Brand Blotters
by William MacLeod Raine · English · Gutenberg #27436 · 430,473 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Brand Blotters
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: Brand Blotters
Author: William MacLeod Raine
Illustrator: Clarence Rowe
Release date: December 7, 2008 [eBook #27436]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27436
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRAND BLOTTERS ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: "WHO ARE YOU?" "WATER!" HE GASPED. Page 20.]
BRAND BLOTTERS
By
WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE
Author Of
Wyoming, Bucky O'Connor, Mavericks,
A Texas Ranger, Ridgway Of Montana, Etc.
Illustrations By
CLARENCE ROWE
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Made in the United States of America
Copyright, 1909, by J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1911, by Street & Smith
Copyright, 1912, by G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
Brand Blotters
TO
FRANK N. SPINDLER
In Memory of Certain Sunday Afternoon Tramps
Long Ago, During Which We Solved the
Problems of the Nation
CONTENTS
PART I
MELISSY OF THE BAR DOUBLE G
CHAPTER PAGE
I A Crossed Trail 11
II Brand Blotting 18
III An Accusation 35
IV The Man with the Chihuahua Hat 49
V The Tenderfoot Takes up a Claim 61
VI "Hands Up" 75
VII Watering Sheep 98
VIII The Boone-Bellamy Feud is Renewed 109
IX The Danger Line 121
X Jack Goes to the Head of the Class 141
XI A Conversation 156
XII The Tenderfoot Makes a Proposition 163
XIII Old Acquaintances 182
XIV Concerning the Boone-Bellamy-Yarnell Feud 191
PART II
DEAD MAN'S CACHE
CHAPTER PAGE
I Kidnapped 199
II A Capture 209
III The Tables Turned 217
IV The Real Bucky and the False 231
V A Photograph 243
VI In Dead Man's Cache 255
VII "Trapped!" 266
VIII An Escape and a Capture 276
IX A Bargain 286
X The Price 301
XI Squire Latimer Takes a Hand 306
XII The Taking of the Cache 322
XIII Melissy Entertains 334
XIV Black MacQueen Cashes his Checks 340
PART I
MELISSY OF THE BAR DOUBLE G
CHAPTER I
A CROSSED TRAIL
The tenderfoot rose from the ledge upon which he had been lying and
stretched himself stiffly. The chill of the long night had set him
shivering. His bones ached from the pressure of his body upon the rock
where he had slept and waked and dozed again with troubled dreams. The
sharpness of his hunger made him light-headed. Thirst tortured him. His
throat was a lime-kiln, his tongue swollen till it filled his mouth.
If the night had been bad, he knew the day would be a hundred times worse.
Already a gray light was sifting into the hollow of the sky. The vague
misty outlines of the mountains were growing sharper. Soon from a crotch
of them would rise a red hot cannon ball to pour its heat into the parched
desert.
He was headed for the Sonora line, for the hills where he had heard a man
might drop out of sight of the civilization that had once known him. There
were reasons why he had started in a hurry, without a horse or food or a
canteen, and these same reasons held good why he could not follow beaten
tracks. All yesterday he had traveled without sighting a ranch or meeting
a human being. But he knew he must get to water soon--if he were to reach
it at all.
A light breeze was stirring, and on it there was borne to him a faint
rumble as of thunder. Instantly the man came to a rigid alertness. Thunder
might mean rain, and rain would be salvation. But the sound did not die
away. Instead, it deepened to a steady roar, growing every instant louder.
His startled glance swept the canyon that drove like a sword cleft into the
hills. Pouring down it, with the rush of a tidal wave, came a wall of
cattle, a thousand backs tossing up and down as the swell of a troubled
sea. Though he had never seen one before, the man on the lip of the gulch
knew that he was watching a cattle stampede. Under the impact of the
galloping hoofs the ground upon which he stood quaked.
A cry diverted his attention. From the bed of the sandy wash a man had
started up and was running for his life toward the canyon walls. Before he
had taken half a dozen steps the avalanche was upon him, had cut him down,
swept over him.
The thud of the hoofs died away. Into the open desert the stampede had
passed. A huddled mass lay motionless on the sand in the track of the
avalanche.
A long ragged breath whistled through the closed lips of the tenderfoot.
He ran along the edge of the rock wall till he found a descent less sharp,
lowered himself by means of jutting quartz and mesquit cropping out from
the crevices, and so came through a little draw to the canyon.
He dropped on a knee beside the sprawling, huddled figure. No second
glance was needed to see that the man was dead. Life had been trampled out
of him almost instantly and his features battered beyond any possible
recognition. Unused to scenes of violence, the stranger stooping over him
felt suddenly sick. It made him shudder to remember that if he could have
found a way down in the darkness he, too, would have slept in the warm
sand of the dry wash. If he had, the fate of this man would have been
his.
Under the doubled body was a canteen. The trembling fingers of the
tenderfoot unscrewed the cork. Tipping the vessel, he drank avidly. One
swallow, a second, then a few trickling drops. The canteen had been almost
empty.
Uncovering, he stood bareheaded before the inert body and spoke gently in
the low, soft voice one instinctively uses in the presence of the dead.
"Friend, I couldn't save your life, but your water has saved mine, I
reckon. Anyhow, it gives me another chance to fight for it. I wish I could
do something for you ... carry a message to your folks and tell them how
it happened."
He dropped down again beside the dead man and rifled the pockets. In them
he found two letters addressed in an illiterate hand to James Diller,
Cananea, Sonora, Mexico. An idea flashed into his brain and for a moment
held him motionless while he worked it out. Why not? This man was about
his size, dressed much like him, and so mutilated that identification was
impossible.
From his own pocket he took a leather bill book and a monogrammed
cigarcase. With a sharp stone he scarred the former. The metal case he
crushed out of shape beneath the heel of his boot. Having first taken one
twenty dollar yellowback from the well-padded book, he slipped it and the
cigarcase into the inner coat pocket of the dead man. Irregularly in a
dozen places he gashed with his knife the derby hat he was wearing, ripped
the band half loose, dragged it in the dust, and jumped on it till the hat
was flat as a pancake. Finally he kicked it into the sand a dozen yards
away.
"The cattle would get it tangled in their hoofs and drag it that far with
them," he surmised.
The soft gray hat of the dead man he himself appropriated. Again he spoke
to the lifeless body, lowering his voice to a murmur.
"I reckon you wouldn't grudge me this if you knew. I'm up against it. If I
get out of these hills alive I'll be lucky. But if I do--well, it won't do
you any harm to be mistaken for me, and it will accommodate me mightily. I
hate to leave you here alone, but it's what I've got to do to save
myself."
He turned away and plodded up the dry creek bed.
* * * * *
The sun was at the meridian when three heavily armed riders drew up at the
mouth of the canyon. They fell into the restful, negligent postures of
horsemen accustomed to take their ease in the saddle.
"Do you figure maybe he's working up to the headwaters of Dry Sandy?" one
suggested.
A squat, bandy-legged man with a face of tanned leather presently
answered. "No, Tim, I expect not. The way I size him up Mr. Richard
Bellamy wouldn't know Dry Sandy from an irrigation ditch. Mr. R. B. hopes
he's hittin' the high spots for Sonora, but he ain't anyways sure. Right
about now he's ridin' the grub line, unless he's made a strike
somewhere."
The third member of the party, a lean, wide-shouldered, sinewy youth, blue
silk kerchief knotted loosely around his neck, broke in with a gesture
that swept the sky. "Funny about all them buzzards. What are they doing
here, sheriff?"
The squat man opened his mouth to answer, but Tim took the word out of his
mouth.
"Look!" His arm had shot straight out toward the canyon. A coyote was
disappearing on the lope. "Something lying there in the wash at the bend,
Burke."
Sheriff Burke slid his rifle from its scabbard. "We'll not take any
chances, boys. Spread out far as you can. Tim, ride close to the left
wall. You keep along the right one, Flatray. Me, I'll take the center.
That's right."
They rode forward cautiously. Once Flatray spoke.
"By the tracks there has been a lot of cattle down here on the jump
recently."
"That's what," Tim agreed.
Flatray swung from his saddle and stooped over the body lying at the bend
of the wash.
"Crushed to death in a cattle stampede, looks like," he called to the
sheriff.
"Search him, Jack," the sheriff ordered.
The young man gave an exclamation of surprise. He was standing with a
cigarcase in one hand and a billbook in the other. "It's the man we're
after--it's Bellamy."
Burke left his horse and came forward. "How do you know?"
"Initials on the cigarcase, R. B. Same monogram on the billbook."
The sheriff had stooped to pick up a battered hat as he moved toward the
deputy. Now he showed the initials stamped on the sweat band. "R. B. here,
too."
"Suit of gray clothes, derby hat, size and weight about medium. We'll
never know about the scar on the eyebrow, but I guess Mr. Bellamy is
identified without that."
"Must have camped here last night and while he was asleep the cattle
stampeded down the canyon," Tim hazarded.
"That guess is as good as any. They ce'tainly stomped the life out of him
thorough. Anyhow, Bellamy has met up with his punishment. We'll have to
pack the body back to town, boys," the sheriff told them.
Half an hour later the party filed out to the creosote flats and struck
across country toward Mesa. Flatray was riding pillion behind Tim. His own
horse was being used as a pack saddle.
CHAPTER II
BRAND BLOTTING
The tenderfoot, slithering down a hillside of shale, caught at a
greasewood bush and waited. The sound of a rifle shot had drifted across
the ridge to him. Friend or foe, it made no difference to him now. He had
reached the end of his tether, must get to water soon or give up the
fight.
No second shot broke the stillness. A swift zigzagged across the cattle
trail he was following. Out of a blue sky the Arizona sun still beat down
upon a land parched by aeons of drought, a land still making its brave show
of greenness against a dun background.
Arrow straight the man made for the hill crest. Weak as a starved puppy,
his knees bent under him as he climbed. Down and up again a dozen times,
he pushed feverishly forward. All day he had been seeing things. Cool
lakes had danced on the horizon line before his tortured vision. Strange
fancies had passed in and out of his mind. He wondered if this, too, were
a delusion. How long that stiff ascent took him he never knew, but at
last he reached the summit and crept over its cactus-covered shoulder.
He looked into a valley dressed in its young spring garb. Of all deserts
this is the loveliest when the early rains have given rebirth to the hope
that stirs within its bosom once a year. But the tenderfoot saw nothing of
its pathetic promise, of its fragile beauty so soon to be blasted. His
sunken eyes swept the scene and found at first only a desert waste in
which lay death.
"I lose," he said to himself out loud.
With the words he gave up the long struggle and sank to the ground. For
hours he had been exhausted to the limit of endurance, but the will to
live had kept him going. Now the driving force within had run down. He
would die where he lay.
Another instant, and he was on his feet again eager, palpitant, tremulous.
For plainly there had come to him the bleating of a calf.
Moving to the left, he saw rising above the hill brow a thin curl of
smoke. A dozen staggering steps brought him to the edge of a draw. There
in the hollow below, almost within a stone's throw, was a young woman
bending over a fire. He tried to call, but his swollen tongue and dry
throat refused the service. Instead, he began to run toward her.
Beyond the wash was a dead cow. Not far from it lay a calf on its side,
all four feet tied together. From the fire the young woman took a red-hot
running iron and moved toward the little bleater.
The crackling of a twig brought her around as a sudden tight rein does a
high-strung horse. The man had emerged from the prickly pears and was
close upon her. His steps dragged. The sag of his shoulders indicated
extreme fatigue. The dark hollows beneath the eyes told of days of
torment.
The girl stood before him slender and straight. She was pale to the lips.
Her breath came fast and ragged as if she had been running.
Abruptly she shot her challenge at him. "Who are you?"
"Water," he gasped.
One swift, searching look the girl gave him, then "Wait!" she ordered, and
was off into the mesquit on the run. Three minutes later the tenderfoot
heard her galloping through the brush. With a quick, tight rein she drew
up, swung from the saddle expertly as a _vaquero_, and began to untie a
canteen held by buckskin thongs to the side of the saddle.
He drank long, draining the vessel to the last drop.
From her saddle bags she brought two sandwiches wrapped in oiled paper.
"You're hungry, too, I expect," she said, her eyes shining with tender
pity.
She observed that he did not wolf his food, voracious though he was. While
he ate she returned to the fire with the running iron and heaped live
coals around the end of it.
"You've had a pretty tough time of it," she called across to him gently.
"It hasn't been exactly a picnic, but I'm all right now."
The girl liked the way he said it. Whatever else he was--and already faint
doubts were beginning to stir in her--he was not a quitter.
"You were about all in," she said, watching him.
"Just about one little kick left in me," he smiled.
"That's what I thought."
She busied herself over the fire inspecting the iron. The man watched her
curiously. What could it mean? A cow killed wantonly, a calf bawling with
pain and fear, and this girl responsible for it. The tenderfoot could not
down the suspicion stirring in his mind. He knew little of the cattle
country. But he had read books and had spent a week in Mesa not entirely
in vain. The dead cow with the little stain of red down its nose pointed
surely to one thing. He was near enough to see a hole in the forehead just
above the eyes. Instinctively his gaze passed to the rifle lying in the
sand close to his hand. Her back was still turned to him. He leaned over,
drew the gun to him, and threw out an empty shell from the barrel.
At the click of the lever the girl swung around upon him.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
He put the rifle down hurriedly. "Just seeing what make it is."
"And what make is it?" she flashed.
He was trapped. "I hadn't found out yet," he stammered.
"No, but you found out there was an empty shell in it," she retorted
quickly.
Their eyes fastened. She was gray as ashes, but she did not flinch. By
chance he had stumbled upon the crime of crimes in Cattleland, had caught
a rustler redhanded at work. Looking into the fine face, nostrils
delicately fashioned, eyes clear and deep, the thing was scarce credible
of her. Why, she could not be a day more than twenty, and in every line of
her was the look of pride, of good blood.
"Yes, I happened to throw it out," he apologized.
But she would have no evasion, would not let his doubts sleep. There was
superb courage in the scornful ferocity with which she retorted.
"Happened! And I suppose you _happened_ to notice that the brand on the
cow is a Bar Double G, while that on the calf is different."
"No, I haven't noticed that."
"Plenty of time to see it yet." Then, with a swift blaze of feeling,
"What's the use of pretending? I know what you think."
"Then you know more than I do. My thoughts don't go any farther than this,
that you have saved my life and I'm grateful for it."
"I know better. You think I'm a rustler. But don't say it. Don't you dare
say it."
Brought up in an atmosphere of semi-barbaric traditions, silken-strong,
with instincts unwarped by social pressure, she was what the sun and wind
and freedom of Arizona had made her, a poetic creation far from
commonplace. So he judged her, and in spite of the dastardly thing she had
done he sensed an innate refinement strangely at variance with the
circumstances.
"All right. I won't," he answered, with a faint smile.
"Now you've got to pay for your sandwiches by making yourself useful. I'm
going to finish this job." She said it with an edge of self-scorn. He
guessed her furious with self-contempt.
Under her directions he knelt on the calf so as to hold it steady while
she plied the hot iron. The odor of burnt hair and flesh was already acrid
in his nostrils. Upon the red flank F was written in raw, seared flesh. He
judged that the brand she wanted was not yet complete. Probably the iron
had got too cold to finish the work, and she had been forced to reheat
it.
The little hand that held the running iron was trembling. Looking up, the
tenderfoot saw that she was white enough to faint.
"I can't do it. You'll have to let me hold him while you blur the brand,"
she told him.
They changed places. She set her teeth to it and held the calf steady,
but the brander noticed that she had to look away when the red-hot iron
came near the flesh of the victim.
"Blur the brand right out. Do it quick, please," she urged.
A sizzle of burning skin, a piteous wail from the tortured animal, an
acrid pungent odor, and the thing was done. The girl got to her feet,
quivering like an aspen.
"Have you a knife?" she asked faintly.
"Yes."
"Cut the rope."
The calf staggered to all fours, shook itself together, and went bawling
to the dead mother.
The girl drew a deep breath. "They say it does not hurt except while it is
being done."
His bleak eyes met hers stonily. "And of course it will soon get used to
doing without its mother. That is a mere detail."
A shudder went through her.
The whole thing was incomprehensible to him. Why under heaven had she done
it? How could one so sensitive have done a wanton cruel thing like this?
Her reason he could not fathom. The facts that confronted him were that
she _had_ done it, and had meant to carry the crime through. Only
detection had changed her purpose.
She turned upon him, plainly sick of the whole business. "Let's get away
from here. Where's your horse?"
"I haven't any. I started on foot and got lost."
"From where?"
"From Mammoth."
Sharply her keen eyes fixed him. How could a man have got lost near
Mammoth and wandered here? He would have had to cross the range, and even
a child would have known enough to turn back into the valley where the
town lay.
"How long ago?"
"Day before yesterday." He added after a moment: "I was looking for a
job."
She took in the soft hands and the unweathered skin of the dark face.
"What sort of a job?"
"Anything I can do."
"But what can you do?"
"I can ride."
She must take him home with her, of course, and feed and rest him. That
went without saying. But what after that? He knew too much to be turned
adrift with the story of what he had seen. If she could get a hold on
him--whether of fear or of gratitude--so as to insure his silence, the
truth might yet be kept quiet. At least she could try.
"Did you ever ride the range?"
"No."
"What sort of work have you done?"
After a scarcely noticeable pause, "Clerical work," he answered.
"You're from the East?" she suggested, her eyes narrowing.
"Yes."
"My name is Melissy Lee," she told him, watching him very steadily.
Once more the least of pauses. "Mine is Diller--James Diller."
"That's funny. I know another man of that name. At least, I know him by
sight."
The man who had called himself Diller grew wary. "It's a common enough
name."
"Yes. If I find you work at my father's ranch would you be too particular
about what it is?"
"Try me."
"And your memory--is it inconveniently good?" Her glance swept as by
chance over the scene of her recent operations.
"I've got a right good forgettery, too," he assured her.
"You're not in the habit of talking much about the things you see." She
put it in the form of a statement, but the rising inflection indicated the
interrogative.
His black eyes met hers steadily. "I can padlock my mouth when it is
necessary," he answered, the suggestion of a Southern drawl in his
intonation.
She wanted an assurance more direct. "When _you_ think it necessary, I
suppose."
"That is what I meant to say."
"Come. One good turn deserves another. What about this?" She nodded toward
the dead cow.
"I have not seen a thing I ought not to have seen."
"Didn't you see me blot a brand on that calf?"
He shook his head. "Can't recall it at all, Miss Lee."
Swiftly her keen glance raked him again. Judged by his clothes, he was one
of the world's ineffectives, flotsam tossed into the desert by the wash of
fate; but there was that in the steadiness of his eye, in the set of his
shoulders, in the carriage of his lean-loined, slim body that spoke of
breeding. He was no booze-fighting grubliner. Disguised though he was in
cheap slops, she judged him a man of parts. He would do to trust,
especially since she could not help herself.
"We'll be going. You take my horse," she ordered.
"And let you walk?"
"How long since you have eaten?" she asked brusquely.
"About seven minutes," he smiled.
"But before that?"
"Two days."
"Well, then. Anybody can see you're as weak as a kitten. Do as I say."
"Why can't we both ride?"
"We can as soon as we get across the pass. Until then I'll walk."
Erect as a willow sapling, she took the hills with an elastic ease that
showed her deep-bosomed in spite of her slenderness. The short corduroy
riding skirt and high-laced boots were made for use, not grace, but the
man in the saddle found even in her manner of walking the charm of her
direct, young courage. Free of limb, as yet unconscious of sex, she had
the look of a splendid boy. The descending sun was in her sparkling hair,
on the lank, undulating grace of her changing lines.
Active as a cat though it was, the cowpony found the steep pass with its
loose rubble hard going. Melissy took the climb much easier. In the way
she sped through the mesquit, evading the clutch of the cholla by supple
dips to right and left, there was a kind of pantherine litheness.
At the summit she waited for the horse to clamber up the shale after her.
"Get down in your collar, you Buckskin," she urged, and when the pony was
again beside her petted the animal with little love pats on the nose.
Carelessly she flung at Diller a question. "From what part of the East did
you say?"
He was on the spot promptly this time. "From Keokuk."
"Keokuk, Indiana?"
"Iowa," he smiled.
"Oh, is it Iowa?" He had sidestepped her little trap, but she did not give
up. "Just arrived?"
"I've been herding sheep for a month."
"Oh, sheep-herding!" Her disdain implied that if he were fit for nothing
better than sheep-herding, the West could find precious little use for
him.
"It was all I could get to do."
"Where did you say you wrangled Mary's little lamb?"
"In the Catalinas."
"Whose outfit?"
Question and answer were tossed back and forth lightly, but both were
watching warily.
"Outfit?" he repeated, puzzled.
"Yes. Who were you working for?"
"Don't remember his name. He was a Mexican."
"Must have been one of the camps of Antonio Valdez."
"Yes, that's it. That's the name."
"Only he runs his sheep in the Galiuros," she demurred.
"Is it the Galiuros? Those Spanish names! I can't keep them apart in my
mind."
She laughed with hard, young cruelty. "It is hard to remember what you
never heard, isn't it?"
The man was on the rack. Tiny beads of perspiration stood out on his
forehead. But he got a lip smile into working order.
"Just what do you mean, Miss Lee?"
"You had better get your story more pat. I've punched a dozen holes in it
already. First you tell me you are from the East, and even while you were
telling me I knew you were a Southerner from the drawl. No man ever got
lost from Mammoth. You gave a false name. You said you had been herding
sheep, but you didn't know what an outfit is. You wobbled between the
Galiuros and the Catalinas."
"I'm not a native. I told you I couldn't remember Spanish names."
"It wasn't necessary to tell me," she countered quickly. "A man that can't
recall even the name of his boss!"
"I'm not in the witness box, Miss Lee," he told her stiffly.
"Not yet, but you're liable to be soon, I reckon."
"In a cattle rustling case, I suppose you mean."
"No, I don't." She went on with her indictment of his story, though his
thrust had brought the color to her cheek. "When I offered you Antonio
Valdez for an employer you jumped at him. If you want to know, he happens
to be our herder. He doesn't own a sheep and never will."
"You know all about it," he said with obvious sarcasm.
"I know you're not who you say you are."
"Perhaps you know who I am then."
"I don't know or care. It's none of my business. But others may think it
is theirs. You can't be so reckless with the truth without folks having
notions. If I were you I'd get a story that will hang together."
"You're such a good detective. Maybe I could get you to invent one for
me," he suggested maliciously.
Her indignation flashed. "I'm no such thing. But I'm not quite a fool. A
babe in arms wouldn't swallow that fairy tale."
Awkward as her knowledge might prove, he could not help admiring the
resource and shrewdness of the girl. She had virtually served notice that
if she had a secret that needed keeping so had he.
They looked down over a desert green with bajadas, prickly pears, and
mesquit. To the right, close to a spur of the hills, were the dwarfed
houses of a ranch. The fans of a windmill caught the sun and flashed it
back to the travelers.
"The Bar Double G. My father owns it," Miss Lee explained.
"Oh! Your father owns it." He reflected a moment while he studied her.
"Let's understand each other, Miss Lee. I'm not what I claim to be, you
say. We'll put it that you have guessed right. What do you intend to do
about it? I'm willing to be made welcome at the Bar Double G, but I don't
want to be too welcome."
"I'm not going to do anything."
"So long as I remember not to remember what I've seen."
The blood burned in her cheeks beneath their Arizona tan. She did not look
at him. "If you like to put it that way."
He counted it to her credit that she was ashamed of the bargain in every
honest fiber of her.
"No matter what they say I've done. You'll keep faith?"
"I don't care what you've done," she flung back bitterly. "It's none of my
affair. I told you that before. Men come out here for all sorts of
reasons. We don't ask for a bill of particulars."
"Then I'll be right glad to go down to the Bar Double G with you, and say
thanks for the chance."
He had dismounted when they first reached the pass. Now she swung to the
saddle and he climbed behind her. They reached presently one of the
nomadic trails of the cattle country which wander leisurely around hills
and over gulches along the line of least resistance. This brought them to
a main traveled road leading to the ranch.
They rode in silence until the pasture fence was passed.
"What am I to tell them your name is?" she asked stiffly.
He took his time to answer. "Tom Morse is a good name, don't you think?
How would T. L. Morse do?"
She offered no comment, but sat in front of him, unresponsive as the
sphinx. The rigor of her flat back told him that, though she might have to
keep his shameful secret for the sake of her own, he could not presume
upon it the least in the world.
Melissy turned the horse over to a little Mexican boy and they were just
mounting the steps of the porch when a young man cantered up to the house.
Lean and muscular and sunbaked, he looked out of cool, gray eyes upon a
man's world that had often put him through the acid test. The plain,
cactus-torn chaps, flannel shirt open at the sinewy throat, dusty,
wide-brimmed hat, revolver peeping from its leather pocket on the thigh:
every detail contributed to the impression of efficiency he created. Even
the one touch of swagger about him, the blue silk kerchief knotted loosely
around his neck, lent color to his virile competency.
He dragged his horse to a standstill and leaped off at the same instant.
"Evenin', 'Lissie."
She was busy lacing her shoe and did not look up. He guessed that he was
being snubbed and into his eyes came a gleam of fun. A day later than he
had promised, Jack Flatray was of opinion that he was being punished for
tardiness.
Casually he explained. "Couldn't make it any sooner. Burke had a hurry-up
job that took us into the hills. Fellow by the name of Bellamy, wanted for
murder at Nemo, Arkansas, had been tracked to Mesa. A message came over
the wires to arrest him. When Burke sent me to his room he had lit out,
taken a swift hike into the hills. Must a-had some warning, for he didn't
even wait for a horse."
The dilated eyes of the girl went past the deputy to the man she had
rescued. He was leaning against one of the porch posts, tense and rigid,
on his face the look of the hunted brought to bay.
"And did you find him?" she asked mechanically of the deputy.
"We found him. He had been trampled to death by a cattle stampede."
Her mind groped blindly for an explanation. Her woman's instinct told her
that the man panting on the porch within six feet of the officer was the
criminal wanted. There must be a mistake somewhere.
"Did you identify him?"
"I guess there is no doubt about it. His papers and belongings all showed
he was our man."
"Oh!" The excitement of his news had for a moment thawed her, but a
dignified aloofness showed again in her manner. "If you want to see father
you'll find him in the corral, Mr. Flatray."
"Well, I don't know as I'm looking for him awful hard," the blue
kerchiefed youth smiled genially. "Anyway, I can wait a few minutes if I
have to."
"Yes." She turned away indifferently. "I'll show you your room, Mr.
Morse."
The deputy watched them disappear into the house with astonishment printed
on his face. He had ridden twenty-seven miles to see Melissy Lee and he
had not quite expected this sort of a greeting.
"If that don't beat the Dutch. Looks like I'll do my callin' on the old
man after all, maybe," he murmured with a grin.
CHAPTER III
AN ACCUSATION
The rescued man ate, drank, and from sheer fatigue fell asleep within five
minutes of the time he was shown his bedroom.
Since he was not of the easily discouraged kind, the deputy stayed to
supper on invitation of Lee. He sat opposite the daughter of his host, and
that young woman treated him with the most frigid politeness. The owner of
the Bar Double G was quite unaware of any change of temperature. Jack and
his little girl had always been the best of friends. So now he discoursed
on the price of cows, the good rains, the outrages of the rustlers, and
kindred topics without suspecting that the attention of the young man was
on more personal matters.
Though born in Arizona, Melissy was of the South. Due westward rolls the
tide of settlement, and Beauchamp Lee had migrated from Tennessee after
the war, following the line of least resistance to the sunburned
territory. Later he had married a woman a good deal younger than himself.
She had borne him two children, the elder of whom was now a young man.
Melissy was the younger, and while she was still a babe in arms the mother
had died of typhoid and left her baby girl to grow up as best she might in
a land where women were few and far. This tiny pledge of her mother's love
Champ Lee had treasured as a gift from Heaven. He had tended her and
nursed her through the ailments of childhood with a devotion the most pure
of his reckless life. Given to heady gusts of passion, there had never
been a moment when his voice had been other than gentle and tender to
her.
Inevitably Melissy had become the product of her inheritance and her
environment. If she was the heiress of Beauchamp Lee's courage and
generosity, his quick indignation against wrong and injustice, so, too,
she was of his passionate lawlessness.
After supper Melissy disappeared. She wanted very much to be alone and
have a good cry. Wherefore she slipped out of the back door and ran up the
Lone Tree trail in the darkness. Jack thought he saw a white skirt fly a
traitorous signal, and at leisure he pursued.
But Melissy was not aware of that. She reached Lone Tree rock and slipped
down from boulder to boulder until she came to the pine which gave the
place its name. For hours she had been forced to repress her emotions, to
make necessary small talk, to arrange for breakfast and other household
details. Now she was alone, and the floods of her bitterness were
unloosed. She broke down and wept passionately, for she was facing her
first great disillusionment. She had lost a friend, one in whom she had
put great faith.
The first gust of the storm was past when Melissy heard a step on the
rocks above. She knew intuitively that Jack Flatray had come in search of
her, and he was the last man on earth she wanted to meet just now.
"'Lissie!" she heard him call softly; and again, "'Lissie!"
Noiselessly she got to her feet, waiting to see what he would do. She knew
he must be standing on the edge of the great rock, so directly above her
that if he had kicked a pebble it would have landed beside her. Presently
he began to clamber down.
She tiptoed along the ledge and slipped into the trough at the farther end
that led to the top. It was a climb she had taken several times, but never
in the dark. The ascent was almost perpendicular, and it had to be made by
clinging to projecting rocks and vegetation. Moreover, if she were to
escape undetected it had to be done in silence.
She was a daughter of the hills, as surefooted as a mountain goat. Handily
she went up, making the most of the footholds that offered. In spite of
the best she could do the rustling of bushes betrayed her.
Jack came to the foot of the trough and looked up.
"So you're there, are you?" he asked.
Her foot loosened a stone and sent it rolling down.
"If I were you I wouldn't try that at night, 'Liss," he advised.
She made sure of the steadiness of her voice before she answered. "You
don't need to try it."
"I said if I were you, girl."
"But you are not. Don't let me detain you here, Mr. Flatray," she told him
in a manner of icy precision.
The deputy began the climb too. "What's the use of being so hostile,
little girl?" he drawled. "Me, I came as soon as I could, burning the
wind, too."
She set her teeth, determined to reach the top in time to get away before
he could join her. In her eagerness she took a chance that proved her
undoing. A rock gave beneath her foot and clattered down. Clinging by one
hand and foot, she felt her body swing around. From her throat a little
cry leaped. She knew herself slipping.
"Jack!"
In time, and just in time, he reached her, braced himself, and gave her
his knee for a foot rest.
"All right?" he asked, and "All right!" she answered promptly.
"We'll go back," he told her.
She made no protest. Indeed, she displayed a caution in lowering herself
that surprised him. Every foothold she tested carefully with her weight.
Once she asked him to place her shoe in the crevice for her. He had never
seen her take so much time in making sure or be so fussy about her
personal safety.
Safely on the ledge again, she attempted a second time to dismiss him.
"Thank you, Mr. Flatray. I won't take any more of your time."
He looked at her steadily before he spoke. "You're mighty high-heeled,
'Lissie. You know my name ain't Mr. Flatray to you. What's it all about?
I've told you twice I couldn't get here any sooner."
She flamed out at him in an upblaze of feminine ferocity. "And I tell
_you_, that I don't care if you had never come. I don't want to see you or
have anything to do with you."
"Why not?" He asked it quietly, though he began to know that her charge
against him was a serious one.
"Because I know what you are now, because you have made us believe in you
while all the time you were living a lie."
"Meaning what?"
"I was gathering poppies on the other side of Antelope Pass this
afternoon."
"What has that got to do with me being a liar and a scoundrel," he wanted
to know.
"Oh, you pretend," she scoffed. "But you know as well as I do."
"I'm afraid I don't. Let's have the indictment."
"If everybody in Papago County had told me I wouldn't have believed it,"
she cried. "I had to see it with my own eyes before I could have been
convinced."
"Yes, well what is it you saw with your eyes?"
"You needn't keep it up. I tell you I saw it all from the time you fired
the shot."
He laughed easily, but without mirth. "Kept tab on me, did you?"
She wheeled from him, gave a catch of her breath, and caught at the rock
wall to save herself from falling.
He spoke sharply. "You hurt yourself in the trough."
"I sprained my ankle a little, but it doesn't matter."
He understood now why she had made so slow a descent and he suspected that
the wrench was more than she admitted. The moon had come out from under a
cloud and showed him a pale, tear-stained face, with a row of even, little
teeth set firm against the lower lip. She was in pain and her pride was
keeping it from him.
"Let me look at your ankle."
"No."
"I say yes. You've hurt it seriously."
"That is my business, I think," she told him with cold finality.
"I'm going to make it mine. Think I don't know you, proud as Lucifer when
you get set. You'll lame yourself for life if you're not careful."
"I don't care to discuss it."
"Fiddlesticks! If you've got anything against me we'll hear what it is
afterward. Right now we'll give first aid to the injured. Sit down here."
She had not meant to give way, but she did. Perhaps it was because of the
faintness that stole over her, or because the pain was sharper than she
could well endure. She found herself seated on the rock shelf, letting him
cut the lace out of her shoe and slip it off. Ever so gently he worked,
but he could tell by the catches of her breath that it was not pleasant to
endure. From his neck he untied the silk kerchief and wrapped it tightly
around the ankle.
"That will have to do till I get you home."
"I'll not trouble you, sir. If you'll stop and tell my father that is all
I'll ask."
"Different here," he retorted cheerfully. "Just so as to avoid any
argument, I'll announce right now that Jack Flatray is going to see you
home. It's his say-so."
She rose. None knew better than she that he was a dominating man when he
chose to be. She herself carried in her slim body a spirit capable of
passion and of obstinacy, but to-night she had not the will to force the
fighting.
Setting her teeth, she took a step or two forward, her hand against the
rock wall to help bear the weight. With narrowed eyes, he watched her
closely, noting the catches of pain that shot through her breathing. Half
way up the boulder bed he interposed brusquely.
"This is plumb foolishness, girl. You've got no business putting your
weight on that foot, and you're not going to do it."
He slipped his arm around her waist in such a way as to support her all he
could. With a quick turn of the body she tried to escape.
"No use. I'm going through with this, 'Lissie. Someone has been lying to
you about me, and just now you hate the ground I walk on. Good enough.
That's got nothing to do with this. You're a woman that needs help, and
any old time J. F. meets up with such a one he's on the job. You don't owe
me 'Thank you,' but you've got to stand for me till you reach the house."
"You're taking advantage of me because I can't help myself. Why don't you
go and bring father," she flung out.
"I'm younger than your father and abler to help. That's why?"
They reached the top of the bluff and he made her sit down to rest. A pale
moon suffused the country, and in that stage set to lowered lights her
pallor was accented. From the colorless face shadowy, troubled eyes spoke
the misery through which she was passing. The man divined that her pain
was more than physical, and the knowledge went to him poignantly by the
heart route.
"What is it, 'Lissie? What have I done?" he asked gently.
"You know. I don't want to talk about it."
"But I don't know."
"What's the use of keeping it up? I caught you this afternoon."
"Caught me doing what?"
"Caught you rustling, caught you branding a calf just after you had shot
the cow."
For an instant her charge struck him dumb. He stared at her as if he
thought she had gone suddenly mad.
"What's that? Say it again," he got out at last.
"And the cow had the Bar Double G brand, belonged to my father, your best
friend," she added passionately.
He spoke very gently, but there was an edge to his voice that was new to
her. "Suppose you tell me all about it."
She threw out a hand in a gesture of despair. "What's the use? Nothing
could have made me believe it but my own eyes. You needn't keep up a
pretense. I saw you."
"Yes, so you said before. Now begin at the start and tell your story."
She had the odd feeling of being put on the defensive and it angered her.
How dared he look at her with those cool, gray eyes that still appeared to
bore a hole through treachery? Why did her heart convict her of having
deserted a friend, when she knew that the desertion was his?
"While I was gathering poppies I heard a shot. It was so close I walked to
the edge of the draw and looked over. There I saw you."
"What was I doing?"
"You were hogtying a calf."
"And then?"
"I didn't understand at first. I thought to slip down and surprise you for
fun. But as I got lower I saw the dead cow. Just then you began to brand
the calf and I cried out to you."
"What did I do?"
"You know what you did," she answered wearily. "You broke for the brush
where your horse was and galloped away."
"Got a right good look at me, did you?"
"Not at your face. But I knew. You were wearing this blue silk
handkerchief." Her finger indicated the one bound around her ankle.
"So on that evidence you decide I'm a rustler, and you've only known me
thirteen years. You're a good friend, 'Lissie."
Her eyes blazed on him like live coals. "Have you forgotten the calf you
left with your brand on it?"
She had startled him at last. "With my brand on it?" he repeated, his
voice dangerously low and soft.
"You know as well as I do. You had got the F just about finished when I
called. You dropped the running iron and ran."
"Dropped it and ran, did I? And what did you do?"
"I reheated the iron and blurred the brand so that nobody could tell what
it had been."
He laughed harshly without mirth. "I see. I'm a waddy and a thief, but
you're going to protect me for old times' sake. That's the play, is it? I
ought to be much obliged to you and promise to reform, I reckon."
His bitterness stung. She felt a tightening of the throat. "All I ask is
that you go away and never come back to me," she cried with a sob.
"Don't worry about that. I ain't likely to come back to a girl that thinks
I'm the lowest thing that walks. You're not through with me a bit more
than I am with you," he answered harshly.
Her little hand beat upon the rock in her distress. "I never would have
believed it. Nobody could have made me believe it. I--I--why, I trusted
you like my own father," she lamented. "To think that you would take that
way to stock your ranch--and with the cattle of my father, too."
His face was hard as chiseled granite. "Distrust all your friends. That's
the best way."
"You haven't even denied it--not that it would do any good," she said
miserably.
There was a sound of hard, grim laughter in his throat. "No, and I ain't
going to deny it. Are you ready to go yet?"
His repulse of her little tentative advance was like a blow on the face to
her.
She made a movement to rise. While she was still on her knees he stooped,
put his arms around her, and took her into them. Before she could utter
her protest he had started down the trail toward the house.
"How dare you? Let me go," she ordered.
"You're not able to walk, and you'll go the way I say," he told her
shortly in a flinty voice.
Her anger was none the less because she realized her helplessness to get
what she wanted. Her teeth set fast to keep back useless words. Into his
stony eyes her angry ones burned. The quick, irregular rise and fall of
her bosom against his heart told him how she was struggling with her
passion.
Once he spoke. "Tell me where it was you saw this rustler--the exact place
near as you can locate it."
She answered only by a look.
The deputy strode into the living room of the ranch with her in his arms.
Lee was reading a newspaper Jack had brought with him from Mesa. At sight
of them he started up hurriedly.
"Goddlemighty, what's the matter, Jack?"
"Only a ricked ankle, Champ. Slipped on a stone," Flatray explained as he
put Melissy down on the lounge.
In two minutes the whole house was upset. Hop Ling was heating water to
bathe the sprain. A rider from the bunkhouse was saddling to go for the
doctor. Another was off in the opposite direction to buy some liniment at
Mammoth.
In the confusion Flatray ran up his horse from the pasture, slapped on the
saddle, and melted into the night.
An hour later Melissy asked her father what had become of him.
"Doggone that boy, I don't know where he went. Reckon he thought he'd be
in the way. Mighty funny he didn't give us a chanct to tell him to stay."
"Probably he had business in Mesa," Melissy answered, turning her face to
the wall.
"Business nothing," retorted the exasperated rancher. "He figured we
couldn't eat and sleep him without extra trouble. Ain't that a fine
reputation for him to be giving the Bar Double G? I'll curl his hair for
him onct I meet up with him again."
"If you would put out the light, I think I could sleep, dad," she told him
in the least of voices.
"Sure, honey. Has the throbbing gone out of the ankle?" he asked
anxiously.
"Not entirely, but it's a good deal better. Good-night, dad."
"If Doc comes I'll bring him in," Lee said after he had kissed her.
"Do, please."
But after she was left alone Melissy did not prepare herself for sleep.
Her wide open eyes stared into the darkness, while her mind stormily
reviewed the day. The man who for years had been her best friend was a
scoundrel. She had proved him unworthy of her trust, and on top of that he
had insulted her. Hot tears stung her eyes--tears of shame, of wounded
self-love, of mortification, and of something more worthy than any of
these.
She grieved passionately for that which had gone out of her life, for the
comradeship that had been so precious to her. If this man were a waddy,
who of all her friends could she trust? She could have forgiven him had he
done wrong in the heat of anger. But this premeditated evil was beyond
forgiveness. To make it worse, he had come direct from the doing of it to
meet her, with a brazen smile on his lips and a lie in his heart. She
would never speak to him again--never so long as she lived.
CHAPTER IV
THE MAN WITH THE CHIHUAHUA HAT
A little dust cloud was traveling up the trail toward the Bar Double G,
the center of which presently defined itself as a rider moving at a road
gait. He wore a Chihuahua hat and with it the picturesque trappings the
Southwest borrows on occasion from across the border. Vanity disclosed
itself in the gold-laced hat, in the silver conchos of the fringed chaps,
in the fine workmanship of the saddle and bit. The man's finery was
overdone, carried with it the suggestion of being on exhibition. But one
look at the man himself, sleek and graceful, black-haired and
white-toothed, exuding an effect of cold wariness in spite of the masked
smiling face, would have been enough to give the lie to any charge of
weakness. His fopperies could not conceal the silken strength of him. One
meeting with the chill, deep-set eyes was certificate enough for most
people.
Melissy, sitting on the porch with her foot resting on a second chair,
knew a slight quickening of the blood as she watched him approach.
"Good evenin', Miss M'lissy," he cried, sweeping his sombrero as low as
the stirrup.
"_Buenos tardes_, _Senor_ Norris," she flung back gayly.
Sitting at ease in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that
smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in
spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her
long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating.
Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her
soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood toward
which Nature was pushing her so relentlessly. From a fund of experience
Philip Norris read her shrewdly, knew how to evoke the latent impulses
which brought her eagerly to the sex duel.
"Playing off for sick," he scoffed.
"I'm not," she protested. "Never get sick. It's just a sprained ankle."
"Sho! I guess you're Miss Make Believe; just harrowing the feelings of
your beaux."
"The way you talk! I haven't got any beaux. The boys are just my
friends."
"Oh, just friends! And no beaux. My, my! Not a single sweetheart in all
this wide open country. Shall I go rope you one and bring him in,
_compadre_?"
"No!" she exploded. "I don't want any. I'm not old enough yet." Her
dancing eyes belied the words.
"Now I wouldn't have guessed it. You look to me most ready to be picked."
He rested his weight on the farther stirrup and let his lazy smile mock
her. "My estimate would be sixteen. I'll bet you're every day of that."
"I only lack three months of being eighteen," she came back indignantly.
"You don't say! You'll ce'tainly have to be advertising for a husband
soon, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen. Maybe an ad in the Mesa paper
would help. You ain't so awful bad looking."
"I'll let you write it. What would you say?" she demanded, a patch of pink
standing out near the curve of the cheek bone.
He swung from the saddle and flung the reins to the ground. With jingling
spurs he came up the steps and sat on the top one, his back against a
pillar. Boldly his admiring eyes swept her.
"_Nina_, I couldn't do the subject justice. Honest, I haven't got the
vocabulary."
"Oh, you!" Laughter was in the eyes that studied him with a side tilt of
the chin. "That's a fine way to get out of it when your bluff is called."
He leaned back against the post comfortably and absorbed the beauty of the
western horizon. The sun had just set behind a saddle of the Galiuros in a
splash of splendor. All the colors of the rainbow fought for supremacy in
a brilliant-tinted sky that blazed above the fire-girt peaks. Soon dusk
would slip down over the land and tone the hues to a softer harmony. A
purple sea would flow over the hills, to be in turn displaced by a deep,
soft violet. Then night, that night of mystery and romance which
transforms the desert to a thing of incredible wonder!
"Did your father buy this sunset with the ranch? And has he got a
guarantee that it will perform every night?" he asked.
"Did you ever see anything like it?" she cried. "I have looked at them all
my life and I never get tired."
He laughed softly, his indolent, sleepy look on her. "Some things I would
never get tired of looking at either."
Without speaking she nodded, still absorbing the sunset.
"But it wouldn't be that kind of scenery," he added. "How tall are you,
_muchacha_?"
Her glance came around in surprise. "I don't know. About five foot five, I
think. Why?"
"I'm working on that ad. How would this do? 'Miss
Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen wants to meet up with gentleman between
eighteen and forty-eight. Object, matrimony. Description of lady: Slim,
medium height, brunette, mop of blue-black hair, the prettiest dimple you
ever saw----'"
"Now I know you're making fun of me. I'm mad." And the dimple flashed into
being.
"'--mostly says the opposite of what she means, has a----'"
"I don't. I don't"
"'--has a spice of the devil in her, which----'"
"Now, I _am_ mad," she interrupted, laughing.
"'--which is excusable, since she has the reddest lips for kissing in
Arizona.'"
He had gone too far. Her innocence was in arms. Norris knew it by the
swiftness with which the smile vanished from her face, by the flash of
anger in the eyes.
"I prefer to talk about something else, Mr. Norris," she said with all the
prim stiffness of a schoolgirl.
Her father relieved the tension by striding across from the stable. With
him came a bowlegged young fellow in plain leathers. The youngster was
Charley Hymer, one of the riders for the Bar Double G.
"You're here at the right time, Norris," Lee said grimly. "Charley has
just come down from Antelope Pass. He found one of my cows dead, with a
bullet hole through the forehead. The ashes of a fire were there, and in
the brush not far away a running iron."
The eyes of Norris narrowed to slits. He was the cattle detective of the
association and for a year now the rustlers had outgeneraled him. "I'll
have you take me to the spot, Charley. Get a move on you and we'll get
there soon as the moon is up."
Melissy gripped the arms of her chair tightly with both hands. She was
looking at Norris with a new expression, a kind of breathless fear. She
knew him for a man who could not be swerved from the thing he wanted. For
all his easy cynicism, he had the reputation of being a bloodhound on the
trail. Moreover, she knew that he was no friend to Jack Flatray. Why had
she left that running iron as evidence to convict its owner? What folly
not to have removed it from the immediate scene of the crime!
The cattle detective and her father had moved a few steps away and were
talking in low tones. Melissy became aware of a footfall. The man who
called himself Morse came around the corner of the house and stopped at
the porch steps.
"May I speak to you a moment, Miss Lee?" he said in a low voice.
"Of course."
The voice of Norris rose to an irritated snarl. "Tell you I've got
evidence, Lee. Mebbe it's not enough to convict, but it satisfies me
a-plenty that Jack Flatray's the man."
Melissy was frozen to a tense attention. Her whole mind was on what passed
between the detective and her father. Otherwise she would have noticed the
swift change that transformed the tenderfoot.
The rancher answered with impatient annoyance. "You're 'way off, Norris. I
don't care anything about your evidence. The idea is plumb ridiculous.
Twenty odd years I've known him. He's the best they make, a pure through
and through. Not a crooked hair in his head. I've eat out of the same
frying pan too often with that boy not to know what he is. You go bury
those suspicions of yours immediate. There's nothing to them."
Norris grumbled objections as they moved toward the stable. Melissy drew a
long breath and brought herself back to the tenderfoot.
He stood like a coiled spring, head thrust far forward from the shoulders.
The look in his black eyes was something new to her experience. For hate,
passion, caution were all mirrored there.
"You know Mr. Norris," she said quickly.
He started. "What did you say his name was?" he asked with an assumption
of carelessness.
"Norris--Philip Norris. He is a cattle detective."
"Never heard of Mr. Norris before in my life," he answered, but it was
observable that he still breathed deep.
She did not believe him. Some tie in their buried past bound these two men
together. They must have known each other in the South years ago, and one
of them at least was an enemy of the other. There might come a day when
she could use this knowledge to save Jack Flatray from the punishment
dogging his heels. Melissy filed it away in her memory for future
reference.
"You wanted to speak to me," she suggested.
"I'm going away."
"What for?"
"Because I'm not a hound. I can't blackmail a woman."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean that you've found work here for me because I saw what you did over
by Antelope Pass. We made a bargain. Oh, not in words, but a bargain just
the same! You were to keep my secret because I knew yours. I release you
from your part of it. Give me up if you think it is your duty. I'll not
tell what I know."
"That wasn't how you talked the other day."
"No. It's how I talk now. I'm a hunted man, wanted for murder. I make you
a present of the information."
"You make me a present of what I already know, Mr. Diller, alias Morse,
alias Bellamy."
"You guessed it the first day?"
"Yes."
"And meant to keep quiet about it?"
"Yes, I meant to shelter you from the punishment you deserve." She added
with a touch of bitter self-scorn: "I was doing what I had to do."
"You don't have to do it any longer." He looked straight at her with his
head up. "And how do you know what I deserve? Who made you a judge about
these facts? Grant for the sake of argument I killed him. Do you know I
wasn't justified?"
His fierce boldness put her on the defense. "A man sure of his cause does
not run away. The paper said this Shep Boone was shot from ambush.
Nothing could justify such a thing. When you did that----"
"I didn't. Don't believe it, Miss Lee."
"He was shot from behind, the paper said."
"Do I look like a man who would kill from ambush?"
She admitted to herself that this clear-eyed Southerner did not look like
an assassin. Life in the open had made her a judge of such men as she had
been accustomed to meet, but for days she had been telling herself she
could no longer trust her judgment. Her best friend was a rustler. By a
woman's logic it followed that since Jack Flatray was a thief this man
might have committed all the crimes in the calendar.
"I don't know." Then, impulsively, "No, you don't, but you may be for all
that."
"I'm not asking anything for myself. You may do as you please after I've
gone. Send for Mr. Flatray and tell him if you like."
A horse cantered across the plaza toward the store. Bellamy turned quickly
to go.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," the girl called after him in a low voice.
Norris swung from the saddle. "Who's our hurried friend?" he asked
carelessly.
"Oh, a new rider of ours. Name of Morse." She changed the subject. "Are
you--do you think you know who the rustler is?"
His cold, black eyes rested in hers. She read in them something cruel and
sinister. It was as if he were walking over the grave of an enemy.
"I'm gathering evidence, a little at a time."
"Do I know him?"
"Maybe you do."
"Tell me."
He shook his head. "Wait till I've got him cinched."
"You told father," she accused.
He laughed in a hard, mirthless fashion. "That cured me. The Lee family is
from Missouri. When I talk next time I'll have the goods to show."
"I know who you mean. You're making a mistake." Her voice seemed to plead
with him.
"Not on your life, I ain't. But we'll talk about that when the subject is
riper. There will be a showdown some day, and don't you forget it. Well,
Charley is calling me. So long, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen." He
went jingling down the steps and swung to the saddle. "I'll not forget the
ad, and when I find the right man I'll ce'tainly rope and bring him to
you."
"The rustler?" she asked innocently.
"No, not the rustler, the gent between eighteen and forty-eight, object
matrimony."
"I don't want to trouble you," she flung at him with her gay smile.
"No trouble at all. Fact is, I've got him in mind already," he assured her
promptly.
"Oh!" A pulse of excitement was beating in her throat.
"You don't ask me who he is," suggested Norris boldly, crouched in the
saddle with his weight on the far stirrup.
She had brought it upon herself, but now she dodged the issue. "'Most
anyone will do, and me going on eighteen."
"You're wrong, girl. Only one out of a thousand will do for your master."
"Master, indeed! If he comes to the Bar Double G he'll find he is at the
wrong address. None wanted, thank you."
"Most folks don't want what's best for them, I allow. But if they have
luck it sometimes comes to them."
"Luck!" she echoed, her chin in the air.
"You heard me right. What you need is a man that ain't afraid of you, one
to ride close herd on you so as to head off them stampede notions of
yours. Now this lad is the very one. He is a black-haired guy, and when he
says a thing----"
Involuntarily she glanced at his sleek black head. Melissy felt a sudden
clamor of the blood, a pounding of the pulses.
"--he most generally means it. I've wrangled around a heap with him and
there's no manner of doubt he's up to specifications. In appearance he
looks like me. Point of fact, he's a dead ringer for me."
She saw her chance and flashed out. "Now you're flattering him. There
can't be two as--as fascinating as Senor Norris," she mocked.
His smoldering eyes had the possessive insolence she resented and yet
found so stimulating.
"Did I say there were two?" he drawled.
It was his parting shot. With a touch of the spur he was off, leaving her
no time for an adequate answer.
There were no elusions and inferences about Philip Norris when he wanted
to be direct. He had fairly taken her breath away. Melissy's instinct told
her there was something humiliating about such a wooing. But picturesque
and unconventional conduct excuse themselves in a picturesque personality.
And this man had that if nothing else.
She told herself she was angry at him, that he took liberties far beyond
those of any of the other young men. Yet, somehow, she went into the house
smiling. A color born of excitement burned beneath her sparkling eyes. She
had entered into her heritage of womanhood and the call of sex was
summoning her to the adventure that is old as the garden where Eve met
Adam.
CHAPTER V
THE TENDERFOOT TAKES UP A CLAIM
Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy, did not long remain at the Bar
Double G as a rider. It developed that he had money, and, tenderfoot
though he was, the man showed a shrewd judgment in his investments. He
bought sheep and put them on the government forest reserve, much to the
annoyance of the cattlemen of the district.
Morse, as he now called himself, was not the first man who had brought
sheep into the border country. Far up in the hills were several camps of
them. But hitherto these had been there on sufferance, and it had been
understood that they were to be kept far from the cattle range. The
extension of the government reserves changed the equation. A good slice of
the range was cut off and thrown open to sheep. When Morse leased this and
put five thousand bleaters upon the feeding ground the sentiment against
him grew very bitter.
Lee had been spokesman of a committee appointed to remonstrate with him.
Morse had met them pleasantly but firmly. This part of the reserve had
been set aside for sheep. If it were not leased by him it would be by
somebody else. Therefore, he declined to withdraw his flocks. Champ lost
his temper and swore that he for one would never submit to yield the
range. Sharp bitter words were passed. Next week masked men drove a small
flock belonging to Morse over a precipice.
The tenderfoot retaliated by jumping a mining claim staked out by Lee upon
which the assessment work had not been kept up. The cattleman contested
this in the courts, lost the decision, and promptly appealed. Meanwhile,
he countered by leasing from the forest supervisor part of the run
previously held by his opponent and putting sheep of his own upon it.
"I reckon I'll play Mr. Morse's own game and see how he likes it," the
angry cattleman told his friends.
But the luck was all with Morse. Before he had been working his new claim
a month the Monte Cristo (he had changed the name from its original one of
Melissy) proved a bonanza. His men ran into a rich streak of dirt that
started a stampede for the vicinity.
Champ indulged in choice profanity. From his point of view he had been
robbed, and he announced the fact freely to such acquaintances as dropped
into the Bar Double G store.
"Dad gum it, I was aimin' to do that assessment work and couldn't jest
lay my hands on the time. I'd been a millionaire three years and didn't
know it. Then this damned Morse butts in and euchres me out of the claim.
Some day him and me'll have a settlement. If the law don't right me, I
reckon I'm most man enough to 'tend to Mr. Morse."
It was his daughter who had hitherto succeeded in keeping the peace. When
the news of the relocation had reached Lee he had at once started to
settle the matter with a Winchester, but Melissy, getting news of his
intention, had caught up a horse and ridden bareback after him in time to
avert by her entreaties a tragedy. For six months after this the men had
not chanced to meet.
Why the tenderfoot had first come West--to hide what wounds in the great
baked desert--no man knew or asked. Melissy had guessed, but she did not
breathe to a soul her knowledge. It was a first article of Arizona's creed
that a man's past belonged to him alone, was a blotted book if he chose to
have it so. No doubt many had private reasons for their untrumpeted
migration to that kindly Southwest which buries identity, but no wise
citizen busied himself with questions about antecedents. The present
served to sift one, and by the way a man met it his neighbors judged him.
And T. L. Morse met it competently. In every emergency with which he had
to cope the man "stood the acid." Arizona approved him a man, without
according him any popularity. He was too dogmatic to win liking, but he
had a genius for success. Everything he touched turned to gold.
The Bar Double G lies half way between Mammoth and Mesa. Its position
makes it a central point for ranchers within a radius of fifteen miles.
Out of the logical need for it was born the store which Beauchamp Lee ran
to supply his neighbors with canned goods, coffee, tobacco, and other
indispensables; also the eating house for stage passengers passing to and
from the towns. Young as she was, Melissy was the competent manager of
both of these.
It was one afternoon during the hour the stage stopped to let the
passengers dine that Melissy's wandering eye fell upon Morse seated at one
of the tables. Anger mounted within her at the cool impudence of the man.
She had half a mind to order him out, but saw he was nearly through dinner
and did not want to make a scene. Unfortunately Beauchamp Lee happened to
come into the store just as his enemy strolled out from the dining-room.
The ranchman stiffened. "What you been doing in there, seh?" he demanded
sharply.
"I've been eating a very good dinner in a public cafe. Any objections?"
"Plenty of 'em, seh. I don't aim to keep open house for Mr. Morse."
"I understand this is a business proposition. I expect to pay seventy-five
cents for my meal."
The eyes of the older man gleamed wrathfully. "As for yo' six bits, if you
offer it to me I'll take it as an insult. At the Bar Double G we're not
doing friendly business with claim jumpers. Don't you evah set yo' legs
under my table again, seh."
Morse shrugged, turned away to the public desk, and addressed an envelope,
the while Lee glared at him from under his heavy beetling brows. Melissy
saw that her father was still of half a mind to throw out the intruder and
she called him to her.
"Dad, Jose wants you to look at the hoof of one of his wheelers. He asked
if you would come as soon as you could."
Beauchamp still frowned at Morse, rasping his unshaven chin with his hand.
"Ce'tainly, honey. Glad to look at it."
"Dad! Please."
The ranchman went out, grumbling. Five minutes later Morse took his seat
on the stage beside the driver, having first left seventy-five cents on
the counter.
The stage had scarce gone when the girl looked up from her bookkeeping to
see the man with the Chihuahua hat.
"_Buenos tardes, senorita_," he gave her with a flash of white teeth.
"_Buenos_," she nodded coolly.
But the dancing eyes of her could not deny their pleasure at sight of him.
They had rested upon men as handsome, but upon none who stirred her blood
so much.
He was in the leather chaps of a cowpuncher, gray-shirted, and a polka dot
kerchief circled the brown throat. Life rippled gloriously from every
motion of him. Hermes himself might have envied the perfect grace of the
man.
She supplied his wants while they chatted.
"Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven't you?" she suggested.
"Some. I'll take two bits' worth of that smokin', _nina_."
She shook her head. "I'm no little girl. Don't you know I'm now half past
eighteen?"
"My--my. That ad didn't do a mite of good, did it?"
"Not a bit."
"And you growing older every day."
"Does my age show?" she wanted to know anxiously.
The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her
dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the
laughter of his surface badinage.
"You're standing it well, honey."
The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress
in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland
flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy,
and, though the girl had never wakened to love, Nature was pushing her
relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but
scantily safeguarded her.
She turned toward the shelves. "How many air-tights did you say?"
"I didn't say." He leaned forward across the counter. "What's the hurry,
little girl?"
"My name is Melissy Lee," she told him over her shoulder.
"Mine is Phil Norris. Glad to give it to you, Melissy Lee," the man
retorted glibly.
"Can't use it, thank you," came her swift saucy answer.
"Or to lend it to you--say, for a week or two."
She flashed a look at him and passed quickly from behind the counter. Her
father was just coming into the store.
"Will you wait on Mr. Norris, dad? Hop wants to see me in the kitchen."
Norris swore softly under his breath. The last thing he had wanted was to
drive her away. It had been nearly a year since he had seen her last, but
the picture of her had been in the coals of many a night camp fire.
The cattle detective stayed to dinner and to supper. He and her father had
their heads together for hours, their voices pitched to a murmur. Melissy
wondered what business could have brought him, whether it could have
anything to do with the renewed rustling that had of late annoyed the
neighborhood. This brought her thoughts to Jack Flatray. He, too, had
almost dropped from her world, though she heard of him now and again. Not
once had he been to see her since the night she had sprained her ankle.
Later, when Melissy was watering the roses beside the porch, she heard the
name of Morse mentioned by the stock detective. He seemed to be urging
upon her father some course of action at which the latter demurred. The
girl knew a vague unrest. Lee did not need his anger against Morse
incensed. For months she had been trying to allay rather than increase
this. If Philip Norris had come to stir up smoldering fires, she would
give him a piece of her mind.
The men were still together when Melissy told her father good-night. If
she had known that a whisky bottle passed back and forth a good many times
in the course of the evening, the fears of the girl would not have been
lightened. She knew that in the somber moods following a drinking bout the
lawlessness of Beauchamp Lee was most likely to crop out.
As for the girl, now night had fallen--that wondrous velvet night of
Arizona, which blots out garish day with a cloak of violet, purple-edged
where the hills rise vaguely in the distance, and softens magically all
harsh details beneath the starry vault--she slipped out to the summit of
the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease
born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong
young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this
man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of
his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity
set the blood leaping through her like wine? He lured her to the sex duel,
then trampled down her reserves roughshod. His bold assurance stung her to
anger, but there was a something deeper than anger that left her flushed
and tingling.
Both men slept late, but Norris was down first. He found Melissy
superintending a drive of sheep which old Antonio, the herder, was about
to make to the trading-post at Three Pines. She was on her pony near the
entrance to the corral, her slender, lithe figure sitting in a boy's
saddle with a businesslike air he could not help but admire. The gate bars
had been lifted and the dog was winding its way among the bleating gray
mass, which began to stir uncertainly at its presence. The sheep dribbled
from the corral by ones and twos until the procession swelled to a swollen
stream that poured forth in a torrent. Behind them came Antonio in his
sombrero and blanket, who smiled at his mistress, shouted an "_Adios,
senorita_," and disappeared into the yellow dust cloud which the herd left
in its wake.
"How does Champ like being in the sheep business," Norris said to the
girl.
Melissy did not remove her eyes from the vanishing herd, but a slight
frown puckered her forehead. She chose to take this as a criticism of her
father and to resent it.
"Why shouldn't he be?" she said quietly, answering the spirit of his
remark.
"I didn't mean it that way," he protested, with his frank laugh.
"Then if you didn't mean it so, I shan't take it that way;" and her smile
met his.
"Here's how I look at this sheep business. Some ranges are better adapted
for sheep than cattle, and you can't keep Mary's little lamb away from
those places. No use for a man to buck against the thing that's bound to
be. Better get into the band-wagon and ride."
"That's what father thought," the girl confessed. "He never would have
been the man to bring sheep in, but after they got into the country he saw
it was a question of whether he was going to get the government reserve
range for his sheep, or another man, some new-comer like Mr. Morse, for
his. It was going to be sheep anyhow."
"Well, I'm glad your father took the chance he saw." He added
reminiscently: "We got to be right good friends again last night before we
parted."
She took the opening directly. "If you're so good a friend of his, you
must not excite him about Mr. Morse. You know he's a Southerner, and he
is likely to do something rash--something we shall all be sorry for
afterward."
"I reckon that will be all right," he said evasively.
Her eyes swept to his. "You won't get father into trouble will you?"
The warm, affectionate smile came back to his face, so that as he looked
at her he seemed a sun-god. But again there was something in his gaze that
was not the frankness of a comrade, some smoldering fire that strangely
stirred her blood and yet left her uneasy.
"I'm not liable to bring trouble to those you love, girl. I stand by my
friends."
Her pony began to move toward the house, and he strode beside, as debonair
and gallant a figure as ever filled the eye and the heart of a woman. The
morning sun glow irradiated him, found its sparkling reflection in the
dark curls of his bare head, in the bloom of his tanned cheeks, made a fit
setting for the graceful picture of lingering youth his slim, muscular
figure and springy stride personified. Small wonder the untaught girl
beside him found the merely physical charm of him fascinating. If her
instinct sometimes warned her to beware, her generous heart was eager to
pay small heed to the monition except so far as concerned her father.
After breakfast he came into the office to see her before he left.
"Good-by for a day or two," he said, offering his hand.
"You're coming back again, are you?" she asked quietly, but not without a
deeper dye in her cheeks.
"Yes, I'm coming back. Will you be glad to see me?"
"Why should I be glad? I hardly know you these days."
"You'll know me better before we're through with each other."
She would acknowledge no interest in him, the less because she knew it was
there. "I may do that without liking you better."
And suddenly his swift, winning smile flashed upon her. "But you've got to
like me. I want you to."
"Do you get everything you want?" she smiled back.
"If I want it enough, I usually do."
"Then since you get so much, you'll be better able to do without my
liking."
"I'm going to have it too."
"Don't be too sure." She had a feeling that things were moving too fast,
and she hailed the appearance of her father with relief. "Good morning,
dad. Did you sleep well? Mr. Norris is just leaving."
"Wait till I git a bite o' breakfast and I'll go with you, Phil," promised
Lee. "I got to ride over to Mesa anyhow some time this week."
The girl watched them ride away, taking the road gait so characteristic of
the Southwest. As long as they were in sight her gaze followed them, and
when she could see nothing but a wide cloud of dust travelling across the
mesa she went up to her room and sat down to think it out. Something new
had come into her life. What, she did not yet know, but she tried to face
the fact with the elemental frankness that still made her more like a boy
than a woman. Sitting there before the looking-glass, she played absently
with the thick braid of heavy, blue-black hair which hung across her
shoulder to the waist. It came to her for the first time to wonder if she
was pretty, whether she was going to be one of the women that men desire.
Without the least vanity she studied herself, appraised the soft brown
cheeks framed with ebon hair, the steady, dark eyes so quick to passion
and to gaiety, the bronzed throat full and rounded, the supple, flowing
grace of the unrestrained body.
Gradually a wave of color crept into her cheeks as she sat there with her
chin on her little doubled hand. It was the charm of this Apollo of the
plains that had set free such strange thoughts in her head. Why should she
think of him? What did it matter whether she was good-looking? She shook
herself resolutely together and went down to the business of the day.
It was not long after midnight the next day that Champ Lee reached the
ranch. His daughter came out from her room in her night-dress to meet
him.
"What kept you, Daddy?" she asked.
But before he could answer she knew. She read the signs too clearly to
doubt that he had been drinking.
CHAPTER VI
"HANDS UP"
Melissy had been up the Can del Oro for wild poppies in her runabout and
had just reached the ranch. She was disposing of her flowers in ollas when
Jim Budd, waiter, chambermaid, and odd jobs man at the Bar Double G,
appeared in the hall with a frightened, mysterious face.
"What's the matter, Jim? You and Hop Ling been quarrelling again?" she
asked carelessly.
"No'm, that ain't it. It's wusser'n that. I got to tell you-all su'thin' I
hearn yore paw say."
The girl looked up quickly at him. "What do you mean, Jim?"
"That Mistah Norris he come back whilst you wus away, and him and yore paw
wus in that back room a-talkin' mighty confidential."
"Yes, and you listened. Well?"
Jim swelled with offended dignity. "No'm, I didn't listen neither. I des
natcherally hearn, 'count of that hole fer the stovepipe what comes
through the floor of my room."
"But what was it you heard?" she interrupted impatiently.
"I wus a-comin' to that. Plum proverdenshul, I draps into my room des as
yore paw wus sayin', 'Twenty thousand dollars goin' down to the Fort on
the stage to-day?' 'Cose I pricks up my ears then and tuk it all in. This
yere Norris had foun' out that Mistah Morse was shippin' gold from his
mine to-day on the Fort Allison stage, and he gits yore paw to go in with
him an' hold it up. Yore paw cussed and said as how 't wus his gold anyhow
by rights."
The girl went white and gave a little broken cry. "Oh, Jim! Are you
sure?"
"Yas'm, 'cose I'm suah. Them's his ve'y words. Hope to die if they ain't.
They wus drinkin', and when 't wus all fixed up that 't wus to be at the
mouth of the Box canyon they done tore an old black shirt you got for a
dust-rag and made masks out of it and then rode away."
"Which way did they go?"
"Tow'ds the Box canyon Miss M'lissy."
A slender, pallid figure of despair, she leaned against the wall to
support the faintness that had so suddenly stolen the strength from her
limbs, trying desperately to think of some way to save her father from
this madness. She was sure he would bungle it and be caught eventually,
and she was equally sure he would never let himself be taken alive. Her
helplessness groped for some way out. There must be some road of escape
from this horrible situation, and as she sought blindly for it the path
opened before her.
"Where is Hop?" she asked quickly.
"A-sleepin' in his room, ma'am."
"Go to the store and tend it till I come back, Jim. I may be an hour, or
mebbe two, but don't you move out of it for a moment. And don't ever speak
of any of this, not a word, Jim."
"No'm, 'cose I won't."
His loyalty she did not doubt an instant, though she knew his simple wits
might easily be led to indiscretion. But she did not stay to say more now,
but flew upstairs to the room that had been her brother's before he left
home. Scarce five minutes elapsed before she reappeared transformed. It
was a slim youth garbed as a cowpuncher that now slipped along the passage
to the rear, softly opened the door of the cook's room, noiselessly
abstracted the key, closed the door again as gently, and locked it from
the outside. She ran into her own room, strapped on her revolver belt, and
took her empty rifle from its case. As she ran through the room below the
one Jim occupied, she caught sight of a black rag thrown carelessly into
the fireplace and stuffed it into her pocket.
"That's just like Dad to leave evidence lying around," she said to
herself, for even in the anxiety that was flooding her she kept her quiet
commonsense.
After searching the horizon carefully to see that nobody was in sight,
she got into the rig and drove round the corral to the irrigating ditch.
This was a wide lateral of the main canal, used to supply the whole lower
valley with water, and just now it was empty. Melissy drove down into its
sandy bed and followed its course as rapidly as she could. If she were
only in time! If the stage had not yet passed! That was her only fear, the
dread of being too late. Not once did the risk of the thing she intended
occur to her. Physical fear had never been part of her. She had done the
things her brother Dick had done. She was a reckless rider, a good shot,
could tramp the hills or follow the round-up all day without knowing
fatigue. If her flesh still held its girlish curves and softness, the
muscles underneath were firm and compact. Often for her own amusement and
that of her father she had donned her brother's chaps, his spurs,
sombrero, and other paraphernalia, to masquerade about the house in them.
She had learned to imitate the long roll of the vaquero's stride, the
mannerisms common to his class, and even the heavy voice of a man. More
than once she had passed muster as a young man in the shapeless garments
she was now wearing. She felt confident that the very audacity of the
thing would carry it off. There would be a guard for the treasure box, of
course, but if all worked well he could be taken by surprise. Her rifle
was not loaded, but the chances were a hundred to one that she would not
need to use it.
For the first time in his life the roan got the whip from his mistress.
"Git up, Bob. We've got to hurry. It's for dad," she cried, as they raced
through the sand and sent it flying from the wheels.
The Fort Allison stage passed within three miles of the Lee ranch on its
way to Mesa. Where the road met in intersection with the ditch she had
chosen as the point for stopping it, and no veteran at the business could
have selected more wisely, for a reason which will hereafter appear. Some
fifty yards below this point of intersection the ditch ran through a grove
of cottonwoods fringing the bank. Here the banks sloped down more
gradually, and Melissy was able to drive up one side, turn her rig so that
the horse faced the other way, and draw down into the ditch again in order
that the runabout could not be seen from the road. Swiftly and skilfully
she obliterated the track she had made in the sandy bank.
She was just finishing this when the sound of wheels came to her. Rifle in
hand, she ran back along the ditch, stooping to pass under the bridge, and
waited at the farther side in a fringe of bushes for the coming of the
stage.
Even now fear had no place in the excitement which burned high in her. The
girl's wits were fully alert, and just in time she remembered the need of
a mask. Her searching fingers found the torn black shirt in a pocket and a
knife in another. Hastily she ripped the linen in half, cut out eyeholes,
and tied the mask about her head. With perfectly steady hands she picked
up the rifle from the ground and pushed the muzzle of it through the
bushes.
Leisurely the stage rolled up-grade toward the crossing. The Mexican
driver was half asleep and the "shotgun messenger" was indolently rolling
a cigarette, his sawed-off gun between his knees. Alan McKinstra was the
name of this last young gentleman. Only yesterday he had gone to work for
Morse, and this was the first job that had been given him. The stage never
had been held up since the "Monte Cristo" had struck its pay-streak, and
there was no reason to suppose it would be. Nevertheless, Morse proposed
to err on the side of caution.
"I reckon the man that holds down this job don't earn his salt, Jose. It's
what they call a sinecure," Alan was saying at the very instant the
summons came.
"Throw up your hands!"
Sharp and crisp it fell on Alan's ears. He sat for a moment stunned, the
half-rolled cigarette still between his fingers. The driver drew up his
four horses with a jerk and brought them to a huddled halt.
"Hands up!" came again the stinging imperative.
Now, for the first time, it reached Alan's consciousness that the stage
was actually being held up. He saw the sun shining on the barrel of a
rifle and through the bushes the masked face of a hidden cowpuncher. His
first swift instinct was to give battle, and he reached for the shotgun
between his knees. Simultaneously the driver's foot gave it a push and
sent the weapon clattering to the ground. Jose at least knew better than
to let him draw the road agent's fire while he sat within a foot of the
driver. His hands went into the air, and after his Alan's and those of the
two passengers.
"Throw down that box."
Alan lowered his hands and did as directed.
"Now reach for the stars again."
McKinstra's arms went skyward. Without his weapon, he was helpless to do
otherwise. The young man had an odd sense of unreality about the affair, a
feeling that it was not in earnest. The timbre of the fresh young voice
that came from the bushes struck a chord in his memory, though for the
life of him he could not place its owner.
"Drive on, Jose. Burn the wind and keep a-rollin' south."
The Mexican's whip coiled over the head of the leaders and the broncos
sprang forward with a jump. It was the summit of a long hill, on the edge
of which wound the road. Until the stage reached the foot of it there
would be no opportunity to turn back. Round a bend of the road it swung at
a gallop, and the instant it disappeared Melissy leaped from the bushes,
lifted the heavy box, and carried it to the edge of the ditch. She flew
down the sandy bottom to the place where the rig stood, drove swiftly
back again, and, though it took the last ounce of strength in her, managed
to tumble the box into the trap.
Back to the road she went, and from the place where the box had fallen
made long strides back to the bushes where she had been standing at the
moment of the hold-up. These tracks she purposely made deep and large,
returning in her first ones to the same point, but from the marks where
the falling treasure box had struck into the road she carefully
obliterated with her hand the foot-marks leading to the irrigation ditch,
sifting the sand in carefully so as to leave no impression. This took
scarcely a minute. She was soon back in her runabout, driving homeward
fast as whip and voice could urge the horse.
She thought she could reason out what McKinstra and the stage-driver would
do. Mesa was twenty-five miles distant, the "Monte Cristo" mine seventeen.
Nearer than these points there was no telephone station except the one at
the Lee ranch. Their first thought would be to communicate with Morse,
with the officers at Mammoth, and with the sheriff of Mesa County. To do
this as soon as possible they would turn aside and drive to the ranch
after they reached the bottom of the hill and could make the turn. It was
a long, steep hill, and Melissy estimated that this would give her a start
of nearly twenty minutes. She would save about half a mile by following
the ditch instead of the road, but at best she knew she was drawing it
very fine.
She never afterward liked to think of that drive home. It seemed to her
that Bob crawled and that the heavy sand was interminable. Feverishly she
plied the whip, and when at length she drew out of the ditch she sent her
horse furiously round the big corral. Though she had planned everything to
the last detail, she knew that any one of a hundred contingencies might
spoil her plan. A cowpuncher lounging about the place would have ruined
everything, or at best interfered greatly. But the windmill clicked over
sunlit silence, empty of life. No stir or movement showed the presence of
any human being.
Melissy drove round to the side door, dumped out the treasure-box, ran
into the house, and quickly returned with a hammer and some tacks, then
fell swiftly to ripping the oilcloth that covered the box which stood
against the wall to serve as a handy wash-stand for use by dusty
travellers before dining. The two boxes were of the same size and shape,
and she draped the treasure chest with the cloth, tacked it in place,
restored to the top of it the tin basin, and tossed the former wash-stand
among a pile of old boxes from the store, that were to be used for
kindling. After this she ran upstairs, scudded softly along the corridor,
and silently unlocked the cook's door, dropping the key on the floor to
make it appear as if something had shaken it from the keyhole. Presently
she was in her brother's room, doffing his clothes and dressing herself in
her own.
A glance out of the window sapped the color from her cheek, for she saw
the stage breasting the hill scarce two hundred yards from the house. She
hurried downstairs, pinning her belt as she ran, and flashed into the
store, where Jim sat munching peanuts.
"The stage is coming, Jim. Remember, you're not to know anything about it
at all. If they ask for Dad, say he's out cutting trail of a bunch of hill
cows. Tell them I started after the wild flowers about fifteen minutes
ago. Don't talk much about it, though. I'll be back inside of an hour."
With that she was gone, back to her trap, which she swung along a trail
back of the house till it met the road a quarter of a mile above. Her
actions must have surprised steady old Bob, for he certainly never before
had seen his mistress in such a desperate hurry as she had been this day
and still was. Nearly a mile above, a less well defined track deflected
from the main road. Into this she turned, following it until she came to
the head-gates of the lateral which ran through their place. The main
canal was full of water, and after some effort she succeeded in opening
the head-gates so as to let the water go pouring through.
Returning to the runabout, the girl drove across a kind of natural meadow
to a hillside not far distant, gathered a double handful of wild flowers,
and turned homeward again. The stage was still there when she came in
sight of the group of buildings at the ranch.
As she drew up and dismounted with her armful of flowers, Alan McKinstra
stepped from the store to the porch and came forward to assist her.
"The Fort Allison stage has been robbed," he blurted out.
"What nonsense! Who would want to rob it?" she retorted.
"Morse had a gold shipment aboard," he explained in a low voice, and added
in bitter self-condemnation: "He sent me along to guard it, and I never
even fired a shot to save it."
"But--do you mean that somebody held up the stage?" she gasped.
"Yes. But whoever it was can't escape. I've 'phoned to Jack Flatray and to
Morse. They'll be right out here. The sheriff of Mesa County has already
started with a posse. They'll track him down. That's a cinch. He can't get
away with the box without a rig. If he busts the box, he's got to carry it
on a horse and a horse leaves tracks."
"But who do you think it was?"
"Don't know. One of the Roaring Fork bunch of bad men, likely. But I don't
know."
The young man was plainly very much excited and disturbed. He walked
nervously up and down, jerking his sentences out piecemeal as he thought
of them.
"Was there only one man? And did you see him?" Melissy asked
breathlessly.
He scarcely noticed her excitement, or if he did, it seemed to him only
natural under the circumstances.
"I expect there were more, but we saw only one. Didn't see much of him. He
was screened by the bushes and wore a black mask. So long as the stage was
in sight he never moved from that place; just stood there and kept us
covered."
"But how could he rob you if he didn't come out?" she asked in wide-eyed
innocence.
"He didn't rob _us_ any. He must 'a' heard of the shipment of gold, and
that's what he was after. After he'd got us to rights he made me throw the
box down in the road. That's where it was when he ordered us to move on
and keep agoing."
"And you went?"
"Jose handled the lines, but 't would 'a' been the same if I'd held them.
That gun of his was a right powerful persuader." He stopped to shake a
fist in impotent fury in the air. "I wish to God I could meet up with him
some day when he didn't have the drop on me."
"Maybe you will some time," she told him soothingly. "I don't think you're
a bit to blame, Alan. Nobody could think so. Ever so many times I've heard
Dad say that when a man gets the drop on you there's nothing to do but
throw up your hands."
"Do you honest think so, Melissy? Or are you just saying it to take the
sting away? Looks like I ought to 'a' done something mor'n sit there like
a bump on a log while he walked off with the gold."
His cheerful self-satisfaction was under eclipse. The boyish pride of him
was wounded. He had not "made good." All over Cattleland the news would be
wafted on the wings of the wind that Alan McKinstra, while acting as
shotgun messenger to a gold shipment, had let a road agent hold him up for
the treasure he was guarding.
"Very likely they'll catch him and get the gold back," she suggested.
"That won't do me any good," he returned gloomily. "The only thing that
can help me now is for me to git the fellow myself, and I might just as
well look for a needle in a haystack."
"You can't tell. The robber may be right round here now." Her eyes,
shining with excitement, passed the crowd moving in and out of the store,
for already the news of the hold-up had brought riders and ranchmen
jogging in to learn the truth of the wild tale that had reached them.
"More likely he's twenty miles away. But whoever he is, he knows this
county. He made a slip and called Jose by his name."
Melissy's gaze was turned to the dust whirl that advanced up the road that
ran round the corral. "That doesn't prove anything, Alan. Everybody knows
Jose. He's lived all over Arizona--at Tucson and Tombstone and Douglas."
"That's right too," the lad admitted.
The riders in advance of the dust cloud resolved themselves into the
persons of her father and Norris. Her incautious admission was already
troubling her.
"But I'm sure you're right. No hold-up with any sense would stay around
here and wait to be caught. He's probably gone up into the Galiuros to
hide."
"Unless he's cached the gold and is trying to throw off suspicion."
The girl had moved forward to the end of the house with Alan to meet her
father. At that instant, by the ironic humor of chance, her glance fell
upon a certain improvised wash-stand covered with oilcloth. She shook her
head decisively. "No, he won't risk waiting to do that. He'll make sure of
his escape first."
"I reckon."
"Have you heard, Daddy?" Melissy called out eagerly. She knew she must
play the part expected of her, that of a young girl much interested in
this adventure which had occurred in the community.
He nodded grimly, swinging from the saddle. She observed with surprise
that his eye did not meet hers. This was not like him.
"What do you think?"
His gaze met that of Norris before he answered, and there was in it some
hint of a great fear. "Beats me, 'Lissy."
He had told the simple truth, but not the whole truth. The men had waited
at the entrance to the Box canyon for nearly two hours without the arrival
of the stage. Deciding that something must have happened, they started
back, and presently met a Mexican who stopped to tell them the news. To
say that they were dazed is to put it mildly. To expect them to believe
that somebody else had heard of the secret shipment and had held up the
stage two miles from the place they had chosen, was to ask a credulity too
simple. Yet this was the fact that confronted them.
Arrived at the scene of the robbery both men had dismounted and had
examined the ground thoroughly. What they saw tended still more to
bewilder them. Neither of them was a tenderfoot, and the little table at
the summit of the long hill told a very tangled tale to those who had eyes
to read. Obvious tracks took them at once to the spot where the bandit had
stood in the bushes, but there was something about them that struck both
men as suspicious.
"Looks like these are worked out on purpose," commented Lee. "The guy's
leaving too easy a trail to follow, and it quits right abrupt in the
bushes. Must 'a' took an airship from here, I 'low."
"Does look funny. Hello! What's this?"
Norris had picked up a piece of black cloth and was holding it out. A
startled oath slipped from the lips of the Southerner. He caught the rag
from the hands of his companion and studied it with a face of growing
astonishment.
"What's up?"
Lee dived into his pocket and drew forth the mask he had been wearing.
Silently he fitted it to the other. The pieces matched exactly, both in
length and in the figure of the pattern.
When the Southerner looked up his hands were shaking and his face ashen.
"For God's sake, Phil, what does this mean?" he cried hoarsely.
"Search me."
"It must have been--looks like the hold-up was somebody--my God, man, we
left this rag at the ranch when we started!" the rancher whispered.
"That's right."
"We planned this thing right under the nigger's room. He must 'a' heard
and---- But it don't look like Jim Budd to do a thing like that."
Norris had crossed the road again and was standing on the edge of the
lateral.
"Hello! This ditch is full of water. When we passed down it was empty," he
said.
Lee crossed over and stood by his side, a puzzled frown on his face.
"There hadn't ought to be water running hyer now," he said, as if to
himself. "I don't see how it could 'a' come hyer, for Bill Weston--he's
the ditch rider--went to Mesa this mo'ning, and couldn't 'a' got back to
turn it in."
The younger man stooped and examined a foot-print at the edge of the
ditch. It was the one Melissy had made just as she stepped into the rig.
"Here's something new, Lee. We haven't seen this gentleman's track before.
Looks like a boy's. It's right firm and deep in this soft ground. I'll bet
a cooky your nigger never made that track."
The Southerner crouched down beside him, and they looked at it together,
head to head.
"No, it ain't Jim's. I don't rightly _savez_ this thing at all," the old
man muttered, troubled at this mystery which seemed to point to his
household.
"By Moses, I've got it! The guy who did the holding up had his horse down
here. He loaded the sack on its back and drove off up the ditch. All we
got to do is follow the ditch up or down till we come to the place where
he climbed out and struck across country."
"That's right, Phil. He must have had a pardner up at the head-gates. They
had some kind of signal arranged, and when Mr. Hold-up was ready down come
the water and washed out his tracks. It's a blame' smooth piece of
business if you ask me."
"The fellow made two bad breaks, though. That piece of shirt is one. This
foot-print is another. They may land him in the pen yet."
"I don't think it," returned the old man with composure, and as he spoke
his foot erased the telltale print. "I 'low there won't anybody go to the
pen for he'pin himself to Mr. Morse's gold dust. I don't give a cuss who
it was."
Norris laughed in his low, easy way. "I'm with you, Mr. Lee. We'll make a
thorough job while we're at it and mess up these other tracks. After that
we'll follow the ditch up and see if there's anything doing."
They remounted their broncos and rode them across the tracks several
times, then followed the lateral up, one on either side of the ditch,
their eyes fastened to the ground to see any evidence of a horse having
clambered over the bank. They drew in sight of the ranch house without
discovering what they were looking for. Lee's heart was in his mouth, for
he knew that he would see presently what his eye sought.
"I reckon the fellow went down instead of up," suggested Norris.
"No, he came up."
Lee had stopped and was studying wheel tracks that ran up from the ditch
to his ranch house. His face was very white and set. He pointed to them
with a shaking finger.
"There's where he went in the ditch, and there's where he came out."
Norris forded the stream, cast a casual eye on the double track, and
nodded. He was still in a fog of mystery, but the old man was already
fearing the worst.
He gulped out his fears tremblingly. For himself, he was of a flawless
nerve, but this touched nearer home than his own danger.
"Them wheel-tracks was made by my little gyurl's runabout, Phil."
"Good heavens!" The younger man drew rein sharply and stared at him. "You
don't think----"
He broke off, recalling the sharp, firm little foot-print on the edge of
the ditch some miles below.
"I don't reckon I know what to think. If she was in this, she's got some
good reason." A wave of passion suddenly swept the father. "By God! I'd
like to see the man that dares mix her name up in this."
Norris met this with his friendly smile. "You can't pick a row with me
about that, old man. I'm with you till the cows come home. But that ain't
quite the way to go at this business. First thing, we've got to wipe out
these tracks. How? Why, sheep! There's a bunch of three hundred in that
pasture. We'll drive the bunch down to the ditch and water them here.
_Savez?_"
"And wipe out the wheel-marks in the sand. Bully for you, Phil."
"That's the idea. After twelve hundred chisel feet have been over this
sand I reckon the wheel-tracks will be missing."
They rode up to the house, and the first thing that met them was the
candid question of the girl:
"Have you heard, Daddy?"
And out of his troubled heart he had answered, "Beats me, 'Lissie."
"They've sent for the officers. Jack Flatray is on the way himself. So is
Sheriff Burke," volunteered Alan gloomily.
"Getting right busy, ain't they?" Norris sneered.
Again Lee glanced quickly at Norris. "I reckon, Phil, we better drive that
bunch of sheep down to water right away. I clean forgot them this
mo'ning."
"Sure." The younger man was not so easily shaken. He turned to McKinstra
naturally. "How many of the hold-ups were there?"
"I saw only one, and didn't see him very good. He was a slim fellow in a
black mask."
"You don't say. Were you the driver?"
Alan felt the color suffuse his face. "No, I was the guard."
"Oh, you were the guard."
Alan felt the suave irony that covered this man's amusement, and he
resented it impotently. When Melissy came to his support he was the more
grateful.
"And we all think he did just right in using his common sense, Mr.
Norris," the girl flashed.
"Oh, certainly."
And with that he was gone after her father to help him water the sheep.
"I don't see why those sheep have to be watered right now," she frowned
to Alan. "Dad _did_ water them this morning. I helped him."
Together they went into the store, where Jose was telling his story for
the sixth time to a listening circle of plainsmen.
"And right then he come at you and ree-quested yore whole outfit to poke a
hole in the scenery with yore front feet?" old Dave Ellis asked just as
Melissy entered.
"_Si, Senor._"
"One of MacQueen's Roaring Fork gang did it, I'll bet," Alan contributed
sourly.
"What kind of a lookin' guy was he?" spoke up a dark young man known as
Bob Farnum.
"A big man, _senor_, and looked a ruffian."
"They're always that way until you run 'em down," grinned Ellis. "Never
knew a hold-up wasn't eight foot high and then some--to the fellow at the
wrong end of the gun."
"If you mean to say, Dave Ellis, that I lay down to a bluff----" Alan was
beginning hotly when the old frontiersman interrupted.
"Keep your shirt on, McKinstra. I don't mean to say it. Nobody but a darn
fool makes a gun-play when the cards are stacked that-a-way. Yore bad play
was in reaching for the gun at all."
"Well, Jack Flatray will git him. I'll bet a stack of blues on that,"
contributed a fat ranchman wheezily.
"Unless you mussed up the trail coming back," said Ellis to the
stage-driver.
"We didn't. I thought of that, and I had Jose drive clear round the place.
Jack will find it all right unless there's too much travel before he gets
here," said Alan.
Farnum laughed malevolently. "Mebbe he'll get him and mebbe he won't.
Jack's human, like the rest of us, if he is the best sheriff in Arizona.
Here's hoping he don't get him. Any man that waltzes out of the cactus and
appropriates twenty thousand dollars belonging to Mr. Morse is welcome to
it for all of me. I don't care if he is one of MacQueen's bad men. I wish
it had been forty thousand."
Farnum did not need to explain the reasons for his sentiments. Everybody
present knew that he was the leader of that bunch of cattlemen who had
bunched themselves together to resist the encroachments of sheep upon the
range. Among these the feeling against Morse was explosively dangerous. It
had found expression in more than one raid upon his sheep. Many of them
had been destroyed by one means or another, but Morse, with the obstinacy
characteristic of him, had replaced them with others and continually
increased his herds. There had been threats against his life, and one of
his herders had been wounded. But the mine-owner went his way with quiet
fearlessness and paid no attention to the animosity he had stirred up. The
general feeling was that the trouble must soon come to a head. Nobody
expected the rough and ready vaqueros, reckless and impulsive as they
were, to submit to the loss of the range, which meant too the wiping out
of their means of livelihood, without a bitter struggle that would be both
lawless and bloody.
Wherefore there was silence after Farnum had spoken, broken at length by
the amiable voice of the fat ranchman, Baker.
"Well, we'll see what we'll see," he wheezed complacently. "And anyways I
got to have some horseshoe plug, Melissy."
The girl laughed nervously as she reached for what he wanted. "You're a
safe prophet, Mr. Baker," she said.
"He'd be a safe one if he'd prophesy that Jack Flatray would have Mr.
Hold-up in the calaboose inside of three days," put in a half-grown lad in
leathers.
"I ain't so sure about that. You'll have to show me, and so will Mr.
Deputy Sheriff Flatray," retorted Farnum.
A shadow darkened the doorway.
"Good afternoon, gentlemen all--and Miss Lee," a pleasant voice drawled.
The circle of eyes focused on the new-comer and saw a lean, muscular,
young fellow of medium height, cool and alert, with the dust of the desert
on every sunbaked inch of him.
"I'm damned if it ain't Jack here already!" gasped Baker.
CHAPTER VII
WATERING SHEEP
The deputy glanced quietly round, nodded here and there at sight of the
familiar face of an acquaintance, and spoke to the driver.
"Let's hear you say your little piece again, Jose."
The Mexican now had it by heart, and he pattered off the thing from
beginning to end without a pause. Melissy, behind the counter, leaned her
elbows on it and fastened her eyes on the boyish face of the officer. In
her heart she was troubled. How much did he know? What could he discover
from the evidence she had left? He had the reputation of being the best
trailer and the most fearless officer in Arizona. But surely she had
covered her tracks safely.
From Jose the ranger turned to Alan. "We'll hear your account of it now,
seh," he said gently.
While Alan talked, Jack's gaze drifted through the window to the flock of
sheep that were being driven up from the ditch by Lee and Norris. That
little pastoral scene had its significance for him. He had arrived at the
locality of the hold-up a few minutes after they had left, and his keen
intelligence had taken in some of the points they had observed. A rapid
circuit of the spot at the distance of thirty yards had shown him no
tracks leading from the place except those which ran up the lateral on
either side of it. It was possible that these belonged to the horses of
the robbers, but if so the fellows were singularly careless of detection.
Moreover, the booty must be accounted for. They had not carried it with
them, since no empty box remained to show that they had poured the gold
into sacks, and it would have been impossible to take the box as it was on
a horse. Nor had they buried it, unless at the bottom of the irrigating
ditch, for some signs of their work must have remained.
Balancing probabilities, it had seemed to Flatray that these might be the
tracks of ranchmen who had arrived after the hold-up and were following
the escaping bandits up the lateral. For unless these were the robber's,
there was no way of escape except either up or down the bottom of the
ditch. His search had eliminated the possibility of any other but the
road, and this was travelled too frequently to admit of even a chance of
escape by it without detection. Jack filed away one or two questions in
his brain for future reference. The most important of these was to
discover whether there had been any water in the ditch at the time of the
hold-up.
He had decided to follow the tracks leading up the ditch and found no
difficulty in doing so at a fast walk. Without any hesitation they
paralleled the edge of the lateral. Nor had the deputy travelled a quarter
of a mile before he made a discovery. The rider on the right hand side of
the stream had been chewing tobacco, and he had a habit of splashing his
mark on boulders he passed in the form of tobacco juice. Half a dozen
times before he reached the Lee ranch the ranger saw this signature of
identity writ large on smooth rocks shining in the sun. The last place he
saw it was at the point where the two riders deflected from the lateral
toward the ranch house, following tracks which led up from the bottom of
the ditch.
An instant later Flatray had dodged back into the chaparral, for somebody
was driving a flock of sheep down to the ditch. He made out that there
were two riders behind them, and that they had no dog. For the present his
curiosity was satisfied. He thought he knew why they were watering sheep
in this odd fashion. Swiftly he had made a circuit, drawn rein in front of
the store, and dropped in just in time to hear his name. Now, as with one
ear he listened to Alan's account of the hold-up, with his subconscious
mind he was with the sheep-herders who were driving the flock back into
the pasture.
"Looks like our friend the bad man was onto his job all right," was the
deputy's only comment when Alan had finished.
"I'll bet he's making his getaway into the hills mighty immediate,"
chuckled Baker. "He can't find a bank in the mountainside to deposit that
gold any too soon to suit him."
"Sho! I'll bet he ain't worried a mite. He's got his arrangements all
made, and likely they'll dovetail to suit him. He's put his brand on that
gold to stay," answered Farnum confidently.
Jack's mild blue eyes rested on him amiably. "Think so, Bob?"
"I ain't knockin' you any, Jack. You're all right. But that's how I figure
it out, and, by Gad! I'm hopin' it too," Farnum made answer recklessly.
Flatray laughed and strolled from the crowded room to the big piazza. A
man had just cantered up and flung himself from his saddle. The ranger,
looking at him, thought he had never seen another so strikingly handsome
an Apollo. Black eyes looked into his from a sun-tanned face perfectly
modelled. The pose of the head and figure would have delighted a
sculptor.
There was a vigor, an unspoken hostility, in the gaze of both men.
"Mo'nin", Mr. Deputy Sheriff, one said; and the other, "Same to you, Mr.
Norris."
"You're on the job quick," sneered the cattle detective.
"The quicker the sooner, I expect."
"And by night you'll have Mr. Hold-up roped and hog-tied?"
"Not so you could notice it. Are you a sheep-herder these days, Mr.
Norris?"
The gentle irony of this was not lost on its object, for in the West a
herder of sheep is the next remove from a dumb animal.
"No, I'm riding for the Quarter Circle K Bar outfit. This is the first
time I ever took the dust of a sheep in my life. I did it to oblige Mr.
Lee."
"Oh! To oblige Mr. Lee?"
"He wanted to water them, and his herder wasn't here."
"Must 'a' been wanting water mighty bad, I reckon," commented Jack
amiably.
"You bet! Lee feels better satisfied now he's watered them."
"I don't doubt it."
Norris changed the subject. "You must have burnt the wind getting here. I
didn't expect to see you for some hours."
"I happened to be down at Yeager's ranch, and one of the boys got me on
the line from Mesa."
"Picked up any clues yet?" asked the other carelessly, yet always with
that hint of a sneer; and innocently Flatray answered, "They seem to be
right seldom."
"Didn't know but you'd happened on the fellow's trail."
"I guess I'm as much at sea as you are," was the equivocal answer.
Lee came over from the stable, still wearing spurs and gauntlets.
"Howdy, Jack!" he nodded, not quite so much at his ease as usual. "Got
hyer on the jump, didn't you?"
"I kept movin'."
"This shorely beats hell, don't it?" Lee glanced around, selected a smooth
boulder, and fired his discharge of tobacco juice at it true to the inch.
"Reminds me of the old days. You boys ain't old enough to recall them, but
stage hold-ups were right numerous then."
Blandly the deputy looked from one to the other. "I don't suppose either
of you gentlemen happen to have been down and looked over the ground where
the hold-up was? The tracks were right cut up before I got there."
This center shot silenced Lee for an instant, but Norris was on the spot
with smiling ease.
"No, Mr. Lee and I have been hunting strays on the mesa. We didn't hear
about it till a few minutes ago. We're at your service, though, Mr.
Sheriff, to join any posses you want to send out."
"Much obliged. I'm going to send one out toward the Galiuros in a few
minutes now. I'll be right glad to have you take charge of it, Mr.
Norris."
The derisive humor in the newly appointed deputy's eyes did not quite
reach the surface.
"Sure. Whenever you want me."
"I'm going to send Alan McKinstra along to guide you. He knows that
country like a book. You want to head for the lower pass, swing up Diable
canyon, and work up in the headquarters of the Three Forks."
Within a quarter of an hour the posse was in motion. Flatray watched it
disappear in the dust of the road without a smile. He had sent them out
merely to distract the attention of the public and to get rid of as many
as possible of the crowd. For he was quite as well aware as the leader of
the posse that this search in the Galiuros was a wild-goose chase.
Somewhere within three hundred yards of the place he stood both the robber
and his booty were in all probability to be found.
Flatray was quite right in his surmise, since Melissy Lee, who had come
out to see the posse off, was standing at the end of the porch with her
dusky eyes fastened on him, the while he stood beside the house with one
foot resting negligently on the oilcloth cover of the wash-stand.
She had cast him out of her friendship because of his unworthiness, but
there was a tumult in her heart at sight of him. No matter how her
judgment condemned him as a villain, some instinct in her denied the
possibility of it. She was torn in conflict between her liking for him and
her conviction that he deserved only contempt. Somehow it hurt her too
that he accepted without protest her verdict, appeared so willing to be a
stranger to her.
Now that the actual physical danger of her adventure was past, Melissy was
aware too of a chill dread lurking at her heart. She was no longer buoyed
up by the swiftness of action which had called for her utmost nerve. There
was nothing she could do now but wait, and waiting was of all things the
one most foreign to her impulsive temperament. She acknowledged too some
fear of this quiet, soft-spoken frontiersman. All Arizona knew not only
the daredevil spirit that fired his gentleness, but the competence with
which he set about any task he assigned himself. She did not see how he
_could_ unravel this mystery. She had left no clues behind her, she felt
sure of that, and yet was troubled lest he guessed at her secret behind
that mask of innocence he wore. He did not even remotely guess it as yet,
but he was far closer to the truth than he pretended. The girl knew she
should leave him and go about her work. Her role was to appear as
inconspicuous as possible, but she could not resist the fascination of
trying to probe his thoughts.
"I suppose your posse will come back with the hold-ups in a few hours.
Will it be worth while to wait for them?" she asked with amiable
derision.
The ranger had been absorbed in thought, his chin in his hand, but he
brought his gaze back from the distance to meet hers. What emotion lay
behind those cold eyes she could not guess.
"You're more hopeful than I am, Miss Lee."
"What are you sending them out for, then?"
"Oh, well, the boys need to work off some of their energy, and there's
always a show they might happen onto the robbers."
"Do you think some of the Roaring Fork gang did it?"
"Can't say."
"I suppose you are staying here in the hope that they will drop in and
deliver themselves to you."
He looked at her out of an expressionless face. "That's about it, I
reckon. But what I tell the public is that I'm staying so as to be within
telephone connection. You see, Sheriff Burke is moving up to cut them off
from the Catalinas, Jackson is riding out from Mammoth to haid them off
that way, these anxious lads that have just pulled out from here are
taking care of the Galiuros. I'm supposed to be sitting with my fingers on
the keys as a sort of posse dispatcher."
"Well, I hope you won't catch them," she told him bluntly.
"That seems to be a prevailing sentiment round here. You say it right
hearty too; couldn't be more certain of your feelings if it had been your
own father."
He said it carelessly, yet with his keen blue eyes fixed on her.
Nevertheless, he was totally unprepared for the effect of his words. The
color washed from her bronzed cheeks, and she stood staring at him with
big, fear-filled eyes.
"What--what do you mean?" she gasped. "How dare you say that?"
"I ain't said anything so terrible. You don't need to take it to heart
like that." He gave her a faint smile for an instant. "I'm not really
expecting to arrest Mr. Lee for holding up that stage."
The color beat back slowly into her face. She knew she had made a false
move in taking so seriously his remark.
"I don't think you ought to joke about a thing like that," she said
stiffly.
"All right. I'll not say it next time till I'm in earnest," he promised as
he walked away.
"I wonder if he really meant anything," the girl was thinking in terror,
and he, "she knows something; now, I would like to know what."
Melissy attended to her duties in the postoffice after the arrival of the
stage, and looked after the dining-room as usual, but she was all the time
uneasily aware that Jack Flatray had quietly disappeared. Where had he
gone? And why? She found no answer to that question, but the ranger
dropped in on his bronco in time for supper, imperturbable and
self-contained as ever.
"Think I'll stay all night if you have a room for me," he told her after
he had eaten.
"We have a room," she said. "What more have you heard about the stage
robbery?"
"Nothing, Miss Lee."
"Oh, I thought maybe you had," she murmured tremulously, for his blue
eyes were unwaveringly upon her and she could not know how much or how
little he might mean.
Later she saw him sitting on the fence, holding genial converse with Jim
Budd. The waiter was flashing a double row of white teeth in deep laughter
at something the deputy had told him. Evidently they were already friends.
When she looked again, a few minutes later, she knew Jack had reached the
point where he was pumping Jim and the latter was disseminating
misinformation. That the negro was stanch enough, she knew, but she was on
the anxious seat lest his sharp-witted inquisitor get what he wanted in
spite of him. After he had finished with Budd the ranger drifted around to
the kitchen in time to intercept Hop Ling casually as he came out after
finishing his evening's work. The girl was satisfied Flatray could not
have any suspicion of the truth. Nevertheless, she wished he would let the
help alone. He might accidentally stumble on something that would set him
on the right track.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BOONE-BELLAMY FEUD IS RENEWED
"Here's six bits on the counter under a seed catalogue. Did you leave it
here, daddy?"
Champ Lee, seated on the porch just outside the store door, took the pipe
from his mouth and answered:
"Why no, honey, I don't reckon I did, not to my ricollection."
"That's queer. I know I didn't----"
Melissy broke her sentence sharply. There had come into her eyes a spark
of excitement, simultaneous with the brain-flash which told her who had
left the money. No doubt the quarter and the half dollar had been lying
there ever since the day last week when Morse had eaten at the Bar Double
G. She addressed an envelope, dropped the money in, sealed the flap, and
put the package beside a letter addressed to T. L. Morse.
Lee, full of an unhappy restlessness which he could not control, presently
got up and moved away to the stables. He was blaming himself bitterly for
the events of the past few days.
It was perhaps half an hour later that Melissy looked up to see the
sturdy figure of Morse in the doorway. During the past year he had filled
out, grown stronger and more rugged. His deep tan and heavy stride
pronounced him an outdoor man no less surely than the corduroy suit and
the high laced miners' boots.
He came forward to the postoffice window without any sign of recognition.
"Is Mr. Flatray still here?"
"No!" Without further explanation Melissy took from the box the two
letters addressed to Morse and handed them to him.
The girl observed the puzzled look that stole over his face at sight of
the silver in one envelope. A glance at the business address printed on
the upper left hand corner enlightened him. He laid the money down in the
stamp window.
"This isn't mine."
"You heard what my father said?"
"That applies to next time, not to this."
"I think it does apply to this time."
"I can't see how you're going to make me take it back. I'm an obstinate
man."
"Just as you like."
A sudden flush of anger swept her. She caught up the silver and flung it
through the open window into the dusty road.
His dark eyes met hers steadily and a dull color burned in his tanned
cheeks. Without a word he turned away, and instantly she regretted what
she had done. She had insulted him deliberately and put herself in the
wrong. At bottom she was a tender-hearted child, even though her father
and his friends had always spoiled her, and she could not but reproach
herself for the hurt look she had brought into his strong, sad face. He
was their enemy, of course, but even enemies have rights.
Morse walked out of the office looking straight before him, his strong
back teeth gripped so that the muscles stood out on his salient jaw.
Impulsively the girl ran around the counter after him.
He looked up from untying his horse to see her straight and supple figure
running toward him. Her eager face was full of contrition and the color of
pink rose petals came and went in it.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Morse. I oughtn't to have done that. I hurt your
feelings," she cried.
At best he was never a handsome man, but now his deep, dark eyes lit with
a glow that surprised her.
"Thank you. Thank you very much," he said in a low voice.
"I'm so tempery," she explained in apology, and added: "I suppose a nice
girl wouldn't have done it."
"A nice girl did do it," was all he could think to say.
"You needn't take the trouble to say that. I know I've just scrambled up
and am not ladylike and proper. Sometimes I don't care. I like to be able
to do things like boys. But I suppose it's dreadful."
"I don't think it is at all. None of your friends could think so. Not that
I include myself among them," he hastened to disclaim. "I can't be both
your friend and your enemy, can I?"
The trace of a sardonic smile was in his eyes. For the moment as she
looked at him she thought he might. But she answered:
"I don't quite see how."
"You hate me, I suppose," he blurted out bluntly.
"I suppose so." And more briskly she added, with dimples playing near the
corners of her mouth: "Of course I do."
"That's frank. It's worth something to have so decent an enemy. I don't
believe you would shoot me in the back."
"Some of the others would. You should be more careful," she cried before
she could stop herself.
He shrugged. "I take my fighting chance."
"It isn't much of a one. You'll be shot at from ambush some day."
"It wouldn't be a new experience. I went through it last week."
"Where?" she breathed.
"Down by Willow Wash."
"Who did it?"
He laughed, without amusement. "I didn't have my rifle with me, so I
didn't stay to inquire."
"It must have been some of those wild vaqueros."
"That was my guess."
"But you have other enemies, too."
"Miss Lee," he smiled.
"I mean others that are dangerous."
"Your father?" he asked.
"Father would never do that except in a fair fight. I wasn't thinking of
him."
"I don't know whom you mean, but a few extras don't make much difference
when one is so liberally supplied already," he said cynically.
"I shouldn't make light of them if I were you," she cautioned.
"Who do you mean?"
"I've said all I'm going to, and more than I ought," she told him
decisively. "Except this, that it's your own fault. You shouldn't be so
stiff. Why don't you compromise? With the cattlemen, for instance. They
have a good deal of right on their side. They _did_ have the range
first."
"You should tell that to your father, too."
"Dad runs sheep on the range to protect himself. He doesn't drive out
other people's cattle and take away their living."
"Well, I might compromise, but not at the end of a gun."
"No, of course not. Here comes dad now," she added hurriedly, aware for
the first time that she had been holding an extended conversation with her
father's foe.
"We started enemies and we quit enemies. Will you shake hands on that,
Miss Lee?" he asked.
She held out her hand, then drew it swiftly back. "No, I can't. I forgot.
There's another reason."
"Another reason! You mean the Arkansas charge against me?" he asked
quietly.
"No. I can't tell you what it is." She felt herself suffused in a crimson
glow. How could she explain that she could not touch hands with him
because she had robbed him of twenty thousand dollars?
Lee stopped at the steps, astonished to see his daughter and this man in
talk together. Yesterday he would have resented it bitterly, but now the
situation was changed. Something of so much greater magnitude had occurred
that he was too perturbed to cherish his feud for the present. All night
he had carried with him the dreadful secret he suspected. He could not
look Melissy in the face, nor could he discuss the robbery with anybody.
The one fact that overshadowed all others was that his little girl had
gone out and held up a stage, that if she were discovered she would be
liable to a term in the penitentiary. Laboriously his slow brain had
worked it all out. A talk with Jim Budd had confirmed his conclusions. He
knew that she had taken this risk in order to save him. He was bowed down
with his unworthiness, with shame that he had dragged her into this
horrible tangle. He was convinced that Jack Flatray would get at the
truth, and already he was resolved to come forward and claim the whole
affair as his work.
"I've been apologizing to Mr. Morse for insulting him, dad," the girl said
immediately.
Her father passed a bony hand slowly across his unshaven chin. "That's
right, honey. If you done him a meanness, you had ought to say so."
"She has said so very handsomely, Mr. Lee," spoke up Morse.
"I've been warning him, dad, that he ought to be more careful how he rides
around alone, with the cattlemen feeling the way they do."
"It's a fact they feel right hot under the collar. You're ce'tainly a
temptation to them, Mr. Morse," the girl's father agreed.
The mine owner shifted the subject of conversation. He was not a man of
many impulses, but he yielded to one now.
"Can't we straighten out this trouble between us, Mr. Lee? You think I've
done you an injury. Perhaps I have. If we both mean what's right, we can
get together and fix it up in a few minutes."
The old Southerner stiffened and met him with an eye of jade. "I ain't
asking any favors of you, Mr. Morse. We'll settle this matter some day,
and settle it right. But you can't buy me off. I'll not take a bean from
you."
The miner's eyes hardened. "I'm not trying to buy you off. I made a fair
offer of peace. Since you have rejected it, there is nothing more to be
said." With that he bowed stiffly and walked away, leading his horse.
Lee's gaze followed him and slowly the eyes under the beetled brows
softened.
"Mebbe I done wrong, honey. Mebbe I'd ought to have given in. I'm too
proud to compromise when he's got me beat. That's what's ailin' with me.
But I reckon I'd better have knuckled under."
The girl slipped her arm through his. "Sometimes I'm just like that too,
daddy. I've just _got_ to win before I make up. I don't blame you a mite,
but, all the same, we should have let him fix it up."
It was characteristic of them both that neither thought of reversing the
decision he had made. It was done now, and they would abide by the
results. But already both of them half regretted, though for very
different reasons. Lee was thinking that for Melissy's sake he should have
made a friend of the man he hated, since it was on the cards that within a
few days she might be in his power. The girl's feeling, too, was
unselfish. She could not forget the deep hunger for friendship that had
shone in the man's eyes. He was alone in the world, a strong man
surrounded by enemies who would probably destroy him in the end. There was
stirring in her heart a sweet womanly pity and sympathy for the enemy
whose proffer of friendship had been so cavalierly rejected.
The sight of a horseman riding down the trail from the Flagstaff mine
shook Melissy into alertness.
"Look, dad. It's Mr. Norris," she cried.
Morse, who had not yet recognized him, swung to the saddle, his heart full
of bitterness. Every man's hand was against his, and every woman's. What
was there in his nature that turned people against him so inevitably?
There seemed to be some taint in him that corroded all natural human
kindness.
A startled oath brought him from his somber reflections. He looked up, to
see the face of a man with whom in the dead years of the past he had been
in bitter feud.
Neither of them spoke. Morse looked at him with a face cold as chiselled
marble and as hard. The devil's own passion burned in the storm-tossed one
of the other.
Norris was the first to break the silence.
"So it was all a lie about your being killed, Dick Bellamy."
The mine owner did not speak, but the rigor of his eyes did not relax.
"Gave it out to throw me off your trail, did you? Knew mighty well I'd cut
the heart out of the man who shot poor Shep." The voice of the cattle
detective rang out in malignant triumph. "You guessed it c'rect, seh.
Right here's where the Boone-Bellamy feud claims another victim."
The men were sitting face to face, so close that their knees almost
touched. As Norris jerked out his gun Bellamy caught his wrist. They
struggled for an instant, the one to free his arm, the other to retain his
grip. Bellamy spurred his horse closer. The more powerful of the two, he
slowly twisted around the imprisoned wrist. Inch by inch the revolver
swung in a jerky, spasmodic circle. There was a moment when it pointed
directly at the mine owner's heart. His enemy's finger crooked on the
trigger, eyes passionate with the stark lust to kill. But the pressure on
the wrist had numbed the hand. The weapon jumped out of line, went
clattering down into the dust from the palsied fingers.
Lee ran forward and pushed between the men.
"Here. Ain't you boys got ary bettah sense than to clinch like wildcats?"
he demanded, jerking one of the horses away by the bridle. "No, you don't,
Phil. I'll take keer of this gun for the present." It was noticeable that
Beauchamp Lee's speech grew more after the manner of the plantations when
he became excited.
The cowpuncher, white with anger, glared at his enemy and poured curses at
him, the while he nursed his strained wrist. For the moment he was
impotent, but he promised himself vengeance in full when they should meet
again.
"That'll be enough from you now, Phil," said the old ex-Confederate
good-naturedly, leading him toward the house and trying to soothe his
malevolent chagrin.
Bellamy turned and rode away. At the corner of the corral he met Jack
Flatray riding up.
"Been having a little difference of opinion with our friend, haven't you,
seh?" the deputy asked pleasantly.
"Yes." Bellamy gave him only the crisp monosyllable and changed the
subject immediately. "What about this stage robbery? Have you been able to
make anything of it, Mr. Flatray?"
"Why, yes. I reckon we'll be able to land the miscreant mebbe, if things
come our way," drawled the deputy. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to offer a
reward, though, to keep things warm?"
"I thought of that. I made it a thousand dollars. The posters ought to be
out to-day on the stage."
"Good enough!"
"Whom do you suspect?"
Jack looked at him with amiable imperturbability. "I reckon I better
certify my suspicions, seh, before I go to shouting them out."
"All right, sir. Since I'm paying the shot, it ought to entitle me to some
confidence. But it's up to you. Get back the twenty thousand dollars,
that's all I ask, except that you put the fellow behind the bars of the
penitentiary for a few years."
Flatray gave him an odd smile which he did not understand.
"I hope to be able to accommodate you, seh, about this time to-morrow, so
far as getting the gold goes. You'll have to wait a week or two before
the rest of your expectations get gratified."
"Any reasonable time. I want to see him there eventually. That's all."
Jack laughed again, without giving any reason for his mirth. That ironic
smile continued to decorate his face for some time. He seemed to have some
inner source of mirth he did not care to disclose.
CHAPTER IX
THE DANGER LINE
Though Champ Lee had business in Mesa next day that would not be denied,
he was singularly loath to leave the ranch. He wanted to stay close to
Melissy until the denouement of the hunt for the stage robber. On the
other hand, it was well known that his contest with Morse for the Monte
Cristo was up for a hearing. To stay at home would have been a confession
of his anxiety that he did not want to make. But it was only after
repeated charges to his daughter to call him up by telephone immediately
if anything happened that he could bring himself to ride away.
He was scarcely out of sight when a Mexican vaquero rode in with the
information that old Antonio, on his way to the post at Three Pines with a
second drove of sheep, had twisted his ankle badly about fifteen miles
from the ranch. After trying in vain to pick up a herder at Mesa by
telephone, Melissy was driven to the only feasible course left her, to
make the drive herself in place of Antonio. There were fifteen hundred
sheep in the bunch, and they must be taken care of at once by somebody
competent for the task. She knew she could handle them, for it had amused
her to take charge of a herd often for an hour or two at a time. The long
stretch over the desert would be wearisome and monotonous, but she had the
slim, muscular tenacity of a half-grown boy. It did not matter what she
wanted to do. The thing to which she came back always was that the sheep
must be taken care of.
She left directions with Jim for taking care of the place, changed to a
khaki skirt and jacket, slapped a saddle on her bronco, and disappeared
across country among the undulations of the sandhills. A tenderfoot would
have been hopelessly lost in the sameness of these hills and washes, but
Melissy knew them as a city dweller does his streets. Straight as an arrow
she went to her mark. The tinkle of distant sheep-bells greeted her after
some hours' travel, and soon the low, ceaseless bleating of the herd.
The girl found Antonio propped against a pinon tree, solacing himself
philosophically with cigarettes. He was surprised to see her, but made
only a slight objection to her taking his place. His ankle was paining him
a good deal, and he was very glad to get the chance to pull himself to her
saddle and ride back to the ranch.
A few quick words sent the dog Colin out among the sheep, by now
scattered far and wide over the hill. They presently came pouring toward
her, diverged westward, and massed at the base of a butte rising from a
dry arroyo. The journey had begun, and hour after hour it continued
through the hot day, always in a cloud of dust flung up by the sheep,
sometimes through the heavy sand of a wash, often over slopes of shale,
not seldom through thick cactus beds that shredded her skirt and tore like
fierce, sharp fingers at her legging-protected ankles. The great gray
desert still stretched before her to the horizon's edge, and still she
flung the miles behind her with the long, rhythmic stride that was her
birthright from the hills. A strong man, unused to it, would have been
staggering with stiff fatigue, but this slender girl held the trail with
light grace, her weight still carried springily on her small ankles.
Once she rested for a few minutes, flinging herself down into the sand at
length, her head thrown back from the full brown throat so that she could
gaze into the unstained sky of blue. Presently the claims of this planet
made themselves heard, for she, too, was elemental and a creature of
instinct. The earth was awake and palpitating with life, the low,
indefatigable life of creeping things and vegetation persisting even in
this waste of rock and sand.
But she could not rest long, for Diablo canyon must be reached before dark.
The sheep would be very thirsty by the time they arrived, and she could
not risk letting them tear down the precipitous edge among the sharp rocks
in the dark. Already over the sand stretches a peculiar liquid glow was
flooding, so that the whole desert seemed afire. The burning sun had
slipped behind a saddle of the purple peaks, leaving a brilliant horizon
of many mingled shades.
It was as she came forward to the canyon's edge in this luminous dusk that
Melissy became aware of a distant figure on horseback, silhouetted for a
moment against the skyline. One glance was all she got of it, for she was
very busy with the sheep, working them leisurely toward the black chasm
that seemed to yawn for them. High rock walls girt the canyon, gigantic and
bottomless in the gloom. A dizzy trail zigzagged back and forth to the
pool below, and along this she and the collie skilfully sent the eager,
thirsty animals.
The mass of the sheep were still huddled on the edge of the ravine when
there came the thud of horses' hoofs and the crack of revolvers,
accompanied by hoarse, triumphant yells and cries. Melissy knew instantly
what it was--the attack of cattlemen upon her defenseless flock. They had
waited until the sheep were on the edge of the precipice, and now they
were going to drive the poor creatures down upon the rocks two hundred
feet below. Her heart leaped to her throat, but scarce more quickly than
she upon a huge boulder bordering the trail.
"Back! Keep back!" she heard herself crying, and even as she spoke a
bullet whistled through the rim of her felt hat.
Standing there boldly, unconscious of danger, the wind draped and defined
the long lines of her figure like those of the Winged Victory.
The foremost rider galloped past, waving his sombrero and shooting into
the frightened mass in front of him. Within a dozen feet of her he turned
his revolver upon the girl, then, with an oath of recognition, dragged his
pony back upon its haunches. Another horse slithered into it, and a
third.
"It's 'Lissie Lee!" a voice cried in astonishment; and another, with a
startled oath, "You're right, Bob!"
The first rider gave his pony the spur, swung it from the trail in a
half-circle which brought it back at the very edge of the ravine, and
blocked the forward pour of terror-stricken sheep. Twice his revolver rang
out. The girl's heart stood still, for the man was Norris, and it seemed
for an instant as if he must be swept over the precipice by the stampede.
The leaders braced themselves to stop, but were slowly pushed forward
toward the edge. One of the other riders had by this time joined the
daring cowpuncher, and together they stemmed the tide. The pressure on the
trail relaxed and the sheep began to mill around and around.
It was many minutes before they were sufficiently quieted to trust upon
the trail again, but at last the men got them safely to the bottom, with
the exception of two or three killed in the descent.
Her responsibility for the safety of the sheep gone, the girl began to
crawl down the dark trail. She could not see a yard in front of her, and
at each step the path seemed to end in a gulf of darkness. She could not
be sure she was on the trail at all, and her nerve was shaken by the
experience through which she had just passed. Presently she stopped and
waited, for the first time in her life definitely and physically afraid.
She stood there trembling, a long, long time it seemed to her, surrounded
by the impenetrable blackness of night.
Then a voice came to her.
"Melissy!"
She answered, and the voice came slowly nearer.
"You're off the trail," it told her presently, just before a human figure
defined itself in the gloom.
"I'm afraid," she sobbed.
A strong hand came from nowhere and caught hers. An arm slipped around her
waist.
"Don't be afraid, little girl. I'll see no harm comes to you," the man
said to her with a quick, fierce tenderness.
The comfort of his support was unspeakable. It stole into her heart like
water to the roots of thirsty plants. To feel her head against his
shoulder, to know he held her tight, meant safety and life. He had told
her not to be afraid, and she was so no longer.
"You shot at me," she murmured in reproach.
"I didn't know. We thought it was Bellamy's herd. But it's true, God
forgive me! I did."
There was in his voice the warm throb of emotion, and in his eyes
something she had never seen before in those of any human being. Like
stars they were, swimming in light, glowing with the exultation of the
triumph he was living. She was a splendid young animal, untaught of life,
generous, passionate, tempestuous, and as her pliant, supple body lay
against his some sex instinct old as creation stirred potently within her.
She had found her mate. It came to her as innocently as the same impulse
comes to the doe when the spring freshets are seeking the river, and as
innocently her lips met his in their first kiss of surrender. Something
irradiated her, softened her, warmed her. Was it love? She did not know,
but as yet she was still happy in the glow of it.
Slowly, hand in hand, they worked back to the trail and down it to the
bottom of the canyon. The soft velvet night enwrapped them. It shut them
from the world and left them one to one. From the meeting palms strange
electric currents tingled through the girl and flushed her to an ecstasy
of emotion.
A camp fire was already burning cheerfully when they reached the base of
the descent. A man came forward to meet them. He glanced curiously at the
girl after she came within the circle of light. Her eyes were shining as
from some inner glow, and she was warm with a soft color that vitalized
her beauty. Then his gaze passed to take in with narrowed lids her
companion.
"I see you found her," he said dryly.
"Yes, I found her, Bob."
He answered the spirit of Farnum's words rather than the letter of them,
nor could he keep out of his bearing and his handsome face the exultation
that betrayed success.
"H'mp!" Farnum turned from him and addressed the girl: "I suppose Norris
has explained our mistake and eaten crow for all of us, Miss Lee. I don't
see how come we to make such a blame' fool mistake. It was gitting dark,
and we took your skirt for a greaser's blanket. It's ce'tainly on us."
"Yes, he has explained."
"Well, there won't any amount of explaining square the thing. We might 'a'
done you a terrible injury, Miss Lee. It was gilt-edged luck for us that
you thought to jump on that rock and holler."
"I was thinking of the sheep," she said.
"Well, you saved them, and I'm right glad of it. We ain't got any use for
Mary's little trotter, but your father's square about his. He keeps them
herded up on his own range. We may not like it, but we ce'tainly aren't
going to the length of attackin' his herd." Farnum's gaze took in her
slender girlishness, and he voiced the question in his mind. "How in time
do you happen to be sheep-herding all by your lone a thousand miles from
nowhere, Miss Lee?"
She explained the circumstances after she had moved forward to warm
herself by the fire. For already night was bringing a chill breeze with
it. The man cooking the coffee looked up and nodded pleasantly, continuing
his work. Norris dragged up a couple of saddle blankets and spread them on
the ground for her to sit upon.
"You don't have to do a thing but boss this outfit," he told her with his
gay smile. "You're queen of the range to-night, and we're your herders or
your punchers, whichever you want to call us. To-morrow morning two of us
are going to drive these sheep on to the trading post for you, and the
other one is going to see you safe back home. It's all arranged."
They were as good as his word. She could not move from her place to help
herself. It was their pleasure to wait upon her as if she had really been
a queen and they her subjects. Melissy was very tired, but she enjoyed
their deference greatly. She was still young enough to find delight in the
fact that three young and more or less good-looking men were vying with
each other to anticipate her needs.
Like them, she ate and drank ravenously of the sandwiches and the strong
coffee, though before the meal was over she found herself nodding
drowsily. The tactful courtesy of these rough fellows was perfect. They
got the best they had for her of their blankets, dragged a pinon root to
feed the glowing coals, and with cheerful farewells of "_Buenos Noches_"
retired around a bend in the canyon and lit another fire for themselves.
The girl snuggled down into the warmth of the blankets and stretched her
weary limbs in delicious rest. She did not mean to go to sleep for a long
time. She had much to think about. So she looked up the black sheer canyon
walls to the deep blue, starry sky above, and relived her day in memory.
A strange excitement tingled through her, born of shame and shyness and
fear, and of something else she did not understand, something which had
lain banked in her nature like a fire since childhood and now threw forth
its first flame of heat. What did it mean, that passionate fierceness with
which her lips had clung to his? She liked him, of course, but surely
liking would not explain the pulse that her first kiss had sent leaping
through her blood like wine. Did she love him?
Then why did she distrust him? Why was there fear in her sober second
thought of him? Had she done wrong? For the moment all her maiden defenses
had been wiped out and he had ridden roughshod over her reserves. But
somewhere in her a bell of warning was ringing. The poignant sting of sex
appeal had come home to her for the first time. Wherefore in this frank
child of the wilderness had been born a shy shame, a vague trembling for
herself that marked a change. At sunrise she had been still treading gayly
the primrose path of childhood; at sunset she had entered upon her
heritage of womanhood.
The sun had climbed high and was peering down the walls of the gulch when
she awoke. She did not at once realize where she was, but came presently
to a blinking consciousness of her surroundings. The rock wall on one side
was still shadowed, while the painted side of the other was warm with the
light which poured upon it. The Gothic spires, the Moorish domes, the
weird and mysterious caves, which last night had given more than a touch
of awe to her majestic bedchamber, now looked a good deal less like the
ruins of mediaeval castles and the homes of elfin sprites and gnomes.
"_Buenos dios, muchacha,_" a voice called cheerfully to her.
She did not need to turn to know to whom it belonged. Among a thousand she
would have recognized its tone of vibrant warmth.
"_Buenos,_" she answered, and, rising hurriedly, she fled to rearrange her
hair and dress.
It was nearly a quarter of an hour later that she reappeared, her thick
coils of ebon-hued tresses shining in the sun, her skirt smoothed to her
satisfaction, and the effects of feminine touches otherwise visible upon
her fresh, cool person.
"Breakfast is served," Norris sang out.
"Dinner would be nearer it," she laughed. "Why in the world didn't you
boys waken me? What time is it, anyhow?"
"It's not very late--a little past noon maybe. You were all tired out with
your tramp yesterday. I didn't see why you shouldn't have your sleep
out."
He was pouring a cup of black coffee for her from the smoky pot, and she
looked around expectantly for the others. Simultaneously she remembered
that she had not heard the bleating of the sheep.
"Where are the others--Mr. Farnum and Sam? And have you the sheep all
gagged?" she laughed.
He gave her that odd look of smoldering eyes behind half-shut lids.
"The boys have gone on to finish the drive for you. They started before
sun-up this morning. I'm elected to see you back home safely."
"But----"
Her protest died unspoken. She could not very well frame it in words, and
before his bold, possessive eyes the girl's long, dark lashes wavered to
the cheeks into which the hot blood was beating. Nevertheless, the feeling
existed that she wished one of the others had stayed instead of him. It
was born, no doubt, partly of the wave of shyness running through her,
but partly too of instinctive maidenly resistance to something in his
look, in the assurance of his manner, that seemed to claim too much. Last
night he had taken her by storm and at advantage. Something of shame
stirred in her that he had found her so easy a conquest, something too of
a new vague fear of herself. She resented the fact that he could so move
her, even though she still felt the charm of his personal presence. She
meant to hold herself in abeyance, to make sure of herself and of him
before she went further.
But the cowpuncher had no intention of letting her regain so fully control
of her emotions. Experience of more than one young woman had taught him
that scruples were likely to assert themselves after reflection, and he
purposed giving her no time for that to-day.
He did not count in vain upon the intimacy of companionship forced upon
them by the circumstances, nor upon the skill with which he knew how to
make the most of his manifold attractions. His role was that of the
comrade, gay with good spirits and warm with friendliness, solicitous of
her needs, but not oppressively so. If her glimpse of him at breakfast had
given the girl a vague alarm, she laughed her fears away later before his
open good humor.
There had been a time when he had been a part of that big world "back in
the States," peopled so generously by her unfettered imagination. He knew
how to talk, and entertainingly, of books and people, of events and
places he had known. She had not knowledge enough of life to doubt his
stories, nor did she resent it that he spoke of this her native section
with the slighting manner of one who patronized it with his presence.
Though she loved passionately her Arizona, she guessed its crudeness, and
her fancy magnified the wonders of that southern civilization from which
it was so far cut off.
Farnum had left his horse for the girl, and after breakfast the cowpuncher
saddled the broncos and brought them up. Melissy had washed the dishes,
filled his canteen, and packed the saddle bags. Soon they were off,
climbing slowly the trail that led up the canyon wall. She saw the carcass
of a dead sheep lying on the rocks half way down the cliff, and had spoken
of it before she could stop herself.
"What is that? Isn't it----?"
"Looks to me like a boulder," lied her escort unblushingly. There was no
use, he judged, in recalling unpleasant memories.
Nor did she long remember. The dry, exhilarating sunshine and the sting of
gentle, wide-swept breezes, the pleasure of swift motion and the ring of
that exultingly boyish voice beside her, combined to call the youth in her
to rejoice. Firm in the saddle she rode, as graceful a picture of piquant
girlhood as could be conceived, thrilling to the silent voices of the
desert. They traveled in a sunlit sea of space, under a sky of blue, in
which tenuous cloud lakes floated. Once they came on a small bunch of hill
cattle which went flying like deer into the covert of a draw. A
rattlesnake above a prairie dog's hole slid into the mesquit. A swift
watched them from the top of a smooth rock, motionless so long as they
could see. She loved it all, this immense, deserted world of space filled
with its multitudinous dwellers.
They unsaddled at Dead Cow Creek, hobbled the ponies, and ate supper.
Norris seemed in no hurry to resaddle. He lay stretched carelessly at full
length, his eyes upon her with veiled admiration. She sat upright, her
gaze on the sunset with its splashes of topaz and crimson and saffron,
watching the tints soften and mellow as dusk fell. Every minute now
brought its swift quota of changing beauty. A violet haze enveloped the
purple mountains, and in the crotch of the hills swam a lake of indigo.
The raw, untempered glare of the sun was giving place to a limitless pour
of silvery moonlight.
Her eyes were full of the soft loveliness of the hour when she turned them
upon her companion. He answered promptly her unspoken question.
"You bet it is! A night for the gods--or for lovers."
He said it in a murmur, his eyes full on hers, and his look wrenched her
from her mood. The mask of comradeship was gone. He looked at her
hungrily, as might a lover to whom all spiritual heights were denied.
Her sooty lashes fell before this sinister spirit she had evoked, but were
raised instantly at the sound of him drawing his body toward her.
Inevitably there was a good deal of the young animal in her superbly
healthy body. She had been close to nature all day, the riotous passion of
spring flowing free in her as in the warm earth herself. But the magic of
the mystic hills had lifted her beyond the merely personal. Some sense of
grossness in him for the first time seared across her brain. She started
up, and her face told him she had taken alarm.
"We must be going," she cried.
He got to his feet. "No hurry, sweetheart."
The look in his face startled her. It was new to her in her experience of
men. Never before had she met elemental lust.
"You're near enough," she cautioned sharply.
He cursed softly his maladroitness.
"I was nearer last night, honey," he reminded her.
"Last night isn't to-night."
He hesitated. Should he rush her defenses, bury her protests in kisses? Or
should he talk her out of this harsh mood? Last night she had been his.
There were moments during the day when she had responded to him as a
musical instrument does to skilled fingers. But for the moment his power
over her was gone. And he was impatient of delay.
"What's the matter with you?" he asked roughly.
"We'll start at once."
"No."
"Yes."
Frightened though she was, her gaze held steadily to his. It was the same
instinct in her that makes one look a dangerous wild beast straight in the
eye.
"What's got into you?" he demanded sullenly.
"I'm going home."
"After a while."
"Now."
"I reckon not just yet. It's my say-so."
"Don't you dare stop me."
The passion in him warred with prudence. He temporized. "Why, honey! I'm
the man that loves you."
She would not see his outstretched hands.
"Then saddle my horse."
"By God, no! You're going to listen to me."
His anger ripped out unexpectedly, even to him. Whatever fear she felt,
the girl crushed down. He must not know her heart was drowned in terror.
"I'll listen after we've started."
He cursed her fickleness. "What's ailin' you, girl? I ain't a man to be
put off this way."
"Don't forget you're in Arizona," she warned.
He understood what she meant. In the ranch country no man could with
impunity insult a woman.
Standing defiantly before him, her pliant form very straight, the
underlying blood beating softly under the golden brown of her cheeks, one
of the thick braids of her heavy, blue-black hair falling across the
breast that rose and fell a little fast, she was no less than a challenge
of Nature to him. He looked into a mobile face as daring and as passionate
as his own, warm with the life of innocent youth, and the dark blood
mantled his face.
"Saddle the horses," she commanded.
"When I get good and ready."
"Now."
"No, ma'am. We're going to have a talk first."
She walked across to the place where her pony grazed, slipped on the
bridle, and brought the animal back to the saddle. Norris watched her
fitting the blankets and tightening the cinch without a word, his face
growing blacker every moment. Before she could start he strode forward and
caught the rein.
"I've got something to say to you," he told her rudely. "You're not going
now. So that's all about it."
Her lips tightened. "Let go of my horse."
"We'll talk first."
"Do you think you can force me to stay here?"
"You're going to hear what I've got to say."
"You bully!"
"I'll tell what I know--Miss Hold-up."
"Tell it!" she cried.
He laughed harshly, his narrowed eyes watching her closely. "If you throw
me down now, I'll ce'tainly tell it. Be reasonable, girl."
"Let go my rein!"
"I've had enough of this. Tumble off that horse, or I'll pull you off."
Her dark eyes flashed scorn of him. "You coward! Do you think I'm afraid
of you? Stand back!"
The man looked long at her, his teeth set; then caught at her strong
little wrist. With a quick wrench she freed it, her eyes glowing like live
coals.
"You dare!" she panted.
Her quirt rose and fell, the lash burning his wrist like a band of fire.
With a furious oath he dropped his hand from the rein. Like a flash she
was off, had dug her heels home, and was galloping into the moonlight
recklessly as fast as she could send forward her pony. Stark terror had
her by the throat. The fear of him flooded her whole being. Not till the
drumming hoofs had carried her far did other emotions move her.
She was furious with him, and with herself for having been imposed upon by
him. His beauty, his grace, his debonair manner--they were all hateful to
her now. She had thought him a god among men, and he was of common clay.
It was her vanity that was wounded, not her heart. She scourged herself
because she had been so easily deceived, because she had let herself
become a victim of his good looks and his impudence. For that she had let
him kiss her--yes, and had returned his kiss--she was heartily
contemptuous of herself. Always she had held herself with an instinctive
pride, but in her passion of abandonment the tears confessed now that this
pride had been humbled to the dust.
This gusty weather of the spirit, now of chastened pride and now of bitter
anger, carried her even through the group of live-oaks which looked down
upon the silent houses of the ranch, lying in a sea of splendid moon-beat.
She was so much less confident of herself than usual that she made up her
mind to tell her father the whole story of the hold-up and of what this
man had threatened.
This resolution comforted her, and it was with something approaching
calmness that she rode past the corral fence and swung from the saddle in
front of the house.
CHAPTER X
JACK GOES TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS
She trailed the bridle reins, went up the porch steps, and drew off her
gauntlets. Her hand was outstretched to open the door when her gaze fell
upon a large bill tacked to the wall. Swiftly she read it through, and,
having read it, remained in suspended motion. For the first time she fully
realized the danger and the penalty that confronted her.
ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS
Will Be Paid By Thomas L. Morse
For the arrest and conviction of each of the men who were implicated
in the robbery of the Fort Allison stage on April twenty-seventh
last. A further reward of $1000 will be paid for the recovery of the
bullion stolen.
This was what she read, and her eye was running over it a second time when
she heard the jingle of a spur approaching.
"We're red-hot after them, you see, Miss Lee," a mocking voice drawled.
"If you want to round up a thousand plunks, all you've got to do is to
tell me who Mr. Hold-up is."
He laughed quietly, as if it were a joke, but the girl answered with a
flush. "Is that all?"
"That's all."
"If I knew, do you suppose I would tell for five thousand--or ten
thousand?"
For some reason this seemed to give him sardonic amusement. "No, I don't
suppose you would."
"You'll have to catch him yourself if you want him. I'm not in that
business, Mr. Flatray."
"I am. Sorry you don't like the business, Miss Lee." He added dryly: "But
then you always were hard to please. You weren't satisfied when I was a
rustler."
Her eyes swept him with a look, whether of reproach or contempt he was not
sure. But the hard derision of his gaze did not soften. Mentally as well
as physically he was a product of the sun and the wind, as tough and
unyielding as a greasewood sapling. For a friend he would go the limit,
and he could not forgive her that she had distrusted him.
"But mebbe you'd prefer it if I was rustling stages," he went on, looking
straight at her.
"What do you mean?" she asked breathlessly.
"I want to have a talk with you."
"What about?"
"Suppose we step around to the side of the house. We'll be freer from
interruption there."
He led the way, taking her consent for granted. With him he carried a
chair for her from the porch.
"If you'll be as brief as possible, Mr. Flatray. I've been in the desert
two days and want to change my clothes."
"I'll not detain you. It's about this gold robbery."
"Yes."
She could not take her eyes from him. Something told her that he knew her
secret, or part of it. Her heart was fluttering like a caged thrush.
"Shall we begin at the beginning?"
"If you like."
"Or in the middle, say."
"If only you'll begin anywhere," she said impatiently.
"How will this do for a beginning, then? 'One thousand dollars will be
paid by Thomas L. Morse for the arrest and conviction of each of the men
who were implicated in the robbery of the Fort Allison stage on April
twenty-seventh last.'"
She was shaken, there was no denying it. He could see the ebb of blood
from her cheeks, the sudden stiffening of the slender figure.
She did not speak until she had control of her voice. "Dear me! What has
all that to do with me?"
"A good deal, I'm afraid. You know how much, better than I do."
"Perhaps I'm stupid. You'll have to be a great deal clearer before I can
understand you."
"I've noticed that it's a lot easier to understand what you want to than
what you don't want to."
Sharply a thought smote her. "Have you seen Phil Norris lately?"
"No, I haven't. Do you think it likely that he would confess?"
"Confess?" she faltered.
"I see I'll have to start at the beginning, after all. It's pretty hard to
say just where that is. It might be when Morse got hold of your father's
claim, or another fellow might say it was when the Boone-Bellamy feud
began, and that is a mighty long time ago."
"The Boone-Bellamy feud," echoed the girl.
"Yes. The real name of our friend Norris is Dunc Boone."
"He's no friend of mine." She flamed it out with such intensity that he
was surprised.
"Glad to hear it. I can tell you, then, that he's a bad lot. He was driven
out of Arkansas after a suspected murder. It was a killing from ambush.
They couldn't quite hang it on him, but he lit a shuck to save his skin
from lynchers. At that time he was a boy. Couldn't have been more than
seventeen."
"Who did he kill?"
"One of the Bellamy faction. The real name of T. L. Morse is----"
"--Richard Bellamy."
"How do you know that?" he asked in surprise.
"I've known it since the first day I met him."
"Known that he was wanted for murder in Arkansas?"
"Yes."
"And you protected him?"
"I had a reason." She did not explain that her reason was Jack Flatray,
between whom and the consequences of his rustling she had stood.
He pondered that a moment. "Well, Morse, or Bellamy, told me all about it.
Now that Boone has recognized him, the game is up. He's ready to go back
and stand trial if he must. I've communicated with the authorities in
Arkansas and I'll hear from them in a day or two."
"What has this to do with the hold-up?"
"That's right, the hold-up. Well, this fellow Boone got your father to
drinking, and then sprung it on him to rob the stage when the bullion was
being shipped. Somehow Boone had got inside information about when this
was to be. He had been nosing around up at the mine, and may have
overheard something. O' course we know what your father would have done if
he hadn't been drinking. He's straight as a string, even if he does go off
like powder. But when a man's making a blue blotter of himself, things
don't look the same to him. Anyhow he went in."
"He didn't. I can prove he didn't," burst from Melissy's lips.
"Be glad to hear your proof later. He ce'tainly planned the hold-up. Jim
Budd overheard him."
"Did Jim tell you that?"
"Don't blame him for that. He didn't mean to tell, but I wound him up so
he couldn't get away from it. I'll show you later why he couldn't."
"I'm sure you must have been very busy, spying and everything," she told
him bitterly.
"I've kept moving. But to get back to the point. Your father and Boone
were on the ground where the stage was robbed _either at the time or right
after_. Their tracks were all over there. Then they got on their horses
and rode up the lateral."
"But they couldn't. The ditch was full," broke from the girl.
"You're right it was. You must be some observing to know when that ditch
is full and empty to an hour. I reckon you've got an almanac of tides," he
said ironically.
She bit her lip with chagrin. "I just happened to notice."
"Some folks _are_ more noticing than others. But you're surely right. They
came up the ditch one on each side. Now, why one on each side, do you
reckon?"
Melissy hid the dread that was flooding her heart. "I'm sure I don't
know. You know everything else. I suppose you do that, too, if they really
did."
"They had their reasons, but we won't go into that now. First off when
they reach the house they take a bunch of sheep down to the ditch to water
them. Now, why?"
"Why, unless because they needed water?"
"We'll let that go into the discard too just now. Let's suppose your
father and Boone dumped the gold box down into the creek somewhere after
they had robbed the stage. Suppose they had a partner up at the
head-gates. When the signal is given down comes the water, and the box is
covered by it. Mebbe that night they take it away and bury it somewhere
else."
The girl began to breathe again. He knew a good deal, but he was still off
the track in the main points.
"And who is this partner up at the canal? Have you got him located too?"
"I might guess."
"Well?"--impatiently.
"A young lady hailing from this _hacienda_ was out gathering flowers all
mo'ning. She was in her runabout. The tracks led straight from here to the
head-gates. I followed them through the sands. There's a little break in
one of the rubber tires. You'll find that break mark every eight feet or
so in the sand wash."
"I opened the head-gates, then, did I?"
"It looks that way, doesn't it?"
"At a signal from father?"
"I reckon."
"And that's all the evidence you've got against him and me?" she demanded,
still outwardly scornful, but very much afraid at heart.
"Oh, no, that ain't all, Miss Lee. Somebody locked the Chink in during
this play. He's still wondering why."
"He dreamed it. Very likely he had been rolling a pill."
"Did I dream this too?" From his coat pocket he drew the piece of black
shirting she had used as a mask. "I found it in the room where your father
put me up that first night I stayed here. It was your brother Dick's room,
and this came from the pocket of a shirt hanging in the closet. Now, who
do you reckon put it there?"
For the first time in her life she knew what it was to feel faint. She
tried to speak, but the words would not come from her parched throat. How
could he be so hard and cruel, this man who had once been her best friend?
How could he stand there so like a machine in his relentlessness?
"We--we used to--to play at hold-up when he was a boy," she gasped.
He shook his head. "No, I reckon that won't go. You see, I've found the
piece this was torn from, _and I found it in your father's coat_. I went
into his room on tiptoe that same hour. The coat was on the bed. He had
gone downstairs for a minute and left it there. Likely he hadn't found a
good chance to burn it yet." Taking the two pieces, he fitted them
together and held them up. "They match exactly, you see. Did your father
used to play with you too when he was a boy?"
He asked this with what seemed to her tortured soul like silken cruelty.
She had no answer, none at least that would avail. Desperately she
snatched at a straw.
"All this isn't proof. It's mere surmise. Some one's tracks were found by
you. How do you know they were father's?"
"I've got that cinched too. I took his boots and measured them."
"Then where's the gold, if he took it? It must be somewhere. Where is
it?"
"Now I'm going up to the head of the class, ma'am. The gold--why, that's a
dead easy one. _Near as I can make out, I'm sitting on it right now._"
She gave a startled little cry that died in her throat.
"Yes, it's ce'tainly a valuable wash-stand. Chippendale furniture ain't in
it with this kind. I reckon the king of England's is ace high against a
straight flush when it bucks up against yours."
Melissy threw up her cards. "How did you find out?" she asked hoarsely.
The deputy forced her to commit herself more definitely. "Find out what?"
"Where I put the box."
"I'll go back and answer some of those other questions first. I might as
well own up that I knew all the time your father didn't hold up the
stage."
"You did?"
"He's no fool. He wouldn't leave his tracks all over the place where he
had just held up a stage. He might jest as well have left a signed note
saying he had done it. No, that didn't look like Champ Lee to me. It
seemed more likely he'd arrived after the show than before. It wouldn't be
like him, either, to go plowing up the side of the ditch, with his partner
on the other side, making a trail that a blind man could follow in the
night. Soon as I knew Lee and Boone made those tracks, I had it cinched
that they were following the lateral to see where the robber was going.
They had come to the same conclusion I had, that there wasn't any way of
escape _except by that empty lateral_, _assuming it had been empty_. The
only point was to find out where the hold-up left the lateral. That's why
they rode one on each side of it. They weren't missing any bets, you
see."
"And that's why they drove the sheep down to water--to hide the
wheel-tracks. I couldn't understand that."
"I must 'a' been right on their heels, for they were jest getting the
trotters out of the corral when I reached the place where your rig left
the water. 'Course I fell back into the brush and circled around so as to
hit the store in front."
"But if dad knew all the time, I don't see--surely, he wouldn't have come
right after me and made plain the way I escaped."
"That's the point. He didn't know. I reckon he was sort of guessing around
in the dark, plumb puzzled; couldn't find the switch at all at first. Then
it come to him, and he thought of the sheep to blind the trail. If I'd
been half a hour later he would have got away with it too. No, if he had
guessed that you were in the hold-up, him and Boone would have hiked right
out on a false trail and led us into the Galiuros. Having no notion of it
at first, he trails you down."
"And the gold--how did you find that?"
"I knew it was either right around the place or else you had taken it on
with you when you went to the head-gates and buried it up there somewhere.
Next day I followed your tracks and couldn't find any place where you
might have left it. I knew how clever you were by the way you planned your
getaway. Struck me as mighty likely that you had left it lying around in
plain view somewhere. If you had dumped it out of the box into a sack, the
box must be somewhere. You hadn't had time to burn it before the stage got
back. I drifted back to your kindling pile, where all the old boxes from
the store are lying. I happened to notice a brass tack in one near the
end; then the marks of the tack heads where they had pressed against the
wood. I figured you might have substituted one box for another, and inside
of ten minutes I stumbled against your wash-stand and didn't budge it.
Then I didn't have to look any further."
"I've been trying to get a chance to move it and haven't ever found one.
You were always coming around the corner on me," she explained.
"Sorry I incommoded you," he laughed. "But it's too heavy for a lady to
lift alone, anyhow. I don't see how you managed it this far."
"I'm pretty strong," she said quietly.
She had no hope of escape from the net of evidence in which he had
entangled her. It was characteristic of her that she would not stoop to
tricks to stir his pity. Deep in her heart she knew now that she had
wronged him when she had suspected him of being a rustler. He _could_ not
be. It was not in the man's character. But she would ask no mercy of him.
All her pride rose to meet his. She would show him how game she could be.
What she had sown she would reap. Nor would it have been any use to
beseech him to spare her. He was a hard man, she told herself. Not even a
fool could have read any weakness in the quiet gray eyes that looked so
steadily into hers. In his voice and movements there was a certain
deliberation, but this had nothing to do with indecision of character. He
would do his duty as he saw it, regardless of whom it might affect.
Melissy stood before him in the unconscious attitude of distinction she
often fell into when she was moved, head thrown back so as to bare the
rounded throat column, brown little hands folded in front of her, erectly
graceful in all her slender lines.
"What are you going to do with me?" she asked.
His stone-cold eyes met hers steadily. "It ain't my say-so. I'm going to
put it up to Bellamy. I don't know what he'll do."
But, cold as his manner was, the heart of the man leaped to her courage.
He saw her worn out, pathetically fearful, but she could face him with
that still little smile of hers. He longed to take her in his arms, to
tell her it would be all right--all right.
"There's one thing that troubles me. I don't know how father will take
this. You know how quick-tempered he is. I'm afraid he'll shoot somebody
or do something rash when he finds out. You must let me be alone with him
when I tell him."
He nodded. "I been thinking of that myself. It ain't going to do him any
good to make a gun-play. I have a notion mebbe this thing will unravel
itself if we give it time. It will only make things worse for him to go
off half-cocked."
"How do you mean it may unravel itself?" she asked.
"Bellamy is a whole lot better man than folks give him credit for being.
I expect he won't be hard on you when he knows why you did it."
"And why did I do it?" she asked quietly.
"Sho! I know why you did it. Jim Budd told you what he had heard, and you
figured you could save your father from doing it. You meant to give the
money back, didn't you?"
"Yes, but I can't prove that either in court or to Mr. Bellamy."
"You don't need to prove it to me. If you say so, that's enough," he said
in his unenthusiastic voice.
"But you're not judge and jury, and you're certainly not Mr. Bellamy."
"Scrape Arizona with a fine-tooth comb and you couldn't get a jury to
convict when it's up against the facts in this case."
At this she brightened. "Thank you, Mr. Flatray." And naively she added
with a little laugh: "Are you ready to put the handcuffs on me yet?"
He looked with a smile at her outstretched hands. "They wouldn't stay
on."
"Don't you carry them in sizes to fit all criminals?"
"I'll have to put you on parole."
"I'll break it and climb out the window. Then I'll run off with this."
She indicated the box of treasure.
"I need that wash-stand in my room. I'm going to take it up there
to-night," he said.
"This _isn't_ a very good safety deposit vault," she answered, and,
nodding a careless good-night, she walked away in her slow-limbed,
graceful Southern fashion.
She had carried it off to the last without breaking down, but, once in her
own room, the girl's face showed haggard in the moonlight. It was one
thing to jest about it with him; it was another to face the facts as they
stood. She was in the power of her father's enemy, the man whose proffer
of friendship they had rejected with scorn. Her pride cried out that she
could not endure mercy from him even if he wished to extend it. Surely
there must be some other way out than the humiliation of begging him not
to prosecute. She could see none but one, and that was infinitely worse.
Yet she knew it would be her father's first impulsive instinct to seek to
fight her out of her trouble, the more because it was through him that it
had fallen upon her. At all hazards she must prevent this.
CHAPTER XI
A CONVERSATION
Not five minutes after Melissy had left the deputy sheriff, another rider
galloped up the road. Jack, returning from his room, where he had left the
box of gold locked up, waited on the porch to see who this might be.
The horseman proved to be the man Norris, or Boone, and in a thoroughly
bad temper, as Jack soon found out.
"Have you see anything of 'Lissie Lee?" he demanded immediately.
"Miss Lee has just left me. She has gone to her room," answered Flatray
quietly.
"Well, I want to see her," said the other hoarsely.
"I reckon you better postpone it to to-morrow. She's some played out and
needs sleep."
"Well, I'm going to see her now."
Jack turned, still all gentleness, and called to Jim Budd, who was in the
store.
"Oh, Jim! Run upstairs and knock on Miss Melissy's door and tell her Mr.
Norris is down here. Ask if she will see him to-night."
"You're making a heap of formality out of this, Mr. Buttinsky," sneered
the cowpuncher.
Jack made no answer, unless it were one to whistle gently and look out
into the night as if he were alone.
"No, seh. She doan' wan' tuh see him to-night," announced Jim upon his
return.
"That seems to settle it, Mr. Norris," said Jack pleasantly.
"Not by a hell of a sight. I've got something to say to her, and I'm going
to say it."
"To-morrow," amended the officer.
"I said to-night."
"But your say doesn't go here against hers. I reckon you'll wait."
"Not so's you could notice it." The cowpuncher took a step forward toward
the stairway, but Flatray was there before him.
"Get out of the way, you. I don't stand for any butting-in," the cowboy
blustered.
"Don't be a goat, Norris. She's tired, and she says she don't want to see
you. That's enough, ain't it?"
Norris leaped back with an oath to draw his gun, but Jack had the quickest
draw in Arizona. The puncher found himself looking into the business end
of a revolver.
"Better change your mind, seh," suggested the officer amiably. "I take it
you've been drinking and you're some excited. If you were in condition to
_savez_ the situation, you'd understand that the young lady doesn't care
to see you now. Do you need a church to fall on you before you can take a
hint?"
"I reckon if you knew all about her, you wouldn't be so anxious to stand
up for her," Norris said darkly.
"I expect we cayn't any of us stand the great white light on all our acts;
but if any one can, it's that little girl upstairs."
"What would you say if I told you that she's liable to go to Yuma if I
lift my hand?"
"I'd say I was from Missouri and needed showing."
"Put up that gun, come outside with me, and if I take a notion I'll show
you all right."
Jack laughed as his gun disappeared. "I'd be willing to bet high that
there are a good many citizens around here haided straighter for Yuma than
Miss Melissy."
Without answering, Norris led the way out and stopped only when his arm
rested on the fence of the corral.
"Nobody can hear us now," he said brusquely, and the ranger got a whiff of
his hot whisky breath. "You've put it up to me to make good. All right,
I'll do it. That little girl in there, as you call her, is the bad man who
held up the Fort Allison stage."
The officer laughed tolerantly as he lit a cigarette.
"I hear you say it, Norris."
"I didn't expect you to believe it right away, but it's a fact just the
same."
Flatray climbed to the fence and rested his feet on a rail. "Fire ahead.
I'm listenin'."
"The first men on the ground after that hold-up were me and Lee. We
covered the situation thorough and got hold of some points right away."
"That's right funny too. When I asked you if you'd been down there you
both denied it," commented the officer.
"We were protecting the girl. Mind you, we didn't know who had done it
then, but we had reasons to think the person had just come from this
ranch."
"What reasons?" briefly demanded Flatray.
"We don't need to go into them. We had them, anyhow. Then I lit on a
foot-print right on the edge of the ditch that no man ever made. We didn't
know what to make of it, but we wiped it out and followed the ditch, one
on each side. We'd figured that was the way he had gone. You see, though
water was running in the ditch now, it hadn't been half an hour before."
"You don't say!"
"There wasn't a sign of anybody leaving the ditch till we got to the
ranch; then we saw tracks going straight to the house."
"So you got a bunch of sheep and drove them down there to muss things up
some."
Norris looked sharply at him. "You got there while we were driving them
back. Well, that's right. We had to help her out."
"You're helping her out now, ain't you?" Jack asked dryly.
"That's my business. I've got my own reasons, Mr. Deputy. All you got to
do is arrest her."
"Just as soon as you give me the evidence, seh."
"Haven't I given it to you? She was seen to drive away from the house in
her rig. She left footprints down there. She came back up the ditch and
then rode right up to the head-gates and turned on the water. Jim Little
saw her cutting across country from the head-gates hell-to-split."
"Far as I can make out, all the evidence you've given me ain't against
her, but against you. She was out drivin' when it happened, you say, and
you expect me to arrest her for it. It ain't against the law to go
driving, seh. And as for that ditch fairy tale, on your own say-so you
wiped out all chance to prove the story."
"Then you won't arrest her?"
"If you'll furnish the evidence, seh."
"I tell you we know she did it. Her father knows it."
"Is it worryin' his conscience? Did he ask you to lay an information
against her?" asked the officer sarcastically.
"That isn't the point."
"You're right. Here's the point." Not by the faintest motion of the body
had the officer's indolence been lifted, but the quiet ring of his voice
showed it was gone. "You and Lee were overheard planning that robbery the
day after you were seen hanging around the 'Monte Cristo.' You started out
to hold up the stage. It was held up. By your own story you were the first
men on the ground after the robbery. I tracked you straight from there
here along the ditch. I found a black mask in Lee's coat. A dozen people
saw you on that fool sheep-drive of yours. And to sum up, I found the
stolen gold right here where you must have hidden it."
"You found the gold? Where?"
"That ain't the point either, seh. The point is that I've got you where I
want you, Mr. Norris, alias Mr. Boone. You're wound up in a net you cayn't
get away from. You're wanted back East, and you're wanted here. I'm onto
your little game, sir. Think I don't know you've been trying to
manufacture evidence against me as a rustler? Think I ain't wise to your
whole record? You're arrested for robbing the Fort Allison stage."
Norris, standing close in front of him, shot his right hand out and
knocked the officer backward from the fence. Before the latter could get
on his feet again the cowpuncher was scudding through the night. He
reached his horse, flung himself on, and galloped away. Harmlessly a
bullet or two zipped after him as he disappeared.
The deputy climbed over the fence again and laughed softly to himself.
"You did that right well, Jack. He'll always think he did that by his
lone, never will know you was a partner in that escape. It's a fact,
though, I could have railroaded him through on the evidence, but not
without including the old man. No, there wasn't any way for it but that
grandstand escape of Mr. Boone's."
Still smiling, he dusted himself, put up his revolver, and returned to the
house.
CHAPTER XII
THE TENDERFOOT MAKES A PROPOSITION
Melissy waited in dread expectancy to see what would happen. Of quick,
warm sympathies, always ready to bear with courage her own and others'
burdens, she had none of that passive endurance which age and experience
bring. She was keyed to the heroism of an occasion, but not yet to that
which life lays as a daily burden upon many without dramatic emphasis.
All next day nothing took place. On the succeeding one her father returned
with the news that the "Monte Cristo" contest had been continued to
another term of court. Otherwise nothing unusual occurred. It was after
mail time that she stepped to the porch for a breath of fresh air and
noticed that the reward placard had been taken down.
"Who did that?" she asked of Alan McKinstra, who was sitting on the steps,
reading a newspaper and munching an apple.
"Jack Flatray took it down. He said the offer of a reward had been
withdrawn."
"When did he do that?"
"About an hour ago. Just before he rode off."
"Rode off! Where did he go?"
"Heard him say he was going to Mesa. He told your father that when he
settled the bill."
"He's gone for good, then?"
"That's the way I took it. Say, Melissy, Farnum says Jack told him the
gold had been found and turned back to Morse. Is that right?"
"How should I know?"
"Well, it looks blamed funny they could get the bullion back without
getting the hold-up."
"Maybe they'll get him yet," she consoled him.
"I wish I could get a crack at him," the boy murmured vengefully.
"You had one chance at him, didn't you?"
"Jose spoiled it. Honest, I wasn't going to lie down, 'Lissie."
Again the days followed each other uneventfully. Bellamy himself never
came for his mail now, but sent one of the boys from the mine for it.
Melissy wondered whether he despised her so much he did not ever want to
see her again. Somehow she did not like to think this. Perhaps it might be
delicacy on his part. He was going to drop the whole thing magnanimously
and did not want to put upon her the obligation of thanking him by
presenting himself to her eyes.
But though he never appeared in person, he had never been so much in her
mind. She could not rid herself of a growing sympathy and admiration for
this man who was holding his own against many. A story which was being
whispered about reached her ears and increased this. A bunch of his sheep
had been found poisoned on their feeding ground, and certain cattle
interests were suspected of having done the dastardly thing.
When she could stand the silence no longer Melissy called up Jack Flatray
on the telephone at Mesa.
"You caught me just in time. I'm leaving for Phoenix to-night," he told
her. "What can I do for you, Miss Lee?"
"I want to know what's being done about that Fort Allison stage hold-up."
"The money has been recovered."
"I know that, but--what about the--the criminals?"
"They made their getaway all right."
"Aren't you looking for them?"
"No."
"Did Mr. Morse want you to drop it?"
"Yes. He was very urgent about it."
"Does he know who the criminals are?"
"Yes."
"And isn't going to prosecute?"
"So he told me."
"What did Mr. Morse say when you made your report?"
"Said, 'Thank you.'"
"Oh, yes, but--you know what I mean."
"Not being a mind-reader----"
"About the suspect. Did he say anything?"
"Said he had private reasons for not pushing the case. I didn't ask him
what they were."
This was all she could get out of him. It was less than she had hoped.
Still, it was something. She knew definitely what Bellamy had done.
Wherefore she sat down to write him a note of thanks. It took her an hour
and eight sheets of paper before she could complete it to her
satisfaction. Even then the result was not what she wanted. She wished she
knew how he felt about it, so that she could temper it to the right degree
of warmth or coolness. Since she did not know, she erred on the side of
stiffness and made her message formal.
"Mr. Thomas L. Morse,
"Monte Cristo Mine.
"Dear Sir:
"Father and I feel that we ought to thank you for your considerate
forbearance in a certain matter you know of. Believe me, sir, we are
grateful.
"Very respectfully,
"Melissy Lee."
She could not, however, keep herself from one touch of sympathy, and as a
postscript she naively added:
"I'm sorry about the sheep."
Before mailing it she carried this letter to her father. Neither of them
had ever referred to the other about what each knew of the affair of the
robbery. More than once it had been on the tip of Champ Lee's tongue to
speak of it, but it was not in his nature to talk out what he felt, and
with a sigh he had given it up. Now Melissy came straight to the point.
"I've been writing a letter to Mr. Morse, dad, thanking him for not having
me arrested."
Lee shot at her a glance of quick alarm.
"Does he know about it, honey?"
"Yes. Jack Flatray found out the whole thing and told him. He was very
insistent on dropping it, Mr. Flatray says."
"You say Jack found out all about it, honey?" repeated Lee in surprise.
He was seated in a big chair on the porch, and she nestled on one arm of
it, rumpled his gray hair as she had always done since she had been a
little girl, kissed him, and plunged into her story.
He heard her to the end without a word, but she noticed that he gripped
the chair hard. When she had finished he swept her into his arms and broke
down over her, calling her the pet names of her childhood.
"Honey-bird ... Dad's little honey-bird ... I'm that ashamed of myse'f.
'Twas the whisky did it, lambie. Long as I live I'll nevah touch it again.
I'll sweah that befo' God. All week you been packin' the troubles I
heaped on you, precious, and afteh you-all saved me from being a
criminal...."
So he went on, spending his tempestuous love in endearments and caresses,
and so together they afterward talked it out and agreed to send the letter
she had written.
But Lee was not satisfied with her atonement. He could not rest to let it
go at that, without expressing his own part in it to Bellamy. Next day he
rode up to the mine, and found its owner in workman's slops just stepping
from the cage. If Bellamy were surprised to see him, no sign of it reached
his face.
"If you'll wait a minute till I get these things off, I'll walk up to the
cabin with you, Mr. Lee," he said.
"I reckon you got my daughter's letter," said Lee abruptly as he strode up
the mountainside with his host.
"Yes, I got it an hour ago."
"I be'n and studied it out, Mr. Morse. I couldn't let it go at that, and
so I reckoned I'd jog along up hyer and tell you the whole story."
"That's as you please, Mr. Lee. I'm quite satisfied as it is."
The rancher went on as if he had not heard. "'Course I be'n holding a
grudge at you evah since you took up this hyer claim. I expect that
rankles with me most of the time, and when I take to drinking seems to me
that mine still belongs to me. Well, I heerd tell of that shipment you was
making, and I sets out to git it, for it ce'tainly did seem to belong to
me. Understand, I wasn't drunk, but had be'n settin' pretty steady to the
bottle for several days. Melissy finds it out, no matter how, and
undertakes to keep me out of trouble. She's that full of sand, she nevah
once thought of the danger or the consequences. Anyhow, she meant to git
the bullion back to you afteh the thing had blown over."
"I haven't doubted that a moment since I knew she did it," said Bellamy
quietly.
"Glad to hear it. I be'n misjudgin' you, seh, but you're a white man afteh
all. Well, you know the rest of the story: how she held up the stage, how
Jack drapped in befo' our tracks were covered, how smart he worked the
whole thing out, and how my little gyurl confessed to him to save me."
"Yes, I know all that."
"What kind of a figure do I make in this? First off, I act like a durn
fool, and she has to step in to save me. Then I let her tote the worry of
it around while I ride off to Mesa. When Jack runs me down, she takes the
blame again. To finish up with, she writes you a letter of thanks, jes' as
if the whole fault was hers."
The old soldier selected a smooth rock and splashed it with tobacco juice
before he continued with rising indignation against himself.
"I'm a fine father for a gyurl like that, ain't I? Up to date I always
had an idee I was some sort of a man, but dad gum it! I cayn't see it
hyer. To think of me lettin' my little gyurl stand the consequences of my
meanness. No, Mr. Morse, that's one too much for Champ Lee. He's nevah
going to touch another drop of whisky long as he lives."
"Glad to hear it. That's a square amend to make, one she will
appreciate."
"So I took a _pasear_ up hyer to explain this, and to thank you for yore
kindness. Fac' is, Mr. Morse, it would have jest about killed me if
anything had happened to my little 'Lissie. I want to say that if you had
a-be'n her brother you couldn't 'a' be'n more decent."
"There was nothing else to do. It happens that I am in her debt. She saved
my life once. Besides, I understood the motives for her action when she
broke the law, and I honored them with all my heart. Flatray felt just as
I did about it. So would any right-thinking man."
"Well, you cayn't keep me from sayin' again that you're a white man, seh,"
the other said with a laugh behind which the emotion of tears lay near.
"That offer of a compromise is still open, Mr. Lee."
The Southerner shook his grizzled head. "No, I reckon not, Mr. Morse.
Understand, I got nothin' against you. The feud is wiped out, and I'll
make you no mo' trouble. But it's yore mine, and I don't feel like taking
charity. I got enough anyhow."
"It wouldn't be charity. I've always felt as if you had a moral claim on
an interest in the 'Monte Cristo.' If you won't take this yourself, why
not let me make out the papers to Miss Lee? You would feel then that she
was comfortably fixed, no matter what happened to you."
"Well, I'll lay it befo' her. Anyhow, we're much obliged to you, Mr.
Morse. I'll tell you what, seh," he added as
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/27436