The Trey o' Hearts Part 3

CHAPTER XXXV
Detail

APLATFORM, a siding, a water-tank, a Wells-Fargo office, and a telegraph and ticket office, backed by three rough frame buildings, that is Detail on the Santa Fé.

Shortly after nightfall the steel ribbons of the Santa Fé began to hum. A headlight peered suspiciously round a shoulder of the eastern range, took heart of courage to find the plain still wrapped in peace, and trudged stolidly toward Detail, the engine, whose eye it was, pulling after it a string of freight cars, both flat and box.

At Detail the train paused. Its crew alighted and engaged in animated argument. Detail gathered that the excitement was due to the unaccountable disappearance of the caboose: none seemed to have any notion as to how it could have broken loose, yet missing it conspicuously was.

In the pause that followed, while a report was telegraphed to headquarters and instructions returned to proceed without delay, one of the trainmen spied a boyish figure lurking in the open door ​of an empty box-car. Cunningly boarding this car from the opposite side, the trainman caught the skulker unawares, and booted him vaingloriously into the night.

Shortly after the freight train had gone on its way a second headlight appeared in the east, swept swiftly across the plain, stopped at Detail an instant, and then proceeded to back onto the siding.

The second bird of passage proved to be a locomotive drawing a single car—a Pullman.

As the Pullman jolted across the frogs, however, the brakeman, interposing himself between it and the tender, released the coupling.

By the time that the Pullman had come to a full stop on the siding the locomotive was swinging westward like a scared jackrabbit. Then three men appeared on the Pullman's platform and shook impotent fists in the direction taken by the fugitive engine.

At the sound of a voice calling from the interior of the par—a voice strangely sonorous of tone—the three men ran back into the car and reported, with countenances variously apologetic, to a man wrapped in a steamer-rug and a cloud of fury.

While this was taking place, the person of boyish appearance, who had been keeping aloof and inconspicuous in the background of Detail ever since that unhappy affair with the trainman, stole up to the rear of the stalled Pullman, climbed aboard, and un​ceremoniously interrupted the conference just as the invalid was polishing off a rude but honest opinion of the intellectual calibre of one of the three, named Marrophat, who figured as his right-hand man and familiar genius.

"Amen to that!" the boyish person ejaculated. "There's many a true word spoken in wrath, Mr. Marrophat. Father forgot only one thing—your masterly way with a revolver. There's something downright uncanny in the way you can hit anything but what you aim at!"

To this Mr. Marrophat found nothing to say, but there was great eloquence in his manner of performing one of the minor gestures in the repertoire of every properly barefaced scoundrel—the trick known as biting the lip.

"Judith!" exclaimed the invalid. "Where did you drop from?"

"From that freight," Judith explained carelessly, neglecting to elucidate the exact fashion of drop. "I judged you'd be along presently, and thought I'd like to learn the news. Well, what luck?"

Her father shrugged with his one movable shoulder. The others shuffled uneasily.

"None?" Judith interpreted. "You don't mean to tell me that after I had cast the caboose loose on the middle of that trestle you didn't have the nerve to go through with the business!"

​"We went through with it all right," replied Marrophat defensively, "but as usual they were too quick for us. They jumped out and dropped off the trestle before our engine hit the caboose. We smashed that to kindling wood, but they got away. It was dark and no telling which way they had run. We did our best," Marrophat continued. "We can't be blamed if something—somehow—always happens to tip the others off."

The girl swung to face him with blazing eyes. "Just what does that mean?" she demanded in a dangerous voice. But her eyes just then travelled past the person of Mr. Marrophat to the doorway of the drawing-room, and found it framing a stranger, a man of such huge bulk that his head must bow to pass beneath the lintel, while his shoulders all but touched both jambs. A heavy Colt's .45 hung level in his either hand.

"Excuse me, friends," he offered in a lazy, semi-humorous drawl. "It pains me considerable to butt in on this happy family gathering, but business is business, and I got to ask you all to please put up your hands!"

There was little to choose between the alacrity with which nine hands were elevated; but one, the right hand of the invalid, remained motionless. And this the intruder indicated with a significant jerk of one revolver.

​"You, too, mister," he advised. "I'm sorry to, judge you're sickly, but I can't afford to play no favourites! Both hands is what I meant."

"Shoot," said the invalid, "if you like. The hand is paralyzed, even fear of death cannot move it. What do you want?"

"Why," drawled the bandit, "nothing in particular, only your cash. Shell out, if you please."

"One minute," the invalid interposed. "I guarantee you shall be amply satisfied. I give you my word—the word of Seneca Trine."

The eyes of the bandit widened. "No? Is that so? Seneca Trine, the railroad king? You ought to be able to pay something handsome——"

"I'll pay you far more handsomely than you dream of if you'll do as I wish," Trine interrupted. "Do me the service I wish, and name your price, whatever it is, you shall have it! What's the life of a man worth in this neck of the woods?"

"How much you got?"

"I'll pay you ten thousand dollars for the life of the man I will name."

"Give me a thousand on account," said the other, "and a paper saying you'll pay me nineteen thousand more in exchange for one dead man, properly identified as the one you want, and your man's as good as dead this minute."

"Jimmy, find a thousand dollars for this gentle​man. Make out the paper he indicates for the balance, and I'll sign it."

"Ain't you powerful trustful, Mr. Trine? How do you know I'll do anything more'n pocket that thousand and fade delicately away."

"My daughter and this gentleman, Mr. Marrophat, will accompany you."

"Oh, that's the way of it, is it?"

"Precisely!" Trine snapped.

"All right," he agreed at length, after a surprised recognition of Judith's femininity and a deliberately admiring review of her charms, "you're on as aforesaid."

"Name?" interjected the secretary.

"Slade," said the bandit, "James Slade, commonly known as Hopi Jim. That's me."

"Then attend closely, Mr. Slade," said Trine. "The man whose life I want is named Alan Law. He is running away with my daughter Rose, accompanied by a person named Barcus disguised as a Pullman porter——"

"The three of them having recently escaped from a train wreck up yonder on the trestle?" Hopi Jim interposed.

"You've met them?" Judith demanded.

"About an hour ago," Hopi Jim replied, "a good ways down the road. They stopped and asked where they could get put up for the night. I directed ​

JUDITH FELT THE FIRST QUICKENING OF LOVE FOR THE MAN SHE HAD MEANT TO KILL.

​

JUDITH AND HER GUIDE WERE PLUNGED INTO THE ICY WATERS.

​them on to Mesa, down in the Painted Hills yonder."

Hopi Jim drifted away into the desert night, to return soon with horses and an assistant—one "Texas"—for whose utter innocence of scruples Mr. Slade unhesitatingly vouched.

 

CHAPTER XXXVI
The Painted Hills

IN THE first rush of golden day the party came quietly into the town of Mesa, riding slowly in order that the noise of their approach might not warn the fugitives, whom Hopi asserted confidently would still be sound asleep in the accommodations offered by the town's one hotel.

It was to be termed a town only in courtesy, this Mesa: a straggling street of shacks, the halfway station between the railroad and the mining-camps secreted in the fastnesses of the Painted Hills, camps now abandoned, their very names faded out of the memory of mankind.

Midway in this string of edifices the hotel stood, an unpainted wooden edifice, mainly veranda and barroom as to its lower floor. Judith watched the windows of the second floor, and she alone of the four detected the face at one of them that showed for one brief instant and then was gone. It was the face of Alan Law.

Alighting with every precaution to avoid noise, the party left its horses "hitched to the ground" and ​

SHE HELD THE "DEATH SIGN" IN HER HAND.

​

ALAN AND ROSE TAKE A DESPERATE CHANCE TO ESCAPE.

​entered the hotel. Two sentences exchanged between Hopi Jim and a blear-eyed fellow behind the bar sealed their confidence with conviction: the three fugitives were guests of the house, occupying two of the three rooms that composed its upper story.

In the rush that followed up the narrow stairway Judith led with such spirit that not even Marrophat suspected her revolver was poised solely with intent to shoot his own from his hand the instant he levelled it at a human target.

Closed and locked doors confronted them, and their summons educed no response; while the first door, when broken in, discovered nothing more satisfactory than an unoccupied room, its empty bed bearing the imprint of a woman's body. From the one window, looking down the side of the house, Texas announced that the woman had not escaped by jumping out.

So it seemed that the three must have had warning of their arrival, after all, and presumably were now herded together in the adjoining room, which looked out over the veranda roof, waiting in fear and trembling for the assault that soon came.

But it met with more stubborn resistance than had been anticipated. The door had been barricaded from within. Four minutes and the united efforts of four men (including the bleary loafer of the barroom) were required to overcome its inert resistance. Even ​when it was down, the room was found to be as empty as the first. But the fingers of two hands gripping the edge of the veranda roof showed the way the fugitives had flown, and these vanished instantly as the room was invaded.

Followed a swift rush of hoofs down the dusty street and a chorus of blasphemy in the hotel hallway, for Judith had headed the rush for the staircase and contrived to block it for a full half-minute by pretending to stumble and twist her ankle. In spite of that alleged injury, she never limped, and wasn't a yard behind the first who broke from the hotel, nor yet appreciably behind in vaulting to saddle.

Well up the road a cloud of dust half obscured the shapes of three who rode for their lives. The pursuit was off in a twinkling and well bunched, Marrophat's mount leading by a nose, Judith second, Hopi Jim and Texas but little in the rear. Then that happened which brought Judith's heart into her mouth. The foremost of the horses ridden by the three in flight stumbled and fell in such wise that its rider must have been crushed but for miraculous luck and agility.

Just then a puff of wind whipped the curtain of dust aside and showed the figure of a woman standing in the roadway a few feet distant from the fallen horse—Rose, who had somehow managed to fall upon her feet, waiting with a bright face of confidence ​for Alan to overtake her. And Alan, who had been riding well to the rear, was abreast her in a flash.

Leaning out as he swept up, without drawing rein, the man wrapped an arm round the woman and lifted her lightly from the ground, setting her in the saddle before him in the flutter of a heartbeat. As if the added weight were but a stimulant, his horse let out its stride.

At this, Judith heard an oath muttered beside her and saw Marrophat jerking a revolver from its holster. The weapon swept up and to a level, but as the hammer fell Judith's horse cannoned heavily against the other, deflecting the bullet hopelessly. The shock of collision was so great that Marrophat kept his seat with difficulty. He turned toward Judith a face livid with rage.

Simultaneously, Judith saw Alan lean back over his horse's rump and open fire. An instant later his companion, Barcus, imitated his example.

In immediate consequence, Texas dropped reins, slumped forward over the pommel, then, losing the stirrups, pitched headlong to the ground, while Hopi Jim's horse stopped short, precipitating his rider over his head, and dropped dead.

CHAPTER XXXVII
The Up Trail

IT WAS simply an accident," was all the satisfaction Judith would afford Marrophat in return for his insistent expostulations.

But for her, he asserted, the chase would have ended with the pressure of his finger on the trigger.

"I had him covered, I tell you!" he raved. "If you'd minded your horse, we'd be on our way back to your father now with the body of Alan Law!"

"You flatter yourself," she retorted. "What was it we were saying, only last night, about the quality of your marksmanship?"

Mumbling his indignation, the man swung his horse round and trotted off after Hopi Jim, leaving the girl to smile openly at his discomfiture.

But she smiled prematurely, for in the brief interval that elapsed before his return with Hopi Jim, Marrophat contrived to persuade the bandit that Judith had been responsible for their ill luck. As a consequence, the only information as to their purpose that she was able to extract from either man, when the pursuing party turned aside from the main trail, ​some distance from Mesa, was that Hopi Jim knew a short cut through the range, via what he termed the upper trail, by which they hoped to be able to head the fugitives off before they could gain the desert on the far side of the hills.

And the trail proved rough, narrow, and tortuous, winding along the ridge-pole of an unholy wilderness. Only at long intervals did they draw rein, to permit Hopi Jim to make reconnaissance of the lower trail that threaded the valley on the far side of the ridge-pole.

Toward noon he returned in haste from the last of these surveys, and threw himself upon his horse with the advice:

"We've headed 'em! Can make it now if we ride like all get-out!"

For half an hour more they pushed on at their best speed, and at length drew rein at a point where the trail crossed the ridge and widened out upon a long, broad ledge that overhung the valley of the lower trail, with a clear drop to the latter from the brink of a good two hundred feet.

One hasty look into the valley evoked a grunt of satisfaction from Hopi Jim.

"Just in time," he asseverated. "There they come! Ten minutes more …"

His smile answered Marrophat's with unspeakably cruel significance.

​"Texas will sleep better to-night when he knows how I've squared the deal for him!" the bandit declared.

"What are you going to do?" Judith demanded.

A gesture drew her attention to a huge boulder poised on the very lip of the chasm.

"We're going to tip that over on your friends, Miss Judith," Marrophat replied. "Simple, neat, efficient—eh? What more can you ask?"

She answered only with an irrepressible gesture of horror. Marrophat's laugh followed her as she turned away.

For some moments she strained her vision vainly. Then she made out the faintly marked line of the lower trail and caught a glimpse of three figures, mounted, toiling painfully toward the point where death awaited them.

Hastily she glanced over-shoulder. Hopi Jim and Marrophat were straining themselves against the boulder without budging it an inch, for all its apparent nicety of poise. For an instant a wild hope flashed through her mind, it was exorcised when Hopi Jim stepped back and uttered a few words of which only two—"dynamite" and "fuse" reached her ears.

Then he turned and lumbered off to a rude plank cabin which, hidden in the brush nearby, had until that moment escaped Judith's notice. He kicked ​open the door, entered, and returned bringing a short length of dynamite, a coil of prepared fuse, and a small spade.

Kneeling beside the boulder he dug busily for an instant, then lodged the stick, attached the fuse, and crawling on his belly to the edge of the cliff, looked down, to carefully calculate the length of the fuse by the distance of the party down below from the spot where the rock must fall.

But while he was so engaged, and Marrophat aided him, all eager interest, Judith was taking advantage of their disregard of her.

Love had changed the nature of this woman. A fortnight since she would have applauded the scheme, callous to the hideousness of the end it was designed to compass. To-day … she felt a little faint and sick when she considered what might befall were she unable to give warning.

Unbuttoning her jacket, she slipped a playing-card from her pocket, a Trey of Hearts, and with a pencil scribbled on its face—"Danger! Go back!"

Then finding a bit of rock, she bound the card to it and approached the brink. Hopi Jim was meticulously shortening the fuse, Marrophat absorbed in watching him.

In the cañon below the three were within two minutes of the danger-point. It was no trick at all to drop the stone so that it fell within a dozen feet ​of the leading horseman. She saw him dismount and pick up the warning.

At the same time Hopi Jim and Marrophat jumped up and ran back, each seizing and holding his horse. Constrained to do likewise, Judith waited with a throbbing heart. …

As the explosion smote dull echoes from the flanks of the Painted Hills, the boulder teetered reluctantly on the brink, then disappeared, followed by a rush of earth and gravel.

Presently, from the cañon below, a dull rumour of galloping hoofs advertised the failure of their attempt.

And then the girl made a surprising little speech to the cruelly chagrined men: "Gentlemen, I've something to say that needs your attention, likewise your respect. It is this: I am parting company with you. I am riding west by this trail. If either of you care to follow me"—the automatic flashed ominously in the sun-glare—"it will be with full knowledge of the consequences. If you are well advised, you will turn back and report your failure to my father."

She nodded curtly and swung her horse round.

"And what shall I tell your father from you?" Marrophat demanded.

"What you please," the girl replied, flashing an impish smile over-shoulder. "I am done with him as well as you."

​She thrust heels into her horse's flanks and sped away at a reckless pace.

"Well," Mr. Marrophat admitted confidentially to Mr. Slade, "I'm damned!"

"And that ain't all," Mr. Slade confided in Mr. Marrophat, whipping out his own revolver, "you're being held up, too. I'll take those guns of yourn, friend, and what else you've got about you that's of value, including your hoss—and when you get back to Old Man Trine you can just tell him, with my best compliments, that I've quit the job and lit out after that daughter of hisn. She's a heap sight more attractive than nineteen thousand dollars, and not half so hard to earn."

CHAPTER XXXVIII
Hopi Jim

ONCE she had lost touch with her father's creatures, the girl drew rein and went on more slowly and cautiously.

Below her, in the valley, from time to time she could discern three mounted figures. To their progress she regulated her own, abbreviating her own rests in order that they might not distance her who followed a more arduous trail.

As chance served she would scout a little distance back along the upper trail, thinking to surprise pursuit by the men she had defied. But not once did she find any sign to show that she was being followed; and by nightfall she comforted herself with the assurance that Hopi Jim and Marrophat must have guided themselves by her advice, and returned with their report to Seneca Trine.

It was within an hour of midnight when Alan's party made its last pause and camped, unconscious of the fact that, a quarter of a mile above them, a lonely woman paused when they paused and made ​her own camp on the edge of a sharp declivity, choosing the spot because it afforded her a clear view of their twinkling campfire.

She made no fire of her own, but consumed the last of the provisions she had brought with her from the Pullman, then wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down to rest, her last conscious act the wafting of a kiss down to the depths whose shadows hid the man she loved.

The level shafts of the rising sun awakened her, and of a sudden she started up, surprised, by the grating of footsteps on the rocks behind her.

Before she could turn she was caught and wrapped in the arms of Hopi Jim. His face of bronze bent over her, smiling in the triumph of his cunning; his breath fanned her cheek, hot with his desire; his lips threatened hers imminently. …

Only for an instant she remained motionless in the man's embrace. Then, without warning, she was like a steel spring that he sought to supple to his will. She fought like a wildcat, kicking, biting, tearing, scratching, sobbing, panting, despairing—and fought but the more fiercely as despair grew more dark in her consciousness.

She mustered all her strength and wits and will for one last struggle, and in a frenzied moment managed to break his hold a trifle, enough to enable ​her to snatch at the pistol hanging from her belt, and present it at his head.

But it exploded harmlessly, spending its bullet on the blue of the morning sky, and in an instant it was wrested from her.

And now all hint of mercy left his eyes; remained only the glare of rage. He put forth all his strength and Judith was as a child in bis hands. In half an minute he had her helpless, in as much time more her back was breaking across his knee, while he bound her with loop after loop of his rawhide lariat. Then Hopi Jim caught her horse, and lifted the girl to its bare back, face upward, catching her hand and feet, as they fell on either flank of the animal, with more loops of that unbreakable rawhide, and placing the master-knot of the hitch that bound this human pack well beyond her reach.

She panted a prayer for mercy. He laughed, bent and kissed her brutally, and stepped back, still laughing, to admire his handiwork.

Thus he stood for an instant between the horse and the edge of the declivity, a fair mart, stark against the sky, for one who stood in the valley below, holding his rifle with eager fingers, waiting just such an opportunity as he had waited it ever since the noise of débris kicked over the edge by the struggling man and woman had drawn his attention to what was going on above.

​As Alan pressed the trigger, Judith saw a look of aggrieved amazement cross the face of Hopi Jim Slade. Then he threw his hands out, reeled, stumbled at the verge, and abruptly shot from sight over the edge of the bluff.

CHAPTER XXXIX
The Man in the Shadow

TWO hundred feet if one he fell from the lip of the cliff. Then suddenly the Thing that had been Hopi Jim Slade was checked in its headlong descent by the outstanding trunk of a tree, over which it remained, doubled up, limp, horrible. …

The man who had compassed the bandit's death stepped back, thrust the weapon, still smoking, into the holster strapped to his thigh, and snatched up a case containing binoculars.

Not before the glasses were adjusted to his vision did he find time to respond absently to the inquiries of his two companions. Now the girl plucked at his sleeve, deflecting the glasses from the object which they were following so sedulously as it moved along the heights, a running horse with a woman bound upon its back, both sharply in silhouette against the burning blue.

"Alan," the girl demanded, "what is it? Why did you fire?"

"Judith," he affirmed with a look of poignant solicitude. "She's roped to the back of that crazy ​broncho! See for yourself, one false step, and she'll be killed!"

While the girl focussed her glasses upon that speck that flew against the sky, Alan turned to the two horses hobbled nearby, and seizing a saddle threw it over the back of one.

At this the other man strode to his side and dropped a detaining hand upon his arm.

"What are you going to do?" he demanded.

Alan shook the hand off and went on with his self-appointed task.

"Go after her, Tom, of course," he replied. "What else? That animal is crazy, I tell you. Think of being carried that way—all day, perhaps—face up to this brutal sun! She'll go mad if something isn't done——"

"You've gone mad yourself already," Mr. Barcus contended darkly. "What's it to you if she does? Suppose you do succeed in rescuing her, what then? As soon as she gets on her pins, she'll try to stick a knife into you, like as not. I suppose you'd like me to call your conduct chivalry? I'll tell you what I call it—lunacy!"

"Don't be an ass," Alan responded temperately, gathering the reins together. "Who warned us yesterday in time to prevent our being crushed by that rock? Judith! Why was she separated from Marrophat and the others—alone up there when that ​beast sneaked up behind her—I saw it all—and grabbed her and roped her to that broncho, if it wasn't that she had broken with, them for good and all, and started to fight on our side?"

"You're raving," Barcus commented. He looked to the girl. "Rose—Miss Trine—reason with this madman——"

Dropping the glasses, the girl came swiftly and confidently to her lover's side, lifting her lips to his.

"Go, sweetheart!" she told him. "Save her if you can!"

With a look of triumph for the benefit of Mr. Barcus, Alan Law gathered Rose Trine into his arms.

With an indignant grunt, Mr. Barcus caught up the glasses and turned his back. …

"Go on!" he grumbled, pretending to ignore the hand Alan offered him from the saddle. "I've got no patience with you. … But go!" he insisted, of a sudden seizing the hand and pressing it fervently. "And God go with you, my friend!" ​

HE LEAPED … DOWN, DOWN, UPON THE WATCHER BELOW.

​

THEIR EYES SCANNED THE HORIZON FOR AN APPROACHING SHIP.

CHAPTER XL
The Trail of Flying Hoof-prints

ALAN'S departure from camp had anticipated by a round quarter hour the appearance on the upper trail of friends of the slain bandit, to the number of four or five, who had both discovered and recovered his body, called his death murder, and pledged themselves to its avengement, laying responsibility for the putative crime at the door of the man and woman to be seen in the cañon, immediately below the scene of Hopi Jim's fall.

Between the moment when discovery of the men on the ridge trail interrupted their hurried breakfast and that which found Rose and Barcus mounted on the back of their one horse and making the best of their way down the cañon in pursuit of Alan but little time had lapsed. But for the fact that no one could pass from the upper to the lower trail nothing could have saved them. The party on the heights offered abundant testimony of its intentions by wasting its ammunition in futile attempts at long-range marksmanship.

Even with its double burden, their horse made ​better time upon the lower level than those on the ridge trail. By mid-morning, when they approached the foothills that ran down to the desert, the pursuit was more than a mile in the rear and shut off to boot by a monolithic hill, while Alan was many a weary mile in advance.

He sat upon his horse, just then, at standstill upon the summit of a rounded knoll, the Painted Hills lifted up behind him, the desert before, unfolding like a map, but blurred by the heat-haze that simmered over it.

Was Judith out there, somewhere, lost, defenceless, impotent to lift a hand to shield her face from the blast of the savage sun?

Was she back there among the Painted Hills, lying still and lifeless, crushed beneath the weight of that fallen horse?

No rest for Alan till he knew. …

Descending the knoll, he reined his lagging mount back into the trail, following its winding course through the foothills and round the base of that monolithic mountain toward the junction with the ridge trail miles away.

It approached the hour of noon before he gained the point where the two trails joined and struck out across the desert. And here he discovered indications that the fright of Judith's horse had persisted (perhaps because of her struggles to free herself) even ​to the extent of driving it out upon the desert, for the hoof-prints of a galloping horse were plainly marked, evidently fresh, and led from the other trail past its point of contact and out to lose itself in the welter of the heat.

He turned and, at the best pace he could spur from his broncho, rode into the embrace of that implacable wilderness of sun and sand. Within half an hour he had lost touch completely with the hills that crouched behind him—had forgotten them even as he had forgotten Rose and Barcus in the torments he was suffering for the sake of that strange woman who loved him and whom he did not love.

For now he was reminded that he had broken his fast neither by bite nor sup. The heat seemed to tear the very breath from his nostrils, thirst had him by the throat like a mortal enemy, giddiness assailed him intermittently.

At long intervals he would check the broncho and, feeling in the saddle, endeavour to sweep the desert with his binoculars. Ordinarily, they discovered nothing, but ever the trail of hoof-prints lured him on.

And toward the middle of the afternoon he fancied that something rewarded one such effort, something that seemed to move like a weary horse with a human figure bound to its back. He was persuaded he had gained upon the chase. And he pressed on.

But now phenomena were discernible which, had he ​been more desertwise, would have made him pause before he adventured farther from those hills. The sun had taken on a coppery complexion and swam low. The air was heavy, but seemingly as hot as fire.

All this was strange and terrible to him, but he never dreamed that it foreboded anything more nearly intolerable.

All at once the surface of the desert seemed to lift and shake like the top of a canvas bent in a gale. The dust enveloped man and horse. And then darkness fell, a copper-coloured pall. Nothing remained visible beyond arm's length.

The broncho swung round, back to the blast, and refused to budge another inch.

Alan dismounted and, seizing the bridle, sought to draw the horse on with him. He wasted his strength; the animal balked, stiffened its legs, and resisted with the stubbornness of a rock; then, of a sudden, jerked its head smartly, snapped the bridle from his grasp, and scuttled away before the storm.

The bridle was barely torn from his hand before Alan lost sight of the broncho. For a moment he stood rooted in consternation as in a bog, with an arm up-thrown across his face.

Then the thought of Judith recurred. …

Head bended and shoulders rounded, he began to forge a way into the teeth of the sandstorm, pos​sessed by determination not to desert her in this hour of greatest extremity, though he died of the trying.

In the end he stumbled blindly down a decline, and was conscious that he had in some way found shelter from the full force of the wind. He staggered on another yard or two, and blundered into a rough-ribbed wall of rock, whose lee it was that had created this scanty oasis of shelter from the fury that raged through the world.

He thought to rest there for a time, until the storm had spent its greatest strength; but as he laid his shoulder gratefully against the rock and scrubbed the dust from his smarting eyes, he saw what he at first conceived to bean hallucination—Judith Trine standing within a yard of him, alive, strong, free, completely mistress of herself, in no way needing the help of his generous heart and hand.

He stared incredulously, saw her open her mouth to utter a wondering cry that was nearly inaudible. Her hand fell upon his arm with the weight of unquestionable reality. Then he heard words of understanding and of gratitude:

"Alan! You came to me! You followed me, through all this——"

The bitter irony of this outcome to all his labourings and sufferings ate like an acid at his heart.

He threw off her hand with a bitter laugh—that ​was like the croaking of a raven as it issued from his bone-dry throat—and in a momentary possession of hysteric madness reeled away from the woman and the shelter of the rock and delivered himself anew to the mercy of the duststorm.

CHAPTER XLI
Avalanche

WHEN Alan Law denied her and would have none of her, when he threw himself off into the storm rather than endure association with her in the shelter of the rock, Judith Trine, whose nature Love was strangely altering, swallowed her chagrin and followed him with the solicitude of one whose love can recognize no wrong in its object. Through all the remainder of that day of terror she was never far from his side, never out of touch with him, though she did not again offer to touch him after that first rebuff.

What did it matter? she asked herself. All along she had known that he could never love her, that his love was pledged to her own sister Rose. So why should she complain if he despised and rebuffed her, preferred the fury of the tempest to refuge from it in her company? Her love was no less sweet to her for that. And she could not forget that he had come in search of her, spurred inexorably by that sentiment in his nature which would not let him spare himself while a woman needed to be served.

​Once it caught her in the open, the storm flew at her throat like a maddened animal that thirsted for blood. Its shriek of eldritch joy fairly deafened her. Judith was well-nigh swept off her feet, while Alan, in the weakness of his fatigue and suffering, actually staggered and was beaten to his knees.

Yet when he was warned of her approach by some subtle instinct he rose and battled blindly on. …

With the meekness of the strong, she made herself his shadow. And she was now the stronger, for she had had more than an hour's rest beside the water-hole which he had missed on the way of that rocky windbreak. Sooner or later his strength must fail him and he would need her: till then she was content to bide her hour.

It befell presently in startling fashion: she was not a yard behind him when he vanished abruptly. The next moment Judith herself was trembling on the crumbling brink of an arroyo of depth and width interminable in the obscurity of the duststorm. Down this, evidently, Alan had fallen.

At once she scouted along that brink until she found a spot which seemed to offer a less sheer descent, and let herself down.

Alan she found lying insensible. There was a slight cut upon his brow, a bruise about his left temple. She tore linen from her bosom, and with sparing aid from the canteen washed the cut clean ​and bandaged it. Then she pillowed his head upon her lap, and bending over him made of her body an additional shelter from the swirling clouds of dust.

From the insensibility induced by that blow upon his temple the man passed quietly into slumbers of profound physical exhaustion. And for hours on end Judith nursed him there, scarce daring to move; save to minister to his needs. In the course of the first hour she was once startled by the spectral vision, through the driving sheets of dust, of a horse that plodded up the arroyo bearing two riders on his back.

Weary with the weight of its double burden, it went slowly, and passed so near to Judith that she was able to recognize the features of her sister and Tom Barcus. Riding with heads bowed to the blasts they passed without seeing the fierce-eyed woman who crouched there over the body of a man who lay so still that he might have been dead.

Be sure she made never a sign to catch their attention.

This hour, at least, was hers; Rose would never grudge it to her when it had passed!

Within the next succeeding hour twilight stole athwart the desert, turning its heat to chill, its light to violet. Then night shut down upon the world. Not before that hour did the storm subside and give place to a bright, clear night of stars and moonlight.

​Growing more intense, the cold eventually roused the sleeping man.

Hardly had his eyes unclosed and looked up into the eyes of Judith bending over him than he started up and out of her embrace, got unsteadily to his feet, and staggered away, with a gesture of exorcism. Hugging her new-born humility to her, Judith followed patiently, at a little distance.

Not far from where they had rested there was a break in the wall of the arroyo. Through this he scrambled painfully, the unheeded woman at his heels.

A pause there afforded both time to regain their breath and survey the desert for signs of assistance. It offered none. For leagues in any quarter it stretched without a break. The southward hills, however, seemed the nearer. They seemed to have won by now at least two thirds of the way across. And low down upon the slope of one of the hills a tiny light shone like a friendly star.

With tacit consent both turned that way, Alan leading, Judith his pertinacious shadow.

And then of a sudden she collapsed. The white world swam giddily about her, rocking like a confused sea. Her knees became as water. … She sank silently to the earth.

He turned and came back to her, lifted her head, and plied her in turn with the dregs of the canteen. ​With a sigh and a little shiver she revived. Then, with a struggle, she sat up.

Neither spoke.

She shivered again in his arms, and he put his coat about her shoulders. It wrung her heart that he should so expose himself for her sake, yet not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.

Then they struggled on in strange, dumb companionship of misery.

Thus an hour passed, and for all their desperate struggles neither could see that the light on the mountainside was a yard nearer.

Suddenly Alan, again exhausted, dropped as if shot. Instantly she was kneeling by his side. But in the act of bending over him she drew back to stare amazed at two twin glaring eyes sweeping down upon them with all the speed attainable by a six-cylinder touring-car negotiating a trackless desert.

When Judith did move, it was not to comfort Alan. Her first act was to draw from her pocket a heavy, blunt-nosed revolver, break it at the breech, and blow its barrel clear of dust. Her hand went next to the holster on Alan's hip. From this she extracted his Colt's .45, treating it as she had the other. Then she crouched low above the man she loved, as if thinking to escape notice from the occupants of the motor-car. But the glare of the headlights fell upon ​them and, as was inevitable, discovery followed. The motor-car stopped within twenty feet. Three men jumped out and ran toward them, leaving two in the car—the chauffeur and one who occupied a corner of the rear seat—an aged man with the face of a damned soul doomed for a little time to live upon this earth in the certain foreknowledge of his damnation.

Judith Trine leaped to her feet and stood over the body of Alan, a revolver poised in either hand.

"Halt!" she ordered. "Hands up!"

The three men obeyed without a moment's hesitation, her father's creatures, they knew the daughter far too well to dream of opposing her will.

In the six hands three revolvers glimmered; but at her command all three dropped to the earth.

Then, sharply, "Stand back two paces!" she required. They complied, and she pocketed their weapons.

"Now, Marrophat—and you, Hicks, pick Mr. Law up and carry him into the car. If one of you lift a finger to harm him, that one shall answer to me."

Still none ventured to dispute her. The two men designated lifted Alan Law and bore him with every care toward the motor-car.

Then the man in the rear seat lifted up a weirdly sonorous voice:

​"Stop!" he cried. "Drop that man! Judith, I command you——"

"Be silent!" the girl cut in sharply. "I command here—if it's necessary to tell you."

Then the old man broke out in exasperation that waxed into fury. As well command the sea to still its voice: her father raged like the madman that he was, for the time being divested of his habitual mask of frigid heartlessness. The desperate girl turned to the third man.

"Now, Jimmy," she said crisply, "into that car— be quick—and gag him."

"If you do," the father foamed, "I'll have your life——"

The man named Jimmy hesitated between fear of the one and awe of the other; but his hesitation vanished when the girl pulled trigger and two bullets, bored into the earth near his feet. Then with alacrity he jumped into the car and, ignoring the threats of the old man, proceeded to execute Judith's order.

"Now out with you!" she instructed in a tolerant tone when that task was finished and Marrophat and Hicks had placed Alan gently on the floor of the car.

A flourish of her weapons gained instant indulgence of this wish.

She stepped up on the running-board and addressed the terrified chauffeur.

​"Straight ahead, my man!" she said. "Make for the nearest pass through those hills yonder, and don't delay unless you're anxious for trouble."

The car began to move. The three men left in the desert made no effort to plead their cause. It was not until five minutes later that she realized what had made them so content to abide by her will.

Then she heard their voices lifted together in a howl that was quickly answered, first, by fainter yells from a distant quarter of the desert, then by a growing rumour of galloping hoofs.

The night glasses in the car afforded her glimpses of some six or seven horsemen making toward the spot where Marrophat, Hicks, and Jimmy waited beside a beacon which they had lighted.

Half a dozen sentences exchanged with the chauffeur advised her that these were horsemen from the town of Mesa who had charged themselves with the duty of avenging the death of Hopi Jim Slade, who had followed Rose and Barcus until these last eluded them in the duststorm; who had later effected a junction with the car and been purchased to the uses of her father.

The subsequent division of forces, it appeared, was due to the fact that two passes were available for escape by way of the southern hills. The horsemen had been designated to investigate and shut up the ​trail toward the east, while the car with Trine had set out to perform like service in the west.

Exacting his utmost speed from the chauffeur, Judith set herself to revive Alan. With the aid of such stores of food and drink as the car carried, this was quickly accomplished. Alan was soon sitting up and taking stock of the situation as he devoured sandwiches and emptied a canteen.

Then, ignoring the fact that proximity with him threatened to end the life of Trine with a stroke of apoplexy, he stationed himself on the rear seat, kneeling, his .45 ready for use if the horsemen drew too near.

The mountain pass was about a mile distant. The light on the hillside, according to the chauffeur, was that of a prospector who had camped there temporarily. There was nothing, then, to be feared from that quarter. The horsemen, having paused to take counsel with Marrophat and his companions, had resumed their hot pursuit.

Their own case, Alan realized, was becoming desperate, the motor-car was now labouring through, deeper sand, and the posse was coming up rapidly.

A long-range pistol duel was in progress before the car had covered half the remaining distance to the pass. By the time it entered this last the pursuit was not a hundred yards behind. The body of the car was struck half a dozen times, its pas​sengers escaped only by what they chose to term a miracle.

And a minor miracle of fact was already at work in their behalf, though they were unconscious of it. Two hundred feet above the trail two men were working with desperate haste at some mysterious business, though none noticed them.

Only the chauffeur was aware of a woman running down the hillside at an angle, to intercept the car several hundred yards from the mouth of the pass. As it drew near the spot where she paused the head of the pursuing party swept into the mouth of the ravine.

And then a great explosion rent the peaceful hush of night, that till then had been profaned only by the spattering cracks of the revolver fusillade. From the side of the hill directly opposite the mouth of the pass shot forth a wide sheet of dusky flame.

As the roar of dynamite subsided the entire side of the hill slid ponderously down, choking the ravine with débris to the depth of thirty or forty feet and burying the leaders of the pursuit beyond hope of rescue.

Only an instant later the motor-car jolted to a bait, and Rose and Barcus were standing beside the door, jabbering joyful greetings mixed with incoherent explanations of the manner in which they had come to seek shelter for the night in the prospector's shack, ​and, roused by the noise of firing and recognizing Alan in the car by the aid of night glasses, had with the prospector's aid hit upon this scheme of shooting a landslide in between the pursuit and its devoted quarry.

CHAPTER XLII
As in A Glass, Darkly

IT WAS a bad situation.

The chauffeur had been unable to start his engine, once he had stopped it, and reported picturesquely that forcing it through the desert sands at top speed had "just naturally plumb busted its heart." Alan's animosity could not but soften a little to the new Judith who had so evidently thrown in her lot with theirs, and whose well-timed aid that day had certainly saved him from a lingering death in the desert.

He and Judith had actually talked together almost amicably for several minutes. And it was plain to see that the gentle Rose did not relish the sight of this rapprochement.

Now Mr. Barcus was shrewdly observing an interview between Alan and Rose. And—if the evidence of his senses did not mislead him—he was witnessing their first difference of opinion. It was not an argument acute enough to deserve the name of quarrel, but undoubtedly the two were at odds upon some question—Rose insistent, Alan reluctant.

​This last gave way in the end, shrugged, and returned to the car.

"I'm going back up the trail," he announced.

"Feeling the need of some little exercise, no doubt," Barcus suggested.

"Rose thinks it's dangerous to stop here," Alan began to explain, ignoring the interruption.

"Miss Rose is right, eh, Miss Judith?" Barcus interpolated.

Judith nodded darkly.

"According to our friend, the chauffeur," Alan resumed, "it's a good twenty-mile ride to the next pass and then back here. But Marrophat is capable of it—presuming his horses are—and even though we needn't look for them before morning, it would be well to put as much distance between us as possible. So I'm going to see if I can't buy burros from the prospector back there. Rose said he had some—doesn't know how many——"

"Three will be enough," Judith interposed. "I mean, don't get one for me. I'm stopping here."

"But——" Alan started to protest.

"Please! It's no good arguing, Mr. Law, I've made up my mind, I can be most helpful here, by my father's side," she asserted, and nodded at Trine with a significant smile that maddened him. "He needs me, and no harm can come to me, I'm pretty well able to take care of myself!"

​At this Barcus breathed an unheard but fervent prayer of thanksgiving, whose spirit he doubted not was shared by Alan. For it stuck in the memory of Barcus that their friend the prospector (whose shack had sheltered Rose and Barcus after their transit of the desert and prior to the man-made avalanche which had afforded this temporary immunity from pursuit) had mentioned in the hearing of Rose the fact that his string of burros was limited to three. And this intelligence Rose had undoubtedly communicated to Alan.

This, then, must have been the nub of the lovers' quarrel: Rose's insistence that Judith be left behind, Alan's reluctance to consent to this lest he convict himself of the charge of ingratitude, remembering the great service his erstwhile antagonist had done him.

If only Judith might not find cause to change her mind!

Thus, the prayer of Thomas Barcus.

But one dared not trust that young woman to demean herself consistently for as long as two consecutive minutes. It would need no more than a sisterly little spat with Rose to waken the perverse demon dormant in Judith, and bring her right-about-face on the question of staying behind with her father.

Now Mr. Barcus earnestly desired that nothing of the sort should happen. In him distaste for the society ​of Miss Judith amounted to a passion. His belief in the sincerity of the defiance she had thrown in her father's face was slight, his hope that it would endure until the wind changed or the moon set was nil. He set himself sedulously to divert Judith with the magic of his conversational powers, an offering indifferently received. He was still blithely gossiping when Judith flung away to her sister's side.

The ensuing quarrel seemed the more portentous in view of the restraint imposed upon themselves by both parties thereto; they were at pains not to betray the all-too-patient subject of their dispute, so thoughtfully modulating their accents that never a word was audible to Barcus.

He believed, however, that a crisis impended when the tinkle of mule-bells sounded down the cañon road. Judith's ears were as quick as his own, she, too, had caught the sound of bells behind the base of the hill. And of a sudden, without another word, she turned and flung away into the thickets of undergrowth that masked the cañon to either side of the wagon-trail. In a twinkling she had lost herself to view. …

The remainder of that business was transacted rapidly enough. There were no preparations to be made, once Alan had ridden up with his three burros, nothing remained but to mount and make off. Farewells were not for Trine, though Barcus didn't neg​lect to shake a leg at him before kicking his burro into motion. As for Judith, she kept herself invisible; and though he looked about for her, Alan was sensitive to Rose's tensity of emotion and forebore to aggravate it by open search or calling.

Five minutes after his return the three had ridden out of sight of the motor-car. In as much time more they had found the forking of the trails described by the chauffeur; and by tacit consent, none questioning the move, struck off on what the chauffeur had termed the up-trail—the town of Mesquite, whatever its character and wherever it might be, their goal.

The trail mounted at a sharp grade, seldom wide enough to permit one burro to pass another at need, not seldom skirting the brink of some declivity so sheer that by common instinct the fugitives kept their eyes studiously averted from the abyss.

But the frequency of such passages bred indifference in their sleepy minds. Before morning they were all riding like so many hypnotized subjects, fatigue bearing so heavily on all their senses that none spoke or cared to speak. Broad daylight surprised them in this state, still stubbornly travelling; and shortly afterward showed them one place so perilous that it shocked them temporarily awake.

This was simply a spot where the trail came abruptly to an end on one side of a cleft in the hills quite thirty feet wide and several hundred in depth, ​and was continued on the farther side, the chasm being spanned by a bridge of the simplest character—no more than a footway of boards bound together with ropes none too substantial in seeming, with another rope, breast-high, to serve as a hand-rail.

Alan tested the bridge cautiously. It bore him. He returned, helped Rose to cross, and, with her once safely on the farther side, took his life in his hands, and, aided by Barcus, unaffectedly afflicted with qualms, somehow or other persuaded the burros to cross.

After that, though the way grew more broad and easy and even showed symptoms of a decline, they had not strength enough left to sustain through another hour.

And what they thought good fortune, opportunely at this pass, brought them to a clearing dotted with the buildings of an abandoned copper mine. Not a soul was in evidence there, but the rude structures offered shelter for beast as well as man; here (so ran their sleepy thoughts) they might hide the burros and themselves for a few hours, and so obtain a little sorely needed sleep. Pursuit, if any, might overlook them, go on in ignorance of their proximity.

None but men fatigued beyond the power of coherent reasoning would have built hopes upon so preposterous a suggestion. But Rose and Barcus had known little rest since the previous dawn, while ​Alan, though he had slept a few hours on the desert, had endured even heavier drains upon his vitality than either of the others. None but men in such plight could have overlooked the obvious way of making themselves secure by cutting down that sword-wide bridge so short a way behind them.

No less futile was their thought to stand watch and watch about. Barely had they made Rose as comfortable as might be upon the plank flooring of one of the sheds, and tethered the burros out of sight, when Alan collapsed as if drugged, while Barcus, who had elected himself to keep the first watch, felt sleep overcoming him like a cloud of thick darkness.

CHAPTER XLIII
Jaws of Death

AWAKENING befell Mr. Barcus in a fashion sufficiently startling to render him indifferent to the beneficial effects of some eight hours of dreamless slumber.

He discovered himself lying flat on his face, with somebody's heavy hand purposefully grinding the said face into the planks of the shed flooring. At the same time other hands were busy binding his own together by the wrists, and lashing them to the small of his back by means of cord passed round his middle, while his natural efforts to kick were hampered by the fact that his ankles had already been secured.

His hands attended to, his head was released. Promptly he lifted it and essayed a yell, an effort rendered abortive by the gag that was thrust between his teeth the instant his jaws opened. After which—barring a gratuitous kick in the ribs—he was left to his own devices.

They were limited, in the beginning, to resting as he was and listening. Sounds of retreating footsteps were all that rewarded him. Then he heard a cold ​and mirthless chuckle, from some considerable distance, and calculated that he who laughed was some place in the clearing.

Now the blood of Thomas Barcus ran cold (or he thought it did, which amounts to much the same thing). For if his senses had played fair, the laugh he had heard was the laugh of Mr. Marrophat.

He twisted his head to one side and saw nothing but the wall. Twisting the other way, his effort was repaid by the discovery of Rose Trine in plight like unto his own—wrists and ankles bound, gagged into the bargain—the width of the shed between them.

But of Alan Law no sign. …

Tormented beyond endurance by the fears he suffered for the safety of his friend, he began painfully inching his way across the floor toward Rose, with what design, Heaven alone knows!

He had contrived to bridge the distance by half when a dark body put the sunlight of the open doorway into temporary eclipse. Another followed it. Boots clumped heavily on the flooring. Two pairs of hands seized him, one beneath the shoulders, the other beneath the knees, and he was lugged out into the sunlight, carried a considerable distance, and deposited within a few feet of the mouth of the abandoned mine just at the moment when he had satisfied himself that the purpose of his captors was to throw him into that black well.

​Then he was left to himself once more, but only for a few moments: the interval ended when the two appeared again, this time bringing Rose in similar fashion. Not until she had been put down beside him did he discover that Alan was likewise a captive, trussed to a tree at some distance.

The remaining arrangements of their captors were swiftly and deftly consummated. He, after Rose, was dumped like a bale into a huge bucket, and therein by means of rope and windlass lowered to the bottom of the shaft—a descent of something like a hundred feet.

Marrophat operated the windlass, his first assistant (a boyish body never known to Barcus by any other name than Jimmy) having accompanied Rose down the shaft and waiting there to receive and dispose of Barcus and Alan in turn.

His handling of them was much like the treatment a sincere baggage-smasher accords an exceptionally heavy trunk. Barcus was partly dragged, partly thrown, tumbled, and kicked, some ten feet or so along a tunnel that struck away from the foot of the shaft, then left shoulder to shoulder with Rose, in darkness only emphasized by the feeble flicker of a candle which Jimmy had thrust into the wall of the tunnel near its mouth, while Alan was lowered, brought in, and thrown roughly down across the body of Barcus.

​A hideous screeching followed, the protests of rusty and greaseless machinery. Twisting his neck, Barcus saw the dim opening of the shaft slowly closing, as if a curtain were being drawn down over it. Jimmy was closing the bulkhead door, leaving them definitely prisoners, beyond human aid.

The silence was broken by Alan's voice:

"Barcus!"

The latter grunted by way of answer, he could do no more.

"I've worked my gag loose," Alan pursued, "but my hands are tied behind my back. Are yours? Grunt once for 'yes.'"

Dutifully Barcus grunted a solitary grunt.

"Then roll over on your face and give me a chance at your bonds with my teeth."

Barcus wasted no time in obeying Alan's suggestion—then lay for upward of ten minutes with his face in the mould of the tunnel while Alan chewed and spat and chewed again at the ropes round the wrists of his friend.

It seemed upward of an hour before the bonds grew slack and Barcus worried a hand free, then loosed the other, removed his gag, and set hastily about freeing his friend. That took but a few instants—little more than was needed to rid Rose of her bonds.

That much accomplished, a pause of consternation followed. The darkness was absolute in the tunnel, ​Jimmy having taken the candle away with him. Barcus had turned to the bulkhead and was, without the slightest hope, groping about its joints and crevices in search of some way of forcing it. …

"Barcus, old man, did you notice what that blackguard had fixed up?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why—at the bottom of the shaft—I got only a glimpse coming in—the door of the powder-room was open, and I saw a fuse set to the top of a keg of blasting powder. …"

"What's the good of that? We're fast enough as it is!"

"Simply to make assurance doubly sure by causing a cave-in. …"

"Why the deuce doesn't he set off his explosion if he means to?"

"Heaven only knows. Perhaps he's thought of some scheme more devilish. Perhaps he set the stage with an empty powder-keg simply to drive us mad with the strain of waiting. …"

"I wouldn't put that by h»m, either," Barcus commented. "See here, what do you know about mines?"

"Next to nothing."

"Then you've got little on me. But I seem to remember hearing or reading, some place, that tunnels have two ends. If that's true, the far end of this ​ought to be the safest place when that explosion happens."

"Something in that!"

"Got any matches?" Barcus inquired.

"Never one."

"Nor I. We'll have to feel our way along. Let me lead. If I step over the brink of a pit or anything, I'll try to yell and warn you in time."

Alan caught his friend's hand and pressed it warmly, a caress eloquent of his gratitude to Barcus for taking their peril lightly, or pretending to, for the sake of Rose.

A ticklish business, that—groping their way through blackness so opaque that it seemed palpable. An elbow in the tunnel—sensed rather than felt or seen—cut them off from direct communication with the bulkhead, and at the same time opened up a shaft of daylight striking down through that pitchy darkness like a column of gold.

Cries of joy choking in their throats, they gained the spot immediately below the shaft, and looked up dazzled, to see blue sky, like a coin of Heaven's minting, far above them, at the end of a long and almost perpendicular tunnel, wide enough to permit the passage of a man's body, and lined with wooden ladders.

The end of the lowermost ladder hung within easy reach from the floor of the tunnel. But even as Alan ​lifted his hands to grasp the bottom rung, the opening at the top of the shaft was temporarily obscured.

Thrilled with apprehension, he hesitated, Marrophat was up there, he little doubted; it was hardly like that fiend to overlook the ladder-shaft in preparing the tunnel to be a living tomb.

Marrophat or no Marrophat at the top, there was nothing for him to do but to grasp the ladder with a steady hand. Even though he were shot dead on emerging from the shaft, it were better than to die down there. …

He had climbed not more than half a dozen rungs when a few drops of water spattered his fact, like heavy rain. Almost immediately the blue sky was permanently eclipsed, a cascade of water, almost a solid column, shot down the shaft with terrific force. Alan sought vainly to escape it, to mount against it. Before he knew it, his grasp had been wrenched away from the ladders and he was shooting feet first back into the tunnel.

Half drowned, he felt himself dragged out of the waterfall. Then he comprehended the fact that the tunnel was already filling; that, where they stood, it was already ankle-deep, while the water continued to fall without hint of let-up.

CHAPTER XLIV
Debacle

SCREAMING to make himself heard above the roar of the deluge, Barcus yelled in Alan's, ear: "That devil! He's found the reservoir—opened the sluice-gates—turned it into that shaft! We're done for!"

Alan had no argument with which to gainsay him. Silently getting on his feet he groped for Rose and drew her away with him, up the incline that led back to the bulkhead.

The hour that followed lived ever in his memory as an hour in hell. To die there, in the darkness, like so many noxious animals trapped in a well. …

The water mounted rapidly. Within five minutes it drove them back to the elbow in the tunnel, within ten it lapped their ankles as they lingered there, doubting which was the greater peril, to advance or to stand fast.

Of a sudden the thought crossed Alan's mind that Marrophat had arranged the fuse and the keg of powder solely to keep them away from the bulkhead. Now that he thought of it, he felt certain that the ​

AS SHE WAS DRAGGED BELOW JUDITH SNEERED AT HER SISTER.

​

​powder-room had been deliberately disclosed to him by Jimmy.

Probably, then, the keg and fuse were but stage properties——

At any rate he concluded that it were better to be extinguished in the space of a second, annihilated by an explosion, than to die thus lingeringly. On this consideration, he drew Rose with him back to the bulkhead. It was solid—a crackless barrier of stout oaken planks reinforced with straps of iron.

The water was stalking them even there like an insatiable enemy. The lisp of its advancing wavelets rang in his hearing like the purring of a man-killing tiger in the darkness of a night-bound jungle. When they had been some fifteen minutes beside the bulkhead the water mounted the head of a slight rise perhaps ten feet behind them and poured down in ever-deeper volume to back up against the barrier.

It was waist-deep there before they retreated to the head of the rise. Half an hour later it was waist-deep even there, the highest spot in the tunnel.

In fifteen minutes more it had reached their chins. Holding Rose close to him, Alan kissed her lips that were as cold as death.

Then fumbling under water, he found the hand of the man at his side. ...•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•In the tunnel that branched off from the ​main-shaft, beyond the bulkhead, some thirty minutes before this juncture, a candle had guttered in its stick, left carelessly thrust into the wall by Marrophat's lieutenant, and, guttering, had dropped a flaming wick into the little heap of bone-dry débris which blazed up against the timbering that upheld the walls of the tunnel. This timbering caught fire without delay, and in a space of time incredibly brief the flames were spreading right and left.

As Alan said a mute farewell to Rose and Barcus the fire spread out in the bottom of the shaft and invaded the powder-room. Alan had guessed aright at Marrophat's design: the keg of blasting-powder was less than an eighth full, its explosion could not possibly have effected the cave-in Alan had at first feared.

But what Marrophat had overlooked was the proximity to the keg of several sticks of dynamite, masked by a film of earth that had fallen from the crumbling walls. When the blazing fuse dropped sparks into the blasting-powder this last exploded right willingly, and the dynamite took its cue without the least delay.

The resultant detonation was terrific. The bulk-head was crushed in like an eggshell barrier, and the released flood streamed out and spread swiftly to the farthest recesses of the burning tunnel. Dense clouds of steam filled that place of terror as the fires were extinguished.

​Swept with the stream Alan contrived to retain his hold round the waist of Rose. Barcus shot past him unseen in the darkness. It was not until Alan had contrived to stay himself and his almost witless burden beneath the mouth of the shaft that he discovered Barcus alive, if almost unrecognizable in his mask of mould and soot, battling back toward the shaft against the knee-deep tide.

Immediately before them dangled the hoisting bucket and rope.

Surrendering the care of Rose to Barcus, Alan climbed into the bucket and stared upward, examining the walls of the shaft for a way to the top. There was none other than the most difficult; the one feasible route was via the rope.

He lifted himself up on the rope, wound it round one leg, and began that heart-breaking climb. And somehow, by almost superhuman effort, it was eventually accomplished.

He arrived at the top of the shaft far too exhausted to show surprise when, falling in half-fainting condition within two feet of the brink, he saw Judith Trine running across the clearing.

Without her aid he would not within hours have been able to work the windlass and lift Rose and Barcus to the surface.

CHAPTER XLV
The Last Warning—and Flight

IN THE clear light of dawn four strangers straggled into Mesquite town—two weary and haggard men, two footsore and bedraggled women. One of these last was dressed in a suit of man's clothing, much the worse for wear. The other members of the party, one and all, wore the look of people who have escaped the jaws of death by the narrowest of imaginable squeaks. Their clothing, of the most rough-and-ready description though it was, had evidently at some quite recent time been sopping wet, then rough dried on its wearers; every garment was warped out of shape and caked with mud and dust. Even their hands and faces were none too clean; abortive efforts had evidently been made to erase some of the grime at a mountain stream, but lacking soap and towels the outcome had not been altogether happy.

At sight of the Mountain House—Mesquite's one carvanserai—the party betrayed slight symptoms of a more cheerful spirit: rejoicing in its promise of food and drink, and beds withal wherein to sleep, the four quickened their steps.

​But of a sudden one of the women—she who wore the garments of her sex—paused, uttered a low cry athrill with terror, and clutching the arm of the man nearest her, pointed down to the card that stared up from the dust at her feet.

It was a Trey of Hearts. …

"Oh, what can it mean?" Rose—for it was she—whispered brokenly, clinging to her lover's arm. "Surely you don't think. … Surely it must be accidental. … Surely it can't mean——"

"I'm afraid it does," Alan Law responded gravely, eying the front of the Mountain House. "Our luck holds inconsistently—that's all. It wouldn't be us if we didn't pick out the one place where Marrophat and Jimmy chose to stop overnight. Fortunately, it's early; I doubt they're up. With half a show we ought to be able to find some way of putting a good distance between us and this town before they waken. … Tom!"

But Mr. Barcus was already at his elbow, in thorough sympathy of Alan's interpretation of the significance to be attached to the card that trembled in Rose's hand.

"Sharp's the word!" he agreed. "And there's a motor-car over there, in front of the blacksmith's. Probably we can hire her——"

"Trine's car!" Alan ejaculated, recognizing the automobile at a glance. "Then he's here, as well!"

​"Looks like it," Barcus admitted. "But so much the better. We'll just naturally take the darn thing off his hands, and I'll bet there isn't another car within fifty miles! We'll be well out of these mountains before he finds anything to chase us with."

But his confidence was demonstrated to be premature by the discovery, which rewarded the first cursory examination, that the car was very thoroughly out of commission.

Two minutes later, however, their earnest inquiries elicited the fact that Mesquite itself boasted two motor-cycles whose owners were not indifferent to a chance to sell them second-hand at a considerable advance on the retail list price of the machines when new.

And thus it was that, within ten minutes from Rose's discovery of that chance-flung warning in the dust, the party was again in rapid motion.

Mr. Barcus was the first to get under way, with Judith Trine occupying the extra seat over the rear wheel. And though Alan was little slower, the staccato chatter of the other motor had diminished to a merely steady drumming in the distance before the second machine began to move.

Now civilization has produced no noises more alarming and irritating than the chant of the steam riveter and the road-song of the motor-cycle.

Disturbed by the departure of the machine bearing ​Barcus and Judith, Seneca Trine craned his neck and managed to glimpse through his window the second motor-cycle as it started, Alan steering. Rose in the seat behind.

And something subtly pyschological drew the gaze of his daughter toward her father's window. As they chugged past the Mountain House Alan was conscious of a startled movement behind him and a convulsive tightening of the hands that clutched his belt. Instinctively he applied all the power that the motor could generate.

Sixty seconds later a flaunting banner of dust was all that remained to remind Mesquite that Romance had passed that way—that, and a series of passionate screams emanating from the bedchamber of Seneca Trine, where the cripple lay possessed by seven devils of insensate rage.

Thus was his pleasure in the dawning of a new day ruined by the discovery that those whom he had thought to be safely entombed in the lowermost level of a flooded mine, twenty miles distant, were alive and sound and active enough to make yet another effort toward their salvation.

His screams brought attendance; but it was some time before his demands could be met and Marrophat and Jimmy roused from their heavy slumbers in adjoining chambers; and half an hour elapsed before the chauffeur, roused from his own well-earned rest, ​succeeded in convincing the pair that pursuit with the motor-car was altogether out of the question until he had spent at least half the day overhauling the motor.

But the devil takes care of his own; within another half hour luck brought a casual automobile to Mesquite—a two-seated, high-power racing machine, driven by two irresponsible wayfarers who proved only too susceptible to Marrophat's offer of double the cost of the car—f. o. b. Detroit—for its immediate surrender.

The two piled out promptly, Marrophat and Jimmy jumped in, and Trine from his bedroom window sped them with a blast of blasphemy which was destined to keep his memory green in Mesquite for many a year after he had been consigned to his grave. …

It must have been an hour later when Alan looked back and discovered, several miles distant on the far-flung windings of the mountain road, a small crimson shape that ran like a mad thing tirelessly pursued by a cloud of tawny dust.

A motor-car of uncommon road-devouring quality, it might or might not contain Marrophat and Jimmy, once more in pursuit. Bitter experience had long since taught Alan to take no chances.

Though it was his life that they sought no later than yesterday, they had proved that if Rose were ​with Alan they would include her ruthlessly in whatsoever scheme they might contemplate for his personal extermination. Nor would Tom Barcus be exempt, though Judith might be, in view of Marrophat's infatuation for the girl.

These two were far ahead and must somehow be overtaken and warned—no easy matter, since the machine which bore them was faster than Alan's, just as the racing automobile was faster than either. From its jog-trot the cycle swept into its greatest speed: ventre-à-terre, ears back, tail a-stream, it roared down the road at such speed as tore the very breath from the lips of those whom it carried.

Alan kept his gaze steadfast to the road, for at such frightful speed as they were now making the slightest obstruction was fraught with direst peril. Now on one hand, now on the other, now on both, the hillsides fell away in such steep declivities as almost to deserve the name of cliffs, as the road wound its serpentine way through the heart of these desolate, silent mountains.

Then catastrophe befell. …

Round the swelling bosom of a wooded mountain-side the motor-cycle swept like a hunted hare, and without the least warning came upon Barcus and Judith, dismounted, Barcus bending over his cycle and tinkering with its motor. For an instant collision seemed unavoidable. Barcus and Judith and ​the motor-cycle occupied most of the width of the road; there was little room between them and the declivity, less between them and the forest. To try to pass them on the latter side would be only to dash his brains out against the trees; while to make the attempt on the outside would be to risk leaving the road altogether and dashing off into space. …

It was impossible to stop the cycle. In desperation Alan chose the outside of the road; and for the space of a single heartbeat thought that he might possibly make it, but with the next realized that he would not—seeing the front wheel swing off over the lip of the slope.

At this he acted sharply and upon sheer instinct. As the cycle left the road altogether he risked a broken knee by releasing his grasp of the handle-bars and straightening out his leg and driving it down forcibly against the road bed. The effect of this was to lift him bodily from the saddle; the machine shot from beneath him like some strange projectile hurled from the bore of a great gun, and Rose crashed against him in the same fraction of a second.

Headlong they plunged as one down the hillside, struck its shelving surface a good twenty feet from the brink of the road, and, flying apart, tumbled their separate ways down the remainder of the drop and into the friendly shelter of the underbrush.

Something nearly miraculous saved them whole. ​Beyond a few scratches and bruises and a severe shaking up, they escaped unharmed. And they were picking themselves up and recollecting their scattered wits when, with impetus no less terrific than their own had been, the pursuing motor-car swung round the bend and hurled itself directly at the two who remained upon the road above.

CHAPTER XLVI
Sacrifice

BUT Tom Bacus hadn't failed to profit by the warning implied in Alan's accident. Alan, he told himself, would never have run his cycle at so foolhardy a pace without good reason, and under the circumstances good reason was synonymous solely with pursuit.

He was therefore on the alert, quick to see the racing automobile when it came hurtling round the bend, and in the nick of time grasped Judith's arm and swung her back with him out of harm's way.

His motor-cycle, abandoned in the middle of the road, was struck by the motor-car and flung halfway down the enbankment, a hopeless tangle of shattered tubing and twisted wire. As the collision took place, he saw Jimmy seated beside Marrophat, who drove, swing a magazine gun round and let it off at hopeful random. The bullet lodged in a tree-trunk. Judith fired in response. But her shot flew wild, and the racing-car flew on, as if on the wings of the wind.

At first blush it seemed surprising that the car did not stop. But Barcus reminded himself that ​Marrophat and Jimmy could not possibly have witnessed the accident involving Alan and Rose, who, together with the wreck of their machine, remained well-cloaked by the underbrush at the bottom of the cañon. The assassins had assumed that Alan had hurried on; and since their own first business was with him, they had done likewise, reasoning that they could return and deal with his unfortunate friend at their convenience after overhauling their quarry whose life they most coveted.

As for Rose and Alan—Heaven alone knew what had happened to them. But Barcus set himself to find out without delay. He sprang from the sheltering trees and, Judith at his heels, pelted headlong down the slope to the spot where the others had vanished. To find them practically unscathed affected that loyal soul almost to tears.

But when congratulations had been mutually exchanged, there fell an awkward pause. The eyes of the four sought one another's ruefully, each pair quick with the unuttered but inexorable inquiry: What next?

The road was now barred to them. At any moment the racer might return. They confronted the necessity of threading afoot a wild and mountainous country of whose geography they were absolutely ignorant. And time pressed, while the fatigue bred of their many hardships weighed heavily upon them all.

​It was Barcus who advanced the suggestion which was adopted, more through lack of a better than for any appeal intrinsic in the proposition.

"When we broke down, up there," he ventured, "I saw a cañon branching off from this one about a quarter of a mile over yonder. We might stroll round that way and see what its natural attractions may be, if any. It's sure a mighty poor sort of a cañon that doesn't lead anywhere—and anyway we can't be worse off than we are, and——"

"Sufficient!" Mr. Law interrupted. "Providing Rose and Judith feel equal to the effort, I'm for your suggestion."

"We must," said Judith slowly.

With a sigh, Rose nodded her agreement.

Crooking a deferential arm, Barcus offered it to Judith.

"Everything is lovely in the formal garden," he insisted; "so sweetly romantic. Are you game for an idle saunter, just to while the idle hours away?"

The woman found spirit enough for a smile as she tucked her hand gratefully beneath his arm.

"You're the cheerfulest soul I ever met," she said demurely. "What I'm going to do without you when, if ever, we get out of this awful business, goodness only knows."

"Let's talk of something else," he suggested hastily.

​"Unless, of course," she pursued with unbroken gravity, "I marry you. …"

"Heaven," the young man prayed fervently "forfend!"

"That is hardly gallant——"

"I mean—Heaven forfend that you should throw yourself away!"

"Humph!" she mused. "Perhaps you're right. …"

Their banter was not without a subtle object, namely to reassure the girl who followed, supported by her lover's arm.

In the course of the last twenty-four hours Rose's jealousy of her sister's new-found friendliness with Alan had become acutely evident. The least courtesy which circumstances now and again demanded that he show Judith was enough to cloud the countenance of Alan's betrothed.

Nor, indeed, was Rose altogether destitute of plausible excuse for this feeling of hers. It was undeniable that between Alan and Judith a bond of sympathy had grown out of the trials and hardships they had of late suffered in common. It was undeniable, but even in his most private thoughts Alan denied it fiercely.

That her love was hopeless, Judith knew but too well. Even though Alan might not be altogether indifferent to her, his loyalty to Rose was unshakable. ​And not for worlds would Rose's rival have had it otherwise. She could not have loved him as she did had he not been so immovably true. As it was, since she could not hope her love might ever be returned, she was content to love and to promise herself that, if opportunity offered, she would not prove unready to sacrifice herself to her love. At times she caught herself praying that such opportunity would soon be accorded her, and that the sacrifice it should demand would be complete. …

Now prayers are sometimes answered when the craved boon is good for the soul. …

Slowly and painfully these four toiled along an obscure trail. Above them, on the road they had abandoned, the crimson racer doubled back to the point where it had passed Judith and Barcus; its occupants descended, explored, and came presently upon the trail of the fugitives.

Bloodhounds could not have settled down upon a scent with more good-will and eagerness than Mr. Marrophat and his faithful aide. The sun was high above the cañon when the pursuit came within rifle-shot of the chase.

The spiteful crack roused the quartet from a pause of dismay due to tardy appreciation of the fact that they had penetrated almost to the end of a blind alley. According to Mr. Barcus's definition, in short, this was indeed a mighty poor sort of a cañon, since ​it proved to lead nowhither; its head was a wall of rock around three hundred feet in height, closing the end of a traplike chasm.

A trap, indeed, now that the report of the rifle advised them that their retreat was cut off!

A hasty council of war armed Alan with Judith's revolver and posted him behind a boulder commanding the approaches to the chasm. The weapon, a powerful .45, had a range sufficient to numb the impetuosity of the assassins and keep them under cover and out of sight of the desperate essays the fugitives were making to compass an escape.

For in the shed behind an abandoned log-cabin—souvenir, no doubt, of some long-forgotten prospector—Barcus had unearthed a length of stout rope. He had hacked this into two equal lengths. One of these lengths he proceeded to make fast round his own waist, then round Rose's. The other he left to be similarly employed by Alan and Judith. For it was agreed that they must climb, and while the cliff offered no problem to daunt a skilled mountain-climber, it was considered best that the fugitives should be hitched up in pairs against any possibility of a slip. The manner of the pairing had been determined by the fact that Barcus boasted some experience in mountaineering, while Rose was plainly the most exhausted of the two women, the least able to help herself in an emergency.

​He had worked his way, with the girl in tow, to a point about midway up the face of the cliff, following a long diagonal that provided the easiest climbing, when Alan stole back to Judith and reported that he was convinced that the pursuit had turned back—perhaps for want of ammunition. Without delay, then, following the way Barcus had chosen, he and Judith began the ascent.

Two thirds of the climb had been accomplished, and Rose and Barcus had arrived in safety at the top, before the temptation to look down proved irresistible to Alan. Immediately beneath his heels the face of the cliff was deeply hollowed out, leaving a drop of fifty feet to a shelving ledge of shale as steep as a roof, whose eaves—perhaps another fifty feet below—jutted out over another fall of a hundred feet. Alan shuddered and swallowed hard before resuming the ascent.

Another twenty feet, however, brought him to a ledge quite six feet wide, offering a broad and easy path to the summit. He gained this with a prayer of heartfelt relief, and was on the point of rising to his feet when a scream of terror from Rose, watching over the upper edge, warned him in time to enable him to snatch and grasp a knob of rock before Judith's weight suddenly tautened the rope between them and jerked Alan's legs from under him.

His feet and legs kicking the empty air beyond the ​

THE STRUGGLE WAS SHORT, TERRIFIC; ALAN, ROSE, AND BARCUS FOUND THEMSELVES CAPTIVES.

​

JUDITH WAS LIMP AS THEY DRAGGED HER FROM THE SEA.

​lip of the edge, he lay face downward, clutching desperately the knob of rock, praying that it might not come away in his grasp, that his grasp might hold, that Barcus might arrive in time to save them both. The rope was cutting into his waist like a dull knife. The drag of Judith's body was frightful. He could feel her swinging like a pendulum at the end of its thirty feet, and could imagine but too vividly what would happen if the rope should prove faulty.

The fall of twenty feet to the shale roof was nothing. What would follow would, however, spell death. The impact of her body would set the shale in motion, like an avalanche—and beyond the eaves was only emptiness and the boulder-strewn bed of the chasm, a hundred feet below!

The sweat poured from his face like rain. His eyes started in their sockets. The blood drummed in his ears. His fingers grew numb, his throat dry. He felt that he could not hold on another instant, when, abruptly, that torture was no more. The rope had been relieved of its burden. He heard a scream from above, then the thump of Judith's body falling on the shale, then the slithering rumble of the landslide gathering momentum …

Barcus at length arrived, and assisted him to a place of security. Spent and faint and sick with horror, he lay prone, shuddering.

​Only the assurance of Barcus that Judith had somehow escaped being precipitated over the eaves of the shale roof gave him nerve enough to resume the climb. It was true, she lay within three yards of the brink, unstirring. She dared not stir—a single movement would set the shale bed again in motion.

Alan understood that, as Barcus asserted, she had deliberately cut the rope herself—and offered up her life to spare his own. …

A broad roadway ran along the top of the precipice, turning off, at a little distance to the right, to descend the mountainside. And just beyond this turning Providence had chosen to locate the camp of an hydraulic mining outfit.

Alan's appearance at the top, in fact, was coincident with the arrival at the point of half a dozen excited miners; and he had no more than voiced his demands than three of their number were hastening to procure rope and more hands. Within five minutes Alan was being lowered over the edge and down to the shale roof, on which he landed at a spot far to one side of Judith, to escape all danger of sending a second landslide down upon her.

Picking his way carefully, Alan edged along the brink, more than once saved from falling by the rope, until he stood immediately below Judith. There pausing, he tossed the end of the rope into her hands, and when she had wound it twice around her arms, ​crept up to her side and helped her make it fast about her body.

His signal to the miners that all was well educed prompt response. There was a giddy interval in which the two swung perilously between heaven and earth. Then they stood once more in safety.

Supported by sympathetic hands, the quartet staggered into camp, their story, as condensed by Barcus and breathlessly confirmed by Alan, already winning them enthusiastic champions. And this was well; for in a few moments the rumble of a motor-car sounded beyond the shoulder of the hill.

A startled question elicited the information that the cliff road was only a continuation of the road they had abandoned in the cañon. The approaching car, then, could hardly be any other than that which was freighted with the men who had so long sought the death of Alan and his friend.

Startled into command of his faculties, Alan rose, took quick cognizance of such faculties for defence as the camp afforded, and issued his instructions.

Not far from the point where the road swung from the cliff to thread the camp the hydraulic nozzle was in action, its terrific force of water melting the mountainside away ton by ton. Toward this Barcus ran at top speed, gaining the men in charge of the nozzle just as the car swung round the bend.

Pausing only long enough to make certain that ​there could be no mistake, and having this certainty made doubly sure by Jimmy's action in rising from his seat and firing an ill-aimed revolver at Alan, Barcus and the miner swung the nozzle round until it bore directly on the car.

The power of its stream was so great that the car was checked in its tracks; and before the water could have been shut off or the stream diverted, the machine was driven back to the very lip of the cliff and over it, taking with it those twain upon whose efforts the hope of Seneca Trine of late had been centred. A death that was merciful, in that it was instantaneous, awaited them at the foot of the cliff.

CHAPTER XLVII
The New Judith

FROM sleep as from drugged stupour Judith Trine awakened, struggling back to consciousness like some exhausted diver from the black depths of a night-bound pool. At first she could not recognize her surroundings. This chamber of rough plank walls and primitive furnishings, this hard couch she shared with her still slumbering sister Rose, the view of tree-clad mountains revealed by an open window at the bedside, conveyed nothing to her intelligence.

A formless sense of some epochal change in the habits and mental processes of a lifetime added to her confusion. Who was she herself, this strange creature who rested there so calmly by the side of Rose? … If she were Judith Trine, how came she to be there? The sisters had sedulously avoided association with each other ever since childhood: they had not shared the shelter of four walls overnight since time beyond the bounds of Judith's memory! What, then, had so changed them both that they should be found in such close company?

​What, undeed, had become of that wild thing, Judith Trine of yesterday? Surely she had little enough in common with this Judith of to-day, in whose heart was no more room for envy, hatred, malice, or any uncharitableness, so full was it of love which, though focussed upon the person of one man, none the less embraced all the world—even her sister and successful rival.

And this was the work of Love!

She sighed, but sighed softly, that she might not disturb her sister; and in this very act of consideration emphasized the vastness of the change that had come over her. For a week ago to have roused Rose needlessly would have afforded Judith malicious delight: while to-day Judith was not only thoughtful of her sister's minor comforts, but stood prepared to sacrifice herself, to break her own heart with her own two hands, that Rose's happiness might be assured.

Now the chain of memories was complete. She recalled every incident that had marked the growth of this great love she had for Alan Law, from that first day, not yet a month old, when he had escaped the fiery death-trap she had set for him and repaid her only by risking his life anew to save her from destruction, down to this very morning, when the stream from a hydraulic nozzle had swept over the brink of a precipice the two desperate men bent upon compassing the death of her beloved.

​Alan Law might now be considered safe from further persecution, since there remained not one soul loyal enough to Seneca Trine to prosecute his private war of vengeance. And though that aged monomaniac had means whereby he might purchase other scoundrels, Judith was determined that he should never again have an opportunity to do so. If there were any justice in the land—if there were any alienists capable of discriminating between Trine's apparent sanity and his deep-rooted mania—then surely not many more days should pass into history without witnessing his consignment to an institution for the criminally insane.

She, Judith, would see to that, and then. …

She made a small gesture of resignation to her destiny. What became of her no longer mattered, so that Alan were made happy in such happiness as he coveted.

With the utmost care she rose from the bed, crept to the door of the room (now recognized as the quarters of the foreman of the hydraulic mining outfit) and out into the room adjoining. And there, pulling the door to gently behind her, she paused and stood in tense-strung contemplation of the man she loved—Alan Law—asleep in a chair beside a table, his head pillowed on his arms.

This was leave-taking between him and her—and he would never know.

​Far better so: Judith felt she could not trust herself to say farewell to him.

Like a thief she stole across the creaking floor to Alan's side, hesitated, bent her head to his and touched her lips to his cheek—a caress so slight that he slept on in ignorance of it.

Then, as she lifted her head, her bosom convulsed with silent sobs, she looked into the face of Rose.

CHAPTER XLVIII
The Old Adam

IT WAS as if the women had exchanged natures while they slept.

Rose threatened and Judith shrank!

The countenance that Rose showed her sister was a thunder-cloud rent by the lightning of her angry eyes. Her pose was like that of an animal set to spring. In her hand hung a revolver, and slowly the girl's grasp tightened upon the grip of the weapon and its muzzle lifted. Remarking this, a flash of her one-time temper quickened Judith.

"Well?" she taunted her sister. "Why don't you shoot?"

"What were you doing there?" Rose demanded.

"If you must know from me what you already know on the evidence of your eyes, I was bidding good-bye to the man I love, kissing him without his knowledge or consent before leaving him to you for good and all!"

"And so you leave him to me out of your charity! Is that it?"

"Any way you like. But if it's so intolerable to ​you to think that I dare love him and confess it to you, if you begrudge me the humiliation of stooping to kiss a man who doesn't want my kisses, if you are so afraid of losing him while I live and love him, very well, then!"

With a passionate gesture Judith tore open the bosom of her waist, offering her flesh to the muzzle of the revolver.

Just then the man at the table, startled from his sleep by the sound of angry voices, leaped from his chair with a violence that sent it clattering to the floor, and hurled himself headlong across the room, imprisoning the wrist of his betrothed with one hand while the other wrested the weapon away and passed it to Judith.

"Rose!" he cried thickly, "What does this mean? Are you mad? Judith——!"

Dragging the bosom of her waist together, Judith thrust the weapon into its holster and turned away.

"Be kind to her, Alan," she said in an uncertain voice, "she didn't understand and—and I goaded her beyond endurance, I'm afraid. Forgive me—but be kind to her always."

Somehow, blindly, she stumbled out of the cabin. into the open, possessed by a thought whose temptation was stronger than her powers of resistance. She had the pistol. … None, she told herself bitterly, would seek to hinder her. … But ​she meant so to arrange the matter that none should see or suspect and be moved to interfere. Round the shoulder of the mountain, on the road along the edge of the cliff, she was sure of freedom from observation.

Late though the afternoon hour was, the business of hydraulic mining still engaged the undivided attention of every man in the camp. None noticed the girl as she sped up the road toward the cliff—at least, if any one did, it was without remarking the symptoms of the hysteria which was at the bottom of this mad impulse toward self-destruction.

And yet, such is the inconsistency of the human animal, the instinct for self-preservation was stronger than her purpose: when a touring-car swung round the mountain and shot toward her she jumped aside hastily to escape being run down. The next instant the machine was lurching to a halt and the sonorous accents of Seneca Trine were saluting her.

"Judith! You here! Where've you been? Where are Marrophat and Jimmy? Haven't you seen or heard anything of them? They left me at six o'clock this morning, to go after——"

"Dead!" the girl interrupted, sententious, eying him strangely.

"Dead?" he echoed. "Who's dead?" A gleam of infernal joy lighted up his countenance. "You don't mean to tell me Alan Law——"

​"No," she cut him short. "I mean to tell you that Marrophat and Jimmy are dead."

"I don't believe it!" the old man screamed, aghast. "You're lying to me, you jade! You're lying——"

"I am not," she broke in coldly. "I am telling you the plain truth. … They caught up with us here, about noon—came up this road, shooting over the windshield. It was our life or theirs. We turned the hydraulic stream on them and washed the car over the cliff. If you don't believe me, get somebody to show you their faces."

She indicated with a gesture two forms that lay at a little distance back from the roadside, motionless beneath a sheet of canvas, the bodies of Trine's creatures, recovered by the mining gang and brought up for a Christian burial.

But Trine required no more confirmation of Judith's word. The light flickered and died in his evil old eyes; and despair followed realization that he no longer owned even one friend or creature upon whose conscienceless loyalty he might depend.

This, then, was the cruel fruition of his merciless hounding of Alan Law from the woods of northern Maine to the hills of southern California! ...

The last bitter drop that brimmed his cup of misery was added when Alan Law himself appeared, leaving the miners' cabin in company with his betrothed—Rose now soothed and comforted, smiling ​through the traces of her recent tears as she clung to her lover, nestling in the hollow of his arm. But this sight aroused Trine.

"Drive on!" he screamed to the chauffeur. "Drive on, do you hear?"

Judith had stepped up on the running-board and was eying the driver coldly, with one hand significantly resting on the butt of the weapon at her side. The car remained at a standstill.

"Where's Barcus?" Judith demanded, when, after helping Rose into the car and running back to thank their hosts, Alan returned alone to the car.

"Goodness only knows," the young man answered cheerfully. "He would insist on rambling off down the cañon in search of an alleged town where we could hire a motor-car. I daresay we'll meet him on his way back—or else asleep somewhere by the roadside!"

Taking the seat next the chauffeur, Alan gave the word to drive on, and the car slipped away from the mining-camp, saluted by cheers from the miners.

Half an hour passed without a word being spoken by any member of the party. Each was deep in his or her own especial preoccupation, Alan turning over plans for an early wedding, Rose hugging the contentment regained through her lover's protestations, Judith lost in profoundest melancholy, Trine nursing his rage, working himself up into a silent fury whose ​consequences were to be more far-reaching than he dreamed.

The aged monomaniac occupied the right-hand corner of the rear seat. Thus his one able hand was next to Judith, in close juxtaposition to the revolver in the holster on her hip. Without the least warning his left hand closed upon the weapon, withdrew it, and levelled it at the back of Alan's head.

As he pulled the trigger Judith flung herself bodily upon the arm. Even so, the bullet found a goal, though in another than the intended victim. The muscular forearm of the chauffeur received it. With a shriek of pain the man released the wheel and grasped his arm.

Before Alan could move to prevent the disaster the car, running without a guiding hand, cannoned off a low embankment to the left and shot full-tilt into a shallow ditch on the right, shelling its passengers like peas from a broken pod. Alan catapulted a good twenty feet through the air and alighted with such force that he lay stunned for several moments.

When he came to he found Barcus helping him to his feet, a heavy seven-passenger touring-car halted in the roadway indicated the manner in which his friend had arrived on the scene of the accident. When damages were assessed it was found that none of the party had suffered seriously but the chauffeur and Seneca Trine himself. The former had only his ​wound to show, however, while Trine lay still and senseless at a considerable distance from the wrecked automobile.

Nothing but a barely perceptible respiration and an intermittently fluttering pulse persuaded them that the flame of life was not extinct in that poor, old, pain-racked and twisted body.

CHAPTER XLIX
The Last Trump

TOWARD the evening of the third day following the motor spill, Judith sat in the deeply recessed window of a bedchamber on the second floor of a hotel situated in the heart of California's orange-growing lands.

Behind her Seneca Trine sat, apparently asleep, in a wheeled invalid chair.

There was no other occupant of the room.

Though he had lain nearly two days in coma, her father's subsequent progress toward recovery of his normal state had been rapid. Now, according to a council of surgeons and physicians who had been summoned to deliberate on his case, he was in a fair way to round out the average span of a sound man's lifetime. He had apparently suffered nothing in consequence of his accident more serious than prolonged unconsciousness. For the last twenty-four hours he had been in full possession of his faculties and (for some reason impossible for Judith to fathom) uncommonly cheerful.

From this circumstance she drew a certain sense ​of mystified anxiety. Twice in the course of the morning she had caught his eye following her with a gleam of sardonic exultancy, as though he nursed some secret of extraordinary potentialities. She was oppressed by a great uneasiness.

Perhaps (she reasoned) the weather was responsible for this feeling. The day had been unconscionably hot, without a breath of air. Now, as it drew toward its close, its heat seemed to become more and more oppressive even as its light was darkened by a vast pall of inky cloud shouldering up over the mountains to the music of distant rumblings.

Within another ten minutes the man Judith loved with all her body and soul would be the husband of her sister. She had told herself she was resigned, but she was not, and she would never be. Her heart was breaking in her bosom as she sat there, listening to the ever-heavier detonations of the approaching thunderstorm and to the jubilant pealing of a great organ down below.

She had told herself that, though resigned, she could not bear to witness the ceremony. Now as the moment drew near she found herself unable to endure the strain alone.

Slowly, against her will, she rose and stole across the floor to her father's chair.

His breathing was slow and regular, beyond doubt he slept; there was no reason why she should not ​leave him for ten minutes; even though he waked, it could not harm him to await her return at the end of that scant period.

She crept from the room, closed the door silently, ran down the hall, and descended by a back way, a little used staircase, to the lower hall, which was to be the scene of the marriage.

Constructed in imitation of an old Spanish Mission chapel, it contained one of the finest organs in the world; at this close range its deep-throated tones vied with the warnings of the storm. Judith, lurking in a passageway whose open door revealed the altar steps and chancel, was shaken to the very marrow of her being by the majestic reverberations of the music.

Since they had regained contact with civilization in a section of the country where the Law estate had vast holdings of land, the chapel was thronged with men and women who had known Alan's father and wished to honour his son. ...

Above stairs, in the room Judith had quitted, Seneca Trine opened both eyes wide and laughed a silent laugh of savage triumph when the door closed behind his daughter. At last he was left to his own devices, and at a time the most fitting imaginable for what he had in mind.

With a grin. Trine raised both arms and stretched them wide apart. Then, grasping the arms of his ​chair, he lifted himself from it and stood trembling upon his own feet for the first time in almost twenty years.

Grasping the back of the wheeled chair, he used it as a crutch to guide his feeble and uncertain movements. But these became momentarily stronger and more confident.

This, then, was the secret he had hugged to his embittered bosom, a secret unsuspected even by the attending surgeon: that through the motor accident of three days ago he had regained the use of his limbs that had been stricken motionless—strangely enough, by a motor-car—nearly two decades since.

Slowly but surely moving to the bureau in the room, he opened one of its drawers and took out something he had, without her knowledge, seen Judith put away there while she thought he slept. With this hidden in the pocket of his dressing-gown, he steered a straight if very deliberate course to the door, let himself out, and like a materialized spectre of the man he once had been, navigated the corridor to the head of the broad central staircase, and step by step, clinging with both hands, negotiated the descent.

The lobby of the hotel was deserted. As the ceremony approached its end, every guest and servant in the house was crowding the doorway to the chapel. None opposed the progress of this ghastly vision in ​dressing-gown and slippered feet, chuckling insanely to himself as he tottered through the empty halls and corridors, finding an almost supernatural strength to sustain him till he found himself face to face with his chosen enemy and victim.

The first that blocked his way into the chapel, a bell-boy of the hotel, looked round at the touch of the clawlike hand upon his shoulder, and shrank back with a cry of terror—a cry that was echoed from half a dozen throats within another instant.

As if from the path of some grisly visitant from the world beyond the grave, the throng pressed back and cleared a way for Seneca Trine, father of the bride.

And as the way opened and he looked toward the altar and saw Alan standing hand in hand with Rose while the minister invoked a blessing upon the union that had been but that instant consummated, added strength, the strength of the insane, was given to Seneca Trine.

When Alan, annoyed by the disturbance in the body of the chapel, looked round, it was to see the aged maniac standing within a dozen feet of him; and as he cried out in wonder, Trine whipped a revolver from the pocket of his dressing-gown and swung it steadily to bear upon Alan's head.

At that instant the storm broke with infernal fury upon the land.

A crash of thunder so heavy and prolonged that it ​rocked the building upon its foundations accompanied the shattering of a huge stained glass window.

A bolt of bluish flame of dazzling brilliance slashed through the window like a flaming sword and smote the pistol in the hand of Seneca Trine, discharging the weapon even as it struck him dead.

As he fell, the bolt swerved and struck two others down—Alan Law and the woman who had just been made his wife.

CHAPTER L
The Wife

AGAIN three days elapsed; and Judith, returning from the double funeral of her father and sister, doffed her mourning for a gown less sombre and more suited to the atmosphere of a sick-room, then relieved the nurse in charge of Alan.

He remained as he had been ever since the falling of the thunderbolt—in absolute coma.

But he lived, and—or the physicians lied—must soon regain consciousness.

Kneeling by his bedside, Judith prayed long and earnestly.

When she arose, it was to answer a tap upon the door. She admitted Tom Barcus and suffered him to lead her into the recess of the window, where they spoke in guarded tones.

"I've come to tell you something," Barcus announced with characteristic awkwardness. "I've known it for three days—ever since the wedding, in fact—and kept it to myself, not knowing whether I ought to tell you yet or not."

He paused, eying her uncertainly, unhappily.

​"I am prepared," Judith assured him calmly.

"You couldn't be. It's the most amazing thing imaginable. … See here …"

"Well?"

"You understand, don't you, that Alan must never know that Rose was killed by that lightning stroke?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean"—the man floundered miserably—"you see, he loved her so—I thought—I'm sure it would be best—if you can bring yourself to it—to let him go on believing it wasn't Rose who was killed, but Judith. And that's skating so close to the truth that it makes no difference: the Judith Alan knew and the Judith I knew in the beginning is gone as completely as though she and not Rose had been killed."

After a long pause, the girl asked him quietly: "I understand. But don't you see that, if I were to consent to this—lend myself to a deception which I must maintain through all my life to come—Alan would consider me his wife?"

"Well, but—you see—you are his wife. … Oh, don't think I'm off my bat: I'm telling you the plain, unvarnished truth. You are Alan's wife. … You remember that day in New York when you substituted for Rose, when Alan tried to elope with her, and you went with him to Jersey City, and stood up to be married by a preacher-guy named ​Wright—and Marrophat broke in just at the critical moment and busted up the party?"

"Well?" she demanded.

Barcus produced a folded yellow paper from his coat-pocket and proffered it.

"Read that. It was handed to me as best man just before the ceremony. Seeing it was addressed to Alan, and knowing he was in no frame of mind to be bothered by telegrams, I slipped it into my pocket and forgot all about it temporarily. When I came to find it, I took the liberty of reading it. But read it for yourself."

The typewritten lines of the message blurred and ran together almost indecipherably in Judith's vision. None the less she contrived to grasp the substance of its meaning:

"Why didn't you wire me sooner? Marriage to Rose impossible. Rev. Mr. Wright informs me your marriage to Judith last week was completed before Marrophat interrupted. Judith legally your wife. Would have advised you sooner had you let me know where to address you. Hope to heaven this gets to you before too late."

The message was signed with the name of Alan's confidential man of business in New York. ...

When Judith looked up, she was alone in the room, ​but for the silent patient on his couch. Slowly, almost fearfully, she crept to his bedside and stood looking down into the face of her husband. And while she looked Alan's lashes fluttered, his respiration quickened, a faint colour crept into his pallid cheeks, and his eyes opened wide and looked into hers.

His lips moved and breathed a word of recognition:

"Judith!"

With a low cry of tenderness, the girl sank to her knees and encircled his head with her arms.

"Judith," she whispered, hiding her face in his bosom, "Judith is no more. …"

A pause, then again the feeble voice:

"Then, if I was mistaken, if you aren't Judith, you must be Rose—my wife!"

She said steadily, "I am your wife."

His hands fumbled with her face, closed upon her cheeks, lifted her head until her eyes looked into his.

And for many minutes he held her so, looking deep into the soul of the woman.

Then quietly he said, "I know …"

THE END

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