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The Rustler of Wind River

by George W. Ogden · English · Gutenberg #30485 · 454,649 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Rustler of Wind River

Author: George W. Ogden

Illustrator: Frank E. Schoonover


        
Release date: November 16, 2009 [eBook #30485]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER ***

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




THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER

By G. W. OGDEN

WITH FRONTISPIECE

By FRANK E. SCHOONOVER

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers--New York

Published by Arrangement with A. C. McClurg & Company




Copyright

A. C. McClurg & Co.

1917

Published March, 1917




CONTENTS

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




THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER


CHAPTER I

STRANGE BARGAININGS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Macdonald?"

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

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

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

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

"You've named it."

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II

BEEF DAY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nola tossed her head with a contemptuous sniff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then I'll take it myself!"

"Miss Landcraft!"

"_Major_ King!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III

THE RANCHHOUSE BY THE RIVER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The chorus of it ran:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV

THE MAN IN THE PLAID


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"At the first word," said she.

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

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

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

"He's one of your officers."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"King of the rustlers," she corrected.

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

They turned and walked back toward the house.

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

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

"Tell me about it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps in a year."

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They may come any minute, they--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V

IF HE WAS A GENTLEMAN


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh!" deprecatingly.

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

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

"Let's not quarrel, Frances."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Miss Landcraft, I am waiting."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A messenger arrived with it an hour ago."

"For you, Major King?"

"For me, certainly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is ended--you are free!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI

A BOLD CIVILIAN


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.

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

"I am listening, sir."

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

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

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

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

"Go on, sir," the colonel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I ask you to consider--"

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

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

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

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

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

"Sir--"

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

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

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

The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.

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

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

Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the door he turned.

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

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

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

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

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

"He is gone," she said.

"Very well," he nodded, shortly.

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

"Impossible! nonsense!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VII

THROWING THE SCARE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I've heard of him."

"Well, he's in this country."

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

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

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

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

"I'd know him," Macdonald nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII

AFOOT AND ALONE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chadron jerked his head in expression of lofty disdain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IX

BUSINESS, NOT COMPANY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then what'd you sneak--"

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

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


"I got him last night."

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

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

"The hell you say!"

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

"How did you do it?"

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

"Where did it happen at?"

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

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

"Fifty yards, more 'r less."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Huh!" Chadron grunted, noncommittally.

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

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

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

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

"If hell's got fire in it!"

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

"I'll hang around--"

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

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

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

                  *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Earn it before you collect it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Grab your gun!" Chadron whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Drop that gun!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You'll have a chance, Thorn."

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER X

"HELL'S A-GOIN' TO POP"


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Which?" said he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, he got away."

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

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




CHAPTER XI

THE SEÑOR BOSS COMES RIDING


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course," said Nola, positively.

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

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

"No, I never did."

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

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

"How?"

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

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

"Oh, you little goose!" said she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The hell you would!" said he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It would seem so," the colonel agreed.

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

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

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

"Sir!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"King, I believe you!" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No matter for the justice of the homesteaders' cause, and the
sincerity of their leader, neither of which she doubted or questioned,
the weight of numbers and resources would be on the side of the
cattlemen. It could result only in the homesteaders being driven from
their insecure holdings after the sacrifice of many lives. If she
could see Macdonald, and appeal to him to put down this foolish, even
though well-intended strife, something might result.

It was an inconsequential turmoil, it seemed to her, there in that
sequestered land, for a man like Alan Macdonald to squander his life
upon. If he stood against the forces which Chadron had gone to summon,
he would be slain, and the abundant promise of his life wasted like
water on the sand.

"I'll go with you, Nola," she said, rising from the table in quick
decision.




CHAPTER XII

"THE RUSTLERS!"


"I've stood up for that man, and I've stood by him," said Banjo
Gibson, "but when a man shoots a friend of my friend he ain't no
friend of mine. I'm done with him; I won't never set a boot-heel
inside of his door ag'in."

Banjo was in Mrs. Chadron's south sitting-room, with its friendly
fireplace and homely things, including Mrs. Chadron and her apparently
interminable sock. Only now it was a gray sock, designed not for the
mighty foot of Saul, but for Chance Dalton, lying on his back in the
bunkhouse in a fever growing out of the handling that he had gone
through at Macdonald's place.

Banjo had arrived at the ranch the previous evening. He was sitting
now with his fiddle on his knee, having gone through the repertory
most favored by his hostess, with the exception of "Silver Threads."
That was an afternoon melody, Banjo maintained, and one would have
strained his friendship and shaken his respect if he had insisted upon
the musician putting bow to it in the morning hours.

"Yes," sighed Mrs. Chadron, "it was bad enough when he just shot
cowboys, but when it come to Chance we felt real grieved. Chance he
ain't much to look at, but he's worth his weight in gold on the
ranch."

"Busted his right arm all to pieces, they tell me?"

"Right here." Mrs. Chadron marked across her wrist with her knitting
needle, and shook her head in heavy sadness.

"That'll kind of spile him, won't it?"

"Well, Saul says it won't make so much difference about him not havin'
the use of his hand on that side if it don't break his nerve. A man
loses confidence in himself, Saul says, most always when he loses the
hand or arm he's slung his gun with all his life. He takes the notion
that everybody's quicker'n he is, and just kind of slinges back and
drops out of the game."

"Do you expect Saul he'll come back here with them soldiers he went
after?"

"I expect he'll more'n likely order 'em right up the river to clear
them rustlers out before he stops or anything," she replied, in high
confidence.

"The gall of them low-down brand-burners standin' up to fight a man on
his own land!" Banjo's indignation could not have been more pointed if
he had been a lord of many herds himself.

"There comes them blessed girls!" reported Mrs. Chadron from her
station near the window. Banjo crossed over to see, his fiddle held to
his bosom like an infant. Nola and Frances were nearing the gate.

"That colonel girl she's a up-setter, ain't she?" Banjo admired.

"She's as sweet as locu

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