The Sheriff's Son Part 2

Chapter XVI
Roy is Invited to Take a Drink

DINGWELL gave a fishing-party next day. His invited guests were Sheriff Sweeney, Royal Beaudry, Pat Ryan, and Superintendent Elder, of the Western Express Company. Among those present, though at a respectable distance, were Ned Rutherford and Brad Charlton.

The fishermen took with them neither rods nor bait. Their flybooks were left at home. Beaudry brought to the meeting-place a quarter-inch rope and a grappling-iron with three hooks. Sweeney and Ryan carried rifles and the rest of the party revolvers.

Dave himself did the actual fishing. After the grappling-hook had been attached to the rope, he dropped it into Big Creek from a large rock under the bridge that leads to town from Lonesome Park. He hooked his big fish at the fourth cast and worked it carefully into the shallow water. Roy waded into the stream and dragged the catch ashore. It proved to be a gunnysack worth twenty thousand dollars.

​Elder counted the sacks inside. "Everything is all right. How did you come to drop the money here?"

"I'm mentioning no names, Mr. Elder. But I was so fixed that I could n't turn back. If I left the road, my tracks would show. There were reasons why I did n't want to continue on into town with the loot. So, as I was crossing the bridge, without leaving the saddle or even stopping, I deposited the gold in the Big Creek safety deposit vault," Dingwell answered with a grin.

"But supposing the Rutherfords had found it?" The superintendent put his question blandly.

The face of the cattleman was as expressive as a stone wall. "Did I mention the Rutherfords?" he asked, looking straight into the eye of the Western Express man. "I reckon you did n't hear me quite right."

Elder laughed a little. He was a Westerner himself. "Oh, I heard you, Mr. Dingwell. But I have n't heard a lot of things I'd like to know."

The cattleman pushed the sack with his toe. "Money talks, folks say."

"Maybe so. But it has n't told me why you ​could n't go back along the road you came, why you could n't leave the road, and why you did n't want to go right up to Sweeney's office with the sack. It has n't given me any information about where you have been the past two weeks, or how—"

"My gracious! He bubbles whyfors and howfors like he had just come uncorked," murmured Dave, in his slow drawl. "Just kinder effervesces them out of the mouth."

"I know you 're not going to tell me anything you don't want me to know, still—"

"You done guessed it first, crack. Move on up to the haid of the class."

"Still, you can't keep me from thinking. You can call the turn on the fellows that robbed the Western Express Company whenever you feel like it. Right now you could name the men that did it."

Dave's most friendly, impudent smile beamed upon the superintendent. "I thank you for the compliment, Mr. Elder. Honest, I did n't know how smart a haid I had in my hat till you told me."

"It's good ye 've got an air-tight alibi yoursilf, Dave," grinned Pat Ryan.

"I've looked up his alibi. It will hold water," ​admitted Elder genially. "Well, Dingwell, if you won't talk, you won't. We 'll move on up to the bank and deposit our find. Then the drinks will be on me."

The little procession moved uptown. A hundred yards behind it came young Rutherford and Charlton as a rear guard. When the contents of the sack had been put in a vault for safe-keeping, Elder invited the party into the Last Chance. Dave and Roy ordered buttermilk.

Dingwell gave his partner a nudge. "See who is here."

The young man nodded gloomily. He had recognized already the two men drinking at a table in the rear.

"Meldrum and Hart make a sweet pair to draw to when they 're tanking up. They 're about the two worst bad men in this part of the country. My advice is to take the other side of the street when you see them coming," Ryan contributed.

The rustlers glowered at Elder's party, but offered no comment other than some sneering laughter and ribald whispering. Yet Beaudry breathed freer when he was out in the open again lengthening the distance between him and them at every stride.

​Ryan walked as far as the hotel with Dave and his partner.

"Come in and have dinner with us, Pat," invited the cattleman.

The Irishman shook his head. "Can't, Dave. Got to go round to the Elephant Corral and look at my horse. A nail wint into its foot last night."

After they had dined, Dingwell looked at his watch. "I want you to look over the ranch today, son. We 'll ride out and I 'll show you the place. But first I 've got to register a kick with the station agent about the charges for freight on a wagon I had shipped in from Denver. Will you stop at Salmon's and order this bill of groceries sent up to the corral? I 'll meet you here at 2.30."

Roy walked up Mission Street as far as Salmon's New York Grocery and turned in the order his friend had given him. After he had seen it filled, he strolled along the sunny street toward the plaza. It was one of those warm, somnolent New Mexico days as peaceful as old age. Burros blinked sleepily on three legs and a hoof-tip. Cowponies switched their tails indolently to brush away flies. An occasional half-garbed Mexican lounged against a door ​jamb or squatted in the shade of a wall. A squaw from the reservation crouched on the curb beside her display of pottery. Not a sound disturbed the siesta of Battle Butte.

Into this peace broke an irruption of riot. A group of men poured through the swinging doors of a saloon into the open arcade in front. Their noisy disputation shattered the sunny stillness like a fusillade in the desert. Plainly they were much the worse for liquor.

Roy felt again the familiar clutch at his throat, the ice drench at his heart, and the faint slackness of his leg muscles. For in the crowd just vomited from the Silver Dollar were Meldrum, Fox, Hart, Charlton, and Ned Rutherford.

Charlton it was that caught sight of the passing man. With an exultant whoop he leaped out, seized Beaudry, and swung him into the circle of hillmen.

"Tickled to death to meet up with you, Mr. Royal-Cherokee-Beaudry-Street. How is every little thing a-coming? Fine as silk, eh? You'd ought to be laying by quite a bit of the mazuma, what with rewards and spy money together," taunted Charlton.

To the center of the circle Meldrum elbowed ​his drunken way. "Lemme get at the pink-ear. Lemme bust him one," he demanded.

Ned Rutherford held him back. "Don't break yore breeching, Dan. Brad has done spoke for him," the young man drawled.

Into the white face of his victim Charlton puffed the smoke of his cigar. "If you ain't too busy going fishing maybe you could sell me a windmill to-day. How about that, Mr. Cornell-I-Yell?"

"Where's yore dry nurse Dingwell?" broke in the ex-convict bitterly. "Thought he tagged you everywhere. Tell the son-of-a-gun for me that next time we meet I 'll curl his hair right."

Roy said nothing. He looked wildly around for a way of escape and found none. A half ring of jeering faces walled him from the street.

"Lemme get at him. Lemme crack him one on the bean," insisted Meldrum as he made a wild pass at Beaudry.

"No hurry a-tall," soothed Ned. "We got all evening before us. Take yore time, Dan."

"Looks to me like it's certainly up to Mr. Cherokee-What's-his-name-Beaudry to treat the crowd," suggested Chet Fox.

The young man clutched at the straw. "Sure. Of course, I will. Glad to treat, even though I ​don't drink myself," he said with a weak, forced heartiness.

"You don't drink. The hell you don't!" cut in Meldrum above the Babel of voices.

"He drinks—hic—buttermilk," contributed Hart.

"He 'll drink whiskey when I give the word, by Gad!" Meldrum shook himself free of Rutherford and pressed forward. He dragged a bottle from his pocket, drew out the cork, and thrust the liquor at Roy. "Drink, you yellow-streaked coyote—and drink a-plenty."

Roy shook his head. "No!—no," he protested. "I—I—never touch it." His lips were ashen. The color had fled from his cheeks.

The desperado pushed his cruel, vice-scarred face close to that of the man he hated.

"Sa-ay. Listen to me, young fellow. I'm going to bump you off one o' these days sure. Me, I don't like yore name nor the color of yore hair nor the map you wear for a face. I'm a killer. Me, Dan Meldrum. And I serve notice on you right now." With an effort he brought his mind back to the issue on hand. "But that ain't the point. When I ask a man to drink he drinks. See? You ain't deef, are you? Then drink, you rabbit!"

​Beaudry, his heart beating like a triphammer, told himself that he was not going to drink that they could not make him—that he would die first. But before he knew it the flask was in his trembling fingers. Apparently, without the consent of his flaccid will, the muscles had responded to the impulse of obedience to the spur of fear. Even while his brain drummed the refrain, "I won't drink—I won't—I won't," the bottle was rising to his lips.

He turned a ghastly grin on his tormentors. It was meant to propitiate them, to save the last scrap of his self-respect by the assumption that they were all good fellows together. Feebly it suggested that after all a joke is a joke.

From the uptilted flask the whiskey poured into his mouth. He swallowed, and the fiery liquid scorched his throat. Before he could hand the liquor back to its owner, the ex-convict broke into a curse.

"Drink, you pink-ear. Don't play 'possum with me," he roared. Roy drank. Swallow after swallow of the stuff burned its way into his stomach. He stopped at last, sputtering and coughing.

"M—much obliged. I 'll be going now," he stammered.

​"Not quite yet, Mr. R. C. Street-Beaudry," demurred Charlton suavely. "Stay and play with us awhile, now you 're here. No telling when we 'll meet again." He climbed on the shoe-shining chair that stood in the entry. "I reckon I 'll have my boots shined up. Go to it, Mr. Beaudry-Street."

With a whoop of malice the rest of them fell in with the suggestion. To make this young fellow black their boots in turn was the most humiliating thing they could think of at the moment. They pushed Roy toward the stand and put a brush into his hand. He stood still, hesitating.

"Git down on yore knees and hop to it," ordered Charlton. "Give him room, boys."

Again Beaudry swore to himself that he would not do it. He had an impulse to smash that sneering, cruel face, but it was physically impossible for him to lift a hand to strike. Though he was trembling violently, he had no intention of yielding. Yet the hinges of his knees bent automatically. He found himself reaching for the blacking just as if his will were paralyzed.

Perhaps it was the liquor rushing to his head when he stooped. Perhaps it was the madness ​of a terror-stricken rat driven into a corner. His fear broke bounds, leaped into action. Beaudry saw red. With both hands he caught Charlton's foot, twisted it savagely, and flung the man head over heels out of the chair. He snatched up the bootblack's stool by one leg and brought it crashing down on the head of Meldrum. The ex-convict went down as if he had been pole-axed.

There was no time to draw guns, no time to prepare a defense. His brain on fire from the liquor he had drunk and his overpowering terror, Beaudry was a berserk gone mad with the lust of battle. He ran amuck like a maniac, using the stool as a weapon to hammer down the heads of his foes. It crashed first upon one, now on another.

Charlton rushed him and was struck down beside Meldrum. Hart, flung back into the cigar-case, smashed the glass into a thousand splinters. Young Rutherford was sent spinning into the street.

His assailants gave way before Beaudry, at first slowly, then in a panic of haste to escape. He drove them to the sidewalk, flailing away at those within reach. Chet Fox hurdled in his flight a burro loaded with wood.

​Then, suddenly as it had swept over Roy, the brain-storm passed. The mists cleared from his eyes. He looked down at the leg of the stool in his hand, which was all that remained of it. He looked up—and saw Beulah Rutherford in the street astride a horse.

She spoke to her brother, who had drawn a revolver from his pocket. "You don't need that now, Ned. He's through."

Her contemptuous voice stung Roy. "Why did n't they leave me alone, then?" he said sullenly in justification.

The girl did not answer him. She slipped from the horse and ran into the arcade with the light grace that came of perfect health and the freedom of the hills. The eyes of the young man followed this slim, long-limbed Diana as she knelt beside Charlton and lifted his bloody head into her arms. He noticed that her eyes burned and that her virginal bosom rose and fell in agitation.

None the less she gave first aid with a business-like economy of motion. "Bring water, Ned,—and a doctor," she snapped crisply, her handkerchief pressed against the wound.

To see what havoc he had wrought amazed Roy. The arcade looked as if a cyclone had ​swept through it. The cigar-stand was shattered beyond repair, its broken glass strewn everywhere. The chair of the bootblack had been splintered into kindling wood. Among the débris sat Meldrum groaning, both hands pressing a head that furiously ached. Brad Charlton was just beginning to wake up to his surroundings.

A crowd had miraculously gathered from nowhere. The fat marshal of Battle Butte was puffing up the street a block away. Beaudry judged it time to be gone. He dropped the leg of the stool and strode toward the hotel.

Already his fears were active again. What would the hillmen do to him when they had recovered from the panic into which his madness had thrown them? Would they start for him at once? Or would they mark one more score against him and wait? He could scarcely keep his feet from breaking into a run to get more quickly from the vicinity of the Silver Dollar. He longed mightily to reach the protection of Dave Dingwell's experience and debonair sang froid.

The cattleman had not yet reached the hotel. Roy went up to their room at once and locked himself in. He sat on the bed with a revolver in ​his hand. Now that it was all over, he was trembling like an aspen leaf. For the hundredth time in the past week he flung at himself his own contemptuous scorn. Why was the son of John Beaudry such an arrant coward? He knew that his sudden madness and its consequences had been born of panic. What was there about the quality of his nerves that differed from those of other men? Even now he was shivering from the dread that his enemies might come and break down the door to get at him.

He heard the jocund whistle of Dingwell as the cattleman came along the corridor. Swiftly he pocketed the revolver and unlocked the door. When Dave entered, Roy was lying on the bed pretending to read a newspaper.

If the older man noticed that the paper shook, he ignored it.

"What's this I hear, son, about you falling off the water-wagon and filling the hospital?" His gay grin challenged affectionately the boy on the bed. "Don't you know you 're liable to give the new firm, Dingwell & Beaudry, a bad name if you pull off insurrections like that? The city dads are talking some of building a new wing to the accident ward to accommodate your victims. Taxes will go up and—"

​Roy smiled wanly. "You 've heard about it, then?"

"Heard about it! Say, son, I 've heard nothing else for the last twenty minutes. You 're the talk of the town. I did n't know you was such a bad actor." Dave stopped to break into a chuckle. "Wow! You certainly hit the high spots. Friend Meldrum and Charlton and our kind host Hart—all laid out at one clatter. I never was lucky. Here I would n't 'a' missed seeing you pull off this Samson encore for three cows on the hoof, and I get in too late for the show."

"They 're not hurt badly, are they?" asked Beaudry, a little timidly.

Dave looked at him with a curious little smile. "You don't want to go back and do the job more thorough, do you? No need, son. Meldrum and Charlton are being patched up in the hospital and Hart is at Doc White's having the glass picked out of his geography. I 've talked with some of the also rans, and they tell me unanimous that it was the most thorough clean-up they have participated in recently."

"What will they do—after they get over it?"

Dingwell grinned. "Search me! But I 'll ​tell you what they won't do. They 'll not invite you to take another drink right away. I 'll bet a hat on that. … Come on, son. We got to hit the trail for home."

Chapter XVII
Roy Improves the Shining Hours

THE tender spring burnt into crisp summer. Lean hill cattle that had roughed through the winter storms lost their shaggy look and began to fill out. For there had been early rains and the bunch grass was succulent this year.

Roy went about learning his new business with an energy that delighted his partner. He was eager to learn and was not too proud to ask questions. The range conditions, the breeding of cattle, and transportation problems were all studied by him. Within a month or two he had become a fair horseman and could rope a steer inexpertly.

Dingwell threw out a suggestion one day in his characteristic casual manner. The two men were riding a line fence and Roy had just missed a shot at a rabbit.

"Better learn to shoot, son. Take an hour off every day and practice. You had n't ought to have missed that cottontail. What you want is to fire accurately, just as soon as yore gun ​jumps to the shoulder. I can teach you a wrinkle or two with a six-gun. Then every time you see a rattler, take a crack at it. Keep in form. You might need to bend a gun one of these days."

His partner understood what that last veiled allusion meant. The weeks had slipped away since the fracas in front of the Silver Dollar. The enemy had made no move. But cowpunchers returning to the ranch from town reported that both Meldrum and Charlton had sworn revenge. It was an even bet that either one of them would shoot on sight.

Beaudry took Dave's advice. Every day he rode out to a wash and carried with him a rifle and a revolver. He practiced for rapidity as well as accuracy. He learned how to fire from the hip, how to empty a revolver in less than two seconds, how to shoot lying down, and how to hit a mark either from above or below.

The young man never went to town alone. He stuck close to the ranch. The first weeks had been full of stark terror lest he might find one of his enemies waiting for him behind a clump of prickly pear or hidden in the mesquite of some lonely wash. He was past that stage, but his nerves were still jumpy. It was impossible for him to forget that at least three men were ​deadly enemies of his and would stamp out his life as they would that of a wolf. Each morning he wakened with a little shock of dread. At night he breathed relief for a few hours of safety.

Meanwhile Dave watched him with an indolent carelessness of manner that masked his sympathy. If it had been possible, he would have taken the burden on his own broad, competent shoulders. But this was not in Dingwell's code. He had been brought up in that outdoor school of the West where a man has to game out his own feuds. As the cattleman saw it, Roy had to go through now just as his father had done seventeen years before.

In town one day Dave met Pat Ryan and had a talk with him over dinner. A remark made by the little cowpuncher surprised his friend. Dingwell looked at him with narrowed, inquiring eyes.

The Irishman nodded. "Ye thought you were the only one that knew it? Well, I'm on, too, Dave."

"That's not what I hear everywhere else, Pat," answered the cattleman, still studying the other. "Go down the street and mention the same of Royal Beaudry—ask any one if he is game. What will you get for a reply?"

​Without the least hesitation Ryan spoke out. "You 'll hear that he's got more guts than any man in Washington County—that he does n't know what fear is. Then likely you 'll be told it's natural enough, since he's the son of Jack Beaudry, the fighting sheriff. Ever-rybody believes that excipt you and me, Dave. We know better."

"What do we know, Pat?"

"We know that the bye is up against a man-size job and is scared stiff."

"Hmp! Was he scared when he licked a dozen men at the Silver Dollar and laid out for repairs three of the best fighters in New Mexico?"

"You 're shouting right he was, Dave. No man alive could 'a' done it if he had n't been crazy with fright."

Dingwell laughed. "Hope I'm that way, then, when I get into my next tight place." He added after a moment: "The trouble with the boy is that he has too much imagination. He makes his own private little hell beforehand."

"I reckon he never learned to ride herd on his fears."

"Jack Beaudry told me about him onc't. The kid was born after his mother had been ​worrying herself sick about Jack. She never could tell when he'd be brought home dead. Well, Roy inherited fear. I 've noticed that when a sidewinder rattles, he jumps. Same way, when any one comes up and surprises him. It's what you might call constitootional with him."

"Yep. That's how I 've got it figured. But—" Pat hesitated and looked meditatively out of the window.

"All right. Onload yore mind. Gimme the run of the pen just as yore thoughts happen," suggested the cattleman.

"Well, I'm thinking—that he's been lucky, Dave. But soon as Tighe's tools guess what we know, something's going to happen to Beaudry. He's got them buffaloed now. But Charlton and Meldrum ain't going to quit. Can you tell me how your frind will stand the acid next time hell pops?"

Dave shook his head. "I cannot. That's just what is worrying me. There are men that have to be lashed on by ridicule to stand the gaff. But Roy is not like that. I reckon he's all the time flogging himself like the penitentes. He's sick with shame because he can't go out grinning to meet his troubles. … There ain't a ​thing I can do for him. He's got to play out his hand alone."

"Sure he has, and if the luck breaks right, I would n't put it past him to cash in a winner. He's gamer than most of us because he won't quit even when the divvle of terror is riding his back."

"Another point in his favor is that he learns easily. When he first came out to the Lazy Double D, he was afraid of horses. He has got over that. Give him another month and he 'll be a pretty fair shot. Up till the time he struck this country, Roy had lived a soft city life. He's beginning to toughen. The things that scare a man are those that are mysteries to him. Any kid will fight his own brother because he knows all about him, but he's plumb shy about tackling a strange boy. Well, that's how it is with Roy. He has got the notion that Meldrum and Charlton are terrors, but now he has licked them onc't, he won't figure them out as so bad."

"He did n't exactly lick them in a stand-up fight, Dave."

"No, he just knocked them down and tromped on them and put them out of business," agreed Dingwell dryly.

​The eyes of the little Irishman twinkled. "Brad Charlton is giving it out that it was an accident."

"That's what I'd call it, too, if I was Brad," assented the cattleman with a grin. "But if we could persuade Roy to put over about one more accident like that, I reckon Huerfano Park would let him alone."

"While Jess Tighe is living?"

Dingwell fell grave. "I'd forgotten Tighe. No, I expect the kid had better keep his weather eye peeled as long as that castor-oil smile of Jess is working."

Chapter XVIII
Rutherford Answers Questions

BEULAH RUTHERFORD took back with her to Huerfano Park an almost intolerable resentment against the conditions of her life. She had the family capacity for sullen silence, and for weeks a kind of despairing rage simmered in her heart. She was essentially of a very direct, simple nature, clear as Big Creek where it tumbled down from the top of the world toward the foothills. An elemental honesty stirred in her. It was necessary to her happiness that she keep her own self-respect and be able to approve those she loved.

Just now she could do neither. The atmosphere of the ranch seemed to stifle her. When she rode out into a brave, clean world of sunshine, the girl carried her shame along. Ever since she could remember, outlaws and miscreants had slipped furtively about the suburbs of her life. The Rutherfords themselves were a hard and savage breed. To their door had come more than one night rider flying for ​his life, and Beulah had accepted the family tradition of hospitality to those at odds with society.

A fierce, untamed girl of primitive instincts, she was the heritor of the family temperament. But like threads of gold there ran through the warp of her being a fineness that was her salvation. She hated passionately cruelty and falsehood and deceit. All her life she had walked near pitch and had never been defiled.

Hal Rutherford was too close to her not to feel the estrangement of her spirit. He watched her anxiously, and at last one morning he spoke. She was standing on the porch waiting for Jeff to bring Blacky when Rutherford came out and put his arm around her shoulder.

"What is it, honey?" he asked timidly.

"It's—everything," she answered, her gaze still on the distant hills.

"You have n't quarreled with Brad?"

"No—and I'm not likely to if he 'll let me alone."

Her father did not press the point. If Brad and she had fallen out, the young man would have to make his own amende.

"None of the boys been deviling you?"

"No."

​"Are n't you going to tell dad about it, Boots?"

Presently her dark eyes swept round to his.

"Why did you say that you did n't know anything about the Western Express robbery?"

He looked steadily at her. "I did n't say that, Beulah. What I said was that I did n't know where the stolen gold was hidden—and I did n't."

"That was just an evasion. You meant me to think that we had had nothing to do with the—the robbery."

"That's right. I did."

"And all the time—" She broke off, a sob choking her throat.

"I knew who did it. That's correct. But I was n't a party to the robbery. I knew nothing about it till afterward."

"I 've always believed everything you 've told me, dad. And now—"

He felt doubt in her shaken voice. She did not know what to think now. Rutherford set himself to clear away her suspicions. He chose to do it by telling the exact truth.

"Now you may still believe me, honey. The robbery was planned by Tighe. I 'll not mention the names of those in it. The day after it ​was pulled off, I heard of it for the first time. Dave Dingwell knew too much. To protect my friends I had to bring him up here. Legally I'm guilty of abduction and of the train robbery, too, because I butted in after the hold-up and protected the guilty ones. I even tried to save for them the gold they had taken."

"Were—any of the boys in it, dad?" she quavered.

"One of them. I won't tell you which."

"And Brad?"

"We 're not giving names, Boots."

"Oh, well! I know he was one of them." She slipped her arm within her father's and gave his hand a little pressure. "I'm glad you told me, just the same, dad. I'd been thinking—worse things about you."

"That's all right, honey. Now you won't worry any more, will you?"

"I don't know. … That's not all that troubles me. I feel bad when the boys drink and brawl. That attack on Mr. Beaudry at Battle Butte was disgraceful," she flamed. "I don't care if he did come up here spying. Why can't they let him alone?"

He passed a hand in a troubled fashion through his grizzled hair. "You can bet our ​boys won't touch him again, Boots. I've laid the law down. But I can't answer for Tighe. He 'll do him a meanness if he can, and he 'll do it quicker since I 've broken off with him because you helped Dingwell and Beaudry to escape. I don't know about Brad."

"I told Brad if he touched him again, I would never speak to him."

"Maybe that will hold him hitched, then. Anyhow, I'm not going to make the young fellow trouble. I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie."

Beulah pressed her arm against his. "I have n't been fair to you, dad. I might have known you would do right."

"I aim to stay friends with my little girl no matter what happens. Yore mother gave you into my hands when she was dying and I promised to be mother and father to you. Yore own father was my brother Anse. He died before you were born. I 've been the only dad you ever had, and I reckon you know you 've been more to me than any of my own boys."

"You should n't say that," she corrected quickly. "I'm a girl, and, of course, you spoil me more. That's all."

She gave him a ferocious little hug and went quickly into the house. Happiness had swept ​through her veins like the exquisite flush of dawn. Her lustrous eyes were wells of glad tears.

The owner of the horse ranch stood on the porch and watched a rider coming out of the gulch toward him. The man descended heavily from his horse and moved down the path. Rutherford eyed him grimly.

"Well, I'm back," the dismounted horseman said surlily.

"I see you are."

"Got out of the hospital Thursday."

"Hope you 've made up yore mind to behave, Dan."

"It does n't hurt a man to take a drink onc't in a while."

"Depends on the man. It put you in the hospital."

Meldrum ripped out a sudden oath. "Wait. Just wait till I get that pink-ear. I 'll drill him full of holes right."

"By God, you 'll not!" Rutherford's voice was like the snap of a whip. "Try it. Try it. I 'll hunt you down like a wolf and riddle yore carcass."

In amazement the ex-convict stared at him. "What's ailin' you, Rutherford?"

​"I'm through with you and Tighe. You 'll stop making trouble or you 'll get out of here. I'm going to clean up the park—going to make it a place where decent folks can live. You 've got yore warning now, Dan. Walk a straight chalk-line or hit the trail."

"You can't talk that way to me, Rutherford. I know too much," threatened Meldrum, baring his teeth.

"Don't think it for a minute, Dan. Who is going to take yore word against mine? I 've got the goods on you. I can put you through for rustling any time I have a mind to move. And if you don't let young Beaudry alone, I 'll do it."

"Am I the only man that ever rustled? Ain't there others in the park? I reckon you 've done some night-riding yore own self."

"Some," drawled Rutherford, with a grim little smile. "By and large, I 've raised a considerable crop of hell. But I'm reforming in my old age. New Mexico has had a change of heart. Guns are going out, Meldrum, and little red schoolhouses are coming in. We 've got to keep up with the fashions."

"Hmp! Schoolhouses! I know what's ailin' you. Since Anse Rutherford's girl—"

​"You 're off the reservation, Dan," warned the rancher, and again his low voice had the sting of cactus thorns in it.

Meldrum dropped that subject promptly. "Is Buck going to join this Sunday-School of yours?" he jeered. "And all the boys?"

"That's the programme. Won't you come in, too?"

"And Jess Tighe. He 'll likely be one of the teachers."

"You'd better ask him. He has n't notified me."

"Hell! You and yore kin have given the name to deviltry in this country. Mothers scare their kids by telling them the Rutherfords will git them."

"Fact. But that's played out. My boys are grown up and are at the turn of the trail. It hit me plumb in the face when you fools pulled off that express robbery. It's a piece of big luck you 're not all headed for the penitentiary. I know when I 've had enough. So now I quit."

"All right. Quit. But we have n't all got to go to the mourner's bench with you, have we? You can travel yore trail and we can go ours, can't we?"

"Not when we're on the same range, Dan. ​What I say goes." The eyes of Rutherford bored into the cruel little shifty ones of the bad man. "Take yore choice, Dan. It's quit yore deviltry or leave this part of the country."

"Who elected you czar of Huerfano Park?" demanded Meldrum, furious with anger.

He glared at the ranchman impotently, turned away with a mumbled oath, and went back with jingling spurs to his horse.

Chapter XIX
Beaudry Blows a Smoke Wreath

ROYAL BEAUDRY carried about with him in his work on the Lazy Double D persistent memories of the sloe-eyed gypsy who had recently played so large a part in his life. Men of imagination fall in love, not with a woman, but with the mystery they make of her. The young cattleman was not yet a lover, but a rumor of the future began to murmur in his ears. Beulah Rutherford was on the surface very simple and direct, but his thoughts were occupied with the soul of her. What was the girl like whose actions functioned in courage and independence and harsh hostility?

Life had imposed on her a hard finish. But it was impossible for Roy to believe that this slender, tawny child of the wind and the sun could at heart be bitter and suspicious. He had seen the sweet look of her dark-lashed eyes turned in troubled appeal upon her father. There had been one hour when he had looked into her face and found it radiant, all light and response and ecstasy. The emotion that had ​pulsed through her then had given the lie to the sullen silence upon which she fell back as a defense. If the gods were good to her some day, the red flower of passion would bloom on her cheeks and the mists that dulled her spirit would melt in the warm sunshine of love.

So the dreamer wove the web of his fancy about her, and the mystery that was Beulah Rutherford lay near his thoughts when he walked or rode or ate or talked.

Nor did it lessen his interest in her that he felt she despised him. The flash of her scornful eyes still stung him. He was beyond caring whether she thought him a spy. He knew that the facts justified him in his attempt to save Dingwell. But he writhed that she should believe him a coward. It came too close home. And since the affray in the arcade, no doubt she set him down, too, as a drunken rowdy.

He made the usual vain valorous resolutions of youth to show her his heroic quality. These served at least one good purpose. If he could not control his fears, he could govern his actions. Roy forced himself by sheer will power to ride alone into Battle Butte once a week. Without hurry he went about his business up and down Mission Street.

​The town watched him and commented. "Got sand in his craw, young Beaudry has," was the common verdict. Men wondered what would happen when he met Charlton and Meldrum. Most of them would have backed John Beaudry's son both in their hopes and in their opinion of the result.

Into saloons and gambling-houses word was carried, and from there to the hillmen of the park by industrious peddlers of trouble, that the young cattleman from the Lazy Double D could be found by his enemies heeled for business whenever they wanted him.

Charlton kept morosely to the park. If he had had nothing to consider except his own inclination, he would have slapped the saddle upon a cowpony and ridden in to Battle Butte at once. But Beulah had laid an interdict upon him. For a year he had been trying to persuade her to marry him, and he knew that he must say good-bye to his hopes if he fought with his enemy.

It was fear that kept Meldrum at home. He had been a killer, but the men he had killed had been taken at advantage. It was one thing to shoot this Beaudry cub down from ambush. It was another to meet him in the open. Moreover, he knew the Rutherfords. The owner of ​the horse ranch had laid the law down to him. No chance shot from the chaparral was to cut down Dingwell's partner.

The ex-convict listened to the whispers of Tighe. He brooded over them, but he did not act on them. His alcohol-dulled brain told him that he had reached the limit of public sufferance. One more killing by him, and he would pay the penalty at the hands of the law. When he took his revenge, it must be done so secretly that no evidence could connect him with the crime. He must, too, have an alibi acceptable to Hal Rutherford.

Meldrum carried with him to Battle Butte, on his first trip after the arcade affair, a fixed determination to avoid Beaudry. In case he met him, he would pass without speaking.

But all of Meldrum's resolutions were apt to become modified by subsequent inhibitions. In company with one or two cronies he made a tour of the saloons of the town. At each of them he said, "Have another," and followed his own advice to show good faith.

On one of these voyages from port to port the bad man from Chicito Cañon sighted a tall, lean-flanked, long-legged brown man. He was crossing the street so that the party came face ​to face with him at the apex of a right angle. The tanned stranger in corduroys, hickory shirt, and pinched-in hat of the range rider was Royal Beaudry. It was with a start of surprise that Meldrum recognized him. His enemy was no longer a "pink-ear." There was that in his stride, his garb, and the steady look of his eye which told of a growing confidence and competence. He looked like a horseman of the plains, fit for any emergency that might confront him.

Taken at advantage by the suddenness of the meeting, Meldrum gave ground with a muttered oath. The young cattleman nodded to the trio and kept on his way. None of the others knew that his heart was hammering a tattoo against his ribs or that queer little chills chased each other down his spine.

Chet Fox ventured a sly dig at the ex-convict. "Looks a right healthy sick man, Dan."

"Who said he was sick?" growled Meldrum.

"Did n't you-all say he was good as dead?"

"A man can change his mind, Chet, can't he?" jeered Hart.

The blotched face of the bad man grew purple. "That 'll be about enough from both of you. But I 'll say this: when I get ready to ​settle with Mr. Beaudry you can order his coffin."

Nevertheless, Meldrum had the humiliating sense that he had failed to live up to his reputation as a killer. He had promised Battle Butte to give it something to talk about, but he had not meant to let the whisper pass that he was a four-flusher. His natural recourse was to further libations. These made for a sullen, ingrowing rage as the day grew older.

More than one well-meaning citizen carried to Roy the superfluous warning that Meldrum was in town and drinking hard. The young man thanked them quietly without comment. His reticence gave the impression of strength.

But Beaudry felt far from easy in mind. A good deal of water had flowed under the Big Creek bridge since the time when he had looked under the bed at nights for burglars. He had schooled himself not to yield to the impulses of his rabbit heart, but the unexpected clatter of hoofs still set his pulses a-flutter. Why had fate snatched so gentle a youth from his law desk and flung him into such turbid waters to sink or swim? All he had asked was peace—friends, books, a quiet life. By some ironic quirk be found himself in scenes of battle and tur​moil. As the son of John Beaudry he was expected to show an unflawed nerve, whereas his eager desire was to run away and hide.

He resisted the first panicky incitement to fly back to the Lazy Double D, and went doggedly about the business that had brought him to Battle Butte. Roy had come to meet a cattle-buyer from Denver and the man had wired that he would be in on the next train. Meanwhile Beaudry had to see the blacksmith, the feed-store manager, the station agent, and several others.

This kept him so busy that he reached the Station only just in time to meet the incoming train. He introduced himself to the buyer, captured his suitcase, and turned to lead the way to the rig.

Meldrum lurched forward to intercept him. "Shus' a moment."

Roy went white. He knew the crisis was upon him. The right hand of the hillman was hidden under the breast of his coat. Even the cattle-buyer from Denver knew what was in that hand and edged toward the train. For this ruffian was plainly working himself into a rage sufficient to launch murder.

"Yore father railroaded me to the peniten​tiary—cooked up test'mony against me. You bust me with a club when I was n't looking. Here's where I git even. See?"

The imminence of tragedy had swept the space about them empty of people. Roy knew with a sinking heart that it was between him and the hillman to settle this alone. He had been caught with the suitcase in his right hand, so that he was practically trapped unarmed. Before he could draw his revolver, Meldrum would be pumping lead.

Two months ago under similar circumstances terror had paralyzed Roy's thinking power. Now his brain functioned in spite of his fear. He was shaken to the center of his being, but he was not in panic. Immediately he set himself to play the poor cards he found in his hand.

"Liar!" Beaudry heard a chill voice say and knew it was his own. "Liar on both counts! My father sent you up because you were a thief. I beat your head off because you are a bully. Listen!" Roy shot the last word out in crescendo to forestall the result of a convulsive movement of the hand beneath his enemy's coat. "Listen, if you want to live the day out, you yellow coyote!"

Beaudry had scored his first point—to gain ​time for his argument to get home to the sodden brain. Dave Dingwell had told him that most men were afraid of something, though some hid it better than others; and he had added that Dan Meldrum had the murderer's dread lest vengeance overtake him unexpectedly. Roy knew now that his partner had spoken the true word. At that last stinging sentence, alarm had jumped to the blear eyes of the former convict.

"Whadjamean?" demanded Meldrum thickly, the menace of horrible things in his voice.

"Mean? Why, this. You came here to kill me, but you have n't the nerve to do it. You 've reached the end of your rope, Dan Meldrum. You 're a killer, but you 'll never kill again. Murder me, and the law would hang you high as Haman—if it ever got a chance."

The provisional clause came out with a little pause between each word to stress the meaning. The drunken man caught at it to spur his rage.

"Hmp! Mean you 're man enough to beat the law to it?"

Beaudry managed to get out a derisive laugh. "Oh, no! Not when I have a suitcase in my right hand and you have the drop on me. I can't help myself—and twenty men see it."

"Think they 'll help you?" Meldrum swept ​his hand toward the frightened loungers and railroad officials. His revolver was out in the open now. He let its barrel waver in a semi-circle of defiance.

"No. They won't help me, but they 'll hang you. There's no hole where you can hide that they won't find you. Before night you 'll be swinging underneath the big live-oak on the plaza. That's a prophecy for you to swallow, you four-flushing bully."

It went home like an arrow. The furtive eyes of the killer slid sideways to question this public which had scattered so promptly to save itself. Would the mob turn on him later and destroy him?

Young Beaudry's voice flowed on. "Even if you reached the hills, you would be doomed. Tighe can't save you—and he would n't try. Rutherford would wash his hands of you. They 'll drag you back from your hole."

The prediction rang a bell in Meldrum's craven soul. Again he sought reassurance from those about him and found none. In their place he knew that he would revenge himself for present humiliation by cruelty later. He was checkmated.

It was an odd psychological effect of Beau​dry's hollow defiance that confidence flowed in upon him as that of Meldrum ebbed. The chill drench of fear had lifted from his heart. It came to him that his enemy lacked the courage to kill. Safety lay in acting upon this assumption.

He raised his left hand and brushed the barrel of the revolver aside contemptuously, then turned and walked along the platform to the building. At the door he stopped, to lean faintly against the jamb, still without turning. Meldrum might shoot at any moment. It depended on how drunk he was, how clearly he could vision the future, how greatly his prophecy had impressed him. Cold chills ran up and down the spinal column of the young cattleman. His senses were reeling.

To cover his weakness Roy drew tobacco from his coat-pocket and rolled a cigarette with trembling fingers. He flashed a match. A moment later an insolent smoke wreath rose into the air and floated back toward Meldrum. Roy passed through the waiting-room to the street beyond.

Young Beaudry knew that the cigarette episode had been the weak bluff of one whose strength had suddenly deserted him. He had snatched at it to cover his weakness. But to ​the score or more who saw that spiral of smoke dissolving jauntily into air, no such thought was possible. The filmy wreath represented the acme of dare-devil recklessness, the final proof of gameness in John Beaudry's son. He had turned his back on a drunken killer crazy for revenge and mocked the fellow at the risk of his life.

Presently Roy and the cattle-buyer were bowling down the street behind Dingwell's fast young four-year-olds. The Denver man did not know that his host was as weak from the reaction of the strain as a child stricken with fear.

Chapter XX
At the Lazy Double D

DINGWELL squinted over the bunch of cattle in the corral. "Twenty dollars on the hoof, f.o.b. at the siding," he said evenly. "You to take the run of the pen, no culls."

"I heard you before," protested the buyer. "Learn a new song, Dingwell. I don't like the tune of that one. Make it eighteen and let me cull the bunch."

Dave garnered a straw clinging to the fence and chewed it meditatively. "Could n't do it without hurting my conscience. Nineteen—no culls. That's my last word."

"I'd sure hate to injure your conscience, Dingwell," grinned the man from Denver. "Think I 'll wait till you go to town and do business with your partner."

"Think he's easy, do you?"

"Easy!" The cattle-buyer turned the conversation to the subject uppermost in his mind. He had already decided to take the cattle and the formal agreement could wait. "Easy! Say, ​do you know what I saw that young man put over to-day at the depot?"

"I 'll know when you 've told me," suggested Dingwell.

The Denver man told his story and added editorial comment. "Gamest thing I ever saw in my life, by Jiminy—stood there with his back to the man-killer and lit a cigarette while the ruffian had his finger on the trigger of a six-gun ready to whang away at him. Can you beat that?"

The eyes of the cattleman gleamed, but his drawling voice was still casual. "Why did n't Meldrum shoot?"

"Triumph of mind over matter, I reckon. He wanted to shoot—was crazy to kill your friend. But—he did n't. Beaudry had talked him out of it."

"How?"

"Bullied him out of it—jeered at him and threatened him and man-called him, with that big gun shining in his eyes every minute of the time."

Dingwell nodded slowly. He wanted to get the full flavor of this joyous episode that had occurred. "And the kid lit his cigarette while Meldrum, crazy as a hydrophobia skunk, had his gun trained on him?"

​"That's right. Stood there with a kind o' you-be-damned placard stuck all over him, then got out the makings and lit up. He tilted back that handsome head of his and blew a smoke wreath into the air. Looked like he'd plumb wiped Mr. Meldrum off his map. He's a world-beater, that young fellow is—does n't know what fear is," concluded the buyer sagely.

"You don't say!" murmured Mr. Dingwell.

"Sure as you 're a foot high. While I was trying to climb up the side of a railroad car to get out of range, that young guy was figuring it all out. He was explaining thorough to the bad man what would happen if he curled his fore-finger another quarter of an inch. Just as cool and easy, you understand."

"You mean that he figured out his chances?"

"You bet you! He figured it all out, played a long shot, and won. The point is that it would n't help him any if this fellow Meldrum starred in a subsequent lynching. The man had been drinking like a blue blotter. Had he sense enough left to know his danger? Was his brain steady enough to hold him in check? Nobody could tell that. But your partner gambled on it and won."

This was meat and drink to Dave. He art​fully pretended to make light of the whole affair in order to stir up the buyer to more details.

"I reckon maybe Meldrum was just bluffing. Maybe—"

"Bluffing!" The Coloradoan swelled. "Bluffing! I tell you there was murder in the fellow's eye. He had come there primed for a killing. If Beaudry had weakened by a hair's breadth, that forty-four would have pumped lead into his brain. Ask the train crew. Ask the station agent. Ask any one who was there."

"Maybeso," assented Dave dubiously. "But if he was so game, why did n't Beaudry go back and take Meldrum's gun from him?"

The buyer was on the spot with an eager, triumphant answer. "That just proves what I claim. He just brushed the fellow's gun aside and acted like he'd forgot the killer had a gun. 'Course, he could 'a' gone back and taken the gun. After what he'd already pulled off, that would have been like stealing apples from a blind Dutchman. But Beaudry was n't going to give him that much consideration. Don't you see? Meldrum, or whatever his name is, was welcome to keep the revolver to play with. Your friend did n't care how many guns he was toting."

​"I see. It he had taken the gun, Meldrum might have thought he was afraid of him."

"Now you 're shouting. As it is the bad man is backed clear off the earth. It's like as if your partner said, 'Garnish yourself with forty-fours if you like, but don't get gay around me.'"

"So you think—"

"I think he's some bear-cat, that young fellow. When you 're looking for something easy to mix with, go pick a grizzly or a wild cat, but don't you monkey with friend Beaudry. He's liable to interfere with your interior geography. … Say, Dingwell. Do I get to cull this bunch of longhorn skeletons you 're misnaming cattle?"

"You do not."

The Denver man burlesqued a sigh. "Oh, well! I 'll go broke dealing with you unsophisticated Shylocks of the range. The sooner the quicker. Send 'em down to the siding. I 'll take the bunch."

Roy rode up on a pinto.

"Help! Help!" pleaded the Coloradoan of the young man.

"He means that I 've unloaded this corral full of Texas dinosaurs on him at nineteen a throw." explained Dave.

​"You 've made a good bargain," Beaudry told the buyer.

"’Course he has, and he knows it." Dingwell opened on Roy his gay smile. "I hear you 've had a run-in with the bad man of Chicito Cañon, son."

Roy looked at the Denver man reproachfully. Ever since the affair on the station platform he had been flogging himself because he had driven away and left Meldrum in possession of the field. No doubt all Battle Butte knew now how frightened he had been. The women were gossiping about it over their tea, probably, and men were retailing the story in saloons and on sidewalks.

"I did n't want any trouble," he said apologetically. "I—I just left him."

"That's what I 've been hearing," assented Dave dryly. "You merely showed him up for a false alarm and kicked him into the discard. That's good, and it's bad. We know now that Meldrum won't fight you in the open. You 've got him buffaloed. But he 'll shoot you in the back if he can do it safely. I know the cur. After this don't ride alone, Roy, and don't ride that painted hoss at all. Get you a nice quiet buckskin that melts into the atmosphere like a ​patch of bunch grass. Them's my few well-chosen words of advice, as Mañana Bill used to say."

Three days later Beaudry, who had been superintending the extension of an irrigation ditch, rode up to the porch of the Lazy Double D ranch house and found Hal Rutherford, senior, with his chair tilted back against the wall. The smoke of his pipe mingled fraternally with that of Dingwell's cigar. He nodded genially to Roy without offering to shake hands.

"Mr. Rutherford dropped in to give us the latest about Meldrum," explained Dave. "Seems he had warned our friend the crook to lay off you, son. When Dan showed up again at the park, he bumped into Miss Beulah and said some pleasant things to her. He had n't noticed that Jeff was just round the corner of the schoolhouse fixing up some dingus as a platform for the last day's speaking. Jeff always was hot-headed. Before he had got through with Mr. Meldrum, he had mussed his hair up considerable. Dan tried to gun him and got an awful walloping. He hit the trail to Jess Tighe's place. When Mr. Rutherford heard of it, he was annoyed. First off, because of what had happened at the depot. Second, and a heap ​more important, because the jailbird had threatened Miss Beulah. So he straddled a horse and called on Dan, who shook the dust of Huerfano Park from his bronco's hoofs poco tiempo."

"Where has he gone?" asked Roy.

"Nobody knows, and he won't tell. But, knowing Meldrum as we do, Rutherford and I have come to a coincidentical opinion, as you might say. He's a bad actor, that bird. We figure that he's waiting in the chaparral somewhere to pull off a revenge play, after which he means pronto to slide his freight across the line to the land of old Porf. Diaz."

"Revenge—on Jeff Rutherford—or who?"

"Son, that's a question. But Jeff won't be easily reached. On the whole, we think you 're elected."

Roy's heart sank. If Meldrum had been kicked out of Huerfano Park, there was no room for him in New Mexico. Probably the fear of the Rutherfords had been a restraint upon him up to this time. But now that he had broken with them and was leaving the country, the man was free to follow the advice of Tighe. He was a bully whose prestige was tottering. It was almost sure that he would attempt some ​savage act of reprisal before he left. Beaudry had no doubt that he would be the victim of it.

"What am I to do, then?" he wanted to know, his voice quavering.

"Stay right here at the ranch. Don't travel from the house till we check up on Meldrum. Soon as he shows his hand, we 'll jump him and run him out of the country. All you 've got to do is to sit tight till we locate him."

"I 'll not leave the house," Roy vowed fervently.

Chapter XXI
Roy Rides his Paint Hoss

BUT he did.

For next day Pat Ryan rode up to the Lazy Double D with a piece of news that took Roy straight to his pinto. Beulah Rutherford had disappeared. She had been out riding and Blacky had come home with an empty saddle. So far as was known, Brad Charlton had seen her last. He had met her just above the Laguna Sinks, had talked with her, and had left the young woman headed toward the mountains.

The word had reached Battle Butte through Slim Sanders, who had been sent down from Huerfano Park for help. The Rutherfords and their friends were already combing the hills for the lost girl, but the owner of the horse ranch wanted Sheriff Sweeney to send out posses as a border patrol. Opinion was divided. Some thought Beulah might have met a grizzly, been unhorsed, and fallen a victim to it. There was the possibility that she might have stumbled while climbing and hurt herself. According to ​Sanders, her father held to another view. He was convinced that Meldrum was at the bottom of the thing.

This was Roy's instant thought, too. He could not escape the sinister suggestion that through the girl the ruffian had punished them all. While he gave sharp, short orders to get together the riders of the ranch, his mind was busy with the situation. Had he better join Sweeney's posse and patrol the desert? Or would he help more by pushing straight into the hills?

Dingwell rode up and looked around in surprise. "What's the stir, son?"

His partner told him what he had heard and what he suspected.

Before he answered, Dave chewed a meditative cud. "Maybeso you 're right—and maybe 'way off. Say you 're wrong. Say Meldrum has nothing to do with this. In that case it is in the hills that we have got to find Miss Beulah."

"But he has. I feel sure he has. Mr. Ryan says Rutherford thinks so, too."

"Both you and Hal have got that crook Meldrum in yore minds. You 've been thinking a lot about him, so you jump to the conclusion that what you 're afraid of has hap​pened. The chances are ten to one against it. But we 'll say you're right. Put yourself in Meldrum's place. What would he do?"

Beaudry turned a gray, agonized face on his friend. "I don't know. What—what would he do?"

"The way to get at it is to figure yourself in his boots. Remember that you 're a bad, rotten lot, cur to the bone. You meet up with this girl and get her in yore power. You 've got a grudge against her because she spoiled yore plans, and because through her you were handed the whaling of yore life and are being hounded out of the country. You 're sore clear through at all her people and at all her friends. Naturally, you 're as sweet-tempered as a sore-headed bear, and you 've probably been drinking like a sheepherder on a spree."

"I know what a devil he is. The question is how far would he dare go?"

"You 've put yore finger right on the point, son. What might restrain him would n't be any moral sense, but fear. He knows that once he touched Miss Rutherford, this country would treat him like a rattlesnake. He could not even be sure that the Rutherfords would not hunt him down in Mexico."

​"You think he would let her alone, then?"

The old-timer shook his head. "No, he would n't do that. But I reckon he'd try to postpone a decision as long as he could. Unless he destroyed her in the first rush of rage, he would n't have the nerve to do it until he had made himself crazy drunk. It all depends on circumstances, but my judgment is—if he had a chance and if he did n't think it too great a risk—that he would try to hold her a prisoner as a sort of hostage to gloat over."

"You mean keep her—unharmed?"

They were already in the saddle and on the road. Dave looked across at his white-faced friend.

"I'm only guessing, Roy, but that's the way I figure it," he said gently.

"You don't think he would try to take her across the desert with him to Mexico."

Ryan shook his head.

"No chance. He could n't make it. When he leaves the hills, Miss Rutherford will stay there."

"Alive?" asked Beaudry from a dry throat.

"Don't know."

"God!"

"So that whether Miss Beulah did or did not ​meet Meldrum, we have to look for her up among the mountains of the Big Creek watershed," concluded Dingwell. "I believe we 'll find her safe and sound. Chances are Meldrum is n't within forty miles of her."

They were riding toward Lonesome Park, from which they intended to work up into the hills. Just before reaching the rim of the park, they circled around a young pine lying across the trail. Roy remembered the tree. It had stood on a little knoll, strong and graceful, reaching straight toward heaven with a kind of gallant uprightness. Now its trunk was snapped, its boughs crushed, its foliage turning sere. An envious wind had brought it low. Somehow that pine reminded Beaudry poignantly of the girl they were seeking. She, too, had always stood aloof, a fine and vital personality, before the eyes of men sufficient to herself. But as the evergreen had stretched its hundred arms toward light and sunshine, so Beulah Rutherford had cried dumbly to life for some vague good she could not formulate.

Were her pride and courage abased, too? Roy would not let himself believe it. The way of youth is to deny the truth of all signposts which point to the futility of beauty and strength. It ​would be a kind of apostasy to admit that her sweet, lissom grace might be forever crushed and bruised.

They rode hard and steadily. Before dusk they were well up toward the divide among the wooded pockets of the hills. From one of these a man came to meet them.

"It's Hal Rutherford," announced Ryan, who was riding in front with Dingwell.

The owner of the horse ranch nodded a greeting as he drew up in front of them. He was unshaven and gaunt. Furrows of anxiety lined his face.

"Anything new, Hal?" asked Dave.

"Not a thing. We 're combing the hills thorough."

"You don't reckon that maybe a cougar—?" Ryan stopped. It occurred to him that his suggestion was not a very cheerful one.

Rutherford looked at the little Irishman from bleak eyes. The misery in them was for the moment submerged in a swift tide of hate. "A two-legged cougar, Pat. If I meet up with him, I 'll take his hide off inch by inch."

"Meaning Meldrum?" asked Roy.

"Meaning Meldrum." A spasm of pain shot across the face of the man. "If he's done my ​little girl any meanness, he'd better blow his head off before I get to him."

"Don't believe he'd dare hurt Miss Beulah, Rutherford. Meldrum belongs to the coyote branch of the wolf family. I 've noticed it's his night to howl only when hunters are liable to be abed. If he's in this thing at all, I 'll bet he's trying to play both ends against the middle. We 'll sure give him a run for his white alley," Dingwell concluded.

"Hope you 're right, Dave," Rutherford added in a voice rough with the feeling he could not suppress: "I appreciate it that you boys from the Lazy Double D came after what has taken place."

Dave grinned cheerfully. "Sho, Hal! Maybe Beaudry and I are n't sending any loving-cups up to you and yours, but we don't pull any of that sulk-in-the-tent stuff when our good friend Beulah Rutherford is lost in the hills. She went through for us proper, and we ain't going to quit till we bring her back to you as peart and sassy as that calf there."

"What part of the country do you want us to work?" asked Ryan.

"You can take Del Oro and Lame Cow Creeks from the divide down to the foothills," ​Rutherford answered. "I 'll send one of the boys over to boss the round-up. He 'll know the ground better than you lads. Make camp here to-night and he 'll join you before you start. To-morrow evening I 'll have a messenger meet you on the flats. We 're trying to keep in touch with each other, you understand."

Rutherford left them making camp. They were so far up in the mountains that the night was cool, even though the season was midsummer. Unused to sleeping outdoors as yet, Roy lay awake far into the night. His nerves were jumpy. The noises of the grazing horses and of the four-footed inhabitants of the night startled him more than once from a cat-nap. His thoughts were full of Beulah Rutherford. Was she alive or dead to-night, in peril or in safety?

At last, in the fag end of the night, he fell into sound sleep that was untroubled. From this he was wakened in the first dim dawn by the sound of his companions stirring. A fire was already blazing and breakfast in process of making. He rose and stretched his stiff limbs. Every bone seemed to ache from contact with the hard ground.

While they were eating breakfast, a man rode up and dismounted. A long, fresh zigzag scar ​stretched across his forehead. It was as plain to be seen as the scowl which drew his heavy eyebrows together.

"’Lo, Charlton. Come to boss this round-up for us?" asked Dingwell cheerily.

The young man nodded sulkily. "Hal sent me. The boys were n't with him." He looked across the fire at Beaudry, and there was smouldering rage in his narrowed eyes.

Roy murmured "Good-morning" in a rather stifled voice. This was the first time he had met Charlton since they had clashed in the arcade of the Silver Dollar. That long deep scar fascinated him. He felt an impulse to apologize humbly for having hit him so hard. To put such a mark on a man for life was a liberty that might well be taken as a personal affront. No wonder Charlton hated him—and as their eyes met now, Roy had no doubt about that. The man was his enemy. Some day he would even the score. Again Beaudry's heart felt the familiar drench of an icy wave.

Charlton did not answer his greeting. He flushed to his throat, turned abruptly on his heel, and began to talk with Ryan. The hillman wanted it clearly understood that the feud he cherished was only temporarily abandoned. ​But even Roy noticed that the young Admirable Crichton had lost some of his debonair aplomb.

The little Irishman explained this with a grin to Dave as they were riding together half an hour later. "It's not so easy to get away with that slow insolence of his while he's wearing that forgit-me-not young Beaudry handed him in the mix-up."

"Sort of spoils the toutensemble, as that young Melrose tenderfoot used to say—kinder as if a bald-haided guy was playing Romeo and had lost his wig in the shuffle," agreed Dave.

By the middle of the forenoon they were well up in the headwaters of the two creeks they were to work. Charlton divided the party so as to cover both watersheds as they swept slowly down. Roy was on the extreme right of those working Del Oro.

It was a rough country, with wooded draws cached in unexpected pockets of the hills. Here a man might lie safely on one of a hundred ledges while the pursuit drove past within fifty feet of him. As Roy's pinto clambered up and down the steep hills, he recalled the advice of Dave to ride a buckskin "that melts into the atmosphere like a patch of bunch grass." He ​wished he had taken that advice. A man looking for revenge could crouch in the chaparral and with a crook of his finger send winged death at his enemy. A twig crackling under the hoof of his horse more than once sent an electric shock through his pulses. The crash of a bear through the brush seemed to stop the beating of his heart.

Charlton had made a mistake in putting Beaudry on the extreme right of the drive. The number of men combing the two creeks was not enough to permit close contact. Sometimes a rider was within hail of his neighbor. More often he was not. Roy, unused to following the rodeo, was deflected by the topography of the ridge so far to the right that he lost touch with the rest.

By the middle of the afternoon he had to confess to himself with chagrin that he did not even know how to reach Del Oro. While he had been riding the rough wooded ridge above, the creek had probably made a sharp turn to the left. Must he go back the way he had come? Or could he cut across country to it? It was humiliating that he could not even follow a small river without losing the stream and himself. He could vision the cold sneer of Charlton when he ​failed to appear at the night rendezvous. Even his friends would be annoyed at such helplessness.

After an hour's vain search he was more deeply tangled in the web of hills. He was no longer even sure how to get down from them into the lower reaches of country toward which he was aiming.

While he hesitated on a ridge there came to him a faint, far cry. He gave a shout of relief, then listened for his answer. It did not come. He called again, a third time, and a fourth. The wind brought back no reply. Roy rode in the direction of the sound that had first registered itself on his ears, stopping every minute or two to shout. Once he fancied he heard again the voice.

Then, unexpectedly, the cry came perfectly clear, over to the right scarcely a hundred yards. A little arroyo of quaking aspens lay between him and the one who called. He dismounted, tied his horse to a sapling, and pushed through the growth of young trees. Emerging from these, he climbed the brow of the hill and looked around. Nobody was in sight.

"Where are you?" he shouted.

"Here—in the prospect hole."

​His pulses crashed. That voice—he would have known it out of a million.

A small dirt dump on the hillside caught his eye. He ran forward to the edge of a pit and looked down.

The haggard eyes of Beulah Rutherford were lifted to meet his.

Chapter XXII
Miss Rutherford Speaks her Mind

FOR the first time in over a year an itinerant preacher was to hold services in the Huerfano Park schoolhouse. He would speak, Beulah Rutherford knew, to a mere handful of people, and it was to mitigate his disappointment that she rode out into the hills on the morning of her disappearance to find an armful of columbines for decorating the desk-pulpit. The man had written Miss Rutherford and asked her to notify the community. She had seen that the news was carried to the remotest ranch, but she expected for a congregation only a scatter of patient women and restless children with three or four coffee-brown youths in high-heeled boots on the back row to represent the sinners.

It was a brave, clean world into which she rode this summer morning. The breeze brought to her nostrils the sweet aroma of the sage. Before her lifted the saw-toothed range into a sky of blue sprinkled here and there with light mackerel clouds. Blacky pranced with fire ​and intelligence, eager to reach out and leave behind him the sunny miles.

Near the upper end of the park she swung up an arroyo that led to Big Flat Top. A drawling voice stopped her.

"Oh, you, Beulah Rutherford! Where away this glad mo'ning?"

A loose-seated rider was lounging in the saddle on a little bluff fifty yards away. His smile reminded her of a new copper kettle shining in the sun.

"To find columbines for church decorations," she said with an answering smile.

"Have you been building a church since I last met up with you?"

"There will be services in the schoolhouse tomorrow at three p.m., conducted by the Reverend Melancthon Smith. Mr. Charlton is especially invited to attend."

"Maybe I 'll be there. You can't sometimes 'most always tell. I'm going to prove I 've got nothing against religion by going with you to help gather the pulpit decorations."

"That's very self-sacrificing of you." She flashed a look of gay derision at him as he joined her. "Sure you can afford to waste so much time?"

​"I don't call it wasted. But since you 've invited me so hearty to your picnic, I'd like to be sure you 've got grub enough in the chuck wagon for two," he said with a glance at her saddle-bags.

"I'm not sure. Maybe you had better not come."

"Oh, I'm coming if you starve me. Say, Beulah, have you heard about Jess Tighe?"

"What about him?"

"He had a stroke last night. Doc Spindler thinks he won't live more than a few hours."

Beulah mused over that for a few moments without answer. She had no liking for the man, but it is the way of youth to be shocked at the approach of death. Yet she knew this would help to clear up the situation. With the evil influence of Tighe removed, there would be a chance for the park to develop along more wholesome lines. He had been like a sinister shadow that keeps away the sunlight.

She drew a deep breath. "I don't wish him any harm. But it will be a good thing for all of us when he can't make us more sorrow and trouble."

"He never made me any," Charlton answered.

​"Did n't he?" She looked steadily across at him. "You can't tell me he did n't plan that express robbery, for instance."

"Meaning that I was in the party that pulled it off?" he asked, flushing.

"I know well enough you were in it—knew it all along. It's the sort of thing you could n't keep out of."

"How about Ned? Do you reckon he could keep out of it?" She detected rising anger beneath his controlled voice.

"Not with you leading him on." Her eyes poured scorn on him. "And I'm sure he would appreciate your loyalty in telling me he was in it."

"Why do you jump on me, then?" he demanded sulkily. "And I did n't say Ned was in that hold-up—any more than I admit having been in it myself. Are you trying to make trouble with me? Is that it?"

"I don't care whether I make trouble with you or not. I'm not going to pretend and make-believe, if that's what you want. I don't have to do it."

"I see you don't," he retorted bluntly. "I suppose you don't have to mind your own business either."

​"It is my business when Ned follows you into robbery."

"Maybe I followed him," he jeered.

She bit back the tart answer on her tongue. What was the use of quarreling? It used to be that they were good friends, but of late they jangled whenever they met. Ever since the Western Express affair she had held a grudge at him. Six months ago she had almost promised to marry him. Now nothing was farther from her thoughts.

But he was still very much of the mind that she should.

"What's the matter with you, Boots?" he wanted to know roughly. "You used to have some sense. You were n't always flying out at a fellow. Now there's no way of pleasing you."

"I suppose it is odd that I don't want my friends to be thieves," she flung out bitterly.

"Don't use that word if you mean me," he ordered.

"What word shall I substitute?"

He barely suppressed an oath. "I know what's ailing you? We 're not smooth enough up here for you. We 're not educated up to your standard. If I'd been to Cornell, say—"

​"Take care," she warned with a flash of anger in her black eyes.

"Oh, I don't know. Why should I cull my words so careful? I notice yours ain't hand-picked. Ever since this guy Beaudry came spying into the park, you 've had no use for me. You have been throwing yourself at his head and could n't see any one else."

She gasped. "How dare you, Brad Charlton?"

His jealousy swept away the prudence that had dammed his anger. "Did n't you take him out driving? Did n't you spend a night alone with him and Dave Dingwell? Did n't you hot-foot it down to Hart's because you was afraid yore precious spy would meet up with what he deserved?"

Beulah drew up Blacky abruptly. "Now you can leave me. Don't stop to say good-bye. I hate you. I don't ever want to see you again."

He had gone too far and he knew it. Sulkily he began to make his apology. "You know how fond I am of you, Boots. You know—"

"Yes, I ought to. I 've heard it often enough," she interrupted curtly. "That's probably why you insult me?"

​Her gypsy eyes stabbed him. She was furiously angry. He attempted to explain. "Now, listen here, Beulah. Let's be reasonable."

"Are you going up or down?" she demanded. "I'm going the other way. Take one road or the other, you—you scandalmonger."

Never a patient man, he too gave rein to his anger. "Since you want to know, I'm going down—to Battle Butte, where I 'll likely meet yore friend Beaudry and settle an account or two with him. I reckon before I git through with him he 'll yell something besides Cornell."

The girl laughed scornfully. "Last time I saw him he had just beaten a dozen or so of you. How many friends are you going to take along this trip?"

Already her horse was taking the trail. She called the insult down to him over her shoulder.

But before she had gone a half-mile her eyes were blind with tears. Why did she get so angry? Why did she say such things? Other girls were ladylike and soft-spoken. Was there a streak of commonness in her that made possible such a scene as she had just gone through? In her heart she longed to be a lady—gentle, refined, sweet of spirit. Instead of which she was a bad-tempered tomboy. "Miss Spitfire" her ​brothers sometimes called her, and she knew the name was justified.

Take this quarrel now with Brad. She had had no intention of breaking with him in that fashion. Why could n't she dismiss a lover as girls in books do, in such a way as to keep him for a friend? She had not meant, anyhow, to bring the matter to issue to-day. One moment they had been apparently the best of comrades. The next they had been saying hateful things to each other. What he had said was unforgivable, but she had begun by accusing him of complicity in the train robbery. Knowing how arrogant he was, she might have guessed how angry criticism would make him.

Yet she was conscious of a relief that it was over with at last. Charlton was proud. He would leave her alone unless she called him to her side. Her tears were for the humiliating way in which they had wrenched apart rather than for the fact of the break.

She knew his temper. Nothing on earth could keep him from flying at the throat of Roy Beaudry now. Well, she had no interest in either of them, she reminded herself impatiently. It was none of her business how they settled their differences. Yet, as Blacky followed the stiff trail ​to Big Flat Top, her mind was wretchedly troubled.

Beulah had expected to find her columbines in a gulch back of Big Flat Top, but the flowers were just past their prime here. The petals fell fluttering at her touch. She hesitated. Of course, she did not have to get columbines for the preaching service. Sweet-peas would do very well. But she was a young woman who did not like to be beaten. She had plenty of time, and she wanted an excuse to be alone all day. Why not ride over to Del Oro Creek, where the season was later and the columbines would be just coming on?

The ayes had it, and presently Miss Rutherford was winding deeper into the great hills that skirted Flat Top. Far in the gulches, dammed by the small thick timber, she came on patches of snow upon which the sun never shone. Once a ptarmigan started from the brush at her feet. An elk sprang up from behind a log, stared at her, and crashed away through the fallen timber.

Her devious road took Beulah past a hill flaming with goldenrod and Indian paint-brushes. A wealth of color decorated every draw, for up here at the roots of the peaks blos​soms rioted in great splashes that ran to the snowbanks.

After all, she had to go lower for her favorite blooms. On Del Oro she found columbines, but in no great profusion. She wandered from the stream, leading Blacky by the bridle. On a hillside just above an aspen grove the girl came upon scattered clumps of them. Tying the pony loosely to a clump of bushes, she began to gather the delicate blue wild flowers.

The blossoms enticed her feet to the edge of a prospect hole long since abandoned. A clump of them grew from the side of the pit about a foot below the level of the ground. Beulah reached for them, and at the same moment the ground caved beneath her feet. She clutched at a bush in vain as she plunged down.

Jarred by the fall, Beulah lay for a minute in a huddle at the bottom of the pit. She was not quite sure that no bones were broken. Before she had time to make certain, a sound brought her rigidly to her feet. It was a light loose sound like the shaking of dried peas in their pods. No dweller of the outdoors Southwest could have failed to recognize it, and none but would have been startled by it.

The girl whipped her revolver from its scab​bard and stood pressed against the rock wall while her eyes searched swiftly the prison into which she had fallen. Again came that light swift rattle with its sinister menace.

The enemy lay coiled across the pit from her, head and neck raised, tongue vibrating. Beulah fired—once—twice—a third time. It was enough. The rattlesnake ceased writhing.

The first thing she did was to examine every inch of her prison to make sure there were no more rattlers. Satisfied as to this, she leaned faintly against the wall. The experience had been a shock even to her sound young nerves.

Chapter XXIII
In the Pit

BEULAH shut her eyes to steady herself. From the impact of her fall she was still shaken. Moreover, though she had shot many a rattlesnake, this was the first time she had ever been flung head first into the den of one. It would have been easy to faint, but she denied herself the luxury of it and resolutely fought back the swimming lightness in her head.

Presently she began to take stock of her situation. The prospect hole was circular in form, about ten feet across and nine feet deep. The walls were of rock and smooth clay. Whatever timbering had been left by the prospector was rotted beyond use. It crumbled at the weight of her foot.

How was she to get out? Of course, she would find some way, she told herself. But how? Blacky was tied to a bush not fifty yards away, and fastened to the saddle horn was the rope that would have solved her problem quickly enough. If she had it here— But it might as ​well be at Cheyenne for all the good it would do her now.

Perhaps she could dig footholds in the wall by means of which she could climb out. Unbuckling the spur from her heel, she used the rowel as a knife to jab a hole in the clay. After half an hour of persistent work she looked at the result in dismay. She had gouged a hollow, but it was not one where her foot could rest while she made steps above.

Every few minutes Beulah stopped work to shout for help. It was not likely that anybody would be passing. Probably she had been the only person on this hill for months. But she dared not miss any chance.

For it was coming home to her that she might die of starvation in this prison long before her people found the place. By morning search parties would be out over the hills looking for her. But who would think to find her away over on Del Oro? If Brad had carried out his threat immediately and gone down to Battle Butte, nobody would know even the general direction in which to seek.

With every hour Beulah grew more troubled. Late in the afternoon she fired a fourth shot from her revolver in the hope that some one ​might hear the sound and investigate. The sun set early for her. She watched its rays climb the wall of her prison while she worked half-heartedly with the spur. After a time the light began to fade, darkness swept over the land, and she had to keep moving in order not to chill.

Never had she known such a night. It seemed to the tortured girl that morning would never come. She counted the stars above her. Sometimes there were more. Sometimes fewer. After an eternity they began to fade out in the sky. Day was at hand.

She fired the fifth shot from her revolver. Her voice was hoarse from shouting, but she called every few minutes. Then, when she was at the low ebb of hope, there came an answer to her call. She fired her last shot. She called and shouted again and again. The voice that came back to her was close at hand.

"I'm down in the prospect hole," she cried.

Another moment, and she was looking up into the face of a man, Dan Meldrum. In vacant astonishment he gazed down at her.

"Whad you doing here?" he asked roughly.

"I fell in. I 've been here all night." Her voice broke a little. "Oh, I'm so glad you 've come."

​It was of no importance that he was a man she detested, one who had quarreled with her father and been thrashed by her brother for insulting her. All she thought of was that help had come to her at last and she was now safe.

He stared down at her with a kind of drunken malevolence.

"So you fell in, eh?"

"Yes. Please help me out right away. My riata is tied to Blacky's saddle."

He looked around. "Where?"

"Is n't Blacky there? He must have broken loose, then. Never mind. Pass me down the end of a young sapling and you can pull me up."

"Can I?"

For the first time she felt a shock of alarm. There was in his voice something that chilled her, something inexpressibly cruel.

"I 'll see my father rewards you. I 'll see you get well paid," she promised, and the inflection of the words was an entreaty.

"You will, eh?"

"Anything you want," she hurried on. "Name it. If we can give it to you, I promise it."

His drunken brain was functioning slowly. ​This was the girl who had betrayed him up in Chicito Cañon, the one who had frustrated his revenge at Hart's. On account of her young Rutherford had given him the beating of his life and Hal had driven him from Huerfano Park. First and last she was the rock upon which his fortunes had split. Now chance had delivered her into his hands. What should he do with her? How could he safely make the most of the opportunity?

It did not for an instant occur to him to haul her from the pit and send her rejoicing on the homeward way. He intended to make her pay in full. But how? How get his revenge and not jeopardize his own safety?

"Won't you hurry, please?" she pleaded. "I'm hungry—and thirsty. I 've been here all night and most of yesterday. It's been … rather awful."

He rubbed his rough, unshaven cheek while his little pig eyes looked down into hers. "Tha' so? Well, I dunno as it's any business of mine where you spend the night or how long you stay there. I had it put up to me to lay off 'n interfering with you. Seems like yore family got notions I was insulting you. That young bully Jeff jumped me whilst I was n't looking and ​beat me up. Hal Rutherford ordered me to pull my freight. That's all right. I won't interfere in what don't concern me. Yore family says 'Hands off!' Fine. Suits me. Stay there or get out. It's none of my business. See?"

"You don't mean you 'll … leave me here?" she cried in horror.

"Sure," he exulted. "If I pulled you out of there, like as not you'd have me beat up again. None o' my business! That's what yore folks have been drilling into me. I reckon they 're right. Anyhow, I 'll play it safe."

"But— Oh, you can't do that. Even you can't do such a thing," she cried desperately. "Why, men don't do things like that."

"Don't they? Watch me, missie." He leaned over the pit, his broken, tobacco-stained teeth showing in an evil grin. "Just keep an eye on yore Uncle Dan. Nobody ever yet done me a meanness and got away with it. I reckon the Rutherfords won't be the first. It ain't on the cyards," he boasted.

"You 're going away … to leave me here … to starve?"

"Who said anything about going away? I 'll stick around for a while. It's none of my business whether you starve or live high. Do just ​as you please about that. I 'll let you alone, like I promised Jeff I would. You Rutherfords have got no call to object to being starved, anyhow. Whad you do to Dave Dingwell in Chicito?"

After all, she was only a girl in spite of her little feminine ferocities and her pride and her gameness. She had passed through a terrible experience, had come out of it to apparent safety and had been thrown back into despair. It was natural that sobs should shake her slender body as she leaned against the quartz wall of her prison and buried her head in her forearm.

When presently the sobs grew fewer and less violent, Beulah became aware without looking up that her tormentor had taken away his malignant presence. This was at first a relief, but as the hours passed an acute fear seized her. Had he left her alone to die? In spite of her knowledge of the man, she had clung to the hope that he would relent. But if he had gone—

She began again to call at short intervals for help. Sometimes tears of self-pity choked her voice. More than once she beat her brown fists against the rock in an ecstasy of terror.

Then again he was looking down at her, a hulk of venom, eyes bleared with the liquor he had been drinking.

​"Were you calling me, missie?" he jeered.

"Let me out," she demanded. "When my brothers find me—"

"If they find you," he corrected with a hiccough.

"They 'll find me. By this time everybody in Huerfano Park is searching for me. Before night half of Battle Butte will be in the saddle. Well, when they find me, do you think you won't be punished for this?"

"For what?" demanded the man. "You fell in. I have n't touched you."

"Will that help you, do you think?"

His rage broke into speech. "You 're aimin' to stop my clock, are you? Take another guess, you mischief-making vixen. What's to prevent me from emptying my forty-four into you when I get good and ready, then hitting the trail for Mexico?"

She knew he was speaking the thoughts that had been drifting through his mind in whiskey-lit ruminations. That he was a wanton killer she had always heard. If he could persuade himself it could be done with safety, he would not hesitate to make an end of her.

This was the sort of danger she could fight against—and she did.

​"I 'll tell you what's to prevent you," she flung back, as it were in a kind of careless scorn. "Your fondness for your worthless hide. If they find me shot to death, they will know who did it. You could n't hide deep enough in Chihuahua to escape them. My father would never rest till he had made an end of you."

Her argument sounded appallingly reasonable to him. He knew the Rutherfords. They would make him pay his debt to them with usury.

To stimulate his mind he took another drink, after which he stared down at her a long time in sullen, sulky silence. She managed at the same time to irritate him and tempt him and fill his coward heart with fear of consequences. Through the back of his brain from the first there had been filtering thoughts that were like crouching demons. They reached toward her and drew back in alarm. He was too white-livered to go through with his villainy boldly.

He recorked the bottle and put it in his hip pocket. "’Nough said," he blustered. "Me, I 'll git on my hawss and be joggin' along to Mex. I 'll take chances on their finding you before you 're starved. After that it won't matter to me when they light on yore body."

​"Oh, yes, it will," she corrected him promptly, "I'm going to write a note and tell just what has happened. It will be found beside me in case they … don't reach here in time."

The veins in his blotched face stood out as he glared down at her while he adjusted himself to this latest threat. Here, too, she had him. He had gone too far. Dead or alive, she was a menace to his safety.

Since he must take a chance, why not take a bigger one, why not follow the instigation of the little crouching devils in his brain? He leered down at her with what was meant to be an ingratiating smile.

"Sho! What's the use of we 'uns quarreling, Miss Beulah? I ain't got nothing against you. Old Dan he always liked you fine. I reckon you did n't know that, did you?"

Her quick glance was in time to catch his face napping. The keen eyes of the girl pounced on his and dragged from them a glimpse of the depraved soul of the ruffian. Silently and warily she watched him.

"I done had my little joke, my dear," he went on. "Now we 'll be heap good friends. Old Dan ain't such a bad sort. There's lots of folks worse than Dan. That's right. Now, what ​was that you said a while ago about giving me anything I wanted?"

"I said my father would pay you anything in reason." Her throat was parched, but her eyes were hard and bright. No lithe young panther of the forest could have been more alert than she.

"Leave yore dad out of it. He ain't here, and, anyway, I ain't having any truck with him. Just say the word, Miss Beulah, and I 'll git a pole and haul you up in a jiffy."

Beulah made a mistake. She should have waited till she was out of the pit before she faced the new issue. But her horror of the man was overpowering. She unscabbarded swiftly the revolver at her side and lifted it defiantly toward him.

"I 'll stay here."

Again he foamed into rage. The girl had stalemated him once more. "Then stay, you little wild cat. You 've had yore chance. I'm through with you." He bared his teeth in a snarling grin and turned his back on her.

Beulah heard him slouching away. Presently there came the sound of a furiously galloping horse. The drumming of the hoofbeats died in the distance.

​During the rest of the day she saw no more of the man. It swept over her toward evening in a wave of despair that he had left her to her fate.

Chapter XXIV
The Bad Man Decides not to Shoot

BEULAH woke from a sleep of exhaustion to a world into which the morning light was just beginning to sift. The cold had penetrated to her bones. She was stiff and cramped and sore from the pressure of the rock bed against her tender young flesh. For nearly two days she had been without food or drink. The urge of life in her was at low tide.

But the traditions among which she had been brought up made pluck a paramount virtue. She pushed from her the desire to weep in self-pity over her lot. Though her throat was raw and swollen, she called at regular intervals during the morning hours while the sun climbed into view of her ten-foot beat. Even when it rode the heavens a red-hot cannon ball directly above her, the hoarse and lonely cry of the girl echoed back from the hillside every few minutes. There were times when she wanted to throw herself down and give up to despair, but she knew there would be opportunity for that when she could no longer fight for her life. The ​shadow was beginning to climb the eastern wall of the pit before Beaudry's shout reached her ears faintly. Her first thought was that she must already be delirious. Not till she saw him at the edge of the prospect hole was she sure that her rescuer was a reality.

At the first sight of her Roy wanted to trumpet to high heaven the joy that flooded his heart. He had found her—alive. After the torment of the night and the worry of the day he had come straight to her in his wandering, and he had reached her in time.

But when he saw her condition pity welled up in him. Dark hollows had etched themselves into her cheeks. Tears swam in her eyes. Her lips trembled weakly from emotion. She leaned against the side of the pit to support her on account of the sudden faintness that engulfed her senses. He knelt and stretched his hands toward her, but the pit was too deep.

"You 'll have to get a pole or a rope," she told him quietly.

Beaudry found the dead trunk of a young sapling and drew the girl up hand over hand. On the brink she stumbled and he caught her in his arms to save her from falling back into the prospect hole.

​For a moment she lay close to him, heart beating against heart. Then, with a little sobbing sigh, she relaxed and began to weep. Her tears tugged at his sympathy, but none the less the pulses pounded in his veins. He held her tight, with a kind of savage tenderness, while his body throbbed with the joy of her. She had come to him with the same sure instinct that brings a child to its mother's arms. All her pride and disdain and suspicion had melted like summer mists in her need of the love and comfort he could give her.

"It's all right now. You 're safe. Nothing can hurt you," he promised.

"I know, but you don't know—what—what—" She broke off, shuddering.

Still with his arm about her, he led Beulah to his horse. Here he made her sit down while he gave her water and food. Bit by bit she told him the story of her experience. He suffered poignantly with her, but he could not be grateful enough that the finger-tip of destiny had pointed him to her prison. He thanked his rather vague gods that it had been his footsteps rather than those of another man that had wandered here to save her.

What surprised and wholly delighted him ​was the feminine quality of her. He had thought of her before as a wild young creature full of pride and scorn and anger, but with a fine barbaric loyalty that might yet redeem her from her faults. He had never met a young woman so hard, so self-reliant. She had asked no odds because of her sex. Now all this harshness had melted. No strange child could have been more shy and gentle. She had put herself into his hands and seemed to trust him utterly. His casual opinions were accepted by her as if they had been judgments of Solomon.

Roy spread his blankets and put the saddle-bags down for a pillow.

"We 're not going to stay here to-night, are we?" she asked, surprised.

He smiled. "No, you 're going to lie down and sleep for an hour. When you wake, supper will be ready. You 're all in now, but with a little rest you will be fit to travel."

"You won't go away while I sleep," she said.

"Do you think it likely? No, you can't get rid of me that easy. I'm a regular adhesive plaster for sticking."

"I don't want to get rid of you," she answered naïvely. "I'd be afraid without you. Will you promise to stay close all the time I sleep?"

​"Yes."

"I know I won't sleep, but if you want me to try—"

"I do."

She snuggled down into the blankets and was asleep in five minutes.

Beaudry watched her with hungry eyes. What was the use of denying to himself that he loved her? If he had not known it before, the past half-hour had made it clear to him. With those wan shadows below her long eye-lashes and that charming manner of shy dependence upon him, she was infinitely more attractive to him than she had ever been before.

Beulah Rutherford was not the kind of girl he had thought of as a sweetheart in his daydreams. His fancies had hovered hazily about some imaginary college girl, one skilled in the finesse of the rules that society teaches young women in self-defense. Instead, he had fallen in love with a girl who could not play the social game at all. She was almost the only one he had known who never used any perfume; yet her atmosphere was fragrant as one of the young pines in her own mountain park. The young school-teacher was vital, passionate, and—he suspected—fiercely tender. For her lover there ​would be rare gifts in her eyes, wonderful largesse in her smile. The man who could qualify as her husband must be clean and four-square and game from the soles of his feet up—such a man as Dave Dingwell, except that the cattleman was ten years too old for her.

Her husband! What was he thinking about? Roy brought his bolting thoughts up with a round turn. There could be no question of marriage between her father's daughter and his father's son. Hal Rutherford had put that out of doubt on the day when he had ridden to the Elephant Corral to murder Sheriff Beaudry. No decent man could marry the daughter of the man who had killed his father in cold blood. Out of such a wedding could come only sorrow and tragedy.

And if this were not bar enough between them, there was another. Beulah Rutherford could never marry a man who was a physical coward. It was a dear joy to his soul that she had broken down and wept and clung to him. But this was the sex privilege of even a brave woman. A man had to face danger with a nerve of tested iron, and that was a thing he could never do.

Roy was stretched on the moss face down, his ​chin resting on the two cupped palms of his hands. Suddenly he sat up, every nerve tense and alert. Silently he got to his feet and stole down into the aspen grove. With great caution he worked his way into the grove and peered through to the hillside beyond. A man was standing by the edge of the prospect hole. He was looking down into it. Young Beaudry recognized the heavy, slouch figure at the first glance.

Not for an instant did he hesitate about what he meant to do. The hour had come when he and Dan Meldrum must have an accounting. From its holster he drew his revolver and crept forward toward the bad man. His eyes were cold and hard as chilled steel. He moved with the long, soft stride of a panther crouched for the kill. Not till the whole thing was over did he remember that for once the ghost of fear had been driven from his soul. He thought only of the wrongs of Beulah Rutherford, the girl who had fallen asleep in the absolute trust that he would guard her from all danger. This scoundrel had given her two days of living hell. Roy swore to pay the fellow in full.

Meldrum turned. He recognized Beaudry with a snarl of rage and terror. Except one of ​the Rutherfords there was no man on earth he less wanted to meet. The forty-four in his hand jerked up convulsively. The miscreant was in two minds whether to let fly or wait.

Roy did not even falter in his stride. He did not raise the weapon in his loosely hanging hand. His eyes bored as steadily as gimlets into the craven heart of the outlaw.

Meldrum, in a panic, warned him back. His nerve was gone. For two days he had been drinking hard, but the liquor had given out at midnight. He needed a bracer badly. This was no time for him to go through with a finish fight against such a man as Beaudry.

"Keep yore distance and tell me what you want," the ex-convict repeated hoarsely. "If you don't, I 'll gun you sure."

The young cattleman stopped about five yards from him. He knew exactly what terms he meant to give the enemy.

"Put your gun up," he ordered sharply.

"Who's with you?"

"Never mind who is with me. I can play this hand alone. Put up that gun and then we 'll talk."

That suited Meldrum. If it was a question of explanations, perhaps he could whine his way ​out of this. What he had been afraid of was immediate battle. One cannot talk bullets aside.

Slowly he pushed his revolver into its holster, but the hand of the man rested still on the butt.

"I came back to help Miss Rutherford out of this prospect hole," he whimperingly complained. "When onc't I got sober, I done recalled that she was here. So I hit the trail back."

Meldrum spoke the exact truth. When the liquor was out of him, he became frightened at what he had done. He had visions of New Mexico hunting him down like a wild dog. At last, unable to stand it any longer, he had come back to free her.

"That's good. Saves me the trouble of looking for you. I'm going to give you a choice. You and I can settle this thing with guns right here and now. That's one way out for you. I 'll kill you where you stand."

"W—what's the other way?" stammered the outlaw.

"The other way is for you to jump into that prospect hole. I 'll ride away and leave you there to starve."

"Goddlemighty! You would n't do that," ​Meldrum wheedled. "I did n't go for to hurt Miss Rutherford any. Did n't I tell you I was drunk?"

"Dead or alive, you 're going into that prospect hole. Make up your mind to that."

The bad man moistened his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. He stole one furtive glance around. Could he gun this man and make his getaway?

"Are any of the Rutherfords back of that clump of aspens?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.

"Yes."

"Do … do they know I'm here?"

"Not yet."

Tiny beads of sweat stood out on the blotched face of the rustler. He was trapped. Even if he fired through the leather holster and killed Beaudry, there would be no escape for him on his tired horse.

"Gimme a chanc't," he pleaded desperately. "Honest to God, I 'll clear out of the country for good. I 'll quit belling around and live decent. I 'll—"

"You 'll go into the pit."

Meldrum knew as he looked into that white, set face that he had come to his day of judgment. But he mumbled a last appeal.

​"I'm an old man, Mr. Beaudry. I ain't got many years—"

"Have you made your choice?" cut in Roy coldly.

"I'd do anything you say—go anywhere—give my Bible oath never to come back."

"Perhaps I'd better call Rutherford."

The bad man made a trembling clutch toward him. "Don't you, Mr. Beaudry. I 'll—I 'll go into the pit," he sobbed.

"Get in, then."

"I know you would n't leave me there to starve. That would be an awful thing to do," the killer begged.

"You 're finding that out late. It did n't worry you when Dave Dingwell was being starved."

"I had n't a thing to do with that—not a thing, Mr. Beaudry. Hal Rutherford, he give the order and it was up to me to go through. Honest, that was the way of it."

"And you could starve a girl who needed your help. That was all right, of course."

"Mr. Beaudry, I—I was only learning her a lesson—just kinder playing, y' understand. Why, I 've knowed Miss Beulah ever since she was a little bit of a trick. I would n't ​do her a meanness. It ain't reasonable, now, is it?"

The man fawned on Roy. His hands were shaking with fear. If it would have done any good, he would have fallen on his knees and wept. The sight of him made Roy sick. Was this the way he looked when the yellow streak was showing?

"Jump into that pit," he ordered in disgust. "That is, unless you'd rather I would call Rutherford."

Meldrum shambled to the edge, sat down, turned, and slid into the prospect hole.

"I know it's only yore little joke, Mr. Beaudry," he whined. "Mebbe I ain't jest been neighborly with you-all, but what I say is let bygones be bygones. I'm right sorry. I 'll go down with you to Battle Butte and tell the boys I done wrong."

"No, you 'll stay here."

Beaudry turned away. The muffled scream of the bad man followed him as far as the aspens.

Chapter XXV
Two and a Camp-Fire

ROY worked his way through the aspens and returned to the place where he had left Beulah. She was still sleeping soundly and did not stir at his approach. Quietly he built a fire and heated water for coffee. From his saddlebags he took sandwiches wrapped in a newspaper. Beside the girl he put his canteen, a pocket comb, a piece of soap, and the bandanna he wore around his neck. Then, reluctantly, he awakened her.

"Supper will be served in just five minutes," he announced with a smile.

She glanced at the scant toilet facilities and nodded her head decisively. "Thank you, kind sir. I 'll be on hand."

The young woman rose, glanced in the direction of the aspens, gathered up the supplies, and fled to the grove. The eyes of Beaudry followed her flight. The hour of sleep had been enough to restore her resilience. She moved with the strong lightness that always reminded him of wild woodland creatures.

​In spite of her promise Beulah was away beyond the time limit. Beaudry became a little uneasy. It was not possible, of course, that Meldrum could have escaped from the pit. And yet—

He called to her. "Is every little thing all right, neighbor?"

"All right," she answered.

A moment later she emerged from the aspens and came toward the camp. She was panting a little, as if she had been running.

"Quite a hill," he commented.

She gave him a quick glance. There was in it shy curiosity, but her dark eyes held, too, an emotion more profound.

"Yes," she said. "It makes one breathe fast."

Miss Rutherford had improved her time. The disorderly locks had been hairpinned into place. From her face all traces of the dried tears were washed. Pit clay no longer stained the riding-skirt.

Sandwiches and coffee made their meal, but neither of them had ever more enjoyed eating. Beulah was still ravenously hungry, though she restrained her appetite decorously.

"I forgot to tell you that I am lost," he ex​plained. "Unless you can guide me out of this labyrinth of hills, we 'll starve to death."

"I can take you straight to the park."

"But we 're not going to the park. Everybody is out looking for you. We are to follow Del Oro down to the flats. The trouble is that I 've lost Del Oro," he grinned.

"It is just over the hill."

After refreshments he brought up his pinto horse and helped her to the saddle. She achieved the mount very respectably. With a confidential little laugh she took him into the secret of her success.

"I 've been practicing with dad. He has to help me up every time I go riding."

They crossed to Del Oro in the dusk and followed the trail by the creek in the moonlight. In the starlight night her dusky beauty set his pulses throbbing. The sweet look of her dark-lashed eyes stirred strange chaos in him. They talked little, for she, too, felt a delicious emotion singing in the currents of her blood. When their shy eyes met, it was with a queer little thrill as if they had kissed each other.

It was late when they reached the flats. There was no sign of Charlton's party.

"The flats run for miles each way. We might ​wander all night and not find them," Beulah mentioned.

"Then we 'll camp right here and look for them in the morning," decided Roy promptly.

Together they built a camp-fire. Roy returned from picketing the horse to find her sitting on a blanket in the dancing light of the flickering flames. Her happy, flushed face was like the promise of a summer day at dawn.

In that immensity of space, with night's million candles far above them and the great hills at their backs, the walls that were between them seemed to vanish.

Their talk was intimate and natural. It had the note of comradeship, took for granted sympathy and understanding.

He showed her the picture of his mother. By the fire glow she studied it intently. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

"She's so lovely and so sweet—and she had to go away and leave her little baby when she was so young. I don't wonder you worship her. I would, too."

Roy did not try to thank her in words. He choked up in his throat and nodded.

"You can see how fine and dainty she was," the girl went on. "I'd rather be like that than ​anything else in the world—and, of course, I never can be."

"I don't know what you mean," he protested warmly. "You 're as fine as they grow."

She smiled, a little wistfully. "Nice of you to say so, but I know better. I'm not a lady. I'm just a harum-scarum, tempery girl that grew up in the hills. If I did n't know it, that would n't matter. But I do know it, and so like a little idiot I pity myself because I'm not like nice girls."

"Thank Heaven, you 're not!" he cried. "I 've never met a girl fit to hold a candle to you. Why, you 're the freest, bravest, sweetest thing that ever lived."

The hot blood burned slowly into her cheek under its dusky coloring. His words were music to her, and yet they did not satisfy.

"You 're wrapping it up nicely, but we both know that I'm a vixen when I get angry," she said quietly. "We used to have an old Indian woman work for us. When I was just a wee bit of a thing she called me Little Cactus Tongue."

"That's nothing. The boys were probably always teasing you and you defended yourself. In a way the life you have led has made you ​hard. But it is just a surface hardness nature has provided as a protection to you."

"Since it is there, I don't see that it helps much to decide why it is a part of me," she returned with a wan little smile.

"But it does," he insisted. "It matters a lot. The point is that it is n't you at all. Some day you 'll slough it the way a butterfly does its shell."

"When?" she wanted to know incredulously.

He did not look at her while he blurted out his answer. "When you are happily married to a man you love who loves you."

"Oh! I'm afraid that will be never." She tried to say it lightly, but her face glowed from the heat of an inward fire.

"There's a deep truth in the story of the princess who slept the years away until the prince came along and touched her lips with his. Don't you think lots of people are hampered by their environment? All they need is escape." He suggested this with a shy diffidence.

"Oh, we all make that excuse for ourselves," she answered with a touch of impatient scorn. "I'm all the time doing it. I say if things were different I would be a nice, sweet-tempered, gentle girl and not fly out like that Katherine in ​Shakespeare's play. But I know all the time it is n't true. We have to conquer ourselves. There is no city of refuge from our own temperaments."

He felt sure there was a way out from her fretted life for this deep-breasted, supple daughter of the hills if she could only find it. She had breathed an atmosphere that made for suspicion and harshness. All her years she had been forced to fight to save herself from shame. But Roy, as he looked at her, imaged another picture of Beulah Rutherford. Little children clung to her knees and called her "Mother." She bent over them tenderly, her face irradiated with love. A man whose features would not come clear strode toward her and the eyes she lifted to his were pools of light.

Beaudry drew a deep breath and looked away from her into the fire. "I wish time would solve my problem as surely as it will yours," he said.

She looked at him eagerly, lips parted, but she would not in words invite his confession.

The young man shaded his eyes with his hand as if to screen them from the fire, but she noticed that the back of his hand hid them from her, too. He found a difficulty in beginning. When at last he spoke, his voice was rough with feeling.

​"Of course, you 'll despise me—you of all people. How could you help it?"

Her body leaned toward him ever so slightly. Love lit her face like a soft light.

"Shall I? How do you know?"

"It cuts so deep—goes to the bottom of things. If a fellow is wild or even bad, he may redeem himself. But you can't make a man out of a yellow cur. The stuff is n't there." The words came out jerkily as if with some physical difficulty.

"If you mean about coming up to the park, I know about that," she said gently. "Mr. Dingwell told father. I think it was splendid of you."

"No, that is n't it. I knew I was right in coming and that some day you would understand." He dropped the hand from his face and looked straight at her. "Dave did n't tell your father that I had to be flogged into going, did he? He did n't tell him that I tried to dodge out of it with excuses."

"Of course, you were n't anxious to throw up your own affairs and run into danger for a man you had never met. Why should you be wild for the chance. But you went."

"Oh, I went. I had to go. Ryan put it up to ​me so that there was no escape," was his dogged, almost defiant, answer.

"I know better," the girl corrected quickly. "You put it up to yourself. You 're that way."

"Am I?" He flashed a questioning look at her. "Then, since you know that, perhaps you know, too, what—what I'm trying to tell you."

"Perhaps I do," she whispered softly to the fire.

There was panic in his eyes. "—That … that I—"

"—That you are sensitive and have a good deal of imagination," the girl concluded gently.

"No, I 'll not feed my vanity with pleasant lies to-night." He gave a little gesture of self-scorn as he rose to throw some dry sticks on the fire. "What I mean and what you mean is that—that I'm an arrant coward." Roy gulped the last words out as if they burned his throat.

"I don't mean that at all," she flamed. "How can you say such a thing about yourself when everybody knows that you 're the bravest man in Washington County?"

"No—no. I'm a born trembler." From where he stood beyond the fire he looked across at her with dumb anguish in his eyes. "You say ​yourself you 've noticed it. Probably everybody that knows me has."

"I did n't say that." Her dark eyes challenged his very steadily. "What I said was that you have too much imagination to rush into danger recklessly. You picture it all out vividly beforehand and it worries you. Is n't that the way of it?"

He nodded, ashamed.

"But when the time comes, nobody could be braver than you," she went on. "You 've been tried out a dozen times in the last three months. You have always made good."

"Made good! If you only knew!" he answered bitterly.

"Knew what? I saw you down at Hart's when Dan Meldrum ordered you to kneel and beg. But you gamed it out, though you knew he meant to kill you."

He flushed beneath the tan. "I was too paralyzed to move. That's the simple truth."

"Were you too paralyzed to move down at the arcade of the Silver Dollar?" she flashed at him.

"It was the drink in me. I was n't used to it and it went to my head."

"Had you been drinking that time at the ​depot?" she asked with a touch of friendly irony.

"That was n't courage. If it would have saved me, I would have run like a rabbit. But there was no chance. The only hope I had was to throw a fear into him. But all the time I was sick with terror."

She rose and walked round the camp-fire to him. Her eyes were shining with a warm light of admiration. Both hands went out to him impulsively.

"My friend, that is the only kind of courage really worth having. That kind you earn. It is yours because it is born of the spirit. You have fought for it against the weakness of the flesh and the timidity of your own soul. Some men are born without sense or imagination. They don't know enough to be afraid. But the man who tramples down a great fear wins his courage by earning it." She laughed a little, to make light of her own enthusiasm. "Oh, I know I'm preaching like a little prig. But it's the truth, just the same."

At the touch of her fingers his pulses throbbed. But once more he tried to make her understand.

"No, I 've had luck all the way through. Do ​you remember that night at the cabin—before we went up the cañon?"

"Yes."

"Some one shot at me as I ran into the cabin. I was so frightened that I piled all the furniture against the door and hid in the cellar. It was always that way with me. I used to jump if anybody rode up unexpectedly at the ranch. Every little thing set my nerves fluttering."

"But it is n't so now."

"No, not so much."

"That's what I'm telling you," she triumphed. "You came out here from a soft life in town. But you 've grown tough because you set your teeth to go through no matter what the cost. I wish I could show you how much I … admire you. Dad feels that way, too. So does Ned."

"But I don't deserve it. That's what humiliates me."

"Don't you?" She poured out her passionate protest. "Do you think I don't know what happened back there at the prospect hole? Do you think I don't know that you put Dan Meldrum down in the pit—and him with a gun in his hand? Was it a coward that did that?"

​

With a gesture wholly savage and feminine her firm arms crept about his neck and fastened there

​"So you knew that all the time," he cried.

"I heard him calling you—and I went close. Yes, I knew it. But you would never have told me because it might seem like bragging."

"It was easy enough. I was n't thinking of myself, but of you. He saw I meant business and he wilted."

"You were thinking about me—and you forgot to be afraid," the girl exulted.

"Yes, that was it." A wave of happiness broke over his heart as the sunlight does across a valley at dawn. "I'm always thinking of you. Day and night you fill my thoughts, hillgirl. When I'm riding the range—whatever I do—you 're with me all the time."

"Yes."

Her lips were slightly parted, eyes eager and hungry. The heart of the girl drank in his words as the thirsty roots of a rosebush do water. She took a long deep breath and began to tremble.

"I think of you as the daughter of the sun and the wind. Some day you will be the mother of heroes, the wife of a man—"

"Yes," she prompted again, and the face lifted to his was flushed with innocent passion.

The shy invitation of her dark-lashed eyes ​was not to be denied. He flung away discretion and snatched her into his arms. An inarticulate little sound welled up from her throat, and with a gesture wholly savage and feminine her firm arms crept about his neck and fastened there.

Chapter XXVI
The Sins of the Fathers

THEY spoke at first only in that lovers' Esperanto which is made up of fond kisses and low murmurs and soft caresses. From these Beulah was the first to emerge.

"Would you marry a girl off the range?" she whispered. "Would you dare take her home to your people?"

"I have n't any people. There are none of them left but me."

"To your friends, then?"

"My friends will be proud as punch. They 'll wonder how I ever hypnotized you into caring for me."

"But I'm only a hillgirl," she protested. "Are you sure you won't be ashamed of me, dear?"

"Certain sure. I'm a very sensible chap at bottom, and I know when I have the best there is."

"Ah, you think that now because—"

"Because of my golden luck in winning the most wonderful girl I ever met." In the fling of ​the fire glow he made a discovery and kissed it. "I did n't know before that you had dimples."

"There are lots of things you don't know about me. Some of them you won't like. But if you love me, perhaps you 'll forgive them, and then—because I love you—maybe I 'll grow out of them. I feel to-night as if anything were possible. The most wonderful thing that ever happened to me has come into my life."

"My heart is saying that, too, sweetheart."

"I love to hear you say that I'm—nice," she confided. "Because, you know, lots of people don't think so. The best people in Battle Butte won't have anything to do with me. I'm one of the Rutherford gang."

The light was full on his face, so that she saw the dawning horror in his eyes.

"What is it? What are you thinking?" she cried.

He gave a little groan and his hands fell slackly from her. "I'd forgotten." The words came in a whisper, as if he spoke to himself rather than to her.

"Forgotten what?" she echoed; and like a flash added: "That I'm a Rutherford. Is that what you mean?"

​"That you are the daughter of Hal Rutherford and that I'm the son of John Beaudry."

"You mean that you would be ashamed to marry a Rutherford," she said, her face white in the fire glow.

"No." He brushed her challenge aside and went straight to what was in his mind. "I'm thinking of what happened seventeen years ago," he answered miserably.

"What did happen that could come between you and me to-night?"

"Have you forgotten, too?" He turned to the fire with a deep breath that was half a sob.

"What is it? Tell me," she demanded.

"Your father killed mine at Battle Butte."

A shiver ran through her lithe, straight body. "No … No! Say it is n't true, Roy."

"It's true. I was there … Did n't they ever tell you about it?"

"I 've heard about the fight when Sheriff Beaudry was killed. Jess Tighe had his spine injured in it. But I never knew that dad … You 're sure of it?" she flung at him.

"Yes. He led the attackers. I suppose he thought of it as a feud. My father had killed one of his people in a gun fight."

​She, too, looked into the fire. It was a long time before she spoke, and then in a small, lifeless voice. "I suppose you … hate me."

"Hate you!" His voice shook with agitation. "That would make everything easy. But—there is no other woman in the world for me but you."

Almost savagely she turned toward him. "Do you mean that?"

"I never mean anything so much."

"Then what does it matter about our fathers? We have our own lives to live. If we 've found happiness we've a right to it. What happened seventeen years ago can't touch us—not unless we let it."

White-lipped, drear-eyed, Roy faced her hopelessly. "I never thought of it before, but it is true what the Bible says about the sins of the fathers. How can I shake hands in friendship with the man who killed mine? Would it be loyal or decent to go into his family and make him my father by marrying his daughter?"

Beulah stood close to him, her eyes burning into his. She was ready to fight for her love to a finish. "Do you think I'm going to give you up now … now … just when we 've found out how much we care … because of any reason ​under heaven outside ourselves? By God, no! That's a solemn oath, Roy Beaudry. I 'll not let you go."

He did not argue with her. Instead, he began to tell her of his father and his mother. As well as he could remember it he related to her the story of that last ride he had taken with John Beaudry. The girl found herself visioning the pathetic tenderness of the father singing the "li'l'-ole-hawss" song under the stars of their night camp. There flashed to her a picture of him making his stand in the stable against the flood of enemies pouring toward him.

When Roy had finished, she spoke softly. "I'm glad you told me. I know now the kind of man your father was. He loved you more than his own life. He was brave and generous and kind. Do you think he would have nursed a grudge for seventeen years? Do you think he would have asked you to give up your happiness to carry on a feud that ought never to have been?"

"No, but—"

"You are going to marry me, not Hal Rutherford. He is a good man now, however wild he may have been once. But you need n't believe that just because I say so. Wait and see. Be to ​him just as much or as little as you like. He 'll understand, and so shall I. My people are proud. They won't ask more of you than you care to give. All they 'll ask is that you love me—and that's all I ask, dear."

"All you ask now, but later you will be unhappy because there is a gulf between your father and me. You will try to hide it, but I 'll know."

"I 'll have to take my chance of that," she told him. "I don't suppose that life even with the man you love is all happiness. But it is what I want. It's what I'm not going to let your scruples rob me of."

She spoke with a low-voiced, passionate intensity. The hillgirl was fighting to hold her lover as a creature of the woods does to protect its young. So long as she was sure that he loved her, nothing on earth should come between them. For the moment she was absorbed by the primitive idea that he belonged to her and she to him. All the vital young strength in her rose to repel separation.

Roy, yearning to take into his arms this dusky, brown-cheeked sweetheart of his, became aware that he did not want her to let his arguments persuade her. The fierce, tender ​egoism of her love filled him with exultant pride.

He snatched her to him and held her tight while his lips found her hot cheeks, her eager eyes, her more than willing mouth.

Chapter XXVII
The Quicksands

BEULAH was too perfect of body, too sound of health, not to revel in such a dawn as swept across the flats next morning. The sun caressed her throat, her bare head, the uplifted face. As the tender light of daybreak was in the hills, so there was a lilt in her heart that found expression in her voice, her buoyant footsteps, and the shine of her eyes. She had slept soundly in Beaudry's blankets while he had lain down in his slicker on the other side of the fire. Already she was quite herself again. The hours of agony in the pit were obliterated. Life was a wholly joyous and beautiful adventure.

She turned back to the camp where Roy was making coffee.

"Am I not to do any of the work?"

At the sound of that deep, sweet voice with its hint of a drawl the young man looked up and smiled. "Not a bit. All you have to do is to drink my coffee and say I'm the best cook you know."

​After they had drunk the coffee and finished the sandwiches, Roy saddled.

"They 're probably over to the left. Don't you think so?" Beaudry suggested.

"Yes."

There drifted to them the sound of two shots fired in rapid succession.

Roy fired twice in answer. They moved in the direction of the shooting. Again the breeze brought revolver shots. This time there were three of them.

Beaudry bad an odd feeling that this was a call for help from somebody in difficulties. He quickened their pace. The nature of the ground, a good deal of which was deep sand, made fast travel impossible.

"Look!" Beulah pointed forward and to the right.

At the same moment there came a shout. "Help! I'm in the quicksands."

They made out the figure of a man buried to his waist in the dry wash of a creek. A horse stood on the farther bank of the wash. Roy deflected toward the man, Beulah at his heels.

"He must be caught in Dead Man's Sink," the girl explained. "I 've never seen it, but I know it is somewhere near here. All my life I 've ​heard of it. Two Norwegians were caught here five years ago. Before help reached them, they were lost."

"Get me a rope—quick," the man in the sand called.

"Why, it's Brad," cried Beulah.

"Yep. Saw the smoke of yore fire and got caught trying to reach you. Can't make it alone. Thought I sure was a goner. You 'll have to hurry."

Already Roy was taking the riata from its place below the saddle-horn. From the edge of the wash he made a cast toward the man in the quicksands. The loop fell short.

"You 'll have to get into the bed of the stream," suggested Beulah.

Beaudry moved across the sand a few steps and tried again. The distance was still too great.

Already he was beginning to bog down. The soles of his shoes disappeared in the treacherous sand. When he moved it seemed to him that some monster was sucking at him from below. As he dragged his feet from the sand the sunken tracks filled with mud. He felt the quiver of the river-bed trembling at his weight.

Roy turned to Beulah, the old familiar cold ​chill traveling up his spine to the roots of his hair. "It won't bear me up. I'm going down," he quavered.

"Let me go, then. I'm lighter," she said eagerly.

She made the proposal in all good faith, with no thought of reflecting on his courage, but it stung her lover like a slap in the face.

"Hurry with that rope!" Charlton sang across. "I'm sinking fast."

"Is there any way for Miss Rutherford to get over to your horse?" asked Roy quickly.

"She can cross the wash two hundred yards below here. It's perfectly safe."

As Roy plunged forward, he gave Beulah orders without turning his head. "You hear, dear. Run down and get across. But go over very carefully. If you come to a bad place, go back at once. When you get over tie Charlton's rope to his saddle-horn and throw him the looped end. The horse will drag him out."

The young woman was off on the run before he had half finished.

Once more Roy coiled and threw the rope. Charlton caught the loop, slipped it over his head, and tightened it under his arms.

"All right. Pull!" he ordered.

​Beaudry had no footing to brace himself. Already he was ankle-deep in the quicksand. It flashed across his mind that he could not fight his own way out without abandoning Charlton. For one panicky moment he was mad to get back to solid ground himself. The next he was tugging with all the strength of his arms at the rope.

"Keep on the job!" encouraged Charlton. "You 're pulling my body over a little so that the weight is on new sand. If Beulah gets here in time, I 'll make it."

Roy pulled till his muscles ached. His own feet were sliding slowly from under him. The water-bubbles that oozed out of the sand were now almost at his high boot-tops. It was too late to think of retreat. He must go through whether he wanted to or not.

He cast one look down the dry river-bed. Beulah was just picking her way across. She might get over in time to save Charlton, but before they made it back across to him, he would be lost.

He wanted to scream aloud to her his urgent need, to beg her, for Heaven's sake, to hurry. The futility of it he knew. She was already running with the knowledge to wing her feet that a ​man's life hung in the balance. Besides, Charlton was not shrieking his fears out. He was calling cheerful words of hope across the quaking morass of sand that separated them. There was no use in making a gibbering idiot of one's self. Beaudry clenched his jaws tight on the cries that rose like a thermometer of terror in his throat.

With every ounce of strength that was in him he fought, meanwhile, for the life of the man at the other end of the rope. Before Beulah reached Charlton, Roy was in deeper than his knees. He shut his eyes and pulled like a machine. It seemed an eternity before Charlton called to him to let go the rope.

A new phase of his danger seared like a flame across the brain of Beaudry. He had dragged himself from a perpendicular position. As soon as he let loose of the rope he would begin to sink forward. This would reduce materially the time before his face would sink into the sand.

Why not hang on and let the horse drag him out, too? He had as much right to live as Charlton. Was there any law of justice that forced him to throw away the rope that was his only hope?

But he knew the tough little cowpony could ​not drag two heavy men from the quicksands at the same time. If he held tight, Charlton, too, would be sacrificed. His fingers opened.

Roy watched the struggle on the opposite side of the wash. Charlton was in almost to his arm-pits. The horse braced its feet and pulled. Beulah, astride the saddle, urged it to the task again and again. At first by imperceptible gains, then inch by inch, the man was dragged from the mire that fought with a thousand clinging tentacles for its prey.

Not till Charlton was safe on the bank did Beulah realize the peril of Beaudry. One glance across the river showed her that he was sliding face downward to a shifting grave. With an anguished little cry she released the rope from Charlton's body, flung herself to the saddle again, and dashed down the bank of the creek.

Roy lost count of time. His face was sliding down toward the sand. Soon his mouth and nostrils would be stopped. He believed that it was a question of minutes with him.

Came the swift pounding of hoofs and Beulah's clear, ringing voice.

"Hold your hands straight out, Roy."

His back was toward her, so that he did not ​see what she meant to do. But he obeyed blindly. With a wrench first one hand and then the other came free from the sand and wavered into the air heavily. A rope sang, dropped over his arms and head, tightened with a jerk around his waist.

Two monsters seemed to be trying to tear him in two. A savage wrench of pain went through him jaggedly. At short intervals this was repeated.

In spite of the suction of the muddy sand he felt its clutch giving way. It loosened a little here, a little there. His body began to move. After a long tug he came out at last with a rush. But he left his high cowpuncher's boots behind. They remained buried out of sight in the sand. He had literally been dragged out of them.

Roy felt himself pulled shoreward. From across the quicksands came Charlton's whoop of triumph. Presently Beulah was stooping over him with tender little cries of woe and joy.

He looked at her with a wan, tired smile. "I did n't think you'd make it in time." In a moment he added: "I was horribly afraid. God, it was awful!"

"Of course. Who would n't have been?" She dismissed his confession as of no importance. ​"But it's all over now. I want to hug you tight to make sure you're here, boy."

"There's no law against it," he said with feeble humor.

"No, but—" With a queer little laugh she glanced across the river toward her former lover. "I don't think I had better."

Charlton joined them a few minutes later. He went straight to Roy and offered his hand.

"The feud stuff is off, Mr. Beaudry. Beulah will tell you that I started in to make you trouble. Well, there's nothing doing in that line. I can't fight the man who saved my life at the risk of his own."

"Oh, well!" Roy blushed. "I just threw you a rope."

"You bogged down some," Charlton returned dryly. "I 've known men who would have thought several times before throwing that rope from where you did. They would have hated to lose their boots."

Beulah's eyes shone. "Oh, Brad, I'm so glad. I do want you two to be friends."

"Do you?" As he looked at her, the eyes of the young hillman softened. He guessed pretty accurately the state of her feelings. Beaudry had won and he had lost. Well, he was going to ​be a good loser this time. "What you want goes with me this time, Boots. The way you yanked me out of the sinks was painful, but thorough. I 'll be a friend to Mr. Beaudry if he is of the same opinion as you. And I 'll dance at his wedding when it comes off."

She cried out at that, but Charlton noticed that she made no denial. Neither did Roy. He confined his remarks to the previous question, and said that he would be very glad of Charlton's friendship.

"Good enough. Then I reckon we better light out for camp with the glad news that Beulah has been found. You can tell me all about it on the way," the hillman suggested.

Beulah dropped from her horse ten minutes later into the arms of Ned Rutherford. Quite unexpectedly to himself, that young man found himself filled with emotion. He caught his sister in his arms and held her as if he never intended to let the sobbing girl go. His own voice was not at all steady.

"Boots—Boots … Honey-bug … Where you-all been?" he asked, choking up suddenly.

Chapter XXVIII
Pat Ryan Evens an Old Score

DINGWELL, the coffee-pot in one hand and a tin cup in the other, hailed his partner cheerfully. "Come over here, son, and tell me who you traded yore boots to."

"You and Brad been taking a mud bath, Mr. Beaudry?" asked one of the Lazy Double D riders.

Roy told them, with reservations, the story of the past twenty-four hours. Dave listened, an indifferent manner covering a quick interest. His young friend had done for himself a good stroke of business. There could no longer be any question of the attitude of the Rutherfords toward him, since he had been of so great service to Beulah. Charlton had renounced his enmity, the ground cut from beneath his feet. Word had reached camp only an hour before of the death of Tighe. This left of Beaudry's foes only Hart, who did not really count, and Dan Meldrum, at the present moment facing starvation in a prospect hole. On the whole, it had been a surprisingly good twenty-four hours for Roy. His part​ner saw this, though he did not know the best thing Roy had won out of it.

"Listens fine," the old-timer commented when the young man had finished.

"Can you rustle me a pair of boots from one of the boys, Dave? Size number eight. I 've got to run back up Del Oro to-day."

"Better let me go, son," Dave proposed casually.

"No. It's my job to turn the fellow loose."

"Well, see he does n't get the drop on you. I would n't trust him far as I could throw a bull by the tail."

Dingwell departed to borrow the boots and young Rutherford came over to Beaudry. Out of the corner of his eye Roy observed that Beulah was talking with the little Irish puncher, Pat Ryan.

Rutherford plunged awkwardly into his thanks. His sister had made only a partial confidant of him, but he knew that she was under obligations to Beaudry for the rescue from Meldrum. The girl had not dared tell her brother that the outlaw was still within his reach. She knew how impulsively his anger would move to swift action.

"We Rutherfords ain't liable to forget this, ​Mr. Beaudry. Dad has been 'most crazy since Boots disappeared. He 'll sure want to thank you himself soon as he gets a chance," blurted Ned.

"I happened to be the lucky one to find her; that's all," Roy depreciated.

"Sure. I understand. But you did find her. That's the point. Dad won't rest easy till he's seen you. I'm going to take sis right home with me. Can't you come along?"

Roy wished he could, but it happened that he had other fish to fry. He shook his head reluctantly.

Dingwell returned with a pair of high-heeled cowpuncher's boots. "Try these on, son. They belong to Dusty. The lazy hobo was n't up yet. If they fit you, he 'll ride back to the ranch in his socks."

After stamping about in the boots to test them, Roy decided that they would do. "They fit like a coat of paint," he said.

"Say, son, I'm going to hit the trail with you on that little jaunt you mentioned," his partner announced definitely.

Roy was glad. He had of late been fed to repletion with adventure. He did not want any more, and with Dingwell along he was not likely ​to meet it. Already he had observed that adventures generally do not come to the adventurous, but to the ignorant and the incompetent. Dave moved with a smiling confidence along rough trails that would have worried his inexperienced partner. To the old-timer these difficulties were not dangers at all, because he knew how to meet them easily.

They rode up Del Oro by the same route Roy and Beulah had followed the previous night. Before noon they were close to the prospect hole where Roy had left the rustler. The sound of voices brought them up in their tracks.

They listened. A whine was in one voice; in the other was crisp command.

"Looks like some one done beat us to it," drawled Dingwell. "We 'll move on and see what's doing."

They topped the brow of a hill.

A bow-legged little man with his back to them was facing Dan Meldrum.

"I'm going along with yez as far as the border. You 'll keep moving lively till ye hit the hacienda of old Porf. Diaz. And you 'll stay there. Mind that now, Dan. Don't—"

The ex-convict broke in with the howl of a ​trapped wolf. "You 've lied to me. You brought yore friends to kill me."

The six-gun of the bad man blazed once—twice. In answer the revolver of the bandy-legged puncher barked out, fired from the hip. Meldrum staggered, stumbled, pitched forward into the pit. The man who had killed him walked slowly forward to the edge and looked down. He stood poised for another shot if one should prove necessary.

Dave joined him.

"He's dead as a stuck shote, Pat," the cattleman said gravely.

Ryan nodded. "You saw he fired first, Dave."

"Yes." After a moment he added: "You 've saved the hangman a job, Pat. I don't know anybody Washington County could spare better. There 'll be no complaint, I reckon."

The little Irishman shook his head. "That would go fine if you had shot him, Dave, or if Mr. Beaudry here had. But with me it's different. I've been sivinteen years living down a reputation as a hellion. This ain't going to do me any good. Folks will say it was a case of one bad man wiping out another. They 'll say I 've gone back to being a gunman. I 'll be in bad sure as taxes."

​Dingwell looked at him, an idea dawning in his mind. Why not keep from the public the name of the man who had shot Meldrum? The position of the wound and the revolver clenched in the dead man's hand would show he had come to his end in fair fight. The three of them might sign a statement to the effect that one of them had killed the fellow in open battle. The doubt as to which one would stimulate general interest. No doubt the gossips would settle on Beaudry as the one who had done it. This would still further enhance his reputation as a good man with whom not to pick trouble.

"Suits me if it does Roy," the cattleman said, speaking his thoughts aloud. "How about it, son? Pat is right. This will hurt him, but it would n't hurt you or me a bit. Say the word and all three of us will refuse to tell which one shot Meldrum."

"I'm willing," Roy agreed. "And I 've been looking up ancient history, Mr. Ryan. I don't think you were as bad as you painted yourself to me once. I'm ready to shake hands with you whenever you like."

The little Irishman flushed. He shook hands with shining eyes.

"That's why I was tickled when Miss Beulah ​asked me to come up and turn loose that coyote. It's a God's truth that I hoped he'd fight. I wanted to do you a good bit of wolf-killing if I could. And I've done it … and I'm not sorry. He had it coming if iver a man had."

"Did you say that Beulah Rutherford sent you up here?" asked Roy.

"She asked me to come. Yis."

"Why?"

"I can only guess her reasons. She did n't want you to come and she could n't ask Ned for fear he would gun the fellow. So she just picked on a red-headed runt of an Irishman."

"While we 're so close, let's ride across to Huerfano Park," suggested Dave. "I have n't been there in twenty years."

That suited Roy exactly. As they rode across the hills his mind was full of Beulah. She had sent Ryan up so that he could get Meldrum away before her lover arrived. Was it because she was afraid Roy might show the white feather? Or was it because she feared for his safety? He wished he knew.

Chapter XXIX
A New Leaf

HAL RUTHERFORD himself met the three riders as they drew up at the horse ranch. He asked no verbal questions, but his eyes ranged curiously from one to another.

"’Light, gentlemen. I been wanting to see you especially, Mr. Beaudry," he said.

"I reckon you know where we 've been, Hal," answered Dave after he had dismounted.

"I reckon."

"We got a little news for public circulation. You can pass the word among the boys. Dan Meldrum was shot three hours ago beside the pit where Miss Beulah was imprisoned. His body is in the prospect hole now. You might send some lads with spades to bury him."

"One of you shot him."

"You done guessed it, Hal. One of us helped him out of that pit intending to see he hit the dust to Mexico. Dan was loaded to the guards with suspicions. He chose to make it a gun-play. Fired twice. The one of us that took him out of the pit fired back and dropped him first ​crack. All of us saw the affair. It happened just as I 've told you."

"But which of you—?"

"That's the only point we can't remember. It was one of us, but we 've forgotten which one."

"Suits me if it does you. I 'll thank all three of you, then." Rutherford cleared his throat and plunged on. "Boys, to-day kinder makes an epoch in Huerfano Park. Jess Tighe died yesterday and Dan Meldrum to-day. They were both bad citizens. There were others of us that were bad citizens, too. Well, it's right-about face for us. We travel broad trails from now on. Right now the park starts in to make a new record for itself."

Dave offered his hand, and with it went the warm smile that made him the most popular man in Washington County. "Listens fine, Hal. I sure am glad to hear you say so."

"I niver had any kick against the Rutherfords. They were open and aboveboard, anyhow, in all their diviltry," contributed Ryan to the pact of peace.

Nobody looked at Roy, but he felt the weight of their thoughts. All four of them bore in mind the death of John Beaudry. His son spoke quietly.

​"Mr. Rutherford, I 've been thinking of my father a good deal these last few days. I want to do as he would have me do about this thing. I'm not going to chop my words. He gave his life to bring law and order into this country, The men who killed him were guilty of murder. That's an ugly word, but it's the true one."

The grim face of the big hillman did not twitch. "I 'll take the word from you. Go on."

"But I 've been thinking more and more that he would want me to forget that. Tighe and Meldrum are gone. Sheriff Beaudry worked for the good of the community. That is all he asked. It is for the best interest of Washington County that we bury the past. If you say so, I 'll shake hands on that and we 'll all face to the future. Just as you say."

Dingwell grinned. "Hooray! Big Chief Dave will now make oration. You 've got the right idea, son. I knew Jack Beaudry. There was n't an atom of revenge in his game body. His advice would have been to shake hands. That's mine, too."

The hillman and Roy followed it.

Upon the porch a young woman appeared.

"I 've written those letters for you, dad," she called.

​Roy deserted the peace conference at once and joined her.

"Oh! I did n't know it was you," she cried. "I'm so glad you came this way. Was it … all right?"

"Right as the wheat. Why did you send Pat up Del Oro?"

She looked at him with eyes incredibly kind and shy. "Because I … did n't want to run any chance of losing my new beau."

"Are you sure that was your only reason?"

"Certain sure. I did n't trust Meldrum, and … I thought you had taken chances enough with him. So I gave Mr. Ryan an opportunity."

"He took it," her lover answered gravely.

She glanced at him quickly. "You mean—?"

"Never mind what I mean now. We 've more important things to talk about. I have n't seen you for eight hours, and thirty-three minutes."

Rutherford turned his guests over to Ned, who led the way to the stable. The ranchman joined the lovers. He put an arm around Beulah.

"Boots has done told me about you two, Mr. Beaudry. I'm eternally grateful to you for bringing back my little girl to me, and if you all feel right sure you care for each other I 've ​got nothing to say but 'God bless you.' You 're a white man. You 're decent. I believe you 'll be kind to her."

"I'm going to try to the best I know, Mr. Rutherford."

"You'd better, young man." The big rancher swallowed a lump in his throat and passed to another phase of the subject. "Boots was telling me about how it kinder stuck in yore craw to marry the daughter of Hal Rutherford, seeing as how things happened the way they did. Well, I'm going to relieve yore mind. She's the one that has got the forgiving to do, not you. She knew it all the time, too, but she did n't tell it. Beulah is the daughter of my brother Anse. I took her from the arms of her dying mother when she was a little trick that could n't crawl. She's not the daughter of the man that shot yore father. She's the daughter of the man yore father shot."

"Oh!" gasped Roy.

Beulah went to her lover arrow-swift.

"My dear … my dear! What does it matter now? Dad says my father was killed in fair fight. He had set himself against the law. It took his life. Your father did n't."

"But—"

​"Oh, his was the hand. But he was sheriff. He did only his duty. That's true, is n't it, dad?"

"I reckon."

Her strong young hands gripped tightly those of her lover. She looked proudly into his eyes with that little flare of feminine ferocity in hers.

"I won't have it any other way, Roy Beaudry. You 're the man I'm going to marry, the man who is going to be the father of my children if God gives me any. No blood stands between us—nothing but the memory of brave men who misunderstood each other and were hurt because of it. Our marriage puts an end forever to even the memory of the wrong they did each other. That is the way it is to me—and that's the way it has got to be to you, too."

Roy laughed softly, tears in his eyes. As he looked at her eager young beauty the hot life in his pulses throbbed. He snatched her to him with an ardor as savage as her own.

THE END

OF THE BEGINNING

​

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS

U . S . A

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.