running-boards loaded with canvas-covered suitcases. Three goggled,
sunburned women in ugly khaki suits were disconsolately drinking soda
water from bottles without straws, and a goggled, red-faced,
angry-looking man was jerking impatiently at the hood of the machine.
Lorraine and her suitcase apparently excited no interest whatever in
Echo, Idaho.

The station agent was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of
California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue
gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was
making his way across the dusty, rut-scored street to the post-office.

Two questions and two brief answers convinced her that the station agent
did not know Britton Hunter,--which was strange, unless this happened to
be a very new agent. Lorraine left him to his cabbages and followed the
man with the mail sack.

At the post-office the anemic clerk came forward, eyeing her with
admiring curiosity. Lorraine had seen anemic young men all her life, and
the last three years had made her perfectly familiar with that look in a
young man's eyes. She met it with impatient disfavor founded chiefly
upon the young man's need of a decent hair-cut, a less flowery tie and a
tailored suit. When he confessed that he did not know Mr. Britton Hunter
by sight he ceased to exist so far as Lorraine was concerned. She
decided that he also was new to the place and therefore perfectly
useless to her.

The postmaster himself--Lorraine was cheered by his spectacles, his
shirt sleeves, and his chin whiskers, which made him look the part--was
better informed. He, too, eyed her curiously when she said "My father,
Mr. Britton Hunter," but he made no comment on the relationship. He gave
her a telegram and a letter from the General Delivery. The telegram, she
suspected, was the one she had sent to her dad announcing the date of
her arrival. The postmaster advised her to get a "livery rig" and drive
out to the ranch, since it might be a week or two before any one came in
from the Quirt. Lorraine thanked him graciously and departed for the
livery stable.

The man in charge there chewed tobacco meditatively and told her that
his teams were all out. If she was a mind to wait over a day or two, he
said, he might maybe be able to make the trip. Lorraine took a long look
at the structure which he indicated as the hotel.

"I think I'll walk," she said calmly.

"_Walk_?" The stableman stopped chewing and stared at her. "It's some
consider'ble of a walk. It's all of eighteen mile--I dunno but twenty,
time y'get to the house."

"I have frequently walked twenty-five or thirty miles. I am a member of
the Sierra Club in Los Angeles. We seldom take hikes of less than
twenty miles. If you will kindly tell me which road I must take----"

"There she is," the man stated flatly, and pointed across the railroad
track to where a sandy road drew a yellowish line through the sage,
evidently making for the hills showing hazily violet in the distance.
Those hills formed the only break in the monotonous gray landscape, and
Lorraine was glad that her journey would take her close to them.

"Thank you so much," she said coldly and returned to the station. In the
small lavatory of the depot waiting room she exchanged her slippers for
a pair of moderately low-heeled shoes which she had at the last minute
of packing tucked into her suitcase, put a few extra articles into her
rather smart traveling bag, left the suitcase in the telegraph office
and started. Not another question would she ask of Echo, Idaho, which
was flatter and more insipid than the drinking water in the tin "cooler"
in the waiting room. The station agent stood with his hands on his hips
and watched her cross the track and start down the road, pardonably
astonished to see a young woman walk down a road that led only to the
hills twenty miles away, carrying her luggage exactly as if her trip was
a matter of a block or two at most.

The bag was rather heavy and as she went on it became heavier. She meant
to carry it slung across her shoulder on a stick as soon as she was well
away from the prying eyes of Echo's inhabitants. Later, if she felt
tired, she could easily hide it behind a bush along the road and send
one of her father's cowboys after it. The road was very dusty and
carried the wind-blown traces of automobile tires. Some one would surely
overtake her and give her a ride before she walked very far.

For the first half hour she believed that she was walking on level
ground, but when she looked back there was no sign of any town behind
her. Echo had disappeared as completely as if it had been swallowed.
Even the unseemly bay-windowed houses on the hill had gone under. She
walked for another half hour and saw only the gray sage stretching all
around her. The hills looked farther away than when she started. Still,
that beaten road must lead somewhere. Two hours later she began to
wonder why this particular road should be so unending and so empty.
Never in her life before had she walked for two hours without seeming to
get anywhere, or without seeing any living human.

Both shoulders were sore from the weight of the bag on the stick, but
the sagebushes looked so exactly alike that she feared she could not
describe the particular spot where the cowboys would find her bag,
wherefore she carried it still. She was beginning to change hands very
often when the wind came.

Just where or how that wind sprang up she did not know. Suddenly it was
whooping across the sage and flinging up clouds of dust from the road.
To Lorraine, softened by years of southern California weather, it seemed
to blow straight off an ice field, it was so cold.

After an interminable time which measured three hours on her watch, she
came to an abrupt descent into a creek bed, down the middle of which the
creek itself was flowing swiftly. Here the road forked, a rough,
little-used trail keeping on up the creek, the better traveled road
crossing and climbing the farther bank. Lorraine scarcely hesitated
before she chose the main trail which crossed the creek.

From the creek the trail she followed kept climbing until Lorraine
wondered if there would ever be a top. The wind whipped her narrow
skirts and impeded her, tugged at her hat, tingled her nose and watered
her eyes. But she kept on doggedly, disgustedly, the West, which she had
seen through the glamour of swift-blooded Romance, sinking lower and
lower in her estimation. Nothing but jack rabbits and little, twittery
birds moved through the sage, though she watched hungrily for horsemen.

Quite suddenly the gray landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance,
unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face the
west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes
the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the
earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged a thunderstorm
she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be a deadly, terrifying
peril she never had quite believed. Her mother had told of people being
struck by lightning, but Lorraine could not associate lightning with
death, especially in the West, where men usually died by shooting,
lynching, or by pitching over a cliff.

The wind hushed as suddenly as it had whooped. Warned by the twinkling
lights far behind her--lights which must be the small part at last
visible of Echo, Idaho--Lorraine went on. She had been walking steadily
for four hours, and she must surely have come nearly twenty miles. If
she ever reached the top of the hill, she believed that she would see
her father's ranch just beyond.

The afterglow had deepened to dusk when she came at last to the highest
point of that long grade. Far ahead loomed a cluster of square, black
objects which must be the ranch buildings of the Quirt, and Lorraine's
spirits lightened a little. What a surprise her father and all his
cowboys would have when she walked in upon them! It was almost worth the
walk, she told herself hearteningly. She hoped that dad had a good cook.
He would wear a flour-sack apron, naturally, and would be tall and lean,
or else very fat. He would be a comedy character, but she hoped he would
not be the grouchy kind, which, though very funny when he rampages
around on the screen, might be rather uncomfortable to meet when one is
tired and hungry and out of sorts. But of course the crankiest of comedy
cooks would be decently civil to _her_. Men always were, except
directors who are paid for their incivility.

A hollow into which she walked in complete darkness and in silence, save
the gurgling of another stream, hid from sight the shadowy semblance of
houses and barns and sheds. Their disappearance slumped her spirits
again, for without them she was no more than a solitary speck in the
vast loneliness. Their actual nearness could not comfort her. She was
seized with a reasonless, panicky fear that by the time she crossed the
stream and climbed the hill beyond they would no longer be there where
she had seen them. She was lifting her skirts to wade the creek when the
click of hoofs striking against rocks sent her scurrying to cover in a
senseless fear.

"I learned this act from the jack rabbits," she rallied herself shakily,
when she was safely hidden behind a sagebush whose pungency made her
horribly afraid that she might sneeze, which would be too ridiculous.

"Some of dad's cowboys, probably, but still they _may_ be bandits."

If they were bandits they could scarcely be out banditting, for the two
horsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rode
leisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horse nearest
her shied against the other and was sworn at parenthetically for a fool.
Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulk squatty and
ungraceful, reminding her of an actor whom she knew and did not like. It
was that resemblance perhaps which held her quiet instead of following
her first impulse to speak to them and ask them to carry her grip to the
house.

The horses stopped with their forefeet in the water and drooped heads to
drink thirstily. The riders continued their conversation.

"--and as I says time and again, they ain't big enough to fight the
outfit, and the quicker they git out the less lead they'll carry under
their hides when they do go. What they want to try an' hang on for,
beats me. Why, it's like setting into a poker game with a five-cent
piece! They ain't got my sympathy. I ain't got any use for a damn fool,
no way yuh look at it."

"Well, there's the TJ--they been here a long while, and they ain't
packin' any lead, and they ain't getting out."

"Well, say, lemme tell yuh something. The TJ'll git theirs and git it
right. Drink all night, would yuh?" He swore long and fluently at his
horse, spurred him through the shallows, and the two rode on up the
hill, their voices still mingled in desultory argument, with now and
then an oath rising clearly above the jumble of words.

They may have been law-abiding citizens riding home to families that
were waiting supper for them, but Lorraine crept out from behind her
sagebush, sneezing and thanking her imitation of the jack rabbits.
Whoever they were, she was not sorry she had let them ride on. They
might be her father's men, and they might have been very polite and
chivalrous to her. But their voices and their manner of speaking had
been rough; and it is one thing, Lorraine reflected, to mingle with
made-up villains--even to be waylaid and kidnapped and tied to trees and
threatened with death--but it is quite different to accost
rough-speaking men in the dark when you know that they are not being
rough to suit the director of the scene.

She was so absorbed in trying to construct a range war or something
equally thrilling from the scrap of conversation she had heard that she
reached the hilltop in what seemed a very few minutes of climbing. The
sky was becoming overcast. Already the stars to the west were blotted
out, and the absolute stillness of the atmosphere frightened her more
than the big, dark wilderness itself. It seemed to her exactly as though
the earth was holding its breath and waiting for something terrible to
happen. The vague bulk of buildings was still some distance ahead, and
when a rumble like the deepest notes of a pipe organ began to fill all
the air, Lorraine thrust her grip under a bush and began to run, her
soggy shoes squashing unpleasantly on the rough places in the road.

Lorraine had seen many stage storms and had thrilled ecstatically to the
mimic lightning, knowing just how it was made. But when that huge
blackness behind and to the left of her began to open and show a
terrible brilliance within, and to close abruptly, leaving the world ink
black, she was terrified. She wanted to hide as she had hidden from
those two men; but from that stupendous monster, a real thunderstorm,
sagebrush formed no protection whatever. She must reach the substantial
shelter of buildings, the comforting presence of men and women.

She ran, and as she ran she wept aloud like a child and called for her
father. The deep rumble grew louder, nearer. The revealed brilliance
became swift sword-thrusts of blinding light that seemed to stab deep
the earth. Lorraine ran awkwardly, her hands over her ears, crying out
at each lightning flash, her voice drowned in the thunder that followed
it close. Then, as she neared the somber group of buildings, the clouds
above them split with a terrific, rending crash, and the whole place
stood pitilessly revealed to her, as if a spotlight had been turned on.
Lorraine stood aghast. The buildings were not buildings at all. They
were rocks, great, black, forbidding boulders standing there on a narrow
ridge, having a diabolic likeness to houses.

The human mind is wonderfully resilient, but readjustment comes slowly
after a shock. Dumbly, refusing to admit the significance of what she
had seen, Lorraine went forward. Not until she had reached and had
touched the first grotesque caricature of habitation did she wholly
grasp the fact that she was lost, and that shelter might be miles away.
She stood and looked at the orderly group of boulders as the lightning
intermittently revealed them. She saw where the road ran on, between
two square-faced rocks. She would have to follow the road, for after all
it must lead _somewhere_,--to her father's ranch, probably. She wondered
irrelevantly why her mother had never mentioned these queer rocks, and
she wondered vaguely if any of them had caves or ledges where she could
be safe from the lightning.

She was on the point of stepping out into the road again when a horseman
rode into sight between the two rocks. In the same instant of his
appearance she heard the unmistakable crack of a gun, saw the rider jerk
backward in the saddle, throw up one hand,--and then the darkness
dropped between them.

Lorraine crouched behind a juniper bush close against the rock and
waited. The next flash, came within a half-minute. It showed a man at
the horse's head, holding it by the bridle. The horse was rearing.
Lorraine tried to scream that the man on the ground would be trampled,
but something went wrong with her voice, so that she could only whisper.

When the light came again the man who had been shot was not altogether
on the ground. The other, working swiftly, had thrust the injured man's
foot through the stirrup. Lorraine saw him stand back and lift his quirt
to slash the horse across the rump. Even through the crash of thunder
Lorraine heard the horse go past her down the hill, galloping furiously.
When she could see again she glimpsed him running, while something
bounced along on the ground beside him.

She saw the other man, with a dry branch in his hand, dragging it across
the road where it ran between the two rocks. Then Lorraine Hunter,
hardened to the sight of crimes committed for picture values only,
realized sickeningly that she had just looked upon a real murder,--the
cold-blooded killing of a man. She felt very sick. Queer little red
sparks squirmed and danced before her eyes. She crumpled down quietly
behind the juniper bush and did not know when the rain came, though it
drenched her in the first two or three minutes of downpour.




CHAPTER FOUR

"SHE'S A GOOD GIRL WHEN SHE AIN'T CRAZY"


When the sun has been up just long enough to take the before-dawn chill
from the air without having swallowed all the diamonds that spangle bush
and twig and grass-blade after a night's soaking rain, it is good to
ride over the hills of Idaho and feel oneself a king,--and never mind
the crown and the scepter. Lone Morgan, riding early to the Sawtooth to
see the foreman about getting a man for a few days to help replace a
bridge carried fifty yards downstream by a local cloudburst, would not
have changed places with a millionaire. The horse he rode was the horse
he loved, the horse he talked to like a pal when they were by
themselves. The ridge gave him a wide outlook to the four corners of the
earth. Far to the north the Sawtooth range showed blue, the nearer
mountains pansy purple where the pine trees stood, the foothills shaded
delicately where canyons swept down to the gray plain. To the south was
the sagebrush, a soft, gray-green carpet under the sun. The sky was
blue, the clouds were handfuls of clean cotton floating lazily. Of the
night's storm remained no trace save slippery mud when his horse struck
a patch of clay, which was not often, and the packed sand still wet and
soggy from the beating rain.

Rock City showed black and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock
walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the
rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way
through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of
the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned
north and shook his horse into a trot.

A hundred yards or so down the slope beyond Rock City he pulled up short
with a "What the hell!" that did not sound profane, but merely amazed.
In the sodden road were the unmistakable footprints of a woman. Lone did
not hesitate in naming the sex, for the wet sand held the imprint
cleanly, daintily. Too shapely for a boy, too small for any one but a
child or a woman with little feet, and with the point at the toes
proclaiming the fashion of the towns, Lone guessed at once that she was
a town girl, a stranger, probably,--and that she had passed since the
rain; which meant since daylight.

He swung his horse and rode back, wondering where she could have spent
the night. Halfway through Rock City the footprints ended abruptly, and
Lone turned back, riding down the trail at a lope. She couldn't have
gone far, he reasoned, and if she had been out all night in the rain,
with no better shelter than Rock City afforded, she would need
help,--"and lots of it, and pretty darn quick," he added to John Doe,
which was the ambiguous name of his horse.

Half a mile farther on he overtook her. Rather, he sighted her in the
trail, saw her duck in amongst the rocks and scattered brush of a small
ravine, and spurred after her. It was precarious footing for his horse
when he left the road, but John Doe was accustomed to that. He jumped
boulders, shied around buckthorn, crashed through sagebrush and so
brought the girl to bay against a wet bank, where she stood shivering.
The terror in her face and her wide eyes would have made her famous in
the movies. It made Lone afraid she was crazy.

Lone swung off and went up to her guardedly, not knowing just what an
insane woman might do when cornered. "There, now, I'm not going to hurt
yuh at all," he soothed. "I guess maybe you're lost. What made you run
away from me when you saw me coming?"

Lorraine continued to stare at him.

"I'm going to the ranch, and if you'd like a ride, I'll lend you my
horse. He'll be gentle if I lead him. It's a right smart walk from
here." Lone smiled, meaning to reassure her.

"Are you the man I saw shoot that man and then fasten him to the stirrup
of the saddle so the horse dragged him down the road? If you are,
I--I----"

"No--oh, no, I'm not the man," Lone said gently. "I just now came from
home. Better let me take you in to the ranch."

"I was going to the ranch--did you see him shoot that man and make the
horse drag him--_make_ the horse--he _slashed_ that horse with the
quirt--and he went tearing down the road dragging--it--it
was--_horrible_!"

"Yes--yes, don't worry about it. We'll fix him. You come and get on John
Doe and let me take you to the ranch. Come on--you're wet as a ducked
pup."

"That man was just riding along--I saw him when it lightened. And he
shot him--oh, can't you _do_ something?"

"Yes, yes, they're after him right now. Here. Just put your foot in the
stirrup--I'll help you up. Why, you're soaked!" Perseveringly Lone urged
her to the horse. "You're soaking wet!" he exclaimed again.

"It rained," she muttered confusedly. "I thought it was the ranch--but
they were rocks. Just rocks. Did you _see_ him shoot that man? Why--why
it shouldn't be allowed! He ought to be arrested right away--I'd have
called a policeman but--isn't thunder and lightning just perfectly
_awful_? And that horse--going down the road dragging----

"You'd better get some one to double for me in this scene," she said
irrelevantly. "I--I don't know this horse, and if he starts running the
boys might not catch him in time. It isn't safe, is it?"

"It's safe," said Lone pityingly. "You won't be dragged. You just get on
and ride. I'll lead him. John Doe's gentle as a dog."

"Just straight riding?" Lorraine considered the matter gravely.
"Wel-ll--but I saw a man dragged, once. He'd been shot first. It--it
was awful!"

"I'll bet it was. How'd you come to be walking so far?"

Lorraine looked at him suspiciously. Lone thought her eyes were the most
wonderful eyes--and the most terrible--that he had ever seen.
Almond-shaped they were, the irises a clear, dark gray, the eyeballs
blue-white like a healthy baby's. That was the wonder of them. But their
glassy shine made them terrible. Her lids lifted in a sudden stare.

"You're not the man, are you? I--I think he was taller than you. And his
hat was brown. He's a brute--a _beast_! To shoot a man just riding
along---- It rained," she added plaintively. "My bag is back there
somewhere under a bush. I think I could find the bush--it was where a
rabbit was sitting--but he's probably gone by this time. A rabbit," she
told him impressively, "wouldn't sit out in the rain all night, would
he? He'd get wet. And a rabbit would feel horrid when he was wet--such
thick fur he never _would_ get dried out. Where do they go when it
rains? They have holes in the ground, don't they?"

"Yes. Sure, they do. I'll _show_ you one, down the road here a little
piece. Come on--it ain't far."

To see a rabbit hole in the ground, Lorraine consented to mount and ride
while Lone walked beside her, agreeing with everything she said that
needed agreement. When she had gone a few rods, however, she began to
call him Charlie and to criticize the direction of the picture. They
should not, she declared, mix murders and thunderstorms in the same
scene. While the storm effect was perfectly _wonderful_, she thought it
rather detracted from the killing. She did not believe in lumping big
stuff together like that. Why not have the killing done by moonlight,
and use the storm when the murderer was getting away, or something like
that? And as for taking them out on location and making all those storm
scenes without telling them in advance so that they could have dry
clothes afterwards, she thought it a perfect outrage! If it were not for
spoiling the picture, she would quit, she asserted indignantly. She
thought the director had better go back to driving a laundry wagon,
which was probably where he came from.

Lone agreed with her, even though he did not know what she was talking
about. He walked as fast as he could, but even so he could not travel
the six miles to the ranch very quickly. He could see that the girl was
burning up with fever, and he could hear her voice growing husky,--could
hear, too, the painful laboring of her breath. When she was not mumbling
incoherent nonsense she was laughing hoarsely at the plight she was in,
and after that she would hold both hands to her chest and moan in a way
that made Lone grind his teeth.

When he lifted her off his horse at the foreman's cottage she was
whispering things no one could understand. Three cowpunchers came
running and hindered him a good deal in carrying her into the house, and
the foreman's wife ran excitedly from one room to the other, asking
questions and demanding that some one do something "for pity's sake, she
may be dying for all you know, while you stand there gawping like
fool-hens."

"She was out all night in the rain--got lost, somehow. She said she was
coming here, so I brought her on. She's down with a cold, Mrs. Hawkins.
Better take off them wet clothes and put hot blankets around her. And a
poultice or something on her chest, I reckon." Lone turned to the door,
stopped to roll a cigarette, and watched Mrs. Hawkins hurrying to
Lorraine with a whisky toddy the cook had mixed for her.

"A sweat's awful good for a cold like she's got," he volunteered
practically. "She's out of her head--or she was when I found her. But I
reckon that's mostly scare, from being lost all night. Give her a good
sweat, why don't you?" He reached the doorstep and then turned back to
add, "She left a grip back somewhere along the road. I'll go hunt it up,
I reckon."

He mounted John Doe and rode down to the corral, where two or three
riders were killing time on various pretexts while they waited for
details of Lone's adventure. Delirious young women of the silk-stocking
class did not arrive at the Sawtooth every morning, and it was rumored
already amongst the men that she was some looker, which naturally
whetted their interest in her.

"I'll bet it's one of Bob's girls, come trailin' him up. Mebby another
of them heart-ballum cases of Bob's," hazarded Pop Bridgers, who read
nothing unless it was printed on pink paper, and who refused to believe
that any good could come out of a city. "Ain't that right, Loney?
Hain't she a heart-ballum girl of Bob's?"

From the saddle Lone stared down impassively at Pop and Pop's
companions. "I don't know a thing about her," he stated emphatically.
"She said she was coming to the ranch, and she was scared of the thunder
and lightning. That's every word of sense I could get outa her. She
ain't altogether ignorant--she knows how to climb on a horse, anyway,
and she kicked about having to ride sideways on account of her skirts.
She was plumb out of her head, and talked wild, but she handled her
reins like a rider. And she never mentioned Bob, nor anybody else
excepting some fellow she called Charlie. She thought I was him, but she
only talked to me friendly. She didn't pull any love talk at all."

"Charlie?" Pop ruminated over a fresh quid of tobacco. "Charlie! Mebby
Bob, he stakes himself to a different name now and then. There ain't any
Charlie, except Charlie Werner; she wouldn't mean him, do yuh s'pose?"

"Charlie Werner? Hunh! Say, Pop, she ain't no squaw--is she, Loney?" Sid
Sterling remonstrated.

"If I can read brands," Lone testified, "she's no girl of Bob's. She's
a good, honest girl when she ain't crazy."

"And no good, honest girl who is not crazy could possibly be a girl of
mine! Is that the idea, Lone?"

Lone turned unhurriedly and looked at young Bob Warfield standing in the
stable door with his hands in his trousers pockets and his pipe in his
mouth.

"That ain't the argument. Pop, here, was wondering if she was another
heart-ballum girl of yours," Lone grinned unabashed. "I don't know such
a hell of a lot about heart-balm ladies, Bob. I ain't a millionaire. I'm
just making a guess at their brand--and it ain't the brand this little
lady carries."

Bob removed one hand from his pocket and cuddled the bowl of his pipe.
"If she's a woman, she's a heart-balmer if she gets the chance. They all
are, down deep in their tricky hearts. There isn't a woman on earth that
won't sell a man's soul out of his body if she happens to think it's
worth her while--and she can get away with it. But don't for any sake
call her _my_ heart-balmer."

"That was Pop," drawled Lone. "It don't strike me as being any subject
for you fellows to make remarks about, anyway," he advised Pop firmly.
"She's a right nice little girl, and she's pretty darn sick." He touched
John Doe with the spurs and rode away, stopping at the foreman's gate to
finish his business with Hawkins. He was a conscientious young man, and
since he had charge of Elk Spring camp, he set its interests above his
own, which was more than some of the Sawtooth men would have done in his
place.

Having reported the damage to the bridge and made his suggestions about
the repairs, he touched up John Doe again and loped away on a purely
personal matter, which had to do with finding the bag which the girl had
told him was under a bush where a rabbit had been sitting.

If she had not been so very sick, Lone would have laughed at her naive
method of identifying the spot. But he was too sorry for her to be
amused at the vagaries of her sick brain. He did not believe anything
she had said, except that she had been coming to the ranch and had left
her bag under a bush beside the road. It should not be difficult to find
it, if he followed the road and watched closely the bushes on either
side.

Until he reached the place where he had first sighted her, Lone rode
swiftly, anxious to be through with the business and go his way. But
when he came upon her footprints again, he pulled up and held John Doe
to a walk, scanning each bush and boulder as he passed.

It seemed probable that she had left the grip at Rock City where she
must have spent the night. She had spoken of being deceived into
thinking the place was the Sawtooth ranch until she had come into it and
found it "just rocks." Then, he reasoned, the storm had broken, and her
fright had held her there. When daylight came she had either forgotten
the bag or had left it deliberately.

At Rock City, then, Lone stopped to examine the base of every rock, even
riding around those nearest the road. The girl, he guessed shrewdly, had
not wandered off the main highway, else she would not have been able to
find it again. Rock City was confusing unless one was perfectly familiar
with its curious, winding lanes.

It was when he was riding slowly around the boulder marked "Palace
Hotel, Rates Reasnible," that he came upon the place where a horse had
stood, on the side best sheltered from the storm. Deep hoof marks
closely overlapping, an over-turned stone here and there gave proof
enough, and the rain-beaten soil that blurred the hoofprints farthest
from the rock told him more. Lone backed away, dismounted, and, stepping
carefully, went close. He could see no reason why a horse should have
stood there with his head toward the road ten feet away, unless his
rider was waiting for something--or some one. There were other boulders
near which offered more shelter from rain.

Next the rock he discovered a boot track, evidently made when the rider
dismounted. He thought of the wild statement of the girl about seeing
some one shoot a man and wondered briefly if there could be a basis of
truth in what she said. But the road showed no sign of a struggle,
though there were, here and there, hoofprints half washed out with the
rain.

Lone went back to his horse and rode on, still looking for the bag. His
search was thorough and, being a keen-eyed young man, he discovered the
place where Lorraine had crouched down by a rock. She must have stayed
there all night, for the scuffed soil was dry where her body had rested,
and her purse, caught in the juniper bush close by, was sodden with
rain.

"The poor little kid!" he muttered, and with, a sudden impulse he turned
and looked toward the rock behind which the horse had stood. Help had
been that close, and she had not known it, unless----

"If anything happened there last night, she could have seen it from
here," he decided, and immediately put the thought away from him.

"But nothing happened," he added, "unless maybe she saw him ride out and
go on down the road. She was out of her head and just imagined things."

He slipped the soaked purse into his coat pocket, remounted and rode on
slowly, looking for the grip and half-believing she had not been
carrying one, but had dreamed it just as she had dreamed that a man had
been shot.

He rode past the bag without seeing it, for Lorraine had thrust it far
back under a stocky bush whose scraggly branches nearly touched the
ground. So he came at last to the creek, swollen with the night's storm
so that it was swift and dangerous. Lone was turning back when John Doe
threw up his head, stared up the creek for a moment and whinnied
shrilly. Lone stood in the stirrups and looked.

A blaze-faced horse was standing a short rifle-shot away, bridled and
with an empty saddle. Whether he was tied or not Lone could not tell at
that distance, but he knew the horse by its banged forelock and its
white face and sorrel ears, and he knew the owner of the horse. He rode
toward it slowly.

"Whoa, you rattle-headed fool," he admonished, when the horse snorted
and backed a step or two as he approached. He saw the bridle-reins
dangling, broken, where the horse had stepped on them in running. "Broke
loose and run off again," he said, as he took down his rope and widened
the loop. "I'll bet Thurman would sell you for a bent nickel, this
morning."

The horse squatted and jumped when he cast the loop, and then stood
quivering and snorting while Lone dismounted and started toward him. Ten
steps from the horse Lone stopped short, staring. For down in the bushes
on the farther side half lay, half hung the limp form of a man.




CHAPTER FIVE

A DEATH "BY ACCIDENT"


Lone Morgan was a Virginian by birth, though few of his acquaintances
knew it. Lone never talked of himself except as his personal history
touched a common interest with his fellows. But until he was seventeen
he had lived very close to the center of one of the deadliest feuds of
the Blue Ridge. That he had been neutral was merely an accident of
birth, perhaps. And that he had not become involved in the quarrel that
raged among his neighbors was the direct result of a genius for holding
his tongue. He had attended the funerals of men shot down in their own
dooryards, he had witnessed the trials of the killers. He had grown up
with the settled conviction that other men's quarrels did not concern
him so long as he was not directly involved, and that what did not
concern him he had no right to discuss. If he stood aside and let
violence stalk by unhindered, he was merely doing what he had been
taught to do from the time he could walk. "Mind your own business and
let other folks do the same," had been the family slogan in Lone's home.
There had been nothing in Lone's later life to convince him that minding
his own business was not a very good habit. It had grown to be second
nature,--and it had made him a good man for the Sawtooth Cattle Company
to have on its pay roll.

Just now Lone was stirred beyond his usual depth of emotion, and it was
not altogether the sight of Fred Thurman's battered body that unnerved
him. He wanted to believe that Thurman's death was purely an
accident,--the accident it appeared. But Lorraine and the telltale
hoofprints by the rock compelled him to believe that it was not an
accident. He knew that if he examined carefully enough Fred Thurman's
body he would find the mark of a bullet. He was tempted to look, and yet
he did not want to know. It was no business of his; it would be foolish
to let it become his business.

"He's too dead to care now how it happened--and it would only stir up
trouble," he finally decided and turned his eyes away.

He pulled the twisted foot from the stirrup, left the body where it lay,
and led the blaze-faced horse to a tree and tied it securely. He took
off his coat and spread it over the head and shoulders of the dead man,
weighted the edges with rocks and rode away.

Halfway up the hill he left the road and took a narrow trail through the
sage, a short-cut that would save him a couple of miles.

The trail crossed the ridge half a mile beyond Rock City, dipping into
the lower end of the small gulch where he had overtaken the girl. The
place recalled with fresh vividness, her first words to him: "Are _you_
the man I saw shoot that other man and fasten his foot in the stirrup?"
Lone shivered and threw away the cigarette he had just lighted.

"My God, that girl mustn't tell that to any one else!" he exclaimed
apprehensively. "No matter who she is or what she is, she mustn't tell
that!"

"Hello! Who you talking to? I heard somebody talking----" The bushes
parted above a low, rocky ledge and a face peered out, smiling
good-humoredly. Lone started a little and pulled up.

"Oh, hello, Swan. I was just telling this horse of mine all I was going
to do to him. Say, you're a chancey bird, Swan, yelling from the brush,
like that. Some folks woulda taken a shot at you."

"Then they'd hit me, sure," Swan observed, letting himself down into the
trail. He, too, was wet from his hat crown to his shoes, that squelched
when he landed lightly on his toes. "Anybody would be ashamed to shoot
at a mark so large as I am. I'd say they're poor shooters." And he added
irrelevantly, as he held up a grayish pelt, "I got that coyote I been
chasing for two weeks. He was sure smart. He had me guessing. But I made
him guess some, maybe. He guessed wrong this time."

Lone's eyes narrowed while he looked Swan over. "You must have been out
all night," he said. "You're crazier about hunting than I am."

"Wet bushes," Swan corrected carelessly. "I been tramping since
daylight. It's my work to hunt, like it's your work to ride." He had
swung into the trail ahead of John Doe and was walking with long
strides,--the tallest, straightest, limberest young Swede in all the
country. He had the bluest eyes, the readiest smile, the healthiest
color, the sunniest hair and disposition the Sawtooth country had seen
for many a day. He had homesteaded an eighty-acre claim on the south
side of Bear Top and had by that means gained possession of two living
springs and the only accessible portion of Wilder Creek where it crossed
the meadow called Skyline before it plunged into a gulch too narrow for
cattle to water with any safety.

The Sawtooth Cattle Company had for years "covered" that eighty-acre
patch of government land, never dreaming that any one would ever file on
it. Swan Vjolmar was there and had his log cabin roofed and ready for
the door and windows before the Sawtooth discovered his presence. Now,
nearly a year afterwards, he was accepted in a tolerant, half-friendly
spirit. He had not objected to the Sawtooth cattle which still watered
at Skyline Meadow. He was a "Government hunter" and he had killed many
coyotes and lynx and even a mountain lion or two. Lone wondered
sometimes what the Sawtooth meant to do about the Swede, but so far the
Sawtooth seemed inclined to do nothing at all, evidently thinking his
war on animal pests more than atoned for his effrontery in taking
Skyline as a homestead. When he had proven up on his claim they would
probably buy him out and have the water still.

"Well, what do you know?" Swan turned his head to inquire abruptly.
"You're pretty quiet."

Lone roused himself. "Fred Thurman's been dragged to death by that
damned flighty horse of his," he said. "I found him in the brush this
side of Granite Creek. Had his foot caught in the stirrup. I thought I'd
best leave him there till the coroner can view him."

Swan stopped short in the trail and turned facing Lone. "Last night my
dog Yack whines to go out. He went and sat in a place where he looks
down on the walley, and he howled for half an hour. I said then that
somebody in the walley has died. That dog is something queer about it.
He knows things."

"I'm going to the Sawtooth," Lone told him. "I can telephone to the
coroner from there. Anybody at Thurman's place, do you know?"

Swan shook his head and started again down the winding, steep trail. "I
don't hunt over that way for maybe a week. That's too bad he's killed. I
like Fred Thurman. He's a fine man, you bet."

"He was," said Lone soberly. "It's a damn shame he had to go--like
that."

Swan glanced back at him, studied Lone's face for an instant and turned
into a tributary gully where a stream trickled down over water-worn
rocks. "Here I leave you," he volunteered, as Lone came abreast of him.
"A coyote's crossed up there, and I maybe find his tracks. I could go do
chores for Fred Thurman if nobody's there. Should I do that? What you
say, Lone?"

"You might drift around by there if it ain't too much out of your way,
and see if he's got a man on the ranch," Lone suggested. "But you better
not touch anything in the house, Swan. The coroner'll likely appoint
somebody to look around and see if he's got any folks to send his stuff
to. Just feed any stock that's kept up, if nobody's there."

"All right," Swan agreed readily. "I'll do that, Lone. Good-by."

Lone nodded and watched him climb the steep slope of the gulch on the
side toward Thurman's ranch. Swan climbed swiftly, seeming to take no
thought of where he put his feet, yet never once slipping or slowing. In
two minutes he was out of sight, and Lone rode on moodily, trying not
to think of Fred Thurman, trying to shut from his mind the things that
wild-eyed, hoarse-voiced girl had told him.

"Lone, you mind your own business," he advised himself once. "You don't
know anything that's going to do any one any good, and what you don't
know there's no good guessing. But that girl--she mustn't talk like
that!"

Of Swan he scarcely gave a thought after the Swede had disappeared, yet
Swan was worth a thought or two, even from a man who was bent on minding
his own business. Swan had no sooner climbed the gulch toward Thurman's
claim than he proceeded to descend rather carefully to the bottom again,
walk along on the rocks for some distance and climb to the ridge whose
farther slope led down to Granite Creek. He did not follow the trail,
but struck straight across an outcropping ledge, descended to Granite
Creek and strode along next the hill where the soil was gravelly and
barren. When he had gone some distance, he sat down and took from under
his coat two huge, crudely made moccasins of coyote skin. These he
pulled on over his shoes, tied them around his ankles and went on, still
keeping close under the hill.

He reached the place where Fred Thurman lay, stood well away from the
body and studied every detail closely. Then, stepping carefully on
trampled brush and rocks, he approached and cautiously lifted Lone's
coat. It was not a pretty sight, but Swan's interest held him there for
perhaps ten minutes, his eyes leaving the body only when the blaze-faced
horse moved. Then Swan would look up quickly at the horse, seem
reassured when he saw that the animal was not watching anything at a
distance, and return to his curious task. Finally he drew the coat back
over the head and shoulders, placed each stone exactly as he had found
it and went up to the horse, examining the saddle rather closely. After
that he retreated as carefully as he had approached. When he had gone
half a mile or so upstream he found a place where he could wash his
hands without wetting his moccasins, returned to the rocky hillside and
took off the clumsy footgear and stowed them away under his coat. Then
with long strides that covered the ground as fast as a horse could do
without loping, Swan headed as straight as might be for the Thurman
ranch.

About noon Swan approached the crowd of men and a few women who stood
at a little distance and whispered together, with their faces averted
from the body around which the men stood grouped. The news had spread as
such news will, even in a country so sparsely settled as the Sawtooth.
Swan counted forty men,--he did not bother with the women. Fred Thurman
had been known to every one of them. Some one had spread a piece of
canvas over the corpse, and Swan did not go very near. The blaze-faced
horse had been led farther away and tied to a cottonwood, where some one
had thrown down a bundle of hay. The Sawtooth country was rather
punctilious in its duty toward the law, and it was generally believed
that the coroner would want to see the horse that had caused the
tragedy.

Half an hour after Swan arrived, the coroner came in a machine, and with
him came the sheriff. The coroner, an important little man, examined the
body, the horse and the saddle, and there was the usual formula of
swearing in a jury. The inquest was rather short, since there was only
one witness to testify, and Lone merely told how he had discovered the
horse there by the creek, and that the body had not been moved from
where he found it.

Swan went over to where Lone, anxious to get away from the place, was
untying his horse after the jury had officially named the death an
accident.

"I guess those horses could be turned loose," he began without prelude.
"What you think, Lone? I been to Thurman's ranch, and I don't find
anybody. Some horses in a corral, and pigs in a pen, and chickens. I
guess Thurman was living alone. Should I tell the coroner that?"

"I dunno," Lone replied shortly. "You might speak to the sheriff. I
reckon he's the man to take charge of things."

"It's bad business, getting killed," Swan said vaguely. "It makes me
feel damn sorry when I go to that ranch. There's the horses waiting for
breakfast--and Thurman, he's dead over here and can't feed his pigs and
his chickens. It's a white cat over there that comes to meet me and rubs
my leg and purrs like it's lonesome. That's a nice ranch he's got, too.
Now what becomes of that ranch? What you think, Lone?"

"Hell, how should I know?" Lone scowled at him from the saddle and rode
away, leaving Swan standing there staring after him. He turned away to
find the sheriff and almost collided with Brit Hunter, who was glancing
speculatively from him to Lone Morgan. Swan stopped and put out his hand
to shake.

"Lone says I should tell the sheriff I could look after Fred Thurman's
ranch. What you think, Mr. Hunter?"

"Good idea, I guess. Somebody'll have to. They can't----" He checked
himself. "You got a horse? I'll ride over with yuh, maybe."

"I got legs," Swan returned laconically. "They don't get scared, Mr.
Hunter, and maybe kill me sometime. You could tell the sheriff I'm
government hunter and honest man, and I take good care of things. You
could do that, please?"

"Sure," said Brit and rode over to where the sheriff was standing.

The sheriff listened, nodded, beckoned to Swan. "The court'll have to
settle up the estate and find his heirs, if he's got any. But you look
after things--what's your name? Vjolmar--how yuh spell it? I'll swear
you in as a deputy. Good Lord, you're a husky son-of-a-gun!" The
sheriff's eyes went up to Swan's hat crown, descended to his shoulders
and lingered there admiringly for a moment, traveled down his flat,
hard-muscled body and his straight legs. "I'll bet you could put up
some fight, if you had to," he commented.

Swan grinned good-humoredly, glanced conscience-stricken at the covered
figure on the ground and straightened his face decorously.

"I could lick you good," he admitted in a stage whisper. "I'm a
son-off-a-gun all right--only I don't never get mad at somebody."

Brit Hunter smiled at that, it was so like Swan Vjolmar. But when they
were halfway to Thurman's ranch--Brit on horseback and Swan striding
easily along beside him, leading the blaze-faced horse, he glanced down
at Swan's face and wondered if Swan had not lied a little.

"What's on your mind, Swan?" he asked abruptly.

Swan started and looked up at him, glanced at the empty hills on either
side, and stopped still in the trail.

"Mr. Hunter, you been longer in the country than I have been. You seen
some good riding, I bet. Maybe you see some men ride backwards on a
horse?"

Brit looked at him uncomprehendingly. "Backwards?"

Swan led up the blaze-faced horse and pointed to the right stirrup.
"Spurs would scratch like that if you jerk your foot, maybe. You're a
good rider, Mr. Hunter, you can tell. That's a right stirrup, ain't it?
Fred Thurman, he's got his left foot twist around, all broke from
jerking in his stirrup. Left foot in right stirrup----" He pushed back
his hat and rumpled his yellow hair, looking up into Brit's face
inquiringly. "Left foot in right stirrup is riding backwards. That's a
damn good rider to ride like that--what you think, Mr. Hunter?"




CHAPTER SIX

LONE ADVISES SILENCE


Twice in the next week Lone found an excuse for riding over to the
Sawtooth. During his first visit, the foreman's wife told him that the
young lady was still too sick to talk much. The second time he went, Pop
Bridgers spied him first and cackled over his coming to see the girl.
Lone grinned and dissembled as best he could, knowing that Pop Bridgers
fed his imagination upon denials and argument and remonstrance and was
likely to build gossip that might spread beyond the Sawtooth. Wherefore
he did not go near the foreman's house that day, but contented himself
with gathering from Pop's talk that the girl was still there.

After that he rode here and there, wherever he would be likely to meet a
Sawtooth rider, and so at last he came upon Al Woodruff loping along the
crest of Juniper Ridge. Al at first displayed no intention of stopping,
but pulled up when he saw John Doe slowing down significantly. Lone
would have preferred a chat with some one else, for this was a
sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued man; but Al Woodruff stayed at the ranch and
would know all the news, and even though he might give it an ill-natured
twist, Lone would at least know what was going on. Al hailed him with a
laughing epithet.

"Say, you sure enough played hell all around, bringin' Brit Hunter's
girl to the Sawtooth!" he began, chuckling as if he had some secret
joke. "Where'd you pick her up, Lone? She claims you found her at Rock
City. That right?"

"No, it ain't right," Lone denied promptly, his dark eyes meeting Al's
glance steadily. "I found her in that gulch away this side. She was in
amongst the rocks where she was trying to keep outa the rain. Brit
Hunter's girl, is she? She told me she was going to the Sawtooth. She'd
have made it, too, if it hadn't been for the storm. She got as far as
the gulch, and the lightning scared her from going any farther." He
offered Al his tobacco sack and fumbled for a match. "I never knew Brit
Hunter had a girl."

"Nor me," Al said and sifted tobacco into a cigarette paper. "Bob, he
drove her over there yesterday. Took him close to all day to make the
trip--and Bob, he claims to hate women!"

"So would I, if I'd got stung for fifty thousand. She ain't that kind.
She's a nice girl, far as I could tell. She got well, all right, did
she?"

"Yeah--only she was still coughing some when she left the ranch. She
like to of had pneumonia, I guess. Queer how she claimed she spent the
night in Rock City, ain't it?"

"No," Lone answered judicially, "I don't know as it's so queer. She
never realized how far she'd walked, I reckon. She was plumb crazy when
I found her. You couldn't take any stock in what she said. Say, you
didn't see that bay I was halter-breaking, did yuh, Al? He jumped the
fence and got away on me, day before yesterday. I'd like to catch him up
again. He'll make a good horse."

Al had not seen the bay, and the talk tapered off desultorily to a final
"So-long, see yuh later." Lone rode on, careful not to look back. So she
was Brit Hunter's girl! Lone whistled softly to himself while he studied
this new angle of the problem,--for a problem he was beginning to
consider it. She was Brit Hunter's girl, and she had told them at the
Sawtooth that she had spent the night at Rock City. He wondered how
much else she had told; how much she remembered of what she had told
him.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a round leather purse
with a chain handle. It was soiled and shrunken with its wetting, and
the clasp had flecks of rust upon it. What it contained Lone did not
know. Virginia had taught him that a man must not be curious about the
personal belongings of a woman. Now he turned the purse over, tried to
rub out the stiffness of the leather, and smiled a little as he dropped
it back into his pocket.

"I've got my calling card," he said softly to John Doe. "I reckon I had
the right hunch when I didn't turn it over to Mrs. Hawkins. I'll ask her
again about that grip she said she hid under a bush. I never heard about
any of the boys finding it."

His thoughts returned to Al Woodruff and stopped there. Determined still
to attend strictly to his own affairs, his thoughts persisted in playing
truant and in straying to a subject he much preferred not to think of at
all. Why should Al Woodruff be interested in the exact spot where Brit
Hunter's daughter had spent the night of the storm? Why should Lone
instinctively discount her statement and lie whole-heartedly about it?

"Now if Al catches me up in that, he'll think I know a lot I don't know,
or else----" He halted his thoughts there, for that, too, was a
forbidden subject.

Forbidden subjects are like other forbidden things: they have a way of
making themselves very conspicuous. Lone was heading for the Quirt ranch
by the most direct route, fearing, perhaps, that if he waited he would
lose his nerve and would not go at all. Yet it was important that he
should go; he must return the girl's purse!

The most direct route to the Quirt took him down Juniper Ridge and
across Granite Creek near the Thurman ranch. Indeed, if he followed the
trail up Granite Creek and across the hilly country to Quirt Creek, he
must pass within fifty yards of the Thurman cabin. Lone's time was
limited, yet he took the direct route rather reluctantly. He did not
want to be reminded too sharply of Fred Thurman as a man who had lived
his life in his own way and had died so horribly.

"Well, he didn't have it coming to him--but it's done and over with,
now, so it's no use thinking about it," he reflected, when the roofs of
the Thurman ranch buildings began to show now and then through the thin
ranks of the cottonwoods along the creek.

But his face sobered as he rode along. It seemed to him that the sleepy
little meadows, the quiet murmuring of the creek, even the soft rustling
of the cottonwood leaves breathed a new loneliness, an emptiness where
the man who had called this place home, who had clung to it in the face
of opposition that was growing into open warfare, had lived and had left
life suddenly--unwarrantably, Lone knew in his heart. It might be of no
use to think about it, but the vivid memory of Fred Thurman was with him
when he rode up the trail to the stable and the small corrals. He had to
think, whether he would or no.

At the corral he came unexpectedly in sight of the Swede, who grinned a
guileless welcome and came toward him, so that Lone could not ride on
unless he would advertise his dislike of the place. John Doe, plainly
glad to find an excuse to stop, slowed and came to where Swan waited by
the gate.

"By golly, this is lonesome here," Swan complained, heaving a great
sigh. "That judge don't get busy pretty quick, I'm maybe jumping my job.
Lone, what you think? You believe in ghosts?"

"Naw. What's on your chest, Swan?" Lone slipped sidewise in the saddle,
resting his muscles. "You been seeing things?"

"No--I don't be seeing things, Lone. But sometimes I been--like I _feel_
something." He stared at Lone questioningly. "What you think, Lone, if
you be sitting down eating your supper, maybe, and you feel something
say words in your brain? Like you know something talks to you and then
quits."

Lone gave Swan a long, measuring look, and Swan laughed uneasily.

"That sounds crazy. But it's true, what something tells me in my brain.
I go and look, and by golly, it's there just like the words tell me."

Lone straightened in the saddle. "You better come clean, Swan, and tell
the whole thing. What was it? Don't talk in circles. What words did you
feel--in your brain?" In spite of himself, Lone felt as he had when the
girl had talked to him and called him Charlie.

Swan closed the gate behind him with steady hands. His lips were pressed
firmly together, as if he had definitely made up his mind to something.
Lone was impressed somehow with Swan's perfect control of his speech,
his thoughts, his actions. But he was puzzled rather than anything else,
and when Swan turned, facing him, Lone's bewilderment did not lessen.

"I'll tell you. It's when I'm sitting down to eat my supper. I'm just
reaching out my hand like this, to get my coffee. And something says in
my head, 'It's a lie. I don't ride backwards. Go look at my saddle.
There's blood----' And that's all. It's like the words go far away so I
can't hear any more. So I eat my supper, and then I get the lantern and
I go look. You come with me, Lone. I'll show you."

Without a word Lone dismounted and followed Swan into a small shed
beside the stable, where a worn stock saddle hung suspended from a
crosspiece, a rawhide string looped over the horn. Lone did not ask
whose saddle it was, nor did Swan name the owner. There was no need.

Swan took the saddle and swung it around so that the right side was
toward them. It was what is called a full-stamped saddle, with the
popular wild-rose design on skirts and cantle. Much hard use and
occasional oilings had darkened the leather to a rich, red brown, marred
with old scars and scratches and the stains of many storms.

"Blood is hard to find when it's raining all night," Swan observed,
speaking low as one does in the presence of death. "But if somebody is
bleeding and falls off a horse slow, and catches hold of things and
tries like hell to hang on----" He lifted the small flap that covered
the cinch ring and revealed a reddish, flaked stain. Phlegmatically he
wetted his finger tip on his tongue, rubbed the stain and held up his
finger for Lone to see. "That's a damn funny place for blood, when a man
is dragging on the ground," he commented drily. "And something else is
damn funny, Lone."

He lifted the wooden stirrup and touched with his finger the rowel
marks. "That is on the front part," he said. "I could swear in court
that Fred's left foot was twisted--that's damn funny, Lone. I don't see
men ride backwards, much."

Lone turned on him and struck the stirrup from his hand. "I think you
better forget it," he said fiercely. "He's dead--it can't help him any
to----" He stopped and pulled himself together. "Swan, you take a fool's
advice and don't tell anybody else about feeling words talk in your
head. They'll have you in the bug-house at Blackfoot, sure as you live."
He looked at the saddle, hesitated, looked again at Swan, who was
watching him. "That blood most likely got there when Fred was packing a
deer in from the hills. And marks on them old oxbow stirrups don't mean
a damn thing but the need of a new pair, maybe." He forced a laugh and
stepped outside the shed. "Just shows you, Swan, that imagination and
being alone all the time can raise Cain with a fellow. You want to watch
yourself."

Swan followed him out, closing the door carefully behind him. "By golly,
I'm watching out now," he assented thoughtfully. "You don't tell
anybody, Lone."

"No, I won't tell anybody--and I'd advise you not to," Lone repeated
grimly. "Just keep those thoughts outa your head, Swan. They're bad
medicine."

He mounted John Doe and rode away, his eyes downcast, his quirt slapping
absently the weeds along the trail. It was not his business, and
yet---- Lone shook himself together and put John Doe into a lope. He had
warned Swan, and he could do no more.

Halfway to the Quirt he met Lorraine riding along the trail. She would
have passed him with no sign of recognition, but Lone lifted his hat and
stopped. Lorraine looked at him, rode on a few steps and turned. "Did
you wish to speak about something?" she asked impersonally.

Lone felt the flush in his cheeks, which angered him to the point of
speaking curtly. "Yes. I found your purse where you dropped it that
night you were lost. I was bringing it over to you. My name's Morgan.
I'm the man that found you and took you in to the ranch."

"Oh." Lorraine looked at him steadily. "You're the one they call Loney?"

"When they're feeling good toward me. I'm Lone Morgan. I went back to
find your grip--you said you left it under a bush, but the world's plumb
full of bushes. I found your purse, though."

"Thank you so much. I must have been an awful nuisance, but I was so
scared--and things were terribly mixed in my mind. I didn't even have
sense enough to tell you what ranch I was trying to find, did I? So you
took me to the wrong one, and I was a week there before I found it out.
And then they were perfectly lovely about it and brought me--home." She
turned the purse over and over in her hands, looking at it without much
interest. She seemed in no hurry to ride on, which gave Lone courage.

"There's something I'd like to say," he began, groping for words that
would make his meaning plain without telling too much. "I hope you won't
mind my telling you. You were kinda out of your head when I found you,
and you said something about seeing a man shot and----"

"Oh!" Lorraine looked up at him, looked through him, he thought, with
those brilliant eyes of hers. "Then I did tell----"

"I just wanted to say," Lone interrupted her, "that I knew all the time
it was just a nightmare. I never mentioned it to anybody, and you'll
forget all about it, I hope. You didn't tell any one else, did you?"

He looked up at her again and found her studying him curiously. "You're
not the man I saw," she said, as if she were satisfying herself on that
point. "I've wondered since--but I was sure, too, that I had seen it.
Why mustn't I tell any one?"

Lone did not reply at once. The girl's eyes were disconcertingly direct,
her voice and her manner disturbed him with their judicial calmness, so
at variance with the wildness he remembered.

"Well, it's hard to explain," he said at last. "You're strange to this
country, and you don't know all the ins and outs of--things. It wouldn't
do any good to you or anybody else, and it might do a lot of harm." His
eyes nicked her face with a wistful glance. "You don't know me--I really
haven't got any right to ask or expect you to trust me. But I wish you
would, to the extent of forgetting that you saw--or thought you
saw--anything that night in Rock City."

Lorraine shivered and covered her eyes swiftly with one hand. His words
had brought back too sharply that scene. But she shook off the emotion
and faced him again.

"I saw a man murdered," she cried. "I wasn't sure afterwards; sometimes
I thought I had dreamed it. But I was sure I saw it. I saw the horse go
by, running--and you want me to keep still about that? What harm could
it do to tell? Perhaps it's true--perhaps I did see it all. I might
think you were trying to cover up something--only, you're not the man I
saw--or thought I saw."

"No, of course I'm not. You dreamed the whole thing, and the way you
talked to me was so wild, folks would say you're crazy if they heard you
tell it. You're a stranger here, Miss Hunter, and--your father is not as
popular in this country as he might be. He's got enemies that would be
glad of the chance to stir up trouble for him. You--just dreamed all
that. I'm asking you to forget a bad dream, that's all, and not go
telling it to other folks."

For some time Lorraine did not answer. The horses conversed with sundry
nose-rubbings, nibbled idly at convenient brush tips, and wondered no
doubt why their riders were so silent. Lone tried to think of some
stronger argument, some appeal that would reach the girl without
frightening her or causing her to distrust him. But he did not know what
more he could say without telling her what must not be told.

"Just how would it make trouble for my father?" Lorraine asked at last.
"I can't believe you'd ask me to help cover up a crime, but it seems
hard to believe that a nightmare would cause any great commotion. And
why is my father unpopular?"

"Well, you don't know this country," Lone parried inexpertly. "It's all
right in some ways, and in some ways it could be a lot improved. Folks
haven't got much to talk about. They go around gabbling their heads off
about every little thing, and adding onto it until you can't recognize
your own remarks after they've been peddled for a week. You've maybe
seen places like that."

"Oh, yes." Lorraine's eyes lighted with a smile. "Take a movie studio,
for instance."

"Yes. Well, you being a stranger, you would get all the worst of it. I
just thought I'd tell you; I'd hate to see you misunderstood by folks
around here. I--I feel kinda responsible for you; I'm the one that found
you."

Lorraine's eyes twinkled. "Well, I'm glad to know one person in the
country who doesn't gabble his head off. You haven't answered any of my
questions, and you've made me feel as if you'd found a dangerous, wild
woman that morning. It isn't very flattering, but I think you're honest,
anyway."

Lone smiled for the first time, and she found his smile pleasant. "I'm
no angel," he disclaimed modestly, "and most folks think I could be
improved on a whole lot. But I'm honest in one way. I'm thinking about
what's best for you, this time."

"I'm terribly grateful," Lorraine laughed. "I shall take great care not
to go all around the country telling people my dreams. I can see that it
wouldn't make me awfully popular." Then she sobered. "Mr. Morgan, that
was a _horrible_ kind of--nightmare. Why, even last night I woke up
shivering, just imagining it all over again."

"It was sure horrible the way you talked about it," Lone assured her.
"It's because you were sick, I reckon. I wish you'd tell me as close as
you can where you left that grip of yours. You said it was under a bush
where a rabbit was sitting. I'd like to find the grip--but I'm afraid
that rabbit has done moved!"

"Oh, Mr. Warfield and I found it, thank you. The rabbit had moved, but I
sort of remembered how the road had looked along there, and we hunted
until we discovered the place. Dad has driven in after my other luggage
to-day--and I believe I must be getting home. I was only out for a
little ride."

She thanked him again for the trouble he had taken and rode away. Lone
turned off the trail and, picking his way around rough outcroppings of
rock, and across unexpected little gullies, headed straight for the ford
across Granite Creek and home. Brit Hunter's girl, he was thinking, was
even nicer than he had pictured her. And that she could believe in the
nightmare was a vast relief.




CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MAN AT WHISPER


Brit Hunter finished washing the breakfast dishes and put a stick of
wood into the broken old cook-stove that had served him and Frank for
fifteen years and was feeling its age. Lorraine's breakfast was in the
oven, keeping warm. Brit looked in, tested the heat with his gnarled
hand to make sure that the sour-dough biscuits would not be dried to
crusts, and closed the door upon them and the bacon and fried potatoes.
Frank Johnson had the horses saddled and it was time to go, yet Brit
lingered, uneasily conscious that his habitation was lacking in many
things which a beautiful young woman might consider absolute
necessities. He had seen in Lorraine's eyes, as they glanced here and
there about the grimy walls, a certain disparagement of her
surroundings. The look had made him wince, though he could not quite
decide what it was that displeased her. Maybe she wanted lace curtains,
or something.

He set the four chairs in a row against the wall, swept up the bits of
bark and ashes beside the stove, made sure that the water bucket was
standing full on its bench beside the door, sent another critical glance
around the room, and tiptoed over to the dish cupboard and let down the
flowered calico curtain that had been looped up over a nail for
convenience. The sun sent a bright, wide bar of yellow light across the
room to rest on the shelf behind the stove where stood the salt can, the
soda, the teapot, a box of matches and two pepper cans, one empty and
the other full. Brit always meant to throw out that empty pepper can and
always neglected to do so. Just now he remembered picking up the empty
one and shaking it over the potatoes futilely and then changing it for
the full one. But he did not take it away; in the wilderness one learns
to save useless things in the faint hope that some day they may become
useful. The shelves were cluttered with fit companions to that empty
pepper can. Brit thought that he would have "cleaned out" had he known
that Lorraine was coming. Since she was here, it scarcely seemed worth
while.

He walked on his boot-toes to the door of the second room of the cabin,
listened there for a minute, heard no sound and took a tablet and pencil
off another shelf littered with useless things. The note which he wrote
painstakingly, lest she might think him lacking in education, he laid
upon the table beside Lorraine's plate; then went out, closing the door
behind him as quietly as a squeaking door can be made to close.

Lorraine, in the other room, heard the squeak and sat up. Her wrist
watch, on the chair beside her bed, said that it was fifteen minutes
past six, which she considered an unearthly hour for rising. She pulled
up the covers and tried to sleep again. The day would be long enough, at
best. There was nothing to do, unless she took that queer old horse with
withers like the breastbone of a lean Christmas turkey and hips that
reminded her of the little roofs over dormer windows, and went for a
ride. And if she did that, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do
when she arrived there.

In a very few days Lorraine had exhausted the sights of Quirt Creek and
vicinity. If she rode south she would eventually come to the top of a
hill whence she could look down upon further stretches of barrenness. If
she rode east she would come eventually to the road along which she had
walked from Echo, Idaho. Lorraine had had enough of that road. If she
went north she would--well, she would not meet Mr. Lone Morgan again,
for she had tried it twice, and had turned back because there seemed no
end to the trail twisting through the sage and rocks. West she had not
gone, but she had no doubt that it would be the same dreary monotony of
dull gray landscape.

Monotony of landscape was one thing which Lorraine could not endure,
unless it had a foreground of riders hurtling here and there, and of
perspiring men around a camera tripod. At the Sawtooth ranch, after she
was able to be up, she had seen cowboys, but they had lacked the dash
and the picturesque costuming of the West she knew. They were mostly
commonplace young men, jogging past the house on horseback, or loitering
down by the corrals. They had offered absolutely no interest or "color"
to the place, and the owner's son, Bob Warfield, had driven her over to
the Quirt in a Ford and had seemed exactly like any other big,
good-looking young man who thought well of himself. Lorraine was not
susceptible to mere good looks, three years with the "movies" having
disillusioned her quite thoroughly. Too many young men of Bob Warfield's
general type had attempted to make love to her--lightly and not too
well--for Lorraine to be greatly impressed.

She yawned, looked at her watch again, found that she had spent exactly
six minutes in meditating upon her immediate surroundings, and fell to
wondering why it was that the real West was so terribly commonplace.
Why, yesterday she had been brought to such a pass of sheer loneliness
that she had actually been driven to reading an old horse-doctor book!
She had learned the symptoms of epizooetic--whatever that was--and
poll-evil and stringhalt, and had gone from that to making a shopping
tour through a Montgomery Ward catalogue. There was nothing else in the
house to read, except a half dozen old copies of the _Boise News_.

There was nothing to do, nothing to see, no one to talk to. Her dad and
the big, heavy-set man whom he called Frank, seemed uncomfortably aware
of their deficiencies and were pitiably anxious to make her feel
welcome,--and failed. They called her "Raine." The other two men did not
call her anything at all. They were both sandy-complexioned and they
both chewed tobacco quite noticeably, and when they sat down in their
shirt sleeves to eat, Lorraine had seen irregular humps in their hip
pockets which must be six-guns; though why they should carry them in
their pockets instead of in holster belts buckled properly around their
bodies and sagging savagely down at one side and swinging ferociously
when they walked, Lorraine could not imagine. They did not wear chaps,
either, and their spurs were just spurs, without so much as a silver
concho anywhere. Cowboys in overalls and blue gingham shirts and faded
old coats whose lapels lay in wrinkles and whose pockets were torn down
at the corners! If Lorraine had not been positive that this was actually
a cattle ranch in Idaho, she never would have believed that they were
anything but day laborers.

"It's a comedy part for the cattle-queen's daughter," she admitted,
putting out a hand to stroke the lean, gray cat that jumped upon her bed
from the open window. "Ket, it's a _scream_! I'll take my West before
the camera, thank you; or I would, if I hadn't jumped right into the
middle of this trick West before I knew what I was doing. Ket, what do
you do to pass away the time? I don't see how you can have the nerve to
live in an empty space like this and purr!"

She got up then, looked into the kitchen and saw the paper on the table.
This was new and vaguely promised some sort of break in the deadly
monotony which she saw stretching endlessly before her. Carrying the
nameless cat in her arms, Lorraine went in her bare feet across the
grimy, bare floor to the table and picked up the note. It read simply:

     "Your brekfast is in the oven we wont be back till dark maby. Don't
     leave the ranch today. Yr loveing father."

Lorraine hugged the cat so violently that she choked off a purr in the
middle. "'Don't leave the ranch to-day!' Ket, I believe it's going to be
dangerous or something, after all."

She dressed quickly and went outside into the sunlight, the cat at her
heels, the thrill of that one command filling the gray monotone of the
hills with wonderful possibilities of adventure. Her father had made no
objection before when she went for a ride. He had merely instructed her
to keep to the trails, and if she didn't know the way home, to let the
reins lie loose on Yellowjacket's neck and he would bring her to the
gate.

Yellowjacket's instinct for direction had not been working that day,
however. Lorraine had no sooner left the ranch out of sight behind her
than she pretended that she was lost. Yellowjacket had thereupon walked
a few rods farther and stopped, patiently indifferent to the location of
his oats box. Lorraine had waited until his head began to droop lower
and lower, and his switching at flies had become purely automatic.
Yellowjacket was going to sleep without making any effort to find the
way home. But since Lorraine had not told her father anything about it,
his injunction could not have anything to do with the unreliability of
the horse.

"Now," she said to the cat, "if three or four bandits would appear on
the ridge, over there, and come tearing down into the immediate
foreground, jump the gate and surround the house, I'd know this was the
real thing. They'd want to make me tell where dad kept his gold or
whatever it was they wanted, and they'd have me tied to a chair--and
then, cut to Lone Morgan (that's a perfectly _wonderful_ name for the
lead!) hearing shots and coming on a dead run to the rescue." She
picked up the cat and walked slowly down the hard-trodden path to the
stable. "But there aren't any bandits, and dad hasn't any gold or
anything else worth stealing--Ket, if dad isn't a miser, he's _poor_!
And Lone Morgan is merely ashamed of the way I talked to him, and afraid
I'll queer myself with the neighbors. No Western lead that _I_ ever saw
would act like that. Why, he didn't even want to ride home with me, that
day.

"And Bob Warfield and his Ford are incidents of the past, and not one
soul at the Sawtooth seems to give a darn whether I'm in the country or
out of it. Soon as they found out where I belonged, they brought me over
here and dropped me and forgot all about me. And that, I suppose, is
what they call in fiction the Western spirit!

"Dad looked exactly as if he'd opened the door to a book agent when I
came. He--he _tolerates_ my presence, Ket! And Frank Johnson's pipe
smells to high heaven, and I hate him in the house and 'the boys'--hmhm!
The _boys_--Ket, it would be terribly funny, if I didn't have to stay
here."

She had reached the corral and stood balancing the cat on a warped top
rail, staring disconsolately at Yellowjacket, who stood in a far corner
switching at flies and shamelessly displaying all the angularity of his
bones under a yellowish hide with roughened hair that was shedding
dreadfully, as Lorraine had discovered to her dismay when she removed
her green corduroy skirt after riding him. Yellowjacket's lower lip
sagged with senility or lack of spirit, Lorraine could not tell which.

"You look like the frontispiece in that horse-doctor book," she
remarked, eyeing him with disfavor. "I can't say that comedy hide you've
got improves your appearance. You'd be better peeled, I believe."

She heard a chuckle behind her and turned quickly, palm up to shield her
eyes from the straight, bright rays of the sun. Now here was a live man,
after all, with his hat tilted down over his forehead, a cigarette in
one hand and his reins in the other, looking at her and smiling.

"Why don't you peel him, just on a chance?" His smile broadened to a
grin, but when Lorraine continued to look at him with a neutral
expression in her eyes, he threw away his cigarette and abandoned with
it his free-and-easy manner.

"You're Miss Hunter, aren't you? I rode over to see your father. Thought
I'd find him somewhere around the corral, maybe."

"You won't, because he's gone for the day. No, I don't know where."

"I--see. Is Mr. Johnson anywhere about?"

"No, I don't believe any one is anywhere about. They were all gone when
I got up, a little while ago." Then, remembering that she did not know
this man, and that she was a long way from neighbors, she added, "If
you'll leave a message I can tell dad when he comes home."

"No-o--I'll ride over to-morrow or next day. I'm the man at Whisper. You
can tell him I called, and that I'll call again."

Still he did not go, and Lorraine waited. Some instinct warned her that
the man had not yet stated his real reason for coming, and she wondered
a little what it could be. He seemed to be watching her covertly, yet
she failed to catch any telltale admiration for her in his scrutiny. She
decided that his forehead was too narrow to please her, and that his
eyes were too close together, and that the lines around his mouth were
cruel lines and gave the lie to his smile, which was pleasant enough if
you just looked at the smile and paid no attention to anything else in
his face.

"You had quite an experience getting out here, they tell me," he
observed carelessly; too carelessly, thought Lorraine, who was well
schooled in the circumlocutions of delinquent tenants, agents of various
sorts and those who crave small gossip of their neighbors. "Heard you
were lost up in Rock City all night."

Lorraine looked up at him, startled. "I caught a terrible cold," she
said, laughing nervously. "I'm not used to the climate," she added
guardedly.

The man fumbled in his pocket and produced smoking material. "Do you
mind if I smoke?" he asked perfunctorily.

"Why, no. It doesn't concern me in the slightest degree." Why, she
thought confusedly, must she _always_ be reminded of that horrible place
of rocks? What was it to this man where she had been lost?

"You must of got there about the time the storm broke," the man hazarded
after a silence. "It's sure a bad place in a thunderstorm. Them rocks
draw lightning. Pretty bad, wasn't it?"

"Lightning is always bad, isn't it?" Lorraine tried to hold her voice
steady. "I don't know much about it. We don't have thunderstorms to
amount to anything, in Los Angeles. It sometimes does thunder there in
the winter, but it is very mild."

With hands that trembled she picked the cat off the rail and started
toward the house. "I'll tell dad what you said," she told him, glancing
back over her shoulder. When she saw that he had turned his horse and
was frankly following her to the house, her heart jumped wildly into her
throat,--judging by the feel of it.

"I'm plumb out of matches. I wonder if you can let me have some," he
said, still speaking too carelessly to reassure her. "So you stuck it
out in Rock City all through that storm! That's more than what I'd want
to do."

She did not answer that, but once on the doorstep Lorraine turned and
faced him. Quite suddenly it came to her--the knowledge of why she did
not like this man. She stared at him, her eyes wide and bright.

"Your hat's brown!" she exclaimed unguardedly. "I--I saw a man with a
brown hat----"

He laughed suddenly. "If you stay around here long you'll see a good
many," he said, taking off his hat and turning it on his hand before
her. "This here hat I traded for yesterday. I had a gray one, but it
didn't suit me. Too narrow in the brim. Brown hats are getting to be the
style. If I can borrow half a dozen matches, Miss Hunter, I'll be
going."

Lorraine looked at him again doubtfully and went after the matches. He
thanked her, smiling down at her quizzically. "A man can get along
without lots of things, but he's plumb lost without matches. You've
maybe saved my life, Miss Hunter, if you only knew it."

She watched him as he rode away, opening the gate and letting himself
through without dismounting. He disappeared finally around a small spur
of the hill, and Lorraine found her knees trembling under her.

"Ket, you're an awful fool," she exclaimed fiercely. "Why did you let me
give myself away to that man? I--I believe he _was_ the man. And if I
really did see him, it wasn't my imagination at all. He saw me there,
perhaps. Ket, I'm scared! I'm not going to stay on this ranch all alone.
I'm going to saddle the family skeleton, and I'm going to ride till
dark. There's something queer about that man from Whisper. I'm afraid
of him."

After awhile, when she had finished her breakfast and was putting up a
lunch, Lorraine picked up the nameless gray cat and holding its head
between her slim fingers, looked at it steadily. "Ket, you're the
humanest thing I've seen since I left home," she said wistfully. "I
_hate_ a country where horrible things happen under the surface and the
top is just gray and quiet and so dull it makes you want to scream. Lone
Morgan lied to me. He lied--he lied!" She hugged the cat impulsively and
rubbed her cheek absently against it, so that it began purring
immediately.

"Ket--I'm afraid of that man at Whisper!" she breathed miserably against
its fur.




CHAPTER EIGHT

"IT TAKES NERVE JUST TO HANG ON"


Brit was smoking his pipe after supper and staring at nothing, though
his face was turned toward the closed door. Lorraine had washed the
dishes and was tidying the room and looking at her father now and then
in a troubled, questioning way of which Brit was quite oblivious.

"Dad," she said abruptly, "who is the man at Whisper?"

Brit turned his eyes slowly to her face as if he had not grasped her
meaning and was waiting for her to repeat the question. It was evident
that his thoughts had pulled away from something that meant a good deal
to him.

"Why?"

"A man came this morning, and said he was the man at Whisper, and that
he would come again to see you."

Brit took his pipe from his mouth, looked at it and crowded down the
tobacco with a forefinger. "He seen me ride away from the ranch, this
morning," he said. "He was coming down the Whisper trail as I was taking
the fork over to Sugar Spring, Frank and me. What did he say he wanted
to see me about?"

"He didn't say. He asked for you and Frank." Lorraine sat down and
folded her arms on the oilcloth-covered table. "Dad, what _is_ Whisper?"

"Whisper's a camp up against a cliff, over west of here. It belongs to
the Sawtooth. Is that all he said? Just that he wanted to see me?"

"He--talked a little," Lorraine admitted, her eyebrows pulled down. "If
he saw you leave, I shouldn't think he'd come here and ask for you."

"He knowed I was gone," Brit stated briefly.

With a finger nail Lorraine traced the ugly, brown pattern on the
oilcloth. It was not easy to talk to this silent man who was her father,
but she had done a great deal of thinking during that long, empty day,
and she had reached the point where she was afraid not to speak.

"Dad!"

"What do you want, Raine?"

"Dad, was--has any one around here died, lately?"

"Died? Nobody but Fred Thurman, over here on Granite. He was drug with a
horse and killed."

Lorraine caught her breath, saw Brit looking at her curiously and moved
closer to him. She wanted to be near somebody just then, and after all,
Brit was her father, and his silence was not the inertia of a dull mind,
she knew. He seemed bottled-up, somehow, and bitter. She caught his hand
and held it, feeling its roughness between her two soft palms.

"Dad, I've got to tell you. I feel trapped, somehow. Did his horse have
a white face, dad?"

"Yes, he's a blaze-faced roan. Why?" Brit moved uncomfortably, but he
did not take his hand away from her. "What do you know about it, Raine?"

"I saw a man shoot Fred Thurman and push his foot through the stirrup.
And, dad, I believe it was that man at Whisper. The one I saw had on a
brown hat, and this man wears a brown hat--and I was advised not to tell
any one I had been at that place they call Rock City, when the storm
came. Dad, would an innocent man--one that didn't have anything to do
with a crime--would he try to cover it up afterwards?"

Brit's hand shook when he removed the pipe from his mouth and laid it on
the table. His face had turned gray while Lorraine watched him
fearfully. He laid his hand on her shoulder, pressing down hard--and at
last his eyes met her big, searching ones.

"If he wanted to _live_--in this country--he'd have to. Leastways, he'd
have to keep his mouth shut," he said grimly.

"And he'd try to shut the mouths of others----"

"If he cared anything about them, he would. You ain't told anybody what
you saw, have yuh?"

Lorraine hid her face against his arm. "Just Lone Morgan, and he thought
I was crazy and imagined it. That was in the morning, when he found me.
And he--he wanted me to go on thinking it was just a nightmare--that I'd
imagined the whole thing. And I did, for awhile. But this man at Whisper
tried to find out where I was that night----"

Brit pulled abruptly away from her, got up and opened the door. He
stood there for a time, looking out into the gloom of early nightfall.
He seemed to be listening, Lorraine thought. When he came back to her
his voice was lower, his manner intangibly furtive.

"You didn't tell him anything, did you?" he asked, as if there had been
no pause in their talk.

"No--I made him believe I wasn't there. Or I tried to. And dad! As I was
going to cross that creek just before you come to Rock City, two men
came along on horseback, and I hid before they saw me. They stopped to
water their horses, and they were talking. They said something about the
TJ had been here a long time, but they would get theirs, and it was like
sitting into a poker game with a nickel. They said the little ones
aren't big enough to fight the Sawtooth, and they'd carry lead under
their hides if they didn't leave. Dad, isn't your brand the TJ? That's
what it looks like on Yellowjacket."

Brit did not answer, and when Lorraine was sure that he did not mean to
do so, she asked another question. "Dad, why didn't you want me to leave
the ranch to-day? I was nervous after that man was here, and I did go."

"I didn't want you riding around the country unless I knew where you
went," Brit said. "My brand is the TJ up-and-down. We never call it just
the TJ."

"Oh," said Lorraine, relieved. "They weren't talking about you, then.
But dad--it's horrible! We simply _can't_ let that murder go and not do
anything. Because I know that man was shot. I heard the shot fired, and
I saw him start to fall off his horse. And the next flash of lightning I
saw----"

"Look here, Raine. I don't want you talking about what you saw. I don't
want you _thinkin'_ about it. What's the use? Thurman's dead and buried.
The cor'ner come and held an inquest, and the jury agreed it was an
accident. I was on the jury. The sheriff's took charge of his property.
You couldn't prove what you saw, even if you was to try." He looked at
her very much as Lone Morgan had looked at her. His next words were very
nearly what Lone Morgan had said, Lorraine remembered. "You don't know
this country like I know it. Folks live in it mainly because they don't
go around blatting everything they see and hear and think."

"You have laws, don't you, dad? You spoke about the sheriff----"

"The sheriff!" Brit laughed harshly. "Yes, we got a sheriff, and we got
a jail, and a judge--all the makin's of law. But we ain't got one thing
that goes with it, and that's justice. You'd best make up your mind like
the cor'ner's jury done, that Fred Thurman was drug to death by his
horse. That's all that'll ever be proved, and if you can't prove nothing
else you better keep your mouth shut."

Lorraine sprang up and stood facing her father, every nerve taut with
protest. "You don't mean to tell me, dad, that you and Frank Johnson and
Lone Morgan and--everybody in the country are _cowards_, do you?"

Brit looked at her patiently. "No," he said in the tone of acknowledged
defeat, "we ain't cowards, Raine. A man ain't a coward when he stands
with his hands over his head. Most generally it's because some one's got
the drop on 'im."

Lorraine would not accept that. "You think so, because you don't fight,"
she cried hotly. "No one is holding a gun at your head. Dad! I thought
Westerners never quit. It's fight to the finish, always. Why, I've seen
one man fight a whole outfit and win. He couldn't be beaten because he
wouldn't give up. Why----"

Brit gave her a tolerant glance. "Where'd you see all that, Raine?" He
moved to the table picked up his pipe and knocked out the ashes on the
stove hearth. His movements were those of an aging man,--yet Brit Hunter
was not old, as age is reckoned.

"Well--in stories--but it was reasonable and logical and possible, just
the same. If you use your brains you can outwit them, and if you have
any nerve----"

Brit made a sound somewhat like a snort. "These days, when politics is
played by the big fellows, and the law is used to make money for 'em, it
takes nerve just to hang on," he said. "Nobody but a dang fool would
fight." Slow anger grew within him. He turned upon Lorraine almost
fiercely. "D'yuh think me and Frank could fight the Sawtooth and get
anything out of it but a coffin apiece, maybe?" he demanded harshly.
"Don't the Sawtooth _own_ this country? Warfield's got the sheriff in
his pocket, and the cor'ner, and the judge, and the stock
inspector--he's _Senator_ Warfield, and what he wants he gets. He gets
it through the law that you was talking about a little while ago. What
you goin' to do about it? If I had the money and the land and the
political pull he's got, mebby I'd have me a sheriff and a judge, too.

"Fred Thurman tried to fight the Sawtooth over a water right he owned
and they wanted. They had the case runnin' in court till they like to of
took the last dollar he had. He got bull-headed. That water right meant
the hull ranch--everything he owned. You can't run a ranch without
water. And when he'd took the case up and up till it got to the Supreme
Court, and he stood some show of winnin' out--he had an accident. He was
drug to death by his horse."

Brit stooped and opened the stove door, seeking a live coal; found none
and turned again to Lorraine, shaking his pipe at her for emphasis.

"We try to prove Fred was murdered, and what's the result? Something
happens: to me, mebby, or Frank, or both of us. And you can't say,
'Here, I know the Sawtooth had a hand in that.' You got to _prove_ it!
And when you've proved it," he added bitterly, "you got to have officers
that'll carry out the law instead of using it to hog-tie yuh."

His futile, dull anger surged up again. "You call us cowards because we
don't git up on our hind legs and fight the Sawtooth. A lot _you_ know
about courage! You've read stories, and you've saw moving pictures, and
you think that's the West--that's the way they do it. One man hold off a
hunderd with his gun--and on the other hand, a hunderd men, mebby,
ridin' hell-whoopin' after one. You think that's it--that's the way they
do it. Hunh!" He lifted the lid of the stove, spat into it as if he were
spitting in the face of an enemy, and turned again to Lorraine.

"What you seen--what you say you seen--that was done at night when there
wasn't no audience. All the fighting the Sawtooth does is done under
cover. _You_ won't see none of it--they ain't such fools. And what us
small fellers do, we do it quiet, too. We ain't ridin' up and down the
trail, flourishin' our six-shooters and yellin' to the Sawtooth to come
on and we'll clean 'em up!"

"But you're fighting just the same, aren't you, dad? You're not letting
them----"

"We're makin' out to live here--and we've been doin' it for twenty-five
year," Brit told her, with a certain grim dignity. "We've still got a
few head uh stock left--enough to live on. Playin' poker with a nickel,
mebby--but we manage to ante, every hand so fur." His mind returned to
the grisly thing Lorraine had seen.

"We can't run down the man that got Fred Thurman, supposin' he was
killed, as you say. That's what the law is paid to do. If Lone Morgan
told you not to talk about it, he told you right. He was talking for
your own good. What about Al--the man from Whisper? You didn't tell
_him_, did you?"

His tone, the suppressed violence of his manner, frightened Lorraine.
She moved farther away from him.

"I didn't tell him anything. He was curious but--I only said I knew him
because he was wearing a brown hat, and the man that shot Mr. Thurman
had a brown hat. I didn't say all that. I just mentioned the hat. And he
said there were lots of brown hats in the country. He said he had traded
for that one, just yesterday. He said his own hat was gray."

Brit stared at her, his jaw sagging a little, his eyes growing vacant
with the thoughts he hid deep in his mind. He slumped down into his
chair and leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees, his fingers
clasped loosely. After a little he tilted his head and looked up at
her.

"You better go to bed," he told her stolidly. "And if you're going to
live at the Quirt, Raine, you'll have to learn to keep your mouth shut.
I ain't blaming you--but you told too much to Al Woodruff. Don't talk to
him no more, if he comes here when I'm gone." He put out a hand,
beckoning her to him, sorry for his harshness. Lorraine went to him and
knelt beside him, slipping an arm around his neck while she hid her face
on his shoulder.

"I won't be a nuisance, dad--really, I won't," she said. "I--I can shoot
a gun. I never shot one with bullets in, but I could. And I learned to
do lots of things when I was working in that play West I thought was
real. It isn't like I thought. There's no picture stuff in the real
West, I guess; they don't do things that way. But--what I want you to
know is that if they're fighting you they'll have to fight me, too.

"I don't mean movie stuff, honestly I don't. I'm in this thing now, and
you'll have to count me, same as you count Jim and Sorry. Won't you
please feel that I'm one more in the game, dad, and not just another
responsibility? I'll herd cattle, or do whatever there is to do. And
I'll keep my mouth shut, too. I can't stay here, day after day, doing
nothing but sweep and dust two rooms and fry potatoes and bacon for you
at night. Dad, I'll go _crazy_ if you don't let me into your life!

"Dad, if you knew the stunts I've done in the last three years! It was
make-believe West, but I learned things just the same." She kissed him
on the unshaven cheek nearest her,--and thought of the kisses she had
breathed upon the cheeks of story fathers with due care for the make-up
on her lips. Just because this was real, she kissed him again with the
frank vigor of a child.

"Dad," she said wheedlingly, "I think you might scare up something that
I can really ride. Yellowjacket is safe, but--but you have real _live_
horses on the ranch, haven't you? You must _not_ go judging me by the
palms and the bay windows of the Casa Grande. That's where I've slept,
the last few years when I wasn't off on location--but it's just as
sensible to think I don't know anything else, as it would be for me to
think you can't do anything but skim milk and fry bacon and make
sour-dough bread, just because I've seen you do it!"

Brit laughed and patted her awkwardly on the back. "If you was a boy,
I'd set you up as a lawyer," he said with an attempt at playfulness. "I
kinda thought you could ride. I seen how you piled onto old Yellowjacket
and the way you held your reins. It runs in the blood, I guess. I'll see
what I can do in the way of a horse. Ole Yellowjacket used to be a real
rim-rider, but he's gitting old; gitting old--same as me."

"You're not! You're just letting yourself _feel_ old. And am I one of
the outfit, dad?"

"I guess so--only there ain't going to be any of this hell-whoopin'
stuff, Raine. You can't travel these trails at a long lope with yore
hair flyin' out behind and--and all that damn foolishness. I've saw 'em
in the movin' pitchers----"

Lorraine blushed, and was thankful that her dad had not watched her work
in that serial. For that matter, she hoped that Lone Morgan would never
stray into a movie where any of her pictures were being shown.

"I'm serious, dad. I don't want to make a show of myself. But if you'll
feel that I can be a help instead of a handicap, that's what I want. And
if it comes to fighting----"

Brit pushed her from him impatiently. "There yuh go--fight--fight--and I
told yuh there ain't any fighting going on. Nothing more'n a fight to
hang on and make a living. That means straight, hard work and mindin'
your own business. If you want to help at that----"

"I do," said Raine quietly, getting to her feet. Her legacy of
stubbornness set her lips firmly together. "That's exactly what I mean.
Good night, dad."

Brit answered her noncommittally, apparently sunk already in his own
musings. But his lips drew in to suppress a smile when he saw, from the
corner of his eyes, that Lorraine was winding the alarm on the cheap
kitchen clock, and that she set the hand carefully and took the clock
with her to bed.




CHAPTER NINE

THE EVIL EYE OF THE SAWTOOTH


Oppression is a growth that flourishes best in the soil of opportunity.
It seldom springs into full power at once. The Sawtooth Cattle Company
had begun much as its neighbors had begun: with a tract of land, cattle,
and the ambition for prospering. Senator Warfield had then been plain
Bill Warfield, manager of the outfit, who rode with his men and saw how
his herds increased,--saw too how they might increase faster under
certain conditions. At the outset he was not, perhaps, more unscrupulous
than some of his neighbors. True, if a homesteader left his claim for a
longer time than the law allowed him, Bill Warfield would choose one of
his own men to file a contest on that claim. The man's wages would be
paid. Witnesses were never lacking to swear to the improvements he had
made, and after the patent had been granted the homesteader (for the
contestant always won, in that country) the Sawtooth, would pay him for
the land. Frequently a Sawtooth man would file upon land before any
other man had claimed it. Sometimes a Sawtooth man would purchase a
relinquishment from some poor devil of a claim-holder who seemed always
to have bad luck, and so became discouraged and ready to sell. An
intelligent man like Bill Warfield could acquire much land in this
manner, give him time enough.

In much the same manner his herds increased. He bought out small
ranchers who were crowded to the selling point in one way or another.
They would find themselves fenced off from water, the Sawtooth having
acquired the water rights to creek or spring. Or they would be hemmed in
with fenced fields and would find it next to impossible to make use of
the law which gave them the right to "condemn" a road through. They
would not be openly assailed,--Bill Warfield was an intelligent man. A
dozen brands were recorded in the name of the Sawtooth Cattle Company,
and if a small rancher found his calf crop shorter than it should be, he
might think as he pleased, but he would have no tangible proof that his
calves wore a Sawtooth brand.

Inevitably it became necessary now and then to stop a mouth that was
ready to speak unwelcome truths. But if a Sawtooth man were known to
have committed violence, the Sawtooth itself was the first to put the
sheriff on his trail. If the man successfully dodged the sheriff and
made his way to parts unknown, the Sawtooth could shrug its shoulders
and wash its hands of him.

Then whispers were heard that the Sawtooth had on its pay roll men who
were paid to kill and to leave no trace. So many heedless ones crossed
the Sawtooth's path to riches! Fred Thurman had been one; a "bull-headed
cuss" who had the temerity to fight back when the Sawtooth calmly laid
claim to the first water rights to Granite Creek, having bought it, they
said, with the placer claim of an old miner who had prospected along the
headwaters of Granite at the base of Bear Top.

By that time the Sawtooth had grown to a power no poor man could hope to
defeat. Bill Warfield was Senator Warfield, and Senator Warfield was a
power in the political world that immediately surrounded him. Since his
neighboring ranchmen had not been able to prevent his steady climbing to
the position he now held, they had small hope of pulling him down. Brit
was right. They did well to hang on and continue living in that
country.

An open killing, one that would attract the attention of the outside
world, might be avenged. The man who committed the crime might be
punished,--if public opinion were sufficiently massed against him. In
that case Senator Warfield would cry loudest for justice. But it would
take a stronger man than the country held to raise the question of Fred
Thurman's death and take even the first steps toward proving it a
murder.

"It ain't that they can _do_ anything, Mr. Warfield," the man from
Whisper said guardedly, urging his horse close to the machine that stood
in the trail from Echo. It was broad day--a sun-scorched day to
boot--and Senator Warfield perspired behind the wheel of his car. "It's
the talk they may get started."

"What have they said? The girl was at the ranch for several days. She
didn't talk there, or Hawkins would have told me."

"She was sick. I saw her the other day at the Quirt, and she more'n half
recognized me. Hell! How'd _I_ know she was in there among them rocks?
Everybody that was apt to be riding through was accounted for, and I
knew there wasn't any one coming horseback or with a rig. My hearing's
pretty good."

Warfield moved the spark lever up and down on the wheel while he
thought. "Well," he said carefully at last, "if you're falling down in
your work, what are you whining about it to me for? What do you want?"

Al moistened his lips with his tongue. "I want to know how far I can go.
It's been hands off the Quirt, up to now. And the Quirt's beginning to
think it can get away with most anything. They've throwed a fence across
the pass through from Sugar Spring to Whisper. That sends us away around
by Three Creek. You can't trail stock across Granite Ridge, nor them
lava ledges. If it's going to be hands off, I want to know it. There's
other places I'd rather live in, if the Quirt's going to raise talk
about Fred Thurman."

Senator Warfield pulled at his collar and tie as if they choked him.
"The Quirt has made no trouble," he said. "Of course, if they begin
throwing fences across our stock trails and peddling gossip, that is
another story. I expect you to protect our interests, of course. And I
have never made a practice of dictating to you. In this case"--he sent a
sharp glance at Al--"it seems to me your interests are involved more
than ours. As to Fred Thurman, I don't know anything about it. I was not
here when he died, and I have never seen this girl of Brit's who seems
to worry you. She doesn't interest me, one way or the other."

"She seems to interest Bob a whole lot," Al said maliciously. "He rode
over to see her yesterday. She wasn't home, though."

Senator Warfield seemed unmoved by this bit of news, wherefore Al
returned to the main issue.

"Do I get a free hand, or don't I?" he insisted. "They can't be let
peddle talk--not if I stay around here."

Senator Warfield considered the matter.

"The girl's got the only line on me," Al went on. "The inquest was as
clean as I ever saw. Everything all straight--and then, here she comes
up----"

"If you know how to stop a woman's mouth, Al, you can make a million a
month telling other men." Senator Warfield smiled at him. Then he leaned
across the front seat and added impressively, "Bear one thing in mind,
Al. The Sawtooth cannot permit itself to become involved in any scandal,
nor in any killing cases. We're just at the most crucial point with our
reclamation project, over here on the flat. The legislature is willing
to make an appropriation for the building of the canal, and in two or
three months at the latest we should begin selling agricultural tracts
to the public. The State will also throw open the land it had withdrawn
from settlement, pending the floating of this canal project. More than
ever the integrity of the Sawtooth Cattle Company must be preserved,
since it has come out openly as a backer of the irrigation company.
Nothing--_nothing_ must be permitted to stand in the way."

He removed his thin driving cap and wiped his perspiring forehead. "I'm
sorry this all happened--as it has turned out," he said, with real
regret in his tone. "But since it did happen, I must rely upon you
to--to--er----"

"I guess I understand," Al grinned sardonically. "I just wanted you to
know how things is building up. The Quirt's kinda overreached itself. I
didn't want you comin' back on me for trying to keep their feet outa the
trough. I want you to know things is pretty damn ticklish right now, and
it's going to take careful steppin'."

"Well, don't let your foot slip, Al," Senator Warfield warned him. "The
Sawtooth would hate to lose you; you're a good man."

"Oh, I get yuh," Al retorted. "My foot ain't going to slip---- If it
did, the Sawtooth would be the first to pile onto my back!" The last
sentence was not meant for the senator's ears. Al had backed his horse,
and Senator Warfield was stepping on the starter. But it would not have
mattered greatly if he had heard, for this was a point quite thoroughly
understood by them both.

The Warfield car went on, lurching over the inequalities of the narrow
road. Al shook his horse into a shambling trot, picking his way
carelessly through the scattered sage.

His horse traveled easily, now and then lifting a foot high to avoid
rock or exposed root, or swerving sharply around obstacles too high to
step over. Al very seldom traveled along the beaten trails, though there
was nothing to deter him now save an inherent tendency toward
secretiveness of his motives, destinations and whereabouts. If the
country was open, you would see Al Woodruff riding at some distance from
the trail--or you would not see him at all, if there were gullies in
which he could conceal himself. He was always "line-riding," or hunting
stray stock--horses, usually--or striking across to some line-camp of
the Sawtooth, on business which he was perfectly willing to state.

But you will long ago have guessed that he was the evil eye of the
Sawtooth Company. He took no orders save such general ones as Senator
Warfield had just given him. He gave none. Whatever he did he did alone,
and he took no man into his confidence. It is more than probable that
Senator Warfield would never have known to a certainty that Al was
responsible for Thurman's death, if Al had not been worried over the
Quirt's possible knowledge of the crime and anxious to know just how far
his power might go.

Ostensibly he was in charge of the camp at Whisper, a place far enough
off the beaten trails to free him from chance visitors. The Sawtooth
kept many such camps occupied by men whose duty it was to look after the
Sawtooth cattle that grazed near; to see that stock did not "bog down"
in the tricky sand of the adjacent water holes and die before help came,
and to fend off any encroachments of the smaller cattle owners,--though
these were growing fewer year by year, thanks to the weeding-out policy
of the Sawtooth and the cunning activities of such as Al Woodruff.

It may sound strange to say that the Sawtooth country had not had a real
"killing" for years, though accidental deaths had been rather frequent.
One man, for instance, had fallen over a ledge and broken his neck,
presumably while drunk. Another had bought a few sticks of dynamite to
open up a spring on his ranch, and at the inquest which followed the
jury had returned a verdict of "death caused by being blown up by the
accidental discharge of dynamite." A sheepman was struck by lightning,
according to the coroner, and his widow had been glad to sell ranch and
sheep very cheaply to the Sawtooth and return to her relatives in
Montana. The Sawtooth had shipped the sheep within a month and turned
the ranch into another line-camp.

You will see that Senator Warfield had every reason to be sincere when
he called Al Woodruff a good man; good for the Sawtooth interests, that
means. You will also see that Brit Hunter had reasons for believing that
the business of ranching in the Sawtooth country might be classed as
extra hazardous, and for saying that it took nerve just to hang on.

That is why Al rode oblivious to his surroundings, meditating no doubt
upon the best means of preserving the "integrity" of the Sawtooth and at
the same time soothing effectively the ticklishness of the situation of
which he had complained. It was his business to find the best means. It
was for just such work that the Sawtooth paid him--secretly, to be
sure--better wages than the foreman, Hawkins, received. Al was
conscientious and did his best to earn his wages; not because he
particularly loved killing and spying as a sport, but because the
Sawtooth had bought his loyalty for a price, and so long as he felt that
he was getting a square deal from them, he would turn his hand against
any man that stood in their way. He was a Sawtooth man, and he fought
the enemies of the Sawtooth as matter-of-factly as a soldier will fight
for his country. To his unimaginative mind there was sufficient
justification in that attitude. As for the ease with which he planned to
kill and cover his killing under the semblance of accident, he would
have said, if you could make him speak of it, that he was not squeamish.
They'd all have to die some day, anyway.




CHAPTER TEN

ANOTHER SAWTOOTH "ACCIDENT"


Frank Johnson rose from the breakfast table, shaved a splinter off the
edge of the water bench for a toothpick and sharpened it carefully while
he looked at Brit.

"You goin' after them posts, or shall I?" he inquired glumly, which, by
the way, was his normal tone. "Jim and Sorry oughta git the post holes
all dug to-day. One of us better take a look through that young stock in
the lower field, too, and see if there's any more sign uh blackleg.
Which you ruther do?"

Brit tilted his chair backward so that he could reach the coffeepot on
the stove hearth. "I'll haul down the posts," he decided carelessly.
"They're easy loaded, and I guess my back's as good as yourn."

"All you got to do is skid 'em down off'n the bank onto the wagon,"
Frank said. "I wisht you'd go on up where we cut them last ones and git
my sweater, Brit. I musta left it hanging on a bush right close to where
I was workin'."

Brit's grunt signified assent, and Frank went out. Jim and Sorry, the
two unpicturesque cowboys of whom Lorraine had complained to the cat had
already departed with pick and shovel to their unromantic task of
digging post holes. Each carried a most unattractive lunch tied in a
flour sack behind the cantle of his saddle. Lorraine had done her
conscientious best, but with lumpy, sour-dough bread, cold bacon and
currant jelly of that kind which is packed in wooden kegs, one can't do
much with a cold lunch. Lorraine wondered how much worse it would look
after it had been tied on the saddle for half a day; wondered too what
those two silent ones got out of life,--what they looked forward to,
what was their final goal. For that matter she frequently wondered what
there was in life for any of them, shut into that deadly monotony of
sagebrush and rocks interspersed with little, grassy meadows where the
cattle fed listlessly.

Even the sinister undercurrent of antagonism against the Quirt could not
whip her emotions feeling that she was doing anything more than live
the restricted, sordid little life of a poorly equipped ranch. She had
ridden once with Frank Johnson to look through a bunch of cattle, but it
had been nothing more than a hot, thirsty, dull ride, with a wind that
blew her hat off in spite of pins and tied veil, and with a companion
who spoke only when he was spoken to and then as briefly as possible.

Her father would not talk again as he had talked that night. She had
tried to make him tell her more about the Sawtooth and had gotten
nothing out of him. The man from Whisper, whom Brit had spoken of as Al,
had not returned. Nor had the promised saddle horse materialized. The
boys were too busy to run in any horses, her father had told her shortly
when she reminded him of his promise. When the fence was done, maybe he
could rustle her another horse,--and then he had added that he didn't
see what ailed Yellowjacket, for all the riding she was likely to do.

"Straight hard work and minding your own business," her father had said,
and it seemed to Lorraine after three or four days of it that he had
summed up the life of a cattleman's daughter in a masterly manner which
ought to be recorded among Famous Sayings like "War is hell" and "Don't
give up the ship."

On this particular morning Lorraine's spirits were at their lowest ebb.
If it were not for the new stepfather, she would return to the Casa
Grande, she told herself disgustedly. And if it were not for the belief
among all her acquaintances that she was queening it over the
cattle-king's vast domain, she would return and find work again in
motion pictures. But she could not bring herself to the point of facing
the curiosity and the petty gossip of the studios. She would be expected
to explain satisfactorily why she had left the real West for the mimic
West of Hollywood. She did not acknowledge to herself that she also
could not face the admission of failure to carry out what she had begun.

She had told her dad that she wanted to fight with him, even though
"fighting" in this case meant washing the coarse clothing of her father
and Frank, scrubbing the rough, warped boards of the cabin floor, and
frying ranch-cured bacon for every meal, and in making butter to sell,
and counting the eggs every night and being careful to use only the
cracked ones for cooking.

She hated every detail of this crude housekeeping, from the chipped
enamel dishpan to the broom that was all one-sided, and the pillow slips
which were nothing more nor less than sugar sacks. She hated it even
more than she had hated the Casa Grande and her mother's frowsy
mentality. But because she could see that she made life a little more
comfortable for her dad, because she felt that he needed her, she would
stay and assure herself over and over that she was staying merely
because she was too proud to go back to the old life and own the West a
failure.

She was sweeping the doorstep with the one-sided broom when Brit drove
out through the gate and up the trail which she knew led eventually to
Sugar Spring. The horses, sleek in their new hair and skittish with the
change from hay to new grass, danced over the rough ground so that the
running gear of the wagon, with its looped log-chain, which would later
do duty as a brake on the long grade down from timber line on the side
of Spirit Canyon, rattled and banged over the rocks with a clatter that
could be heard for half a mile. Lorraine looked after her father
enviously. If she were a boy she would be riding on that sack of hay
tied to the "hounds" for a seat. But, being a girl, it had never
occurred to Brit that she might like to go,--might even be useful to
him on the trip.

"I suppose if I told dad I could drive that team as well as he can, he'd
just look at me and think I was crazy," she thought resentfully and gave
the broom a spiteful fling toward a presumptuous hen that had approached
too closely. "If I'd asked him to let me go along he'd have made some
excuse--oh, I'm beginning to know dad! He thinks a woman's place is in
the house--preferably the kitchen. And here I've thought all my life
that cowgirls did nothing but ride around and warn people about stage
holdups and everything! I'd just like to know how a girl would ever have
a chance to know what was going on in the country, unless she heard the
men talking while she poured their coffee. Only this bunch don't talk at
all. They just gobble and go."

She went in then and shut the door with a slam. Up on the ridge Al
Woodruff lowered his small binocular and eased away from the spot where
he had been crouching behind a bush. Every one on the Quirt ranch was
accounted for. As well as if he had sat at their breakfast table Al knew
where each man's work would take him that day. As for the girl, she was
safe at the ranch for the day, probably. If she did take a ride later
on, it would probably be up the ridge between the Quirt and Thurman's
ranch, and sit for an hour or so just looking. That ride was beginning
to be a habit of hers, Al had observed, so that he considered her
accounted for also.

He made his way along the side hill to where his horse was tied to a
bush, mounted and rode away with his mind pretty much at ease. Much more
at ease than it would have been had he read what was in Lorraine's mind
when, she slammed that door.

Up above Sugar Spring was timber. By applying to the nearest Forest
Supervisor a certain amount could be had for ranch improvements upon
paying a small sum for the "stumpage." The Quirt had permission to cut
posts for their new fence which Al Woodruff had reported to his boss.

As he drove up the trail, which was in places barely passable for a
wagon, Brit was thinking of that fence. The Sawtooth would object to it,
he knew, since it cut off one of their stock trails and sent them around
through rougher country. Just what form their objection would take,
Brit did not know. Deep in his intrepid soul he hoped that the Sawtooth
would at last show its hand openly. He had liked Fred Thurman, and what
Lorraine had told him went much deeper than she knew. He wanted to bring
them into the open where he could fight with some show of winning.

"I'll git Bill Warfield yet--and git him right," was the gist of his
musings. "He's bound to show his head, give him time enough. Him and his
killers can't always keep under cover. Let 'em come at me about that
fence! It's on my land--the Quirt's got a right to fence every foot of
land that belongs to 'em."

All the way over the ridge and across the flat and up the steep, narrow
road along the edge of Spirit Canyon, Brit dwelt upon the probable moves
of the Sawtooth. They would wait, he thought, until the fence was
completed and they had made a trail around through the lava rocks. They
would not risk any move at present; they would wait and tacitly accept
the fence, or pretend to accept it, as a natural inconvenience. But Brit
did not deceive himself that they would remain passive. That it had been
"hands off the Quirt" he did not know, but attributed the Quirt's
immunity to careful habits and the fact that they had never come to the
point where their interests actually clashed with the Sawtooth.

It never occurred to him therefore that he was slated for an accident
that day if the details could be conveniently arranged.

It was a long trail to Sugar Spring, and from there up Spirit Canyon the
climb was so tedious and steep that Brit took a full hour for the trip,
resting the team often because they were soft from the new grass diet
and sweated easily. They lost none of their spirit, however, and when
the road was steepest nagged at each other with head-shakings and bared
teeth, and ducked against each other in pretended fright at every
unusual rock or bush.

At the top he was forced to drive a full half mile beyond the piled
posts to a flat large enough to turn around. All this took time,
especially since Caroline, the brown mare, would rather travel ten miles
straight ahead than go backward ten feet. Brit was obliged to "take it
out of her" with the rein ends and his full repertoire of opprobrious
epithets before he could cramp the wagon and head them down the trail
again.

At the post pile he unhitched the team for safety's sake and tied them
to trees, where he fed them a little grain in nose bags. He was absorbed
now in his work and thought no more about the Sawtooth. He fastened the
log chain to the rear wheels to brake the wagon on the long grade down
the canyon, loaded the wagon with posts, bound them fast with a lighter
chain he had brought for the purpose, ate his own lunch and decided
that, since he had made fair time and would arrive home too early to do
the chores and too late to start any other job, he would cruise farther
up the mountain side and see what was the prospect of getting out logs
enough for an addition to the cabin.

Now that Raine was going to live with him, two rooms were not enough.
Brit wanted to make her as happy as he could, in his limited fashion. He
had for some days been planning a "settin' room and bedroom" for her.
She would be having beaux after awhile when she got acquainted, he
supposed. He could not deny her the privilege; she was young and she
was, in Brit's opinion, the best looking girl he had ever seen, not even
excepting Minnie, her mother. But he hoped she wouldn't go off and get
married the first thing she did,--and one good way to prevent that, he
reasoned, was to make her comfortable with him. He had noticed how
pleased she was that their cabin was of logs. She had even remarked that
she could not understand how a rancher would ever want to build a board
shack if there was any timber to be had. Well, timber was to be had, and
she should have her log house, though the hauling was not going to be
any sunshine, in Brit's opinion. With his axe he walked through the
timber, craning upward for straight tree trunks and lightly blazing the
ones he would want, the occasional axe strokes sounding distinctly in
the quiet air.

Lorraine heard them as she rode old Yellowjacket puffing up the grade,
following the wagon marks, and knew that she was nearing the end of her
journey,--for which Yellowjacket, she supposed, would be thankful. She
had started not more than an hour later than her father, but the team
had trotted along more briskly than her poor old nag would travel, so
that she did not overtake her dad as she had hoped.

She was topping the last climb when she saw the team tied to the trees,
and at the same moment she caught a glimpse of a man who crawled out
from under the load of posts and climbed the slope farther on. She was
on the point of calling out to him, thinking that he was her dad, when
he disappeared into the brush. At the same moment she heard the stroke
of an axe over to the right of where the man was climbing.

She was riding past the team when Caroline humped her back and kicked
viciously at Yellowjacket, who plunged straight down off the trail
without waiting to see whether Caroline's aim was exact. He slid into a
juniper thicket and sat down looking very perplexed and very permanently
placed there. Lorraine stepped off on the uphill side of him, thanked
her lucky stars she had not broken a leg, and tried to reassure
Yellowjacket and to persuade him that no real harm had been done him.
Straightway she discovered that Yellowjacket had a mind of his own and
that a pessimistic mind. He refused to scramble back into the trail,
preferring to sit where he was, or since Lorraine made that too
uncomfortable, to stand where he had been sitting. Yellowjacket, I may
explain, owned a Roman nose, a pendulous lower lip and drooping eyelids.
Those who know horses will understand.

By the time Lorraine had bullied and cajoled him into making a somewhat
circuitous route to the road, where he finally appeared some distance
above the point of his descent, Brit was there, hitching the team to the
wagon.

"What yuh doing up there?" he wanted to know, looking up with some
astonishment.

Lorraine furnished him with details and her opinion of both Caroline and
Yellow jacket. "I simply refuse to ride this comedy animal another
mile," she declared with some heat. "I'll drive the team and you can
ride him home, or he can be tied on behind the wagon."

"He won't lead," Brit objected. "Yeller's all right if you make up your
mind to a few failin's. You go ahead and ride him home. You sure can't
drive this team."

"I can!" Lorraine contended. "I've driven four horses--I guess I can
drive two, all right."

"Well, you ain't going to," Brit stated with a flat finality that
abruptly ended the argument.

Lorraine had never before been really angry with her father. She struck
Yellowjacket with her quirt and sent him sidling past the wagon and the
tricky Caroline, too stubborn to answer her dad when he called after her
that she had better ride behind the load. She went on, making
Yellowjacket trot when he did not want to trot down hill.

Behind her she heard the chuck-chuck of the loaded wagon. Far ahead she
heard some one whistling a high, sweet melody which had the queer, minor
strains of some old folk song. For just a few bars she heard it, and
then it was stilled, and the road dipping steeply before her seemed very
lonely, its emptiness cooling her brief anger to a depression that had
held her too often in its grip since that terrible night of the storm.
For the first time she looked back at her father lurching along on the
load and at the team looking so funny with the collars pushed up on
their necks with the weight of the load behind.

With a quick impulse of penitence she waved her hand to Brit, who waved
back at her. Then she went on, feeling a bit less alone in the world.
After all, he was her dad, and his life had been hard. If he failed to
understand her and her mental hunger for real companionship, perhaps she
also failed to understand him.

They had left the timber line now and had come to the lip of the canyon
itself. Lorraine looked down its steep, rock-roughened sides and
thought how her old director would have raved over its possibilities in
the way of "stunts." Yellow jacket, she noticed, kept circumspectly to
the center of the trail and eyed the canyon with frank disfavor.

She did not know at just what moment she became aware of trouble behind
her. It may have been Yellowjacket, turning his head sidewise and
abruptly quickening his pace that warned her. It may have been the
difference in the sound of the wagon and the impact of the horses' hoofs
on the rocky trail. She turned and saw that something had gone wrong.
They were coming down upon her at a sharp trot, stepping high, the wagon
tongue thrust up between their heads as they tried to hold back the
load.

Brit yelled to her then to get out of the way, and his voice was harsh
and insistent. Lorraine looked at the steep bank to the right, knew
instinctively that Yellowjacket would never have time to climb it before
the team was upon them, and urged him to a lope. She glanced back again,
saw that the team was not running away, that they were trying to hold
the wagon, and that it was gaining momentum in spite of them.

"Jump, dad!" she called and got no answer. Brit was sitting braced with
his feet far apart, holding and guiding the team. "He won't jump--he
wouldn't jump--any more than I would," she chattered to herself, sick
with fear for him, while she lashed her own horse to keep out of their
way.

The next she knew, the team was running, their eyeballs staring, their
front feet flung high as they lunged panic-stricken down the trail. The
load was rocking along behind them. Brit was still braced and clinging
to the reins.

Panic seized Yellowjacket. He, too, went lunging down that trail, his
head thrown from side to side that he might watch the thing that menaced
him, heedless of the fact that danger might lie ahead of him also.
Lorraine knew that he was running senselessly, that he might leave the
trail at any bend and go rolling into the canyon.

A sense of unreality seized her. It could not be deadly earnest, she
thought. It was so exactly like some movie thrill, planned carefully in
advance, rehearsed perhaps under the critical eye of the director, and
done now with the camera man turning calmly the little crank and
counting the number of film feet the scene would take. A little farther
and she would be out of the scene, and men stationed ahead would ride up
and stop her horse for her and tell her how well she had "put it over."

She looked over her shoulder and saw them still coming. It was real. It
was terribly real, the way that team was fleeing down the grade. She had
never seen anything like that before, never seen horses so frantically
trying to run from the swaying load behind them. Always, she had been
accustomed to moderation in the pace and a slowed camera to speed up the
action on the screen. Yellowjacket, too--she had never ridden at that
terrific speed down hill. Twice she lost a stirrup and grabbed the
saddle horn to save herself from going over his head.

They neared a sharp turn, and it took all her strength to pull her horse
to the inside and save him from plunging off down the canyon's side. The
nose of the hill hid for a moment her dad, and in that moment she heard
a crash and knew what had happened. But she could not stop; Yellowjacket
had his ears laid back flat on his senseless head, and the bit clamped
tight in his teeth.

She heard the crash repeated in diminuendo farther down in the canyon.
There was no longer the rattle of the wagon coming down the trail, the
sharp staccato of pounding hoofs.




CHAPTER ELEVEN

SWAN TALKS WITH HIS THOUGHTS


Lorraine, following instinct rather than thought, pulled Yellowjacket
into the first opening that presented itself. This was a narrow, rather
precipitous gully that seamed the slope just beyond the bend. The bushes
there whipped her head and shoulders cruelly as the horse forged in
among them, but they trapped him effectually where the gully narrowed to
a point. He stopped perforce, and Lorraine was out of the saddle and
running down to the trail before she quite realized what she was doing.

At the bend she looked down, saw the marks where the wagon had gone
over, scraping rocks and bushes from its path. Fence posts were strewn
at all angles down the incline, and far down a horse was standing with
part of the harness on him and with his head drooping dispiritedly. Her
father she could not see, nor the other horse, nor the wagon. A clump
of young trees hid the lower declivity. Lorraine did not stop to think
of what she would find down there. Sliding, running, she followed the
traces of the wreck to where the horse was standing. It was Caroline,
looking very dejected but apparently unhurt, save for skinned patches
here and there where she had rolled over rocks.

A little farther, just beyond the point of the grove which they seemed
to have missed altogether, lay the other horse and what was left of the
wagon. Brit she did not see at all. She searched the bushes, looked
under the wagon, and called and called.

A full-voiced shout answered her from farther up the canyon, and she ran
stumbling toward the sound, too agonized to shed tears or to think very
clearly. It was not her father's voice; she knew that beyond all doubt.
It was no voice that she had ever heard before. It had a clear resonance
that once heard would not have been easily forgotten. When she saw them
finally, her father was being propped up in a half-sitting position, and
the strange man was holding something to his lips.

"Just a little water. I carry me a bottle of water always in my pocket,"
said Swan, glancing up at her when she had reached them. "It sometimes
makes a man's head think better when he has been hurt, if he can drink a
little water or something."

Brit swallowed and turned his face away from the tilted bottle. "I
jumped--but I didn't jump quick enough," he muttered thickly. "The chain
pulled loose. Where's the horses, Raine?"

"They're all right. Caroline's standing over there. Are you hurt much,
dad?" It was a futile question, because Brit was already going off into
unconsciousness.

"He's hurt pretty bad," Swan declared honestly, looking up at her with
his eyes grown serious. "I was across the walley and I saw him coming
down the road like rolling rocks down a hill. I came quick. Now we make
stretcher, I think, and carry him home. I could take him on my back, but
that is hurting him too much." He looked at her--through her, it seemed
to Lorraine. In spite of her fear, in spite of her grief, she felt that
Swan was reading her very soul, and she backed away from him.

"I could help your father very much," he said soberly, "but I should
tell you a secret if I do that. I should maybe ask that you tell a lie
if somebody asks questions. Could you do that, Miss?"

"Lie?" Lorraine laughed uncertainly. "I'd _kill_!--if that would help
dad."

Swan was folding his coat very carefully and placing it under Brit's
head. "My mother I love like that," he said, without looking up. "My
mother I love so well that I talk with my thoughts to her sometimes. You
believe people can talk with their thoughts?"

"I don't know--what's that got to do with helping dad?" Lorraine knelt
beside Brit and began stroking his forehead softly, as is the soothing
way of women with their sick.

"I could send my thought to my mother. I could say to her that a man is
hurt and that a doctor must come very quickly to the Quirt ranch. I
could do that, Miss, but I should not like it if people knew that I did
it. They would maybe say that I am crazy. They would laugh at me, and it
is not right to laugh at those things."

"I'm not laughing. If you can do it, for heaven's sake go ahead! I don't
believe it, but I won't tell any one, if that's what you want."

"If some neighbors should ask, 'How did that doctor come so quick?'----"

"I'd rather lie and say I sent for him, than say that you or any one
else sent a telepathic message. That would sound more like a lie than a
lie would. How are we going to make a stretcher? We've got to get him
home, somehow----"

"At my cabin is blankets," Swan told her briskly. "I can climb the
hill--it is up there. In a little while I will come back."

He started off without waiting to see what Lorraine would have to say
about it, and with some misgivings she watched him run down to the
canyon's bottom and go forging up the opposite side with a most amazing
speed and certainty. In travel pictures she had seen mountain sheep
climb like that, and she likened him now to one of them. It seemed a
shame that he was a bit crazy, she thought; and immediately she recalled
his perfect assurance when he told her of sending thought messages to
his mother. She had heard of such things, she had even read a little on
the subject, but it had never seemed to her a practical means of
communicating. Calling a doctor, for instance, seemed to Lorraine
rather far-fetched an application of what was at best but a debatable
theory.

Considering the distance, he was back in a surprisingly short time with
two blankets, a couple of light poles and a flask of brandy. He seemed
as fresh and unwinded as if he had gone no farther than the grove, and
he wore, more than ever, his air of cheerful assurance.

"The doctor will be there," he remarked, just as if it were the simplest
thing in the world. "We can carry him to Fred Thurman's. There I can get
horses and a wagon, and you will not have to carry so far. And when we
get to your ranch the doctor will be there, I think. He is starting now.
We will hurry. I will fix it so you need not carry much. It is just to
make it steady for me."

While he talked he was working on the stretcher. He had a rope, and he
was knotting it in a long loop to the poles. Lorraine wondered why,
until he had lifted her father and placed him on the stretcher and
placed the loop over his own head and under one arm, as a ploughman
holds the reins, so that his hands may be free.

"If you will carry the front," said Swan politely, "it will not be
heavy for you like this. But you will help me keep it steady."

Lorraine was past discussing anything. She obeyed him silently, lifting
the end of the stretcher and leading the way down to the canyon's
bottom, where Swan assured her they could walk quite easily and would
save many detours which the road above must take. At the bottom Swan
stopped her so that he might shorten the rope and take more of the
weight on his shoulders. She protested half-heartedly, but Swan only
laughed.

"I am strong like a mule," he said. "You should see me wrestle with
somebody. Clear over my head--I can carry a man in my hands. This is so
you can walk fast. Three miles straight down we come to Thurman's ranch,
where I get the horses. It's funny how hills make a road far around.
Just three miles--that's all. I have walked many times."

Lorraine did not answer him. She felt that he was talking merely to keep
her from worrying, and she was fairly sick with anxiety and did not hear
half of what he was saying. She was nervously careful about choosing her
steps so that she would not stumble and jolt her father. She did not
believe that he was wholly unconscious, for she had seen his eyelids
tighten and his lips twitch several times, when she was waiting for
Swan. He had seemed to be in pain and to be trying to hide the fact from
her. She felt that Swan knew it, else he would have talked of her dad,
would at least have tried to reassure her. But it is difficult to speak
of a person who hears what you are saying, and Swan was talking of
everything, it seemed to her, except the man they were carrying.

She wondered if it were really true that Swan had sent a call through
space for a doctor; straightway she would call herself crazy for even
considering for a moment its possibility. If he could do that--but of
course he couldn't. He must just imagine it.

Many times Swan had her lower the stretcher to the ground, and would
make a great show of rubbing his arms and easing his shoulder muscles.
Whenever Lorraine looked full into his face he would grin at her as
though nothing was wrong, and when they came to a clear-running stream
he emptied the water bottle, dipped up a little fresh water, added
brandy, and lifted Brit's head very gently and gave him a drink. Brit
opened his eyes and looked at Swan, and from him to Lorraine, but he did
not say anything. He still had that tightened look around his mouth
which spelled pain.

"Pretty quick now we get you fixed up good," Swan told him cheerfully.
"One mile more is all, and we get the horses and I make a good bed for
you." He looked a signal, and Lorraine once more took up the stretcher.

Another mile seemed a long way, light though Swan had made the load for
her. She thought once that he must have some clairvoyant power, because
whenever she felt as if her arms were breaking, Swan would tell her to
stop a minute.

"How do you know a doctor will come?" she asked Swan suddenly, when they
were resting with the Thurman ranch in view half a mile below them.

Swan did not look at her directly, as had been his custom. She saw a
darker shade of red creep up into his cheeks. "My mother says she would
send a doctor quick," he replied hesitatingly. "You will see. It is
because--your father he is not like other men in this country. Your
father is a good man. That is why a doctor comes."

Lorraine looked at him strangely and stooped again to her burden. She
did not speak again until they were passing the Thurman fence where it
ran up into the mouth of the canyon. A few horses were grazing there,
the sun striking their sides with the sheen of satin. They stared
curiously at the little procession, snorted and started to run, heads
and tails held high. But one wheeled suddenly and came galloping toward
them, stopped when he was quite close, ducked and went thundering past
to the head of the field. Lorraine gave a sharp little scream and set
down the stretcher with a lurch, staring after the horse wide-eyed, her
face white.

"They do it for play," Swan said reassuringly. "They don't hurt you. The
fence is between, and they don't hurt you anyway."

"That horse with the white face--I saw it--and when the man struck it
with his quirt it went past me, running like that and dragging--_oh-h_!"
She leaned against the bluff side, her face covered with her two palms.

Swan glanced down at Brit, saw that his eyes were closed, ducked his
head from under the looped rope and went to Lorraine.

"The man that struck that horse--do you know that man?" he asked, all
the good nature gone from his voice.

"No--I don't know--I saw him twice, by the lightning flashes. He
shot--and then I saw him----" She stopped abruptly, stood for a minute
longer with her eyes covered, then dropped her hands limply to her
sides. But when the horse came circling back with a great flourish, she
shivered and her hands closed into the fists of a fighter.

"Are you a Sawtooth man?" she demanded suddenly, looking up at Swan
defiantly. "It was a nightmare. I--I dreamed once about a horse--like
that."

Swan's wide-open eyes softened a little. "The Sawtooth calls me that
damn Swede on Bear Top," he explained. "I took a homestead up there and
some day they will want to buy my place or they will want to make a
fight with me to get the water. Could you know that man again?"

"Raine!" Brit's voice held a warning, and Lorraine shivered again as she
turned toward him. "Raine, you----"

He closed his eyes again, and she could get no further speech from him.
But she thought she understood. He did not want her to talk about Fred
Thurman. She went to her end of the stretcher and waited there while
Swan put the rope over his head. They went on, Lorraine walking with her
head averted, trying not to see the blaze-faced roan, trying to shut out
the memory of him dashing past her with his terrible burden, that night.

Swan did not speak of the matter again. With Lorraine's assistance he
carried Brit into Thurman's cabin, laid him, stretcher and all, on the
bed and hurried out to catch and harness the team of work horses.
Lorraine waited beside her father, helpless and miserable. There was
nothing to do but wait, yet waiting seemed to her the one thing she
could not do.

"Raine!" Brit's voice was very weak, but Lorraine jumped as though a
trumpet had bellowed suddenly in her ear. "Swan--he's all right. But
don't go telling--all yuh know and some besides. He ain't--Sawtooth,
but--he might let out----"

"I know. I won't, dad. It was that horse----"

Brit turned his face to the wall as if no more was to be said on the
subject. Lorraine wandered around the cabin, which was no larger than
her father's place. The rooms were scrupulously clean--neater than the
Quirt, she observed guiltily. Not one article, however small and
unimportant, seemed to be out of its place, and the floors of both rooms
were scrubbed whiter than any floors she had ever seen. Swan's
housekeeping qualities made her ashamed of her own imperfections; and
when, thinking that Swan must be hungry and that the least she could do
was to set out food for him, she opened the cupboard, she had a swift,
embarrassed vision of her own culinary imperfections. She could cook
better food than her dad had been content to eat and to set before
others, but Swan's bread was a triumph in sour dough. Biscuits tall and
light as bread can be she found, covered neatly with a cloth. Prunes
stewed so that there was not one single wrinkle in them--Lorraine could
scarcely believe they were prunes until she tasted them. She was
investigating a pot of beans when Swan came in.

"Food I am thinking of, Miss," he grinned at her. "We shall hurry, but
it is not good to go hungry. Milk is outside in a cupboard. It is
quicker than to make coffee."

"It will be dark before we can get him home," said Lorraine uneasily.
"And by the time a doctor can get out there----"

"A doctor will be there, I think. You don't believe, but that is no
difference to his coming just the same."

He brought the milk, poured off the creamy top into a pitcher, stirred
it, and quietly insisted that she drink two glasses. Lorraine observed
that Swan himself ate very little, bolting down a biscuit in great
mouthfuls while he carried a mattress and blankets out to spread in the
wagon. It was like his pretense of weariness on the long carry down the
canyon, she thought. It was for her more than for himself that he was
thinking.




CHAPTER TWELVE

THE QUIRT PARRIES THE FIRST BLOW


A car with dimmed lights stood in front of the Quirt cabin when Swan
drove around the last low ridge and down to the gate. The rattle of the
wagon must have been heard, for the door opened suddenly and Frank stood
revealed in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp on the table within.
Behind Frank, Lorraine saw Jim and Sorry standing in their shirt sleeves
looking out into the dark. Another, shorter figure she glimpsed as Frank
and the two men stepped out and came striding hastily toward them.
Lorraine jumped out and ran to meet them, hoping and fearing that her
hope was foolish. That car might easily be only Bob Warfield on some
errand of no importance. Still, she hoped.

"That you, Raine? Where's Brit? What's all this about Brit being hurt? A
doctor from Shoshone----"

"A _doctor_? Oh, did a doctor come, then? Oh, help Swan carry dad in!
I'm--oh, I'm afraid he's awfully injured!"

"Yes-s--but how'n hell did a doctor know about it?" Sorry, the silent,
blurted unexpectedly.

"Oh,--never mind--but get dad in. I'll----" She ran past them without
finishing her sentence and burst incoherently into the presence of an
extremely calm little man with gray whiskers and dust on the shoulders
of his coat. These details, I may add, formed the sum of Lorraine's
first impression of him.

"Well! Well!" he remonstrated with a professional briskness, when she
nearly bowled him over. "We seem to be in something of a hurry! Is this
the patient I was sent to examine?"

"No!" Lorraine flashed impatiently over her shoulder as she rushed into
her own room and began turning down the covers. "It's dad, of
course--and you'd better get your coat off and get ready to go to work,
because I expect he's just one mass of broken bones!"

The doctor smiled behind his whiskers and returned to the doorway to
direct the carrying in of his patient. His sharp eyes went immediately
to Brit's face, pallid under the leathery tan, his fingers went to
Brit's hairy, corded wrist. The doctor smiled no more that evening.

"No, he is not a mass of broken bones, I am happy to say," he reported
gravely to Lorraine afterwards. "He has a sufficient number, however.
The left scapula is fractured, likewise the clavicle, and there is a
compound fracture of the femur. There is some injury to the head, the
exact extent of which I cannot as yet determine. He should be removed to
a hospital, unless you are prepared to have a nurse here for some time,
or to assume the burden of a long and tedious illness." He looked at her
thoughtfully. "The journey to Shoshone would be a considerable strain on
the patient in his present condition. He has a splendid amount of
constitutional vitality, or he would scarcely have survived his injuries
so long without medical attendance. Can you tell me just how the
accident occurred?"

"Excuse me, doctor--and Miss," Swan diffidently interrupted. "I could
ask you to take a look on my shoulder, if you please. If you are done
setting bones in Mr. Hunter. I have a great pain on my shoulder from
carrying so long."

"You never mentioned it!" Lorraine reproached him quickly. "Of course
it must be looked after right away. And then, Doctor, I'd like to talk
to you, if you don't mind." She watched them retreat to the bunk-house
together, Swan's big form towering above the doctor's slighter figure.
Swan was talking earnestly, the mumble of his voice reaching Lorraine
without the enunciation of any particular word to give a clue to what he
was saying. But it struck her that his voice did not sound quite
natural; not so Swedish, not so careful.

Frank came tiptoeing out of the room where Brit lay bandaged and
unconscious and stood close to Lorraine, looking down at her solemnly.

"How 'n 'ell did he git here--the doctor?" he demanded, making a great
effort to hold his voice down to a whisper, and forgetting now and then.
"How'd _he_ know Brit rolled off'n the grade? Us here, _we_ never knowed
it, and I was tryin' to send him back when you came. He said somebody
telephoned there was a man hurt in a runaway. There ain't a telephone
closer'n the Sawtooth, and that there's a good twenty mile and more from
where Brit was hurt. It's damn funny."

"Yes, it is," Lorraine admitted uncomfortably. "I don't know any more
than you do about it."

"Well, how'n 'ell did it happen? Brit, he oughta know enough to
rough-lock down that hill. An' that team ain't a runaway team. _I_ never
had no trouble with 'em--they're good at holdin' a load. They'll set
down an' slide but what they'll hold 'er. What become of the horses?"

"Why--they're over there yet. We forgot all about the horses, I think.
Caroline was standing up, all right. The other horse may be killed. I
don't know--it was lying down. And Yellowjacket was up that little gully
just this side of the wreck, when I left him. They did try to hold the
load, Frank. Something must have happened to the brake. I saw dad
crawling out from under the wagon just before I got to where the load
was standing. Or some one did. I think it was dad. But Caroline kicked
my horse down off the road, and I only saw him a minute--but it _must_
have been dad. And then, a little way down the hill, something went
wrong."

Frank seemed trying to reconstruct the accident from Lorraine's
description. "He'd no business to start down if his rough-lock wasn't
all right," he said. "It ain't like him. Brit's careful about them
things--little men most always are. I don't see how 'n 'ell it worked
loose. It's a damn queer layout all around; and this here doctor gitting
here ahead of you folks, that there is the queerest. What's he say about
Brit? Think he'll pull through?"

The doctor himself, coming up just then, answered the question. Of
course the patient would pull through! What were doctors for? As to his
reason for coming, he referred them to Mr. Vjolmar, whom he thought
could better explain the matter.

The three of them waited,--five of them, since Jim and Sorry had come
up, anxious to hear the doctor's opinion and anything else pertaining to
the affair. Swan was coming slowly from the bunk-house, buttoning his
coat. He seemed to feel that they were waiting for him and to know why.
His manner was diffident, deprecating even.

"We may as well go in out of the mosquitoes," the doctor suggested. "And
I wish you would tell these people what you told me, young man. Don't be
afraid to speak frankly; it is rather amazing but not at all
impossible, as I can testify. In fact," he added dryly, "my presence
here ought to settle any doubt of that. Just tell them, young man, about
your mother."

Swan was the last to enter the kitchen, and he stood leaning against the
closed door, turning his old hat round and round, his eyes going swiftly
from face to face. They were watching him, and Swan blushed a deep red
while he told them about his mother in Boise, and how he could talk to
her with his thoughts. He explained laboriously how the thoughts from
her came like his mother speaking in his head, and that his thoughts
reached her in the same way. He said that since he was a little boy they
could talk together with their thoughts, but people laughed and some
called them crazy, so that now he did not like to have somebody know
that he could do it.

"But Brit Hunter's hurt bad, so a doctor must come quick, or I think he
maybe will die. It takes too long to ride a horse to Echo from this
ranch, so I call on my mother, and I tell my mother a doctor must come
quick to this ranch. So my mother sends a telephone to this doctor in
Shoshone, and he comes. That is all. But I would not like it if
everybody maybe finds it out that I do that, and makes talk about it."

He looked straight at Jim and Sorry, and those two unprepossessing ones
looked at each other and at Swan and at the doctor and at each other
again, and headed for the door. But Swan was leaning against it, and his
eyes were on them. "I would like it if you say somebody rides to get the
doctor," he hinted quietly.

Sorry looked at Jim. "I rode like hell," he stated heavily. "I leave it
to Jim."

"You shore'n hell did!" Jim agreed, and Swan removed his big form from
the door.

"You boys goin' over t' Spirit Canyon?" Frank wanted to know.

"Yeah," said Sorry, answering for them both, and they went out, giving
Swan a sidelong look of utter bafflement as they passed him. Talking by
the thought route from Spirit Canyon to Boise City was evidently a bit
too much for even their phlegmatic souls to contemplate with perfect
calm.

"They'll keep it to theirselves, whether they believe it or not," Frank
assured Swan in his labored whisper. "It don't go down with me. I ain't
supe'stitious enough fer that."

"The doctor he comes, don't he?" Swan retorted. "I shall go back now and
milk the cows and do chores."

"But if your shoulder is lame, Swan, how can you?" Lorraine asked in her
unexpected fashion.

Swan swallowed and looked helplessly at the doctor, who stood smoothing
his chin. "The muscle strain is not serious," he said calmly. "A little
gentle exercise will prevent further trouble, I think." Whereupon he
turned abruptly to the door of the other room, glanced in at Brit and
beckoned Lorraine with an upraised finger.

"You have had a hard time of it yourself, young lady," he told her. "You
needn't worry about Swan. He is not suffering appreciably. I shall mix
you a very unpleasant dose of medicine, and then I want you to go to bed
and sleep. I shall stay with your father to-night; not that it is
necessary, but because I prefer daylight for the trip back to town. So
there is no reason why you should sit up and wear yourself out. You will
have plenty of time to do that while your father's bones mend."

He proceeded to mix the unpleasant dose, which Lorraine swallowed and
straightway forgot, in the muddle of thoughts that whirled confusingly
in her brain. Little things distressed her oddly, while her father's
desperate state left her numb. She lay down on the cot in the farther
corner of the kitchen where her father had slept just last night--it
seemed so long ago!--and almost immediately, as her senses recorded it,
bright sunlight was shining into the room.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LONE TAKES HIS STAND


Lone Morgan, over at Elk Spring camp, was just sitting down to eat his
midday meal when some one shouted outside. Lone stiffened in his chair,
felt under his coat, and then got up with some deliberation and looked
out of the window before he went to the door. All this was a matter of
habit, bred of Lone's youth in the feud country, and had nothing
whatever to do with his conscience.

"Hello!" he called, standing in the doorway and grinning a welcome to
Swan, who stood with one arm resting on the board gate. "She's on the
table--come on in."

"I don't know if you're home with the door shut like that," Swan
explained, coming up to the cabin. "I chased a coyote from Rock City to
here, and by golly, he's going yet! I'll get him sometime, maybe. He's
smart, but you can beat anything with thinking if you don't stop
thinking. Always the other feller stops sometimes, and then you get
him. You believe that?"

"It most generally works out that way," Lone admitted, getting another
plate and cup from the cupboard, which was merely a box nailed with its
bottom to the wall, and a flour sack tacked across the front for a
curtain. "Even a coyote slips up now and then, I reckon."

Swan sat down, smoothing his tousled yellow hair with both hands as he
did so. "By golly, my shoulder is sore yet from carrying Brit Hunter,"
he remarked carelessly, flexing his muscles and grimacing a little.

Lone was pouring the coffee, and he ran Swan's cup over before he
noticed what he was doing. Swan looked up at him and looked away again,
reaching for a cloth to wipe the spilled coffee from the table.

"How was that?" Lone asked, turning away to the stove. "What-all
happened to Brit Hunter?"

Swan, with his plate filled and his coffee well sweetened, proceeded to
relate with much detail the story of Brit's misfortune. "By golly, I
don't see how he don't get killed," he finished, helping himself to
another biscuit. "By _golly_, I don't. Falling into Spirit Canyon is
like getting dragged by a horse. It should kill a man. What you think,
Lone?"

"It didn't, you say." Lone's eyes were turned to his coffee cup.

"It don't kill Brit Hunter--not yet. I think maybe he dies with all his
bones broke, like that. By golly, that shows you what could happen if a
man don't think. Brit should look at that chain on his wheel before he
starts down that road."

"Oh. His brake didn't hold, eh?"

"I look at that wagon," Swan answered carefully. "It is something funny
about that chain. I worked hauling logs in the mountains, once. It is
something damn funny about that chain, the way it's fixed."

Lone did not ask him for particulars, as perhaps Swan expected. He did
not speak at all for awhile, but presently pushed back his plate as if
his appetite were gone.

"It's like Fred Thurman," Swan continued moralizing. "If Fred don't ride
backwards, I bet he don't get killed--like that."

"Where's Brit now?" Lone asked, getting up and putting on his hat. "At
the ranch?"

"Or heaven, maybe," Swan responded sententiously. "But my dog Yack, he
don't howl yet. I guess Brit's at the ranch."

"Sorry I'm busy to-day," said Lone, opening the door. "You stay as long
as you like, Swan. I've got some riding to do."

"I'll wash the dishes, and then I maybe will think quicker than that
coyote. I'm after him, by golly, till I get him."

Lone muttered something and went out. Within five minutes Swan, hearing
hoofbeats, looked out through a crack in the door and saw Lone riding at
a gallop along the trail to Rock City. "Good bait. He swallows the
hook," he commented to himself, and his good-natured grin was not
brightening his face while he washed the dishes and tidied the cabin.

With Lone rode bitterness of soul and a sick fear that had nothing to do
with his own destiny. How long ago Brit had been hurled into the canyon
Lone did not know; he had not asked. But he judged that it must have
been very recently. Swan had not told him of anything but the runaway,
and of helping to carry Brit home--and of the "damn funny thing about
the chain"--the rough-lock, he must have meant. Too well Lone
understood the sinister meaning that probably lay behind that phrase.

"They've started on the Quirt now," he told himself with foreboding.
"She's been telling her father----"

Lone fell into bitter argument with himself. Just how far was it
justifiable to mind his own business? And if he did not mind it, what
possible chance had he against a power so ruthless and so cunning? An
accident to a man driving a loaded wagon down the Spirit Canyon grade
had a diabolic plausibility that no man in the country could question.
Brit, he reasoned, could not have known before he started that his
rough-lock had been tampered with, else he would have fixed it. Neither
was Brit the man to forget the brake on his load. If Brit lived, he
might talk as much as he pleased, but he could never prove that his
accident had been deliberately staged with murderous intent.

Lone lifted his head and looked away across the empty miles of sageland
to the quiet blue of the mountains beyond. Peace--the peace of
untroubled wilderness--brooded over the land. Far in the distance,
against the rim of rugged hills, was an irregular splotch of brown which
was the headquarters of the Sawtooth. Lone turned his wrist to the
right, and John Doe, obeying the rein signal, left the trail and began
picking his way stiff-legged down the steep slope of the ridge, heading
directly toward the home ranch.

John Doe was streaked with sweat and his flanks were palpitating with
fatigue when Lone rode up to the corral and dismounted. Pop Bridgers saw
him and came bow-legging eagerly forward with gossip titillating on his
meddlesome tongue, but Lone stalked by him with only a surly nod. Bob
Warfield he saw at a distance and gave no sign of recognition. He met
Hawkins coming down from his house and stopped in the trail.

"Have you got time to go back to the office and fix up my time,
Hawkins?" he asked without prelude. "I'm quitting to-day."

Hawkins stared and named the Biblical place of torment. "What yuh
quittin' for, Lone?" he added incredulously. "All you boys got a raise
last month; ain't that good enough?"

"Plenty good enough, so long as I work for the outfit."

"Well, what's wrong? You've been with us five years, Lone, and it's
suited you all right so far----"

Lone looked at him. "Say, I never set out to _marry_ the Sawtooth," he
stated calmly. "And if I have married you-all by accident, you can get a
bill of divorce for desertion. This ain't the first time a man ever quit
yuh, is it, Hawkins?"

"No--and there ain't a man on the pay roll we can't do without," Hawkins
retorted, his neck stiffening with resentment. "It's a kinda rusty
trick, though, Lone, quittin' without notice and leaving a camp empty."

"Elk Spring won't run away," Lone assured him without emotion. "She's
been left alone a week or two at a time during roundups. I don't reckon
the outfit'll bust up before you get a man down there."

The foreman looked at him curiously, for this was not like Lone, whose
tone had always been soft and friendly, and whose manner had no hint of
brusqueness. There was a light, too, in Lone's eyes that had not been
there before. But Hawkins would not question him further. If Lone Morgan
or any other man wanted to quit, that was his privilege,--providing, of
course, that his leaving was not likely to menace the peace and
security of the Sawtooth. Lone had made it a point to mind his own
business, always. He had never asked questions, he had never surmised or
gossiped. So Hawkins gave him a check for his wages and let him go with
no more than a foreman's natural reluctance to lose a trustworthy man.

By hard riding along short cuts, Lone reached the Quirt ranch and
dropped reins at the doorstep, not much past mid-afternoon.

"I rode over to see if there's anything I can do," he said, when
Lorraine opened the door to him. He did not like to ask about her
father, fearing that the news would be bad.

"Why, thank you for coming." Lorraine stepped back, tacitly inviting him
to enter. "Dad knows us to-day, but of course he's terribly hurt and
can't talk much. We do need some one to go to town for things. Frank
helps me with dad, and Jim and Sorry are trying to keep things going on
the ranch. And Swan does what he can, of course, but----"

"I just thought you maybe needed somebody right bad," said Lone quietly,
meaning a great deal more than Lorraine dreamed that he meant. "I'm not
doing anything at all, right now, so I can just as well help out as
not. I can go to town right away, if I can borrow a horse. John Doe,
he's pretty tired. I been pushing him right through--not knowing there
was a town trip ahead of him."

Lorraine found her eyes going misty. He was so quiet, and so reassuring
in his quiet. Half her burden seemed to slip from her shoulders while
she looked at him. She turned away, groping for the door latch.

"You may see dad, if you like, while I get the list of things the doctor
ordered. He left only a little while ago, and I was waiting for one of
the boys to come back so I could send him to town."

It was on Lone's tongue to ask why the doctor had not taken in the order
himself and instructed some one to bring out the things; but he
remembered how very busy with its own affairs was Echo and decided that
the doctor was wise.

He tiptoed in to the bed and saw a sallow face covered with stubbly gray
whiskers and framed with white bandages. Brit opened his eyes and moved
his thin lips in some kind of greeting, and Lone sat down on the edge of
a chair, feeling as miserably guilty as if he himself had brought the
old man to this pass. It seemed to him that Brit must know more of the
accident than Swan had told, and the thought did not add to his comfort.
He waited until Brit opened his eyes again, and then he leaned forward,
holding Brit's wandering glance with his own intent gaze.

"I ain't working now," he said, lowering his voice so that Lorraine
could not hear. "So I'm going to stay here and help see you through with
this. I've quit the Sawtooth."

Brit's eyes cleared and studied Lone's face. "D'you know--anything?"

"No, I don't." Lone's face hardened a little. "But I wanted you to know
that I'm--with the Quirt, now."

"Frank hire yuh?"

"No. I ain't hired at all. I'm just--_with_ yuh."

"We--need yuh," said Brit grimly, looking Lone straight in the eyes.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"FRANK'S DEAD"


"Frank come yet?" The peevish impatience of an invalid whose horizon has
narrowed to his own personal welfare and wants was in Brit's voice. Two
weeks he had been sick, and his temper had not sweetened with the pain
of his broken bones and the enforced idleness. Brit was the type of man
who is never quiet unless he is asleep or too ill to get out of bed.

Lorraine came to the doorway and looked in at him. Two weeks had set
their mark on her also. She seemed older, quieter in her ways; there
were shadows in her eyes and a new seriousness in the set of her mouth.
She had had her burdens, and she had borne them with more patience than
many an older woman would have done, but what she thought of those
burdens she did not say.

"No, dad--but I thought I heard a wagon a little while ago. He must be
coming," she said.

"Where's Lone at?" Brit moved restlessly on the pillow and twisted his
face at the pain.

"Lone isn't back, either."

"He ain't? Where'd he go?"

Lorraine came to the bedside and, lifting Brit's head carefully,
arranged the pillow as she knew he liked it. "I don't know where he
went," she said dully. "He rode off just after dinner. Do you want your
supper now? Or would you rather wait until Frank brings the fruit?"

"I'd ruther wait--if Frank don't take all night," Brit grumbled. "I hope
he ain't connected up with that Echo booze. If he has----"

"Oh, no, dad! Don't borrow trouble. Frank was anxious to get home as
soon as he could. He'll be coming any minute, now. I'll go listen for
the wagon."

"No use listenin'. You couldn't hear it in that sand--not till he gits
to the gate. I don't see where Lone goes to, all the time. Where's Jim
and Sorry, then?"

"Oh, they've had their supper and gone to the bunk-house. Do you want
them?"

"No! What'd I want 'em fur? Not to look at, that's sure. I want to know
how things is going on this ranch. And from all I can make out, they
ain't goin' at all," Brit fretted. "What was you 'n Lone talkin' so long
about, out in the kitchen last night? Seems to me you 'n' him have got
a lot to say to each other, Raine."

"Why, nothing in particular. We were just--talking. We're all human
beings, dad; we have to talk sometimes. There's nothing else to do."

"Well, I caught something about the Sawtooth. I don't want you talking
to Lone or anybody else about that outfit, Raine. I told yuh so once.
He's all right--I ain't saying anything against Lone--but the less you
have to say the more you'll have to be thankful fur, mebby."

"I was wondering if Swan could have gotten word somehow to the Sawtooth
and had them telephone out that you were hurt. And Lone was drawing a
map of the trails and showing me how far it was from the canyon to the
Sawtooth ranch. And he was asking me just how it happened that the brake
didn't hold, and I said it must have been all right, because I saw you
come out from under the wagon just before you hitched up. I thought you
were fixing the chain on them."

"Huh?" Brit lifted his head off the pillow and let it drop back again,
because of the pain in his shoulder. "You never seen me crawl out from
under no wagon. I come straight down the hill to the team."

"Well, I saw some one. He went up into the brush. I thought it was you."
Lorraine turned in the doorway and stood looking at him perplexedly. "We
shouldn't be talking about it, dad--the doctor said we mustn't. But are
you _sure_ it wasn't you? Because I certainly saw a man crawl out from
under the wagon and start up the hill. Then the horses acted up, and I
couldn't see him after Yellowjacket jumped off the road."

Brit lay staring up at the ceiling, apparently unheeding her
explanation. Lorraine watched him for a minute and returned to the
kitchen door, peering out and listening for Frank to come from Echo with
supplies and the mail and, more important just now, fresh fruit for her
father.

"I think he's coming, dad," she called in to her father. "I just heard
something down by the gate."

She could save a few minutes, she thought, by running down to the corral
where Frank would probably stop and unload the few sacks of grain he was
bringing, before he drove up to the house. Frank was very methodical in
a fussy, purposeless way, she had observed. Twice he had driven to Echo
since her father had been hurt, and each time he had stopped at the
corral on his way to the house. So she closed the screen door behind
her, careful that it should not slam, and ran down the path in the heavy
dusk wherein crickets were rasping a strident chorus.

"Oh! It's you, is it, Lone?" she exclaimed, when she neared the vague
figure of a man unsaddling a horse. "You didn't see Frank coming
anywhere, did you? Dad won't have his supper until Frank comes with the
things I sent for. He's late."

Lone was lifting the saddle off the back of John Doe, which he had
bought from the Sawtooth because he was fond of the horse. He hesitated
and replaced the saddle, pulling the blanket straight under it.

"I saw him coming an hour ago," he said. "I was back up on the ridge,
and I saw a team turn into the Quirt trail from the ford. It couldn't be
anybody but Frank. I'll ride out and meet him."

He was mounted and gone before she realized that he was ready. She heard
the sharp

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/19166