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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West, by William MacLeod Raine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West
+
+Author: William MacLeod Raine
+
+Release Date: July, 1999 [eBook #1803]
+[Most recently updated: December 11, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Mary Starr
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WYOMING ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Wyoming
+a Story of the Outdoor West
+
+By William MacLeod Raine
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER I. A DESERT MEETING
+ CHAPTER II. THE KING OF THE BIG HORN COUNTRY
+ CHAPTER III. AN INVITATION GIVEN AND ACCEPTED
+ CHAPTER IV. AT THE LAZY D RANCH
+ CHAPTER V. THE DANCE AT FRASER’S
+ CHAPTER VI. A PARTY CALL
+ CHAPTER VII. THE MAN FROM THE SHOSHONE FASTNESSES
+ CHAPTER VIII. IN THE LAZY D HOSPITAL
+ CHAPTER IX. MISS DARLING ARRIVES
+ CHAPTER X. A SHEPHERD OF THE DESERT
+ CHAPTER XI. A RESCUE
+ CHAPTER XII. MISTRESS AND MAID
+ CHAPTER XIII. THE TWO COUSINS
+ CHAPTER XIV. FOR THE WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP
+ CHAPTER XV. JUDD MORGAN PASSES
+ CHAPTER XVI. HUNTING BIG GAME
+ CHAPTER XVII. RUN TO EARTH
+ CHAPTER XVIII. PLAYING FOR TIME
+ CHAPTER XIX. WEST POINT TO THE RESCUE
+ CHAPTER XX. TWO CASES OF DISCIPLINE
+ CHAPTER XXI. THE SIGNAL LIGHTS
+ CHAPTER XXII. EXIT THE “KING”
+ CHAPTER XXIII. JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS’ MEETING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+A DESERT MEETING
+
+
+An automobile shot out from a gash in the hills and slipped swiftly
+down to the butte. Here it came to a halt on the white, dusty road,
+while its occupant gazed with eager, unsated eyes on the great panorama
+that stretched before her. The earth rolled in waves like a mighty sea
+to the distant horizon line. From a wonderful blue sky poured down upon
+the land a bath of sunbeat. The air was like wine, pure and strong, and
+above the desert swam the rare, untempered light of Wyoming. Surely
+here was a peace primeval, a silence unbroken since the birth of
+creation.
+
+It was all new to her, and wonderfully exhilarating. The infinite roll
+of plain, the distant shining mountains, the multitudinous voices of
+the desert drowned in a sunlit sea of space—they were all details of
+the situation that ministered to a large serenity.
+
+And while she breathed deeply the satisfaction of it, an exploding
+rifle echo shattered the stillness. With excited sputtering came the
+prompt answer of a fusillade. She was new to the West; but some
+instinct stronger than reason told the girl that here was no playful
+puncher shooting up the scenery to ventilate his exuberance. Her
+imagination conceived something more deadly; a sinister picture of men
+pumping lead in a grim, close-lipped silence; a lusty plainsman, with
+murder in his heart, crumpling into a lifeless heap, while the thin
+smoke-spiral curled from his hot rifle.
+
+So the girl imagined the scene as she ran swiftly forward through the
+pines to the edge of the butte bluff whence she might look down upon
+the coulée that nestled against it. Nor had she greatly erred, for her
+first sweeping glance showed her the thing she had dreaded.
+
+In a semicircle, well back from the foot of the butte, half a dozen men
+crouched in the cover of the sage-brush and a scattered group of
+cottonwoods. They were perhaps fifty yards apart, and the attention of
+all of them was focused on a spot directly beneath her. Even as she
+looked, in that first swift moment of apprehension, a spurt of smoke
+came from one of the rifles and was flung back from the forked pine at
+the bottom of the mesa. She saw him then, kneeling behind his
+insufficient shelter, a trapped man making his last stand.
+
+From where she stood the girl distinguished him very clearly, and under
+the field-glasses that she turned on him the details leaped to life.
+Tall, strong, slender, with the lean, clean build of a greyhound, he
+seemed as wary and alert as a panther. The broad, soft hat, the scarlet
+handkerchief loosely knotted about his throat, the gray shirt, spurs
+and overalls, proclaimed him a stockman, just as his dead horse at the
+entrance to the coulée told of an accidental meeting in the desert and
+a hurried run for cover.
+
+That he had no chance was quite plain, but no plainer than the cool
+vigilance with which he proposed to make them pay. Even in the matter
+of defense he was worse off than they were, but he knew how to make the
+most of what he had; knew how to avail himself of every inch of
+sagebrush that helped to render him indistinct to their eyes.
+
+One of the attackers, eager for a clearer shot, exposed himself a
+trifle too far in taking aim. Without any loss of time in sighting,
+swift as a lightning-flash, the rifle behind the forked pine spoke.
+That the bullet reached its mark she saw with a gasp of dismay. For the
+man suddenly huddled down and rolled over on his side.
+
+His comrades appeared to take warning by this example. The men at both
+ends of the crescent fell back, and for a minute the girl’s heart
+leaped with the hope that they were about to abandon the siege.
+Apparently the man in the scarlet kerchief had no such expectation. He
+deserted his position behind the pine and ran back, crouching low in
+the brush, to another little clump of trees closer to the bluff. The
+reason for this was at first not apparent to her, but she understood
+presently when the men who had fallen back behind the rolling hillocks
+appeared again well in to the edge of the bluff. Only by his timely
+retreat had the man saved himself from being outflanked.
+
+It was very plain that the attackers meant to take their time to finish
+him in perfect safety. He was surrounded on every side by a cordon of
+rifles, except where the bare face of the butte hung down behind him.
+To attempt to scale it would have been to expose himself as a mark for
+every gun to certain death.
+
+It was now that she heard the man who seemed to be directing the attack
+call out to another on his right. She was too far to make out the
+words, but their effect was clear to her. He pointed to the brow of the
+butte above, and a puncher in white woolen chaps dropped back out of
+range and swung to the saddle upon one of the ponies bunched in the
+rear. He cantered round in a wide circle and made for the butte. His
+purpose was obviously to catch their victim in the unprotected rear,
+and fire down upon him from above.
+
+The young woman shouted a warning, but her voice failed to carry. For a
+moment she stood with her hands pressed together in despair, then
+turned and swiftly scudded to her machine. She sprang in, swept
+forward, reached the rim of the mesa, and plunged down. Never before
+had she attempted so precarious a descent in such wild haste. The car
+fairly leaped into space, and after it struck swayed dizzily as it shot
+down. The girl hung on, her face white and set, the pulse in her temple
+beating wildly. She could do nothing, as the machine rocked down, but
+hope against many chances that instant destruction might be averted.
+
+Utterly beyond her control, the motor-car thundered down, reached the
+foot of the butte, and swept over a little hill in its wild flight. She
+rushed by a mounted horseman in the thousandth part of a second. She
+was still speeding at a tremendous velocity, but a second hill reduced
+this somewhat. She had not yet recovered control of the machine, but,
+though her eyes instinctively followed the white road that flashed
+past, she again had photographed on her brain the scene of the turbid
+tragedy in which she was intervening.
+
+At the foot of the butte the road circled and dipped into the coulée.
+She braced herself for the shock, but, though the wheels skidded till
+her heart was in her throat, the automobile, hanging on the balance of
+disaster, swept round in safety.
+
+Her horn screamed an instant warning to the trapped man. She could not
+see him, and for an instant her heart sank with the fear that they had
+killed him. But she saw then that they were still firing, and she
+continued her honking invitation as the car leaped forward into the
+zone of spitting bullets.
+
+By this time she was recovering control of the motor, and she dared not
+let her attention wander, but out of the corner of her eye she
+appreciated the situation. Temporarily, out of sheer amaze at this
+apparition from the blue, the guns ceased their sniping. She became
+aware that a light curly head, crouched low in the sage-brush, was
+moving rapidly to meet her at right angles, and in doing so was
+approaching directly the line of fire. She could see him dodging to and
+fro as he moved forward, for the rifles were again barking.
+
+She was within two hundred yards of him, still going rapidly, but not
+with the same headlong rush as before, when the curly head disappeared
+in the sage-brush. It was up again presently, but she could see that
+the man came limping, and so uncertainly that twice he pitched forward
+to the ground. Incautiously one of his assailants ran forward with a
+shout the second time his head went down. Crack! The unerring rifle
+rang out, and the impetuous one dropped in his tracks.
+
+As she approached, the young woman slowed without stopping, and as the
+car swept past Curly Head flung himself in headlong. He picked himself
+up from her feet, crept past her to the seat beyond, and almost
+instantly whipped his rifle to his shoulder in prompt defiance of the
+fire that was now converged on them.
+
+Yet in a few moments the sound died away, for a voice midway in the
+crescent had shouted an amazed discovery:
+
+“By God, it’s a woman!”
+
+The car skimmed forward over the uneven ground toward the end of the
+semicircle, and passed within fifty yards of the second man from the
+end, the one she had picked out as the leader of the party. He was a
+black, swarthy fellow in plain leather chaps and blue shirt. As they
+passed he took a long, steady aim.
+
+“Duck!” shouted the man beside her, and dragged her down on the seat so
+that his body covered hers.
+
+A puff of wind fanned the girl’s cheek.
+
+“Near thing,” her companion said coolly. He looked back at the swarthy
+man and laughed softly. “Some day you’ll mebbe wish you had sent your
+pills straighter, Mr. Judd Morgan.”
+
+Yet a few wheel-turns and they had dipped forward out of range among
+the great land waves that seemed to stretch before them forever. The
+unexpected had happened, and she had achieved a rescue in the face of
+the impossible.
+
+“Hurt badly?” the girl inquired briefly, her dark-blue eyes meeting his
+as frankly as those of a boy.
+
+“No need for an undertaker. I reckon I’ll survive, ma’am.”
+
+“Where are you hit?”
+
+“I just got a telegram from my ankle saying there was a cargo of lead
+arrived there unexpected,” he drawled easily.
+
+“Hurts a good deal, doesn’t it?”
+
+“No more than is needful to keep my memory jogged up. It’s a sort of a
+forget-me-not souvenir. For a good boy; compliments of Mr. Jim Henson,”
+he explained.
+
+Her dark glance swept him searchingly. She disapproved the assurance of
+his manner even while the youth in her applauded his reckless
+sufficiency. His gay courage held her unconsenting admiration even
+while she resented it. He was a trifle too much at his ease for one who
+had just been snatched from dire peril. Yet even in his insouciance
+there was something engaging; something almost of distinction.
+
+“What was the trouble?”
+
+Mirth bubbled in his gray eyes. “I gathered, ma’am, that they wanted to
+collect my scalp.”
+
+“Do what?” she frowned.
+
+“Bump me off—send me across the divide.”
+
+“Oh, I know that. But why?”
+
+He seemed to reproach himself. “Now how could I be so neglectful? I
+clean forgot to ask.”
+
+“That’s ridiculous,” was her sharp verdict.
+
+“Yes, ma’am, plumb ridiculous. My only excuse is that they began
+scattering lead so sudden I didn’t have time to ask many ‘Whyfors.’ I
+reckon we’ll just have to call it a Wyoming difference of opinion,” he
+concluded pleasantly.
+
+“Which means, I suppose, that you are not going to tell me.”
+
+“I got so much else to tell y’u that’s a heap more important,” he
+laughed. “Y’u see, I’m enjoyin’ my first automobile ride. It was
+certainly thoughtful of y’u to ask me to go riding with y’u, Miss
+Messiter.”
+
+“So you know my name. May I ask how?” was her astonished question.
+
+He gave the low laugh that always seemed to suggest a private source of
+amusement of his own. “I suspicioned that might be your name when I say
+y’u come a-sailin’ down from heaven to gather me up like Enoch.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Well, ma’am, I happened to drift in to Gimlet Butte two or three days
+ago, and while I was up at the depot looking for some freight a train
+sashaid in and side tracked a flat car. There was an automobile on that
+car addressed to Miss Helen Messiter. Now, automobiles are awful seldom
+in this country. I don’t seem to remember having seen one before.”
+
+“I see. You’re quite a Sherlock Holmes. Do you know anything more about
+me?”
+
+“I know y’u have just fallen heir to the Lazy D. They say y’u are a
+schoolmarm, but I don’t believe it.”
+
+“Well, I am.” Then, “Why don’t you believe it?” she added.
+
+He surveyed her with his smile audacious, let his amused eyes wander
+down from the mobile face with the wild-rose bloom to the slim young
+figure so long and supple, then serenely met her frown.
+
+“Y’u don’t look it.”
+
+“No? Are you the owner of a composite photograph of the teachers of the
+country?”
+
+He enjoyed again his private mirth. “I should like right well to have
+the pictures of some of them.”
+
+She glanced at him sharply, but he was gazing so innocently at the
+purple Shoshones in the distance that she could not give him the snub
+she thought he needed.
+
+“You are right. My name is Helen Messiter,” she said, by way of
+stimulating a counter fund of information. For, though she was a young
+woman not much given to curiosity, she was aware of an interest in this
+spare, broad-shouldered youth who was such an incarnation of bronzed
+vigor.
+
+“Glad to meet y’u, Miss Messiter,” he responded, and offered his firm
+brown hand in Western fashion.
+
+But she observed resentfully that he did not mention his own name. It
+was impossible to suppose that he knew no better, and she was driven to
+conclude that he was silent of set purpose. Very well! If he did not
+want to introduce himself she was not going to urge it upon him. In a
+businesslike manner she gave her attention to eating up the dusty
+miles.
+
+“Yes, ma’am. I reckon I never was more glad to death to meet a lady
+than I was to meet up with y’u,” he continued, cheerily. “Y’u sure
+looked good to me as y’u come a-foggin’ down the road. I fair had been
+yearnin’ for company but was some discouraged for fear the invitation
+had miscarried.” He broke off his sardonic raillery and let his level
+gaze possess her for a long moment. “Miss Messiter, I’m certainly under
+an obligation to y’u I can’t repay. Y’u saved my life,” he finished
+gravely.
+
+“Nonsense.”
+
+“Fact.”
+
+“It isn’t a personal matter at all,” she assured him, with a touch of
+impatient hauteur.
+
+“It’s a heap personal to me.”
+
+In spite of her healthy young resentment she laughed at the way in
+which he drawled this out, and with a swift sweep her boyish eyes took
+in again his compelling devil-may-care charm. She was a tenderfoot, but
+intuition as well as experience taught her that he was unusual enough
+to be one of ten thousand. No young Greek god’s head could have risen
+more superbly above the brick-tanned column of the neck than this
+close-cropped curly one. Gray eyes, deep and unwavering and masterful,
+looked out of a face as brown as Wyoming. He was got up with no thought
+of effect, but the tigerish litheness, the picturesque competency of
+him, spake louder than costuming.
+
+“Aren’t you really hurt worse than you pretend? I’m sure your ankle
+ought to be attended to as soon as possible.”
+
+“Don’t tell me you’re a lady doctor, ma’am,” he burlesqued his alarm.
+
+“Can you tell me where the nearest ranch house is?” she asked, ignoring
+his diversion.
+
+“The Lazy D is the nearest, I reckon.”
+
+“Which direction?”
+
+“North by east, ma’am.”
+
+“Then I’ll take the most direct road to it.
+
+“In that case I’ll thank y’u for my ride and get out here.”
+
+“But—why?”
+
+He waved a jaunty hand toward the recent battlefield. “The Lazy D lies
+right back of that hill. I expect, mebbe, those wolves might howl again
+if we went back.”
+
+“Where, then, shall I take you?”
+
+“I hate to trouble y’u to go out of your way.
+
+“I dare say, but I’m going just the same,” she told him, dryly.
+
+“If you’re right determined—” He interrupted himself to point to the
+south. “Do y’u see that camel-back peak over there?”
+
+“The one with the sunshine on its lower edge?”
+
+“That’s it, Miss Messiter. They call those two humps the Antelope
+Peaks. If y’u can drop me somewhere near there I think I’ll manage all
+right.”
+
+“I’m not going to leave you till we reach a house,” she informed him
+promptly. “You’re not fit to walk fifty yards.”
+
+“That’s right kind of y’u, but I could not think of asking so much. My
+friends will find me if y’u leave me where I can work a heliograph.”
+
+“Or your enemies,” she cut in.
+
+“I hope not. I’d not likely have the luck to get another invitation
+right then to go riding with a friendly young lady.”
+
+She gave him direct, cool, black-blue eyes that met and searched his.
+“I’m not at all sure she is friendly. I shall want to find out the
+cause of the trouble you have just had before I make up my mind as to
+that.”
+
+“I judge people by their actions. Y’u didn’t wait to find out before
+bringing the ambulance into action,” he laughed.
+
+“I see you do not mean to tell me.”
+
+“You’re quite a lawyer, ma’am,” he evaded.
+
+“I find you a very slippery witness, then.”
+
+“Ask anything y’u like and I’ll tell you.”
+
+“Very well. Who were those men, and why were they trying to kill you?”
+
+“They turned their wolf loose on me because I shot up one of them
+yesterday.”
+
+“Dear me! Is it your business to go around shooting people? That’s
+three I happen to know that you have shot. How many more?”
+
+“No more, ma’am—not recently.”
+
+“Well, three is quite enough—recently,” she mimicked. “You seem to me a
+good deal of a desperado.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am.”
+
+“Don’t say ‘Yes, ma’am,’ like that, as if it didn’t matter in the least
+whether you are or not,” she ordered.
+
+“No, ma’am.”
+
+“Oh!” She broke off with a gesture of impatience at his burlesque of
+obedience. “You know what I mean—that you ought to deny it; ought to be
+furious at me for suggesting it.”
+
+“Ought I?”
+
+“Of course you ought.”
+
+“There’s a heap of ways I ain’t up to specifications,” he admitted,
+cheerfully.
+
+“And who are they—the men that were attacking you?”
+
+There was a gleam of irrepressible humor in the bold eyes. “Your
+cow-punchers, ma’am.”
+
+“My cow-punchers?”
+
+“They ce’tainly belong to the Lazy D outfit.”
+
+“And you say that you shot one of my men yesterday?” He could see her
+getting ready for a declaration of war.
+
+“Down by Willow Creek—Yes, ma’am,” he answered, comfortably.
+
+“And why, may I ask?” she flamed
+
+“That’s a long story, Miss Messiter. It wouldn’t be square for me to
+get my version in before your boys. Y’u ask them.” He permitted himself
+a genial smile, somewhat ironic. “I shouldn’t wonder but what they’ll
+give me a giltedged testimonial as an unhanged horse thief.”
+
+“Isn’t there such a thing as law in Wyoming?” the girl demanded.
+
+“Lots of it. Y’u can buy just as good law right here as in Kalamazoo.”
+
+“I wish I knew where to find it.”
+
+“Like to put me in the calaboose?”
+
+“In the penitentiary. Yes, sir!” A moment later the question that was
+in her thoughts leaped hotly from her lips. “Who are you, sir, that
+dare to commit murder and boast of it?”
+
+She had flicked him on the raw at last. Something that was near to pain
+rested for a second in his eyes. “Murder is a hard name, ma’am. And I
+didn’t say he was daid, or any of the three,” came his gentle answer.
+
+“You _meant_ to kill them, anyhow.”
+
+“Did I?” There was the ghost of a sad smile about his eyes.
+
+“The way you act, a person might think you one of Ned Bannister’s men,”
+she told him, scornfully.
+
+“I expect you’re right.”
+
+She repented her a little at a charge so unjust. “If you are not
+ashamed of your name why are you so loath to part with it?”
+
+“Y’u didn’t ask me my name,” he said, a dark flush sweeping his face.
+
+“I ask it now.”
+
+Like the light from a snuffed candle the boyish recklessness had gone
+out of his face. His jaws were set like a vise and he looked hard as
+hammered steel.
+
+“My name is Bannister,” he said, coldly.
+
+“Ned Bannister, the outlaw,” she let slip, and was aware of a strange
+sinking of the heart.
+
+It seemed to her that something sinister came to the surface in his
+handsome face. “I reckon we might as well let it go at that,” he
+returned, with bitter briefness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+THE KING OF THE BIG HORN COUNTRY
+
+
+Two months before this time Helen Messiter had been serenely teaching a
+second grade at Kalamazoo, Michigan, notwithstanding the earnest
+efforts of several youths of that city to induce her to retire to
+domesticity “What’s the use of being a schoolmarm?” had been the burden
+of their plaint. “Any spinster can teach kids _C-a-t_, Cat, but only
+one in several thousand can be the prettiest bride in Kalamazoo.” None
+of them, however, had been able to drive the point sufficiently home,
+and it is probable that she would have continued to devote herself to
+Young America if an uncle she had never seen had not died without a
+will and left her a ranch in Wyoming yclept the Lazy D.
+
+When her lawyer proposed to put the ranch on the market Miss Helen had
+a word to say.
+
+“I think not. I’ll go out and see it first, anyhow,” she said.
+
+“But really, my dear young lady, it isn’t at all necessary. Fact is,
+I’ve already had an offer of a hundred thousand dollars for it. Now, I
+should judge that a fair price.”
+
+“Very likely,” his client interrupted, quietly. “But, you see, I don’t
+care to sell.”
+
+“Then what in the world are you going to do with it?”
+
+“Run it.”
+
+“But, my dear Miss Messiter, it isn’t an automobile or any other kind
+of toy. You must remember that it takes a business head and a great
+deal of experience to make such an investment pay. I really think—”
+
+“My school ends on the fourteenth of June. I’ll get a substitute for
+the last two months. I shall start for Wyoming on the eighteenth of
+April.”
+
+The man of law gasped, explained the difficulties again carefully as to
+a child, found that he was wasting his breath, and wisely gave it up.
+
+Miss Messiter had started on the eighteenth of April, as she had
+announced. When she reached Gimlet Butte, the nearest railroad point to
+the Lazy D, she found a group of curious, weatherbeaten individuals
+gathered round a machine foreign to their experience. It was on a flat
+car, and the general opinion ran the gamut from a newfangled sewing
+machine to a thresher. Into this guessing contest came its owner with
+so brisk and businesslike an energy that inside of two hours she was
+testing it up and down the wide street of Gimlet Butte, to the wonder
+and delight of an audience to which each one of the eleven saloons of
+the city had contributed its admiring quota.
+
+Meanwhile the young woman attended strictly to business. She had
+disappeared for half an hour with a suit case into the Elk House; and
+when she returned in a short-skirted corduroy suit, leggings and
+wide-brimmed gray Stetson hat, all Gimlet Butte took an absorbing
+interest in the details of this delightful adventure that had happened
+to the town. The population was out _en masse_ to watch her slip down
+the road on a trial trip.
+
+Presently “Soapy” Sothern, drifting in on his buckskin from the Hoodoo
+Peak country, where for private reasons of his own he had been for the
+past month a sojourner, reported that he had seen the prettiest sight
+in the State climbing under a gasoline bronc with a monkey-wrench in
+her hand. Where? Right over the hill on the edge of town. The immediate
+stampede for the cow ponies was averted by a warning chug-chug that
+sounded down the road, followed by the appearance of a flashing whir
+that made the ponies dance on their hind legs.
+
+“The gasoline bronc lady sure makes a hit with me,” announced “Texas,”
+gravely. “I allow I’ll rustle a job with the Lazy D outfit.”
+
+“She ce’tainly rides herd on that machine like a champeen,” admitted
+Soapy. “I reckon I’ll drift over to the Lazy D with you to look after
+yore remains, Tex, when the lightning hits you.”
+
+Miss Messiter swung the automobile round in a swift circle, came to an
+abrupt halt in front of the hotel, and alighted without delay. As she
+passed in through the half score of admirers she had won, her dark eyes
+swept smilingly over assembled Cattleland. She had already met most of
+them at the launching of the machine from the flat car, and had
+directed their perspiring energies as they labored to follow her
+orders. Now she nodded a recognition with a little ripple of gay
+laughter.
+
+“I’m delighted to be able to contribute to the entertainment of Gimlet
+Butte,” she said, as she swept in. For this young woman was possessed
+of Western adaptation. It gave her no conscientious qualms to exchange
+conversation fraternal with these genial savages.
+
+The Elk House did not rejoice in a private dining room, and competition
+strenuous ensued as to who should have the pleasure of sitting beside
+the guest of honor. To avoid ill feeling, the matter was determined by
+a game of freeze-out, in which Texas and a mature gentleman named, from
+his complexion, “Beet” Collins, were the lucky victors. Texas
+immediately repaired to the general store, where he purchased a new
+scarlet bandanna for the occasion; also a cake of soap with which to
+rout the alkali dust that had filtered into every pore of his hands and
+face from a long ride across the desert.
+
+Came supper and Texas simultaneously, the cow-puncher’s face scrubbed
+to an apple shine. At the last moment Collins defaulted, his nerve
+completely gone. Since, however, he was a thrifty soul, he sold his
+place to Soapy for ten dollars, and proceeded to invest the proceeds in
+an immediate drunk.
+
+During the first ten minutes of supper Miss Messiter did not appear,
+and the two guardians who flanked her chair solicitously were the
+object of much badinage.
+
+“She got one glimpse of that red haid of Tex and the pore lady’s took
+to the sage,” explained Yorky.
+
+“And him scrubbed so shiny fust time since Christmas before the big
+blizzard,” sighed Doc Rogers.
+
+“Shucks! She ain’t scared of no sawed-off, hammered-down runt like
+Texas, No, siree! Miss Messiter’s on the absent list ’cause she’s
+afraid she cayn’t resist the blandishments of Soapy. Did yo’ ever hear
+about Soapy and that Caspar hash slinger?”
+
+“Forget it, Slim,” advised Soapy, promptly. He had been engaged in
+lofty and oblivious conversation with Texas, but he did not intend to
+allow reminiscences to get under way just now.
+
+At this opportune juncture arrived the mistress of the “gasoline
+bronc,” neatly clad in a simple white lawn with blue trimmings. She
+looked like a gleam of sunshine in her fresh, sweet youth; and not even
+in her own school room had she ever found herself the focus of a
+cleaner, more unstinted admiration. For the outdoors West takes off its
+hat reverently to women worthy of respect, especially when they are
+young and friendly.
+
+Helen Messiter had come to Wyoming because the call of adventure, the
+desire for experience outside of rutted convention, were stirring her
+warm-blooded youth. She had seen enough of life lived in a parlor, and
+when there came knocking at her door a chance to know the big, untamed
+outdoors at first hand she had at once embraced it like a lover. She
+was eager for her new life, and she set out skillfully to make these
+men tell her what she wanted to know. To them, of course, it was an old
+story, and whatever of romance it held was unconscious. But since she
+wanted to talk of the West they were more than ready to please her.
+
+So she listened, and drew them out with adroit questions when it was
+necessary. She made them talk of life on the open range, of rustlers
+and those who lived outside the law in the upper Shoshone country, of
+the deadly war waging between the cattle and sheep industries.
+
+“Are there any sheep near the Lazy D ranch?” she asked, intensely
+interested in Soapy’s tale of how cattle and sheep could no more be got
+to mix than oil and water.
+
+For an instant nobody answered her question; then Soapy replied, with
+what seemed elaborate carelessness:
+
+“Ned Bannister runs a bunch of about twelve thousand not more’n fifteen
+or twenty miles from your place.”
+
+“And you say they are spoiling the range?”
+
+“They’re ce’tainly spoiling it for cows.”
+
+“But can’t something be done? If my cows were there first I don’t see
+what right he has to bring his sheep there,” the girl frowned.
+
+The assembled company attended strictly to supper. The girl, surprised
+at the stillness, looked round. “Well?”
+
+“Now you’re shouting, ma’am! That’s what we say,” enthused Texas,
+spurring to the rescue.
+
+“It doesn’t much matter what you say. What do you do?” asked Helen,
+impatiently. “Do you lie down and let Mr. Bannister and his kind drive
+their sheep over you?”
+
+“Do we, Soapy?” grinned Texas. Yet it seemed to her his smile was not
+quite carefree.
+
+“I’m not a cowman myself,” explained Soapy to the girl. “Nor do I run
+sheep. I—”
+
+“Tell Miss Messiter what yore business is, Soapy,” advised Yorky from
+the end of the table, with a mouthful of biscuit swelling his cheeks.
+
+Soapy crushed the irrepressible Yorky with a look, but that young man
+hit back smilingly.
+
+“Soapy, he sells soap, ma’am. He’s a sorter city salesman, I reckon.”
+
+“I should never have guessed it. Mr. Sothern does not _look_ like a
+salesman,” said the girl, with a glance at his shrewd, hard,
+expressionless face.
+
+“Yes, ma’am, he’s a first-class seller of soap, is Mr. Sothern,”
+chuckled the cow-puncher, kicking his friends gayly under the table.
+
+“You can see I never sold _him_ any, Miss Messiter,” came back Soapy,
+sorrowfully.
+
+All this was Greek to the young lady from Kalamazoo. How was she to
+know that Mr. Sothern had vended his soap in small cubes on street
+corners, and that he wrapped bank notes of various denominations in the
+bars, which same were retailed to eager customers for the small sum of
+fifty cents, after a guarantee that the soap was good? His customers
+rarely patronized him twice; and frequently they used bad language
+because the soap wrapping was not as valuable as they had expected.
+This was manifestly unfair, for Mr. Sothern, who made no claims to
+philanthropy, often warned them that the soap should be bought on its
+merits, and not with an eye single to the premium that might or might
+not accompany the package.
+
+“I started to tell you, ma’am, when that infant interrupted, that the
+cowmen don’t aim to quit business yet a while. They’ve drawn a
+dead-line, Miss Messiter.”
+
+“A dead-line?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am, beyond which no sheep herder is to run his bunch.”
+
+“And if he does?” the girl asked, open eyed.
+
+“He don’t do it twict, ma’am. Why don’t you pass the fritters to Miss
+Messiter, Slim?”
+
+“And about this Bannister. Who is he?”
+
+Her innocent question seemed to ring a bell for silence; seemed to
+carry with it some hidden portent that stopped idle conversation as a
+striking clock that marks the hour of an execution.
+
+The smile that had been gay grew grim, and men forgot the subject of
+their light, casual talk. It was Sothern that answered her, and she
+observed that his voice was grave, his face studiously without
+expression.
+
+“Mr. Bannister, ma’am, is a sheepman.”
+
+“So I understood, but—” Her eyes traveled swiftly round the table, and
+appraised the sudden sense of responsibility that had fallen on these
+reckless, careless frontiersmen. “I am wondering what else he is.
+Really, he seems to be the bogey man of Gimlet Butte.”
+
+There was another instant silence, and again it was Soapy that lifted
+it. “I expaict you’ll like Wyoming, Miss Messiter; leastways I hope you
+will. There’s a right smart of country here.” His gaze went out of the
+open door to the vast sea of space that swam in the fine sunset light.
+“Yes, most folks that ain’t plumb spoilt with city ways likes it.”
+
+“Sure she’ll like it. Y’u want to get a good, easy-riding hawss, Miss
+Messiter,” advised Slim.
+
+“And a rifle,” added Texas, promptly.
+
+It occurred to her that they were all working together to drift the
+conversation back to a safe topic. She followed the lead given her, but
+she made up her mind to know what it was about her neighbor, Mr.
+Bannister, the sheep herder, that needed to be handled with such
+wariness and circumspection of speech.
+
+Her chance came half an hour later, when she stood talking to the
+landlady on the hotel porch in the mellow twilight that seemed to rest
+on the land like a moonlit aura. For the moment they were alone.
+
+“What is it about this man Bannister that makes men afraid to speak of
+him?” she demanded, with swift impulse.
+
+Her landlady’s startled eyes went alertly round to see that they were
+alone. “Hush, child! You mustn’t speak of him like that,” warned the
+older woman.
+
+“Why mustn’t I? That’s what I want to know.”
+
+“Is isn’t healthy.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+Again that anxious look flashed round in the dusk. “The Bannister
+outfit is the worst in the land. Ned Bannister is king of the whole Big
+Horn country and beyond that to the Tetons.”
+
+“And you mean to tell me that everybody is afraid of him—that men like
+Mr. Sothern dare not say their soul is their own?” the newcomer asked,
+contemptuously.
+
+“Not so loud, child. He has spies everywhere That’s the trouble. You
+don’t know who is in with him. He’s got the whole region terrified.”
+
+“Is he so bad?”
+
+“He is a devil. Last year he and his hell riders swept down on Topaz
+and killed two bartenders just to see them kick, Ned Bannister said.
+Folks allow they knew too much.”
+
+“But the law—the Government? Haven’t you a sheriff and officers?”
+
+“Bannister has. He elects the sheriff in this county.”
+
+“Aren’t there more honest people here than villains?”
+
+“Ten times as many, but the trouble is that the honest folks can’t
+trust each other. You see, if one of them made a mistake and confided
+in the wrong man—well, some fine day he would go riding herd and would
+not turn up at night. Next week, or next month, maybe, one of his
+partners might find a pile of bones in an arroyo.
+
+“Have you ever seen this Bannister?”
+
+“You _must_ speak lower when you talk of him, Miss Messiter,” the woman
+insisted. “Yes, I saw him once; at least I think I did. Mighty few
+folks know for sure that they have seen him. He is a mystery, and he
+travels under many names and disguises.”
+
+“When was it you think you saw him?”
+
+“Two years ago at Ayr. The bank was looted that night and robbed of
+thirty thousand dollars. They roused the cashier from his bed and made
+him give the combination. He didn’t want to, and Ned Bannister”—her
+voice sank to a tremulous whisper—“put red-hot running-irons between
+his fingers till he weakened. It was a moonlight night—much such a
+night as this—and after it was done I peeped through the blind of my
+room and saw them ride away. He rode in front of them and sang like an
+angel—did it out of daredeviltry to mock the people of the town that
+hadn’t nerve enough to shoot him. You see, he knew that nobody would
+dare hurt him ’count of the revenge of his men.”
+
+“What was he like?” the mistress of the Lazy D asked, strangely awed at
+this recital of transcendent villainy.
+
+“’Course he was masked, and I didn’t see his face. But I’d know him
+anywhere. He’s a long, slim fellow, built like a mountain lion. You
+couldn’t look at him and ever forget him. He’s one of these graceful,
+easy men that go so fur with fool women; one of the kind that half
+shuts his dark, devil eyes and masters them without seeming to try.”
+
+“So he’s a woman killer, too, is he? Any more outstanding
+inconsistencies in this versatile Jesse James?”
+
+“He’s plumb crazy about music, they say. Has a piano and plays Grigg
+and Chopping, and all that classical kind of music. He went clear down
+to Denver last year to hear Mrs. Shoeman sing.”
+
+Helen smiled, guessing at Schumann-Heink as the singer in question, and
+Grieg and Chopin as the composers named. Her interest was incredibly
+aroused. She had expected the West and its products to exhilarate her,
+but she had not looked to find so finished a Mephisto among its vaunted
+“bad men.” He was probably overrated; considered a wonder because his
+accomplishments outstepped those of the range. But Helen Messiter had
+quite determined on one thing. She was going to meet this redoubtable
+villain and make up her mind for herself. Already, before she had been
+in Wyoming six hours, this emancipated young woman had decided on that.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+AN INVITATION GIVEN AND ACCEPTED
+
+
+And already she had met him. Not only met him, but saved him from the
+just vengeance about to fall upon him. She had not yet seen her own
+ranch, had not spoken to a single one of her employés, for it had been
+a part of her plan to drop in unexpected and examine the situation
+before her foreman had a chance to put his best foot forward. So she
+had started alone from Gimlet Butte that morning in her machine, and
+had come almost in sight of the Lazy D ranch houses when the battle in
+the coulée invited her to take a hand.
+
+She had acted on generous impulse, and the unforeseen result had been
+to save this desperado from justice. But the worst of it was that she
+could not find it in her heart to regret it. Granted that he was a
+villain, double-dyed and beyond hope, yet he was the home of such
+courage, such virility, that her unconsenting admiration went out in
+spite of herself. He was, at any rate, a _man_, square-jawed, resolute,
+implacable. In the sinuous trail of his life might lie arson, robbery,
+murder, but he still held to that dynamic spark of self-respect that is
+akin to the divine. Nor was it possible to believe that those
+unblinking gray eyes, with the capability of a latent sadness of
+despair in them, expressed a soul entirely without nobility. He had a
+certain gallant ease, a certain attractive candor, that did not consist
+with villainy unadulterated.
+
+It was characteristic even of her impulsiveness that Helen Messiter
+curbed the swift condemnation that leaped to her lips when she knew
+that the man sitting beside her was the notorious bandit of the
+Shoshone fastnesses. She was not in the least afraid. A sure instinct
+told her he was not the kind of a man of whom a woman need have fear so
+long as her own anchor held fast. In good time she meant to let him
+have her unvarnished opinion of him, but she did not mean it to be an
+unconsidered one. Wherefore she drove the machine forward toward the
+camelbacked peak he had indicated, her eyes straight before her, a
+frown corrugating her forehead.
+
+For him, having made his dramatic announcement, he seemed content for
+the present with silence. He leaned back in the car and appreciated her
+with a coolness that just missed impudence. Certainly her appearance
+proclaimed her very much worth while. To dwell on the long lines of her
+supple young body, the exquisite throat and chin curve, was a pleasure
+with a thrill to it. As a physical creation, a mere innocent young
+animal, he thought her perfect; attuned to a fine harmony of grace and
+color. But it was the animating vitality of her, the lightness of
+motion, the fire and sparkle of expression that gave her the
+captivating charm she possessed.
+
+They were two miles nearer the camel-backed peak before he broke the
+silence.
+
+“Beats a bronco for getting over the ground. Think I’ll have to get
+one,” he mused aloud.
+
+“With the money you took from the Ayr bank?” she flashed.
+
+“I might drive off some of your cows and sell them,” he countered,
+promptly. “About how much will they hold me up for a machine like
+this?”
+
+“This is only a runabout. You can get one for twelve or fourteen
+hundred dollars of anybody’s money.”
+
+“Of yours?” he laughed.
+
+“I haven’t that much with me. If you’ll come over and hold up the ranch
+perhaps we might raise it among us,” she jeered.
+
+His mirth was genuine. “But right now I couldn’t get more than how much
+off y’u?”
+
+“Sixty-three dollars is all I have with me, and I couldn’t give you
+more—_not even if you put red hot irons between my fingers_.” She gave
+it to him straight, her blue eyes fixed steadily on him.
+
+Yet she was not prepared for the effect of her words. The last thing
+she had expected was to see the blood wash out of his bronzed face, to
+see his sensitive nostrils twitch with pain. He made her feel as if she
+had insulted him, as if she had been needlessly cruel. And because of
+it she hardened her heart. Why should she spare him the mention of it?
+He had not hesitated at the shameless deed itself. Why should she
+shrink before that wounded look that leaped to his fine eyes in that
+flash of time before he hardened them to steel?
+
+“You did it—didn’t you?” she demanded.
+
+“That’s what they say.” His gaze met her defiantly.
+
+“And it is true, isn’t it?”
+
+“Oh, anything is true of a man that herds sheep,” he returned,
+bitterly.
+
+“If that is true it would not be possible for you to understand how
+much I despise you.”
+
+“Thank you,” he retorted, ironically.
+
+“I don’t understand at all. I don’t see how you can be the man they say
+you are. Before I met you it was easy to understand. But somehow—I
+don’t know—you don’t _look_ like a villain.” She found herself
+strangely voicing the deep hope of her heart. It was surely impossible
+to look at him and believe him guilty of the things of which, he was
+accused. And yet he offered no denial, suggested no defense.
+
+Her troubled eyes went over his thin, sunbaked face with its touch, of
+bitterness, and she did not find it possible to dismiss the subject
+without giving him a chance to set himself right.
+
+“You can’t be as bad as they say. You are not, are you?” she asked,
+naively.
+
+“What do y’u think?” he responded, coolly.
+
+She flushed angrily at what she accepted as his insolence. “A man of
+any decency would have jumped at the chance to explain.”
+
+“But if there is nothing to explain?”
+
+“You are then guilty.”
+
+Their eyes met, and neither of them quailed.
+
+“If I pleaded not guilty would y’u believe me?”
+
+She hesitated. “I don’t know. How could I when it is known by
+everybody? And yet—”
+
+He smiled. “Why should I trouble y’u, then, with explanations? I reckon
+we’ll let it go at guilty.”
+
+“Is that all you can say for yourself?”
+
+He seemed to hang in doubt an instant, then shook his head and refused
+the opening.
+
+“I expect if we changed the subject I could say a good deal for y’u,”
+he drawled. “I never saw anything pluckier than the way y’u flew down
+from the mesa and conducted the cutting-out expedition. Y’u sure
+drilled through your punchers like a streak of lightning.”
+
+“I didn’t know who you were,” she explained, proudly.
+
+“Would it have made any difference if y’u had?”
+
+Again the angry flush touched her cheeks. “Not a bit. I would have
+saved you in order to have you properly hanged later,” she cut back
+promptly.
+
+He shook his head gayly. “I’m ce’tainly going to disappoint y’u some.
+Your enterprising punchers may collect me yet, but not alive, I
+reckon.”
+
+“I’ll give them strict orders to bring you in alive.”
+
+“Did you ever want the moon when y’u was a little kid?” he asked.
+
+“We’ll see, Mr. Outlaw Bannister.”
+
+He laughed softly, in the quiet, indolent fashion that would have been
+pleasant if it had not been at her. “It’s right kind of you to take so
+much interest in me. I’d most be willing to oblige by letting your boys
+rope me to renew this acquaintance, ma’am.” Then, “I get out here Miss
+Messiter,” he added.
+
+She stopped on the instant. Plainly she could not get rid of him too
+soon. “Haven’t you forgot one thing?” she asked, ironically.
+
+“Yes, ma’am. To thank you proper for what y’u did for me.” He limped
+gingerly down from the car and stood with his hand on one of the tires.
+“I have been trying to think how to say it right; but I guess I’ll have
+to give it up. All is that if I ever get a chance to even the score—”
+
+She waved his thanks aside impatiently “I didn’t mean that. You have
+forgotten to take my purse.”
+
+His gravity was broken on the instant, and his laughter was certainly
+delightfully fresh. “I clean forgot, but I expect I’ll drop over to the
+ranch for it some day.”
+
+“We’ll try to make to make you welcome, Mr. Bannister.”
+
+“Don’t put yourself out at all. I’ll take pot-luck when I come.”
+
+“How many of you may we expect?” she asked, defiantly.
+
+“Oh, I allow to come alone.”
+
+“You’ll very likely forget.”
+
+“No, ma’am, I don’t know so many ladies that I’m liable to such an
+oversight.
+
+“I have heard a different story. But if you do remember to come, and
+will let us know when you expect to honor the Lazy D, I’ll have
+messengers sent to meet you.”
+
+He perfectly understood her to mean leaden ones, and the humorous gleam
+in his eye sparkled in appreciation of her spirit. “I don’t want all
+that fuss made over me. I reckon I’ll drop in unexpected,” he said.
+
+She nodded curtly. “Good-bye. Hope your ankle won’t trouble you very
+much.”
+
+“Thank y’u, ma’am. I reckon it won’t. Good-bye, Miss Messiter.”
+
+Out of the tail of her eye she saw him bowing like an Italian opera
+singer, as impudently insouciant, as gracefully graceless as any stage
+villain in her memory. Once again she saw him, when her machine swept
+round a curve and she could look back without seeming to do so, limping
+across through the sage brush toward a little hillock near the road.
+And as she looked the bare, curly head was inclined toward her in
+another low, mocking bow. He was certainly the gallantest vagabond
+unhanged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+AT THE LAZY D RANCH
+
+
+Helen Messiter was a young woman very much alive, which implies that
+she was given to emotions; and as her machine skimmed over the ground
+to the Lazy D she had them to spare. For from the first this young man
+had taken her eye, and it had come upon her with a distinct shock that
+he was the notorious scoundrel who was terrorizing the countryside. She
+told herself almost passionately that she would never have believed it
+if he had not said so himself. She knew quite well that the coldness
+that had clutched her heart when he gave his name had had nothing to do
+with fear. There had been chagrin, disappointment, but nothing in the
+least like the terror she might have expected. The simple truth was
+that he had seemed so much a man that it had hurt her to find him also
+a wild beast.
+
+Deep in her heart she resented the conviction forced upon her. Reckless
+he undoubtedly was, at odds with the law surely, but it was hard to
+admit that attractive personality to be the mask of fiendish cruelty
+and sinister malice. And yet—the facts spoke for themselves. He had not
+even attempted a denial. Still there was a mystery about him, else how
+was it possible for two so distinct personalities to dwell together in
+the same body.
+
+She hated him with all her lusty young will; not only for what he was,
+but also for what she had been disappointed in not finding him after
+her first instinctive liking. Yet it was with an odd little thrill that
+she ran down again into the coulée where her prosaic life had found its
+first real adventure. He might be all they said, but nothing could wipe
+out the facts that she had offered her life to save his, and that he
+had lent her his body as a living shield for one exhilarating moment of
+danger.
+
+As she reached the hill summit beyond the coulée, Helen Messiter was
+aware that a rider in ungainly chaps of white wool was rapidly
+approaching. He dipped down into the next depression without seeing
+her; and when they came face to face at the top of the rise the result
+was instantaneous. His pony did an animated two-step not on the
+programme. It took one glance at the diabolical machine, and went up on
+its hind legs, preliminary to giving an elaborate exhibition of
+pitching. The rider indulged in vivid profanity and plied his quirt
+vigorously. But the bronco, with the fear of this unknown evil on its
+soul, varied its bucking so effectively that the puncher astride its
+hurricane deck was forced, in the language of his kind, to “take the
+dust.”
+
+His red head sailed through the air and landed in the white sand at the
+girl’s feet. For a moment he sat in the road and gazed with chagrin
+after the vanishing heels of his mount. Then his wrathful eyes came
+round to the owner of the machine that had caused the eruption. His
+mouth had opened to give adequate expression to his feelings, when he
+discovered anew the forgotten fact that he was dealing with a woman.
+His jaw hung open for an instant in amaze; and when he remembered the
+unedited vocabulary he had turned loose on the world a flood of purple
+swept his tanned face.
+
+She wanted to laugh, but wisely refrained. “I’m very sorry,” was what
+she said.
+
+He stared in silence as he slowly picked himself from the ground. His
+red hair rose like the quills of a porcupine above a face that had the
+appearance of being unfinished. Neither nose nor mouth nor chin seemed
+to be quite definite enough.
+
+She choked down her gayety and offered renewed apologies.
+
+“I was going for a doc,” he explained, by way of opening his share of
+the conversation.
+
+“Then perhaps you had better jump in with me and ride back to the Lazy
+D. I suppose that’s where you came from?”
+
+He scratched his vivid head helplessly. “Yes, ma’am.”
+
+“Then jump in.”
+
+“I was going to Bear Creek, ma’am,” he added dubiously.
+
+“How far is it?”
+
+“’Bout twenty-five miles, and then some.”
+
+“You don’t expect to walk, do you?”
+
+“No; I allowed—”
+
+“I’ll take you back to the ranch, where you can get another horse.”
+
+“I reckon, ma’am, I’d ruther walk.”
+
+“Nonsense! Why?”
+
+“I ain’t used to them gas wagons.”
+
+“It’s quite safe. There is nothing to be afraid of.”
+
+Reluctantly he got in beside her, as happy as a calf in a branding pen.
+
+“Are you the lady that sashaid off with Ned Bannister?” he asked
+presently, after he had had time to smother successively some of his
+fear, wonder and delight at their smooth, swift progress.
+
+“Yes. Why?”
+
+“The boys allow you hadn’t oughter have done it.” Then, to place the
+responsibility properly on shoulders broader than his own, he added:
+“That’s what Judd says.”
+
+“And who is Judd?”
+
+“Judd, he’s the foreman of the Lazy D.”
+
+Below them appeared the corrals and houses of a ranch nestling in a
+little valley flanked by hills.
+
+“This yere’s the Lazy D,” announced the youth, with pride, and in the
+spirit of friendliness suggested a caution. “Judd, he’s some peppery.
+You wanter smooth him down some, seeing as he’s riled up to-day.”
+
+A flicker of steel came into the blue eyes. “Indeed! Well, here we
+are.”
+
+“If it ain’t Reddy, _and_ the lady with the flying machine,” murmured a
+freckled youth named McWilliams, emerging from the bunkhouse with a pan
+of water which had been used to bathe the wound of one of the punctured
+combatants.
+
+“What’s that?” snapped a voice from within; and immediately its owner
+appeared in the doorway and bored with narrowed black eyes the young
+woman in the machine.
+
+“Who are you?” he demanded, brusquely.
+
+“Your target,” she answered, quietly. “Would you like to take another
+shot at me?”
+
+The freckled lad broke out into a gurgle of laughter, at which the
+black, swarthy man beside him wheeled round in a rage. “What you
+cacklin’ at, Mac?” he demanded, in a low voice.
+
+“Oh, the things I notice,” returned that youth jauntily, meeting the
+other’s anger without the flicker of an eyelid.
+
+“It ain’t healthy to be so noticin’,” insinuated the other.
+
+“Y’u don’t say,” came the prompt, sarcastic retort. “If you’re such a
+darned good judge of health, y’u better be attending to some of your
+patients.” He jerked a casual thumb over his shoulder toward the bunks
+on which lay the wounded men.
+
+“I shouldn’t wonder but what there might be another patient for me to
+attend to,” snarled the foreman.
+
+“That so? Well, turn your wolf loose when y’u get to feelin’ real
+devilish,” jeered the undismayed one, strolling forward to assist Miss
+Messiter to alight.
+
+The mistress of the Lazy D had been aware of the byplay, but she had
+caught neither the words nor their import. She took the offered brown
+hand smilingly, for here again she looked into the frank eyes of the
+West, unafraid and steady. She judged him not more than twenty-two, but
+the school where he had learned of life had held open and strenuous
+session every day since he could remember.
+
+“Glad to meet y’u, ma’am,” he assured her, in the current phrase of the
+semi-arid lands.
+
+“I’m sure I am glad to meet _you_,” she answered, heartily. “Can you
+tell me where is the foreman of the Lazy D?”
+
+He introduced with a smile the swarthy man in the doorway. “This is him
+ma’am—Mr. Judd Morgan.”
+
+Now it happened that Mr. Judd Morgan was simmering with suppressed
+spleen.
+
+“All I’ve got to say is that you had no business mixing up in that
+shootin’ affair back there. Perhaps you don’t know that the man you
+saved is Ned Bannister, the outlaw,” was his surly greeting.
+
+“Oh, yes, I know that.”
+
+“Then what d’ye mean—Who are you, anyway?” His insolent eyes coasted
+malevolently over her.
+
+“Helen Messiter is my name.”
+
+It was ludicrous to see the change that came over the man. He had been
+prepared to bully her; and with a word she had pricked the bubble of
+his arrogance. He swallowed his anger and got a mechanical smile in
+working order.
+
+“Glad to see you here, Miss Messiter,” he said, his sinister gaze
+attempting to meet hers frankly “I been looking for you every day.”
+
+“But y’u managed to surprise him, after all ma’am,” chuckled Mac.
+
+“Where’s yo’ hawss, Reddy?” inquired a tall young man, who had appeared
+silently in the doorway of the bunkhouse.
+
+Reddy pinked violently. “I had an accident, Denver,” he explained.
+“This lady yere she—”
+
+“Scooped y’u right off yore hawss. Y’u _don’t_ say,” sympathized Mac so
+breathlessly that even Reddy joined in the chorus of laughter that went
+up at his expense.
+
+The young woman thought to make it easy for him, and suggested an
+explanation.
+
+“His horse isn’t used to automobiles, and so when it met this one—”
+
+“I got off,” interposed Reddy hastily, displaying a complexion like a
+boiled beet.
+
+“He got off,” Mac explained gravely to the increasing audience.
+
+Denver nodded with an imperturbable face. “He got off.”
+
+Mac introduced Miss Messiter to such of her employés as were on hand.
+“Shake hands with Miss Messiter, Missou,” was the formula, the name
+alone varying to suit the embarrassed gentlemen in leathers. Each of
+them in turn presented a huge hand, in which her little one disappeared
+for the time, and was sawed up and down in the air like a pump-handle.
+Yet if she was amused she did not show it; and her pleasure at meeting
+the simple, elemental products of the plains outweighed a great deal
+her sense of the ludicrous.
+
+“How are your patients getting along?” she presently asked of her
+foreman.
+
+“I reckon all right. I sent Reddy for a doc, but—”
+
+“He got off,” murmured Mac pensively.
+
+“I’ll go rope another hawss,” put in the man who had got off.
+
+“Get a jump on you, then. Miss Messiter, would you like to look over
+the place?”
+
+“Not now. I want to see the men that were hurt. Perhaps I can help
+them. Once I took a few weeks in nursing.”
+
+“Bully for you, ma’am,” whooped Mac. “I’ve a notion those boys are
+sufferin’ for a woman to put the diamond-hitch on them bandages.”
+
+“Bring that suit-case in,” she commanded Denver, in the gentlest voice
+he had ever heard, after she had made a hasty inspection of the first
+wounded man.
+
+From the suit-case she took a little leather medicine-case, the kind
+that can be bought already prepared for use. It held among other things
+a roll of medicated cotton, some antiseptic tablets, and a little steel
+instrument for probing.
+
+“Some warm water, please; and have some boiling on the range,” were her
+next commands.
+
+Mac flew to execute them.
+
+It was a pleasure to see her work, so deftly the skillful hands
+accomplished what her brain told them. In admiring awe the punchers
+stood awkwardly around while she washed and dressed the hurts. Two of
+the bullets had gone through the fleshy part of the arm and left clean
+wounds. In the case of the third man she had to probe for the lead, but
+fortunately found it with little difficulty. Meanwhile she soothed the
+victim with gentle womanly sympathy.
+
+“I know it hurts a good deal. Just a minute and I’ll be through.”
+
+His hands clutched tightly the edges of his bunk. “That’s all right,
+doc. You attend to roping that pill and I’ll endure the grief.”
+
+A long sigh of relief went up from the assembled cowboys when she drew
+the bullet out.
+
+The sinewy hands fastened on the wooden bunk relaxed suddenly.
+
+“’Frisco’s daid,” gasped the cook, who bore the title of Wun Hop for no
+reason except that he was an Irishman in a place formerly held by a
+Chinese.
+
+“He has only fainted,” she said quietly, and continued with the
+antiseptic dressing.
+
+When it was all over, the big, tanned men gathered at the entrance to
+the calf corral and expanded in admiration of their new boss.
+
+“She’s a pure for fair. She grades up any old way yuh take her to the
+best corn-fed article on the market,” pronounced Denver, with
+enthusiasm.
+
+“I got to ride the boundary,” sighed Missou. “I kinder hate to go right
+now.”
+
+“Here, too,” acquiesced another. “I got a round-up on Wind Creek to cut
+out them two-year-olds. If ’twas my say-so, I’d order Mac on that job.”
+
+“Right kind of y’u. Seems to me”—Mac’s sarcastic eye trailed around to
+include all those who had been singing her praises—“the new queen of
+this hacienda won’t have no trouble at all picking a prince consort
+when she gets round to it. Here’s Wun Hop, not what y’u might call
+anxious, but ce’tainly willing. Then Denver’s some in the turtle-dove
+business, according to that hash-slinger in Cheyenne. Missou might be
+induced to accept if it was offered him proper; and I allow Jim ain’t
+turned the color of Redtop’s hair jest for instance. I don’t want to
+leave out ’Frisco and the other boys carrying Bannister’s pills—”
+
+“Nor McWilliams. I’d admire to include him,” murmured Denver.
+
+That sunburned, nonchalant youth laughed musically. “Sure thing. I’d
+hate to be left out. The only difference is—”
+
+“Well?”
+
+His roving eye circled blandly round. “I stand about one show in a
+million. Y’u roughnecks are dead ones already.”
+
+With which cold comfort he sauntered away to join Miss Messiter and the
+foreman, who now appeared together at the door of the ranchhouse,
+prepared to make a tour of the buildings and the immediate corrals.
+
+“Isn’t there a woman on the place?” she was asking Morgan.
+
+“No’m, there ain’t. Henderson’s daughter would come and stay with y’u a
+while I reckon.”
+
+“Please send for her at once, then, and ask her to come to-day.”
+
+“All right. I’ll send one of the boys right away.”
+
+“How did y’u leave ’Frisco, ma’am?” asked Mac, by way of including
+himself easily.
+
+“He’s resting quietly. Unless blood-poisoning sets in they ought all to
+do well.”
+
+“It’s right lucky for them y’u happened along. This is the hawss
+corral, ma’am,” explained the young man just as Morgan opened his thin
+lips to tell her.
+
+Judd contrived to get rid of him promptly. “Slap on a saddle, Mac, and
+run up the remuda so Miss Messiter can see the hawsses for herself,” he
+ordered.
+
+“Mebbe she’d rather ride down and look at the bunch,” suggested the
+capable McWilliams.
+
+As it chanced, she did prefer to ride down the pasture and look over
+the place from on horseback. She was in love with her ranch already.
+Its spacious distances, the thousands of cattle and the horses, these
+picturesque retainers who served her even to the shedding of an enemy’s
+blood; they all struck an answering echo in her gallant young heart
+that nothing in Kalamazoo had been able to stir. She bubbled over with
+enthusiasm, the while Morgan covertly sneered and McWilliams warmed to
+the untamed youth in her.
+
+“What about this man Bannister?” she flung out suddenly, after they had
+cantered back to the house when the remuda had been inspected.
+
+Her abrupt question brought again the short, tense silence she had
+become used to expect.
+
+“He runs sheep about twenty or thirty miles southwest of here,”
+explained McWilliams, in a carefully casual tone.
+
+“So everybody tells me, but it seems to me he spills a good deal of
+lead on my men,” she answered impatiently. “What’s the trouble?”
+
+“Last week he crossed the dead-line with a bunch of five thousand
+sheep.”
+
+“Who draws this dead-line?”
+
+“The cattlemen got together and drew it. Your uncle was one of those
+that marked it off, ma’am.”
+
+“And Bannister crossed it?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. Yesterday ’Frisco come on him and one of his herders with
+a big bunch of them less than fifteen miles from here. He didn’t know
+it was Bannister, and took a pot-shot at him. ’Course Bannister came
+back at him, and he got Frisco in the laig.”
+
+“Didn’t know it was Bannister? What difference WOULD that make?” she
+said impatiently.
+
+Mac laughed. “What difference would it make, Judd?”
+
+Morgan scowled, and the young man answered his own question. “We don’t
+any of us go out of our way more’n a mile to cross Bannister’s trail,”
+he drawled.
+
+“Do you wear this for an ornament? Are you upholstered with hardware to
+catch the eyes of some girl?” she asked, touching with the end of her
+whip the revolver in the holster strapped to his chaps.
+
+His serene, gay smile flashed at her. “Are y’u ordering me to go out
+and get Ned Bannister’s scalp?”
+
+“No, I am not,” she explained promptly. “What I am trying to discover
+is why you all seem to be afraid of one man. He is only a man, isn’t
+he?”
+
+A veil of ice seemed to fall over the boyish face and leave it chiseled
+marble. His unspeaking eyes rested on the swarthy foreman as he
+answered:
+
+“I don’t know what he is, ma’am. He may be one man, or he may be a
+hundred. What’s more, I ain’t particularly suffering to find out. Fact
+is, I haven’t lost any Bannisters.”
+
+The girl became aware that her foreman was looking at her with a wary
+silent vigilance sinister in its intensity.
+
+“In short, you’re like the rest of the people in this section. You’re
+afraid.”
+
+“Now y’u’re shoutin’, Miss Messiter. I sure am when it comes to
+shootin’ off my mouth about Bannister.”
+
+“And you, Mr. Morgan?”
+
+It struck her that the young puncher waited with a curious interest for
+the answer of the foreman.
+
+“Did it look like I was afraid this mawnin’, ma’am?” he asked, with
+narrowed eyes.
+
+“No, you all seemed brave enough then, when you had him eight to one.”
+
+“I wasn’t there,” hastily put in McWilliams. “I don’t go gunning for my
+man without giving him a show.”
+
+“I do,” retorted Morgan cruelly. “I’d go if we was fifty to one. We’d
+’a’ got him, too, if it hadn’t been for Miss Messiter. ’Twas a chance
+we ain’t likely to get again for a year.”
+
+“It wasn’t your fault you didn’t kill him, Mr. Morgan,” she said,
+looking hard at him. “You may be interested to know that your last shot
+missed him only about six inches, and me about four.”
+
+“I didn’t know who you were,” he sullenly defended.
+
+“I see. You only shoot at women when you don’t know who they are.” She
+turned her back on him pointedly and addressed herself to McWilliams.
+“You can tell the men working on this ranch that I won’t have any more
+such attacks on this man Bannister. I don’t care what or who he is. I
+don’t propose to have him murdered by my employés. Let the law take him
+and hang him. Do you hear?”
+
+“I ce’tainly do, and the boys will get the word straight,” he replied.
+
+“I take it since yuh are giving your orders through Mac, yuh don’t need
+me any longer for your foreman,” bullied Morgan.
+
+“You take it right, sir,” came her crisp reply. “McWilliams will be my
+foreman from to-day.”
+
+The man’s face, malignant and wolfish, suddenly lost its mask. That she
+would so promptly call his bluff was the last thing he had expected.
+“That’s all right. I reckon yuh think yuh know your own business, but
+I’ll put it to yuh straight. Long as yuh live you’ll be sorry for
+this.”
+
+And with that he wheeled away.
+
+She turned to her new foreman and found him less radiant than she could
+have desired. “I’m right sorry y’u did that. I’m afraid y’u’ll make
+trouble for yourself,” he said quietly.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“I don’t know myself just why.” He hesitated before adding: “They say
+him and Bannister is thicker than they’d ought to be. It’s a cinch that
+he’s in cahoots somehow with that Shoshone bunch of bad men.”
+
+“But—why, that’s ridiculous. Only this morning he was trying to kill
+Bannister himself.”
+
+“That’s what I don’t just savvy. There’s a whole lot about that
+business I don’t get next to. I guess Bannister is at the head of them.
+Everybody seems agreed about that. But the whole thing is a tangle of
+contradiction to me. I’ve milled it over a heap in my mind, too.”
+
+“What are some of the contradictions?”
+
+“Well, here’s one right off the bat, as we used to say back in the
+States. Bannister is a great musician, they claim; fine singer, and all
+that. Now I happen to know he can’t sing any more than a bellowing
+yearling.”
+
+“How do you know?” she asked, her eyes shining with interest.
+
+“Because I heard him try it. ’Twas one day last summer when I was out
+cutting trail of a bunch of strays down by Dead Cow Creek. The day was
+hot, and I lay down behind a cottonwood and dropped off to sleep. When
+I awakened it didn’t take me longer’n an hour to discover what had woke
+me. Somebody on the other side of the creek was trying to sing. It was
+ce’tainly the limit. Pretty soon he come out of the brush and I seen it
+was Bannister.”
+
+“You’re sure it was Bannister?”
+
+“If seeing is believing, I’m sure.”
+
+“And was his singing really so bad?”
+
+“I’d hate ever to hear worse.”
+
+“Was he singing when you saw him?”
+
+“No, he’d just quit. He caught sight of my pony grazing, and hunted
+cover real prompt.”
+
+“Then it might have been another man singing in the thicket.”
+
+“It might, but it wasn’t. Y’u see, I’d followed him through the bush by
+his song, and he showed up the moment I expected him.”
+
+“Still there might have been another man there singing.”
+
+“One chance in a million,” he conceded.
+
+A sudden hope flamed up like tow in her heart. Perhaps, after all, Ned
+Bannister was not the leader of the outlaws. Perhaps somebody else was
+masquerading in his name, using Bannister’s unpopularity as a shield to
+cover his iniquities. Still, this was an unlikely hypothesis, she had
+to admit. For why should he allow his good name to be dragged in the
+dust without any effort to save it? On a sudden impulse the girl
+confided her doubt to McWilliams.
+
+“You don’t suppose there can be any mistake, do you? Somehow I can’t
+think him as bad as they say. He looks awfully reckless, but one feels
+one could trust his face.”
+
+“Same here,” agreed the new foreman. “First off when I saw him my think
+was, ‘I’d like to have that man backing my play when I’m sitting in the
+game with Old Man Hard Luck reaching out for my blue chips.’”
+
+“You don’t think faces lie, do you?”
+
+“I’ve seen them that did, but, gen’rally speaking, tongues are a heap
+likelier to get tangled with the truth. But I reckon there ain’t any
+doubt about Bannister. He’s known over all this Western country.”
+
+The young woman sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+THE DANCE AT FRASER’S
+
+
+“Heard tell yet of the dance over to Fraser’s?”
+
+He was a young man of a brick red countenance and he wore loosely round
+his neck the best polka dot silk handkerchief that could be bought in
+Gimlet Butte, also such gala attire as was usually reserved only for
+events of importance. Sitting his horse carelessly in the plainsman’s
+indolent fashion, he asked his question of McWilliams in front of the
+Lazy D bunkhouse.
+
+“Nope. When does the shindig come off?”
+
+“Friday night. Big thing. Y’u want to be there. All y’u lads.”
+
+“Mebbe some of us will ride over.”
+
+He of the polka dot kerchief did not appear quite satisfied. His glance
+wandered toward the house, as it had been doing occasionally since the
+moment of his arrival.
+
+“Y’u bet this dance is ace high, Mac. Fancy costumes and masks. Y’u can
+rent the costumes over to Slauson’s for three per. Texas, he’s going to
+call the dances. Music from Gimlet Butte. Y’u want to get it tucked
+away in your thinker that this dance ain’t on the order of culls. No,
+sirree, it’s cornfed.”
+
+“Glad to hear of it. I’ll cipher out somehow to be there, Slim.”
+
+Slim’s glance took in the ranchhouse again. He had ridden twenty-three
+miles out of his way to catch a glimpse of the newly arrived mistress
+of the Lazy D, the report of whose good looks and adventures had
+traveled hand in hand through many cañons even to the heart of the
+Tetons. It had been on Skunk Creek that he had heard of her three days
+before, and now he had come to verify the tongue of rumor, to see her
+quite casually, of course, and do his own appraising. It began to look
+as if he were going to have to ride off without a glimpse of her.
+
+He nodded toward the house, turning a shade more purple than his native
+choleric hue. “Y’u want to bring your boss with y’u, Mac. We been
+hearing a right smart lot about her and the boys would admire to have
+her present. It’s going to be strictly according to Hoyle—no
+rough-house plays go, y’understand.”
+
+“I’ll speak to her about it.” Mac’s deep amusement did not reach the
+surface. He was quite well aware that Slim was playing for time and
+that he was too bashful to plump out the desire that was in him. “Great
+the way cows are jumpin’, ain’t it?”
+
+“Sure. Well, I’ll be movin’ along to Slauson’s. I just drapped in on my
+way. Thought mebbe y’u hadn’t heard tell of the dance.”
+
+“Much obliged. Was it for old man Slauson y’u dug up all them togs,
+Slim? He’ll ce’tainly admire to see y’u in that silk tablecloth y’u got
+round your neck.”
+
+Slim’s purple deepened again. “Y’u go to grass, Mac. I don’t aim to ask
+y’u to be my valley yet awhile.”
+
+“C’rect. I was just wondering do all the Triangle Bar boys ride the
+range so handsome?”
+
+“Don’t y’u worry about the Triangle Bar boys,” advised the embarrassed
+Slim, gathering up his bridle reins.
+
+With one more reluctant glance in the direction of the house he rode
+away. When he reached the corral he looked back again. His gaze showed
+him the boyish foreman doubled up with laughter; also the sweep of a
+white skirt descending from the piazza.
+
+“Now, ain’t that hoodooed luck?” the aggrieved rider of the Triangle
+Bar outfit demanded of himself, “I made my getaway about three shakes
+too soon, by gum!”
+
+Her foreman was in the throes of mirth when Helen Messiter reached him.
+
+“Include me in the joke,” she suggested.
+
+“Oh, I was just thinkin’,” he explained inadequately.
+
+“Does it always take you that way?”
+
+“About these boys that drop in so frequent on business these days.
+Funny how fond they’re getting of the Lazy D. There was that stock
+detective happened in yesterday to show how anxious he was about your
+cows. Then the two Willow Creek riders that wanted a job punching for
+y’u, not to mention mention the Shoshone miner and the storekeeper from
+Gimlet Butte and Soapy Sothern and—”
+
+“Still I don’t quite see the joke.”
+
+“It ain’t any joke with them. Serious business, ma’am.”
+
+“What happened to start you on this line?”
+
+“The lad riding down the road on that piebald pinto. He come twenty
+miles out of his way, plumb dressed for a wedding, all to give me an
+invite to a dance at Fraser’s. Y’u would call that real thoughtful of
+him, I expect.”
+
+She gayly sparkled. “A real ranch dance—the kind you have been telling
+me about. Are Ida and I invited?”
+
+“Invited? Slim hinted at a lynching if I came without y’u.”
+
+She laughed softly, merry eyes flashing swiftly at him. “How gallant
+you Westerners are, even though you do turn it into burlesque.”
+
+His young laugh echoed hers. “Burlesque nothing. My life wouldn’t be
+worth a thing if I went alone. Honest, I wouldn’t dare.”
+
+“Since the ranch can’t afford to lose its foreman Ida and I will go
+along,” she promised. “That is, if it is considered proper here.”
+
+“Proper. Good gracious, ma’am! Every lady for thirty miles round will
+be there, from six months old to eighty odd years. It wouldn’t be
+_proper_ to stay at home.”
+
+The foreman drove her to Fraser’s in a surrey with Ida Henderson and
+one of the Lazy D punchers on the back seat. The drive was over
+twenty-five miles, but in that silent starry night every mile was a
+delight. Part of the way led through a beautiful cañon, along the rocky
+mountain road of which the young man guided the rig with unerring
+skill. Beyond the gorge the country debouched into a grassy park that
+fell away from their feet for miles. It was in this basin that the
+Fraser ranch lay.
+
+The strains of the fiddle and the thumping of feet could be heard as
+they drove up. Already the rooms seemed to be pretty well filled, as
+Helen noticed when they entered. Three sets were on the floor for a
+quadrille and the house shook with the energy of the dancers. On
+benches against the walls were seated the spectators, and on one of
+them stood Texas calling the dance.
+
+“Alemane left. Right hand t’yer pardner and grand right and left.
+Ev-v-rybody swing,” chanted the caller.
+
+A dozen rough young fellows were clustered near the front door,
+apparently afraid to venture farther lest their escape be cut off.
+Through these McWilliams pushed a way for his charges, the cowboys
+falling back respectfully at once when they discovered the presence of
+Miss Messiter.
+
+In the bedroom where she left her wraps the mistress of the Lazy D
+found a dozen or more infants and several of their mothers. In the
+kitchen were still other women and babies, some of the former very old
+and of the latter very young. A few of the babies were asleep, but most
+of them were still very much alive to this scene of unwonted hilarity
+in their young lives.
+
+As soon as she emerged into the general publicity of the dancing room
+her foreman pounced upon Helen and led her to a place in the head set
+that was making up. The floor was rough, the music jerky and uncertain,
+the quadrilling an exhibition of joyous and awkward abandon; but its
+picturesque lack of convention appealed to the girl from Michigan. It
+rather startled her to be swung so vigorously, but a glance about the
+room showed that these humorous-eyed Westerners were merely living up
+to the duty of the hour as they understood it.
+
+At the close of the quadrille Helen found herself being introduced to
+“Mr. Robins,” alias Slim, who drew one of his feet back in an
+embarrassed bow.
+
+“I enjoy to meet y’u, ma’am,” he assured her, and supplemented this
+with a request for the next dance, after which he fell into silence
+that was painful in its intensity.
+
+Nearly all the dances were squares, as few of those present understood
+the intricacies of the waltz and two-step. Hence it happened that the
+proficient McWilliams secured three round dances with his mistress.
+
+It was during the lunch of sandwiches, cake and coffee that Helen
+perceived an addition to the company. The affair had been advertised a
+costume ball, but most of those present had construed this very
+liberally. She herself, to be sure, had come as Mary Queen of Scots,
+Mac was arrayed in the scarlet tunic and tight-fitting breeches of the
+Northwest Mounted Police, and perhaps eight or ten others had made some
+attempt at representing some one other than they were. She now saw
+another, apparently a new arrival, standing in the doorway negligently.
+A glance told her that he was made up for a road agent and that his
+revolvers and mask were a part of the necessary costuming.
+
+Slowly his gaze circled the room and came round to her. His eyes were
+hard as diamonds and as flashing, so that the impact of their meeting
+looks seemed to shock her physically. He was a tall man, swarthy of
+hue, and he carried himself with a light ease that looked silken
+strong. Something in the bearing was familiar yet not quite familiar
+either. It seemed to suggest a resemblance to somebody she knew. And in
+the next thought she knew that the somebody was Ned Bannister.
+
+The man spoke to Fraser, just then passing with a cup of coffee, and
+Helen saw the two men approach. The stranger was coming to be formally
+introduced.
+
+“Shake hands with Mr. Holloway, Miss Messiter. He’s from up in the hill
+country and he rode to our frolic. Y’u’ve got three guesses to figure
+out what he’s made up as.”
+
+“One will be quite enough, I think,” she answered coldly.
+
+Fraser departed on his destination with the coffee and the newcomer sat
+down on the bench beside her.
+
+“One’s enough, is it?” he drawled smilingly.
+
+“Quite, but I’m surprised so few came in costume. Why didn’t you? But I
+suppose you had your reasons.”
+
+“Didn’t I? I’m supposed to be a bad man from the hills.”
+
+She swept him casually with an indifferent glance. “And isn’t that what
+you are in real life?”
+
+His sharp scrutiny chiseled into her. “What’s that?”
+
+“You won’t mind if I forget and call you Mr. Bannister instead of Mr.
+Holloway?”
+
+She thought his counterfeit astonishment perfect.
+
+“So I’m Ned Bannister, am I?”
+
+Their eyes clashed.
+
+“Aren’t you?”
+
+She felt sure of it, and yet there was a lurking doubt. For there was
+in his manner something indescribably more sinister than she had felt
+in him on that occasion when she had saved his life. Then a debonair
+recklessness had been the outstanding note, but now there was something
+ribald and wicked in him.
+
+“Since y’u put it as a question, common politeness demands an answer.
+Ned Bannister is my name.”
+
+“You are the terror of this country?”
+
+“I shan’t be a terror to y’u, ma’am, if I can help it,” he smiled.
+
+“But you are the man they call the king?”
+
+“I have that honor.”
+
+“_Honor?_”
+
+At the sharp scorn of her accent he laughed.
+
+“Do you mean that you are proud of your villainy?” she demanded.
+
+“Y’u’ve ce’tainly got the teacher habit of asking questions,” he
+replied with a laugh that was a sneer.
+
+A shadow fell across them and a voice said quietly, “She didn’t wait to
+ask any when she saved your life down in the coulée back of the Lazy
+D.”
+
+The shadow was Jim McWilliams’s, and its owner looked down at the man
+beside the girl with steady, hostile eyes.
+
+“Is this your put in, sir?” the other flashed back.
+
+“Yes, seh, it is. The boys don’t quite like seeing your hardware so
+prominent at a social gathering. In this community guns don’t come into
+the house at a ranch dance. I’m a committee to mention the subject and
+to collect your thirty-eights if y’u agree with us.”
+
+“And if I don’t agree with you?”
+
+“There’s all outdoors ready to receive y’u, seh. It would be a pity to
+stay in the one spot where your welcome’s wore thin.”
+
+“Still I may choose to stay.”
+
+“Ce’tainly, but if y’u decide that way y’u better step out on the porch
+and talk it over with us where there ain’t ladies present.”
+
+“Isn’t this a costume dance? What’s the matter with my guns? I’m an
+outlaw, ain’t I?”
+
+“I don’t know whether y’u are or not, seh. If y’u say y’u are we’re
+ready to take your word. The guns have to be shucked if y’u stay here.
+They might go off accidental and scare the ladies.”
+
+The man rose blackly. “I’ll remember this. If y’u knew who y’u were
+getting so gay with—”
+
+“I can guess, Mr. Holloway, the kind of an outfit y’u freight with, and
+I expect I could put a handle to another name for you.”
+
+“By God, if y’u dare to say—”
+
+“I don’t dare, especially among so many ladies,” came McWilliams’s
+jaunty answer.
+
+The eyes of the two men gripped, after which Holloway swung on his heel
+and swaggered defiantly out of the house.
+
+Presently there came the sound of a pony’s feet galloping down the
+road. It had not yet died away when Texas announced that the supper
+intermission was over.
+
+“Pardners for a quadrille. Ladies’ choice.”
+
+The dance was on again full swing. The fiddlers were tuning up and
+couples gathering for a quadrille. Denver came to claim Miss Messiter
+for a partner. Apparently even the existence of the vanished Holloway
+was forgotten. But Helen remembered it, and pondered over the affair
+long after daylight had come and brought with it an end to the
+festivities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+A PARTY CALL
+
+
+The mistress of the Lazy D, just through with her morning visit to the
+hospital in the bunkhouse, stopped to read the gaudy poster tacked to
+the wall. It was embellished with the drawing of a placid rider astride
+the embodiment of fury incarnate, under which was the legend: “Stick to
+Your Saddle.”
+
+BIG FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATION AT GIMLET BUTTE.
+ROPING AND BRONCO BUSTING CONTESTS FOR THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE WORLD
+AND BIG PRIZES,
+Including $1,000 for the Best Rider and the Same for Best Roper. Cow
+Pony Races, Ladies’ Races and Ladies’ Riding Contest, Fireworks,
+AND FREE BARBECUE!!!!
+EVERYBODY COME AND TURN YOUR WOLF LOOSE.
+
+
+A sudden thud of pounding hoofs, a snatch of ragtime, and her foreman
+swept up in a cloud of white dust. His pony came from a gallop to an
+instant halt, and simultaneously Mac landed beside her, one hand
+holding the wide-brimmed hat he had snatched off in his descent, the
+other hitched by a casual thumb to the belt of his chaps.
+
+She laughed. “You really did it very well.”
+
+Mac blushed. He was still young enough to take pride in his picturesque
+regalia, to prefer the dramatic way of doing a commonplace thing. But,
+though he liked this girl’s trick of laughing at him with a perfectly
+grave face out of those dark, long-lashed eyes, he would have liked it
+better if sometimes they had given back the applause he thought his
+little tricks merited.
+
+“Sho! That’s foolishness,” he deprecated.
+
+“I suppose they got you to sit for this picture;” and she indicated the
+poster with a wave of her hand.
+
+“That ain’t a real picture,” he explained, and when she smiled added,
+“as of course y’u know. No hawss ever pitched that way—and the saddle
+ain’t right. Fact is, it’s all wrong.”
+
+“How did it come here? It wasn’t here last night.”
+
+“I reckon Denver brought it from Slauson’s. He was ridin’ that country
+yesterday, and as the boys was out of smokin’ he come home that way.”
+
+“I suppose you’ll all go?”
+
+“I reckon.”
+
+“And you’ll ride?”
+
+“I aim to sit in.”
+
+“At the roping, too?”
+
+“No, m’m. I ain’t so much with the rope. It takes a Mexican to snake a
+rope.”
+
+“Then I’ll be able to borrow only a thousand dollars from you to help
+buy that bunch of young cows we were speaking about,” she mocked.
+
+“Only a thousand,” he grinned. “And it ain’t a cinch I’ll win. There
+are three or four straightup riders on this range. A fellow come from
+the Hole-in-the-Wall and won out last year.”
+
+“And where were you?”
+
+“Oh, I took second prize,” he explained, with obvious indifference.
+
+“Well, you had better get first this year. We’ll have to show them the
+Lazy D hasn’t gone to sleep.”
+
+“Sure thing,” he agreed.
+
+“Has that buyer from Cheyenne turned up yet?” she asked, reverting to
+business.
+
+“Not yet. Do y’u want I should make the cut soon as he comes?”
+
+“Don’t you think his price is a little low—twenty dollars from brand
+up?”
+
+“It’s a scrub bunch. We want to get rid of them, anyway. But you’re the
+doctor,” he concluded slangily.
+
+She thought a moment. “We’ll let him have them, but don’t make the cut
+till I come back. I’m going to ride over to the Twin Buttes.”
+
+His admiring eyes followed her as she went toward the pony that was
+waiting saddled with the rein thrown to the ground. She carried her
+slim, lithe figure with a grace, a lightness, that few women could have
+rivaled. When she had swung to the saddle, she half-turned in her seat
+to call an order to the foreman.
+
+“I think, Mac, you had better run up those horses from Eagle Creek.
+Have Denver and Missou look after them.”
+
+“Sure, ma’am,” he said aloud; and to himself: “She’s ce’tainly a
+thoroughbred. Does everything well she tackles. I never saw anything
+like it. I’m a Chink if she doesn’t run this ranch like she had been at
+it forty years. Same thing with her gasoline bronc. That pinto, too.
+He’s got a bad eye for fair, but she makes him eat out of her hand. I
+reckon the pinto is like the rest of us—clean mashed.” He put his arms
+on the corral fence and grew introspective. “Blamed if I know what it
+is about her. ’Course she’s a winner on looks, but that ain’t it alone.
+I guess it’s on account of her being such a game little gentleman. When
+she turns that smile loose on a fellow—well, there’s sure sunshine in
+the air. And game—why, Ned Bannister ain’t gamer himself.”
+
+McWilliams had climbed lazily to the top board of the fence. He was an
+energetic youth, but he liked to do his thinking at his ease. Now, as
+his gaze still followed its lodestar, he suddenly slipped from his seat
+and ran forward, pulling the revolver from its scabbard as he ran. Into
+his eyes had crept a tense alertness, the shining watchfulness of the
+tiger ready for its spring.
+
+The cause of the change in the foreman of the Lazy D was a simple one,
+and on its face innocent enough. It was merely that a stranger had
+swung in casually at the gate of the short stable lane, and was due to
+meet Miss Messiter in about ten seconds. So far good enough. A dozen
+travelers dropped in every day, but this particular one happened to be
+Ned Bannister.
+
+From the stable door a shot rang out. Bannister ducked and shouted
+genially: “Try again.”
+
+But Helen Messiter whirled her pony as on a half-dollar, and charged
+down on the stable.
+
+“Who fired that shot?” she demanded, her eyes blazing.
+
+The horse-wrangler showed embarrassment. He had found time only to lean
+the rifle against the wall.
+
+“I reckon I did, ma’am. Y’u see—”
+
+“Did you get my orders about this feud?” she interrupted crisply.
+
+“Yes, ma’am, but—”
+
+“Then you may call for your time. When I give my men orders I expect
+them to obey.”
+
+“I wouldn’t ’a’ shot if I’d knowed y’u was so near him. Y’u was behind
+that summer kitchen,” he explained lamely.
+
+“You only expect to obey orders when I’m in sight. Is that it?” she
+asked hotly, and without waiting for an answer delivered her ultimatum.
+“Well, I won’t have it. I run this ranch as long as I am its owner. Do
+you understand?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. I hadn’t ought to have did it, but when I seen Bannister
+it come over me I owed him a pill for the one he sent me last week down
+in the coulée. So I up and grabbed the rifle and let him have it.”
+
+“Then you may up and grab your trunk for Medicine Hill. Shorty will
+drive you tomorrow.”
+
+When she returned to her unexpected guest, Helen found him in
+conversation with McWilliams. The latter’s gun had found again its
+holster, but his brown, graceful hand hovered close to its butt.
+
+“Seems like a long time since the Lazy D has been honored by a visit
+from Mr. Bannister,” he was saying, with gentle irony.
+
+“That’s right. So I have come to make up for lost time,” came
+Bannister’s quiet retort.
+
+Miss Messiter did not know much about Wyoming human nature in the raw,
+but she had learned enough to be sure that the soft courtesy of these
+two youths covered a stark courage that might leap to life any moment.
+Wherefore she interposed.
+
+“We’ll be pleased to show you over the place, Mr. Bannister. As it
+happens, we are close to the hospital. Shall we begin there?”
+
+Her cool, silken defiance earned a smile from the visitor. “All your
+cases doing well, ma’am?”
+
+“It’s very kind of you to ask. I suppose you take an interest because
+they are _your_ cases, too, in a way of speaking?”
+
+“Mine? Indeed!”
+
+“Yes. If it were not for you I’m afraid our hospital would be empty.”
+
+“It must be right pleasant to be nursed by Miss Messiter. I reckon the
+boys are grateful to me for scattering my lead so promiscuous.”
+
+“I heard one say he would like to lam your haid tenderly,” murmured
+McWilliams.
+
+“With a two-by-four, I suppose,” laughed Bannister.
+
+“Shouldn’t wonder. But, looking y’u over casual, it occurs to me he
+might get sick of his job befo’ he turned y’u loose,” McWilliams
+admitted, with a glance of admiration at the clean power showing in the
+other’s supple lines.
+
+Nor could either the foreman or his mistress deny the tribute of their
+respect to the bravado of this scamp who sat so jauntily his seat
+regardless of what the next moment might bring forth. Three wounded men
+were about the place, all presumably quite willing to get a clean shot
+at him in the open. One of them had taken his chance already, and
+missed. Their visitor had no warrant for knowing that a second might
+not any instant try his luck with better success. Yet he looked every
+inch the man on horseback, no whit disturbed, not the least conscious
+of any danger. Tall, spare, broad shouldered, this berry-brown young
+man, crowned with close-cropped curls, sat at the gates of the enemy
+very much at his insolent ease.
+
+“I came over to pay my party call,” he explained.
+
+“It really wasn’t necessary. A run in the machine is not a formal
+function.”
+
+“Maybe not in Kalamazoo.”
+
+“I thought perhaps you had come to get my purse and the sixty-three
+dollars,” she derided.
+
+“No, ma’am; nor yet to get that bunch of cows I was going to rustle
+from you to buy an auto. I came to ask you to go riding with me.”
+
+The audacity of it took her breath. Of all the outrageous things she
+had ever heard, this was the cream. An acknowledged outlaw, engaged in
+feud with her retainers over that deadly question of the run of the
+range, he had sauntered over to the ranch where lived a dozen of his
+enemies, three of them still scarred with his bullets, merely to ask
+her to go riding with him. The magnificence of his bravado almost
+obliterated its impudence. Of course she would not think of going. The
+idea! But her eyes glowed with appreciation of his courage, not the
+less because the consciousness of it was so conspicuously absent from
+his manner.
+
+“I think not, Mr. Bannister” and her face almost imperceptibly
+stiffened. “I don’t go riding with strangers, nor with men who shoot my
+boys. And I’ll give you a piece of advice, sir. That is, to burn the
+wind back to your home. Otherwise I won’t answer for your life. My
+punchers don’t love you, and I don’t know how long I can keep them from
+you. You’re not wanted here any more than you were at the dance the
+other evening.”
+
+McWilliams nodded. “That’s right. Y’u better roll your trail, seh; and
+if y’u take my advice, you’ll throw gravel lively. I seen two of the
+boys cutting acrost that pasture five minutes ago. They looked as if
+they might be haided to cut y’u off, and I allow it may be their night
+to howl. Miss Messiter don’t want to be responsible for y’u getting
+lead poisoning.”
+
+“Indeed!” Their visitor looked politely interested. “This solicitude
+for me is very touching. I observe that both of you are carefully
+blocking me from the bunkhouse in order to prevent another
+practice-shot. If I can’t persuade you to join me in a ride, Miss
+Messiter, I reckon I’ll go while I’m still unpunctured.” He bowed, and
+gathered the reins for departure.
+
+“One moment! Mr. McWilliams and I are going with you,” the girl
+announced.
+
+“Changed your mind? Think you’ll take a little _pasear_, after all?”
+
+“I don’t want to be responsible for your killing. We’ll see you safe
+off the place,” she answered curtly.
+
+The foreman fell in on one side of Bannister, his mistress on the
+other. They rode in close formation, to lessen the chance of an
+ambuscade. Bannister alone chatted at his debonair ease, ignoring the
+responsibility they felt for his safety.
+
+“I got my ride, after all,” he presently chuckled. “To be sure, I
+wasn’t expecting Mr. McWilliams to chaperon us. But that’s an added
+pleasure.”
+
+“Would it be an added pleasure to get bumped off to kingdom come?”
+drawled the foreman, giving a reluctant admiration to his aplomb.
+
+“Thinking of those willing boys of yours again, are you?” laughed
+Bannister. “They’re ce’tainly a heap prevalent with their hardware, but
+their hunting don’t seem to bring home any meat.”
+
+“By the way, how _is_ your ankle, Mr. Bannister? I forgot to ask.” This
+shot from the young woman.
+
+He enjoyed it with internal mirth. “They did happen on the target that
+time,” he admitted. “Oh, it’s getting along fine, but I aim to do most
+of my walking on horseback for a while.”
+
+They swept past the first dangerous grove of cottonwoods in safety, and
+rounded the boundary fence corner.
+
+“They’re in that bunch of pines over there,” said the foreman, after a
+single sweep of his eyes in that direction.
+
+“Yes, I see they are. You oughtn’t to let your boys wear red bandannas
+when they go gunning, Miss Messiter. It’s an awful careless habit.”
+
+Helen herself could see no sign of life in the group of pines, but she
+knew their keen, trained eyes had found what hers could not. Riding
+with one or another of her cowboys, she had often noticed how
+infallibly they could read the country for miles around. A scattered
+patch on a distant hillside, though it might be a half-hour’s ride from
+them, told them a great deal more than seemed possible. To her the dark
+spots sifted on that slope meant scrub underbrush, if there was any
+meaning at all in them. But her riders could tell not only whether they
+were alive, but could differentiate between sheep and cattle. Indeed,
+McWilliams could nearly always tell whether they were _her_ cattle or
+not. He was unable to explain to her how he did it. By a sort of
+instinct, she supposed.
+
+The pines were negotiated in safety, and on the part of the men with a
+carelessness she could not understand. For after they had passed there
+was a spot between her shoulder-blades that seemed to tingle in
+expectation of a possible bullet boring its way through. But she would
+have died rather than let them know how she felt.
+
+Perhaps Bannister understood, however, for he remarked casually: “I
+wouldn’t be ambling past so leisurely if I was riding alone. It makes a
+heap of difference who your company is, too. Those punchers wouldn’t
+take a chance at me now for a million dollars.”
+
+“No, they’re some haidstrong, but they ain’t plumb locoed,” agreed Mac.
+
+Fifteen minutes later Helen drew up at the line corner. “We’ll part
+company here, Mr. Bannister. I don’t think there is any more danger
+from my men.”
+
+“Before we part there is something I want to say. I hold that a man has
+as much right to run sheep on these hills as cows. It’s government
+land, and neither one of us owns it. It’s bound to be a case of the
+survival of the fittest. If sheep are hardier and more adapted to the
+country, then cows have got to _vamos_. That’s nature, as it looks to
+me. The buffalo and the antelope have gone, and I guess cows have got
+to take their turn.”
+
+Her scornful eyes burned him. “You came to tell me that, did you? Well,
+I don’t believe a word of it. I’ll not yield my rights without a fight.
+You may depend on that.”
+
+“Here, too,” nodded her foreman. “I’m with my boss clear down the line.
+And as soon as she lets me turn loose my six-gun, you’ll hear it pop,
+seh.”
+
+“I have not a doubt of it, Mr. McWilliams,” returned the sheepman
+blithely. “In the meantime I was going to say that though most of my
+interests are in sheep instead of cattle—”
+
+“I thought most of your interests were in other people’s property,”
+interrupted the young woman.
+
+“It goes into sheep ultimately,” he smiled. “Now, what I am trying to
+get at is this: I’m in debt to you a heap, Miss Messiter, and since I’m
+not all yellow cur, I intend to play fair with you. I have ordered my
+sheep back across the deadline. You can have this range to yourself for
+your cattle. The fight’s off so far as we personally are concerned.”
+
+A hint of deeper color touched her cheeks. Her manner had been cavalier
+at best; for the most part frankly hostile; and all the time the man
+was on an errand of good-will. Certainly he had scored at her expense,
+and she was ashamed of herself.
+
+“Y’u mean that you’re going to respect the deadline? asked Mac in
+surprise.
+
+“I didn’t say quite that,” explained the sheepman. “What I said was
+that I meant to keep on my side of it so far as the Lazy D cattle are
+concerned. I’ll let your range alone.”
+
+“But y’u mean to cross it down below where the Bar Double-E cows run?”
+
+Bannister’s gay smile touched the sardonic face. “Do you invite the
+public to examine your hand when you sit into a game of poker, Mr.
+McWilliams?”
+
+“You’re dead right. It’s none of my business what y’u do so long as y’u
+keep off our range,” admitted the foreman. “And next time the
+conversation happens on Mr. Bannister, I’ll put in my little say-so
+that he ain’t all black.”
+
+“That’s very good of you, sir,” was the other’s ironical retort.
+
+The girl’s gauntleted hand offered itself impulsively. “We can’t be
+friends under existing circumstances, Mr. Bannister. But that does not
+alter the fact that I owe you an apology. You came as a peace envoy,
+and one of my men shot at you. Of course, he did not understand the
+reason why you came, but that does not matter. I did not know your
+reason myself, and I know I have been very inhospitable.”
+
+“Are you shaking hands with Ned Bannister the sheepman or Ned Bannister
+the outlaw?” asked the owner of that name, with a queer little smile
+that seemed to mock himself.
+
+“With Ned Bannister the gentleman. If there is another side to him I
+don’t know it personally.”
+
+He flushed underneath the tan, but very plainly with pleasure. “Your
+opinions are right contrary to Hoyle, ma’am. Aren’t you aware that a
+sheepman is the lowest thing that walks? Ask Mr. McWilliams.”
+
+“I have known stockmen of that opinion, but—”
+
+The foreman’s sentence was never finished. From a clump of bushes a
+hundred yards away came the crack of a rifle. A bullet sang past,
+cutting a line that left on one side of it Bannister, on the other Miss
+Messiter and her foreman. Instantly the two men slid from their horses
+on the farther side, dragged down the young woman behind the cover of
+the broncos, and arranged the three ponies so as to give her the
+greatest protection available. Somehow the weapons that garnished them
+had leaped to their hands before their feet touched the ground.
+
+“That coyote isn’t one of our men. I’ll back that opinion high,” said
+McWilliams promptly.
+
+“Who is he?” the girl whispered.
+
+“That’s what we’re going to find out pretty soon,” returned Bannister
+grimly. “Chances are it’s me he is trying to gather. Now, I’m going to
+make a break for that cottonwood. When I go, you better run up a white
+handkerchief and move back from the firing-line. Turn Buck loose when
+you leave. He’ll stay around and come when I whistle.”
+
+He made a run for it, zigzagging through the sage-brush so swiftly as
+to offer the least certain mark possible for a sharpshooter. Yet twice
+the rifle spoke before he reached the cottonwood.
+
+Meanwhile Mac had fastened the handkerchief of his mistress on the end
+of a switch he had picked up and was edging out of range. His tense,
+narrowed gaze never left the bush-clump from which the shots were being
+pumped, and he was careful during their retreat to remain on the danger
+side of the road, in order to cover Helen.
+
+“I guess Bannister’s right. He don’t want us, whoever he is.”
+
+And even as he murmured it, the wind of a bullet lifted his hat from
+his head. He picked it up and examined it. The course of the bullet was
+marked by a hole in the wide brim, and two more in the side and crown.
+
+“He ce’tainly ventilated it proper. I reckon, ma’am, we’ll make a run
+for it. Lie low on the pinto’s neck, with your haid on the off side.
+That’s right. Let him out.”
+
+A mile and a half farther up the road Mac reined in, and made the
+Indian peace-sign. Two dejected figures came over the hill and resolved
+themselves into punchers of the Lazy D. Each of them trailed a rifle by
+his side.
+
+“You’re a fine pair of ring-tailed snorters, ain’t y’u?” jeered the
+foreman. “Got to get gay and go projectin’ round on the shoot after y’u
+got your orders to stay hitched. Anything to say for yo’selves?”
+
+If they had it was said very silently.
+
+“Now, Miss Messiter is going to pass it up this time, but from now on
+y’u don’t go off on any private massacrees while y’u punch at the Lazy
+D. Git that? This hyer is the last call for supper in the dining-cah.
+If y’u miss it, y’u’ll feed at some other chuckhouse.” Suddenly the
+drawl of his sarcasm vanished. His voice carried the ring of peremptory
+command. “Jim, y’u go back to the ranch with Miss Messiter, _and keep
+your eyes open_. Missou, I need y’u. We’re going back. I reckon y’u
+better hang on to the stirrup, for we got to travel some. _Adios,
+señorita!_”
+
+He was off at a slow lope on the road he had just come, the other man
+running beside the horse. Presently he stopped, as if the arrangement
+were not satisfactory; and the second man swung behind him on the pony.
+Later, when she turned in her saddle, she saw that they had left the
+road and were cutting across the plain, as if to take the sharpshooter
+in the rear.
+
+Her troubled thoughts stayed with her even after she had reached the
+ranch. She was nervously excited, keyed up to a high pitch; for she
+knew that out on the desert, within a mile or two of her, men were
+stalking each other with life or death in the balance as the price of
+vigilance, skill and an unflawed steel nerve. While she herself had
+been in danger, she had been mistress of her fear. But now she could do
+nothing but wait, after ordering out such reinforcements as she could
+recruit without delay; and the inaction told upon her swift, impulsive
+temperament. Once, twice, the wind brought to her a faint sound.
+
+She had been pacing the porch, but she stopped, white as a sheet.
+Behind those faint explosions might lie a sinister tragedy. Her mind
+projected itself into a score of imaginary possibilities. She listened,
+breathless in her tensity, but no further echo of that battlefield
+reached her. The sun still shone warmly on brown Wyoming. She looked
+down into a rolling plain that blurred in the distance from knobs and
+flat spaces into a single stretch that included a thousand rises and
+depressions. That roll of country teemed with life, but the steady,
+inexorable sun beat down on what seemed a shining, primeval waste of
+space. Yet somewhere in that space the tragedy was being
+determined—unless it had been already enacted.
+
+She wanted to scream. The very stillness mocked her. So, too, did the
+clicking windmill, with its monotonous regularity. Her pony still stood
+saddled in the yard. She knew that her place was at home, and she
+fought down a dozen times the tremendous impulse to mount and fly to
+the field of combat.
+
+She looked at her watch. How slowly the minutes dragged! It could not
+be only five minutes since she had looked last time. Again she fell to
+pacing the long west porch, and interrupted herself a dozen times to
+stop and listen.
+
+“I can bear it no longer,” she told herself at last, and in another
+moment was in the saddle plying her pinto with the quirt.
+
+But before she reached the first cottonwoods she saw them coming. Her
+glasses swept the distant group, and with a shiver she made out the
+dreadful truth. They were coming slowly, carrying something between
+them. The girl did not need to be told that the object they were
+bringing home was their dead or wounded.
+
+A figure on horseback detached itself from the huddle of men and
+galloped towards her. He was coming to break the news. But who was the
+victim? Bannister or McWilliams she felt sure, by reason of the sinking
+heart in her; and then it came home that she would be hard hit if it
+were either.
+
+The approaching rider began to take distinct form through her glasses.
+As he pounded forward she recognized him. It was the man nicknamed
+Denver. The wind was blowing strongly from her to him, and while he was
+still a hundred yards away she hurled her question.
+
+His answer was lost in the wind sweep, but one word of it she caught.
+That word was “Mac.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+THE MAN FROM THE SHOSHONE FASTNESSES
+
+
+Though the sharpshooter’s rifle cracked twice during his run for the
+cottonwood, the sheepman reached the tree in safety. He could dodge
+through the brush as elusively as any man in Wyoming. It was a trick he
+had learned on the whitewashed football gridiron. For in his buried
+past this man had been the noted half-back of a famous college, and one
+of his specialties had been running the ball back after a catch through
+a broken field of opponents. The lesson that experience had then
+thumped into him had since saved his life on more than one occasion.
+
+Having reached the tree, Bannister took immediate advantage of the lie
+of the ground to snake forward unobserved for another hundred feet.
+There was a dip from the foot of the tree, down which he rolled into
+the sage below. He wormed his way through the thick scrub brush to the
+edge of a dry creek, into the bed of which he slid. Then swiftly, his
+body bent beneath the level of the bank, he ran forward in the sand. He
+moved noiselessly, eyes and ears alert to aid him, and climbed the bank
+at a point where a live oak grew.
+
+Warily he peeped out from behind its trunk and swept the plain for his
+foe. Nothing was to be seen of him. Slowly and patiently his eyes again
+went over the semi-circle before him, for where death may lurk behind
+every foot of vegetation, every bump or hillock, the plainsman leaves
+as little as may be to chance. No faintest movement could escape the
+sheepman’s eyes, no least stir fail to apprise his ears. Yet for many
+minutes he waited in vain, and the delay told him that he had to do
+with a trained hunter rather than a mere reckless cow-puncher. For
+somewhere in the rough country before him his enemy lay motionless,
+every faculty alive to the least hint of his presence.
+
+It was the whirring flight of a startled dove that told Bannister the
+whereabouts of his foe. Two hundred yards from him the bird rose, and
+the direction it took showed that the man must have been trailing
+forward from the opposite quarter. The sheepman slipped back into the
+dry creek bed, retraced his steps for about a stone-throw, and again
+crawled up the bank.
+
+For a long time he lay face down in the grass, his gaze riveted to the
+spot where he knew his opponent to be hidden. A faint rustle not born
+of the wind stirred the sage. Still Bannister waited. A less
+experienced plainsman would have blazed away and exposed his own
+position. But not this young man with the steel-wire nerves. Silent as
+the coming of dusk, no breaking twig or displaced brush betrayed his
+self-contained presence.
+
+Something in the clump he watched wriggled forward and showed
+indistinctly through an opening in the underscrub. He whipped his rifle
+into position and fired twice. The huddled brown mass lurched forward
+and disappeared.
+
+“Wonder if I got him? Seems to me I couldn’t have missed clean,”
+thought Bannister.
+
+Silence as before, vast and unbroken.
+
+A scramble of running feet tearing a path through the brush, a
+crouching body showing darkly for an eyeflash, and then the pounding of
+a horse’s retreating feet.
+
+Bannister leaped up, ran lightly across the intervening space, and with
+his repeater took a potshot at the galloping horseman.
+
+“Missed!” he muttered, and at once gave a sharp whistle that brought
+his pony to him on the trot. He vaulted to the saddle and gave chase.
+It was rough going, but nothing in reason can stop a cow-pony. As sure
+footed as a mountain goat, as good a climber almost as a cat, Buck
+followed the flying horseman over perilous rock rims and across
+deep-cut creek beds. Pantherlike he climbed up the steep creek sides
+without hesitation, for the round-up had taught him never to falter at
+stiff going so long as his rider put him at it.
+
+It was while he was clambering out of the sheer sides of a wash that
+Bannister made a discovery. The man he pursued was wounded. Something
+in the manner of the fellow’s riding had suggested this to him, but a
+drop of blood splashed on a stone that happened to meet his eye made
+the surmise a certainty.
+
+He was gaining now—not fast, almost imperceptibly, but none the less
+surely. He could see the man looking over his shoulder, once, twice,
+and then again, with that hurried, fearful glance that measures the
+approach of retribution. Barring accidents, the man was his.
+
+But the unforeseen happened. Buck stepped in the hole of a prairie dog
+and went down. Over his head flew the rider like a stone from a
+catapult.
+
+How long Ned Bannister lay unconscious he never knew. But when he came
+to himself it was none too soon. He sat up dizzily and passed his hand
+over his head. Something had happened.
+
+What was it? Oh, yes, he had been thrown from his horse. A wave of
+recollection passed over him, and his mind was clear once more.
+Presently he got to his feet and moved rather uncertainly toward Buck,
+for the horse was grazing quietly a few yards from him.
+
+But half way to the pony he stopped. Voices, approaching by way of the
+bed of Dry Creek, drifted to him.
+
+“He must ’a’ turned and gone back. Mebbe he guessed we was there.”
+
+And a voice that Bannister knew, one that had a strangely penetrant,
+cruel ring of power through the drawl, made answer: “Judd said before
+he fainted he was sure the man was Ned Bannister. I’d ce’tainly like to
+meet up with my beloved cousin right now and even up a few old scores.
+By God, I’d make him sick before I finished with him!”
+
+“I’ll bet y’u would, Cap,” returned the other, admiringly. “Think we’d
+better deploy here and beat up the scenery a few as we go?”
+
+There are times when the mind works like lightning, flashes its
+messages on the wings of an electric current. For Bannister this was
+one of them. The whole situation lighted for him plainly as if it had
+been explained for an hour.
+
+His cousin had been out with a band of his cut-throats on some errand,
+and while returning to the fastnesses of the Shoshone Mountains had
+stopped to noon at a cow spring three or four miles from the Lazy D.
+Judd Morgan, whom he knew to be a lieutenant of the notorious bandit,
+had ridden toward the ranch in the hope of getting an opportunity to
+vent his anger against its mistress or some of her men. While pursuing
+the renegade Bannister had stumbled into a hornet’s nest, and was in
+imminent danger of being stung to death. Even now the last speaker was
+scrambling up the bank toward him.
+
+The sheepman had to choose between leaving his rifle and immediate
+flight. The latter was such a forlorn hope that he gave up Buck for the
+moment, and ran back to the place where his repeating Winchester had
+fallen. Without stopping he scooped the rifle up as he passed. In his
+day he had been a famous sprinter, and he scudded now for dear life. It
+was no longer a question of secrecy. The sound of men breaking their
+hurried way through the heavy brush of the creek bank came crisply to
+him. A voice behind shouted a warning, and from not a hundred yards in
+front of him came an answering shout. Hemmed in from the fore and the
+rear, he swung off at a right angle. An open stretch lay before him,
+but he had to take his desperate chance without cover. Anything was
+better than to be trapped like a wild beast driven by the beaters to
+the guns.
+
+Across the bare, brown mesa he plunged; and before he had taken a dozen
+steps the first rifle had located its prey and was sniping at him. He
+had perhaps a hundred yards to cover ere the mesa fell away into a
+hollow, where he might find temporary protection in the scrub pines.
+And now a second marksman joined himself to the first. But he was going
+fast, already had covered half the distance, and it is no easy thing to
+bring down a live, dodging target.
+
+Again the first gun spoke, and scored another miss, whereat a mocking,
+devilish laugh rang out in the sunshine.
+
+“Y’u boys splash a heap of useless lead around the horizon. I reckon
+Cousin Ned’s my meat. Y’u see, I get him in the flapper without
+spoiling him complete.” And at the word he flung the rifle to his
+shoulder and fired with no apparent aim.
+
+The running man doubled up like a cottontail, but found his feet again
+in an instant, though one arm hung limp by his side. He was within a
+dozen feet of the hilldrop and momentary safety.
+
+“Shall I take him, Cap?” cried one of the men.
+
+“No; he’s mine.” The rifle smoked once more and again the runner went
+down. But this time he plunged headlong down the slope and out of
+sight.
+
+The outlaw chief turned on his heel. “I reckon he’ll not run any more
+to-day. Bring him into camp and we’ll take him along with us,” he said
+carelessly, and walked away to his horse in the creek bed.
+
+Two of the men started forward, but they stopped half way, as if rooted
+to the ground. For a galloping horseman suddenly drew up at the very
+point for which they were starting. He leaped to the ground and warned
+them back with his rifle. While he covered them a second man rode up
+and lifted Bannister to his saddle.
+
+“Ready, Mac,” he gave the word, and both horses disappeared with their
+riders over the brow of the hill. When the surprised desperadoes
+recovered themselves and reached that point the rescuers had
+disappeared in the heavy brush.
+
+The alarm was at once given, and their captain, cursing them in a
+raucous bellow for their blunder, ordered immediate pursuit. It was
+some little time before the trail of the fugitives was picked up, but
+once discovered they were over hauled rapidly.
+
+“We’re not going to get out without swapping lead,” McWilliams admitted
+anxiously. “I wisht y’u wasn’t hampered with that load, but I reckon
+I’ll have to try to stand them off alone.”
+
+“We bucked into a slice of luck when I opened on his bronc mavericking
+around alone. Hadn’t been for that we could never have made it,” said
+Missou, who never crossed a bridge until he came to it.
+
+“We haven’t made it yet, old hoss, not by a long mile, and two more on
+top o’ that. They’re beginning to pump lead already. Huh! Got to drap
+your pills closer’n that ’fore y’u worry me.”
+
+“I believe he’s daid, anyway,” said Missou presently, peering down into
+the white face of the unconscious man.
+
+“Got to hang onto the remains, anyhow, for Miss Helen. Those coyotes
+are too much of the wolf breed to leave him with them.”
+
+“Looks like they’re gittin’ the aim some better,” equably remarked the
+other a minute later, when a spurt of sand flew up in front of him.
+
+“They’re ce’tainly crowding us. I expaict I better send them a
+‘How-de-do?’ so as to discourage them a few.” He took as careful aim as
+he could on the galloping horse, but his bullet went wide.
+
+“They’re gaining like sixty. It’s my offhand opinion we better stop at
+that bunch of trees and argue some with them. No use buck-jumpin’ along
+to burn the wind while they drill streaks of light through us.”
+
+“All right. Take the trees. Y’u’ll be able to get into the game some
+then.”
+
+They debouched from the road to the little grove and slipped from their
+horses.
+
+“Deader’n hell,” murmured Missou, as he lifted the limp body from his
+horse. “But I guess we’ll pack what’s left back to the little lady at
+the Lazy D.”
+
+The leader of the pursuers halted his men just out of range and came
+forward alone, holding his right hand up in the usual signal of peace.
+In appearance he was not unlike Ned Bannister. There was the same long,
+slim, tiger build, with the flowing muscles rippling easily beneath the
+loose shirt; the same effect of power and dominance, the same clean,
+springy stride. The pose of the head, too, even the sweep of salient
+jaw, bore a marked resemblance. But similarity ceased at the
+expression. For instead of frankness there lurked here that hint of the
+devil of strong passion uncontrolled. He was the victim of his own
+moods, and in the space of an hour one might, perhaps, read in that
+face cold cunning, cruel malignity, leering ribaldry, as well as the
+hard-bitten virtues of unflinching courage and implacable purpose.
+
+“I reckon you’re near enough,” suggested Mac, when the man had
+approached to within a hundred feet of the tree clump.
+
+“_Y’u’re_ drawing the dead-line,” the other acknowledged, indolently.
+“It won’t take ten words to tell y’u what I want and mean to have. I’m
+giving y’u two minutes to hand me over the body of Ned Bannister. If
+y’u don’t see it that way I’ll come and make a lead mine of your whole
+outfit.”
+
+“Y’u can’t come too quick, seh. We’re here a-shootin’, and don’t y’u
+forget it,” was McWilliams’s prompt answer.
+
+The sinister face of the man from the Shoshones darkened. “Y’u’ve
+signed your own death warrants,” he let out through set teeth, and at
+the word swung on his heel.
+
+“The ball’s about to open. Pardners for a waltz. Have a dust-cutter,
+Mac, before she grows warm.”
+
+The puncher handed over his flask, and the other held it before his eye
+and appraised the contents in approved fashion. “Don’t mind if I do.
+Here’s how!”
+
+“How!” echoed Missou, in turn, and tipped up the bottle till the liquor
+gurgled down his baked throat.
+
+“He’s fanning out his men so as to, get us both at the front and back
+door. Lucky there ain’t but four of them.”
+
+“I guess we better lie back to back,” proposed Missou. “If our luck’s
+good I reckon they’re going to have a gay time rushing this fort.”
+
+A few desultory shots had already been dropped among the cottonwoods,
+and returned by the defendants when Missou let out a yell of triumph.
+
+“Glory Hallelujah! Here comes the boys splittin’ down the road
+hell-for-leather. That lopsided, ring-tailed snorter of a hawss-thief
+is gathering his wolves for a hike back to the tall timber. Feed me a
+cigareet, Mac. I plumb want to celebrate.”
+
+It was as the cow-puncher had said. Down the road a cloud of dust was
+sweeping toward them, in the centre of which they made out three
+hardriding cowboys from the ranch. Farther back, in the distance, was
+another dust whirl. The outlaw chief’s hard, vigilant gaze swept over
+the reinforcements! and decided instantly that the game had gone
+against him for the present. He whistled shrilly twice, and began a
+slow retreat toward the hills. The miscreants flung a few defiant shots
+at the advancing cowmen, and disappeared, swallowed up in the earth
+swells.
+
+The homeward march was a slow one, for Bannister had begun to show
+signs of consciousness and it was necessary to carry him with extreme
+care. While they were still a mile from the ranch house the pinto and
+its rider could be seen loping toward them.
+
+“Ride forward, Denver, and tell Miss Helen we’re coming. Better have
+her get everything fixed to doctor him soon as we get there. Give him
+the best show in the world, and he’ll still be sailing awful close to
+the divide. I’ll bet a hundred plunks he’ll cash in, anyway.”
+
+“_Done!_”
+
+The voice came faintly from the improvised litter. Mac turned with a
+start, for he had not known that Bannister was awake to his
+surroundings. The man appeared the picture of helplessness, all the
+lusty power and vigor stricken out of him; but his indomitable spirit
+still triumphed over the physical collapse, for as the foreman looked a
+faint smile touched the ashen lips. It seemed to say: “Still in the
+ring, old man.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+IN THE LAZY D HOSPITAL
+
+
+Helen’s first swift glance showed that the wounded man was Bannister.
+She turned in crisp command to her foreman.
+
+“Have him taken to my room and put to bed there. We have no time to
+prepare another. And send one of the boys on your best horse for a
+doctor.”
+
+They carried the limp figure in with rough tenderness and laid him in
+the bed. McWilliams unbuckled the belt and drew off the chaps; then,
+with the help of Denver, undressed the wounded man and covered him with
+quilts. So Helen found him when she came in to attend his wounds,
+bringing with her such things as she needed for her task. Mrs. Winslow,
+the housekeeper, assisted her, and the foreman stayed to help, but it
+was on the mistress of the ranch that the responsibility of saving him
+fell. Missou was already galloping to Bear Creek for a doctor, but the
+girl knew that the battle must be fought and the issue decided before
+he could arrive.
+
+He had fallen again into insensibility and she rinsed and dressed his
+wounds, working with the quiet impersonal certainty of touch that did
+not betray the inner turmoil of her soul. But McWilliams, his eyes
+following her every motion and alert to anticipate her needs, saw that
+the color had washed from her face and that she was controlling herself
+only to meet the demands of the occasion.
+
+As she was finishing, the sheepman opened his eyes and looked at her.
+
+“You are not to speak or ask questions. You have been wounded and we
+are going to take care of you,” she ordered.
+
+“That’s right good of y’u. I ce’tainly feel mighty trifling.” His wide
+eyes traveled round till they fell on the foreman. “Y’u see I came back
+to help fill your hospital. Am I there now? Where am I?” His gaze
+returned to Helen with the sudden irritation of the irresponsible sick.
+
+“You are at the Lazy D, in my room. You are not to worry about
+anything. Everything’s all right.”
+
+He took her at her word and his eyes closed; but presently he began to
+mutter unconnected words and phrases. When his lids lifted again there
+was a wilder look in his eyes, and she knew that delirium was
+beginning. At intervals it lasted for long; indeed, until the doctor
+came next morning in the small hours. He talked of many things Helen
+Messiter did not understand, of incidents in his past life, some of
+them jerky with the excitement of a tense moment, others apparently
+snatches of talk with relatives. It was like the babbling of a child,
+irrelevant and yet often insistent. He would in one breath give orders
+connected with the lambing of his sheep, in the next break into
+football talk, calling out signals and imploring his men to hold them
+or to break through and get the ball. Once he broke into curses, but
+his very oaths seemed to come from a clean heart and missed the
+vulgarity they might have had. Again his talk rambled inconsequently
+over his youth, and he would urge himself or someone else of the same
+name to better life.
+
+“Ned, Ned, remember your mother,” he would beseech. “She asked me to
+look after you. Don’t go wrong.” Or else it would be, “Don’t disgrace
+the general, Ned. You’ll break his heart if you blacken the old name.”
+To this theme he recurred repeatedly, and she noticed that when he
+imagined himself in the East his language was correct and his
+intonation cultured, though still with a suggestion of a Southern
+softness.
+
+But when he spoke of her his speech lapsed into the familiar drawl of
+Cattleland. “I ain’t such a sweep as y’u think, girl. Some day I’ll
+sure tell y’u all about it, and how I have loved y’u ever since y’u
+scooped me up in your car. You’re the gamest little lady! To see y’u
+come a-sailin’ down after me, so steady and businesslike, not turning a
+hair when the bullets hummed—I sure do love y’u, Helen.” And then he
+fell upon her first name and called her by it a hundred times softly to
+himself.
+
+This happened when she was alone with him, just before the doctor came.
+She heard it with starry eyes and with a heart that flushed for joy a
+warmer color into her cheeks. Brushing back the short curls, she kissed
+his damp forehead. It was in the thick of the battle, before he had
+weathered that point where the issues of life and death pressed
+closely, and even in the midst of her great fears it brought her
+comfort. She was to think often of it later, and always the memory was
+to be music in her heart. Even when she denied her love for him,
+assured herself it was impossible she could care for so shameful a
+villain, even then it was a sweet torture to allow herself the luxury
+of recalling his broken delirious phrases. At the very worst he could
+not be as bad as they said; some instinct told her this was impossible.
+His fearless devil-may-care smile, his jaunty, gallant bearing, these
+pleaded against the evidence for him. And yet was it conceivable that a
+man of spirit, a gentleman by training at least, would let himself lie
+under the odium of such a charge if he were not guilty? Her tangled
+thoughts fought this profitless conflict for days. Nor could she
+dismiss it from her mind. Even after he began to mend she was still on
+the rack. For in some snatch of good talk, when the fine quality of the
+man seemed to glow in his face, poignant remembrance would stab her
+with recollection of the difference between what he was and what he
+seemed to be.
+
+One of the things that had been a continual surprise to Helen was the
+short time required by these deep-cheated and clean-blooded Westerners
+to recover from apparently serious wounds. It was scarce more than two
+weeks since Bannister had filled the bunkhouse with wounded men, and
+already two of them were back at work and the third almost fit for
+service. For perhaps three days the sheepman’s life hung in the
+balance, after which his splendid constitution and his outdoor life
+began to tell. The thermometer showed that the fever had slipped down a
+notch, and he was now sleeping wholesomely a good part of his time.
+Altogether, unless for some unseen contingency, the doctor prophesied
+that the sheepman was going to upset the probabilities and get well.
+
+“Which merely shows, ma’am, what is possible when you give a sound man
+twenty-four hours a day in our hills for a few years,” he added.
+“Thanks to your nursing he’s going to shave through by the narrowest
+margin possible. I told him to-day that he owed his life to you, Miss
+Messiter.”
+
+“I don’t think you need have told him that Doctor,” returned that young
+woman, not a little vexed at him, “especially since you have just been
+telling me that he owes it to Wyoming air and his own soundness of
+constitution.”
+
+When she returned to the sickroom to give her patient his medicine he
+wanted to tell her what the doctor had said, but she cut him off
+ruthlessly and told him not to talk.
+
+“Mayn’t I even say ‘Thank you?’” he wanted to know.
+
+“No; you talk far too much as it is.”
+
+He smiled “All right. Y’u sit there in that chair, where I can see y’u
+doing that fancywork and I’ll not say a word. It’ll keep, all right,
+what I want to say.”
+
+“I notice you keep talking,” she told him, dryly.
+
+“Yes, ma’am. Y’u had better have let me say what I wanted to, but I’ll
+be good now.”
+
+He fell asleep watching her, and when he awoke she was still sitting
+there, though it was beginning to grow dark. He spoke before she knew
+he was awake.
+
+“I’m going to get well, the doctor thinks.”
+
+“Yes, he told me,” she answered.
+
+“Did he tell y’u it was your nursing saved me?”
+
+“Please don’t think about that.”
+
+“What am I to think about? I owe y’u a heap, and it keeps piling up. I
+reckon y’u do it all because it’s your Christian duty?” he demanded.
+
+“It is my duty, isn’t it?”
+
+“I didn’t say it wasn’t, though I expaict Bighorn County will forget to
+give y’u a unanimous vote of thanks for doing it. I asked if y’u did it
+because it was your duty?”
+
+“The reason doesn’t matter so that I do it,” she answered, steadily.
+
+“Reasons matter some, too, though they ain’t as important as actions
+out in this country. Back in Boston they figure more, and since y’u
+used to go to school back there y’u hadn’t ought to throw down your
+professor of ethics.”
+
+“Don’t you think you have talked enough for the present?” she smiled,
+and added: “If I make you talk whenever I sit beside you I shall have
+to stay away.”
+
+“That’s where y’u’ve ce’tainly got the drop on me, ma’am. I’m a clam
+till y’u give the word.”
+
+Before a week he was able to sit up in a chair for an hour or two, and
+soon after could limp into the living room with the aid of a walking
+stick and his hostess. Under the tan he still wore an interesting
+pallor, but there could be no question that he was on the road to
+health.
+
+“A man doesn’t know what he’s missing until he gets shot up and is
+brought to the Lazy D hospital, so as to let Miss Messiter exercise her
+Christian duty on him,” he drawled, cheerfully, observing the sudden
+glow on her cheek brought by the reference to his unanswered question.
+
+He made the lounge in the big sunny window his headquarters. From it he
+could look out on some of the ranch activities when she was not with
+him, could watch the line riders as they passed to and fro and command
+a view of one of the corrals. There was always, too, the turquoise sky,
+out of which poured a flood of light on the roll of hilltops. Sometimes
+he read to himself, but he was still easily tired, and preferred
+usually to rest. More often she read aloud to him while he lay back
+with his leveled eyes gravely on her till the gentle, cool abstraction
+she affected was disturbed and her perplexed lashes rose to reproach
+the intensity of his gaze.
+
+She was of those women who have the heavenborn faculty of making home
+of such fortuitous elements as are to their hands. Except her piano and
+such knickknacks as she had brought in a single trunk she had had to
+depend upon the resources of the establishment to which she had come,
+but it is wonderful how much can be done with some Navajo rugs, a
+bearskin, a few bits of Indian pottery and woven baskets and a
+judicious arrangement of scenic photographs. In a few days she would
+have her pictures from Kalamazoo, pending which her touch had
+transformed the big living room from a cheerless barn into a spot that
+was a comfort to the eye and heart. To the wounded man who lay there
+slowly renewing the blood he had lost the room was the apotheosis of
+home, less, perhaps, by reason of what it was in itself than because it
+was the setting for her presence—for her grave, sympathetic eyes, the
+sound of her clear voice, the light grace of her motion. He rejoiced in
+the delightful intimacy the circumstances made necessary. To hear
+snatches of joyous song and gay laughter even from a distance, to watch
+her as she came in and out on her daily tasks, to contest her opinions
+of books and life and see how eagerly she defended them; he wondered
+himself at the strength of the appeal these simple things made to him.
+Already he was dreading the day when he must mount his horse and ride
+back into the turbulent life from which she had for a time, snatched
+him.
+
+“I’ll hate to go back to sheepherding,” he told her one day at lunch,
+looking at her across a snow-white tablecloth upon which were a service
+of shining silver, fragile china teacups and plates stamped Limoges.
+
+He was at the moment buttering a delicious French roll and she was
+daintily pouring tea from an old family heirloom. The contrast between
+this and the dust and the grease of a midday meal at the end of a
+“chuck wagon” lent accent to his smiling lamentation.
+
+“A lot of sheepherding _you_ do,” she derided.
+
+“A shepherd has to look after his sheep, y’u know.”
+
+“You herd sheep just about as much as I punch cows.”
+
+“I have to herd my herders, anyhow, and that keeps me on the move.”
+
+“I’m glad there isn’t going to be any more trouble between you and the
+Lazy D. And that reminds me of another thing. I’ve often wonered who
+those men could have been that attacked you the day you were hurt.”
+
+She had asked the question almost carelessly, without any thought that
+this might be something he wished to conceal, but she recognized her
+mistake by the wariness that filmed his eyes instantly.
+
+“Room there for a right interesting guessing contest,” he replied.
+
+“_You_ wouldn’t need to guess,” she charged, on swift impulse.
+
+“Meaning that I know?”
+
+“You do know. You can’t deny that you now.”
+
+“Well, say that I know?”
+
+“Aren’t you going to tell?”
+
+He shook his head. “Not just yet. I’ve got private reasons for keeping
+it quiet a while.”
+
+“I’m sure they are creditable to you,” came her swift ironic retort.
+
+“Sure,” he agreed, whimsically. “I must live up to the professional
+standard. Honor among thieves, y’u know.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+MISS DARLING ARRIVES
+
+
+Miss Messiter clung to civilization enough, at least, to prefer that
+her chambermaid should be a woman rather than a Chinese. It did not
+suit her preconceived idea of the proper thing that Lee Ming should
+sweep floors, dust bric-a-brac, and make the beds. To see him
+slosh-sloshing around in his felt slippers made her homesick for
+Kalamazoo. There were other reasons why the proprieties would be better
+served by having another woman about the place; reasons that had to do
+with the chaperone system that even in the uncombed West make its
+claims upon unmarried young women of respectability. She had with her
+for the present fourteen-year-old Ida Henderson, but this arrangement
+was merely temporary.
+
+Wherefore on the morning after her arrival Helen had sent two letters
+back to “the States.” One of these had been to Mrs. Winslow, a widow of
+fifty-five, inviting her to come out on a business basis as housekeeper
+of the Lazy D. The buxom widow had loved Helen since she had been a
+toddling baby, and her reply was immediate and enthusiastic. Eight days
+later she had reported in person. The second letter bore the
+affectionate address of Nora Darling, Detroit, Michigan. This also in
+time bore fruit at the ranch in a manner worthy of special mention.
+
+It was the fourth day after Ned Bannister had been carried back to the
+Lazy D that Helen Messiter came out to the porch of the house with a
+letter in her hand. She found her foreman sitting on the steps waiting
+for her, but he got up as soon as he heard the fall of her light
+footsteps behind him.
+
+“You sent for me, ma’am?” he asked, hat in hand.
+
+“Yes; I want you to drive into Gimlet Butte and bring back a person
+whom you’ll find at the Elk House waiting for you. I had rather you
+would go yourself, because I know you’re reliable.”
+
+“Thank you, ma’am. How will I know him?”
+
+“It’s a woman—a spinster. She’s coming to help Mrs. Winslow. Inquire
+for Miss Darling. She isn’t used to jolting two days in a rig, but I
+know you will be careful of her.”
+
+“I’ll surely be as careful of the old lady as if she was my own
+mother.”
+
+The mistress of the ranch smothered a desire to laugh.
+
+“I’m sure you will. At her age she may need a good deal of care. Be
+certain you take rug enough.”
+
+“I’ll take care of her the best I know how. Expect she’s likely
+rheumatic, but I’ll wrop her up till she looks like a Cheyenne squaw
+when tourist is trying to get a free shoot at her with camera.”
+
+“Please do. I want her to get a good impression of Wyoming so that she
+will stay. I don’ know about the rheumatism, but you might ask her.”
+
+There were pinpoints of merriment behind the guileless innocence of her
+eyes, but they came to the surface only after the foreman had departed.
+
+McWilliams ordered a team of young horse hitched, and presently set out
+on his two day journey to Gimlet Butte. He reached that town in good
+season, left the team at a corral and walked back to the Elk House. The
+white dust of the plains was heavy on him, from the bandanna that
+loosely embraced the brown throat above the flannel shirt to the
+encrusted boots but through it the good humor of his tanned face smiled
+fraternally on a young woman he passes at the entrance to the hotel.
+Her gay smile met his cordially, and she was still in his mind while he
+ran his eye down the register in search of the name he wanted. There it
+was—Miss Nora Darling, Detroit, Michigan—in the neatest of little round
+letters, under date of the previous day’s arrivals.
+
+“Is Miss Darling in?” asked McWilliams of the half-grown son of the
+landlady who served in lieu of clerk and porter.
+
+“Nope! Went out a little while ago. Said to tell anybody to wait that
+asked for her.”
+
+Mac nodded, relieved to find that duty had postponed itself long enough
+for him to pursue the friendly smile that had not been wasted on him a
+few seconds before. He strolled out to the porch and decided at once
+that he needed a cigar more than anything else on earth. He was helped
+to a realization of his need by seeing the owner of the smile disappear
+in an adjoining drug store.
+
+She was beginning on a nut sundae when the puncher drifted in. She
+continued to devote even her eyes to its consumption, while the foreman
+opened a casual conversation with the drug clerk and lit his cigar.
+
+“How are things coming in Gimlet Butte?” he asked, by way of prolonging
+his stay rather than out of desire for information.
+
+Yes, she certainly had the longest, softest lashes he had ever seen,
+and the ripest of cherry lips, behind the smiling depths of which
+sparkled two rows of tiny pearls. He wished she would look at _him_ and
+smile again. There wasn’t any use trying to melt a sundae with it,
+anyhow.
+
+“Sure, it’s a good year on the range and the price of cows jumping,” he
+heard his sub-conscious self make answer to the patronizing inquiries
+of him of the “boiled” shirt.
+
+“Funny how pretty hair of that color was especially when there was so
+much of it. You might call it a sort of coppery gold where the little
+curls escaped in tendrils and ran wild. A fellow—”
+
+“Yes, I reckon most of the boys will drop around to the Fourth of July
+celebration. Got to cut loose once in a while, y’u know.”
+
+A shy glance shot him and set him a-tingle with a queer delight.
+Gracious, what pretty dark velvety lashes she had!
+
+She was rising already, and as she paid for the ice cream that innocent
+gaze smote him again with the brightest of Irish eyes conceivable. It
+lingered for just a ponderable sunlit moment or him. She had smiled
+once more.
+
+After a decent interval Mac pursued his _petite_ charmer to the hotel.
+She was seated on the porch reading a magazine, and was absorbedly
+unconscious of him when he passed. For a few awkward moments he hung
+around the office, then returned to the porch and took the chair most
+distant from her. He had sat there a long ten minutes before she let
+her hands and the magazine fall into her lap and demurely gave him his
+chance.
+
+“Can you tell me how far it is to the Lazy D ranch?”
+
+“Seventy-two miles as the crow flies, ma’am.”
+
+“Thank you.”
+
+The conversation threatened to die before it was well born. Desperately
+McWilliams tried to think of something to say to keep it alive without
+being too bold.
+
+“If y’u were thinking of traveling out that way I could give y’u a
+lift. I just came in to get another lady—an old lady that has just come
+to this country.”
+
+“Thank you, but I’m expecting a conveyance to meet me here. You didn’t
+happen to pass one on the way, I suppose?”
+
+“No, I didn’t. What ranch were y’u going to, ma’am?
+
+“Miss Messiter’s—the Lazy D.”
+
+A suspicion began to penetrate the foreman’s brain. “Y’u ain’t Miss
+Darling?”
+
+“What makes you so sure I’m not?” she asked, tilting her dimpled chin
+toward him aggressively.
+
+“Y’u’re too young,” he protested, helplessly.
+
+“I’m no younger than you are,” came her quick, indignant retort.
+
+Thus boldly accused of his youth, the foreman blushed. “I didn’t mean
+that. Miss Messiter said she was an old lady—”
+
+“You needn’t tell fibs about it. She couldn’t have said anything of the
+kind. Who are _you_, anyhow?” the girl demanded, with spirit.
+
+“I’m the foreman of the Lazy D, come to get Miss Darling. My name is
+McWilliams—Jim McWilliams.”
+
+“I don’t need your first name, Mr. McWilliams,” she assured him,
+sweetly. “And will you please tell me why you have kept me waiting here
+more than thirty hours?”
+
+“Miss Messiter didn’t get your letter in time. Y’u see, we don’t get
+mail every day at the Lazy D,” he explained, the while he hopefully
+wondered just when she was going to need his last name.
+
+“I don’t see why you don’t go after your mail every day at least,
+especially when Miss Messiter was expecting me. To leave me waiting
+here thirty hours—I’ll not stand it. When does the next train leave for
+Detroit?” she asked, imperiously.
+
+The situation seemed to call for diplomacy, and Jim McWilliams moved to
+a nearer chair. “I’m right sorry it happened, ma’am, and I’ll bet Miss
+Messiter is, too. Y’u see, we been awful busy one way and ’nother, and
+I plumb neglected to send one of the boys to the post-office.”
+
+“Why didn’t one of them walk over after supper?” she demanded,
+severely.
+
+He curbed the smile that was twitching at his facial muscles.
+
+“Well, o’ course it ain’t so far,—only forty-three miles—still—”
+
+“Forty-three miles to the post-office?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am, only forty-three. If you’ll excuse me this time—”
+
+“Is it really forty-three?”
+
+He saw that her sudden smile had brought out the dimples in the oval
+face and that her petulance had been swept away by his astounding
+information.
+
+“Forty-three, sure as shootin’, except twict a week when it comes to
+Slauson’s, and that’s only twenty miles,” he assured her. “Used to be
+seventy-two, but the Government got busy with its rural free delivery,
+and now we get it right at our doors.”
+
+“You must have big doors,” she laughed.
+
+“All out o’ doors,” he punned. “Y’u see, our house is under our hat,
+and like as not that’s twenty miles from the ranchhouse when night
+falls.”
+
+“Dear me!” She swept his graceful figure sarcastically. “And, of
+course, twenty miles from a brush, too.”
+
+He laughed with deep delight at her thrust, for the warm youth in him
+did not ask for pointed wit on the part of a young woman so attractive
+and with a manner so delightfully provoking.
+
+“I expaict I have gathered up some scenery on the journey. I’ll go
+brush it off and get ready for supper. I’d admire to sit beside y’u and
+pass the butter and the hash if y’u don’t object. Y’u see, I don’t
+often meet up with ladies, and I’d ought to improve my table manners
+when I get a chanct with one so much older than I am and o’ course so
+much more experienced.”
+
+“I see you don’t intend to pass any honey with the hash,” she flashed,
+with a glimpse of the pearls.
+
+“_Didn’t_ y’u say y’u was older than me? I believe I’ve plumb forgot
+how old y’u said y’u was, Miss Darling.”
+
+“Your memory’s such a sieve it wouldn’t be worth while telling you.
+After you’ve been to school a while longer maybe I’ll try you again.”
+
+“Some ladies like ’em young,” he suggested, amiably.
+
+“But full grown,” she amended.
+
+“Do y’u judge by my looks or my ways?” he inquired, anxiously.
+
+“By both.”
+
+“That’s right strange,” he mused aloud. “For judging by some of your
+ways you’re the spinster Miss Messiter was telling me about, but
+judging by your looks y’u’re only the prettiest and sassiest
+twenty-year-old in Wyoming.”
+
+And with this shot he fled, to see what transformation he could effect
+with the aid of a whiskbroom, a tin pan of alkali water and a roller
+towel.
+
+When she met him at the supper table her first question was, “Did Miss
+Messiter say I was an old maid?”
+
+“Sho! I wouldn’t let that trouble me if I was y’u. A woman ain’t any
+older than she looks. Your age don’t show to speak of.”
+
+“But did she?”
+
+“I reckon she laid a trap for me and I shoved my paw in. She wanted to
+give me a pleasant surprise.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+“Don’t y’u grow anxious about being an old maid. There ain’t any in
+Wyoming to speak of. If y’u like I’ll tell the boys you’re worried and
+some of them will be Johnnie-on-the-Spot. They’re awful gallant,
+cowpunchers are.”
+
+“Some of them may be,” she differed. “If you want to know I’m just
+twenty-one.”
+
+He sawed industriously at his steak. “Y’u don’t say! Just old enough to
+vote—like this steer was before they massacreed him.”
+
+She gave him one look, and thereafter punished him with silence.
+
+They left Gimlet Butte early next morning and reached the Lazy D
+shortly after noon on the succeeding day. McWilliams understood
+perfectly that strenuous competition would inevitably ensue as soon as
+the Lazy D beheld the attraction he had brought into their midst. Nor
+did he need a phrenologist to tell him that Nora was a born flirt and
+that her shy slant glances were meant to penetrate tough hides to
+tender hearts. But this did not discourage him, and he set about making
+his individual impression while he had her all to himself. He wasn’t at
+all sure how deep this went, but he had the satisfaction of hearing his
+first name, the one she had told him she had no need of, fall
+tentatively from her pretty lips before the other boys caught a glimpse
+of her.
+
+Shortly after his arrival at the ranch Mac went to make his report to
+his mistress of some business matters connected with the trip.
+
+“I see you got back safely with the old lady,” she laughed when she
+caught sight of him.
+
+His look reproached her. “Y’u said a spinster.”
+
+“But it was you that insisted on the rheumatism. By the way, did you
+ask her about it?”
+
+“We didn’t get that far,” he parried.
+
+“Oh! How far did you get?” She perched herself on the porch railing and
+mocked him with her friendly eyes. Her heart was light within her and
+she was ready for anything in the way of fun, for the doctor had just
+pronounced her patient out of danger if he took proper care of himself.
+
+“About as fur as I got with y’u, ma’am,” he audaciously retorted.
+
+“We might disagree as to how far that is,” she flung back gayly with
+heightened color.
+
+“No, ma’am, I don’t think we would.”
+
+“But, gracious! You’re not a Mormon. You don’t want us both, do you?”
+she demanded, her eyes sparkling with the exhilaration of the tilt.
+
+“Could I get either one of y’u, do y’u reckon? That’s what’s worrying
+me.”
+
+“I see, and so you intend to keep us both on the string.”
+
+His joyous laughter echoed hers. “I expaict y’u would call that
+presumption or some other dictionary word, wouldn’t y’u?”
+
+“In anybody else perhaps, but surely not in Mr. McWilliams.”
+
+“I’m awful glad to be trotting in a class by myself.”
+
+“And you’ll let us know when you have made your mind up which of us it
+is to be?”
+
+“Well, mine ain’t the only mind that has to be made up,” he drawled.
+
+She took this up gleefully. “I can’t answer for Nora, but I’ll jump at
+the chance—if you decide to give it to me.”
+
+He laughed delightedly into the hat he was momentarily expecting to put
+on. “I’ll mill it over a spell and let y’u know, ma’am.”
+
+“Yes, think it over from all points of view. Of course she is prettier,
+but then I’m not afflicted with rheumatism and probably wouldn’t flirt
+as much afterward. I have a good temper, too, as a rule, but then so
+has Nora.”
+
+“Oh, she’s prettier, is she?” With boyish audacity he grinned at her.
+
+“What do you think?”
+
+He shook his head. “I’ll have to go to the foot of the class on that,
+ma’am. Give me an easier one.”
+
+“I’ll have to choose another subject then. What did you do about that
+bunch of Circle 66 cows you looked at on your way in?”
+
+They discussed business for a few minutes, after which she went back to
+her patient and he to his work.
+
+“Ain’t she a straight-up little gentleman for fair?” the foreman asked
+himself in rhetorical and exuberant question, slapping his hat against
+his leg as he strode toward the corral. “Think of her coming at me like
+she did, the blamed little thoroughbred. Y’u bet she knows me down to
+the ground and how sudden I got over any fool notions I might a-started
+to get in my cocoanut. But the way she came back at me, quick as
+lightning and then some, pretendin’ all that foolishness and knowin’
+all the time I’d savez the game.”
+
+Both McWilliams and his mistress had guessed right in their surmise as
+to Nora Darling’s popularity in the cow country. She made an immediate
+and pronounced hit. It was astonishing how many errands the men found
+to take them to “the house,” as they called the building where the
+mistress of the ranch dwelt. Bannister served for a time as an
+excellent excuse. Judging from the number of the inquiries which the
+men found it necessary to make as to his progress, Helen would have
+guessed him exceedingly popular with her riders. Having a sense of
+humor, she mentioned this to McWilliams one day.
+
+He laughed, and tried to turn it into a compliment to his mistress. But
+she would have none of it.
+
+“I know better, sir. They don’t come here to see me. Nora is the
+attraction, and I have sense enough to know it. My nose is quite out of
+joint,” she laughed.
+
+Mac looked with gay earnestness at the feature she had mentioned.
+“There’s a heap of difference in noses,” he murmured, apparently
+apropos of nothing.
+
+“That’s another way of telling me that Nora’s pug is the sweetest thing
+you ever saw,” she charged.
+
+“I ain’t half such a bad actor as some of the boys,” he deprecated.
+
+“Meaning in what way?”
+
+“The Nora Darling way.”
+
+He pronounced her name so much as if it were a caress that his mistress
+laughed, and he joined in it.
+
+“It’s your fickleness that is breaking my heart, though I knew I was
+lost as soon as I saw your beatific look on the day you got back with
+Nora. The first week I came none of you could do enough for me. Now
+it’s all Nora, darling.” She mimicked gayly his intonation.
+
+“Well, ma’am, it’s this way,” explained the foreman with a grin.
+“Y’u’re right pleasant and friendly, but the boys have got a savvy way
+down deep that y’u’d shuck that friendliness awful sudden if any of
+them dropped around with ‘Object, Matrimony’ in their manner.
+Consequence is, they’re loaded down to the ground with admiration of
+their boss, but they ain’t presumptuous enough to expaict any more. I
+had notions, mebbe, I’d cut more ice, me being not afflicted with
+bashfulness. My notions faded, ma’am, in about a week.”
+
+“Then Nora came?” she laughed.
+
+“No, ma’am, they had gone glimmering long before she arrived. I was
+just convalescent enough to need being cheered up when she drapped in.”
+
+“And are you cheered up yet?” his mistress asked.
+
+He took off his dusty hat and scratched his head. “I ain’t right
+certain, yet, ma’am. Soon as I know I’m consoled, I’ll be round with an
+invite to the wedding.”
+
+“That is, if you are.”
+
+“If I am—yes. Y’u can’t most always tell when they have eyes like
+hers.”
+
+“You’re quite an authority on the sex considering your years.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am.” He looked aggrieved, thinking himself a man grown. “How
+did y’u say Mr. Bannister was?”
+
+“Wait, and I’ll send Nora out to tell you,” she flashed, and
+disappeared in the house.
+
+Conversation at the bunkhouse and the chucktent sometimes circled
+around the young women at the house, but its personality rarely grew
+pronounced. References to Helen Messiter and the housemaid were usually
+by way of repartee at each other. For a change had come over the spirit
+of the Lazy D men, and, though a cheerful profanity still flowed freely
+when they were alone together, vulgarity was largely banished.
+
+The morning after his conversation with Miss Messiter, McWilliams was
+washing in the foreman’s room when the triangle beat the call for
+breakfast, and he heard the cook’s raucous “Come and get it.” There was
+the usual stampede for the tent, and a minute later Mac flung back the
+flap and entered. He took the seat at the head of the table, along the
+benches on both sides of which the punchers were plying busy knives and
+forks.
+
+“A stack of chips,” ordered the foreman; and the cook’s “Coming up” was
+scarcely more prompt than the plate of hot cakes he set before the
+young man.
+
+“Hen fruit, sunny side up,” shouted Reddy, who was further advanced in
+his meal.
+
+“Tame that fog-horn, son,” advised Wun Hop; but presently he slid three
+fried eggs from a frying-pan into the plate of the hungry one.
+
+“I want y’u boys to finish flankin’ that bunch of hill calves to-day,”
+said the foreman, emptying half a jug of syrup over his cakes.
+
+“Redtop, he ain’t got no appetite these days,” grinned Denver, as the
+gentleman mentioned cleaned up a second loaded plate of ham, eggs and
+fried potatoes. “I see him studying a Wind River Bible* yesterday.
+Curious how in the spring a young man’s fancy gits to wandering on
+house furnishing. Red, he was taking the catalogue alphabetically.
+Carpets was absorbin’ his attention, chairs on deck, and chandeliers in
+the hole, as we used to say when we was baseball kids.”
+
+[* A Wind River Bible in the Northwest ranch country is a catalogue of
+one of the big Chicago department stores that does a large shipping
+business in the West.]
+
+
+“Ain’t a word of truth in it,” indignantly denied the assailed, his
+unfinished nose and chin giving him a pathetic, whipped puppy look.
+“Sho! I was just looking up saddles. Can’t a fellow buy a new saddle
+without asking leave of Denver?”
+
+“Cyarpets used to begin with a C in my spelling-book, but saddles got
+off right foot fust with a S,” suggested Mac amiably.
+
+“He was ce’tainly trying to tree his saddle among the C’s. He was
+looking awful loving at a Turkish rug. Reckon he thought it was a
+saddle-blanket,” derided Denver cheerfully.
+
+“Huh! Y’u’re awful smart, Denver,” retaliated Reddy, his complexion
+matching his hair. “Y’u talk a heap with your mouth. Nobody believes a
+word of what y’u say.”
+
+Denver relaxed into a range song by way of repartee:
+
+“I want mighty bad to be married,
+    To have a garden and a home;
+I ce’tainly aim to git married,
+    And have a gyurl for my own.”
+
+
+“Aw! Y’u fresh guys make me tired. Y’u don’t devil me a bit, not a bit.
+Whyfor should I care what y’u say? I guess this outfit ain’t got no
+surcingle on me.” Nevertheless, he made a hurried end of his breakfast
+and flung out of the tent.
+
+“Y’u boys hadn’t ought to wound Reddy’s tender feelings, and him so
+bent on matrimony!” said Denver innocently. “Get a move on them fried
+spuds and sashay them down this way, if there’s any left when y’u fill
+your plate, Missou.”
+
+Nor was Reddy the only young man who had dreams those days at the Lazy
+D. Cupid must have had his hands full, for his darts punctured more
+than one honest plainsman’s heart. The reputation of the young women at
+the Lazy D seemed to travel on the wings of the wind, and from far and
+near Cattleland sent devotees to this shrine of youth and beauty. So
+casually the victims drifted in, always with a good business excuse
+warranted to endure raillery and sarcasm, that it was impossible to say
+they had come of set purpose to sun themselves in feminine smiles.
+
+As for Nora, it is not too much to say that she was having the time of
+her life. Detroit, Michigan, could offer no such field for her
+expansive charms as the Bighorn country, Wyoming. Here she might have
+her pick of a hundred, and every one of them picturesquely begirt with
+flannel shirt, knotted scarf at neck, an arsenal that bristled, and a
+sun-tan that could be achieved only in the outdoors of the Rockies.
+Certainly these knights of the saddle radiated a romance with which
+even her floorwalker “gentleman friend” could not compete.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+A SHEPHERD OF THE DESERT
+
+
+It had been Helen Messiter’s daily custom either to take a ride on her
+pony or a spin in her motor car, but since Bannister had been quartered
+at the Lazy D her time had been so fully occupied that she had given
+this up for the present. The arrival of Nora Darling, however, took so
+much work off her hands that she began to continue her rides and
+drives.
+
+Her patient was by this time so far recovered that he did not need her
+constant attendance and there were reasons why she decided it best to
+spend only a minimum of her time with him. These had to do with her
+increasing interest in the man and the need she felt to discourage it.
+It had come to a pretty pass, she told herself scornfully, when she
+found herself inventing excuses to take her into the room where this
+most picturesque of unhanged scamps was lying. Most good women are at
+heart puritans, and if Helen was too liberal to judge others narrowly
+she could be none the less rigid with herself. She might talk to him of
+her duty, but it was her habit to be frank in thought and she knew that
+something nearer than that abstraction had moved her efforts in his
+behalf. She had fought for his life because she loved him. She could
+deny it no longer. Nor was the shame with which she confessed it
+unmingled with pride. He was a man to compel love, one of the mood
+imperative, chain-armored in the outdoor virtues of strength and
+endurance and stark courage. Her abasement began only where his
+superlation ended. That a being so godlike in equipment should have
+been fashioned without a soul, and that she should have given her heart
+to him. This was the fount of her degradation.
+
+It was of these things she thought as she drove in the late afternoon
+toward those Antelope Peaks he had first pointed out to her. She swept
+past the scene of the battle and dipped down into the plains for a run
+to that western horizon behind the jagged mountain line of which the
+sun was radiantly setting in a splash of glorious colors. Lost in
+thought, space slipped under her wheels unnoticed. Not till her car
+refused the spur and slowed to a despondent halt did she observe that
+velvet night was falling over the land.
+
+She prowled round the machine after the fashion of the motorist,
+examining details that might be the cause of the trouble. She
+discovered soon enough with instant dismay that the gasolene tank was
+empty. Reddy, always unreliable, must have forgotten to fill it when
+she told him to.
+
+By the road she must be thirty miles from home if she were a step;
+across country as the crow flies, perhaps twenty. She was a young woman
+of resolution, and she wasted no time in tears or regrets. The XIX
+ranch, owned by a small “nester” named Henderson, could not be more
+than five or six miles to the southeast. If she struck across the hills
+she would be sure to run into one of the barblines. At the XIX she
+could get a horse and reach the Lazy D by midnight. Without any
+hesitation she struck out. It was unfortunate that she did not have on
+her heavy laced high boots, but she realized that she must take things
+as she found them. Things might have been a good deal worse, she
+reflected philosophically.
+
+And before long they were worse, for the increasing darkness blotted
+out the landmarks she was using as guides and she was lost among the
+hill waves that rolled one after another across the range. Still she
+did not give way, telling herself that it would be better after the
+moon was up. She could then tell north from south, and so have a line
+by which to travel. But when at length the stars came out, thousands
+upon thousands of them, and looked down on a land magically flooded
+with chill moonlight, the girl found that the transformation of Wyoming
+into this sense of silvery loveliness had toned the distant mountain
+line to an indefinite haze that made it impossible for her to
+distinguish one peak from another.
+
+She wandered for hours, hungry and tired and frightened, though this
+last she would not confess.
+
+“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she told herself over and over.
+“Even if I have to stay out all night it will do me no harm. There’s no
+need to be a baby about it.”
+
+But try to evade it as she would, there was something in the loneliness
+of this limitless stretch of hilltop that got on her nerves. The very
+shadows cast by the moonshine seemed too fantastic for reality.
+Something eerie and unearthly hovered over it all, and before she knew
+it a sob choked up her throat.
+
+Vague fancies filtered through her mind, weird imaginings born of the
+night in a mind that had been swept from the moorings of reason. So
+that with no sensible surprise there came to her in that moonlit sea of
+desert the sound of a voice a clear sweet tenor swelling bravely in
+song with the very ecstacy of pathos.
+
+It was the prison song from “Il Trovatore,” and the desolation of its
+lifted appeal went to the heart like water to the roots of flowers.
+
+Ah! I have sigh’d to rest me.
+Deep in the quiet grave.
+
+
+The girl’s sob caught in her breast, stilled with the awe of that
+heavenly music. So for an instant she waited before it was borne in on
+her that the voice was a human one, and that the heaven from which it
+descended was the hilltop above her.
+
+A wild laugh, followed by an oath, cut the dying echoes of the song.
+She could hear the swish of a quirt falling again and again, and the
+sound of trampling hoofs thudding on the hard, sun-cracked ground.
+Startled, she sprang to her feet, and saw silhouetted against the
+skyline a horse and his rider fighting for mastery.
+
+The battle was superb while it lasted. The horse had been a famous
+outlaw, broken to the saddle by its owner out of the sheer passion for
+victory, but there were times when its savage strength rebelled at
+abject submission, and this was one of them. It swung itself skyward,
+and came down like a pile-driver, camel-backed, and without joints in
+the legs. Swiftly it rose again lunging forward and whirling in the
+air, then jarred down at an angle. The brute did its malevolent best, a
+fury incarnate. But the ride, was a match, and more than a match, for
+it. He sat the saddle like a Centaur, with the perfect: unconscious
+grace of a born master, swaying in his seat as need was, and spurring
+the horse to a blinder fury.
+
+Sudden as had been the start, no less sudden was the finish of the
+battle. The bronco pounded to a stiff-legged standstill, trembled for a
+long minute like an aspen, and sank to a tame surrender, despite the
+sharp spurs roweling its bloody sides.
+
+“Ah, my beauty. You’ve had enough, have you?” demanded the cruel,
+triumphant voice of the rider. “You would try that game, would you?
+I’ll teach you.”
+
+“Stop spurring that horse, you bully.”
+
+The man stopped, in sheer amazement at this apparition which had leaped
+out of the ground almost at his feet. His wary glance circled the hills
+to make sure she was alone.
+
+“Ce’tainly, ma’am. We’re sure delighted to meet up with you. Ain’t we,
+Two-step?”
+
+For himself, he spoke the simple truth. He lived in his sensations,
+spurring himself to fresh ones as he had but just now been spurring his
+horse to sate the greed of conquest in him. And this high-spirited,
+gallant creature—he could feel her vital courage in the very ring of
+her voice—offered a rare fillip to his jaded appetite. The dusky,
+long-lashed eyes which always give a woman an effect of beauty, the
+splendid fling of head, and the piquant, finely cut features, with
+their unconscious tale of Brahmin caste, the long lines of the supple
+body, willowy and yet plump as a partridge—they went to his head like
+strong wine. Here was an adventure from the gods—a stubborn will to
+bend, the pride of a haughty young beauty to trail in the dust, her
+untamed heart to break if need be. The lust of the battle was on him
+already. She was a woman to dream about,
+
+“Sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
+Or Cytherea’s breath,”
+
+
+he told himself exultantly as he slid from his horse and stood bowing
+before her.
+
+And he, for his part, was a taking enough picture of devil-may-care
+gallantry gone to seed. The touch of jaunty impudence in his humility,
+not less than the daring admiration of his handsome eyes and the easy,
+sinuous grace of his flexed muscles, labeled him what he was—a man bold
+and capable to do what he willed, and a villain every inch of him.
+
+Said she, after that first clash of stormy eyes with bold, admiring
+ones:
+
+“I am lost—from the Lazy D ranch.”
+
+“Why, no, you’re found,” he corrected, white teeth flashing in a smile.
+
+“My motor ran out of gasolene this afternoon. I’ve been”—there was a
+catch in her voice—“wandering ever since.”
+
+“You’re played out, of course, and y’u’ve had no supper,” he said, his
+quiet close gaze on her.
+
+“Yes, I’m played out and my nerve’s gone.” She laughed a little
+hysterically. “I expect I’m hungry and thirsty, too, though I hadn’t
+noticed it before.”
+
+He whirled to his saddle, and had the canteen thongs unloosed in a
+moment. While she drank he rummaged from his saddle-bags some
+sandwiches of jerky and a flask of whiskey. She ate the sandwiches, he
+the while watching her with amused sympathy in his swarthy countenance.
+
+“You ain’t half-bad at the chuck-wagon, Miss Messiter,” he told her.
+
+She stopped, the sandwich part way to her mouth. “I don’t remember your
+face. I’ve met so many people since I came to the Lazy D. Still, I
+think I should remember you.”
+
+He immediately relieved of duty her quasi apology. “You haven’t seen
+_my face_ before,” he laughed, and, though she puzzled over the double
+meaning that seemed to lurk behind his words and amuse him, she could
+not find the key to it.
+
+It was too dark to make out his features at all clearly, but she was
+sure she had seen him before or somebody that looked very much like
+him.
+
+“Life on the range ain’t just what y’u can call exciting,” he
+continued, “and when a young lady fresh from back East drops among us
+while sixguns are popping, breaks up a likely feud and mends right
+neatly all the ventilated feudists it’s a corollary to her fun that’s
+she is going to become famous.”
+
+What he said was true enough. The unsolicited notoriety her exploit had
+brought upon her had been its chief penalty. Garbled versions of it had
+appeared with fake pictures in New York and Chicago Sunday supplements,
+and all Cattleland had heard and discussed it. No matter into what
+unfrequented cañon she rode, some silent cowpuncher would look at her
+as they met with admiring eyes behind which she read a knowledge of the
+story. It was a lonely desolate country, full of the wide deep silences
+of utter emptiness, yet there could be no footfall but the whisper of
+it was bruited on the wings of the wind.
+
+“Do you know where the Lazy D ranch is from here?” she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Can you take me home?”
+
+“I surely can. But not to-night. You’re more tired than y’u know. We’ll
+camp here, and in the mo’ning we’ll hit the trail bright and early.”
+
+This did not suit her at all. “Is it far to the Lazy D?” she inquired
+anxiously.
+
+“Every inch of forty miles. There’s a creek not more than two hundred
+yards from here. We’ll stay there till morning,” he made answer in a
+matter of course voice, leading the way to the place he had mentioned.
+
+She followed, protesting. Yet though it was not in accord with her
+civilized sense of fitness, she knew that what he proposed was the
+common sense solution. She was tired and worn out, and she could see
+that his broncho had traveled far.
+
+Having reached the bank of the creek, he unsaddled, watered his horse
+and picketed it, and started a fire. Uneasily she watched him.
+
+“I don’t like to sleep out. Isn’t there a ranchhouse near?”
+
+“Y’u wouldn’t call it near by the time we had reached it. What’s to
+hinder your sleeping here? Isn’t this room airy enough? And don’t y’u
+like the system of lighting? ’Twas patented I forget how many million
+years ago. Y’u ain’t going to play parlor girl now after getting the
+reputation y’u’ve got for gameness, are y’u?”
+
+But he knew well enough that it was no silly schoolgirl fear she had,
+but some deep instinct in her that distrusted him and warned her to
+beware. So, lightly he took up the burden of the talk while he gathered
+cottonwood branches for the fire.
+
+“Now if I’d only thought to bring a load of lumber and some
+carpenters—and a chaperon,” he chided himself in burlesque, his bold
+eyes closely on the girl’s face to gloat on the color that flew to her
+cheeks at his suggestion.
+
+She hastened to disclaim lightly the feeling he had unmasked in her.
+“It is a pity, but it can’t be helped now. I suppose I am cross and
+don’t seem very grateful. I’m tired out and nervous, but I am sure that
+I’ll enjoy sleeping out. If I don’t I shall not be so ungenerous as to
+blame you.”
+
+He soon had a cup of steaming coffee ready for her, and the heat of it
+made a new woman of her. She sat in the warm fire glow, and began to
+feel stealing over her a delightful reaction of languor. She told
+herself severely it was ridiculous to have been so foolishly prim about
+the inevitable.
+
+“Since you know my name, isn’t it fair that I should know yours?” she
+smilingly asked, more amiably than she had yet spoken to him.
+
+“Well, since I have found the lamb that was lost, y’u may call me a
+shepherd of the desert.”
+
+“Then, Mr. Shepherd, I’m very glad to meet you. I don’t remember when I
+ever was more glad to meet a stranger.” And she added with a little
+laugh: “It’s a pity I’m too sleepy to do my duty by you in a social
+way.”
+
+“We’ll let that wait till to-morrow. Y’u’ll entertain me plenty then.
+I’ll make your bunk up right away.”
+
+She was presently lying with her feet to the fire, snugly rolled in his
+saddle blankets. But though her eyes were heavy, her brain was still
+too active to permit her to sleep immediately. The excitement of her
+adventure was too near, the emotions of the day too poignantly vivid,
+to lose their hold on her at once. For the first time in her life she
+lay lapped in the illimitable velvet night, countless unwinking stars
+lighting the blue-black dream in which she floated. The enchantment of
+the night’s loveliness swept through her sensitive pulses and thrilled
+her with the mystery of the great life of which she was an atom. Awe
+held her a willing captive.
+
+She thought of many things, of her past life and its incongruity with
+the present, of the man who lay wounded at the Lazy D, of this other
+wide-shouldered vagabond who was just now in the shadows beyond the
+firelight, pacing up and down with long, light even strides as he
+looked to his horse and fed the fire. She watched him make an end of
+the things he found to do and then take his place opposite her. Who and
+what was he, this fascinating scamp who one moment flooded the moonlit
+desert with inspired snatches from the opera sung in the voice of an
+angel, and the next lashed at his horse like a devil incarnate? How
+reconcile the outstanding inconsistencies in him? For his every
+inflection, every motion, proclaimed the strain of good blood gone
+wrong and trampled under foot of set, sardonic purpose, indicated him a
+man of culture in a hell of his own choosing. Lounging on his elbow in
+the flickering shadows, so carelessly insouciant in every picturesque
+inch of him, he seemed to radiate the melodrama of the untamed
+frontier, just as her guest of tarnished reputation now at the ranch
+seemed to breathe forth its romance.
+
+“Sleep well, little partner. Don’t be afraid; nothing can harm you,”
+this man had told her.
+
+Promptly she had answered, “I’m not afraid, thank you, in the least”;
+and after a moment had added, not to seem hostile, “Good night, big
+partner.”
+
+But despite her calm assurance she knew she did not feel so entirely
+safe as if it had been one of her own ranch boys on the other side of
+the fire, or even that other vagabond who had made so direct an appeal
+to her heart. If she were not afraid, at least she knew some vague hint
+of anxiety.
+
+She was still thinking of him when she fell asleep, and when she
+awakened the first sound that fell on her ears was his tuneful whistle.
+Indeed she had an indistinct memory of him in the night, wrapping the
+blankets closer about her when the chill air had half stirred her from
+her slumber. The day was still very young, but the abundant desert
+light dismissed sleep summarily. She shook and brushed the wrinkles out
+of her clothes and went down to the creek to wash her face with the
+inadequate facilities at hand. After redressing her hair she returned
+to the fire, upon which a coffee pot was already simmering.
+
+She came up noiselessly behind him, but his trained senses were
+apprised of her approach.
+
+“Good mo’ning! How did y’u find your bedroom?” he asked, without
+turning from the bacon he was broiling on the end of a stick.
+
+“Quite up to the specifications. With all Wyoming for a floor and the
+sky for a ceiling, I never had a room I liked better. But have you eyes
+in the back of your head?”
+
+He laughed grimly. “I have to be all eyes and ears in my business.”
+
+“Is your business of a nature so sensitive?”
+
+“As much so as stocks on Wall Street. And we haven’t any ticker to warn
+us to get under cover. Do you take cream in your coffee, Miss
+Messiter?”
+
+She looked round in surprise. “Cream?”
+
+“We’re in tin-can land, you know, and live on air-tights. I milk my cow
+with a can-opener. Let me recommend this quail on toast.” He handed her
+a battered tin plate, and prepared to help her from the frying-pan.
+
+“I suppose that is another name for pork?”
+
+“No, really. I happened to bag a couple of hooters before you wakened.”
+
+“You’re a missionary of the good-foods movement. I shall name your
+mission St. Sherry’s-in-the-Wilderness.”
+
+“Ah, Sherry’s! That’s since my time. I don’t suppose I should know my
+way about in little old New York now.”
+
+She found him eager to pick up again the broken strands that had
+connected him with the big world from which he had once come. It had
+been long since she had enjoyed a talk more, for he expressed himself
+with wit and dexterity. But through her enjoyment ran a note of
+apprehension. He was for the moment a resurrected gentleman. But what
+would he be next? She had an insistent memory of a heavenly flood of
+music broken by a horrible discord of raucous oaths.
+
+It was he that lingered over their breakfast, loath to make the first
+move to bring him back into realities; and it was she that had to
+suggest the need of setting out. But once on his feet, he saddled and
+packed swiftly, with a deftness born of experience.
+
+“We’ll have to ask Two-step to carry double to-day,” he said, as he
+helped her to a place behind him.
+
+Two-step had evidently made an end of the bronco spree upon which he
+had been the evening before, for he submitted sedately to his unusual
+burden. The first hilltop they reached had its surprise to offer the
+girl. In a little valley below them, scarce a mile away, nestled a
+ranch with its corrals and buildings.
+
+“Look!” she exclaimed; and then swiftly, “Didn’t you know it was
+there?”
+
+“Yes, that’s the Hilke place,” he answered with composure. “It hasn’t
+been occupied for years.”
+
+“Isn’t that some one crossing to the corral now?”
+
+“No. A stray cow, I reckon.”
+
+They dropped into a hollow between the hills and left the ranch on
+their left. She was not satisfied, and yet she had not grounds enough
+upon which to base a suspicion. For surely the figure she had seen had
+been that of a man.
+
+He let his horse take it easy, except when some impulse of mischief
+stirred him to break into a canter so as to make the girl put her arm
+round his waist for support. They stopped about noon by a stream in a
+cañon defile to lunch and rest the pony.
+
+“I don’t remember this place at all. Are we near home?” she asked.
+
+“About five miles. I reckon you’re right tired. It’s an unhandy way to
+ride.”
+
+Every mile took them deeper into the mountains, through winding cañons
+and over unsuspected trails, and the girl’s uneasiness increased with
+the wildness of the country.
+
+“Are you _sure_ we’re going the right way? I Don’t think we can be,”
+she suggested more than once.
+
+“Dead sure,” he answered the last time, letting Two-step turn into a
+blind draw opening from sheer cañon walls.
+
+A hundred feet from the entrance they rode round a great slide of rock
+into a tiny valley containing a group of buildings.
+
+He swung from the horse and offered a hand to help her dismount.
+
+A reckless, unholy light burned in his daring eyes.
+
+“Home at last, Miss Messiter. Let me offer you a thousand welcomes.”
+
+An icy hand seemed to clutch at her heart. “Home! What do you mean?
+This isn’t the Lazy D.”
+
+“Not at all. The Lazy D is sixty miles from here. This is where I hang
+out—and you, for the present.”
+
+“But—I don’t understand. How dare you bring me here?”
+
+“The desire for your company, Miss Messiter, made of me a Lochinvar.”
+
+She saw, with a shiver, that the ribald eyes were mocking her.
+
+“Take me back this instant—this instant,” she commanded, but her
+imperious voice was not very sure of itself. “Take me home at once, you
+liar.”
+
+“I expect you don’t quite understand,” he exclaimed, with gentle
+derision. “You’re a prisoner of war, Miss Messiter.”
+
+“And who are you?” she faltered.
+
+But before he spoke she found an answer to her question, found it by a
+flash of divination she could never afterward explain.
+
+“You’re the man I met at Fraser’s dance—the man they call the King of
+the Bighorn country.”
+
+He accepted identification with an elaborate bow. “Correct, ma’am. I’m
+Ned Bannister the king.”
+
+An instant before she had been sitting rigid with a face of startled
+fear, but as he spoke a great wave of joy beat into her heart. For if
+this man were the terror of the country the one she had left wounded at
+her house could not be. She forgot that she was herself in peril,
+forgot everything in the swift conviction that the man she loved was an
+honest gentleman and worthy of her.
+
+The man standing by the horse could not understand the light that had
+so immediately leaped to her eyes. Even _his_ vanity hesitated at the
+obvious deduction that she had already succumbed to his attractions.
+
+“But I don’t understand-0that isn’t your real name, is it? I know
+another man who calls himself Ned Bannister.”
+
+He laughed scornfully. “My cousin, the sheepherder. Yes, that’s his
+name, too. We both have a right to it.”
+
+“Your cousin?”
+
+The familiarity in him that had been haunting her all day and that had
+deceived her at the dance was now explained. It was her lover of which
+this man reminded her. Now that she had been given the clue she could
+trace kinship in manner, gait and appearance.
+
+“I’m not proud of my mealy-mouthed namesake,” he replied.
+
+“Nor he of you, I am sure,” she quickly answered.
+
+“I dare say not. But won’t y’u ’light, Miss Messiter?”
+
+She slipped immediately to the ground beside him. Her eyes looked him
+over with quiet scorn.
+
+“From first to last you have done nothing but lie to me. When we were
+out last night you knew that ranch was close at hand. You lied to me
+again when you said it was deserted.”
+
+“Very well. We’ll say I lied, though it’s not a nice word in so pretty
+a mouth, as yours, Miss Messiter. Y’u ought to read up again the fable
+about the toads dropping from the beautiful lady’s lips.”
+
+“What’s your object? What do you expect to gain by it?”
+
+“Up to date I’ve gained a right interesting guest. Y’u will be
+diverting enough. With so charming a lady visiting me I’m not worrying
+about getting bored.”
+
+“So you war on women, you coward.”
+
+The change in him was instantaneous. It was as if a thousand years of
+civilization had been sponged out in an eyebeat. He stood before her a
+savage primeval, his tight-lipped smile cruel in its triumph.
+
+“Did I begin this fight? Didn’t y’u and your punchers try to balk me by
+taking that sheep-herder from me after I had bagged him? That was your
+hour. By God, this is mine! I’ll teach y’u it isn’t safe to interfere
+with me. What I want I get one way or another, and don’t y’u forget it,
+my girl.”
+
+She was afraid to the very marrow of her. But she would not show her
+fear, nor could he read it in the slim superb erectness with which she
+gave him defiance.
+
+“You coward!”
+
+“That’s twice you’ve called me that,” he cried, his face flushing
+darkly and his eyes glittering.
+
+“You’ll crawl on your knees to me and beg pardon before I’m through
+with y’u, my beauty. Y’u’ll learn to lick the hand that strikes y’u.
+You’re mine—mine to do with as I please. Don’t forget that for a
+moment. I’ll break your spirit or I’ll break your heart.”
+
+His ferocity appalled her, but her brave eyes held their own. With an
+oath he turned on his heel and struck the palms of his hands together.
+An Indian squaw came running from one of the cabins. He flung at her a
+sentence or two in the native tongue and pointed at his captive. She
+asked a question impassively and he jabbed out a threat. The squaw
+nodded her head, and motioned to the girl to follow her.
+
+When Helen Messiter was alone in the room that was to serve as her
+prison she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands in a
+despair that was for the moment utter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+A RESCUE
+
+
+Helen Messiter was left alone until darkness fell, when the Cheyenne
+squaw brought in a kerosene lamp and shortly afterward her supper. The
+woman either could not or would not speak English, and her only answer
+to her captive’s advances was by sullen grunts. At the expiration of
+half an hour she returned for the dishes, locking the door after her
+when she left.
+
+The room itself was comfortable enough. It was evidently Bannister’s
+own, judging from its contents. Two or three rifles hung in racks. On
+top of the bookcase was a half-filled tobacco pouch and several pipes,
+all of them lying carelessly on a pile of music which ran from Verdi to
+ragtime. In his books she found the same shallow catholicity. Side by
+side with Montaigne’s “Essays,” a well-worn Villon in thé original,
+Stevenson’s “Letters” and “Anna Karenina,” dozens of paper-covered
+novels, mostly the veriest trash, held their disreputable own. Some of
+them were French, others detective stories, still others melodramatic
+tales of love. The piano was an expensive one, but not in the best of
+tune. Everything in the room contributed to the effect of capacity
+untempered by discipline and discrimination. Plainly he was a man of
+taste who had outraged and deadened his power of differentiation by
+abuse.
+
+For Helen the silent night was alive with alarms. The moaning of the
+wind, the slightest rustle outside, the creaking of a board, were
+enough to set her heart wildly beating. She did not undress, but by the
+light of her dim, ragged wick sought for composure from the pages of
+Montaigne and Stevenson. When the first gray day streaks came she was
+still reading, but with their coming she blew out her light and lay
+down. She fell asleep at once, and it was five hours later that the
+knock of her attendant awakened her from heavy slumber.
+
+With the bright sunlit day she was again mistress of her nerves,
+prepared to meet resolutely whatever danger might confront her. But the
+morning passed quietly enough, and after lunch the Indian woman led her
+into the little valley promenade in front of the buildings and sat down
+on a rock while her captive enjoyed the sunshine.
+
+The course of Helen’s saunterings took her toward the rock slide that
+made the gateway of the valley. She was wondering if it could have been
+left unguarded, when a rough voice warned her back. Looking round, she
+caught sight of a man seated cross-legged on a great boulder. It took
+only a second glance to certify that the man was her former foreman,
+Judd Morgan.
+
+She had never seen anything more malevolent than his triumph.
+
+“Better stay in the valley, Miss Messiter. Y’u might right easily get
+lost outside,” he jeered.
+
+Without reply she turned her back on him and began to retrace her way
+to the house. Stung by her contempt, he sprang up and strode after her.
+
+“So y’u won’t speak to me, eh? Think yourself too good to speak to a
+common everyday God damned white man, do y’u?”
+
+Apparently she did not know he was on the map. In a fury he caught at
+her shoulder and whirled her round.
+
+“Now, by God, do y’u see me? I’m Judd Morgan, the man y’u kicked off
+the Lazy D. I told y’u then y’u were going to be sorry long as y’u
+lived.”
+
+“Don’t you dare touch me, you hound!” Her blazing eyes menaced him so
+fiercely that he hesitated.
+
+There was the sound of a quick, light step running toward them. Morgan
+half turned, was caught in a grip of steel and hurled headlong among a
+pile of broken rocks.
+
+“Y’u would dare, would y’u?” panted his assailant, passionately, ready
+to obliterate the offender if he showed fight.
+
+Morgan got up slowly, his head bleeding from contact with the sharp
+rocks. There was murder in his bloodshot eye, but he knew his master,
+and after trying vainly to face him down he swung away with an oath.
+
+“I’ll have to apologize for that coyote, Miss Messiter. These fellows
+need a hint occasionally as to how to behave,” said Bannister.
+
+“Your hints are rather forceful, are they not?”
+
+“I ain’t running a Sunday school,” he admitted.
+
+“So I have gathered. I wonder where he learned to bully women,” she
+mused aloud.
+
+“Putting it another way, you think there ought to be some one to
+apologize for his master.”
+
+He was smiling at her without the least rancor, and it came on her with
+a woman’s swift instinct that safety lay in humoring his volatile moods
+and diverting him from those that were dangerous.
+
+“Since I’m a prisoner of war I wouldn’t dare think that—not aloud, at
+least. You might starve me,” she told him, saucily.
+
+“Still, down in your heart y’u think—”
+
+“That there is a great deal of difference between master and man. One
+is a gentleman in his best moments; the other is always a ruffian.”
+
+She had touched his vanity. As he walked beside her she could almost
+see his complacency purr.
+
+“I’m a miscreant, I reckon, but I was a gentleman first.”
+
+Fortunately he did not see the flash of veiled scorn she shot at him
+under her long lashes.
+
+With her breakfast next morning the Cheyenne woman brought a note
+signed “Shepherd-of-the-Desert.” In it Bannister asked permission to
+pay his respects. The girl divined that he was in his better mood, and
+penciled on his note the favor she could scarce refuse.
+
+But she was scarcely prepared for the impudent air of jocund spring he
+brought into her prison, the gay assumption of _camaraderie_ so
+inconsistent with the facts. Yet since safety lay in an avoidance of
+the tragic, she set herself to match his mood.
+
+At sight of the open Tennyson on the table he laughed and quoted:
+
+She only said, “The day is dreary.”
+“He cometh not,” she said.
+
+
+“But, you see, he comes,” he added. “What say, Mariana of the Robbers’
+Roost, to making a picnic day of it? We’ll climb the Crags and lunch on
+the summit.”
+
+“The Crags?”
+
+“That Matterhorn-shaped peak that begins at our back door. Are you for
+it?”
+
+While this mood was uppermost in him she felt reasonably safe. It was a
+phase of him she certainly did not mean to discourage. Besides, she had
+a youthful confidence in her powers that she was loath to give up
+without an effort to find the accessible side of his ruthless heart.
+
+“I’ll try it; but you must help me when we come to the bad places,” she
+said.
+
+“Sure thing! It’s a deal. You’re a right good mountaineer, I’ll bet.”
+
+“Thank you ; but you had better save your compliments till I make
+good,” she told him, with the most piquant air of gayety in the world.
+
+They started on horseback, following a mountain trail that zigzagged
+across the foothills toward the Crags. He had unearthed somewhere a
+boy’s saddle that suited her very well, and the pony she rode was one
+of the easiest she had ever mounted. At the end of an hour’s ride they
+left the horses and began the ascent on foot. It was a stiff climb,
+growing steeper as they ascended, but Helen Messiter had not tramped
+over golf links for nothing. She might grow leg weary,’ but she would
+not cry “Enough!” And he, on his part, showed the tactful consideration
+for the resources of her strength he had already taught her to expect
+from that other day’s experience on the plains. It was a very rare hand
+of assistance that he offered her, but often he stopped to admire the
+beautiful view that stretched for many miles below them, in order that
+she might get a minute’s breathing space.
+
+Once he pointed out, far away on the horizon, a bright gleam that
+caught the sunlight like a heliograph.
+
+“That’s the big rock slide back of the Lazy, D,” he explained.
+
+She drew a long breath, and flashed a stealthy look at him.
+
+“It’s a long way from here, isn’t it?”
+
+“I didn’t find it so far last time I took the trip—not the last half of
+the journey, anyhow,” he answered.
+
+“You’re very complimentary. I was only wondering whether I could find
+it if I should manage to escape.”
+
+He stroked his black mustache and smiled gallantly at her. “I reckon I
+won’t let so pretty a prisoner escape.”
+
+“Do you expect me to burden your hospitality forever and a day?
+Wouldn’t that be a little too much of Mariana of the Robbers’ Roost?”
+she asked, lightly.
+
+“I’m willing to risk it.”
+
+He looked with half-shut smoldering eyes at her slender exquisiteness,
+so instinct with the vital charm of sex. There was veiled passion in
+his eyes, but there was in them, too, a desire to stand well with her.
+He meant to win her, but if possible he would win with her own
+reluctant consent. She must bring him with hesitant feet a heart
+surrendered in spite of her pride and flinty puritanism. The vanity of
+the man craved a victory that should be of the spirit as well as of the
+flesh.
+
+Deftly she guided the conversation back to less dangerous channels. In
+this the increasing difficulty of the climb assisted her, for after
+they reached the last ascent sustained talk became impossible.
+
+“See that trough above us near the summit?. Y’u’ll have to hang on by
+your eyelashes, pardner.” He always burlesqued the word of comradeship
+a little to soften its familiarity.
+
+“Dear me! Is it that bad?”
+
+“It is so bad that at the top y’u have to jump for a grip and draw
+yourself up by your arms.”
+
+“I’ll never be able to do it.”
+
+“I’m here to help.”
+
+“But if one should miss?”
+
+He shrugged. “Ah! That’s a theological question. If the sky pilots
+guess right, for y’u heaven and for me hell.”
+
+They negotiated the trough successfully to its uptilted end. She had a
+bad moment when he leaped for the rock rim above from the narrow ledge
+on which they stood. But he caught it, drew himself up without the
+least trouble and turned to assist her. He sat down on the rock edge
+facing the abyss beneath them, and told her to lock her hands together
+above his left foot. Then slowly, inch by inch, he drew her up till
+with one of his hands he could catch her wrist. A moment later she was
+standing on his rigid toes, from which position she warily edged to
+safety above.
+
+“Well done, little pardner. You’re the first woman ever climbed the
+Crags.” He offered a hand to celebrate the achievement.
+
+“If I am it is all due to you, big pardner. I could never have made
+that last bit alone.”
+
+They ate lunch merrily in the pleasant sunlight, and both of them
+seemed as free from care as a schoolboy on a holiday.
+
+“It’s good to be alive, isn’t it?” he asked her after they had eaten,
+as he lay on the warm ground at her feet. “And what a life it is here!
+To be riding free, with your knees pressing a saddle, in the wind and
+the sun. There’s something in a man to which the wide spaces call. I’d
+rather lie here in the sunbeat with you beside me than be a king. You
+remember the ‘Last Ride’ that fellow Browning tells about? I reckon
+he’s dead right. If a man could only capture his best moments and hold
+them forever it would be heaven to the _n_th degree.”
+
+She studied her sublimated villain with that fascination his vagaries
+always excited in her. Was ever a more impossible combination put
+together than this sentimental scamp with the long record of evil?
+
+“Say it,” he laughed.” Whang it out I ask, anything you like, pardner.”
+
+Pluckily daring, she took him at his word. “I was only wondering at the
+different men I find in you. Before I have known you a dozen hours I
+discover in you the poet and the man of action, the schoolboy and the
+philosopher, the sentimentalist and the cynic, and—may I say it?—the
+gentleman and the blackguard. One feels a sense of loss. You should
+have specialized. You would have made such a good soldier, for
+instance. Pity you didn’t go to West Point.”
+
+“Think so?” He was immensely flattered at her interest in him.
+
+“Yes. You surely missed your calling. You were born for a soldier;
+cavalry, I should say. What an ornament to society you would have been
+if your energies had found the right vent! But they didn’t find it—and
+you craved excitement, I suppose. Perhaps you had to go the way you
+did.”
+
+“Therefore I am what I am? Please particularize.”
+
+“I can’t, because I don’t understand you. But I think this much is
+true, that you have set yourself against all laws of God and man. Yet
+you are not consistent, since you are better than your creed. You tell
+yourself there shall be no law for you but your own will, and you find
+there is, something in you stronger than desire that makes you shrink
+at many things. You can kill in fair fight, but you can’t knife a man
+in the back, can you?”
+
+“I never have.”
+
+“You have a dreadfully perverted set of rules, but you play by them.
+That’s why I know I’m safe with you, even when you are at your worst.”
+
+She announced this boldly, just as if she had no doubts.
+
+“Oh, you know you’re safe, do you?”
+
+“Of course I do. You were once a gentleman and you can’t forget it
+entirely. That’s the weakness in your philosophy of total depravity.”
+“You speak with an assurance you don’t always feel, I reckon. And I
+expect I wouldn’t bank too much on those divinations of yours, if I
+were you.” He rolled over so that he could face her more directly.
+“You’ve been mighty frank, Miss Messiter, and I take off my hat to your
+sand. Now I’m going to be frank awhile. You interest me. I never met a
+woman that interested me so much. But you do a heap more than interest
+me. No, you sit right there and listen. Your cheeky pluck and that
+insolent, indifferent beauty of yours made a hit with me the first
+minute I saw you that night. I swore I’d tame you, and that’s why I
+brought you to the ranch. Your eye flashed a heap too haughty for me to
+give you the go-by. Mind you, I meant to be master. I meant to make you
+mine as much as that dog that licked my hand before we started. What I
+meant then I still mean, but in a different way.
+
+“That’s as far as it went with me then, but before we reached here next
+day I knew the thing cut deeper with me. I ain’t saying that I love
+you, because I’m a sweep and it’s just likely I don’t know passion from
+love. But I’ll tell you this—there hasn’t been a waking moment since
+then I haven’t been on fire to be with you. That’s why I stayed away
+until I knew I wasn’t so likely to slop over. But here, I’m doing it
+right this minute. I care more for you than I do for anything else on
+this earth. But that makes it worse for you. I never cared for anybody
+without bringing ruin on them. I broke my mother’s heart and spoiled
+the life of a girl I was going to marry. That’s the kind of scoundrel I
+am. Even if I can make you care for me—and I reckon I can if y’u are
+like other women—I’ll likely drag you through hell after me.”
+
+The simulation of despair in his beautiful eyes spoke more impressively
+than his self-scorning words. She was touched in spite of herself,
+despite, too, his colossal egotism. For there is an appeal about the
+engaging sinner that drums in a woman’s head and calls to her heart.
+All good women are missionaries in the last analysis, and Miss Messiter
+was not an exception to her sex. Even though she knew he was half a
+fraud and that his emotion was theatric, she could not let the moment
+pass.
+
+She leaned forward, a sweet, shy dignity in her manner. “Is it too late
+to change? Why not begin now? There is still a to-morrcw, and it need
+not be the slave of yesterday. Life for all of us is full of
+milestones.”
+
+“And how shall I begin my new career of saintliness?” he asked, with a
+swift return to blithe irony.
+
+“The nearest duty. Take me back to my ranch. Begin a life of rigid
+honesty.”
+
+“Give you up now that I have found you? That is just the last thing I
+would do,” he cried, with glancing eyes. “No—no. The clock can’t be
+turned back. I have sowed and I must reap.”
+
+He leaped to his feet. “Come! We must be going.”
+
+She rose sadly, for she knew the mood of sentimental regret for his
+wasted life had passed, and she had failed.
+
+They descended the trough and reached the boulder field that had marked
+the terminal of the glacier. At the farther edge of it the outlaw
+turned to point out to the girl a great bank of snow on a mountainside
+fifteen miles away.
+
+He changed his weight as he turned, when a rock slipped under his foot
+and he came down hard. He was up again in an instant, but Helen
+Messiter caught the sharp intake of his breath when he set foot to the
+ground.
+
+“You’ve sprained your ankle!” she cried.
+
+“Afraid so. It’s my own rotten carelessness.” He broke into a storm of
+curses and limped forward a dozen steps, but he had to set his teeth to
+stand the pain.
+
+“Lean on me,” she said, gently. “I reckon I’ll have to,” he grimly
+answered.
+
+They covered a quarter of a mile, with many stops to rest the swollen
+ankle. Only by the irregularity of his breathing and the damp moisture
+on his forehead could she tell the agony he was enduring.
+
+“It must be dreadful,” she told him once.
+
+“I’ve got to stand for it, I reckon.”
+
+Again she said, when they had reached a wooded grove where pines grew
+splendid on a carpet of grass: “Only two hundred yards more. I think I
+can bring your pony as far as the big cottonwood.”
+
+She noticed that he leaned heavier and heavier on her. However, when
+they reached the cottonwood he leaned no more, but pitched forward in a
+faint. The water bottle was empty, but she ran down to where the ponies
+had been left, and presently came back with his canteen. She had been
+away perhaps twenty minutes, and when she came back he waved a hand
+airily at her.
+
+“First time in my life that ever happened,” he apologized, gayly. “But
+why didn’t y’u get on Jim and cut loose for the Lazy D while you had
+the chance?”
+
+“I didn’t think of it. Perhaps I shall next time.”
+
+“I shouldn’t. Y’u see, I’d follow you and bring you back. And if I
+didn’t find you there would be a lamb lost again in these hills.”
+
+“The sporting thing would be to take a chance.”
+
+“And leave me here alone? Well, I’m going to give you a show to take
+it.” He handed her his revolver. “Y’u may need this if you’re going
+traveling.”
+
+“Are you telling me to go?” she asked, amazed.
+
+“I’m telling you to do as you think best. Y’u may take a hike or y’u
+may bring back Two-step to me. Suit yourself.”
+
+“I tell you plainly, I sha’n’t come back.”
+
+“And I’m sure y’u will.”
+
+“But I won’t. The thing’s absurd. Would you?”
+
+“No, I shouldn’t. But y’u will.”
+
+“I won’t. Good-bye.” She held out her hand.
+
+He shook his head, looking steadily at her. “What’s the use? You’ll be
+back in half an hour.”
+
+“Not I. Did you say I must keep the Antelope Peaks in a line to reach
+the Lazy D.
+
+“Yes, a little to the left. Don’t be long, little pardner.”
+
+“I hate to leave you here. Perhaps I’ll send a sheriff to take care of
+you.”
+
+“Better bring Two-step up to the south of that bunch of cottonwoods.
+It’s not so steep that way.”
+
+“I’ll mention it to the sheriff. I’m not coming myself.”
+
+She left him apparently obstinate in the conviction that she would
+return. In reality he was taking a gambler’s chance, but it was of a
+part with the reckless spirit of the man that the risk appealed to him.
+It was plain he could not drag himself farther. Since he must let her
+go for the horse alone, he chose that she should go with her eyes open
+to his knowledge of the opportunity of escape.
+
+But Helen Messiter had not the slightest intention of returning. She
+had found her chance, and she meant to make the most of it. As rapidly
+ias her unaccustomed fingers would permit she saddled and cinched her
+pony. She had not ridden a hundred yards before Two-step came crashing
+through the young cottonwood grove after her. Objecting to being left
+alone, he had broken the rein that tied him. The girl tried to
+recapture the horse in order that the outlaw might not be left entirely
+without means of reaching camp, but her efforts were unsuccessful. She
+had to give it up and resume her journey.
+
+Of course the men at his ranch would miss their chief and search for
+him. There could be no doubt but that they would find him. She
+bolstered up her assurance of this as she rode toward the Antelope
+Peaks, but her hope lacked buoyancy, because she doubted if they had
+any idea of where he had been going to spend the day.
+
+She rode slower and slower, and finally came to a long halt for
+consideration. Vividly there rose before her a picture of the miscreant
+waiting grimly for death or rescue. Well, she was not to blame. If she
+deserted him it was to save herself. But to leave him helpless——
+
+No, she could not leave a crippled man to die alone, even though he
+were her enemy. That was the goal to which her circling thoughts came
+always home, and with a sob she turned her horse’s head. It was a piece
+of soft-headed folly, she confessed, but she could not help it.
+
+So back she went and found him lying just where she had left him. His
+derisive smile offered
+
+her no thanks. She doubted, indeed, whether he felt any sense of
+gratitude.
+
+“Y’u didn’t break your neck hurrying,” he said.
+
+She made her confession with a palpable chagrin. “I meant to ride away.
+I rode a mile or two. But I had to come back. I couldn’t leave you here
+alone.”
+
+His eyes sparkled triumphantly. She saw that he had misunderstood the
+reason of her return, that he was pluming himself on a conquest of his
+fascinated victim.
+
+“One couldn’t leave even a broken-legged dog without help,” she added,
+quietly.
+
+“So how could we expect a woman to leave the man she’s getting ready to
+love?”
+
+She let her contemptuous eyes rest on him in silence.
+
+“That’s right. Look at me as if I were dirt under your feet. Hate me,
+if it makes y’u feel better. But y’u’ll have to come to loving me just
+the same.”
+
+“Can you get on without help?” she asked, ranging the pony alongside
+him.
+
+“Yes.” He dragged himself to the saddle and smiled down at her. “So y’u
+better make up your mind to that soon as convenient.”
+
+Disdaining answer, she walked in front of the pony down the trail. She
+was tired, but her elastic tread would not admit it to him. For she was
+dramatizing unconsciously, with firmly clenched fingers that bit into
+her palms, the march of the unconquerable.
+
+Evening had fallen before they reached the ranch. It was beautifully
+still, except for the call of the quails. The hazy violet outline of
+the mountains came to silhouette against the skyline with a fine edge.
+
+As they passed the pony corral he spoke again. “I’ll never forget
+to-day. I’ve got it fenced from all the yesterdays and to-morrows. I
+have surely enjoyed our little picnic.”
+
+“Nor will I forget it,” she flung back quickly, as she followed him
+into the house. “For I never before met a man wholly incapable of
+gratitude and entirely lacking in all the elements that go to
+distinguish a human being from a wolf.”
+
+He turned to speak to her, and as he did so a quiet voice cautioned
+him:
+
+“Don’t move, seh, except to throw up your hands.”
+
+At the sound of that pleasant drawl Helen’s heart jumped to her throat.
+Jim McWilliams, half seated on the edge of the table, was looking
+intently at Bannister, and there was a revolver in his hand. On the
+other side of the room sat Morgan and the Cheyenne woman, apparently in
+charge of the young giant Denver.
+
+Bannister’s hands went up, even as he whirled with a snarl toward the
+man Morgan.
+
+“I told y’u to watch out, y’u muttonhead!”
+
+“But y’u clean forgot to remember to watch out your own self,” spoke up
+McWilliams, unbuckling the belt from the waist of his new captive.
+
+“Oh, Mac, you blessed boy!” cried Helen, with an hysterical laugh that
+was half a sob.
+
+“How did you ever find me?”
+
+“Followed the track of the gas wagon to where it ran out of juice. We
+lost your trail after that, but Denver and me had the good luck to pick
+it up again where y’u’d camped that night. We mislaid it again up in
+the hills, and Denver he knew about this place. We dropped in just
+casual for information, but when we set our peepers on Judd we allowed
+we would stay awhile, him being so anxious to have us.”
+
+“You dear boys! I’m so glad! You don’t know,” she sobbed, dropping
+weakly into thes nearest chair.
+
+“We can guess, ma’am,” her foreman answered grimly, his eyes on
+Bannister.” And if either of these scoundrels have treated y’u so they
+need their light put out all y’u have got to do is to say so.”
+
+“No, no, Mac. Let us go away from here and leave them. Can’t we go
+now—this very minute?”
+
+The foreman’s eyes found those of Denver and the latter nodded. Neither
+of them had had a bite to eat since the previous evening, and they were
+naturally ravenous.
+
+“All right. We’ll go right now, ma’am. Denver, I’ll take care of these
+beauties while y’u step into the pantry with Mrs. Lo-the-poor-Indian
+and put up a lunch. Y’u don’t want to forget we’re hungry enough to eat
+the wool off a pair of chaps.”
+
+“I ain’t likely to forget it, am I?” grinned Denver, as he rose.
+
+“You poor boys! I know you are starved. I’ll see about the lunch if one
+of you will get the I horses round,” Helen broke in. “Only let us hurry
+and get away from here.”
+
+Ten minutes later they were in the saddle. For the sake of precaution
+Mac walked two of his captives with them for about a mile before
+releasing them. Bannister, unable to travel, they left behind.
+
+“We’ll get down out of the hills and then cut acrost to the Meeker
+ranch,” said McWilliams, after they had ridden forward a few miles.
+“I’ll telephone from there to Slauson’s and have the old man send a boy
+over to the Lazy D with the good word. We’ll get an early start from
+Meeker’s and make it home in the afternoon.”
+
+“How did you leave Mr. Bannister?” asked Helen, in a carefully careless
+voice.
+
+She had held back this question for nearly an hour till Denver, who was
+guiding the party, had passed out of earshot.
+
+“Left him with two of the boys holding him down. He was plumb anxious
+to commit suicide by joining the hunt for y’u, but I had other
+thoughts,” grinned Mac.
+
+She felt herself flushing in the darkness. “We’ve made a great mistake
+about him, Mac, It’s his cousin of the same name that is the
+desperado—the man we just left.”
+
+“Yes, that’s what Judd let out before y’u and the King arrived. It made
+me plumb glad to my gizzard to hear it.”
+
+“I was pleased, too.”
+
+“Somehow I suspicioned that,” he made answer, with banter in his dry
+tones.
+
+“Of course I would be glad to know that he is not a villain,” she
+defended.
+
+“Sure!”
+
+“Well, one doesn’t like to think that a friend——”
+
+“He’s your friend, is he?” chuckled Mac.
+
+“Why shouldn’t he be?”
+
+“I’m offering no objections, ma’am.”
+
+“You act as if——”
+
+“Sho! Don’t pay any attention to me. Sometimes I get these spells of
+laughing in to myself. They just come. Doctors never could find a
+reason.”
+
+“Oh, well!”
+
+“He was your enemy and now he’s your friend. Course since I’m your
+foreman I got to keep posted on how we stand with our neighbors. If
+your feelings change to him again y’u’ll let me know, I expect.”
+
+“Why should they change?” she asked in a cold voice that her rising
+color belied.
+
+“Search _me!_ I just thought mebbe——”
+
+“You think too much,” she cut in, shortly.
+
+“Yes, ma’am,” admitted the youth, meekly, but from time to time as they
+rode she could hear, faint sounds of mirth from his direction.
+
+McWilliams telephoned from the Meeker ranch to Slauson’s, and inside of
+two hours the Lazy D knew that its owner had been found. As one puncher
+after another reported there on jaded ponies to get the latest word
+they heard that all was well. Each one at once unsaddled, ate and
+turned in for the first night’s sleep he had had since his mistress had
+been missing. Next morning they rode in a body to meet her.
+
+She saw them galloping toward her in a cloud of dust, and presently she
+was the centre of a circle of her happy family. They were like
+boys—exuberant in their joy at her deliverance and eager to set out at
+once to avenge her wrongs.
+
+Ned Bannister, from his window, saw them coming. When the group
+separated at the corral and she rode from among them with McWilliams
+toward the house the sheepman could sit still no longer. He limped to
+the front door and waved the American flag which he had unearthed for
+the occasion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+MISTRESS AND MAID
+
+
+Now that it was safely concluded, Helen thought the adventure almost
+worthwhile for the spontaneous expressions of good will it had drawn
+forth from her adherents. Mrs. Winslow and Nora had taken her to their
+arms and wept and laughed over her in turn, and in their silent
+undemonstrative way she had felt herself hedged in by unusual
+solicitude on the part of her riders. It was good—none but she knew how
+good—to be back among her own, to bask in a friendliness she could not
+doubt. It was best of all to sit opposite Ned Bannister again with no
+weight on her heart from the consciousness of his unworthiness.
+
+She could affect to disregard the gray eyes that followed her with such
+magnetized content about the living room, but beneath her cool
+self-containment she knew the joyous heart in her was strangely
+buoyant. He loved her, and she had a right to let herself love him.
+This was enough for the present.
+
+“They’re so plumb glad to see y’u they can’t let y’u alone,” laughed
+Bannister at the sound of a knock on the door that was about the fifth
+in as many minutes.
+
+This time it proved to be Nora, come to find out what her mistress
+would like for supper. Helen turned to the invalid.
+
+“What would you like, Mr. Bannister?”
+
+“I should like a porterhouse with mushrooms,” he announced promptly.
+
+“You can’t have it. You know what the doctor said.” Very peremptorily
+she smiled this at him.
+
+“He’s an old granny, Miss Messiter.”
+
+“You may have an egg on toast.”
+
+“Make it two,” he pleaded. “Excitement’s just like caviar to the
+appetite, and seeing y’u safe—”
+
+“Very well—two,” she conceded.
+
+They ate supper together in a renewal of the pleasant intimacy so
+delightful to both. He lay on the lounge, propped up with sofa
+cushions, the while he watched her deft fingers butter the toast and
+prepare his egg. It was surely worth while to be a convalescent, given
+so sweet a comrade for a nurse; and after he had moved over to the
+table he enjoyed immensely the gay firmness with which she denied him
+what was not good for him.
+
+“I’ll bet y’u didn’t have supper like this at Robbers’ Roost.” he told
+her, enthusiastically.
+
+“It wasn’t so bad, considering everything.” She was looking directly at
+him as she spoke. “Your cousin is rather a remarkable man in some ways.
+He manages to live on the best that can be got in tin-can land.”
+
+“Did he tell y’u he was my cousin?” he asked, slowly.
+
+“Yes, and that his name was Ned Bannister, too?”
+
+“Did that explain anything to y’u?”
+
+“It explained a great deal, but it left some things not clear yet.”
+
+“For instance?”
+
+“For one thing, the reason why you should bear the odium of his crimes.
+I suppose you don’t care for him, though I can see how you might in a
+way.”
+
+“I don’t care for him in the least, though I used to when we were boys.
+As to letting myself be blamed for his crimes. I did it because I
+couldn’t help myself. We look more or less alike, and he was cunning
+enough to manufacture evidence against me. We were never seen together,
+and so very few know that there are two Bannisters. At first I used to
+protest, but I gave it up. There wasn’t the least use. I could only
+wait for him to be captured or killed. In the meantime it didn’t make
+me any more popular to be a sheepman.”
+
+“Weren’t you taking a long chance of being killed first? Some one with
+a grudge against him might have shot you.”
+
+“They haven’t yet,” he smiled.
+
+“You might at least have told _me_ how it was,” she reproached.
+
+“I started to tell y’u that first day, but it looked so much of a fairy
+tale to unload that I passed it up.”
+
+“Then you ought not to blame me for thinking you what you were not.”
+
+“I don’t remember blaming y’u. The fact is I thought it awful white of
+y’u to do your Christian duty so thorough, me being such a miscreant,”
+he drawled.
+
+“You gave me no chance to think well of you.”
+
+“But yet y’u did your duty from A to Z.”
+
+“We’re not talking about my duty,” she flashed back. “My point is that
+you weren’t fair to me. If I thought ill of you how could I help it?”
+
+“I expaict your Kalamazoo conscience is worryin’ y’u because y’u
+misjudged me.”
+
+“It isn’t,” she denied instantly.
+
+“I ain’t of a revengeful disposition. I’ll forgive y’u for doing your
+duty and saving my life twice,” he said, with a smile of whimsical
+irony.
+
+“I don’t want your forgiveness.”
+
+“Well, then for thinking me a ‘bad man.’”
+
+“You ought to beg _my_ pardon. I was a friend, at least you say I acted
+like one—and you didn’t care enough to right yourself with me.”
+
+“Maybe I cared too much to risk trying it. I knew there would be proof
+some time, and I decided to lie under the suspicion until I could get
+it. I see now that wasn’t kind or fair to you. I am sorry I didn’t tell
+y’u all about it. May I tell y’u the story now?”
+
+“If you wish.”
+
+It was a long story, but the main points can be told in a paragraph.
+The grandfather of the two cousins, General Edward Bannister, had worn
+the Confederate gray for four years, and had lost an arm in the service
+of the flag with the stars and bars. After the war he returned to his
+home in Virginia to find it in ruins, his slaves freed and his fields
+mortgaged. He had pulled himself together for another start, and had
+practiced law in the little town where his family had lived for
+generations. Of his two sons, one was a ne’er-do-well. He was one of
+those brilliant fellows of whom much is expected that never develops.
+He had a taste for low company, married beneath him, and, after a
+career that was a continual mortification and humiliation to his
+father, was killed in a drunken brawl under disgraceful circumstances,
+leaving behind a son named for the general. The second son of General
+Bannister also died young, but not before he had proved his devotion to
+his father by an exemplary life. He, too, was married and left an only
+son, also named for the old soldier. The boys were about of an age and
+were well matched in physical and mental equipment. But the general,
+who had taken them both to live with him, soon discovered that their
+characters were as dissimilar as the poles. One grandson was frank,
+generous, open as the light; the other was of a nature almost
+degenerate. In fact, each had inherited the qualities of his father.
+Tales began to come to the old general’s ears that at first he refused
+to credit. But eventually it was made plain to him that one of the boys
+was a rake of the most objectionable type.
+
+There were many stormy scenes between the general and his grandson, but
+the boy continued to go from bad to worse. After a peculiarly flagrant
+case, involving the character of a respectable young girl, young Ned
+Bannister was forbidden his ancestral home. It had been by means of his
+cousin that this last iniquity of his had been unearthed, and the boy
+had taken it to his grandfather in hot indignation as the last hope of
+protecting the reputation of the injured girl. From that hour the evil
+hatred of his cousin, always dormant in the heart, flamed into active
+heat. The disowned youth swore to be revenged. A short time later the
+general died, leaving what little property he had entirely to the one
+grandson. This stirred again the bitter rage of the other. He set fire
+to the house that had been willed his cousin, and took a train that
+night for Wyoming. By a strange irony of fate they met again in the
+West years later, and the enmity between them was renewed, growing
+every month more bitter on the part of the one who called himself the
+King of the Bighorn Country.
+
+She broke the silence after his story with a gentle “Thank you. I can
+understand why you don’t like to tell the story.”
+
+“I am very glad of the chance to tell it to you,” he answered.
+
+“When you were delirious you sometimes begged some one you called Ned
+not to break his mother’s heart. I thought then you might be speaking
+to yourself as ill people do. Of course I see now it was your cousin
+that was on your mind.”
+
+“When I was out of my head I must have talked a lot of nonsense,” he
+suggested, in the voice of a question. “I expect I had opinions I
+wouldn’t have been scattering around so free if I’d known what I was
+saying.”
+
+He was hardly prepared for the tide of color that swept her cheeks at
+his words nor for the momentary confusion that shuttered the shy eyes
+with long lashes cast down.
+
+“Sick folks do talk foolishness, they say,” he added, his gaze trained
+on her suspiciously.
+
+“Do they?”
+
+“Mrs. Winslow says I did. But when I asked her what it was I said she
+only laughed and told me to ask y’u. Well, I’m askin’ now.”
+
+She became very busy over the teapot. “You talked about the work at
+your ranch—sheep dipping and such things.”
+
+“Was that all?”
+
+“No, about lots of other things—football and your early life. I don’t
+see what Mrs. Winslow meant. Will you have some more tea?”
+
+“No, thank y’u. I have finished. Yes, that ce’tainly seems harmless. I
+didn’t know but I had been telling secrets.” Still his unwavering eyes
+rested quietly on her.
+
+“Secrets?” She summoned her aplomb to let a question rest lightly in
+the face she turned toward him, though she was afraid she met his eyes
+hardly long enough for complete innocence “Why, yes, secrets.” He
+measured looks with her deliberately before he changed the subject, and
+he knew again the delightful excitement of victory. “Are y’u going to
+read to me this evening?”
+
+She took his opening so eagerly that he smiled, at which her color
+mounted again.
+
+“If y’u like. What shall I read?”
+
+“Some more of Barrie’s books, if y’u don’t mind. When a fellow is weak
+as a kitten he sorter takes to things that are about kids.”
+
+Nora came in and cleared away the supper things. She was just beginning
+to wash them when McWilliams and Denver dropped into the kitchen by
+different doors. Each seemed surprised and disappointed at the presence
+of the other. Nora gave each of them a smile and a dishcloth.
+
+“Reddy, he’s shavin’ and Frisco’s struggling with a biled shirt—I mean
+with a necktie,” Denver hastily amended. “They’ll be along right soon,
+I shouldn’t wonder.”
+
+“Y’u better go tell the boys Miss Nora don’t want her kitchen littered
+up with so many of them,” suggested his rival.
+
+“Y’u’re foreman here. I don’t aim to butt into your business, Mac,”
+grinned back the other, polishing a tea plate with the towel.
+
+“I want to get some table linen over to Lee Ming to-night,” said Nora,
+presently.
+
+“Denver, he’ll be glad to take it for y’u, Miss Nora. He’s real
+obliging,” offered Mac, generously.
+
+“I’ve been in the house all day, so I need a walk. I thought perhaps
+one of you gentlemen—” Miss Nora looked from one to the other of them
+with deep innocence.
+
+“Sure, I’ll go along and carry it. Just as Mac says, I’ll be real
+pleased to go,” said Denver, hastily.
+
+Mac felt he had been a trifle precipitate in his assumption that Nora
+did not intend to go herself. Lee Ming had established a laundry some
+half mile from the ranch, and the way thereto lay through most
+picturesque shadow and moonlight. The foreman had conscientious
+scruples against letting Denver escort her down such a veritable
+lovers’ lane of romantic scenery.
+
+“I don’t know as y’u ought to go out in the night air with that cold,
+Denver. I’d hate a heap to have y’u catch pneumony. It don’t seem to me
+I’d be justified in allowin’ y’u to,” said the foreman, anxiously.
+
+“You’re _that_ thoughtful, Mac. But I expect mebbe a little saunter
+with Miss Nora will do my throat good. We’ll walk real slow, so’s not
+to wear out my strength.”
+
+“Big, husky fellows like y’u are awful likely to drop off with
+pneumony. I been thinkin’ I got some awful good medicine that would be
+the right stuff for y’u. It’s in the drawer of my wash-stand. Help
+yourself liberal and it will surely do y’u good. Y’u’ll find it _in a
+bottle_.”
+
+“I’ll bet it’s good medicine, Mac. After we get home I’ll drop around.
+In the washstand, y’u said?”
+
+“I hate to have y’u take such a risk,” Mac tried again. “There ain’t a
+bit of use in y’u exposing yourself so careless. Y’u take a hot
+footbath and some of that medicine, Denver, then go right straight to
+bed, and in the mo’ning y’u’ll be good as new. Honest, y’u won’t know
+yourself.”
+
+“Y’u got the _best_ heart, Mac.”
+
+Nora giggled.
+
+“Since I’m foreman I got to be a mother to y’u boys, ain’t I?”
+
+“Y’u’re liable to be a grandmother to us if y’u keep on,” came back the
+young giant.
+
+“Y’u plumb discourage me, Denver,” sighed the foreman.
+
+“No, sir! The way I look at it, a fellow’s got to take some risk. Now,
+y’u cayn’t tell some things. I figure I ain’t half so likely to catch
+pneumony as y’u would be to get heart trouble if y’u went walking with
+Miss Nora,” returned Denver.
+
+A perfect gravity sat on both their faces during the progress of most
+of their repartee.
+
+“If your throat’s so bad, Mr. Halliday, I’ll put a kerosene rag round
+it for you when we get back,” Nora said, with a sweet little glance of
+sympathy that the foreman did not enjoy.
+
+Denver, otherwise “Mr. Halliday,” beamed. “Y’u’re real kind, ma’am.
+I’ll bet that will help it on the outside much as Mac’s medicine will
+inside.”
+
+“What’ll y’u do for my heart, ma’am, if it gits bad the way Denver
+figures it will?”
+
+“Y’u might try a mustard plaster,” she gurgled, with laughter.
+
+For once the debonair foreman’s ready tongue had brought him to defeat.
+He was about to retire from the field temporarily when Nora herself
+offered first aid to the wounded.
+
+“We would like to have you come along with us, Mr. McWilliams. I want
+you to come if you can spare the time.”
+
+The soft eyes telegraphed an invitation with such a subtle suggestion
+of a private understanding that Mac was instantly encouraged to accept.
+
+He knew, of course, that she was playing them against each other and
+sitting back to enjoy the result, but he was possessed of the hope
+common to youths in his case that he really was on a better footing
+with her than the other boys. This opinion, it may be added, was shared
+by Denver, Frisco and even Reddy as regards themselves. Which is merely
+another way of putting the regrettable fact that this very charming
+young woman was given to coquetting with the hearts of her admirers.
+
+“Any time y’u get oneasy about that cough y’u go right on home, Denver.
+Don’t stay jest out of politeness. We’ll never miss y’u, anyhow,” the
+foreman assured him.
+
+“Thank y’u, Mac. But y’u see I got to stay to keep Miss Nora from
+getting bored.”
+
+“Was it a phrenologist strung y’u with the notion y’u was a cure for
+lonesomeness?”
+
+“Shucks! I don’t make no such claims. The only thing is it’s a comfort
+when you’re bored to have company. Miss Nora, she’s so polite. But, y’u
+see, if I’m along I can take y’u for a walk when y’u get too bad.”
+
+They reached the little trail that ran up to Lee Ming’s place, and
+Denver suggested that Mac run in with the bundle so as to save Nora the
+climb.
+
+“I’d like to, honest I would. But since y’u thought of it first I won’t
+steal the credit of doing Miss Nora a good turn. We’ll wait right here
+for y’u till y’u come back.”
+
+“We’ll all go up together,” decided Nora, and honors were easy.
+
+In the pleasant moonlight they sauntered back, two of them still
+engaged in lively badinage, while the third played chorus with
+appreciative little giggles and murmurs of “Oh, Mr. Halliday!” and “You
+know you’re just flattering me, Mr. McWilliams.”
+
+If they had not been so absorbed in their gay foolishness the two men
+might not have walked so innocently into the trap waiting for them at
+their journey’s end. As it was, the first intimation they had of
+anything unusual was a stern command to surrender.
+
+“Throw up your hands. Quick, you blank fools!”
+
+A masked man covered them, in each hand a six-shooter, and at his
+summons the arms of the cow-punchers went instantly into the air.
+
+Nora gave an involuntary little scream of dismay.
+
+“Y’u don’t need to be afraid, lady. Ain’t nobody going to hurt you, I
+reckon,” the masked man growled.
+
+“Sure they won’t,” Mac reassured her, adding ironically: “This gun-play
+business is just neighborly frolic. Liable to happen any day in
+Wyoming.”
+
+A second masked man stepped up. He, too was garnished with an arsenal.
+
+“What’s all this talking about?” he demanded sharply.
+
+“We just been having a little conversation seh?” returned McWilliams,
+gently, his vigilant eyes searching through the disguise of the other
+“Just been telling the lady that your call is in friendly spirit. No
+objections, I suppose?”
+
+The swarthy newcomer, who seemed to be in command, swore sourly.
+
+“Y’u put a knot in your tongue, Mr. Foreman.”
+
+“Ce’tainly, if y’u prefer,” returned the indomitable McWilliams.
+
+“Shut up or I’ll pump lead into you!”
+
+“I’m padlocked, seh.”
+
+Nora Darling interrupted the dialogue by quietly fainting. The foreman
+caught her as she fell.
+
+“See what y’u done, y’u blamed chump!” he snapped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+THE TWO COUSINS
+
+
+The sheepman lay at his ease, the strong supple lines of him stretched
+lazily on the lounge. Helen was sitting beside him in an easy chair,
+and he watched the play of her face in the lamplight as she read from
+“The Little White Bird.” She was very good to see, so vitally alive and
+full of a sweet charm that half revealed and half concealed her
+personality. The imagination with which she threw herself into a
+discussion of the child fancies portrayed by the Scotch writer captured
+his fancy. It delighted him to tempt her into discussions that told him
+by suggestion something of what she thought and was.
+
+They were in animated debate when the door opened to admit somebody
+else. He had stepped in so quietly that he stood there a little while
+without being observed, smiling down at them with triumphant malice
+behind the mask he wore. Perhaps it was the black visor that was
+responsible for the Mephisto effect, since it hid all the face but the
+leering eyes. These, narrowed to slits, swept the room and came back to
+its occupants. He was a tall man and well-knit, dressed incongruously
+in up-to-date riding breeches and boots, in combination with the usual
+gray shirt, knotted kerchief and wide-brimmed felt hat of the horseman
+of the plains. The dust of the desert lay thick on him, without in the
+least obscuring a certain ribald elegance, a distinction of wickedness
+that rested upon him as his due. To this result his debonair manner
+contributed, though it carried with it no suggestion of weakness. To
+the girl who looked up and found him there he looked indescribably
+sinister.
+
+She half rose to her feet, dilated eyes fixed on him.
+
+“Good evenin’. I came to make sure y’u got safe home, Miss Messiter,”
+he said.
+
+The eyes of the two men clashed, the sheepman’s stern and unyielding,
+his cousin’s lit with the devil of triumph. But out of the faces of
+both men looked the inevitable conflict, the declaration of war that
+never ends till death.
+
+“I’ve been a heap anxious about y’u—couldn’t sleep for worrying. So I
+saddled up and rode in to find out if y’u were all right and to inquire
+how Cousin Ned was getting along.”
+
+The sheepman, not deigning to move an inch from his position, looked in
+silence his steady contempt.
+
+“This conversation sounds a whole lot like a monologue up to date,” he
+continued. “Now, maybe y’u don’t know y’u have the honor of
+entertaining the King of the Bighorn.” The man’s brown hand brushed the
+mask from his eyes and he bowed with mocking deference. “Miss Messiter,
+allow me to introduce myself again—Ned Bannister, train robber,
+rustler, kidnapper and general bad man. But I ain’t told y’u the worst
+yet. I’m cousin to a sheepherder’ and that’s the lowest thing that
+walks.”
+
+He limped forward a few steps and sat down. “Thank you, I believe I
+will stay a while since y’u both ask me so urgent. It isn’t often I
+meet with a welcome so hearty and straight from the heart.”
+
+It was not hard to see how the likeness between them contributed to the
+mistake that had been current concerning them. Side by side, no man
+could have mistaken one for the other. The color of their eyes, the
+shade of hair, even the cut of their features, were different. But
+beneath all distinctions in detail ran a family resemblance not to be
+denied. This man looked like his cousin, the sheepman, as the latter
+might have done if all his life he had given a free rein to evil
+passions.
+
+The height, the build, the elastic tread of each, made further
+contributions to this effect of similarity.
+
+“What are you doing here?” They were the first words spoken by the man
+on the lounge and they rang with a curt challenge.
+
+“Come to inquire after the health of my dear cousin,” came the prompt
+silken answer.
+
+“You villain!”
+
+“My dear cousin, y’u speak with such conviction that y’u almost
+persuade me. But of course if I’m a villain I’ve got to live up to my
+reputation. Haven’t I, Miss Messiter?”
+
+“Wouldn’t it be better to live it down?” she asked with a quietness
+that belied her terror. For there had been in his manner a threat, not
+against her but against the man whom her heart acknowledged as her
+lover.
+
+He laughed. “Y’u’re still hoping to make a Sunday school superintendent
+out of me, I see. Y’u haven’t forgot all your schoolmarm ways yet, but
+I’ll teach y’u to forget them.”
+
+The other cousin watched him with a cool, quiet glance that never
+wavered. The outlaw was heavily armed, but his weapons were sheathed,
+and, though there was a wary glitter behind the vindictive exultation
+in his eyes, his capable hands betrayed no knowledge of the existence
+of his revolvers. It was, he knew, to be a moral victory, if one at
+all.
+
+“Hope I’m not disturbing any happy family circle,” he remarked, and,
+taking two limping steps forward, he lifted the book from the girl’s
+unresisting hands. “H’m! Barrie. I don’t go much on him. He’s too sissy
+for me. But I could have guessed the other Ned Bannister would be
+reading something like that,” he concluded, a flicker of sneering
+contempt crossing his face.
+
+“Perhaps y’u’ll learn some time to attend to your own business,” said
+the man on the couch quietly.
+
+Hatred gleamed in the narrowed slits from which the soul of the other
+cousin looked down at him. “I’m a philanthropist, and my business is
+attending to other people’s. They raise sheep, for instance, and I
+market them.”
+
+The girl hastily interrupted. She had not feared for herself, but she
+knew fear for the indomitable man she had nursed back to life. “Won’t
+you sit down, Mr. Bannister? Since you don’t approve our literature,
+perhaps we can find some other diversion more to your taste.” She
+smiled faintly.
+
+The man turned in smiling divination of her purpose, and sat down to
+play with her as a cat does with a mouse.
+
+“Thank y’u, Miss Messiter, I believe I will. I called to thank y’u for
+your kindness to my cousin as well as to inquire about you. The word
+goes that y’u pulled my dear cousin back when death was reaching mighty
+strong for him. Of course I feel grateful to y’u. How is he getting
+along now?”
+
+“He’s doing very well, I think.”
+
+“That’s ce’tainly good hearing,” was his ironical response. “How come
+he to get hurt, did y’u say?”
+
+His sleek smile was a thing hateful to see.
+
+“A hound bit me,” explained the sheepman.
+
+“Y’u don’t say! I reckon y’u oughtn’t to have got in its way. Did y’u
+kill it?”
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+“That was surely a mistake, for it’s liable to bite again.”
+
+The girl felt a sudden sickness at his honeyed cruelty, but immediately
+pulled herself together. For whatever fiendish intention might be in
+his mind she meant to frustrate it.
+
+“I hear you are of a musical turn, Mr. Bannister. Won’t you play for
+us?”
+
+She had by chance found his weak spot. Instantly his eyes lit up. He
+stepped across to the piano and began to look over the music, though
+not so intently that he forgot to keep under his eye the man on the
+lounge.
+
+“H’m! Mozart, Grieg, Chopin, Raff, Beethoven. Y’u ce’tainly have the
+music here; I wonder if y’u have the musician.” He looked her over with
+a bold, unscrupulous gaze. “It’s an old trick to have classical music
+on the rack and ragtime in your soul. Can y’u play these?”
+
+“You will have to be the judge of that,” she said.
+
+He selected two of Grieg’s songs and invited her to the piano. He knew
+instantly that the Norwegian’s delicate fancy and lyrical feeling had
+found in her no inadequate medium of expression. The peculiar emotional
+quality of the song “I Love Thee” seemed to fill the room as she
+played. When she swung round on the stool at its conclusion it was to
+meet a shining-eyed, musical enthusiast instead of the villain she had
+left five minutes earlier.
+
+“Y’u _can_ play,” was all he said, but the manner of it spoke volumes.
+
+For nearly an hour he kept her at the piano, and when at last he let
+her stop playing he seemed a man transformed.
+
+“You have given me a great pleasure, a very great pleasure, Miss
+Messiter,” he thanked her warmly, his Western idiom sloughed with his
+villainy for the moment. “It has been a good many months since I have
+heard any decent music. With your permission I shall come again.”
+
+Her hesitation was imperceptible. “Surely, if you wish.” She felt it
+would be worse than idle to deny the permission she might not be able
+to refuse.
+
+With perfect grace he bowed, and as he wheeled away met with a little
+shock of remembrance the gaze of his cousin. For a long moment their
+eyes bored into each other. Neither yielded the beat of an eyelid, but
+it was the outlaw that spoke.
+
+“I had forgotten y’u. That’s strange, too because it was for y’u I
+came. I’m going to take y’u home with me.
+
+“Alive or dead?” asked the other serenely.
+
+“Alive, dear Ned.”
+
+“Same old traits cropping out again. There was always something feline
+about y’u. I remember when y’u were a boy y’u liked to torment wild
+animals y’u had trapped.”
+
+“I play with larger game now—and find it more interesting.”
+
+“Just so. Miss Messiter, I shall have to borrow a pony from y’u,
+unless—” He broke off and turned indifferently to the bandit.
+
+“Yes, I brought a hawss along with me for y’u,” replied the other to
+the unvoiced question. “I thought maybe y’u might want to ride with
+us.”
+
+“But he can’t ride. He couldn’t possibly. It would kill him,” the girl
+broke out.
+
+“I reckon not.” The man from the Shoshones glanced at his victim as he
+drew on his gauntlets. “He’s a heap tougher than y’u think.”
+
+“But it will. If he should ride now, why—It would be the same as
+murder,” she gasped. “You wouldn’t make him ride now?”
+
+“Didn’t y’u hear him order his hawss, ma’am? He’s keen on this ride. Of
+course he don’t have to go unless he wants to.” The man turned his
+villainous smile on his cousin, and the latter interpreted it to mean
+that if he preferred, the point of attack might be shifted to the girl.
+He might go or he might stay. But if he stayed the mistress of the Lazy
+D would have to pay for his decision.
+
+“No, I’ll ride,” he said at once.
+
+Helen Messiter had missed the meaning of that Marconied message that
+flashed between them. She set her jaw with decision. “Well, you’ll not.
+It’s perfectly ridiculous. I won’t hear of such a thing.”
+
+“Y’u seem right welcome. Hadn’t y’u better stay, Ned?” murmured the
+outlaw, with smiling eyes that mocked.
+
+“Of course he had. He couldn’t ride a mile—not half a mile. The idea is
+utterly preposterous.”
+
+The sheepman got to his feet unsteadily. “I’ll do famously.”
+
+“I won’t have it. Why are you so foolish about going? He said you
+didn’t need to go. You can’t ride any more than a baby could chop down
+that pine in the yard.”
+
+“I’m a heap stronger than y’u think.”
+
+“Yes, you are!” she derided. “It’s nothing but obstinacy. Make him
+stay,” she appealed to the outlaw.
+
+“Am I my cousin’s keeper?” he drawled. “I can advise him to stay, but I
+can’t make him.”
+
+“Well, _I_ can. I’m his nurse, and I say he sha’n’t stir a foot out of
+this house—not a foot.”
+
+The wounded man smiled quietly, admiring the splendid energy of her.
+“I’m right sorry to leave y’u so unceremoniously.”
+
+“You’re not going.” She wheeled on the outlaw “I don’t understand this
+at all. But if you want him you can find him here when you come again.
+Put him on parole and leave him here. I’ll not be a party to murder by
+letting him go.”
+
+“Y’u think I’m going to murder him?” he smiled.
+
+“I think he cannot stand the riding. It would kill him.”
+
+“A haidstrong man is bound to have his way. He seems hell-bent on
+riding. All the docs say the outside of a hawss is good for the inside
+of a man. Mebbe it’ll be the making of him.”
+
+“I won’t have it. I’ll rouse the whole countryside against you. Why
+don’t you parole him till he is better?”
+
+“All right. We’ll leave it that way,” announced the man. “I’d hate to
+hurt your tender feelings after such a pleasant evening. Let him give
+his parole to come to me whenever I send for him, no matter where he
+may be, to quit whatever he is doing right that instant, and come on
+the jump. If he wants to leave it that way, we’ll call it a bargain.”
+
+Again the rapier-thrust of their eyes crossed. The sheepman was
+satisfied with what he saw in the face of his foe.
+
+“All right. It’s a deal,” he agreed, and sank weakly back to the couch.
+
+There are men whose looks are a profanation to any good woman. Ned
+Bannister, of the Shoshones, was one of them. He looked at his cousin,
+and his ribald eyes coasted back to bold scrutiny of this young woman’s
+charming, buoyant youth. There was Something in his face that sent a
+flush of shame coursing through her rich blood. No man had ever looked
+at her like that before.
+
+“Take awful good care of him,” he sneered, with so plain an implication
+of evil that her clean blood boiled. “But I know y’u will, and don’t
+let him go before he’s real strong.”
+
+“No,” she murmured, hating herself for the flush that bathed her.
+
+He bowed like a Chesterfield, and went out with elastic heels, spurs
+clicking.
+
+Helen turned fiercely on her guest. “Why did you make me insist on your
+staying? As if I want you here, as if—” She stopped, choking with
+anger; presently flamed out, “I hate you,” and ran from the room to
+hide herself alone with her tears and her shame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+FOR THE WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP
+
+
+The scene on which Helen Messiter’s eyes rested that mellow Fourth of
+July was vivid enough to have interested a far more jaded mind than
+hers. Nowhere outside of Cattleland could it have been duplicated.
+Wyoming is sparsely populated, but the riders of the plains think
+nothing of traveling a hundred miles in the saddle to be present at a
+“broncobusting” contest. Large delegations, too, had come in by
+railroad from Caspar, Billings, Sheridan, Cheyenne and a score of other
+points, so that the amphitheatre that looked down on the arena was
+filled to its capacity.
+
+All night the little town had rioted with its guests. Everything was
+wide open at Gimlet Butte. Saloons were doing a land-office business
+and gambling-houses coining money. Great piles of gold had passed to
+and fro during the night at the roulette wheel and the faro table. But
+with the coming of day interest had centered on the rough-riding
+contest for the world’s championship. Saloons and dance halls were
+deserted, and the universal trend of travel had been toward the big
+grand stands, from which the sport could be best viewed.
+
+It was afternoon now. The preliminaries had been ridden, and half a
+dozen of the best riders had been chosen by the judges to ride again
+for the finals. Helen was wonderfully interested, because in the six
+who were to ride again were included the two Bannister cousins, her
+foreman, McWilliams, the young man “Texas,” whom she had met the day of
+her arrival at Gimlet Butte, and Tom Sanford, who had last year won the
+championship.
+
+She looked down on the arena, and her heart throbbed with the pure joy
+of life. Already she loved her West and its picturesque, chap-clad
+population. Their jingling spurs and their colored kerchiefs knotted
+round sunburned necks, their frank, whole-hearted abandon to the
+interest of the moment, led her to regard these youths as schoolboys.
+Yet they were a hard-bitten lot, as one could see, burned to a
+brick-red by the untempered sun of the Rockies; with muscles knit like
+steel, and hearts toughened to endure any blizzard they might meet.
+Only the humorous wrinkles about the corners of their eyes gave them
+away for the cheerful sons of mirth that they were.
+
+“Bob Austin on Two-Step,” announced the megaphone man, and a little
+stir eddied through the group gathered at the lane between the arena
+and the corral.
+
+A meek-looking buckskin was driven into the arena. The embodiment of
+listlessness, it apparently had not ambition enough to flick a fly from
+its flank with its tail. Suddenly the bronco’s ears pricked, its sharp
+eyes dilated. A man was riding forward, the loop of a lariat circling
+about his head. The rope fell true, but the wily pony side-stepped, and
+the loop slithered to the ground. Again the rope shot forward, dropped
+over the pony’s head and tightened. The roper’s mustang braced its
+forefeet, and brought the buckskin up short. Another rope swept over
+its head. It stood trembling, unable to move without strangling itself.
+
+A picturesque youth in flannel shirt and chaps came forward, dragging
+blanket, saddle and bridle. At sight of him the horse gave a spasmodic
+fling, then trembled again violently. A blind was coaxed over its eyes
+and the bridle slipped on. Quickly and warily, with deft fingers, the
+young man saddled and cinched. He waved a hand jauntily to the ropers.
+The lariats were thrown off as the puncher swung to the saddle. For an
+instant the buckskin stood bewildered, motionless as a statue. There
+was a sudden leap forward high in air, and Bob Austin, alias “Texas,”
+swung his sombrero with a joyous whoop.
+
+“Fan him! Fan him!” screamed the spectators, and the rider’s quirt went
+up and down like a piston-rod.
+
+Round and round went Two-Step in a vicious circle, “swapping ends” with
+dizzying rapidity. Suddenly he went forward as from a catapult, and
+came to sudden halt in about five seconds. But Texas’s knees still
+clung, viselike, to the sides of the pony. A series of quick bucks
+followed, the buckskin coming down with back humped, all four legs
+stiff as iron posts. The jar on the rider would have been like a
+pile-driver falling on his head had he not let himself grow limp. The
+buckskin plunged forward again in frenzied leaps, ending in an
+unexpected jump to one side. Alas for Texas! One moment he was
+jubilantly plying quirt and spurs, the next he found himself pitching
+sideways. To save himself he caught at the saddle-horn.
+
+“He’s hunting leather,” shouted a hundred voices.
+
+One of the judges rode out and waved a hand. Texas slipped to the
+ground disqualified, and made his dejected way back to his deriding
+comrades. Some of them had endured similar misfortunes earlier in the
+day. Therefore they found much pleasure in condoling with him.
+
+“If he’d only recollected to saw off the horn of his saddle, then he
+couldn’t ’a’ found it when he went to hunt leather,” mournfully
+commented one puncher in a shirt of robin’s egg blue.
+
+“’Twould have been most as good as to take the dust, wouldn’t it?”
+retorted Texas gently, and the laugh was on the gentleman in blue,
+because he had been thrown earlier in the day.
+
+“A fellow’s hands sure get in his way sometimes. I reckon if you’d tied
+your hands, Tex, you’d been riding that rocking-hawss yet,” suggested
+Denver amiably.
+
+“Sometimes it’s his foot he puts in it. There was onct a gent
+disqualified for riding on his spurs,” said Texas reminiscently.
+
+At which hit Denver retired, for not three hours before he had been
+detected digging his spurs into the cinch to help him stick to the
+saddle.
+
+“Jim McWilliams will ride Dead Easy,” came the announcement through the
+megaphone, and a burst of cheering passed along the grand stand, for
+the sunny smile of the foreman of the Lazy D made him a general
+favorite. Helen leaned forward and whispered something gaily to Nora,
+who sat in the seat in front of her. The Irish girl laughed and
+blushed, but when her mistress looked up it was her turn to feel the
+mounting color creep into her cheeks. For Ned Bannister, arrayed in all
+his riding finery, was making his way along the aisle to her.
+
+She had not seen him since he had ridden away from the Lazy D ten days
+before, quite sufficiently recovered from his wounds to take up the
+routine of life again. They had parted not the best of friends, for she
+had not yet forgiven him for his determination to leave with his cousin
+on the night that she had been forced to insist on his remaining. He
+had put her in a false position, and he had never explained to her why.
+Nor could she guess the reason—for he was not a man to harvest credit
+for himself by explaining his own chivalry.
+
+Since her heart told her how glad she was he had come to her box to see
+her, she greeted him with the coolest little nod in the world.
+
+“Good morning, Miss Messiter. May I sit beside y’u?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, certainly!” She swept her skirts aside carelessly and made room
+for him. “I thought you were going to ride soon.”
+
+“No, I ride last except for Sanford, the champion. My cousin rides just
+before me. He’s entered under the name of Jack Holloway.”
+
+She was thinking that he had no business to be riding, that his wounds
+were still too fresh, but she did not intend again to show interest
+enough in his affairs to interfere even by suggestion. Her heart had
+been in her mouth every moment of the time this morning while he had
+been tossed hither and thither on the back of his mount. In his
+delirium he had said he loved her. If he did, why should he torture her
+so? It was well enough for sound men to risk their lives, but—
+
+A cheer swelled in the grand stand and died breathlessly away.
+McWilliams was setting a pace it would take a rare expert to equal. He
+was a trick rider, and all the spectacular feats that appealed to the
+onlooker were his. While his horse was wildly pitching, he drank a
+bottle of pop and tossed the bottle away. With the reins in his teeth
+he slipped off his coat and vest, and concluded a splendid exhibition
+of skill by riding with his feet out of the stirrups. He had been
+smoking a cigar when he mounted. Except while he had been drinking the
+pop it had been in his mouth from beginning to end, and, after he had
+vaulted from the pony’s back, he deliberately puffed a long
+smoke-spiral into the air, to show that his cigar was still alight. No
+previous rider had earned so spontaneous a burst of applause. “He’s
+ce’tainly a pure when it comes to riding,” acknowledged Bannister. “I
+look to see him get either first or second.”
+
+“Whom do you think is his most dangerous rival?” Helen asked.
+
+“My cousin is a straight-up rider, too. He’s more graceful than Mac, I
+think, but not quite so good on tricks. It will be nip and tuck.”
+
+“How about your cousin’s cousin?” she asked, with bold irony.
+
+“He hopes he won’t have to take the dust,” was his laughing answer.
+
+The next rider suffered defeat irrevocably before he had been thirty
+seconds in the saddle. His mount was one of the most cunning of the
+outlaw ponies of the Northwest, and it brought him to grief by jamming
+his leg hard against the fence. He tried in vain to spur the bronco
+into the middle of the arena, but after it drove at a post for the
+third time and ground his limb against it, he gave up to the pain and
+slipped off.
+
+“That isn’t fair, is it?” Helen asked of the young man sitting beside
+her.
+
+He shrugged his lean, broad shoulders. “He should have known how to
+keep the horse in the open. Mac would never have been caught that way.”
+
+“Jack Holloway on Rocking Horse,” the announcer shouted.
+
+It took four men and two lariats to subdue this horse to a condition
+sufficiently tame to permit of a saddle being slipped on. Even then
+this could not be accomplished without throwing the bronco first. The
+result was that all the spirit was taken out of the animal by the
+preliminary ordeal, so that when the man from the Shoshone country
+mounted, his steed was too jaded to attempt resistance.
+
+“Thumb him! Thumb him!” the audience cried, referring to the cowboy
+trick of running the thumbs along a certain place in the shoulder to
+stir the anger of the bucker.
+
+But the rider slipped off with disgust. “Give me another horse,” he
+demanded, and after a minute’s consultation among the judges a second
+pony was driven out from the corral. This one proved to be a Tartar. It
+went off in a frenzy of pitching the moment its rider dropped into the
+saddle.
+
+“Y’u’ll go a long way before you see better ridin’ than his and Mac’s.
+Notice how he gives to its pitching,” said Bannister, as he watched his
+cousin’s perfect ease in the cyclone of which he was the center.
+
+“I expect it depends on the kind of a ‘hawss,’” she mocked. “He’s
+riding well, isn’t he?”
+
+“I don’t know any that ride better.”
+
+The horse put up a superb fight, trying everything it knew to unseat
+this demon clamped to its back. It possessed in combination all the
+worst vices, was a weaver, a sunfisher and a fence-rower, and never had
+it tried so desperately to maintain its record of never having been
+ridden. But the outlaw in the saddle was too much for the outlaw
+underneath. He was master, just as he was first among the ruffians whom
+he led, because there was in him a red-hot devil of wickedness that
+would brook no rival.
+
+The furious bronco surrendered without an instant’s warning, and its
+rider slipped at once to the ground. As he sauntered through the dust
+toward the grand stand, Helen could not fail to see how his vanity
+sunned itself in the applause that met his performance. His equipment
+was perfect to the least detail. The reflection from a lady’s
+looking-glass was no brighter than the silver spurs he jingled on his
+sprightly heels. Strikingly handsome in a dark, sinister way, one would
+say at first sight, and later would chafe at the justice of a verdict
+not to be denied.
+
+Ned Bannister rose from his seat beside Helen. “Wish me luck,” he said,
+with his gay smile.
+
+“I wish you all the luck you deserve,” she answered.
+
+“Oh, wish me more than that if y’u want me to win.”
+
+“I didn’t say I wanted you to win. You take the most unaccountable
+things for granted.”
+
+“I’ve a good mind to win, then, just to spite y’u,” he laughed.
+
+“As if you could,” she mocked; but her voice took a softer intonation
+as she called after him in a low murmur: “Be careful, please.”
+
+His white teeth flashed a smile of reassurance at her. “I’ve never been
+killed yet.”
+
+“Ned Bannister on Steamboat,” sang out the megaphone man.
+
+“I’m ce’tainly in luck. Steamboat’s the worst hawss on the range,” he
+told himself, as he strode down the grand stand to enter the arena.
+
+The announcement of his name created for the second time that day a
+stir of unusual interest. Everybody in that large audience had heard of
+Ned Bannister; knew of his record as a “bad man” and his prowess as the
+king of the Shoshone country; suspected him of being a train and bank
+robber as well as a rustler. That he should have the boldness to enter
+the contest in his own name seemed to show how defiant he was of the
+public sentiment against him, and how secure he counted himself in
+flaunting this contempt. As for the sheepman, the notoriety that his
+cousin’s odorous reputation had thrust upon him was extremely
+distasteful as well as dangerous, but he had done nothing to disgrace
+his name, and he meant to use it openly. He could almost catch the low
+whispers that passed from mouth to mouth about him.
+
+“Ain’t it a shame that a fellow like that, leader of all the criminals
+that hide in the mountains, can show himself openly before ten thousand
+honest folks?” That he knew to be the purport of their whispering, and
+along with it went a recital of the crimes he had committed. How he was
+a noted “waddy,” or cattle-rustler; how he and his gang had held up
+three trains in eighteen months; how he had killed Tom Mooney, Bob
+Carney and several others—these were the sorts of things that were
+being said about him, and from the bottom of his soul he resented his
+impotency to clear his name.
+
+There was something in Bannister’s riding that caught Helen’s fancy at
+once. It was the unconscious grace of the man, the ease with which he
+seemed to make himself a very part of the horse. He attempted no
+tricks, rode without any flourishes. But the perfect poise of his lithe
+body as it gave with the motions of the horse, proclaimed him a born
+rider; so finished, indeed, that his very ease seemed to discount the
+performance. Steamboat had a malevolent red eye that glared hatred at
+the oppressor man, and to-day it lived up to its reputation of being
+the most vicious and untamed animal on the frontier. But, though it did
+its best to unseat the rider and trample him underfoot, there was no
+moment when the issue seemed in doubt save once. The horse flung itself
+backward in a somersault, risking its own neck in order to break its
+master’s. But he was equal to the occasion; and when Steamboat
+staggered again to its feet Bannister was still in the saddle. It was a
+daring and magnificent piece of horsemanship, and, though he was
+supposed to be a desperado and a ruffian, his achievement met with a
+breathless gasp, followed by thunderous applause.
+
+The battle between horse and man was on again, for the animal was as
+strong almost in courage as the rider. But Steamboat’s confidence had
+been shaken as well as its strength. Its efforts grew less cyclonic.
+Foam covered its mouth and flecked its sides. The pitches were easy to
+foresee and meet. Presently they ceased altogether.
+
+Bannister slid from the saddle and swayed unsteadily across the arena.
+The emergency past, he had scarce an ounce of force left in him. Jim
+McWilliams ran out and slipped an arm around his shoulders, regardless
+of what his friends might think of him for it.
+
+“You’re all in, old man. Y’u hadn’t ought to have ridden, even though
+y’u did skin us all to a finish.”
+
+“Nonsense, Mac. First place goes to y’u or—or Jack Holloway.”
+
+“Not unless the judges are blind.”
+
+But Bannister’s prediction proved true. The champion, Sanford, had been
+traveling with a Wild West show, and was far too soft to compete with
+these lusty cowboys, who had kept hard from their daily life on the
+plains. Before he had ridden three minutes it was apparent that he
+stood no chance of retaining his title, so that the decision narrowed
+itself to an issue between the two Bannisters and McWilliams. First
+place was awarded to the latter, the second prize to Jack Holloway and
+the third to Ned Bannister.
+
+But nearly everybody in the grand stand knew that Bannister had been
+discriminated against because of his unpopularity. The judges were not
+local men, and had nothing to fear from the outlaw. Therefore they
+penalized him on account of his reputation. It would never do for the
+Associated Press dispatches to send word all over the East that a
+murderous desperado was permitted, unmolested, to walk away with the
+championship belt.
+
+“It ain’t a square deal,” declared McWilliams promptly.
+
+He was sitting beside Nora, and he turned round to express his opinion
+to the two sitting behind him in the box.
+
+“We’ll not go behind the returns. Y’u won fairly. I congratulate y’u,
+Mr. Champion-of-the-world,” replied the sheepman, shaking hands
+cordially.
+
+“I told you to bring that belt to the Lazy D,” smiled his mistress, as
+she shook hands.
+
+But in her heart she was crying out that it was an outrage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+JUDD MORGAN PASSES
+
+
+Gimlet Butte devoted the night of the Fourth to a high old time. The
+roping and the other sports were to be on the morrow, and meanwhile the
+night hours were filled with exuberance. The cowboy’s spree comes only
+once in several months, but when it does come he enters into the
+occasion with such whole-hearted enthusiasm as to make up swiftly for
+lost time. A traveling midway had cast its tents in a vacant square in
+competition with the regular attractions of the town, and everywhere
+the hard-riding punchers were “night herding” in full regalia.
+
+There was a big masked ball in the street, and another in the Masonic
+Hall, while here and there flared the lights of the faker with
+something to sell. Among these last was “Soapy” Sothern, doing a
+thriving business in selling suckers and bars wrapped with greenbacks.
+Crowds tramped the streets blowing horns and throwing confetti, and
+everywhere was a large sprinkling of men in high-heeled boots, swinging
+along with the awkward, stiff-legged gait of the cowboy. Sometimes a
+girl was hanging on his arm, and again he was “whooping it up with the
+boys”; but in either case the range-rider’s savings were burning a hole
+through his pockets with extreme rapidity.
+
+Jim McWilliams and the sheepman Bannister had that day sealed a
+friendship that was to be as enduring as life. The owner of the sheep
+ranch was already under heavy obligation to the foreman of the Lazy D,
+but debt alone is not enough on which to found soul brotherhood. There
+must be qualities of kinship in the primeval elements of character.
+Both men had suspected that this kinship existed, but to-day they had
+proved it in the way that one had lost and the other had won the
+coveted championship. They had made no vows and no professions. The
+subject had not even been touched in words; a meeting of the eyes,
+followed by the handshake with which Bannister had congratulated the
+winner. That had been all. But it was enough.
+
+With the casual democracy of the frontier they had together escorted
+Helen Messiter and Nora Darling through a riotous three hours of
+carnival, taking care to get them back to their hotel before the night
+really began “to howl.”
+
+But after they had left the young women, neither of them cared to sleep
+yet. They were still in costume, Mac dressed as a monk, and his friend
+as a Stuart cavalier, and the spirit of frolic was yet strong in them.
+
+“I expaict, mebbe, we better hunt in couples if we’re going to help
+paint the town,” smiled Mac, and his friend had immediately agreed.
+
+It must have been well after midnight that they found themselves
+“bucking the tiger” in a combination saloon and gambling-house, whose
+patrons were decidedly cosmopolitan in character. Here white and red
+and yellow men played side by side, the Orient and the Occident and the
+aboriginal alike intent on the falling cards and the little rolling
+ball. A good many of them were still in their masks and dominos, though
+these, for the most part, removed their vizors before playing.
+
+Neither McWilliams nor his friend were betting high, and the luck had
+been so even that at the end of two hours’ play neither of them had at
+any time either won or lost more than fifteen dollars. In point of
+fact, they were playing not so much to win as just to keep in touch
+with the gay, youthful humor of the night.
+
+They were getting tired of the game when two men jingled in for a
+drink. They were talking loudly together, and it was impossible to miss
+the subject of their conversation.
+
+McWilliams gave a little jerk of his head toward one of them. “Judd
+Morgan,” his lips framed without making a sound.
+
+Bannister nodded.
+
+“Been tanking up all day,” Mac added. “Otherwise his tongue would not
+be shooting off so reckless.”
+
+A silence had fallen over the assembly save for the braggarts at the
+bar. Men looked at each other, and then furtively at Bannister. For
+Morgan, ignorant of who was sitting quietly with his back to him at the
+faro-table, was venting his hate of Bannister and McWilliams.
+
+“Both in the same boat. Did y’u see how Mac ran to help him to-day?
+Both waddies. Both rustlers. Both train robbers. Sho! I got through
+putting a padlock on me mouth. Man to man, I’m as good as either of
+them—damn sight better. I wisht they was here, one or both; I wisht
+they would step up here and fight it out. Bannister’s a false alarm,
+and that foreman of the Lazy D—” His tongue stumbled over a blur of
+vilification that ended with a foul mention of Miss Messiter.
+
+Instantly two chairs crashed to the floor. Two pair of gray eyes met
+quietly.
+
+“My quarrel, Bann,” said Jim, in a low, even voice.
+
+The other nodded. “I’ll see y’u have a clear field.”
+
+The man who was with Morgan suddenly whispered in his ear, and the
+latter slewed his head in startled fear. Almost instantly a bullet
+clipped past McWilliams’s shoulder. Morgan had fired without waiting
+for the challenge he felt sure was at hand. Once—twice the foreman’s
+revolver made answer. Morgan staggered, slipped down to the floor, a
+bullet crashing through the chandelier as he fell. For a moment his
+body jerked. Then he rolled over and lay still.
+
+The foreman’s weapon covered him unwaveringly, but no more steadily
+than Bannister’s gaze the man who had come in with him who lay lifeless
+on the floor. The man looked at the lifeless thing, shuddered, and
+backed out of the saloon.
+
+“I call y’u all to witness that my friend killed him in self-defense,”
+said Bannister evenly. “Y’u all saw him fire first. Mac did not even
+have his gun out.”
+
+“That’s right,” agreed one, and another added: “He got what was coming
+to him.”
+
+“He sure did,” was the barkeeper’s indorsement. “He came in hunting
+trouble, but I reckon he didn’t want to be accommodated so prompt.”
+
+“Y’u’ll find us at the Gimlet Butte House if we’re wanted for this,”
+said Bannister. “We’ll be there till morning.”
+
+But once out of the gambling-house McWilliams drew his friend to one
+side. “Do y’u know who that was I killed?”
+
+“Judd Morgan, foreman before y’u at the Lazy D.”
+
+“Yes, but what else?”
+
+“What do y’u mean?”
+
+“I mean that next to your cousin Judd was leader of that Shoshone-Teton
+bunch.”
+
+“How do y’u know?”
+
+“I suspected it a long time, but I knew for sure the day that your
+cousin held up the ranch. The man that was in charge of the crowd
+outside was Morgan. I could swear to it. I knew him soon as I clapped
+eyes to him, but I was awful careful to forget to tell him I recognized
+him.”
+
+“That means we are in more serious trouble than I had supposed.”
+
+“Y’u bet it does. We’re in a hell of a hole, figure it out any way y’u
+like. Instead of having shot up a casual idiot, I’ve killed Ned
+Bannister’s right-hand man. That will be the excuse—shooting Morgan.
+But the real trouble is that I won the championship belt from your
+cousin. He already hated y’u like poison, and he don’t love me any too
+hard. He will have us arrested by his sheriff here. Catch the point.
+_Y’u’re Ned Bannister, the outlaw, and I’m his right-bower_. That’s the
+play he’s going to make, and he’s going to make it right soon.”
+
+“I don’t care if he does. We’ll fight him on his own ground. We’ll
+prove that he’s the miscreant and not us.”
+
+“Prove nothing,” snarled McWilliams. “Do y’u reckon he’ll give us a
+chance to prove a thing? Not on your life. He’ll have us jailed first
+thing; then he’ll stir up a sentiment against us, and before morning
+there will be a lynchingbee, and y’u and I will wear the neckties. How
+do y’u like the looks of it?”
+
+“But y’u have a lot of friends. They won’t stand for anything like
+that.”
+
+“Not if they had time to stop it. Trouble is, fellow’s friends think
+awful slow. They’ll arrive in time to cut us down and be the mourners.
+No, sir! It’s a hike for Jimmie Mac on the back of the first bronc he
+can slap a saddle on.”
+
+Bannister frowned. “I don’t like to run before the scurvy scoundrels.”
+
+“Do y’u suppose I’m enjoying it? Not to any extent, I allow. But that
+sweet relative of yours holds every ace in the deck, and he’ll play
+them, too. He owns the law in this man’s town, and he owns the lawless.
+But the best card he holds is that he can get a thousand of the best
+people here to join him in hanging the ‘king’ of the Shoshone outlaws.
+Explanations nothing! Y’u _rode_ under the name of Bannister, didn’t
+y’u? He’s Jack Holloway.”
+
+“It does make a strong combination,” admitted the sheepman.
+
+“Strong! It’s invincible. I can see him playing it, laughing up his
+sleeve all the time at the honest fools he is working. No, sir! I draw
+out of a game like that. Y’u don’t get a run for your money.”
+
+“Of course he knows already what has happened,” mused Bannister.
+
+“Sure he knows. That fellow with Morgan made a bee-line for him. Just
+about now he’s routing the sheriff out of his bed. We got no time to
+lose. Thing is, to burn the wind out of this town while we have the
+chance.”
+
+“I see. It won’t help us any to be spilling lead into a sheriff’s
+posse. That would ce’tainly put us in the wrong.”
+
+“Now y’u’re shouting. If we’re honest men why don’t we surrender
+peaceable? That’s the play the ‘king’ is going to make in this town.
+Now if we should spoil a posse and bump off one or two of them, we
+couldn’t pile up evidence enough to get a jury to acquit. No, sir! We
+can’t surrender and we can’t fight. Consequence is, we got to roll our
+tails immediate.”
+
+“We have an appointment with Miss Messiter and Nora for to-morrow
+morning. We’ll have to leave word we can’t keep it.”
+
+“Sure. Denver and Missou are playing the wheel down at the Silver
+Dollar. I reckon we better make those boys jump and run errands for us
+while we lie low. I’ll drop in casual and give them the word. Meet y’u
+here in ten minutes. Whatever y’u do, keep that mask on your face.”
+
+“Better meet farther from the scene of trouble. Suppose we say the
+north gate of the grand stand?”
+
+“Good enough. So-long.”
+
+The first faint streaks of day were beginning to show on the horizon
+when Bannister reached the grand stand. He knew that inside of another
+half-hour the little frontier town would be blinking in the early
+morning sunlight that falls so brilliantly through the limpid
+atmosphere. If they were going to leave without fighting their way out
+there was no time to lose.
+
+Ten minutes slowly ticked away.
+
+He glanced at his watch. “Five minutes after four. I wish I had gone
+with Mac. He may have been recognized.”
+
+But even as the thought flitted through his mind, the semi-darkness
+opened to let a figure out of it.
+
+“All quiet along the Potomac, seh?” asked the foreman’s blithe voice.
+“Good. I found the boys and got them started.” He flung down a Mexican
+vaquero’s gaily trimmed costume.
+
+“Get into these, seh. Denver shucked them for me. That coyote must have
+noticed what we wore before he slid out. Y’u can bet the orders are to
+watch for us as we were dressed then.”
+
+“What are y u going to do?”
+
+“Me? I’m scheduled to be Aaron Burr, seh. Missou swaps with me when he
+gets back here. They’re going to rustle us some white men’s clothes,
+too, but we cayn’t wear them till we get out of town on account of
+showing our handsome faces.”
+
+“What about horses?”
+
+“Denver is rustling some for us. Y’u better be scribbling your
+billy-doo to the girl y’u leave behind y’u, seh.”
+
+“Haven’t y’u got one to scribble?” Bannister retorted. “Seems to me y’u
+better get busy, too.”
+
+So it happened that when Missou arrived a few minutes later he found
+this pair of gentlemen, who were about to flee for their lives, busily
+inditing what McWilliams had termed facetiously _billets-doux_. Each of
+them was trying to make his letter a little warmer than friendship
+allowed without committing himself to any chance of a rebuff. Mac got
+as far as Nora Darling, absentmindedly inserted a comma between the
+words, and there stuck hopelessly. He looked enviously across at
+Bannister, whose pencil was traveling rapidly down his note-book.
+
+“My, what a swift trail your pencil leaves on that paper. That’s going
+some. Mine’s bogged down before it got started. I wisht y’u would start
+me off.”
+
+“Well, if you ain’t up and started a business college already. I had
+ought to have brought a typewriter along with me,” murmured Missou
+ironically.
+
+“How are things stacking? Our friends the enemy getting busy yet?”
+asked Bannister, folding and addressing his note.
+
+“That’s what. Orders gone out to guard every road so as not to let you
+pass. What’s the matter with me rustling up the boys and us holding
+down a corner of this town ourselves?”
+
+The sheepman shook his head. “We’re not going to start a little private
+war of our own. We couldn’t do that without spilling a lot of blood.
+No, we’ll make a run for it.”
+
+“That y’u, Denver?” the foreman called softly, as the sound of
+approaching horses reached him.
+
+“Bet your life. Got your own broncs, too. Sheriff Burns called up
+Daniels not to let any horses go out from his corral to anybody without
+his O.K. I happened to be cinching at the time the ’phone message came,
+so I concluded that order wasn’t for me, and lit out kinder
+unceremonious.”
+
+Hastily the fugitives donned the new costumes and dominos, turned their
+notes over to Denver, and swung to their saddles.
+
+“Good luck!” the punchers called after them, and Denver added an
+ironical promise that the foreman had no doubt he would keep. “I’ll
+look out for Nora—Darling.” There was a drawling pause between the
+first and second names. “I’ll ce’tainly see that she don’t have any
+time to worry about y’u, Mac.”
+
+“Y’u go to Halifax,” returned Mac genially over his shoulder as he
+loped away.
+
+“I doubt if we can get out by the roads. Soon as we reach the end of
+the street we better cut across that hayfield,” suggested Ned.
+
+“That’s whatever. Then we’ll slip past the sentries without being seen.
+I’d hate to spoil any of them if we can help it. We’re liable to get
+ourselves disliked if our guns spatter too much.”
+
+They rode through the main street, still noisy with the shouts of late
+revelers returning to their quarters. Masked men were yet in evidence
+occasionally, so that their habits caused neither remark nor suspicion.
+A good many of the punchers, unable to stay longer, were slipping out
+of town after having made a night of it. In the general exodus the two
+friends hoped to escape unobserved.
+
+They dropped into a side street, galloped down it for two hundred
+yards, and dismounted at a barb-wire fence which ran parallel with the
+road. The foreman’s wire-clippers severed the strands one by one, and
+they led their horses through the gap. They crossed an alfalfa-field,
+jumped an irrigation ditch, used the clippers again, and found
+themselves in a large pasture. It was getting lighter every moment, and
+while they were still in the pasture a voice hailed them from the road
+in an unmistakable command to halt.
+
+They bent low over the backs of their ponies and gave them the spur.
+The shot they had expected rang out, passing harmlessly over them.
+Another followed, and still another.
+
+“That’s right. Shoot up the scenery. Y’u don’t hurt us none,” the
+foreman said, apostrophizing the man behind the gun.
+
+The next clipped fence brought them to the open country. For half an
+hour they rode swiftly without halt. Then McWilliams drew up.
+
+“Where are we making for?”
+
+“How about the Wind River country?”
+
+“Won’t do. First off, they’ll strike right down that way after us.
+What’s the matter with running up Sweetwater Creek and lying out in the
+bad lands around the Roubideaux?”
+
+“Good. I have a sheep-camp up that way. I can arrange to have grub sent
+there for us by a man I can trust.”
+
+“All right. The Roubideaux goes.”
+
+While they were nooning at a cow-spring, Bannister, lying on his back,
+with his face to the turquoise sky, became aware that a vagrant impulse
+had crystallized to a fixed determination. He broached it at once to
+his companion.
+
+“One thing is a cinch, Mac. Neither y’u nor I will be safe in this
+country now until we have broken up the gang of desperadoes that is
+terrorizing this country. If we don’t get them they will get us. There
+isn’t any doubt about that. I’m not willing to lie down before these
+miscreants. What do y’u say?”
+
+“I’m with y’u, old man. But put a name to it. What are y’u proposing?”
+
+“I’m proposing that y’u and I make it our business not to have any
+other business until we clean out this nest of wolves. Let’s go right
+after them, and see if we can’t wipe out the Shoshone-Teton outfit.”
+
+“How? They own the law, don’t they?”
+
+“They don’t own the United States Government. When they held up a
+mail-train they did a fool thing, for they bucked up against Uncle Sam.
+What I propose is that we get hold of one of the gang and make him
+weaken. Then, after we have got hold of some evidence that will
+convict, we’ll go out and run down my namesake Ned Bannister. If people
+once get the idea that his hold isn’t so strong there’s a hundred
+people that will testify against him. We’ll have him in a Government
+prison inside of six months.”
+
+“Or else he’ll have us in a hole in the ground,” added the foreman,
+dryly.
+
+“One or the other,” admitted Bannister. “Are y’u in on this thing?”
+
+“I surely am. Y’u’re the best man I’ve met up with in a month of
+Sundays, seh. Y’u ain’t got but one fault; and that is y’u don’t smoke
+cigareets. Feed yourself about a dozen a day and y’u won’t have a
+blamed trouble left. Match, seh?” The foreman of the Lazy D, already
+following his own advice, rolled deftly his smoke, moistened it and
+proceeded to blow away his troubles.
+
+Bannister looked at his debonair insouciance and laughed. “Water off a
+duck’s back,” he quoted. “I know some folks that would be sweating fear
+right now. It’s ce’tainly an aggravating situation, that of being an
+honest man hunted as a villain by a villain. But I expaict my cousin’s
+enjoying it.”
+
+“He ain’t enjoying it so much as he would if his plans had worked out a
+little smoother. He’s holding the sack right now and cussing right
+smaht over it being empty, I reckon.”
+
+“He _did_ lock the stable door a little too late,” chuckled the
+sheepman. But even as he spoke a shadow fell over his face. “My God! I
+had forgotten. Y’u don’t suppose he would take it out of Miss
+Messiter.”
+
+“Not unless he’s tired of living,” returned her foreman, darkly. “One
+thing, this country won’t stand for is that. He’s got to keep his hands
+off women or he loses out. He dassent lay a hand on them if they don’t
+want him to. That’s the law of the plains, isn’t it?”
+
+“That’s the unwritten law for the bad man, but I notice it doesn’t seem
+to satisfy y’u, my friend. Y’u and I know that my cousin, Ned
+Bannister, doesn’t acknowledge any law, written or unwritten. He’s a
+devil and he has no fear. Didn’t he kidnap her before?”
+
+“He surely would never dare touch those young ladies. But—I don’t know.
+Bann, I guess we better roll along toward the Lazy D country, after
+all.”
+
+“I think so.” Ned looked at his friend with smiling drollery. “I
+thought y’u smoked your troubles away, Jim. This one seems to worry
+y’u.”
+
+McWilliams grinned sheepishly. “There’s one trouble won’t be smoked
+away. It kinder dwells.” Then, apparently apropos of nothing, he added,
+irrelevantly: “Wonder what Denver’s doing right now?”
+
+“Probably keeping that appointment y’u ran away from,” bantered his
+friend.
+
+“I’ll bet he is. Funny how some men have all the luck,” murmured the
+despondent foreman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+HUNTING BIG GAME
+
+
+In point of fact, Denver’s occupation at that moment was precisely what
+they had guessed it to be. He was sitting beside Nora Darling in the
+grand stand, explaining to her the fine points of “roping.” Mr. Bob
+Austin, commonly known as “Texas,” was meanwhile trying to make himself
+agreeable to Helen Messiter. Truth to tell, both young women listened
+with divided interest to their admirers. Both of them had heard the
+story of the night, and each of them had tucked away in her corsage a
+scribbled note she wanted to get back to her room and read again. That
+the pursuit was still on everybody knew, and those on the inside were
+aware that the “King,” masquerading under the name of Jack Holloway,
+was the active power behind the sheriff stimulating the chase.
+
+It was after the roping had begun, and Austin had been called away to
+take his turn, that the outlaw chief sauntered along the aisle of the
+grand stand to the box in which was seated the mistress of the Lazy D.
+
+“Beautiful mo’ning, isn’t it? Delightfully crisp and clear,” he said by
+way of introduction, stopping at her box.
+
+She understood the subtle jeer in his manner, and her fine courage rose
+to meet it. There was a daring light in her eye, a buoyant challenge in
+her voice as she answered:
+
+“It is a splendid morning. I’m not surprised you are enjoying it.”
+
+“Did I say I was enjoying it?” He laughed as he lifted the bar, came
+into her box and took a seat.
+
+“Of course not. How careless of me! I had forgotten you were in
+mourning for a deceased friend.”
+
+His dark eyes flashed. “I’ll not mourn for him long. He was a mighty
+trifling fellow, anyhow. Soon as I catch and hang his murderers I’ll
+quit wearing black.”
+
+“You may wear out several suits before then,” she hit back.
+
+“Don’t y’u believe it; when I want a thing I don’t quit till it’s
+done.”
+
+She met his gaze, and the impact of eyes seemed to shock her
+physically. The wickedness in him threatened, gloated, dominated. She
+shivered in the warm sunlight, and would not have had him know it for
+worlds.
+
+“Dear me! How confident you talk. Aren’t you sometimes disappointed?”
+
+“Temporarily. But when I want a thing I take it in the end.”
+
+She knew he was serving notice on her that he meant to win her; and
+again the little spinal shiver raced over her. She could not look at
+his sardonic, evil face without fear, and she could not look away
+without being aware of his eyes possessing her. What was the use of
+courage against such a creature as this?
+
+“Yes, I understand you take a good deal that isn’t yours,” she retorted
+carelessly, her eyes on the arena.
+
+“I make it mine when I take it,” he answered coolly, admiring the
+gameness which she wore as a suit of chain armor against his thrusts.
+
+“Isn’t it a little dangerous sometimes?” her even voice countered.
+“When you take what belongs to others you run a risk, don’t you?”
+
+“That’s part of the rules. Except for that I shouldn’t like it so well.
+I hunt big game, and the bigger the game the more risk. That’s why y’u
+guessed right when y’u said I was enjoying the mo’ning.”
+
+“Meaning—your cousin?”
+
+“Well, no. I wasn’t thinking of him, though he’s some sizable. But I’m
+hunting bigger game than he is, and I expect to bag it.”
+
+She let her scornful eyes drift slowly over him. “I might pretend to
+misunderstand you. But I won’t. You may have your answer now. I am not
+afraid of you, for since you are a bully you must be a coward. I saw a
+rattlesnake last week in the hills. It reminded me of some one I have
+seen. I’ll leave you to guess who.”
+
+Her answer drew blood. The black tide raced under the swarthy tan of
+his face. He leaned forward till his beady eyes were close to her
+defiant ones. “Y’u have forgotten one thing, Miss Messiter. A
+rattlesnake can sting. I ask nothing of you. Can’t I break your heart
+without your loving me? You’re only a woman—and not the first I have
+broken, by God—”
+
+His slim, lithe body was leaning forward so that it cut off others, and
+left them to all intents alone. At a touch of her fingers the handbag
+in her lap flew open and a little ivory-hilted revolver lay in her
+hand.
+
+“You may break me, but you’ll never bend me an inch.”
+
+He looked at the little gun and laughed ironically. “Sho! If y’u should
+hit me with that and I should find it out I might get mad at y’u.”
+
+“Did I say it was for you?” she said coldly; and again the shock of
+joined eyes ended in drawn battle.
+
+“Have y’u the nerve?” He looked her over, so dainty and so resolute, so
+silken strong; and he knew he had his answer.
+
+His smoldering eyes burned with desire to snatch her to him and ride
+away into the hills. For he was a man who lived in his sensations. He
+had won many women to their hurt, but it was the joy of conflict that
+made the pursuit worth while to him; and this young woman, who could so
+delightfully bubble with little laughs ready to spill over and was yet
+possessed of a spirit so finely superior to the tenderness of her soft,
+round, maidenly curves, allured him mightily to the attack.
+
+She dropped the revolver back into the bag and shut the clasp with a
+click, “And now I think, Mr. Bannister, that I’ll not detain you any
+longer. We understand each other sufficiently.”
+
+He rose with a laugh that mocked. “I expaict to spend quite a bit of
+time understanding y’u one of these days. In the meantime this is to
+our better acquaintance.”
+
+Deliberately, without the least haste, he stooped and kissed her before
+she could rally from the staggering surprise of the intention she read
+in his eyes too late to elude. Then, with the coolest bravado in the
+world, he turned on his heel and strolled away.
+
+Angry sapphires gleamed at him from under the long, brown lashes. She
+was furious, aghast, daunted. By the merest chance she was sitting in a
+corner of the box, so screened from observation that none could see.
+But the insolence of him, the reckless defiance of all standards of
+society, shook her even while it enraged her. He had put forth his
+claim like a braggart, but he had made good with an audacity superb in
+its effrontery. How she hated him! How she feared him! The thoughts
+were woven inseparably in her mind. Mephisto himself could not have
+impressed himself more imperatively than this strutting, heartless
+master artist in vice.
+
+She saw him again presently down in the arena, for it was his turn to
+show his skill at roping. Texas had done well; very well, indeed. He
+had made the throw and tie in thirty-seven seconds, which was two
+seconds faster than the record of the previous year. But she knew
+instinctively, as her fascinated eyes watched the outlaw preparing for
+the feat, that he was going to win. He would use his success as a
+weapon against her; as a means of showing her that he always succeeded
+in whatever he undertook. So she interpreted he look he flung her as he
+waited at the chute for the wild hill steer to be driven into the
+arena. It takes a good man physically to make a successful roper. He
+must be possessed of nerve, skill and endurance far out of the
+ordinary. He must be quick-eyed, strong-handed, nimble of foot, expert
+of hand and built like a wildcat. So Denver explained to the two young
+women in the box, and the one behind him admitted reluctantly that she
+long, lean, supple Centaur waiting impassively at the gateway fitted
+the specifications.
+
+Out flashed the rough-coated hill steer, wild and fleet as a hare, thin
+and leggy, with muscles of whipcord. Down went the flag, and the
+stopwatches began to tick off the seconds. Like an arrow the outlaw’s
+pony shot forward, a lariat circling round and round the rider’s head.
+At every leap the cow pony lessened the gap as it pounded forward on
+the heels of the flying steer.
+
+The loop swept forward and dropped over the horns of the animal. The
+pony, with the perfect craft of long practice, swerved to one side with
+a rush. The dragging rope swung up against the running steer’s legs,
+grew suddenly taut. Down went the steer’s head, and next moment its
+feet were swept from under it as it went heavily to the ground. Man and
+horse were perfect in their team work. As the supple rider slid from
+the back of the pony it ran to the end of the rope and braced itself to
+keep the animal from rising. Bannister leaped on the steer, tie-rope in
+hand. Swiftly his deft hands passed to and fro, making the necessary
+loops and knots. Then his hands went into the air. The steer was
+hog-tied.
+
+For a few seconds the judges consulted together. “Twenty-nine seconds,”
+announced their spokesman, and at the words a great cheer went up.
+Bannister had made his tie in record time.
+
+Impudently the scoundrel sauntered up to the grand stand, bowed
+elaborately to Miss Messiter, and perched himself on the fence, where
+he might be the observed of all observers. It was curious, she thought,
+how his vanity walked hand in hand with so much power and force. He was
+really extraordinarily strong, but no debutante’s self-sufficiency
+could have excelled his. He was so frankly an egotist that it ceased to
+be a weakness.
+
+Back in her room at the hotel an hour later Helen paced up and down
+under a nervous strain foreign to her temperament. She was afraid; for
+the first time in her life definitely afraid. This man pitted against
+her had deliberately divorced his life from morality. In him lay no
+appeal to any conscience court of last resort. But the terror of this
+was not for herself principally, but for her flying lover. With his
+indubitable power, backed by the unpopularity of the sheepman in this
+cattle country, the King of the Bighorn could destroy his cousin if he
+set himself to do so. Of this she was convinced, and her conviction
+carried a certainty that he had the will as well as the means. If he
+had lacked anything in motive she herself had supplied one. For she was
+afraid that this villain had read her heart.
+
+And as her hand went fluttering to her heart she found small comfort in
+the paper lying next it that only a few hours before had brought her
+joy. For at any moment a messenger might come in to tell her that the
+writer of it had been captured and was to be dealt with summarily in
+frontier fashion. At best her lover and her friend were but fugitives
+from justice. Against them were arrayed not only the ruffian followers
+of their enemy, but also the lawfully constituted authorities of the
+county. Even if they should escape to-day the net would tighten on
+them, and they would eventually be captured.
+
+For the third time since coming to Wyoming Helen found refuge in tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+RUN TO EARTH
+
+
+When word came to Denver and the other punchers of the Lazy D that
+Reddy had been pressed into service as a guide for the posse that was
+pursuing the fugitives they gave vent to their feelings in choice
+profanity.
+
+“Now, ain’t that like him? Had to run around like a locoed calf telling
+all he knowed and more till Burns ropes him in,” commented the
+disgusted Missou.
+
+“Trouble with Reddy is he sets his mouth to working and then goes away
+and leaves it,” mourned Jim Henson.
+
+“I’d hate to feel as sore as Reddy will when the boys get through
+playing with him after he gets back to the ranch,” Denver contributed,
+when he had exhausted his vocabulary.
+
+Meanwhile Reddy, unaware of being a cause of offense, was cheerfully
+happy in the unexpected honor that had been thrust upon him. His will
+was of putty, molded into the opinion of whomever he happened at the
+moment to be with. Just now, with the ironic eye of Sheriff Burns upon
+him, he was strong for law enforcement.
+
+“A feller hadn’t ought to be so promiscuous with his hardware. This
+here thing of shooting up citizens don’t do Wyoming no good these days.
+Capital ain’t a-going to come in when such goings-on occur,” he sagely
+opined, unconsciously parroting the sentiment Burns had just been
+instilling into him.
+
+“That’s right, sir. If that ain’t horse sense I don’t know any. You got
+a head on you, all right,” answered the admiring sheriff.
+
+The flattered Reddy pleaded guilty to being wiser than most men. “Jest
+because I punch cows ain’t any reason why I’m anybody’s fool. I’ll show
+them smart boys at the Lazy D I don’t have to take the dust of any of
+the bunch when it comes to using my think tank.”
+
+“I would,” sympathized Burns. “You bet they’ll all be almighty jealous
+when they learn how you was chosen out of the whole outfit on this
+job.”
+
+All day they rode, and that night camped a few miles from the Lazy D.
+Early next morning they hailed a solitary rider as he passed. The man
+turned out to be a cowman, with a small ranch not far from the one
+owned by Miss Messiter.
+
+“Hello, Henderson! y’u seen anything of Jim McWilliams and another
+fellow riding acrost this way?” asked Reddy.
+
+“Nope,” answered the cowman promptly. But immediately he modified his
+statement to add that he had seen two men riding toward Dry Creek a
+couple of hours ago. “They was going kinder slow. Looked to me sorter
+like one of them was hurt and the other was helping him out,” he
+volunteered.
+
+The sheriff looked significantly at one of his men and nodded.
+
+“You didn’t recognize the horses, I reckon?”
+
+“Come to think of it, one of the ponies did look like Jim’s roan.
+What’s up, boys? Anything doing?”
+
+“Nothing particular. We want to see Jim, that’s all. So long.”
+
+What Henderson had guessed was the truth. The continuous hard riding
+had been too much for Bannister and his wound had opened anew. They
+were at the time only a few miles from a shack on Dry Creek, where the
+Lazy D punchers sometimes put up. McWilliams had attended the wound as
+best he could, and after a few hours’ rest had headed for the cabin in
+the hills. They were compelled to travel very slowly, since the motion
+kept the sheepman’s wound continually bleeding. But about noon they
+reached the refuge they had been seeking and Bannister lay down on the
+bunk with their saddle blankets under him. He soon fell asleep, and Mac
+took advantage of this to set out on a foraging expedition to a ranch
+not far distant. Here he got some bread, bacon, milk and eggs from a
+man he could trust and returned to his friend.
+
+It was dark by the time he reached the cabin. He dismounted, and with
+his arms full of provisions pushed into the hut.
+
+“Awake, Bann?” he asked in a low voice.
+
+The answer was unexpected. Something heavy struck his chest and flung
+him back against the wall. Before he could recover his balance he was
+pinioned fast. Four men had hurled themselves upon him.
+
+“We’ve got you, Jim. Not a mite o’ use resisting,” counseled the
+sheriff.
+
+“Think I don’t savez that? I can take a hint when a whole Methodist
+church falls on me. Who are y’u, anyhow?”
+
+“Somebody light a lantern,” ordered Burns.
+
+By the dim light it cast Mac made them out, and saw Ned Bannister
+gagged and handcuffed on the bed. He knew a moment of surprise when his
+eyes fell on Reddy.
+
+“So it was y’u brought them here, Red?” he said quietly.
+
+Contrary to his own expectations, the gentleman named was embarrassed
+“The sheriff, he summoned me to serve,” was his lame defense.
+
+“And so y’u threw down your friends. Good boy!”
+
+“A man’s got to back the law up, ain’t he?”
+
+Mac turned his shoulder on him rather pointedly. “There isn’t any need
+of keeping that gag in my friend’s mouth any longer,” he suggested to
+Burns.
+
+“That’s right, too. Take it out, boys. I got to do my duty, but I don’t
+aim to make any gentleman more uncomfortable than I can help. I want
+everything to be pleasant all round.”
+
+“I’m right glad to hear that, Burns, because my friend isn’t fit to
+travel. Y’u can take me back and leave him out here with a guard,” the
+foreman replied quickly.
+
+“Sorry I can’t accommodate you, Jim, but I got to take y’u both with
+me.”
+
+“Those are the orders of the King, are they?”
+
+Burns flushed darkly. “It ain’t going to do you any good to talk that
+way. You know mighty well this here man with you is Bannister. I ain’t
+going to take no chances on losing him now I’ve got my hand on him.”
+
+“Y’u ce’tainly deserve a re-election, and I’ll bet y’u get it all
+right. Any man so given over to duty, so plumb loaded down to the hocks
+with conscience as y’u, will surely come back with a big majority next
+November.”
+
+“I ain’t askin’ for _your_ vote, Mac.”
+
+“Oh, y’u don’t need votes. Just get the King to O. K. your nomination
+and y’u’ll win in a walk.”
+
+“My friend, y’u better mind your own business. Far as I can make out
+y’u got troubles enough of your own,” retorted the nettled sheriff.
+
+“Y’u don’t need to tell me that, Tom Burns’ Y’u ain’t a man—nothing but
+a stuffed skin worked by a string. When that miscreant Bannister pulls
+the string y’u jump. He’s jerked it now, so y’u’re taking us back to
+him. I can prove that coyote Morgan shot at me first, but that doesn’t
+cut any ice with you.”
+
+“What made you light out so sudden, then?” demanded the aggrieved Burns
+triumphantly.
+
+“Because I knew _you_. That’s a plenty good reason. I’m not asking
+anything for myself. All I say is that my friend isn’t fit to travel
+yet. Let him stay here under a guard till he is.”
+
+“He was fit enough to get here. By thunder, he’s fit to go back!”
+
+“Y’u’ve said enough, Mac,” broke in Bannister. “It’s awfully good of
+y’u to speak for me, but I would rather see it out with you to a
+finish. I don’t want any favors from this yellow dog of my cousin.”
+
+The “yellow dog” set his teeth and swore vindictively behind them. He
+was already imagining an hour when these insolent prisoners of his
+would sing another tune.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+PLAYING FOR TIME
+
+
+“They’ve got ’em. Caught them on Dry Creek, just below Green Forks.”
+
+Helen Messiter, just finishing her breakfast at the hotel preparatory
+to leaving in her machine for the ranch, laid down her knife and fork
+and looked with dilated eyes at Denver, who had broken in with the
+news.
+
+“Are you sure?” The color had washed from her face and left her very
+white, but she fronted the situation quietly without hysterics or fuss
+of any kind.
+
+“Yes, ma’am. They’re bringing them in now to jail. Watch out and y’u’ll
+see them pass here in a few minutes. Seems that Bannister’s wound
+opened up on him and he couldn’t go any farther. Course Mac wouldn’t
+leave him. Sheriff Burns and his posse dropped in on them and had them
+covered before Mac could chirp.”
+
+“You are sure this man—this desperado Bannister—will do nothing till
+night?”
+
+“Not the way I figure it. He’ll have the jail watched all day. But he’s
+got to work the town up to a lynching. I expect the bars will be free
+for all to-day. By night the worst part of this town will be ready for
+anything. The rest of the citizens are going to sit down and do nothing
+just because it is Bannister.”
+
+“But it isn’t Bannister—not the Bannister they think it is.”
+
+He shook his head. “No use, ma’am. I’ve talked till my throat aches,
+but it don’t do a mite of good. Nobody believes a word of what I say.
+Y’u see, we ain’t got any proof.”
+
+“Proof! We have enough, God knows! didn’t this villain—this outlaw that
+calls himself Jack Holloway—attack and try to murder him?”
+
+“That’s what we believe, but the report out is that one of us punchers
+shot him up for crossing the dead-line.”
+
+“Didn’t this fellow hold up the ranch and try to take Ned Bannister
+away with him?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. But that doesn’t look good to most people. They say he had
+his friends come to take him away so y’u wouldn’t hold him and let us
+boys get him. This cousin business is a fairy tale the way they size it
+up. How come this cousin to let him go if he held up the ranch to put
+the sick man out of business? No, miss. This country has made up its
+mind that your friend is the original Ned Bannister. My opinion is that
+nothing on earth can save him.”
+
+“I don’t want your opinion. I’m going to save him, I tell you; and you
+are going to help. Are his friends nothing but a bunch of quitters?”
+she cried, with sparkling eyes.
+
+“I didn’t know I was such a great friend of his,” answered the cowboy
+sulkily.
+
+“You’re a friend of Jim McWilliams, aren’t you? Are you going to sneak
+away and let these curs hang him?”
+
+Denver flushed. “Y’u’re dead right, Miss Helen. I guess I’ll see it out
+with you. What’s the orders?”
+
+“I want you to help me organize a defense. Get all Mac’s friends
+stirred up to make a fight for him. Bring as many of them in to see me
+during the day as you can. If you see any of the rest of the Lazy D
+boys send them in to me for instructions. Report yourself every hour to
+me. And make sure that at least three of your friends that you can
+trust are hanging round the jail all day so as to be ready in case any
+attempt is made to storm it before dark.”
+
+“I’ll see to it.” Denver hung on his heel a moment before leaving.
+“It’s only square to tell y’u, Miss Helen, that this means war here
+tonight. These streets are going to run with blood if we try to save
+them.”
+
+“I’m taking that responsibility,” she told him curtly; but a moment
+later she added gently: “I have a plan, my friend, that may stop this
+outrage yet. But you must do your best for me.” She smiled sadly at
+him. “You’re my foreman, to-day, you know.”
+
+“I’m going to do my level best, y’u may tie to that,” he told her
+earnestly.
+
+“I know you will.” And their fingers touched for an instant.
+
+Through a window the girl could see a crowd pouring down the street
+toward the hotel. She flew up the stairs and out upon the second-story
+piazza that looked down upon the road.
+
+From her point of vantage she easily picked them out—the two unarmed
+men riding with their hands tied behind their backs, encircled by a
+dozen riders armed to the teeth. Bannister’s hat had apparently fallen
+off farther down the street, for the man beside him was dusting it. The
+wounded prisoner looked about him without fear, but it was plain he was
+near the limit of endurance. He was pale as a sheet, and his fair curls
+clung moistly to his damp forehead.
+
+McWilliams caught sight of her first, and she could see him turn and
+say a word to his comrade. Bannister looked up, caught sight of her,
+and smiled. That smile, so pale and wan, went to her heart like a
+knife. But the message of her eyes was hope. They told the prisoners
+silently to be of good cheer, that at least they were not deserted to
+their fate.
+
+“What is it about—the crowd?” Nora asked of her mistress as the latter
+was returning to the head of the stairs.
+
+In as few words as she could Helen told her, repressing sharply the
+tears the girl began to shed. “This is not the time to weep—not yet. We
+must save them. You can do your part. Mr. Bannister is wounded. Get a
+doctor over the telephone and see that he attends him at the prison.
+Don’t leave the ’phone until you have got one to promise to go
+immediately.”
+
+“Yes, miss. Is there anything else?”
+
+“Ask the doctor to call you up from the prison and tell you how Mr.
+Bannister is. Make it plain to him that he is to give up his other
+practice, if necessary, and is to keep us informed through the day
+about his patient’s condition. I will be responsible for his bill.”
+
+Helen herself hurried to the telegraph office at the depot. She wrote
+out a long dispatch and handed it to the operator. “Send this at once
+please.”
+
+He was one of those supercilious young idiots that make the most of
+such small power as ever drifts down to them. Taking the message, he
+tossed it on the table. “I’ll send it when I get time.”
+
+“You’ll send it now.”
+
+“What—what’s that?”
+
+Her steady eyes caught and held his shifting ones. “I say you are going
+to send it now—this very minute.”
+
+“I guess not. The line’s busy,” he bluffed.
+
+“If you don’t begin sending that message this minute I’ll make it my
+business to see that you lose your position,” she told him calmly.
+
+He snatched up the paper from the place where he had tossed it. “Oh,
+well, if it’s so darned important,” he conceded ungraciously.
+
+She stood quietly above him while he sent the telegram, even though he
+contrived to make every moment of her stay an unvoiced insult. Her wire
+was to the wife of the Governor of the State. They had been close
+friends at school, and the latter had been urging Helen to pay a visit
+to Cheyenne. The message she sent was as follows:
+
+Battle imminent between outlaws and cattlemen here. Bloodshed certain
+to-night. My foreman last night killed in self-defense a desperado.
+Bannister’s gang, in league with town authorities, mean to lynch him
+and one of my other friends after dark this evening. Sheriff will do
+nothing. Can your husband send soldiers immediately? Wire answer.
+
+
+The operator looked up sullenly after his fingers had finished the last
+tap. “Well?”
+
+“Just one thing more,” Helen told him. “You understand the rules of the
+company about secrecy. Nobody but you knows I am sending this message.
+If by any chance it should leak out, I shall know through whom. If you
+want to hold your position, you will keep quiet.”
+
+“I know my business,” he growled. Nevertheless, she had spoken in
+season, for he had had it in his mind to give a tip where he knew it
+would be understood to hasten the jail delivery and accompanying
+lynching.
+
+When she returned to the hotel, Helen found Missou waiting for her. She
+immediately sent him back to the office, and told him to wait there
+until the answer was received. “I’ll send one of the boys up to relieve
+you so that you may come with the telegram as soon as it arrives. I
+want the operator watched all day. Oh, here’s Jim Henson! Denver has
+explained the situation to you, I presume. I want you to go up to the
+telegraph office and stay there all day. Go to lunch with the operator
+when he goes. Don’t let him talk privately to anybody, not even for a
+few seconds. I don’t want you to seem to have him under guard before
+outsiders, but let him know it very plainly. He is not to mention a
+wire I sent or the answer to it—not to anybody, Jim. Is that plain?”
+
+“Y’u bet! He’s a clam, all right, till the order is countermanded.” And
+the young man departed with a cheerful grin that assured Helen she had
+nothing to fear from official leaks.
+
+Nora, from answering a telephone call, came to report to the general in
+charge. “The doctor says that he has looked after Mr. Bannister, and
+there is no immediate danger. If he keeps quiet for a few days he ought
+to do well. Mr. McWilliams sent a message by him to say that we aren’t
+to worry about him. He said he would—would—rope a heap of cows on the
+Lazy D yet.”
+
+Nora, bursting into tears, flung herself into Helen’s arms. “They are
+going to kill him. I know they are, and—and ’twas only yesterday,
+ma’am, I told him not to—to get gay, the poor boy. When he tried
+to—to—” She broke down and sobbed.
+
+Her mistress smiled in spite of herself, though she was bitterly aware
+that even Nora’s grief was only superficially ludicrous.
+
+“We’re going to save him, Nora, if we can. There’s hope while there’s
+life. You see, Mac himself is full of courage. _He_ hasn’t given up. We
+must keep up our courage, too.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am, but this is the first gentleman friend I ever had hanged,
+and—” She broke off, sobbing, leaving the rest as a guess.
+
+Helen filled it out aloud. “And you were going to say that you care
+more for him than any of the others. Well, you must stop coquetting and
+tell him so when we have saved him.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am,” agreed Nora, very repentant for the moment of the fact
+that it was her nature to play with the hearts of those of the male
+persuasion. Immediately she added: “He was _that_ kind, ma’am,
+tender-hearted.”
+
+Helen, whose own heart was breaking, continued to soothe her. “Don’t
+say _was_, child. You are to be brave, and not think of him that way.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. He told me he was going to buy cows with the thousand
+dollars he won yesterday. I knew he meant—”
+
+“Yes, of course. It’s a cowboy’s way of saying that he means to start
+housekeeping. Have you the telegram, Missou?” For that young man was
+standing in the doorway.
+
+He handed her the yellow slip. She ripped open the envelope and read:
+
+Company B en route. Railroad connections uncertain. Postpone crisis
+long as possible. May reach Gimlet Butte by ten-thirty.
+
+
+Her first thought was of unspeakable relief. The militia was going to
+take a hand. The boys in khaki would come marching down the street, and
+everything would be all right. But hard on the heels of her instinctive
+gladness trod the sober second thought. Ten-thirty at best, and perhaps
+later! Would they wait that long, or would they do their cowardly work
+as soon as night fell. She must contrive to delay them till the train
+drew in. She must play for those two lives with all her woman’s wit;
+must match the outlaw’s sinister cunning and fool him into delay. She
+knew he would come if she sent for him. But how long could she keep
+him? As long as he was amused at her agony, as long as his pleasure in
+tormenting her was greater than his impatience to be at his ruffianly
+work. Oh, if she ever needed all her power it would be to-night.
+
+Throughout the day she continued to receive hourly reports from Denver,
+who always brought with him four or five honest cowpunchers from
+up-country to listen to the strange tale she unfolded to them. It was,
+of course, in part, the spell of her sweet personality, of that shy
+appeal she made to the manhood in them; but of those who came, nearly
+all believed, for the time at least, and aligned themselves on her side
+in the struggle that was impending. Some of these were swayed from
+their allegiance in the course of the day, but a few she knew would
+remain true.
+
+Meanwhile, all through the day, the enemy was busily at work. As Denver
+had predicted, free liquor was served to all who would drink. The town
+and its guests were started on a grand debauch that was to end in
+violence that might shock their sober intelligence. Everywhere poisoned
+whispers were being flung broadcast against the two men waiting in the
+jail for what the night would bring forth.
+
+Dusk fell on a town crazed by bad whiskey and evil report. The deeds of
+Bannister were hashed and rehashed at every bar, and nobody related
+them with more ironic gusto than the man who called himself Jack
+Holloway. There were people in town who knew his real name and
+character, but of these the majority were either in alliance with him
+or dared not voice their knowledge. Only Miss Messiter and her punchers
+told the truth, and their words were blown away like chaff.
+
+From the first moment of darkness Helen had the outlaw leader dogged by
+two of her men. Since neither of these were her own riders this was
+done without suspicion. At intervals of every quarter of an hour they
+reported to her in turn. Bannister was beginning to drink heavily, and
+she did not want to cut short his dissipation by a single minute. Yet
+she had to make sure of getting his attention before he went too far.
+
+It was close to nine when she sent him a note, not daring to delay a
+minute longer. For the reports of her men were all to the same effect,
+that the crisis would not now be long postponed. Bannister, or
+Holloway, as he chose to call himself, was at the bar with his
+lieutenants in evil when the note reached him. He read it with a
+satisfaction he could not conceal. So! He had brought her already to
+her knees. Before he was through with her she should grovel in the dust
+before him.
+
+“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Do nothing till I return,” he ordered,
+and went jingling away to the Elk House.
+
+The young woman’s anxiety was pitiable, but she repressed it sternly
+when she went to meet the man she feared; and never had it been more in
+evidence than in this hour of her greatest torture. Blithely she came
+forward to meet him, eye challenging eye gayly. No hint of her anguish
+escaped into her manner. He read there only coquetry, the eternal sex
+conflict, the winsome defiance of a woman hitherto the virgin mistress
+of all assaults upon her heart’s citadel. It was the last thing he had
+expected to see, but it was infinitely more piquant, more intoxicating,
+than desperation. She seemed to give the lie to his impression of her
+love for his cousin; and that, too, delighted his pride.
+
+“You will sit down?”
+
+Carelessly, almost indolently, she put the question, her raised
+eyebrows indicating a chair with perfunctory hospitality. He had not
+meant to sit, had expected only to gloat a few minutes over her
+despair; but this situation called for more deliberation. He had yet to
+establish the mastery his vanity demanded. Therefore he took a chair.
+
+“This is ce’tainly an unexpected honor. Did y’u send for me to explain
+some more about that sufficient understanding between us?” he sneered.
+
+It was a great relief to her to see that, though he had been drinking,
+as she had heard, he was entirely master of himself. Her efforts might
+still be directed to Philip sober.
+
+“I sent for you to congratulate you,” she answered, with a smile. “You
+are a bigger man than I thought. You have done what you said you would
+do, and I presume you can very shortly go out of mourning.”
+
+He radiated vanity, seemed to visibly expand “Do y’u go in when I go
+out?” he asked brutally.
+
+She laughed lightly. “Hardly. But it does seem as if I’m unlucky in my
+foremen. They all seem to have engagements across the divide.”
+
+“I’ll get y u another.”
+
+“Thank you. I was going to ask as much of you. Can you suggest one
+now?”
+
+“I’m a right good cattle man myself.”
+
+“And—can you stay with me a reasonable time?”
+
+He laughed. “I have no engagements across the Styx, ma’am.”
+
+“My other foremen thought _they_ were permanent fixtures here, too.”
+
+“We’re all liable to mistakes.”
+
+“Even you, I suppose.”
+
+“I’ll sign a lease to give y’u possession of my skill for as long as
+y’u like.”
+
+She settled herself comfortably back in an easy chair, as alluring a
+picture of buoyant, radiant youth as he had seen in many a day. “But
+the terms. I am afraid I can’t offer you as much as you make at your
+present occupation.”
+
+“I could keep that up as a side-line.”
+
+“So you could. But if you use my time for your own profit, you ought to
+pay me a royalty on your intake.”
+
+His eyes lit with laughter. “I reckon that can be arranged. Any
+percentage you think fair It will all be in the family, anyway.”
+
+“I think that is one of the things about which we don’t agree,” she
+made answer softly, flashing him the proper look of inviting disdain
+from under her silken lashes.
+
+He leaned forward, elbow on the chair-arm and chin in hand. “We’ll
+agree about it one of these days.”
+
+“Think so?” she returned airily.
+
+“I don’t think. I know.”
+
+Just an eyebeat her gaze met his, with that hint of shy questioning, of
+puzzled doubt that showed a growing interest. “I wonder,” she murmured,
+and recovered herself with a hurried little laugh.
+
+How she hated her task, and him! She was a singularly honest woman, but
+she must play the siren; must allure this scoundrel to forgetfulness,
+and yet elude the very familiarity her manner invited. She knew her
+part, the heartless enticing coquette, compounded half of passion and
+half of selfishness. It was a hateful thing to do, this sacrifice of
+her personal reticence, of the individual abstraction in which she
+wrapped herself as a cloak, in order to hint at a possibility of some
+intimacy of feeling between them. She shrank from it with a repugnance
+hardly to be overcome, but she held herself with an iron will and
+consummate art to the role she had undertaken. Two lives hung on her
+success. She must not forget that. She would not let herself forget
+that—and one of them that of the man she loved.
+
+So, bravely she played her part, repelling always with a hint of
+invitation, denying with the promise in her fascinated eyes of ultimate
+surrender to his ardor. In the zest of the pursuit the minutes slipped
+away unnoticed. Never had a woman seemed to him more subtly elusive,
+and never had he felt more sure of himself. Her charm grew on him,
+stirred his pulses to a faster beat. For it was his favorite sport, and
+this warm, supple young creature, who was to be the victim of his bow
+and arrow, showed herself worthy of his mettle.
+
+The clock downstairs struck the half-hour, and Bannister, reminded of
+what lay before him outside, made a move to go. Her alert eyes had been
+expecting it, and she forestalled him by a change of tactics. Moved
+apparently by impulse, she seated herself on the piano-stool, swept the
+keys for an instant with her fingers, and plunged into the brilliant
+“Carmen” overture. Susceptible as this man was to the influence of
+music, he could not fail to be arrested by so perfect an interpretation
+of his mood. He stood rooted, was carried back again in imagination to
+a great artiste’s rendering of that story of fierce passion and aching
+desire so brilliantly enacted under the white sunbeat of a country of
+cloudless skies. Imperceptibly she drifted into other parts of the
+opera. Was it the wild, gypsy seductiveness of _Carmen_ that he felt,
+or, rather, this American girl’s allurement? From “Love will like a
+birdling fly” she slipped into the exquisitely graceful snatches of
+song with which _Carmen_ answers the officer’s questions. Their rare
+buoyancy marched with his mood, and from them she carried him into the
+song “Over the hill,” that is so perfect and romantic an expression of
+the _wanderlust._
+
+How long she could have held him she will never know, for at that
+inopportune time came blundering one of his men into the room with a
+call for his presence to take charge of the situation outside.
+
+“What do y’u want, Bostwick?” he demanded, with curt peremptoriness.
+
+The man whispered in his ear.
+
+“Can’t wait any longer, can’t they?” snapped his chief. “Y’u tell them
+they’ll wait till I give the word. Understand?”
+
+He almost flung the man out of the room, but Helen noticed that she had
+lost him. His interest was perfunctory, and, though he remained a
+little time longer, it was to establish his authority with the men
+rather than to listen to her. Twice he looked at his watch within five
+minutes.
+
+He rose to go. “There is a little piece of business I have to put
+through. So I’ll have to ask y’u to excuse me. I have had a delightful
+hour, and I hate to go.” He smiled, and quoted with mock
+sentimentality:
+
+“The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
+    Are as a string of pearls to me;
+I count them over, every one apart,
+    My rosary! My rosary!”
+
+
+“Dear me! One certainly lives and learns. How could I have guessed
+that, with your reputation, you could afford to indulge in a rosary?”
+she mocked.
+
+“Good night.” He offered his hand.
+
+“Don’t go yet,” she coaxed.
+
+He shook his head. “Duty, y’u know.”
+
+“Stay only a little longer. Just ten minutes more.”
+
+His vanity purred, so softly she stroked it. “Can’t. Wish I could. Y’u
+hear how noisy things are getting. I’ve got to take charge. So-long.”
+
+She stood close, looking up at him with a face of seductive appeal.
+
+“Don’t go yet. Please!”
+
+The triumph of victory mounted to his head. “I’ll come back when I’ve
+done what I’ve got to do.”
+
+“No, no. Stay a little longer just a little.”
+
+“Not a minute, sweetheart.”
+
+He bent to kiss her, and a little clenched fist struck his face.
+
+“Don’t you dare!” she cried.
+
+The outraged woman in her, curbed all evening with an iron bit, escaped
+from control. Delightedly he laughed. The hot spirit in her pleased him
+mightily. He took her little hands and held them in one of his while he
+smiled down at her. “I guess that kiss will keep, my girl, till I come
+back.”
+
+“My God! Are you going to kill your own cousin?”
+
+All her terror, all her detestation and hatred of him, looked haggardly
+out of her unmasked face. His narrowed eyes searched her heart, and his
+countenance grew every second more sinister,
+
+“Y’u have been fooling me all evening, then?”
+
+“Yes, and hating you every minute of the time.”
+
+“Y’u dared?” His face was black with rage.
+
+“You would like to kill me. Why don’t you?”
+
+“Because I know a better revenge. I’m going out to take it now. After
+your lover is dead, I’ll come back and make love to y’u again,” he
+sneered.
+
+“Never!” She stood before him like a queen in her lissom, brave,
+defiant youth. “And as for your cousin, you may kill him, but you can’t
+destroy his contempt for you. He will die despising you for a coward
+and a scoundrel.”
+
+It was true, and he knew it. In his heart he cursed her, while he
+vainly sought some weapon that would strike home through her impervious
+armor.
+
+“Y’u love him. I’ll remember that when I see him kick,” he taunted.
+
+“I make you a present of the information. I love him, and I despise
+you. Nothing can change those facts,” she retorted whitely.
+
+“Mebbe, but some day y’u’ll crawl on your knees to beg my pardon for
+having told me so.”
+
+“There is your overweening vanity again,” she commented.
+
+“I’m going to break y’u, my beauty, so that y’u’ll come running when I
+snap my fingers.”
+
+“We’ll see.”
+
+“And in the meantime I’ll go hang your lover.” He bowed ironically,
+swung on his jingling heel, and strode out of the room.
+
+She stood there listening to his dying footfalls, then covered her face
+with her hands, as if to press back the dreadful vision her mind
+conjured.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+WEST POINT TO THE RESCUE
+
+
+It was understood that the sheriff should make a perfunctory defense
+against the mob in order to “square” him with the voters at the
+election soon to be held. But the word had been quietly passed that the
+bullets of the prison guards would be fired over the heads of the
+attackers. This assurance lent an added braggadocio to the Dutch
+courage of the lynchers. Many of them who would otherwise have hung
+back distinguished themselves by the enthusiasm which they displayed.
+
+Bannister himself generaled the affair, detailing squads to batter down
+the outer door, to guard every side of the prison, and to overpower the
+sheriff’s guard. That official, according to programme, appeared at a
+window and made a little speech, declaring his intention of performing
+his duty at whatever cost. He was hooted down with jeers and laughter,
+and immediately the attack commenced.
+
+The yells of the attackers mingled with the sound of the axe-blows and
+the report of revolvers from inside the building. Among those nearest
+to the door being battered down were Denver and the few men he had with
+him. His plan offered merely a forlorn hope. It was that in the first
+scramble to get in after the way was opened he and his friends might
+push up the stairs in the van, and hold the corridor for as long as
+they could against the furious mob.
+
+It took less than a quarter of an hour to batter down the door, and
+among the first of those who sprang across the threshold were Denver,
+Missou, Frisco and their allies. While others stopped to overpower the
+struggling deputies according to the arranged farce, they hurried
+upstairs and discovered the cell in which their friends were fastened.
+
+Frisco passed a revolver through the grating to McWilliams, and another
+to Bannister. “Haven’t got the keys, so I can’t let y’u out, old hoss,”
+he told the foreman. “But mebbe y’u won’t feel so lonesome with these
+little toys to play with.”
+
+Meanwhile Denver, a young giant of seventy-six inches, held the head of
+the stairs, with four stalwart plainsmen back of him. The rush of many
+feet came up pell-mell, and he flung the leaders back on those behind.
+
+“Hold on there. This isn’t a free-lunch counter. Don’t you see we’re
+crowded up here already?”
+
+“What’s eating you? Whyfor, can’t we come?” growled one of the foremost
+nursing an injured nose.
+
+“I’ve just explained to you, son, that it’s crowded. Folks are
+prevalent enough up here right now. Send up that bunch of keys and
+we’ll bring your meat to you fast enough.”
+
+“What’s that? What’s that?” The outlaw chief pushed his way through the
+dense mob at the door and reached the stairway.
+
+“He won’t let us up,” growled one of them.
+
+“Who won’t?” demanded Bannister sharply, and at once came leaping up
+the stairs.
+
+“Nothing doing,” drawled Frisco, and tossed him over the railing on to
+the heads of his followers below.
+
+They carried Bannister into the open air, for his head had struck the
+newel-post in his descent. This gave the defense a few minutes respite.
+
+“They’re going to come a-shooting next time,” remarked Denver. “Just as
+soon as he comes back from bye-low land you’ll see things hum.”
+
+“Y’u bet,” agreed Missou. “We’ll last about three minutes when the
+stampede begins.”
+
+The scream of an engine pierced the night.
+
+Denver’s face lit. “Make it five minutes, Missou, and Mac is safe. At
+least, I’m hoping so awful hard. Miss Helen wired for the militia from
+Sheridan this mo’ning. Chances are they’re on that train. I couldn’t
+tell you earlier because she made me promise not to. She was afraid it
+might leak out and get things started sooner.”
+
+Weak but furious, the miscreant from the Shoshones returned to the
+attack. “Break in the back door and sneak up behind on those fellows.
+We’ll have the men we want inside of fifteen minutes,” he promised the
+mob.
+
+“We’ll rush them from both sides, and show those guys on the landing
+whether they can stop us,” added Bostwick.
+
+Suddenly some one raised the cry, “The soldiers!” Bannister looked up
+the street and swore a vicious oath. Swinging down the road at double
+time came a company of militia in khaki. He was mad with baffled fury,
+but he made good his retreat at once and disappeared promptly into the
+nearest dark alley.
+
+The mob scattered by universal impulse; disintegrated so promptly that
+within five minutes the soldiers held the ground alone, save for the
+officials of the prison and Denver’s little band.
+
+A boyish lieutenant lately out of the Point, and just come in to a
+lieutenancy in the militia, was in command. “In time?” he asked
+anxiously, for this was his first independent expedition.
+
+“Y’u bet,” chuckled Denver. “We’re right glad to see you, and I’ll bet
+those boys in the cage ain’t regretting your arrival any. Fifteen
+minutes later and you would have been in time to hold the funeral
+services, I reckon.”
+
+“Where is Miss Messiter?” asked the young officer.
+
+“She’s at the Elk House, colonel. I expect some of us better drift over
+there and tell her it’s all right. She’s the gamest little woman that
+ever crossed the Wyoming line. Hadn’t been for her these boys would
+have been across the divide hours ago. She’s a plumb thoroughbred.
+Wouldn’t give up an inch. All day she has generaled this thing; played
+a mighty weak hand for a heap more than it was worth. Sand? Seh: she’s
+grit clear through, if anybody asks you.” And Denver told the story of
+the day, making much of her unflinching courage and nothing of her
+men’s readiness to back whatever steps she decided upon.
+
+It was ten minutes past eleven when a smooth young, apple-cheeked lad
+in khaki presented himself before Helen Messiter with a bow never
+invented outside of West Point.
+
+“I am Lieutenant Beecher. Governor Raleigh presents his compliments by
+me, Miss Messiter, and is very glad to be able to put at your service
+such forces as are needed to quiet the town.”
+
+“You were in time?” she breathed.
+
+“With about five minutes to spare. I am having the prisoners brought
+here for the night if you do not object. In the morning I shall
+investigate the affair, and take such steps as are necessary. In the
+meantime you may rest assured that there will be no further
+disturbance.”
+
+“Thank you I am sure that with you in command everything will now be
+all right, and I am quite of your opinion that the prisoners had better
+stay here for the night. One of them is wounded, and ought to be given
+the best attention. But, of course, you will see to that, lieutenant.”
+
+The young man blushed. This was the right kind of appreciation. He
+wished his old classmates at the Point could hear how implicitly this
+sweet girl relied on him.
+
+“Certainly. And now, Miss Messiter, if there is nothing you wish, I
+shall retire for the night. You may sleep with perfect confidence.”
+
+“I am sure I may, lieutenant.” She gave him a broadside of trusting
+eyes full of admiration. “But perhaps you would like me to see my
+foreman first, just to relieve my mind. And, as you were about to say,
+his friend might be brought in, too, since they are together.”
+
+The young man promptly assented, though he had not been aware that he
+was about to say anything of the kind.
+
+They came in together, Bannister supported by McWilliams’s arm. The
+eyes of both mistress and maid brimmed over with tears when they saw
+them. Helen dragged forward a chair for the sheepman, and he sank into
+it. From its depths he looked up with his rare, sweet smile.
+
+“I’ve heard about it,” he told her, in a low voice. “I’ve heard how y’u
+fought for my life all day. There’s nothing I can say. I owed y’u
+everything already twice, and now I owe it all over again. Give me a
+lifetime and I couldn’t get even.”
+
+Helen’s swift glance swept over Nora and the foreman. They were in a
+dark alcove, oblivious of anybody else. Also they were in each other’s
+arms frankly. For some reason wine flowed into the cream of Helen’s
+cheeks.
+
+“Do you have to ‘get even’? Among friends is that necessary?” she asked
+shyly.
+
+“I hope not. If it is, I’m sure bankrupt. Even my thanks seem to stay
+at home. If y’u hadn’t done so much for me, perhaps I could tell y’u
+how much y’u had done. But I have no words to say it.”
+
+“Then don’t,” she advised.
+
+“Y’u’re the best friend a man ever had. That’s all I can say.”
+
+“It’s enough, since you mean it, even though it isn’t true,” she
+answered gently.
+
+Their eyes met, fastened for an instant, and by common consent looked
+away.
+
+As it chanced they were close to the window, their shadows reflected on
+the blind. A man, slipping past in the street on horseback, stopped at
+sight of that lighted window, with the moving shadows, in an
+uncontrollable white fury. He slid from the saddle, threw the reins
+over the horse’s head to the ground, and slipped his revolver from its
+holster and back to make sure that he could draw it easily. Then he
+passed springily across the road to the hotel and up the stairs. He
+trod lightly, stealthily, and by his very wariness defeated his purpose
+of eluding observation. For a pair of keen eyes from the hotel office
+glimpsed the figure stealing past so noiselessly, and promptly followed
+up the stairway.
+
+“Hope I don’t intrude at this happy family gathering.”
+
+Helen, who had been pouring a glass of cordial for the spent and
+wounded sheepman, put the glass down on the table and turned at sound
+of the silken, sinister voice. After one glance at the vindictive face,
+from the cold eyes of which hate seemed to smolder, she took an
+instinctive step toward her lover. The cold wave that drenched her
+heart accompanied an assurance that the man in the doorway meant
+trouble.
+
+His sleek smile arrested her. He was standing with his feet apart, his
+hands clasped lightly behind his back, as natty and as well groomed as
+was his wont.
+
+“Ah, make the most of what ye yet may spend,
+Before ye, too, into the Dust descend;
+    Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
+Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!”
+
+
+he misquoted, with a sneer; and immediately interrupted his irony to
+give way to one of his sudden blind rages.
+
+With incredible swiftness his right hand moved forward and up, catching
+revolver from scabbard as it rose. But by a fraction of a second his
+purpose had been anticipated. A closed fist shot forward to the salient
+jaw in time to fling the bullets into the ceiling. An arm encircled the
+outlaw’s neck, and flung him backward down the stairs. The railing
+broke his fall, and on it his body slid downward, the weapon falling
+from his hand. He pulled himself together at the foot of the stairs,
+crouched for an upward rush, but changed his mind instantly. The young
+officer who had flung him down had him covered with his own
+six-shooter. He could hear footsteps running toward him, and he knew
+that in a few seconds he would be in the hands of the soldiers.
+Plunging out of the doorway, the desperado vaulted to the saddle and
+drove his spurs home. For a minute hoofs pounded on the hard, white
+road. Then the night swallowed him and the echo of his disappearance.
+
+“That was Bannister of the Shoshones and the Tetons,” the girl’s white
+lips pronounced to Lieutenant Beecher.
+
+“And I let him get away from me,” the disappointed lad groaned. “Why, I
+had him right in my hands. I could have throttled him as easy. But how
+was I to know he would have nerve enough to come rushing into a hotel
+full of soldiers hunting him?”
+
+“Y’u have a very persistent cousin, Mr. Bannister,” said McWilliams,
+coming forward from the alcove with shining eyes. “And I must say he’s
+game. Did y’u ever hear the like? Come butting in here as cool as if he
+hadn’t a thing to do but sing out orders like he was in his own home.
+He was that easy.”
+
+“It seems to me that a little of the praise is due Lieutenant Beecher.
+If he hadn’t dealt so competently with the situation murder would have
+been done. Did you learn your boxing at the Academy, Lieutenant?” Helen
+asked, trying to treat the situation lightly in spite of her hammering
+heart.
+
+“I was the champion middleweight of our class,” Beecher could not help
+saying boyishly, with another of his blushes.
+
+“I can easily believe it,” returned Helen.
+
+“I wish y’u would teach me how to double up a man so prompt and
+immediate,” said the admiring foreman.
+
+“I expect I’m under particular obligations to that straight right to
+the chin, Lieutenant,” chimed in the sheepman. “The fact is that I
+don’t seem to be able to get out anything except thanks these days. I
+ought to send my cousin a letter thanking _him_ for giving me a chance
+to owe so much kindness to so many people.”
+
+“Your cousin?” repeated the uncomprehending officer.
+
+“This desperado, Bannister, is my cousin,” answered the sheepman
+gravely.
+
+“But if he was your cousin, why should he want—to kill you?”
+
+“That’s a long story, Lieutenant. Will y’u hear it now?”
+
+“If you feel strong enough to tell it.”
+
+“Oh, I’m strong enough.” He glanced at Helen. “Perhaps we had better
+not tire Miss Messiter with it. If y’u’ll come to my room—”
+
+“I should like, above all things, to hear it again,” interrupted that
+young woman promptly.
+
+For the man she loved had just come back to her from the brink of the
+grave and she was still reluctant to let him out of her sight.
+
+So Ned Bannister told his story once more, and out of the alcove came
+the happy foreman and Nora to listen to the tale. While he told it his
+sweetheart’s contented eyes were on him. The excitement of the night
+burnt pleasantly in her veins, for out of the nettle danger she had
+plucked safety for her sheepman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+TWO CASES OF DISCIPLINE
+
+
+The Fourth of July celebration at Gimlet Butte had been a thing of the
+past for four days and the Lazy D had fallen back into the routine of
+ranch life. The riders were discussing supper and the continued absence
+of Reddy when that young man drew back the flap and joined them.
+
+He stood near the doorway and grinned with embarrassed guilt at the
+assembled company.
+
+“I reckon I got too much Fourth of July at Gimlet Butte, boys. That’s
+how come I to be onpunctual getting back.”
+
+There was a long silence, during which those at the table looked at him
+with an expressionless gravity that did not seem to veil an unduly warm
+welcome.
+
+“Hello, Mac! Hello, boys! I just got back,” he further contributed.
+
+Without comment the Lazy D resumed supper. Apparently it had not missed
+Reddy or noticed his return. Casual conversation was picked up
+cheerfully. The return of the prodigal was quite ignored.
+
+“Then that blamed cow gits its back up and makes a bee-line for Rogers.
+The old man hikes for his pony and—”
+
+“Seems good to git my legs under the old table again,” interrupted
+Reddy with cheerful unease.
+
+“—loses by about half a second,” continued Missou. “If Doc hadn’t roped
+its hind laig—”
+
+“Have some cigars, boys. I brought a box back with me.” Reddy tossed a
+handful on the table, where they continued to lie unnoticed.
+
+“—there’s no telling what would have happened. As ’twas the old man got
+off with a—”
+
+“Y’u bet, they’re good cigars all right,” broke in the propitiatory
+Reddy.
+
+The interrupted anecdote went on to a finish and the men trooped out
+and left the prodigal alone with his hash. When that young man reached
+the bunkhouse Frisco was indulging in a reminiscence. Reddy got only
+the last of it, but that did not contribute to his serenity.
+
+“Yep! When I was working on the Silver Dollar. Must a-been three years
+ago, I reckon, when Jerry Miller got that chapping.”
+
+“Threw down the outfit in a row they had with the Lafferty crowd,
+didn’t he?” asked Denver.
+
+Frisco nodded.
+
+Mac got up, glanced round, and reached for his hat. “I reckon I’ll have
+to be going,” he said, and forthright departed.
+
+Reddy reached for _his_ hat and rose. “I got to go and have a talk with
+Mac,” he explained.
+
+Denver got to the door first and his big frame filled it.
+
+“Don’t hurry, Reddy. It ain’t polite to rush away right after dinner.
+Besides, Mac will be here all day. He ain’t starting for New York.”
+
+“Y’u’re gittin’ blamed particular. Mac he went right out.”
+
+“But Mac didn’t have a most particular engagement with the boys.
+There’s a difference.”
+
+“Why, I ain’t got—” Reddy paused and looked around helplessly.
+
+“Gents, I move y’u that it be the horse sense of the Lazy D that our
+friend Mr. Reddy Reeves be given gratis one chapping immediately if not
+sooner. The reason for which same being that he played a lowdown trick
+on the outfit whose bread he was eating.”
+
+“Oh, quit your foolin’, boys,” besought the victim anxiously.
+
+“And that Denver, being some able-bodied and having a good reach, be
+requested to deliver same to the gent needing it,” concluded Missou.
+
+Reddy backed in alarm to the wall. “Y’u boys don’t want to get gay with
+me. Y’u can’t monkey with—”
+
+Motion carried unanimously.
+
+Just as Reddy whipped out his revolver Denver’s long leg shot out and
+his foot caught the wrist behind the weapon. When Reddy next took
+cognizance of his surroundings he was serving as a mattress for the
+anatomy of three stalwart riders. He was gently deposited face down on
+his bunk with a one-hundred-eighty-pound live peg at the end of each
+arm and leg.
+
+“All ready, Denver,” announced Frisco from the end of the left foot.
+
+Denver selected a pair of plain leather chaps with care and proceeded
+to business. What he had to do he did with energy. It is safe to say
+that at least one of those present can still vividly remember this and
+testify to his thoroughness.
+
+Mac drifted in after the disciplining. As foreman it was fitting that
+he should be discreetly ignorant of what had occurred, but he could not
+help saying:
+
+“That y’u I heard singing, Reddy? Seems to me y’u had ought to take
+that voice into grand opera. The way y’u straddle them high notes is a
+caution for fair. What was it y’u was singing? Sounded like ‘Would I
+were far from here, love.’”
+
+“Y’u go to hell,” choked Reddy, rushing past him from the bunkhouse.
+
+McWilliams looked round innocently. “I judge some of y’u boys must
+a-been teasing Reddy from his manner. Seemed like he didn’t want to sit
+down and talk.”
+
+“I shouldn’t wonder but he’ll hold his conversations standing for a day
+or two,” returned Missou gravely.
+
+At the end of the laugh that greeted this Mac replied:
+
+“Well, y’u boys want to be gentle with him.” “He’s so plumb tender now
+that I reckon he’ll get along without any more treatment in that line
+from us,” drawled Frisco.
+
+Mac departed laughing. He had an engagement that recurred daily in the
+dusk of the evening, and he was always careful to be on time. The other
+party to the engagement met him at the kitchen door and fell with him
+into the trail that led to Lee Ming’s laundry.
+
+“What made you late?” she asked.
+
+“I’m not late, honey. I seem late because you’re so anxious,” he
+explained.
+
+“I’m not,” protested Nora indignantly. “If you think you’re the only
+man on the place, Jim McWilliams.”
+
+“Sho! Hold your hawsses a minute, Nora, darling. A spinster like y’u—”
+
+“You think you’re awful funny—writing in my autograph album that a
+spinster’s best friend is her powder box. I like Mr. Halliday’s ways
+better. He’s a perfect gentleman.”
+
+“I ain’t got a word to say against Denver, even if he did write in your
+book,
+
+“‘Sugar is sweet,
+    The sky is blue,
+Grass is green
+    And so are you.’
+
+
+I reckon, being a perfect gentleman, he meant—”
+
+“You know very well you wrote that in yourself and pretended it was Mr.
+Halliday, signing his name and everything. It wasn’t a bit nice of
+you.”
+
+“Now do I look like a forger?” he wanted to know with innocence on his
+cherubic face.
+
+“Anyway you know it was mean. Mr. Halliday wouldn’t do such a thing.
+You take your arm down and keep it where it belongs, Mr. McWilliams.”
+
+“That ain’t my name, Nora, darling, and I’d like to know where my arm
+belongs if it isn’t round the prettiest girl in Wyoming. What’s the use
+of being engaged if—”
+
+“I’m not sure I’m going to stay engaged to you,” announced the young
+woman coolly, walking at the opposite edge of the path from him.
+
+“Now that ain’t any way to talk.”
+
+“You needn’t lecture me. I’m not your wife and I don’t think I’m going
+to be,” cut in Nora, whose temper was ruffled on account of having had
+to wait for him as well as for other reasons.
+
+“Y’u surely wouldn’t make me sue y’u for breach of promise, would y’u?”
+he demanded, with a burlesque of anxiety that was the final straw.
+
+Nora turned on her heel and headed for the house.
+
+“Now don’t y’u get mad at me, honey. I was only joking,” he explained
+as he pursued her.
+
+“You think you can laugh at me all you please. I’ll show you that you
+can’t,” she informed him icily.
+
+“Sho! I wasn’t laughing at y’u. What tickled me—”
+
+“I’m not interested in your amusement, Mr. McWilliams.”
+
+“What’s the use of flying out about a little thing like that? Honest, I
+don’t even know what you’re mad at me for,” the perplexed foreman
+averred.
+
+“I’m not mad at you, as you call it. I’m simply disgusted.”
+
+And with a final “Good night” flung haughtily over her shoulder Miss
+Nora Darling disappeared into the house.
+
+Mac took off his hat and gazed at the door that had been closed in his
+face. He scratched his puzzled poll in vain.
+
+“I ce’tainly got mine good and straight just like Reddy got his. But
+what in time was it all about? And me thinkin’ I was a graduate in the
+study of the ladies. I reckon I never did get jarred up so. It’s plumb
+discouraging.”
+
+If he could have caught a glimpse of Nora at that moment, lying on her
+bed and crying as if her heart would break, Mac might have found the
+situation less hopeless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+THE SIGNAL LIGHTS
+
+
+In a little hill-rift about a mile back of the Lazy D Ranch was a
+deserted miner’s cabin.
+
+The hut sat on the edge of a bluff that commanded a view of the
+buildings below, while at the same time the pines that surrounded it
+screened the shack from any casual observation. A thin curl of smoke
+was rising from the mud chimney, and inside the cabin two men lounged
+before the open fire.
+
+“It’s his move, and he is going to make it soon. Every night I look for
+him to drop down on the ranch. His hate’s kind of volcanic, Mr. Ned
+Bannister’s is, and it’s bound to bubble over mighty sudden one of
+these days,” said the younger of the two, rising and stretching
+himself.
+
+“It did bubble over some when he drove two thousand of my sheep over
+the bluff and killed the whole outfit,” suggested the namesake of the
+man mentioned.
+
+“Yes, I reckon that’s some irritating,” agreed McWilliams. “But if I
+know him, he isn’t going to be content with sheep so long as he can
+take it out of a real live man.”
+
+“Or woman,” suggested the sheepman.
+
+“Or woman,” agreed the other. “Especially when he thinks he can cut y’u
+deeper by striking at her. If he doesn’t raid the Lazy D one of these
+nights, I’m a blamed poor prophet.”
+
+Bannister nodded agreement. “He’s near the end of his rope. He could
+see that if he were blind. When we captured Bostwick and they got a
+confession out of him, that started the landslide against him. It began
+to be noised abroad that the government was going to wipe him out.
+Folks began to lose their terror of him, and after that his whole
+outfit began to want to turn State’s evidence. He isn’t sure of one of
+them now; can’t tell when he will be shot in the back by one of his own
+scoundrels for that two thousand dollars reward.”
+
+The foreman strolled negligently to the door. His eyes drifted
+indolently down into the valley, and immediately sparkled with
+excitement.
+
+“The signal’s out, Bann,” he exclaimed. “It’s in your window.”
+
+The sheepman leaped to his feet and strode to the door. Down in the
+valley a light was gleaming in a window. Even while he looked another
+light appeared in a second window.
+
+“She wants us both,” cried the foreman, running to the little corral
+back of the house.
+
+He presently reappeared with two horses, both saddled, and they took
+the downward trail at once.
+
+“If Miss Helen can keep him in play till we arrive,” murmured Mac
+anxiously.
+
+“She can if he gives her a chance, and I think he will. There’s a kind
+of cat instinct in him to play with his prey.”
+
+“Yes, but he missed his kill last time by letting her fool him. That’s
+what I’m afraid of’ that he won’t wait.”
+
+They had reached lower ground now, and could put their ponies at a
+pounding gallop that ate up the trail fast. As they approached the
+houses, both men drew rein and looked carefully to their weapons. Then
+they slid from the saddles and slipped noiselessly forward.
+
+What the foreman had said was exactly true. Helen Messiter did want
+them both, and she wanted them very much indeed.
+
+After supper she had been dreamily playing over to herself one of
+Chopin’s waltzes, when she became aware, by some instinct, that she was
+not alone in the room. There had been no least sound, no slightest stir
+to betray an alien presence. Yet that some one was in the room she
+knew, and by some subtle sixth sense could even put a name to the
+intruder.
+
+Without turning she called over her shoulder: “Shall I finish the
+waltz?” No faintest tremor in the clear, sweet voice betrayed the
+racing heart.
+
+“Y’u’re a cool hand, my friend,” came his ready answer. “But I think
+we’ll dispense with the music. I had enough last time to serve me for
+twice.”
+
+She laughed as she swung on the stool, with that musical scorn which
+both allured and maddened. “I did rather do you that time,” she
+allowed.
+
+“This is the return match. You won then. I win now,” he told her, with
+a look that chilled.
+
+“Indeed! But isn’t that rather discounting the future?”
+
+“Only the immediate future. Y’u’re mine, my beauty, and I mean to take
+y’u with me.”
+
+Just a disdainful sweep of her eyes she gave him as she rose from the
+piano-stool and rearranged the lamps. “You mean so much that never
+comes to pass, Mr. Bannister. The road to the nether regions is paved
+with good intentions, we are given to understand. Not that yours can by
+any stretch of imagination be called ‘good intentions.’”
+
+“Contrariwise, then, perhaps the road to heaven may be paved with evil
+intentions. Since y’u travel the road with me, wherever it may lead, it
+were but gallant to hope so.”
+
+He took three sharp steps toward her and stood looking down in her
+face, her sweet slenderness so close to him that the perfume mounted to
+his brain. Surely no maiden had ever been more desirable than this one,
+who held him in such contemptuous estimation that only her steady eyes
+moved at his approach. These held to his and defied him, while she
+stood leaning motionless against the table with such strong and supple
+grace. She knew what he meant to do, hated him for it, and would not
+give him the satisfaction of flying an inch from him or struggling with
+him.
+
+“Your eyes are pools of splendor. That’s right. Make them flash fire. I
+love to see such spirit, since it offers a more enticing pleasure in
+breaking,” he told her, with an admiration half ironic but wholly
+genuine. “Pools of splendor, my beauty! Therefore I salute them.”
+
+At the touch of his lips upon her eyelids a shiver ran through her, but
+still she made no movement, was cold to him as marble. “You coward!”
+she said softly, with an infinite contempt.
+
+“Your lips,” he continued to catalogue, “are ripe as fresh flesh of
+Southern fruit. No cupid ever possessed so adorable a mouth. A
+worshiper of Eros I, as now I prove.”
+
+This time it was the mouth he kissed, the while her unconquered spirit
+looked out of the brave eyes, and fain would have murdered him. In turn
+he kissed her cold cheeks, the tip of one of her little ears, the
+small, clenched fist with which she longed to strike him.
+
+“Are you quite through?”
+
+“For the present, and now, having put the seal of my ownership on her
+more obvious charms, I’ll take my bride home.”
+
+“I would die first.”
+
+“Nay, you’ll die later, Madam Bannister, but not for many years, I
+hope,” he told her, with a theatrical bow.
+
+“Do you think me so weak a thing as your words imply?”
+
+“Rather so strong that the glory of overcoming y’u fills me with joy.
+Believe me, madam, though your master I am not less your slave,” he
+mocked.
+
+“You are neither my master nor my slave, but a thing I detest,” she
+said, in a low voice that carried extraordinary intensity.
+
+“And obey,” he added, suavely. “Come, madam, to horse, for our
+honeymoon.”
+
+“I tell you I shall not go.”
+
+“Then, in faith, we’ll re-enact a modern edition of ‘The Taming of the
+Shrew.’ Y’u’ll find me, sweet, as apt at the part as old _Petruchio_.”
+He paced complacently up the room and back, and quoted glibly:
+
+“And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humor.
+He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
+Now let him, speak; ’tis charity to show.”
+
+
+“Would you take me against my will?”
+
+“Y’u have said it. What’s your will to me? What I want I take. And I
+sure want my beautiful shrew.” His half-shuttered eyes gloated on her
+as he rattled off a couple more lines from the play he had mentioned.
+
+“Kate, like the hazel-twig,
+Is straight and slender, and as brown in hue
+As hazel-nuts, and sweeter than the kernels.”
+
+
+She let a swift glance travel anxiously to the door. “You are in a very
+poetical mood to-day.”
+
+“As befits a bridegroom, my own.” He stepped lightly to the window and
+tapped twice on the pane. “A signal to bring the horses round. If y’u
+have any preparations to make, any trousseau to prepare, y’u better set
+that girl of yours to work.”
+
+“I have no preparations to make.”
+
+“Coming to me simply as y’u are? Good! We’ll lead the simple life.”
+
+Nora, as it chanced, knocked and entered at his moment. The sight of
+her vivid good looks struck him for the first time. At sight of him she
+stopped, gazing with parted lips, a double row of pearls shining
+through.
+
+He turned swiftly to the mistress. “Y’u ought not to be alone there
+among so many men. It wouldn’t be proper. We’ll take the girl along
+with us.”
+
+“Where?” Nora’s parted lips emitted.
+
+“To Arden, my dear.” He interrupted himself to look at his watch. “I
+wonder why that fellow doesn’t come with the horses. They should pass
+this window.”
+
+Bannister, standing jauntily with his feet astride as he looked out of
+the window, heard someone enter the room. “Did y’u bring round the
+horses?” he snapped, without looking round.
+
+“_No, we allowed they wouldn’t be needed_.”
+
+At sound of the slow drawl the outlaw wheeled like a flash, his hand
+traveling to the hilt of the revolver that hung on his hip. But he was
+too late. Already two revolvers covered him, and he knew that both his
+cousin and McWilliams were dead shots. He flashed one venomous look at
+the mistress of the ranch.
+
+“Y’u fooled me again. That lamp business was a signal, and I was too
+thick-haided to see it. My compliments to y’u, Miss Messiter.”
+
+“Y’u are under arrest,” announced his cousin.
+
+“Y’u don’t say.” His voice was full of sarcastic admiration. “And you
+done it with your little gun! My, what a wonder y’u are!”
+
+“Take your hand from the butt of that gun. Y’u better relieve him of
+it, Mac. He’s got such a restless disposition he might commit suicide
+by reaching for it.”
+
+“What do y’u think you’re going to do with me now y’u have got me,
+Cousin Ned?”
+
+“We’re going to turn y’u over to the United States Government.”
+
+“Guess again. I have a thing, or two to say to that.”
+
+“You’re going to Gimlet Butte with us, alive or dead.”
+
+The outlaw intentionally misunderstood. “If I’ve got to take y’u, then
+we’ll say y’u go dead rather than alive.”
+
+“He was going to take Nora and me with him,” Helen explained to her
+friends.
+
+Instantly the man swung round on her. “But now I’ve changed my mind,
+ma’am. I’m going to take my cousin with me instead of y’u ladies.”
+
+Helen caught his meaning first, and flashed it whitely to her lover. It
+dawned on him more slowly.
+
+“I see y’u remember, Miss Messiter,” he continued, with a cruel, silken
+laugh. “He gave me his parole to go with me whenever I said the word.
+I’m saying it now.” He sat down astride a chair, put his chin on the
+back cross-bar, and grinned malevolently from one to another.
+
+“What’s come over this happy family? It don’t look so joyous all of a
+sudden. Y’u don’t need to worry, ma’am, I’ll send him back to y’u all
+right—alive or dead. With his shield or on it, y’u know. Ha! ha!”
+
+“You will not go with him?” It was wrung from Helen as a low cry, and
+struck her lover’s heart.
+
+“I must,” he answered. “I gave him my word, y’u remember.”
+
+“But why keep it? You know what he is, how absolutely devoid of honor.”
+
+“That is not quite the question, is it?” he smiled.
+
+“Would he keep his word to you?”
+
+“Not if a lie would do as well. But that isn’t the point, either.”
+
+“It’s quixotic—foolish—worse than that—ridiculous,” she implored.
+
+“Perhaps, but the fact remains that I am pledged.”
+
+“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much
+Loved I not honor more,’”
+
+
+murmured the villain in the chair, apparently to the ceiling. “Dear
+Ned, he always was the soul of honor. I’ll have those lines carved on
+his tombstone.”
+
+“You see! He is already bragging that he means to kill you,” said the
+girl.
+
+“I shall go armed,” the sheepman answered.
+
+“Yes, but he will take you into the mountain fastnesses, where the men
+that serve him will do his bidding. What is one man among so many?”
+
+“Two men, ma’am,” corrected the foreman.
+
+“What’s that?” The outlaw broke off the snatch of opera he was singing
+to slew his head round at McWilliams.
+
+“I said two. Any objections, seh?”
+
+“Yes. That wasn’t in the contract.”
+
+“We’re giving y’u surplusage, that’s all. Y’u wanted one of us, and y’u
+get two. We don’t charge anything for the extra weight,” grinned Mac.
+
+“Oh, Mac, will you go with him?” cried Helen, with shining eyes.
+
+“Those are my present intentions, Miss Helen,” laughed her foreman.
+
+Whereat Nora emerged from the background and flung herself on him. “Y’u
+can’t go, Jim! I won’t have you go!” she cried.
+
+The young man blushed a beautiful pink, and accepted gladly this overt
+evidence of a reconciliation. “It’s all right, honey. Don’t y’u think
+two big, grown-up men are good to handle that scalawag? Sho! Don’t y’u
+worry.”
+
+“Miss Nora can come, too, if she likes,” suggested he of the Shoshones.
+“Looks like we would have quite a party. Won’t y’u join us, too, Miss
+Messiter, according to the original plan?” he said, extending an
+ironical invitation.
+
+“I think we had better cut it down to me alone. We’ll not burden your
+hospitality, sir,” said the sheepman.
+
+“No, sir, I’m in on this. Whyfor can’t I go?” demanded Jim.
+
+Bannister, the outlaw, eyed him unpleasantly. “Y’u certainly can so far
+as I am concerned. I owe y’u one, too, Mr. McWilliams. Only if y’u come
+of your own free will, as y’u are surely welcome to do, don’t holler if
+y’u’re not so welcome to leave whenever y’u take a notion.”
+
+“I’ll try and look out for that. It’s settled, then, that we ride
+together. When do y’u want to start?”
+
+“We can’t go any sooner than right now. I hate to take these young men
+from y’u, lady, but, as I said, I’ll send them back in good shape.
+_Adios, señorita_. Don’t forget to whom y’u belong.” He swaggered to
+the door and turned, leaning against the jamb with one hand again it.
+“I expect y’u can say those lovey-dov good-byes without my help. I’m
+going into the yard. If y’u want to y’u can plug me in the back through
+the window,” he suggested, with a sneer.
+
+“As y’u would us under similar circumstances,” retorted his cousin.
+
+“Be with y’u in five minutes,” said the foreman.
+
+“Don’t hurry. It’s a long good-bye y’u’re saying,” returned his enemy
+placidly.
+
+Nora and the young man who belonged to her followed him from the room,
+leaving Bannister and his hostess alone.
+
+“Shall I ever see you again?” Helen murmured.
+
+“I think so,” the sheepman answered. “The truth is that this
+opportunity falls pat. Jim and have been wanting to meet those men who
+are under my cousin’s influence and have a talk with them. There is no
+question but that the gang is disintegrating, and I believe that if we
+offer to mediate between its members and the Government something might
+be done to stop the outrages that have been terrorizing this country.
+My cousin can’t be reached, but I believe the rest of them, or, at
+least a part, can be induced either to surrender or to flee the
+country. Anyhow, we want to try it.”
+
+“But the danger?” she breathed.
+
+“Is less than y’u think. Their leader has not anywhere nearly the
+absolute power he had a few months ago. They would hardly dare do
+violence to a peace envoy.”
+
+“Your cousin would. I don’t believe he has any scruples.”
+
+“We shall keep an eye on him. Both of us will not sleep at the same
+time. Y’u may depend on me to bring your foreman safely back to y’u,”
+he smiled.
+
+“Oh, my foreman!”
+
+“And your foreman’s friend,” he added. “I have the best of reasons for
+wanting to return alive. I think y’u know them. They have to do with
+y’u, Miss Helen.”
+
+It had come at last, but, womanlike, she evaded the issue her heart had
+sought. “Yes, I know. You think it would not be fair to throw away your
+life in this foolish manner after I have saved it for you—how many
+times was it you said?” The blue eyes lifted with deceptive frankness
+to the gray ones.
+
+“No, that isn’t my reason. I have a better one than that. I love y’u,
+girl, more than anything in this world.”
+
+“And so you try to prove it to me by running into a trap set for you to
+take your life. That’s a selfish kind of love, isn’t it? Or it would be
+if I loved you.”
+
+“_Do_ y’u love me, Helen?”
+
+“Why should I tell you, since you don’t love me enough to give up this
+quixotic madness?”
+
+“Don’t y’u see, dear, I _can’t_ give it up?”
+
+“I see you won’t. You care more for your pride than for me.”
+
+“No, it isn’t that. I’ve _got_ to go. It isn’t that I want to leave
+y’u, God knows. But I’ve given my word, and I must keep it. Do y’u want
+me to be a quitter, and y’u so game yourself? Do y’u want it to go all
+over this cattle country that I gave my word and took it back because I
+lost my nerve?”
+
+“The boy that takes a dare isn’t a hero, is he! There’s a higher
+courage that refuses to be drawn into such foolishness, that doesn’t
+give way to the jeers of the empty headed.”
+
+“I don’t think that is a parallel case. I’m sorry, we can’t see this
+alike, but I’ve got to go ahead the way that seems to me right.”
+
+“You’re going to leave me, then, to go with that man?”
+
+“Yes, if that’s the way y’u have to put it.” He looked at her
+sorrowfully, and added gently: “I thought you would see it. I thought
+sure you would.”
+
+But she could not bear that he should leave her so, and she cried out
+after him. “Oh, I see it. I know you must go; but I can’t bear it.” Her
+head buried itself in his coat. “It isn’t right—it isn’t a—a square
+deal that you should go away now, the very minute you belong to me.”
+
+A happy smile shone in his eyes. “I belong to you, do I? That’s good
+hearing, girl o’ mine.” His arm went round her and he stroked the black
+head softly. “I’ll not be gone long, dear. Don’t y’u worry about me.
+I’ll be back with y’u soon; just as soon as I have finished this piece
+of work I have to do.”
+
+“But if you should get—if anything should happen to you?”
+
+“Nothing is going to happen to me. There is a special providence looks
+after lovers, y’u know.”
+
+“Be careful, Ned, of yourself. For my sake, dear.”
+
+“I’ll dry my socks every time I get my feet wet for fear of taking
+cold,” he laughed.
+
+“But you will, won’t you?”
+
+“I’ll be very careful, Helen,” he promised more gravely.
+
+Even then she could hardly let him go, clinging to him with a
+reluctance to separate that was a new experience to her independent,
+vigorous youth. In the end he unloosened her arm, kissed her once, and
+hurried out of the room. In the hallway he met McWilliams, also hurryin
+out from a tearful farewell on the part of Nora.
+
+Bannister, the outlaw, already mounted, was waiting for them. “Y’u
+_did_ get through at last,” he drawled insolently. “Well, if y’u’ll
+kindly give orders to your seven-foot dwarf to point the Winchester
+another way I’ll collect my men an we’ll be moving.”
+
+For, though the outlaw had left his men in command of the ranch when he
+went into the house, he found the situation reversed on his return.
+With the arrival of reinforcements, in the persons of McWilliams and
+his friend, it had been the turn of the raiders to turn over their
+weapons.
+
+“All right, Denver,” nodded the foreman.
+
+The outlaw chief whistled for his men, and with their guests they rode
+into the silent, desert night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+EXIT THE “KING”
+
+
+They bedded that night under the great vault-roof where twinkle a
+million stars.
+
+There were three of the outlaw’s men with him, and both Mcwilliams and
+his friend noticed that they slept a little apart from their chief.
+There were other indications among the rustlers of a camp divided
+against itself. Bannister’s orders to them he contrived to make an
+insult, and their obedience was as surly as possible compatible with
+safety. For all of the men knew that he would not hesitate to shoot
+them down in one of his violent rages should they anger him
+sufficiently.
+
+Throughout the night there was no time that at least two men were not
+awake in the camp. The foreman and the sheepman took turns keeping
+vigil; and on the other side of the fire sat one of the rustlers in
+silent watchfulness. To the man opposite him each of the sentinels were
+outposts of the enemy, but they fraternized after the manner of army
+sentries, exchanging tobacco and occasional casual conversation.
+
+The foreman took the first turn, and opposite him sat a one-eyed old
+scoundrel who had rustled calves from big outfits ever since Wyoming
+was a territory and long before. Chalkeye Dave, he was called, and
+sometimes merely Chalkeye. What his real name was no man knew. Nor was
+his past a subject for conversation in his presence. It was known that
+he had been in the Nevada penitentiary, and that he had killed a man in
+Arizona, but these details of an active life were rarely resurrected.
+For Chalkeye was deadly on the shoot, and was ready for it at the drop
+of the hat, though he had his good points too. One of these was a
+remarkable fondness for another member of the party, a mere lad, called
+by his companions Hughie. Generally surly and morose, to such a degree
+that even his chief was careful to humor him as a rule, when with
+Hughie all the softer elements of his character came to the surface. In
+his rough way he was ever humorous and genial.
+
+Jim McWilliams found him neither, however. He declined to engage in
+conversation, accepted a proffer of tobacco with a silent, hostile
+grunt and relapsed into a long silence that lasted till his shift was
+ended.
+
+“Hate to have y’u leave, old man. Y’u’re so darned good company I’ll
+ce’tainly pine for you,” the foreman suggested, with sarcasm, when the
+old man rolled up in his blankets preparatory to falling asleep
+immediately.
+
+Chalkeye’s successor was a blatant youth much impressed with his own
+importance. He was both foul-mouthed and foul-minded, so that Jim was
+constrained to interrupt his evil boastings by pretending to fall
+asleep.
+
+It was nearly two o’clock when the foreman aroused his friend to take
+his turn. Shortly after this the lad Hughie relieved the bragging,
+would-be bad man.
+
+Hughie was a flaxen-haired, rather good-looking boy of nineteen. In his
+small, wistful face was not a line of wickedness, though it was plain
+that he was weak. He seemed so unfit for the life he was leading that
+the sheepman’s interest was aroused. For on the frontier it takes a
+strong, competent miscreant to be a bad man and survive. Ineffectives
+and weaklings are quickly weeded out to their graves or the
+penitentiaries.
+
+The boy was manifestly under great fear of his chief, but the curly
+haired young Hermes who kept watch with him had a very winning smile
+and a charming manner when he cared to exert it. Almost in spite of
+himself the youngster was led to talk. It seemed that he had but lately
+joined the Teton-Shoshones outfit of desperadoes, and between the lines
+Bannister easily read that his cousin’s masterful compulsion had
+coerced the young fellow. All he wanted was an opportunity to withdraw
+in safety, but he knew he could never do this so long as the “King” was
+alive and at liberty.
+
+Under the star-roof in the chill, breaking day Ned Bannister talked to
+him long and gently. It was easy to bring the boy to tears, but it was
+harder thing to stiffen a will that was of putty and to hearten a soul
+in mortal fear. But he set himself with all the power in him to combat
+the influence of his cousin over this boy; and before the camp stirred
+to life again he knew that he had measurably succeeded.
+
+They ate breakfast in the gray dawn under the stars, and after they had
+finished their coffee and bacon horses were saddled and the trail taken
+up again. It led in and out among the foot-hills sloping upward
+gradually toward the first long blue line of the Shoshones that
+stretched before them in the distance. Their nooning was at a running
+stream called Smith’s Creek, and by nightfall the party was well up in
+the higher foot hills.
+
+In the course of the day and the second night both the sheepman and his
+friend made attempt to establish a more cordial relationship with
+Chalkeye, but so far as any apparent results went their efforts were
+vain. He refused grimly to meet their overtures half way, even though
+it was plain from his manner that a break between him and his chief
+could not long be avoided.
+
+All day by crooked trails they pushed forward, and as the party
+advanced into the mountains the gloom of the mournful pines and
+frowning peaks invaded its spirits. Suspicion and distrust went with
+it, camped at night by the rushing mountain stream, lay down to sleep
+in the shadows at every man’s shoulder. For each man looked with an
+ominous eye on his neighbor, watchful of every sudden move, of every
+careless word that might convey a sudden meaning.
+
+Along a narrow rock-rim trail far above a steep cañon, whose walls shot
+precipitously down, they were riding in single file, when the outlaw
+chief pushed his horse forward between the road wall and his cousin’s
+bronco. The sheepman immediately fell back.
+
+“I reckon this trail isn’t wide enough for two—unless y’u take the
+outside,” he explained quietly.
+
+The outlaw, who had been drinking steadily ever since leaving the Lazy
+D, laughed his low, sinister cackle. “Afraid of me, are y’u? Afraid
+I’ll push y’u off?”
+
+“Not when I’m inside and you don’t have chance.”
+
+“’Twas a place about like this I drove four thousand of your sheep over
+last week. With sheep worth what they are I’m afraid it must have cost
+y’u quite a bit. Not that y’u’ll miss it where you are going,” he
+hastened to add.
+
+“It was very like you to revenge yourself on dumb animals.”
+
+“Think so?” The “King’s” black gaze rested on him. “Y’u’ll sing a
+different song soon Mr. Bannister. It’s humans I’ll drive next time and
+don’t y’u forget it.”
+
+“If you get the chance,” amended his cousin gently.
+
+“I’ll get the chance. I’m not worrying about that. And about those
+sheep—any man that hasn’t got more sense than to run sheep in a cow
+country ought to lose them for his pig-headedness.
+
+“Those sheep were on the right side of the dead-line. You had to cross
+it to reach them.” Their owner’s steady eyes challenged a denial.
+
+“Is that so? Now how do y’u know that? We didn’t leave the herder alive
+to explain that to y’u, did we?”
+
+“You admit murdering him?”
+
+“To y’u, dear cousin. Y’u see, I have a hunch that maybe y’u’ll go join
+your herder right soon. Y’u’ll not do much talking.”
+
+The sheepman fell back. “I think I’ll ride alone.”
+
+Rage flared in the other’s eye. “Too good for me, are y’u, my
+mealy-mouthed cousin? Y’u always thought yourself better than me. When
+y’u were a boy you used to go sneaking to that old hypocrite, your
+grandfather—”
+
+“You have said enough,” interrupted the other sternly. “I’ll not hear
+another word. Keep your foul tongue off him.”
+
+Their eyes silently measured strength.
+
+“Y’u’ll not hear a word!” sneered the chief of the rustlers. “What will
+y’u do, dear cousin?
+
+“Stand up and fight like a man and settle this thing once for all.”
+
+Still their steely eyes crossed as with the thrust of rapiers. The
+challenged man crouched tensely with a mighty longing for the test, but
+he had planned a more elaborate revenge and a surer one than this.
+Reluctantly he shook his head.
+
+“Why should I? Y’u’re mine. We’re four to two, and soon we’ll be a
+dozen to two. I’d like a heap to oblige y’u, but I reckon I can’t
+afford to just now. Y’u will have to wait a little for that bumping off
+that’s coming to y’u.”
+
+“In that event I’ll trouble you not to inflict your society on me any
+more than is necessary.”
+
+“That’s all right, too. If y’u think I enjoy your conversation y’u have
+got another guess coming.”
+
+So by mutual consent the sheepman fell in behind the blatant youth who
+had wearied McWilliams so and rode in silence.
+
+It was again getting close to nightfall. The slant sun was throwing its
+rays on less and less of the trail. They could see the shadows grow and
+the coolness of night sift into the air. They were pushing on to pass
+the rim of a great valley basin that lay like a saucer in the mountains
+in order that they might camp in the valley by a stream all of them
+knew. Dusk was beginning to fall when they at last reached the saucer
+edge and only the opposite peaks were still tipped with the sun rays.
+This, too, disappeared before they had descended far, and the gloom of
+the great mountains that girt the valley was on all their spirits, even
+McWilliams being affected by it.
+
+They were tired with travel, and the long night watches did not improve
+tempers already overstrained with the expectation of a crisis too long
+dragged out. Rain fell during the night, and continued gently in a
+misty drizzle after day broke. It was a situation and an atmosphere
+ripe for tragedy, and it fell on them like a clap of thunder out of a
+sodden sky.
+
+Hughie was cook for the day, and he came chill and stiff-fingered to
+his task. Summer as it was, there lay a thin coating of ice round the
+edges of the stream, for they had camped in an altitude of about nine
+thousand feet. The “King” had wakened in a vile humor. He had a
+splitting headache, as was natural under the circumstances and he had
+not left in his bottle a single drink to tide him over it. He came
+cursing to the struggling fire, which was making only fitful headway
+against the rain which beat down upon it.
+
+“Why didn’t y’u build your fire on the side of the tree?” he growled at
+Hughie.
+
+Now, Hughie was a tenderfoot, and in his knowledge of outdoor life he
+was still an infant. “I didn’t know—” he was beginning, when his master
+cut him short with a furious tongue lashing out of all proportion to
+the offense.
+
+The lad’s face blanched with fear, and his terror was so manifest that
+the bully, who was threatening him with all manner of evils, began to
+enjoy himself. Chalkeye, returning from watering the horses, got back
+in time to hear the intemperate fag-end of the scolding. He glanced at
+Hughie, whose hands were trembling in spite of him, and then darkly at
+the brute who was attacking him. But he said not a word.
+
+The meal proceeded in silence except for jeers and taunts of the
+“King.” For nobody cared to venture conversation which might prove a
+match to a powder magazine. Whatever thoughts might be each man kept
+them to himself.
+
+“Coffee,” snapped the single talker, toward end of breakfast.
+
+Hughie jumped up, filled the cup that was handed him and set the coffee
+pot back on fire. As he handed the tin cup with the coffee to the
+outlaw the lad’s foot slipped on a piece wet wood, and the hot liquid
+splashed over his chief’s leg. The man jumped to his feet in a rage and
+struck the boy across the face with his whip once, and then again.
+
+“By God, that’ll do for you!” cried Chalkeye from the other side of the
+fire, springing revolver in hand. “Draw, you coyote! I come
+a-shooting.”
+
+The “King” wheeled, finding his weapon he turned. Two shots rang out
+almost simultaneously, and Chalkeye pitched forward. The outlaw chief
+sank to his knees, and, with one hand resting on the ground to steady
+himself fired two more shots into the twitching body on the other side
+of the fire. Then he, too, lurched forward and rolled over.
+
+It had come to climax so swiftly that not one of them had moved except
+the combatants. Bannister rose and walked over to the place where the
+body of his cousin lay. He knelt down and examined him. When he rose it
+was with a very grave face.
+
+“He is dead,” he said quietly.
+
+McWilliams, who had been bending over Chalkeye, looked up. “Here, too.
+Any one of the shots would have finished him.”
+
+Bannister nodded. “Yes. That first exchange killed them both.” He
+looked down at the limp body of his cousin, but a minute before so full
+of supple, virile life. “But his hate had to reach out and make sure,
+even though he was as good as dead himself. He was game.” Then sharply
+to the young braggart, who had risen and was edging away with a face of
+chalk: “Sit down, y’u! What do y’u take us for? Think this is to be a
+massacre?”
+
+The man came back with palpable hesitancy. “I was aiming to go and get
+the boys to bury them. My God, did you ever see anything so quick? They
+drilled through each other like lightning.”
+
+Mac looked him over with dry contempt. “My friend, y’u’re too tender
+for a genuwine A1 bad man. If I was handing y’u a bunch of advice it
+would be to get back to the prosaic paths of peace right prompt. And
+while we’re on the subject I’ll borrow your guns. Y’u’re scared stiff
+and it might get into your fool coconut to plug one of us and light
+out. I’d hate to see y’u commit suicide right before us, so I’ll just
+natcherally unload y’u.”
+
+He was talking to lift the strain, and it was for the same purpose that
+Bannister moved over to Hughie, who sat with his face in his hands,
+trying to shut out the horror of what he had seen.
+
+The sheepman dropped a hand on his shoulder gently. “Brace up, boy!
+Don’t you see that the very best thing that could have happened is
+this. It’s best for y’u, best for the rest of the gang and best for the
+whole cattle country. We’ll have peace here at last. Now he’s gone,
+honest men are going to breathe easy. I’ll take y’u in hand and set y’u
+at work on one of my stations, if y’u like. Anyhow, you’ll have a
+chance to begin life again in a better way.”
+
+“That’s right,” agreed the blatant youth. “I’m sick of rustling the
+mails and other folks’ calves. I’m glad he got what was coming to him,”
+he concluded vindictively, with a glance at his dead chief and a sudden
+raucous oath.
+
+McWilliams’s cold blue eye transfixed him “Hadn’t you better be a
+little careful how your mouth goes off? For one thing, he’s daid now;
+and for another, he happens to be Mr. Bannister’s cousin.”
+
+“But—weren’t they enemies?”
+
+“That’s how I understand it. But this man’s passed over the range. A
+_man_ doesn’t unload his hatred on dead folks—and I expect if y’u’ll
+study him, even y’u will be able to figure out that my friend measures
+up to the size of a real man.”
+
+“I don’t see why if—”
+
+“No, I don’t suppose y’u do,” interrupted the foreman, turning on his
+heel. Then to Bannister, who was looking down at his cousin with a
+stony face: “I reckon, Bann, we better make arrangements to have the
+bodies buried right here in the valley,” he said gently.
+
+Bannister was thinking of early days, of the time when this miscreant,
+whose light had just been put out so instantaneously, had played with
+him day in and day out. They had attended their first school together,
+had played marbles and prisoners’ base a hundred times against each
+other. He could remember how they used to get up early in the morning
+to go fishing with each other. And later, when each began,
+unconsciously, to choose the path he would follow in already beginning
+to settle into an established fact. He could see now, by looking back
+on trifles of their childhood, that his cousin had been badly
+handicapped in his fight with himself against the evil in him. He had
+inherited depraved instincts and tastes, and with them somewhere in him
+a strand of weakness that prevented him from slaying the giants he had
+to oppose in the making of a good character. From bad to worse he had
+gone, and here he lay with the drizzling rain on his white face, a
+warning and a lesson to wayward youths just setting their feet in the
+wrong direction. Surely it was kismet.
+
+Ned Bannister untied the handkerchief from his neck and laid it across
+the face of his kinsman. A moment longer he looked down, then passed
+his hands across his eyes and seemed to brush away the memories that
+thronged him. He stepped forward to the fire and warmed his hands.
+
+“We’ll go on, Mac, to the rendezvous he had appointed with his outfit.
+We ought to reach there by noon, and the boys can send a wagon back to
+get the bodies.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS’ MEETING
+
+
+It had been six days since the two Ned Bannisters had ridden away
+together into the mountains, and every waking hour since that time had
+been for Helen one of harassing anxiety. No word had yet reached her of
+the issue of that dubious undertaking, and she both longed and dreaded
+to hear. He had promised to send a messenger as soon as he had anything
+definite to tell, but she knew it would be like his cousin, too, to
+send her some triumphant word should he prove the victor in the
+struggle between them. So that every stranger she glimpsed brought to
+her a sudden beating of the heart.
+
+But it was not the nature of Helen Messiter to sit down and give
+herself up a prey to foreboding. Her active nature cried out for work
+to occupy her and distract her attention. Fortunately this was to be
+had in abundance just now. For the autumn round-up was on, and since
+her foreman was away the mistress of the Lazy D found plenty of work
+ready to her hand.
+
+The meeting place for the round-up riders was at Boom Creek, five miles
+from the ranch, and Helen rode out there to take charge of her own
+interests in person. With her were six riders, and for the use of each
+of them in addition to his present mount three extra ponies were
+brought in the remuda. For the riding is so hard during the round-up
+that a horse can stand only one day in four of it. At the appointed
+rendezvous a score of other cowboys and owners met them. Without any
+delay they proceeded to business. Mr. Bob Austin, better known as
+“Texas,” was elected boss of the round-up, and he immediately assigned
+the men to their places and announced that they would work Squaw Creek.
+They moved camp at once, Helen returning to the ranch.
+
+It was three o’clock in the morning when the men were roused by the
+cook’s triangle calling them to the “chuck wagon” for breakfast. It was
+still cold and dark as the boys crawled from under their blankets and
+squatted round the fire to eat jerky, biscuits and gravy, and to drink
+cupfuls of hot, black coffee. Before sun rose every man was at his post
+far up on the Squaw Creek ridges ready to begin the drive.
+
+Later in the day Helen rode to the _parada_ grounds, toward which a
+stream of cattle was pouring down the cañon of the creek. Every gulch
+tributary to the creek contributed its quota of wild cows and calves.
+These came romping down the cañon mouth, where four picked men, with a
+bunch of tame cows in front of them, stopped the rush of flying cattle.
+Lunch was omitted, and branding began at once. Every calf belonging to
+a Lazy D cow, after being roped and tied, was flanked with the great D
+which indicated its ownership by Miss Messiter, and on account of the
+recumbent position of which letter the ranch had its name.
+
+It was during the branding that a boyish young fellow rode up and
+handed Helen a note. Her heart pumped rapidly with relief, for one
+glance told her that it was in the handwriting of the Ned Bannister she
+loved. She tore it open and glanced swiftly through it.
+
+
+DEAR FRIEND: Two hours ago my cousin was killed by one of his own men.
+I am sending back to you a boy who had been led astray by him, and it
+would be a great service to me if you would give him something to do
+till I return. His name is Hugh Rogers. I think if you trust him he
+will prove worthy of it.
+
+Jim and I are going to stay here a few days longer to finish the work
+that is begun. We hope to meet and talk with as many of the men
+implicated in my cousin’s lawlessness as is possible. What the result
+will be I cannot say. We do not consider ourselves in any danger
+whatever, though we are not taking chances. If all goes well we shall
+be back within a few days.
+
+I hope you are not missing Jim too much at the roundup. Sincerely,
+
+
+NED BANNISTER
+
+
+She liked the letter because there was not a hint of the relationship
+between them to be read in it. He had guarded her against the chance of
+its falling into the wrong hands and creating talk about them.
+
+She turned to Hughie. “Can you ride?”
+
+“In a way, ma’am. I can’t ride like these men.” His glance indicated a
+cow-puncher pounding past after a wild steer that had broken through
+the cordon of riders and was trying to get away.
+
+“Do you want to learn?”
+
+“I’d like to if I had a chance,” he answered wistfully.
+
+“All right. You have your chance. I’ll see that Mr. Austin finds
+something for you to do. From to-day you are in my employ.”
+
+She rode back to the ranch in the late afternoon, while the sun was
+setting in a great splash of crimson. The round-up boss had hinted that
+if she were nervous about riding alone he could find it convenient to
+accompany her. But the girl wanted to be alone with her own thoughts,
+and she had slipped away while he was busy cutting out calves from the
+herd. It had been a wonderful relief to her to find that _her_ Ned
+Bannister was the one that had survived in the conflict, and her heart
+sang a paean of joy as she rode into the golden glow of the westering
+sun. He was alive—to love and be loved. The unlived years of her future
+seemed to unroll before her as a vision. She glowed with a resurgent
+happiness that was almost an ecstasy. The words of a bit of verse she
+had once seen—a mere scrap from a magazine that had stuck in an obscure
+corner of her memory—sang again and again in her heart:
+
+Life and love
+    And a bright sky o’er us,
+And—God take care
+    Of the way before us!
+
+
+Ah, the way before them, before her and her romance-radiating hero! It
+might be rough and hilly, but if they trod it together—Her tangled
+thoughts were off again in another glad leap of imagination.
+
+The days passed somehow. She busied herself with the affairs of the
+ranch, rode out often to the scenes of the cattle drives and watched
+the round-up, and every twenty-four hours brought her one day nearer to
+his return, she told herself. Nora, too, was on the lookout under her
+longlashed, roguish eyelids; and the two young women discussed the
+subject of their lovers’ return in that elusive, elliptical way common
+to their sex.
+
+No doubt each of these young women had conjectured as to the manner of
+that homecoming and the meeting that would accompany it; but it is safe
+to say that neither of them guessed in her day-dreams how it actually
+was to occur.
+
+Nora had been eager to see something of the round-up, and as she was no
+horsewoman her mistress took her out one day in her motor. The drive
+had been that day on Bronco Mesa, and had finished in the natural
+corral made by Bear Cañon, fenced with a cordon of riders at the end
+opening to the plains below. After watching for two hours the busy
+scenes of cutting out, roping and branding, Helen wheeled her car and
+started down the cañon on their return.
+
+Now, a herd of wild cattle is uncertain as an April day’s behavior.
+Under the influence of the tame valley cattle among which they are
+driven, after a little milling around, the whole bunch may gentle
+almost immediately, or, on the other hand, it may break through and go
+crashing away on a wild stampede at a moment’s notice. Every
+experienced cowman knows enough to expect the unexpected.
+
+At Bronco Mesa the round-up had proceeded with unusual facility. Scores
+of wiry, long-legged steers had drifted down the ridges or gulches that
+led to the cañon; and many a cow, followed by its calf, had stumbled
+forward to the herd and apparently accepted the inevitable. But before
+Helen Messiter had well started out of the cañon’s mouth the situation
+changed absolutely.
+
+A big hill steer, which had not seen a man for a year, broke through
+the human corral with a bellow near a point where Reddy kept guard. The
+puncher wheeled and gave chase, Before the other men could close the
+opening a couple of two-year-olds seized the opportunity and followed
+its lead. A second rider gave chase, and at once, as if some imp of
+mischief had stirred them, fifty tails went up in wild flight. Another
+minute and the whole herd was in stampede.
+
+Down the gulch the five hundred cattle thundered toward the motor car,
+which lay directly in their path. Helen turned, appreciated the danger,
+and put the machine at its full speed. The road branched for a space of
+about fifty yards, and in her excitement she made the mistake of
+choosing the lower, more level, one. Into a deep sand bed they plowed,
+the wheels sinking at every turn. Slower and slower went the car;
+finally came to a full stop.
+
+Nora glanced back in affright at the two hundred and fifty tons of beef
+that was charging wildly toward them. “What shall we do?” she gasped,
+and clambered to the ground.
+
+“Run!” cried Helen, following her example and scudding for the sides of
+the cañon, which here sloped down less precipitately than at other
+points. But before they had run a dozen steps each of them was aware
+that they could not reach safety in time to escape the hoofs rushing
+toward them so heavily that the ground quaked.
+
+“Look out!” A resonant cry rang out above the dull thud of the
+stampeding cattle that were almost upon them. Down the steep sides of
+the gorge two riders were galloping recklessly. It was a race for life
+between them and the first of the herd, and they won by scarce more
+than a length. Across the sand the horses plowed, and as they swept
+past the two trembling young women each rider bent from the saddle
+without slackening speed, and snatched one almost from under the very
+hoofs of the leaders.
+
+The danger was not past. As the horses swerved and went forward with
+the rush Helen knew that a stumble would fling not only her and the man
+who had saved her, but also the horse down to death. They must contrive
+to hold their own in that deadly rush until a way could be found of
+escaping from the path of the living cyclone that trod at their heels,
+galloped beside them, in front, behind.
+
+For it came to her that the horse was tiring in that rush through the
+sand with double weight upon its back.
+
+“Courage!” cried the man behind her as her fearful eyes met his.
+
+As he spoke they reached the end of the cañon and firm ground
+simultaneously. Helen saw that her rescuer had now a revolver in his
+hand, and that he was firing in such a way as to deflect the leaders to
+the left. At first the change in course was hardly perceptible, but
+presently she noticed that they were getting closer to the outskirts of
+the herd, working gradually to the extreme right, edging inch by inch,
+ever so warily, toward safety. Going parallel to their course, running
+neck and neck with the cow pony, lumbered a great dun steer.
+Unconsciously it blocked every effort of the horseman to escape. He had
+one shot left in his revolver, and this time he did not fire into the
+air. It was a mighty risk, for the animal in falling might stagger
+against the horse and hunt them all down to death. But the man took it
+without apparent hesitation. Into the ear of the bullock he sent the
+lead crashing. The brute stumbled and went down head over heels. Its
+flying hoofs struck the flanks of the pony, but the bronco stuck to its
+feet, and next moment staggered out from among the herd stragglers and
+came to halt.
+
+The man slid from its back and lifted down the half-fainting girl. She
+clung to him, white a trembling. “Oh, it was horrible, Ned!” She could
+still look down in imagination upon the sea of dun backs that swayed
+and surged about them like storm-tossed waves.
+
+“It was a near thing, but we made it, girl. So did Jim. He got out
+before we did. It’s all past now. You can remember it as the most
+exciting experience of your life.”
+
+She shuddered. “I don’t want to remember it at all.” And so shaken was
+she that she did not realize that his arm was about her the while she
+sobbed on his shoulder.
+
+“A cattle stampede _is_ a nasty thing to get in front of. Never mind.
+It’s done with now and everybody’s safe.”
+
+She drew a long breath. “Yes, everybody’s safe and you are back home.
+Why didn’t you come after your cousin was killed?”
+
+“I had to finish my work.”
+
+“And _did_ you finish it?”
+
+“I think we did. There will be no more Shoshone gang. It’s members have
+scatted in all directions.”
+
+“I’m glad you stayed, then. We can live at peace now.” And presently
+she added: “I knew you would not come back until you had done what you
+set out to do. You’re very obstinate, sir. Do you know that?”
+
+“Perseverance, I call it,” he smiled, glad to see that she was
+recovering her lightness of tone.
+
+“You don’t always insist on putting your actions in the most favorable
+light. Do you remember the first day I ever saw you?”
+
+“Am I likely ever to forget it?” he smiled fondly.
+
+“I didn’t mean _that_. What I was getting at was that you let me go
+away from you thinking you were ‘the king.’ I haven’t forgiven you
+entirely for that.”
+
+“I expect y’u’ll always have to be forgiving me things.”
+
+“If you valued my good opinion I don’t see how you could let me go
+without telling me. Was it fair or kind?”
+
+“If y’u come to that, was it so fair and kind to convict me so promptly
+on suspicion?” he retaliated with a smile.
+
+“No, it wasn’t. But—” She flushed with a divine shyness. “But I loved
+you all the time, even when they said you were a villain.”
+
+“Even while y’u believed me one?”
+
+“I didn’t. I never would believe you one—not deep in my heart. I
+wouldn’t let myself. I made excuses for you—explained everything to
+myself.”
+
+“Yet your reason told y’u I was guilty.”
+
+“Yes, I think my mind hated you and my heart loved you.”
+
+He adored her for the frank simplicity of her confession, that out of
+the greatness of her love she dared to make no secret of it to him.
+Direct as a boy, she was yet as wholly sweet as the most retiring girl
+could be.
+
+“Y’u always swamp my vocabulary, sweetheart. I can’t ever tell y’u—life
+wouldn’t be long enough—how much I care for you.”
+
+“I’m glad,” she said simply.
+
+They stood looking at each other, palms pressed to palms in meeting
+hands, supremely happy in this miracle of love that had befallen them.
+They were alone—for Nora and Jim had gone into temporary eclipse behind
+a hill and seemed in no hurry to emerge—alone in the sunshine with this
+wonder that flowed from one to another by shining eyes, by finger
+touch, and then by meeting lips. He held her close, knew the sweet
+delight of contact with the supple, surrendered figure, then released
+her as she drew away in maidenly reserve.
+
+“When shall we be married, Helen? Is the early part of next week too
+late?” he asked.
+
+Still blushing, she straightened her hat. “That’s ridiculous, sir. I
+haven’t got used to the thought of you yet.”
+
+“Plenty of time for that afterward. Then we’ll say next week if that
+suits y’u.”
+
+“But it doesn’t. Don’t you know that it is the lady’s privilege to name
+the day? Besides, I want time to change my mind if I should decide to.”
+
+“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he laughed joyfully. “So I have to insist
+on an early marriage.”
+
+“Insist?” she demurred.
+
+“I’ve been told on the best of authority that I’m very obstinate,” he
+gayly answered.
+
+“I have a mind of my own myself. If I ever marry you be sure I shall
+name the day, sir.”
+
+“Will y’u marry me the day Nora does Jim?”
+
+“We’ll see.” The eyes slanted at him under the curved lashes, teased
+him delightfully. “Did Nora tell you she was going to marry Jim?”
+
+Bannister looked mildly hurt. “My common sense has been telling it to
+me a month.”
+
+“How long has your common sense been telling you about us?”
+
+“I didn’t use it when I fell in love with y’u,” he boldly laughed.
+
+“Of all things to say!”
+
+“Because it would have told me y’u couldn’t possibly care for me.”
+
+“Oh, that’s different!”
+
+“Not being able to help myself, I just went ahead.”
+
+“Isn’t it good? Isn’t it too good to be true—Ned?”
+
+Tears brimmed in her happy eyes, and unconsciously she leaned toward
+him. In an instant she was in his arms again, both of them compelled by
+the imperative impulse of true lovers.
+
+Out of the hollow presently appeared Nora and McWilliams, very much
+oblivious of the outside world. Presently they condescended to
+recognize the existence of Bannister and Helen.
+
+“We’re allowin’ to be married in September,” said Mac sheepishly, by
+way of explanation.
+
+The two girls flew into each other’s arms. Over Nora’s shoulder Ned
+caught his sweetheart’s eye and read there a blushing consent to a
+public announcement.
+
+“That’s ce’tainly a strange coincidence, Jim. So are we,” he answered
+immediately.
+
+The two friends shook hands.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
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