The gambler regarded him evenly: "You're getting old, Ben."

"Not when it comes to doin' a turn f'r Jim."

Tenison literally swore the money on him. "Ride hard," he said. "An hour may make the difference."

Simeral listened to the injunction but he was putting the money away as slowly and carefully as if he never expected to see money again. This done, he hitched his trousers, shifted his quid, pushed his hat and followed Tenison across the room. He was so slow that Tenison was forced inwardly to smile at his own exasperation: "Never get nervous, do you, Ben?" he asked imperturbably.

"Nervous?"

Tenison, unlocking the street door of the long room, only stood by with his hand outstretched to speed his laggard messenger. The old man stepped out into the night. Tenison, looking after him, shook his head doubtfully. But he was doing what he could and he knew that though the old fellow walked slow, once in a saddle, he could ride fast; and that for Laramie, he would do it.



CHAPTER XXXIII

THE CANYON OF THE FALLING WALL

Laramie, after disposing of his prisoners, had ridden north with less of a hunted feeling experienced every time he mentally inventoried the rocks commanding the trail, the boulders looming ahead of him, and the cottonwoods through which he wound his way along the creek bottoms. And when at length he looked across Turkey creek, he was not surprised to see his cows straying down the hills toward their own range.

Even the bitter sight of the ruins of his cabin bore upon him less now that he had put Van Horn actually in jail for the trick. "You can't keep him there long," Tenison had cynically warned him.

"I've put the mark on him, if he's only there overnight," had been Laramie's reply. "He'll be a long time explaining. And I want you to notice, Harry, with all the fighting they've put me to, they've never got me locked up yet—not for a second. I guess for that," he added, reflecting, "I ought to thank my friends."

Never so much as that day had he realized how every aspect of his situation, as he viewed it, was colored by the thought of Kate Doubleday. If he were determined that despite any intrigue worked against him, he would never be locked up alive on a trumped-up charge, it was chiefly because of the disgrace of such a thing in her eyes. If he avoided opportunities now of finishing with Van Horn, he knew it was chiefly because of her. She would probably never see that finish, but she would hear the story of it from his enemies. Laramie was not at any time thinking merely of being justified in the last resort, nor of the justification of his friends, which would in any case be his. But what would Kate think?

Yet he knew what was ahead of him; he knew what lay at the end of the trail he and Van Horn were traveling. Lawing, as Sleepy Cat contemptuously termed it, was the least of it all and the most futile—yet in thinking of the other, her judgment was what he dreaded. This bore on him and perplexed him. It had, more than all else, put two little vertical furrows between his eyebrows; they were there often of late. Suppression of the feeling that had always and irresistibly drawn him toward her, had only intensified this worry. His pride had suffered at her hands; yet he made excuses for her—he had no high opinion of himself, of his general reputation—and had built dreams on the fanciful imagining that she should, despite everything, some day like him. He wearied his brain in recalling a chance expression of her eyes that could not have been unfriendly; an inflection of her voice that might have carried a hope, if only their paths had been less crossed: and his pride, despite rebuffs, sought her as a moth seeks a flame. It drew him to her and kept him from her, for he lacked for the first time in his life the boldness to stake everything on the turn of a card, and ask Kate to marry him.

Simeral had told him that John Frying Pan saw the cabin burning, and Laramie rode up to his place on the Reservation to talk with him. Failing to find him at home, Laramie left word with his wife and turned south. It was then late. The trail had taken him high up in the mountains and he made up his mind to ride over to the old bridge, stay for the night, pick up the few things he had left there and take them over to Simeral's in the morning.

Night had fallen when riding in easy fashion he reached the rim of the canyon and made his way from foothold to foothold until he came to an open ledge with grass and water for his horse, near the abutment. Leaving him in this spot, Laramie, carrying his rifle, climbed by a zig-zag footpath up a hundred feet to the shelter and rolled himself in a blanket for the night.

He woke at what he believed to be near midnight. The night was cold and he began to think about something to eat. With the aid of a candle he found bacon cached under a crevice in a baking-powder can near his bunk, and found some splinters of wood. These he laid for an early breakfast fire and wrapped himself again in his blanket. He had closed his eyes for another nap when a sound arrested his attention; it was the rumbling of a small piece of rock tumbling into the canyon.

Nothing was more common than for fragments, great and small, of the splintered canyon walls to loosen and start in the silence of the night. As mountain trees withstand the winter winds only to fall in summer calms, so it seemed as if the masses of rock that hung poised on the canyon rim through countless storms, chose the stillest hour of the stillest night to ride like avalanches the headlong slopes, plunge over dizzy cliffs and crash and sprawl in dying thunders from ledge to ledge into the river below. All these noises, big and little, were familiar to Laramie's ears. He could hear them in his sleep without losing the thread of a dream; but the echo of a single footstep would bring him up sitting.

The sound that now caught his attention had a still different effect. Listening, he lay motionless in his blanket with every faculty keyed; had a man at that moment stood before him reading his death warrant, he could not have been more awake. The noise was slight; only a small fragment of rock had fallen and the echoes of its journey were lost almost at once; it was the beginning of the sound that he was thinking of—the noise had not started right. He thought of the four-footed prowlers of the night and as a cause eliminated them one after another. He thought of his horse below—it was not where such a sound could start. But always slow to imagine a mystery when a reason could be assigned, Laramie, lying prone, was brought back every time to his first instinctive inference. Numberless times when tramping the canyon walls, his foot slipping before he recovered his balance had dislodged a bit of loose rock. He knew that sound too well and it was such a sound he had just heard. Behind the sound he suspected there was a man.

He tried long to reason himself out of the conviction. For an hour he lay perfectly still, waiting for some further alarm. There was none and the night was never stiller. Nor was there any haste, even if it should prove the worst, about meeting the situation. He was caught not like a rat in a trap but like a man in a blind canyon, with ample means of defense and none of escape except through a gauntlet. No enemy could molest him where he lay, but he could not lie there indefinitely. And with little ammunition and scarcely any food or water, he had no mind to stand a siege.

If his enemies had actually discovered his retreat and put a watch on him, he must in any event wait for the first peep of daylight. The one chance of escape lay down and not up, and the descent of the canyon was not to be made in complete darkness. A moon would have been a godsend. It would have made things easy, if such a word could be used of the situation; but there was no moon. Acting on his premonition as if it had been an assurance, Laramie, at the end of a long and silent vigil, rolled out of his blanket to save his life if he could. He lighted his breakfast fire and fried his bacon unconcernedly. He could neither be rushed nor potted and if there was a touch of insolent bravado in his seeming carelessness he was well aware that while the appetizing odors of a good breakfast would not tantalize an enemy believing himself master of the situation, it would make him believe he had taken the quarry unawares.

Below, he felt that all was safe—no one without passing him could possibly reach his horse.

By the time the eastern sky warned him of the coming dawn he had crawled to the edge of the abutment to look down and estimate his chances for dropping to the narrow ledge on which it stood footed. Then he crawled noiselessly toward the overhead break through which Kate had plunged. The sky was alive with stars. Worming himself close to the opening, he lay for a time patiently scrutinizing the rocks commanding the abutment from above. One of these long vigils disclosed, he fancied, against the sky the outline of a man's hat.

To satisfy himself if it were one, Laramie picked up a chip of rock and flung it down the canyon wall. The suspicious object moved. Laramie slowly took up his rifle and leaning forward raised it to his shoulder. Against the eastern sky the man's head made a perfect target. It was close range. Laramie covered the hat low. The bullet should penetrate the brim just where it covered the forehead. His finger moved to press the trigger before he thought further. Then he hesitated.

It seemed on reflection like murder, nothing less. He did not know the man, though he was no doubt an enemy who had come either to kill him or to help kill him. And to his natural repugnance to blowing off the top of an unknown man's head even in constructive self-defense, there was the thought of another's view of it. This might, after all, be merely a Texan acting as a lookout. It was even possible, though improbable, that it might be Barb himself. And if the man were not alone less would be gained by killing him.

The rifle came down from Laramie's shoulder as slowly as it had gone up. He made immediate disposition for his escape. Retreating noiselessly from the opening, he found his blanket, cut from it four strips, knotted these into a rope and creeping to the face of the abutment, lowered his rifle, ammunition belt and revolver down to the footing some twenty feet below, where they hung in darkness. For himself there was nothing but to drop after his accoutrements. At one point the horizontal footing ledge below jutted out in a blunt tongue something like six feet; this tongue was where he must land; elsewhere the ledge narrowed to only a foothold for a sober man already on it.

Laramie found an old mackinaw of Hawk's, put it on over his coat, and padding his back under it with the pieces into which he tore a quilt, strapped the mackinaw tight and returned to look over the ledge. He thought he knew precisely where the tongue lay, but wanted a little daylight to dispel any misgiving about letting go at a point where he might drop two hundred feet instead of twenty.

From the abutment the depths of the canyon looked in the half light pretty black, but its recesses hid no terrors of sentiment for Laramie. Fairly serene and stuffed in his baggy mackinaw, he lay for a few minutes flat on his stomach peering over the edge. Far below he could hear the rush of the river. Day was racing toward the mountain tops and diffusing its reflected light into their recesses. The rock tongue below outlined itself faintly in an almost impenetrable gloom. Waiting no longer, Laramie, with a careful hand-hold, let himself down over the face of the abutment and hung for an instant suspended. Loosing one hand he swung sidewise and threw back his head. The fingers of the other hand, straightened by his weight, let go.

Falling like a plummet, one of his heels smashed into the rocky gravel and he struck the ledge on his back. With such instinct as the swift drop left him he threw himself toward the canyon wall when he landed and, shocked though he was, tried to rise.

He could not get a breath, much less move. His mind remained perfectly clear, but the fall left him momentarily paralyzed. His efforts to regain his breath, to make himself breathe, were astonishingly futile, and he lay annoyed at his helplessness. It seemed as if minute after minute passed. Listening, he heard sounds above. Daylight was coming fast and every ray of it meant a slenderer chance of escape.

To his relief, his lungs filled a little. Soon they were doing more. He found he could move. He turned to his side, and, beginning life over again, crawled on hands and knees to where his belt, revolver and rifle hung suspended. He stood up, got out of the mackinaw, adjusted his belt and revolver, and with his rifle resting across his forearm looked around. He was battered and had a stinging ankle, but stood with legs and arms at least usable. Listening, he tiptoed as fast as he could to the narrow footpath leading into the canyon, and turning a corner of the rock wall hastened down to where he had picketed his horse. This trail was not exposed from above. But when he reached his horse and got stiffly into the saddle his problem was less simple.

To get out of the tremendous fissure in which he was trapped from above, Laramie had one trail to follow. This led for a hundred feet in an extremely sharp descent across the face of a nearly vertical canyon wall that flanked the recess where the horse had been left. This first hundred feet of his way down to the river, so steep that it was known as the Ladder, was all that caused Laramie any uneasiness; it was commanded every foot of the way from the abutment above.

Making all possible haste, Laramie headed his horse stealthily for the Ladder. He knew he had lost the most precious juncture of the dawn in lying paralyzed for some unexpected moments after his drop. It was a chance of war and he made no complaint. Indeed, as he reached the beginning of his trail and peered downward he realized that he needed daylight for the perilous ride. To take it slowly would be child's play for him but would leave him an easy target from above. To ride it fast was to invite a header for his horse and himself; one misstep would send the horse and rider bolting into space. How far it was to the river through this space Laramie felt little curiosity in figuring; but it could hardly have been less than two hundred and fifty feet.

There was no time for much thinking; the trail must be ridden and the sooner and faster the better. He struck his horse lightly. The horse jumped, but not very far ahead. Again Laramie used his heels and again the frightened beast sprung as little as he could ahead. A stinging lash was the only reward for his caution. If horses think, Laramie's horse must have imagined himself backed by a madman, and under the goading of his rider, the beast, quivering with fear, peered at the broken rocks below and sprang down among them. Concealment was no longer possible.

Like a man heading into a hailstorm, Laramie crouched to the horse, dropped the reins low on the beast's neck, and, clinging close, made himself as nearly as he could a part of the animal itself. The trail was five to six feet wide, but the descent was almost headlong, and down it the horse, urged by his rider, sprang in dizzy leaps; where the footing was worst Laramie tried to ease his frantic plunges. Stricken with terror, the beast caught his breath in convulsive starts and breathed in grunting snorts. Halting and bucking in jerky recoveries; leaping from foothold to foothold as if every jump were his last, and taking on a momentum far beyond his own or his rider's control, the frightened pony dashed recklessly ahead. It was as if a great weight, bounding on living springs, were heading to bolt at length against the sheer rock wall across the canyon.

Half the distance of the mad flight, and the worst half, was covered when a rifle cracked from the top of the abutment. Laramie felt a violent blow on his shoulder. There was no possible answer; there could be no more speed—no possible defense; the race lay between the rifle sights covering him and the four slender hoofs of the horse under him. Ten yards more were covered and a second rifle shot cracked crisply down the canyon walls. Laramie thought it from a second rifle; the bullet spat the wall above his head into splinters. They were shooting high, he told himself, and only hoped they might keep trying to pick him off the horse and let the horse's legs alone. None knew better than he exactly what was taking place above; the quick alarm, the fast-moving target in the gloomy canyon; the haste to get the feet set, the rifle to the shoulder, the sights lined, the moving target followed, the trigger pressed.

It was a madman's flight. As one or other of the rifles cracked at him, Laramie threw himself back in the saddle. With his hat in his hand, his arm shot straight up, and pointing toward the abutment he yelled a defiant laugh at his enemies. In an instant the hat was knocked from his fingers by a bullet; but the springing legs under him were left untouched. The trick for the rider now was, even should he escape the bullets, to check the flight of the horse before both shot over the foot of the Ladder into the depths. Laramie threw his weight low on the horse's side next the canyon wall and spoke soothingly into his ear as his arms circled the heaving neck.

And on the rim of the precipice, high above, two active men, bending every nerve and muscle to their effort, stood with repeating rifles laid against their cheeks, pumping and firing at the figure plunging into the depths below.



CHAPTER XXXIV

KATE GETS A SHOCK

Late that afternoon a stable boy from Kitchen's barn appeared at Belle's, making inquiries for Doctor Carpy. Kate heard Belle at the door answering and asking questions, but the messenger was not able to answer any questions; his business was to ask only. When Kitchen himself came over a little later there was more talk at the door, this time in low tones that left Kate in ignorance of its purport. But the moment Kitchen went away, Belle, never equal to hiding an emotion, passed with compressed lips and set face through the room in which Kate sat sewing. Kate looked up as Belle walked toward the kitchen and noticed the tense expression—fortunately she asked no questions. After some vigorous moments in the kitchen, evidenced by the sound of a creaking bread-board, sharp blows at the stove lids and an unabashed slamming of the stewpans, Belle passed again through the room carrying a plate covered with a napkin, and evidently going somewhere.

Kate felt compelled to take notice: "Where you bound for, Belle?" she asked.

"Not far. But if I don't get back, don't wait supper," was the only answer. The manner rather than the matter of it puzzled Kate as she bent over her work. But the next moment she was alone and thinking about her own troubles.

Half an hour passed rapidly on her sewing—for Kate's fingers were quick—and Belle returned more perturbed than when she left. She gave Kate hardly a chance to question her.

"Why didn't you eat your supper?" she demanded.

Kate answered unconcernedly: "I wasn't hungry—it isn't late, is it?"

Without answering the question Belle asked another. "Kate," she said, unpinning her hat as she spoke, "how long you going to stay here?"

A less sensitive person than Kate could hardly have mistaken the import of the question. She flushed as she looked up. "Why, surely no longer than you want me, Belle," she answered, as evenly as she could; but her voice showed her surprise. Belle stood before her, a statue of implacability and Kate, in growing astonishment, rose to her feet: "What is it? What has happened?" she asked, then as her wits worked fast: "Doesn't my father wish you to keep me?"

"I'm not thinking about what your father wants. Things are getting too thick here for me." Kate made no effort to interrupt. "I don't say I don't like you, Kate—I've always treated you right, or tried to," continued Belle, laboring under evident excitement. "But it's no use shutting our eyes any longer to facts. You're Barb Doubleday's daughter and Barb Doubleday is making war all the time on my friends and hiring men to assassinate them, and it doesn't seem right to me and it won't to other people, me sheltering Barb Doubleday's daughter with such things going on——"

"But, Belle——"

Belle raised her voice one key higher: "You needn't tell me, I know. Now they're trying to murder Jim Laramie and they've close to done it, this day——"

Belle had received and accepted strict injunctions of secrecy on the next point she disclosed, but her feelings were not to be denied. And she was not prepared for the question that Kate, stung by the accusation, flung at her: "What do you mean?"

"I mean he's lying near here bleeding to death this minute and Doctor Carpy in Medicine Bend."

In tones broken with anger and excitement, Belle told the disconnected story as it had come to her in jerks and nods and oaths from McAlpin at the barn, and in the little she had pulled out of Laramie himself when she took food to him. Then came in terribly heated words the brunt of her anger at Kate. "You knew," she said, pointing her finger at Kate, standing stupefied. "You knew where Jim Laramie hid Hawk. Nobody else did know—not even Lefever or Sawdy knew—I didn't know till you told me. Now, after they've burned his cabin, they set a death watch there at the bridge on Laramie. How did they know there was such a place if you didn't tell 'em?"

Stunned by the fire of Belle's wrath, Kate, breathless, tried to collect her senses. It was only her anger at the final implication that cleared them. But even as her words of indignant denial reached her lips, her utterance was paralyzed by the recollection that unwittingly she had told her father of the night she was thrown into Laramie's retreat. Yet even this did not check her resentment.

"Who accuses me of telling them?" she demanded. "Who says I conspired to murder anyone—did Mr. Laramie say so?"

She shot the question at Belle in a furious tone. Her eyes flashed in a way that confounded her accuser.

"I'm asking you how they found out," retorted Belle, but in spite of herself on the defensive.

Kate's face was set and her eyes were on fire. All the anger that a woman could feel centered in her words and manner. "Answer my question before you say another word." She confronted Belle without yielding. "Did Jim Laramie accuse me in any way of anything?"

"Oh, you needn't be so high and mighty," flustered Belle. "I'll answer your question; no. Now you answer mine, will you?"

"How can I answer how they found out? I will not say another word until I see Mr. Laramie—where is he?"

"You can't see him—nobody knows he is here—he won't talk to you."

Kate paid no attention to her words: "He'll have to tell me that himself," she returned. "If he is near here—he must be at Kitchen's."

Belle could say nothing to check or swerve her. Taking up her hat and ignoring all warnings, Kate walked straight over to the barn. She found McAlpin at the stable door: "I want you to take a message for me to Mr. Laramie," she said, speaking low and collectedly. "Ask him if he will see Kate Doubleday for just two minutes."

McAlpin, in all his devious career, had never passed through more or quicker stages of astonishment, confusion, poise and evasion than he did in listening to those words. But at pulling his wits together, McAlpin was a wonder. By the time Kate had finished, his innocent question was ready: "Where is he?"

"He is here. I must see him at once."

"But I ain't seen him myself for a week. He's not here. Who told you he's here?"

"Belle," persisted Kate calmly, "told me he is here. I must see him. Don't deceive me, McAlpin—do just as I ask you, no more, no less."

"No more, no less, sure," grumbled the Scotchman. "You gives me one kind of orders—the boss gives me another kind. I can't do no more, I can't do no less. I can't do nothin'—I've got a family to support and all this damned rowing going on, a man's job is no safer nowadays in this country than his head!"

But words were not to save him. Kate persisted. She would not be put off. McAlpin, swearing and protesting, could in the end only offer to go see whether he could by any chance find Laramie. After a long trip through the winding alleys of the big barn—for Kate watched the baseball cap and crazy vizor as long as she could follow it—then complete disappearance for a time, McAlpin came back to Kate, immovable at the office door, his face wreathed with a surprised smile.

He spoke, but his eyes were opened wide and his words were delivered in a whisper; mystery hung upon his manner: "Come along," he nodded, indicating the interior. "Only say nothing to nobody. He's hit—there's all there is to it. Here's all I know, but I don't know all: About three hours ago Ben Simeral was riding up the Crazy Woman when he seen a man half dropping off his horse, hat gone, riding head down, slow, with his rifle slung on his arm. Simmie seen who it was—Jim Laramie. He looked at horse 'n' man 'n' says: 'Where the hell you bin?' 'Where the hell 'a' you been,' Laramie says, pretty short. 'Ridin' all over this'—excuse my rough language, Kate—'blamed country, lookin' f'r to tell you Van Horn and Stone's out o' jail!'

"Laramie seen then from the ol' man's horse how he'd been ridin' 'n' softened down a bit. 'So I heard, Simmie,' he says. 'Who'd you hear it from?' says Simmie. 'Direct, Simmie,' he says. 'Did they pot y', Jim?' 'Nicked my shoulder, I guess.' 'Where you goin'?' 'To town.' 'Man,' says Simmie, 'you've lost a lot o' blood.' 'Got a little left, Simmie.'

"Then John Fryin' Pan c'm along. Simmie tried to ride to town with Laramie—f'r fear he'd fall off his horse. Laramie wouldn't let neither of 'em do a thing. 'This is my fight,' he says. But Simmie and John Fryin' Pan scouted along behind and Simmie rode in ahead near town to tell me Laramie was comin'. God! He was a sight when he rode into this barn. He tumbled off his horse right there"—McAlpin pointed to a spot where fresh straw had been sprinkled—"just like a dead man. I helped carry him upstairs," he whispered. "I'll take y' to him. But y' bet your life"—the grizzled old man stopped and turned sharply on his companion—"y' bet your life some o' them niggers bit the dust some'eres this morning. This way."

Kate, pacing McAlpin's rapid step breathlessly, hung on his half-muttered words: "He's bleedin' to death," continued McAlpin; "that's the short of it, and that blamed doctor down at Medicine Bend. I don't think much o' that man. Can't none of us stop it. Where's this goin' to end?"

He led her by roundabout passages, up one alley and down another, and at last opened the door of an old harness room, waited for Kate to follow him inside and, closing the door behind her, spoke: "I didn't want you to have to climb a barn ladder," he said, explaining. "There's the stairs." He pointed in the semi-darkness and led her toward the flight along the opposite wall. At the top of this flight light fell from a square opening in the hay-mow.

"Walk up them stairs—I lifted the trap-door f'r ye. He's right up there at the head of the steps. When y' come down, open this door at the foot, here. It's a blind door; don't show on the other side. See, it's bolted. It takes you right into the office. We keep it bolted from the inside, so no trouble can't come, see?" He unbolted and opened the door a crack to show her, closed and rebolted it. Then starting her up the stairs, McAlpin jerked the crazy vizor on his forehead into a fashion once more simulating child-like frankness and disappeared by the way he had come.



CHAPTER XXXV

AT KITCHEN'S BARN

To be so summarily left alone and in such a place was disconcerting. Kate, in the semi-darkness and silence, put her foot on the first tread of the steps and, placing her hand against the wall, looked upward. Not a sound; above her a partial light through a trap-door and a wounded man. She stood completely unnerved. The thought of Laramie wounded, perhaps dying, the man that had rescued her, protected her, in truth saved her life on that fearful night—this man, now lying above her stricken, perhaps murdered, by her own father's friends! How could she face him? Only the thought that he should not lie wounded unto death without knowing at least that she was not ungrateful, that she had not wittingly betrayed him, gave her strength to start up the narrow steps.

When her head rose above the trap opening the light in the large loft seemed less than it had promised from below. There were no windows, but through a gable door, partly ajar, shot a narrow slit of daylight from the afterglow of the sunset. Kate caught glimpses of a maze of rafters, struts and beams and under them huge piles of loose hay. Reaching the top step she paused, trying to look about in the dim light, when Laramie, close at hand, startled her: "McAlpin told me you wanted to see me," he said. She could distinguish nothing for a moment. But the low words reassured her.

"I'm lying on the hay," he continued, in the same tone. "If you'll open the door a little more you can see better."

Picking her way carefully over to it, Kate pushed the door open somewhat wider and turned toward Laramie.

He lay not far from the stairs. The yellow light of the evening glow falling on his face reflected a greenish pallor. Kate caught her breath, for it seemed as if she were looking into the face of death until she perceived, as he turned his head, the unusual brightness of his eyes.

In her confusion what she had meant to say fled:

"Are you very much hurt?" she faltered.

"Far from it." He spoke slowly. If it cost him an effort none was discernible. "Coming into the barn tonight," he went on, very haltingly, "I had a kind of dizzy spell." He paused again. "I've been eating too much meat lately, anyway. They say—I fell off my horse; leastways I bumped my head. I'll be all right tomorrow."

"Belle told me there had been a fight up at the canyon bridge," Kate stammered, already at a loss to begin.

A sickly yellow smile pointed the silence. "I wouldn't call it exactly a fight," he said, dwelling somewhat on the last word. "Far from it," he repeated, with a touch of grimness. "There was some shooting. And some running." She could see how he paused between sentences. "But if the other fellows ran it must have been after me. I didn't pay much attention to who was behind. I had to make a tolerable steep grade down the Falling Wall Ladder to the river. I was on horseback and didn't have much leisure to pick my trail."

"And they shooting at you from the rim!"

"Well, they must have been shooting at something in my general direction. I guess they hit me once. I didn't mind getting hit myself, but I didn't want them to hit my horse. I was heading for the bottom as fast as the law would allow. If they'd hit the horse, I wouldn't have had much more than one jump from the rim to the river. Can't ask you to sit down," he added, "unless you'll sit here on the hay."

Without the least hesitation Kate placed herself beside him. Without giving her a chance to speak and in the same monotone, he added: "Who told you I was a gambler?"

Less than so blunt and unexpected a question would have sufficed to take her aback. And she was conscious in the fading light of his strangely bright eyes fixed steadily on her. "I don't remember anybody ever did. I——"

"Somebody did. You told Belle once."

"It must have been long ago——"

"Is that the reason you never acted natural with me?"

She flushed with impatience. But if she tried to get away he brought her back to the subject. Cornered, she grew resentful: "I can't tell who told me," she pleaded, after ineffectual sparring. "I've forgotten. Are you a gambler?" she demanded, turning inquisitor herself.

He did not move and it was an instant before he replied: "What do you mean," he asked, "by gambler?"

Kate's tone was hard: "Just what anybody means."

"If you mean a man that makes his living by gambling—or hangs around a gambling house all the time, or plays regularly—then I couldn't fairly and squarely be called a gambler. If you mean a man that plays cards sometimes, or has once in a while bet on a game in a gambling house, then, I suppose"—he was so evidently squirming that Kate meanly enjoyed his discomfort—"you might call me that. It would all depend on whether the one telling it liked me or didn't like me. I haven't been in Tenison's rooms for months, nor played but one game of poker."

"I despise gambling."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why should I?"

"In one sense everybody's a gambler. Everybody I know of is playing for something. Take your father and me: He's playing for my life; I'm playing for you. He's playing for a small stake; I'm playing for a big one."

She could not protest quick enough: "You talk wildly."

"No," he persisted evenly, "I only look at it just as it is."

"Don't ask me to believe all the cruel things said of my father any more than you want me to believe the things said of you. I am terribly sorry to see you wounded. And now"—her words caught in her throat—"Belle blames me even for that."

"How on earth does she blame you for that?"

Despite her efforts to control herself, Kate, as she approached the unpleasant subject, began to tremble inwardly with the fear that it must after all be as Belle had rudely asserted—that her father was behind these efforts against Laramie's life. For nothing had shaken her tottering faith in her father more than the blunt words Laramie himself had just now indifferently spoken.

"If I am in any way to blame, it is innocently," she hurried on. "I will tell you everything; you shall judge. My father was bitterly angry when he learned I had been seen at Abe Hawk's funeral. I told him about my getting lost, about falling into the place at the bridge—how you did everything you could and how Abe Hawk had done all he could. He was so angry he would listen to nothing——" she stopped, collected herself, tried to go on, could not.

"Oh, I hate this country!" she exclaimed. "I hate the people and everything in it! And I'm going away from it—as far as I can get. But I wouldn't go," she said determinedly, "without seeing you and telling you this much."

Laramie spoke quietly but with confidence: "You are not going away from this country."

Kate had picked up a stem of hay and looking down at it was breaking it nervously between her fingers. "You will have to hurry up and get well if I stay," she said abruptly. "I'm beginning to think you are the only friend I have here. And," she added, so quickly as to cut off any words from him, "I've told you everything. I only hope my speaking about the hiding place at the bridge when father was angry with me—and only to defend myself—was not the cause of this."

She was close beside him. "Can it be," she asked, "that this was how it happened?" He heard her voice break with the question.

"No," he blurted out instantly.

"Oh," she cried, "I'm so thankful!"

Listening to her effort to speak the words, he was not sorry for what he had said. "If you're going to lie," Hawk had once said to him, cynically, "don't stumble, don't beat about the bush—do a job!" The moment Kate told her story, Laramie knew exactly how he had been trapped. But why blame her? "It's the first time I ever lied to her," he thought ruefully to himself. "It's the first time she ever believed me!"

"Does Belle know you quarreled with your father?" he asked, to get away from the subject.

"No," she answered, steadying herself.

"She said you'd been acting sort of queer."

"I can't tell people my troubles."

"Why did you tell me?"

"You might die and blame me."

"Who says I'm going to die?"

"They were afraid you might."

"Well, I don't like to disappoint anybody, but dying is a thing a man is entitled to take his time about."

"Can't I do something till the doctor comes?"

He turned very slowly on his side. Kate made an attempt to examine his shoulder. She was not used to the sight of blood. The clotted and matted clothing awed and sickened her. Even the hay was blood-soaked, but she stuck to her efforts. Supplementing the rude efforts of McAlpin and Kitchen to give him first aid, she cut away, with Laramie's knife, the bullet-torn coat and shirt and tried to get the wound ready for cleansing. "I'm so afraid of doing the wrong thing," she murmured, fearfully.

"I don't care what you do—do something," he said. "Your hands feel awful good."

"I've nothing here to work with."

"All right, we'll go to the drug store and get something." After stubborn efforts he got on his feet and insisted on going down the stairs. Nothing that Kate could say would dissuade him. "I've been here long enough, anyway," was his decision. "I'm feeling better every minute; only awfully thirsty."

Kate steadied him down the dark stairs, fearful he might fall over her as she went ahead. Secrecy of movement seemed to have no significance for him. If his friends were disturbed, Laramie was not. He evidently knew the harness room, for he opened the blind door with hardly any hesitation and stepped into the office. The office was empty but the street door of the stable was open. McAlpin stood in the gang-way talking to some man who evidently caught a glimpse of Laramie, for he said rudely and loud enough for Kate to hear: "Hell, McAlpin! There comes your dead man now!"

Kate recognized the heavy voice of Carpy and shrank back. The doctor, McAlpin behind him dumbly staring, confronted Laramie at the door: "What are you doin' here, Jim?" he demanded.

"What would I be doing anywhere?" retorted Laramie.

"Go back to your den. This man says you're dying."

"Well, I'm not getting much encouragement at it—I've been waiting for you three hours to help things along. I'm done with the hay."

"Looking for a feather bed to die in. Some men are blamed particular." As he spoke Carpy caught his first glimpse of Kate. "Hello! There's the pretty little girl from the great big ranch. No wonder the man's up and coming—what did you send for me for, McAlpin? Where you heading, Jim?"

With his hands on the door jambs, Carpy effectually barred the exit. Knowing his stubborn patient well, he humored him, to the verge of letting him have his own way, but with much raillery denied him the drug store trip. A compromise was effected. Laramie consented to go to Belle's to get something to eat. In this way, refusing help, the obdurate patient was got to walk to the cottage.

"Don't let him fall on y'," McAlpin cautioned Kate, as the two followed close behind. "I helped carry him upstairs. He's a ton o' brick."

But Laramie, either incensed by his condition—the idea of any escort being vastly unpleasant to him—or animated by the stiff hypodermics of profanity that Carpy injected into the talk as they crossed the street, did not even stumble; he held his way unaided, met Belle's amazement unresponsively and, sitting down, called for something to eat.

"How does he do it, Doc?" whispered McAlpin, craning forward from the background.

"Pure, damned nerve," muttered Carpy. "But he does it."

They got him into bed. While the doctor was excavating the channel ripped through his shoulder, Laramie said nothing. When, however, he discovered that Kate was missing, he crustily short-circuited Belle's excuses. Words passed. It became clear that Laramie would start out and search the town if Kate were not produced.

"She wanted to see me," he insisted, doggedly. "Now I want to see her."

Carpy found he must again intervene. He despatched McAlpin as a diplomatic envoy over to his own house whither he had taken Kate as his guest when she peremptorily declined to return to Belle's.



CHAPTER XXXVI

MCALPIN AT BAY

However others may have felt that night about Laramie's affairs, one man, McAlpin, was proud of his ride, desperately wounded, all the way to town. Laramie had made a confidant of no one but Kate. His experience in being trapped was not so pleasant that he liked to talk about it and neither McAlpin's shrewd questioning nor Carpy's restrained curiosity was gratified that night.

In the circumstances, McAlpin's fancy had full play; and distrustful of his imagination unaided, he repaired early to the Mountain House bar to stimulate it. Thus it gradually transpired along the bar, either from the stimulant or its reaction or from McAlpin's excitement, that a big fight had taken place that morning in the Falling Wall from which only Laramie had returned alive. It was known that he had come back and inference as to who the dead men might be could center only on his two active enemies, Tom Stone and Harry Van Horn. The pawky barn boss, who possessed perfectly the art of tantalizing innuendo, thus stirred the bar-room pool to the depths.

McAlpin chose the rustler's end of the bar—as Abe Hawk's old stand was called—and held the interest of the room against all comers. As the place filled for the evening, his cap, its vizor more than ordinarily awry, was a conspicuous object and it became a favor on his part to accept the courtesies of the bar at any man's hands.

"I knowed how it had to end," he would repeat when he had rambled again around all aspects of the mysterious encounter. "I knowed if they kept after Jim how it had to end. Why, hell, gentlemen," he would aver, planting a hob-nailed barn boot on the foot-rail, while swinging on one elbow from the polished face of the mahogany, "I've seen the boy stop a coyote on the go, at 900 yards—what could you expect? No, no, not again. What? Well, go ahead; just a dash o' bitters in mine, Luke. Thank you.

"Well, boys, accordin' to my notion, there's two men never would be missed in this country, anyway, if nobody ever seen 'em again. 'N' if my count is anywhere near right, nobody ever will see 'em again. They chased Laramie one foot too far—just one foot—'n' it looks as if they got what was comin' to 'em. I won't name 'em—they won't bother no more in this country."

He had become so absorbed in his recital that the entrance into the bar-room from the barber shop of a booted and spurred man escaped him. The man, advancing deliberately, heard the last of McAlpin's words. He got fairly close to the unsuspecting barn boss unobserved. A few in the listening circle, noting the approach of the new arrival, stepped back a little—for, of all men that might be expected, after McAlpin's dark intimations, to appear, then and there, alive and aggressive, was Tom Stone.

Freshly barbered, head forward, keen eyes peering from under staring, sandy brows; thumbs stuck in his belt and his face framing a confident leer. Stone sauntering forward, listened to McAlpin. So intent was McAlpin on impressing his hearers that the foreman elbowed his way, before McAlpin saw him, directly to the front.

"So you won't name 'em?" grinned Stone, confronting the startled speaker. McAlpin caught his breath. The wiry Scotchman was not a coward, but he knew the merciless cruelty of Stone. Armed, McAlpin would have been no man to affront his deadly skill; he now faced him unarmed.

Stone, leaving his right hand hooked by the thumb in his belt, rested his left elbow on the bar. The bartender, Luke, just back of him, leaning forward, mopped the bar more slowly and, listening, moved a little farther down the bar until his fingers rested on an electric button underneath connecting with Tenison's office in the hotel.

"Name the two men, McAlpin," said Stone, ominously, "while you're able to talk."

McAlpin exhausted his ingenuity in his efforts to evade his danger, but Stone drew the noose about him tighter and tighter. He played the unlucky man with all the malice of an executioner. He baited him and toyed with him. McAlpin, white, stood his ground. His fighting blood was all there and he broke at length into a torrent of abuse of the man that he realized was bent on murdering him.

Made eloquent by desperation, McAlpin never rose to greater heights of profane candor. It was as if he were making his last will and testament of hatred and contempt for his murderer, and when he had showered on his enemy every epithet stored in a retentive memory he struck his empty glass on the bar and shouted:

"Now, you hellcat, shoot!"

It might have been thought Stone would check such a public castigation. He did not. Impervious to abuse, because master of the situation, he seemed to enjoy his victim's fury. "I'm finishing up with your gang around here, McAlpin," he snarled, never losing his grin. "You've run a rustler's barn in Sleepy Cat long enough. I've warned you and I've warned Kitchen. It didn't do no good. Fill up your glass, McAlpin."

"Stone, I'd never fill up a glass with you if I was in hell 'n' you could pull me out."

Stone's grin deepened: "Fill up your glass, McAlpin."

Onlookers, knowing what a refusal would mean, held their breaths. But McAlpin, white and stubborn, with another oath, again refused.

"Fill it, McAlpin," urged a quiet voice behind the bar. Looking quickly, like a hunted animal, around, McAlpin saw Harry Tenison, white-faced and cold, pushing the bottle in friendly fashion toward him. Every man, save one, watching, hoped he would humor at least that much his expectant murderer. But the barn-boss had reached a state of fear and anger that inflamed every stubborn drop in his blood. He swore he would not fill his glass.

Tenison spoke grimly: "Will you drink it if I fill it, you mule?" he demanded, picking up the bottle and pouring into both glasses in front of him.

In the dead silence McAlpin's brain was in a storm. He collected a few of his wildly flying thoughts. Perhaps he remembered the wife and Loretta and the babies; at all events he stared at the liquor, gulped to see whether he could swallow, and, reaching forward, picked up the glass. Stone lifted his own. The two men, their glasses poised, eyed each other.

Stone barbed a taunt for his victim: "Goin' to drink, air you?" he sneered, wreathing his eyes in leering wrinkles.

"No," said a man, unnoticed until then by any except Tenison and Luke, and speaking as he pushed forward through the crowd to face both Stone and McAlpin. "He's not going to drink."



Stone's glass was half-way up to his lips; he looked across it and saw himself face to face with Jim Laramie. Laramie who, unseen, had heard enough of the quarrel, stood with his coat slung over his right shoulder; one arm he carried in a sling, but as far as this concerned Stone, it was the wrong arm. Daring neither to raise the whisky to his lips nor to set the glass down, lest Laramie, suspecting he meant to draw, should shoot, Stone stood rooted. "McAlpin's not going to drink, Stone," repeated Laramie. "What are you going to do about it?"

The mere sight of Laramie would have been a vastly unpleasant surprise. But to find himself faced by him in fighting trim after what had taken place in the morning was an upset.

"What am I going to do about it?" echoed Stone, lifting his eyebrows and grinning anew. "What are you going to do about it, Jim?" he demanded. "You and me used to bunk together, didn't we?"

"I bunked with a rattlesnake once. I didn't know it," responded Laramie dryly. "Next morning the rattlesnake didn't know it."

"Jim, I'll drink you just once for old times."

"I wouldn't drink with you, Stone. No man would drink with you if he wasn't afraid of you. And after tonight nobody's going to be afraid of you. You're a thief among thieves, Tom Stone: a bully, a coward, a skulker. You shoot from cover. When Barb made you foreman, you and Van Horn stole his cattle, and Dutch Henry sold 'em for you and divvied with you. Then, for fear Barb would get wise, you and Van Horn got up the raid and killed Dutch Henry, so he couldn't talk.

"Now you're going to quit this stuff. No more thieving, no more man-killing, no bullyragging, no nothing. Tenison will clear this room. Hold your glass right where it is, till the last man gets out. When he gets out set down your glass; you'll have time enough allowed you. After that, draw where you stand. You're not entitled to a chance. God, Stone, I'd rather bunk with a rattlesnake than with you. I'd rather kill one than kill a thing like you. Your head ought to be pounded with a rock. You're entitled to nothing. But you can have your chance. Get the boys out of here, Harry."

Not for one instant did he take his eye off Stone's eye, or raise his tone above a speaking voice, and Laramie's voice was naturally low. To catch his syllables, listeners crowded in and craned their necks. Few men withdrew but everyone courteously and sedulously got out of the prospective line of fire.

What it cost Laramie even to stand on his feet and talk, Tenison could most shrewdly estimate. From behind the bar he coldly regarded the wounded man. He knew that Laramie must have escaped Carpy and escaped Belle, to look for the men that had tried that morning to kill him. Having found Stone he meant then and there to fight.

Tenison likewise realized that he was in no condition to do it, and promptly intervened: "Don't look at me, Jim," he said. "But I'm talking. There's no man in Sleepy Cat can clear this room now. Most of this crowd are your friends. They want to see this hell-hound cleaned up. But you know what it means to some of 'em if two guns cut loose."

Stone saw the gate open. He welcomed a chance to dodge. Eyeing Laramie, he swallowed his drink, set his glass on the bar. With a voice dried and cracked, he cried: "Keep your hands off, Tenison. I'll give Jim Laramie all the fight he wants, here or anywhere."

Tenison was willing to bridge the crisis with abuse. "Shut up, you coyote," he remarked, with complete indifference.

"You'll throw a man down no matter how much of your whisky he drinks, won't you, Tenison?" cried Stone.

Tenison, both hands judicially spread on the bar, seemed to fail to hear. "McAlpin," he said contemptuously, "walk around behind Laramie and lift Stone's gun."

Stone started violently. "Look out, Tenison! I lift my gun when there's men to stand by and see fair play!"

A roar of laughter went up. "I don't lift it for no frame-up," he shouted, turning angrily toward the unsympathetic crowd. "Get out!" cried one voice far enough back to be safe. "Send for Barb," shouted a second. "Page Van Horn," piped a barber, as Stone moved toward the door.

The baited foreman turned only for a parting shot at Laramie: "I'll see you later."

"If I was your friend," retorted Laramie, unmoved, "I'd advise you not to. If you ride my trail don't expect anything more from me. And I make this town," he hammered home the point with his right forefinger indicating the floor, "and the Falling Wall range my trail."

"Stone ought to have tried it tonight," observed Tenison at the cash register. He was speaking to his bartender long after Stone had disappeared, Laramie had been put to bed again and the billiard hall had been deserted. "He'll never get a chance again at Laramie half shot to pieces."



CHAPTER XXXVII

KATE BURNS THE STEAK

Laramie, held for a week in bed, learned from the Doctor of Belle's outburst at Kate, and, acting through him and with him, arranged peace.

Complaining of a cold, with her other troubles, Belle took to bed when Laramie was moved to the hotel and Kate turned in to nurse her.

"You won't starve while she stays, Belle," declared Carpy, leaving Kate in possession at the cottage, "and while I think of it," he added, turning to Kate, "Laramie says he wants to see you. You call him up on the telephone, will you?"

"What for, doctor?"

"To oblige me, girl. I want to hold that fellow in his room a few days more and keep his arm in a sling. He's no easier to handle than a wildcat."

Kate looked perplexed: "What shall I say to him?"

Carpy stood at the door with his hand on the knob: "Jolly him along—you know how. He says he's coming down here for dinner tonight. Tell him Belle's sick."

Belle listened. The more Kate considered the mandate, the more confusing it seemed. But she rang up the hotel, called for Laramie and heard presently a man's voice in answer.

"Is this Mr. Laramie?" she asked.

"It is not," was the answer.

"Isn't he there?"

"No."

"Can you tell me when he will be in?"

"He won't be in."

She sighed with impatience: "I want to speak to him. And I think this is he speaking. You know very well who I am," she persisted.

"I do."

"And I know very well who you are."

"In that you may be mistaken."

"Surely I'm not mistaken in believing Mr. Laramie a gentleman."

"But you are mistaken in believing any person by that name here."

"There is a person there who loves to persecute me, isn't there?"

"There is not."

"Is there one there that likes to have his own way?"

"No more than you like to have your own way."

"Is there a man named Jim there?"

"Speaking, Kate."

"I've a message from Belle."

"What is the message?"

"She is in bed with a cold and fever and wants you not to come tonight. As soon as she is up she will let you know."

Belle held her peace till Kate left the telephone. "I can't make Doctor Carpy out," she grumbled. "If he didn't want Jim Laramie to come down here what did he ask you to call him up for? If he doesn't know any more than that about doctoring," she added, contemptuously, "I'd hate to take his medicine."

She waited for Kate's comment but Kate possessed the great art of saying nothing. "I guess," continued Belle, at length, "it's time to take that pill he left, but I guess I won't take it. What do you think about it?" she asked, referring again to Carpy.

Kate was not to be drawn out: "I found out a long time ago that Doctor Carpy doesn't tell all he knows," she observed dryly. "But I do know he wants Mr. Laramie to stay in his room. He says his shoulder will never heal if he doesn't keep still."

Belle made no response, but when Laramie knocked at the door in the evening she knew who it was. Kate received him.

Talking in leisurely fashion to her, he walked to the door of Belle's room, looked in, wanted to know whom she had been fighting with and asked if she would get up and get supper for him.

He carried his right arm at his side with the thumb hooked into his belt: "Where's your sling?" demanded Belle, tartly. Laramie pulled it out of his pocket: "I put it on when Carpy comes around," he explained.

"You keep fooling around the streets this way and they'll get you sometime," said Belle, tartly.

He turned the remark: "That idea doesn't seem to worry me as much as it used to. Have I got to cook my own supper?"

This venture after discussion was assumed by Kate. She put on her hat to go across the street to get a steak. Laramie insisted on going with her. She asked him not to.

"Why not?" he asked.

Kate was keyed up with apprehension: "Why take chances all the time?" she asked in turn. "Someone might shoot from the dark."

Belle answered for him: "Nobody in this country would shoot a man when a woman's with him," she said. "Go along."

The butcher stumping in from the back room to wait on them showed no surprise at the two from hostile camps asking for one steak, but he tried so hard to watch the pair and to hear what they were saying that he nearly ruined one quarter of beef before he got what Kate wanted. What he finally cut off and trimmed looked more like a roast than a steak but neither customer seemed disturbed by this.

Laramie paid, over indignant protests, and placing the package in the loop of his left arm, opened the shop door for his companion. He passed out behind her in excellent spirits. The butcher, looking after them, took his surreptitious pipe from his pocket, watched the shop door close, shook his head and ramming the burnt tobacco down hard with the finger that lacked the first joint, stumped back to his lonely stove.

The kitchen was farthest removed from Belle's room. Laramie started the fire with kerosene. When he lighted it there was a flare-back that alarmed Belle in her bed, but she could hear nothing of what was going on in the kitchen. While the supper was being cooked, Laramie stood on the other side of the stove from his enemy's daughter, watching every move. If Kate walked over to the cupboard, his eyes followed her step—she walked with such decision and planted her heels so fast and firm. If she turned from the stove to the table, his eyes devoured her slenderness in amazement that one so delicately proportioned could so crowd everything else out of his head. It seemed as if nothing before had ever been shaped like her ankles—there was so little of them to bear uncomplainingly even so slight a figure—and Kate was by no means diminutive.

As the supper progressed, Laramie watched almost in awe the short-arm jabs she gave the meat on the broiler. The cuffs of her shirtwaist, half back to her elbows, revealed white arms tapering to wrists molded like the ankles, and hands that his eyes fed on as a miser's feed on gold. The blazing coals flushed her cheeks and when she looked up at him to answer some foolish question her own eyes, flushed and softened by the heat, took on an expression that stole all the strength he had left. When she asked him how he liked it, he exclaimed, "Fine," and Kate had to ask him whether he liked the steak well done or rare.

"Any way you like it," he stammered, "but lots of gravy."

As he watched her laugh at his efforts to help her by picking up the hot platter, a sense of his own clumsiness and size and general roughness overcame him. She was too far removed, he told himself, from his kind to make it possible for her ever to like him.

The closer he got to her daintiness and spirit and laughter, the more hopeless his wild dreams seemed. Whenever she asked if the steak were cooked enough, he suggested—to prolong the pleasure of watching her hands—that she give it one more turn. Every moment he saw something new to admire. While she was attending to the meat he could look at her hair and see where the sun had browned her pink throat and neck. As the broiling drew near an end, almost a panic gripped Laramie. The happiest moments of his life had been spent there at the stove. They were slipping away. She was lifting the steak the last time from the fire. He asked her to turn it once more.

"Why, look at it," she exclaimed, "it's burnt up now; hold the platter closer."

It brought him closer in spirit than he had ever been to heaven, to feel her elbow brush against his own, as she deftly landed the smoking steak on the platter while Laramie held it.

A great melancholy overcame him: "What do you want me to do?" he said suddenly.

Kate's eyebrows rose. She looked at him: "Why, set it on the table," she laughed.

"No, I mean what do you want me to do—myself."

She could not wholly misunderstand his look, though little did he realize how she feared it; or what a dread respect she secretly had for the grave eyes so closely bent on her own. She laughed really to gather courage, and it was easy to laugh a little because he did look so odd as he stood before her, with the platter in both hands, but terribly in earnest. "Set the platter on the table before you burn yourself," she pleaded.

"You must want me to do something," he persisted, "get off the earth or stay on it—now, don't you? Say what you want me to do, and, by——" He checked himself. "And I'll do it."

She could restrain him but she could not turn him. He did put the platter on the table without getting any answer but now that his mind was set, it reverted stubbornly to the one subject and when supper was over and they sat opposite each other in the little dining-room talking, she said she knew he had burned his hands. "I wouldn't mind if I had," he remarked frankly. "Almost every time I've talked with you I've held the hot end of a poker; I'm getting to look for it." He drew a deep breath. "You never liked me, did you, Kate?"

"That isn't so."

"You always kind of held off."

"Perhaps I was a little afraid of you."

"You're not afraid of me now—are you—with one arm out of commission? Are you?"

She looked at him in a troubled sort of way: "Why, no—not very," she returned, half laughing.

"You were never half as much afraid of me as I was of you," he murmured.

His eyes across the table were growing very importunate. She could not realize how flushed and soft and tantalizing her own eyes were, framed by the warm color high in her cheeks. She rose with a hurried exclamation and looked dismayed at him, her hands tilted on the table, her brows high and her burning eyes still laughing: "We've left the light on by the stove all this time," she whispered. "Belle will be furious!"

She slipped hurriedly out into the kitchen and turned off the light. Her face was hot. She was thirsty and stepping to the water faucet she picked up a glass. The mountain water tasted so cold and good; in some way it made her think of great peaks and the crisp, clear air of his home far up among them. She had not realized how heated she was. "Do you want a drink?" she called back to the dining room.

He was standing directly behind her. She turned only to stumble against him and before she knew what had happened he was raining kisses on her resisting cheeks. Then his lips found hers and, faint with the moment, she resisted no more.

After a long time she got one hand around his neck and laid the other across his mouth: "Don't make so much noise," she whispered wildly. "Belle will hear us!"



CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE UNEXPECTED CALL

The hush that followed the brain storm in the kitchen put Belle, quite unsuspecting, to sleep. Laramie, with a tread creditable to a cat—and a stealth natural to most carnivorous animals—closed the door without breaking her heavy breathing. The shades, always drawn at nightfall, called for no attention. In the living-room, there was preliminary tiptoeing, and there were futile efforts on Kate's part to cool her rebellious cheeks by applying her open hands to them—when she could get possession of either one to do so. The small couch which served as sofa was drawn out of range of even the protected windows, and the floodgates were opened to the first unrestrained confidences together.

When they could talk of more serious things, Kate could not possibly see how she could marry him; but this, in the circumstances, seemed to cause Laramie no alarm. She admitted she had tried not to like him and confessed how she had failed. "Every time I met you," she murmured, "you seemed to understand me so well—you knew how a woman would like to be treated—that's what I kept thinking about."

"You used to talk and laugh with Van Horn," he complained, jealously. "When I came around, I couldn't drag a smile out of you with a lariat."

"You're getting a smile now that he isn't getting, aren't you?"

"Somehow you never acted natural with me."

"Jim!" It was the word he most wanted to hear, even if the reproach implied the quintessence of stupidity. "Don't you understand, I wasn't afraid of him, and I was of you!"

"And I only trying to get a chance to eat out of your hand!"

"How could I tell—after all I used to hear—but that you'd begin by eating out of my hand and finish by eating me?"

He had to be told every word of her troubles at home, but her uneasiness turned to the dangers threatening him. These, she protested, he belittled too much. Ever since he had come in wounded she had been the prey of fears for him. "It's a mystery how you escaped." He had to tell every detail of his flight down the canyon. "By rights," he said in conclusion, "they ought to have got me. No man should have got out of that scrape as well as I did. Van Horn didn't get into action quick enough. And it seemed to me as if Stone himself was a little slow." The way he spoke the things strengthened her confidence. And his arm held her so close!

"I'll tell you, Kate," he added. "You can easy enough hire a fellow to kill a man. But you can't really hire one to hate a man. And if he doesn't really hate him, he won't be as keen on your job as you'd be yourself. These hired men will booze once in awhile—or go to sleep, maybe. It's work for a clear head and takes patience to hide in the rocks day after day and wait for one certain man to ride by so you can shoot him. If you doze off, your man may pass while you snore. And the kind of man you can hire isn't as keen on getting a man as the man himself is on not getting 'got'—that's where the chance is, sometimes, to pull out better than even."

Because his aim was to reassure, to relieve her anxiety, he did not tell her that all the unfavorable conditions he had named, while never before arrayed against him at one time, were now pretty much all present together. Kate herself, he knew, stood more than ever between him and Van Horn. Stone had been twice publicly disgraced by Laramie at Tenison's—he would never forgive that. He had the patience of the assassin and when hatred swayed him he did not sleep—these were still, Laramie knew in his heart, bridges to be crossed.

But why spoil an hour's happiness with the thought of them now? Laramie drew his hand across his heated forehead as if to clear his eyes and look again down into the face close to his and assure himself he was not really dreaming. "What do I care about them all, Kate," he would say, "now that I've got you? No, now that you've given yourself to me—that's what I'll say—what do I care what they do?"

But she would look up, sudden with apprehension: "But don't you think I care? Jim, let's leave this country soon, soon."

Laramie laughed indulgently: "Somebody'll have to leave it pretty soon—that's certain."

A rude knock at the door broke into his words. Kate threw her hands against his breast. She stared at him thunderstruck, and sprang from the sofa like a deer, looking still at him with wide-open eyes and then glancing apprehensively toward the door.

Laramie sat laughing silently at her get-away as he called it, yet he was not undisturbed.

Nothing, in the circumstances, could have been less welcome than any sort of an intrusion. But a knock at the door, almost violent, and coming three times, stirred even Laramie's temper.

The door was not locked. Laramie rose, his fingers resting on the butt of his revolver, and stepping lightly into the dining-room, turned down the lamp. He stood in the shadow and beckoned Kate to him. His face indicated no alarm.

"This may be something, or it may be nothing. You step into the kitchen. I'll go to the door."

She clung to him, really terror-stricken, begging him not to go. As he tried to quiet her fears the heavy knock shook the flimsy door the second time. Kate, declaring she would go, would not be denied. Laramie told her exactly what to do.

She reached the door on tiptoe and stood to the right of it. The key was in the lock. Kate, reaching out one hand, turned the key. With the door thus locked and standing close against the wall she called out to know who was there. Laramie had followed behind her. He stepped to where he could look from behind the window shade out on the porch. He turned to Kate just as an answer came from outside, and signed to her to open. Standing where she was, Kate turned the key swiftly back in the lock and threw the door wide open.

Stooping slightly forward to bring his hat under the opening, and looking carefully about him, her father walked heavily into the room.

Laramie had disappeared. Kate, dumb, stood still. Barb closed the door behind him, walked to the table, put down his hat and turned to Kate. "Well?" he began, snapping the word in his usual manner, his stupefied daughter struggling with her astonishment. "You don't act terrible glad to see me."

Kate caught her breath. "I was so surprised," she stammered.

"What are you staying in town so long for?" demanded Barb. His voice had lost nothing of its husky heaviness.

She answered with a question: "Where else have I to stay, father? I've been waiting for money to get East with and it hasn't come yet."

"What do you want to go East for?"

"I've nowhere else to go."

"Why don't you come home?"

"Because you told me to leave."

He sat slowly down on a chair near the table and with the care of a burdened man.

"Well," he said, "you mustn't take things too quick from me nowadays." She made no answer. "I've had a good deal of money trouble lately," he went on, "everything going against me." He spoke moodily and his huge frame lost in the bulk of his big storm coat overran almost pathetically the slender chair in which he tried to sit. His spirit seemed broken. "I reckon," he added, taking his hat from the table and fingering it slowly, "you'd better come along back."

She was sorry for him. She told him how much she wished he would give up trying to carry his big load, and she urged him to take a small ranch and keep out of debt. He laid his hat down again. He told her he didn't see how he could let it go, but they would talk it over when she got home.

This was the point of his errand that she dreaded to meet and putting it as inoffensively as possible she tried to parry: "I think," she ventured, "now that I've got some clothes ready and got started, I'd better go East for awhile anyway."

"No." His ponderous teeth clicked. "You'd better wait till fall. I might go along. Tonight I'll take you out home. Put on your things and we'll get started."

She did not want to refuse. She knew she could not consent. She knew that Laramie in the shadow, as well as her father in the light, was waiting for her answer: "Father," she said at once, "I can't go tonight."

"Why not?" was the husky demand.

"Belle is sick in bed," pleaded Kate.

"Is that the only reason?"

She saw he was bound to wring more from her. "No," she answered, "it isn't, father."

"What else?"

"I'm afraid——" she hesitated, and then spoke out: "I can't come back—not just as I was, anyway."

"Why not?"

"It's too late, father."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"When I come back from the East," she spoke slowly but collectedly, "I expect to go into a new home."

"Where?"

"In the Falling Wall."

For a moment he did not speak, only looked at her fixedly: "What I've heard's so, then?" he said, after a pause.

"What have you heard?"

"The story is you're going to marry Jim Laramie."

Kate, in turn, stood silently regarding her father, and as if she knew she must face it out.

"Is that so?" he demanded harshly.

She burst into tears, but through her tears the two men heard her answer: "Yes, father."

Barb picked up his hat without wincing: "I guess that ends things 'tween you and me." He started uncertainly for the door.

"Father!" Kate protested, taking a quick step after him as he passed out. "You don't do him justice. You don't know him."

But slamming the door shut behind him, he cut off her words. If they reached his ears he gave them no heed.



CHAPTER XXXIX

BARB MAKES A SURPRISING ALLIANCE

By a happy chance, on the night of Laramie's great hour, Sawdy and Lefever returned from Medicine Bend. It was late when they arrived—into the early morning hours, in fact, and at the Mountain House the bar was not only closed but securely closed—barricaded against just such marauders. Even the night clerk had gone to bed. But this was less of an embarrassment, for the two adventurers, turning on the lights, took his pass keys from the drawer and, opening the doors of one room after another in the face of a variety of protests, kept on till they found satisfactory quarters that "seemed" unoccupied—quarters in which at least the beds were unoccupied.

The hardy scouts slept late. They breakfasted late, in what Sawdy called the hotel "ornery," and while they were reducing the visible supply of ham and eggs, Tenison walked in on them to ask about complaints made at the office by indignant guests whose privacy had been invaded during the night. Rebuffed on this subject, all knowledge being disclaimed, Tenison was called on for the story of events since the two had been away, and of these Laramie's escape from the canyon came first. Tenison reported further, in confidence, Laramie's success with Kate. Had the news provided every man in the Falling Wall with a brand-new wife, it could not have been more to the humor of Sawdy and Lefever.

Sawdy rose and stretched himself from the waist down to make sure his legs touched the floor: "I've got to have a good cigar on that," he declared. "Take away, Mabel." He nodded courteously to the waitress. "Harry, we had the dustiest trip I ever seen in my life," he added, as with his companions he left the table. "The old Ogallala trail wasn't a marker to it. Why, the dust was a mile deep. My tonsils are plumb full of it yet."

Not everyone in Sleepy Cat was so quick to credit the news that Kate Doubleday was going to marry Jim Laramie. The cattlemen sympathizers looked grumpy, when approached on the subject. They preferred not to talk, but if taunted would retort with an intimating oath: "That show ain't over yet."

"Jim Laramie acts as if it was, anyway," grumbled Belle, when the butcher told her what they were saying. In fact, all of Laramie's intimates were out of patience with him when he announced he was going to rebuild the cabin on his Falling Wall ranch and live there.

"Wait till this cattle fight is over," they would urge.

"It is over," he would retort. And heedless of their protests, he spent his time getting his building materials together.

"What do you want me to do?" he demanded, stirred at length by Belle's remonstrances against going back to the Falling Wall. "I've got to live somewhere. Danger? Why, yes—maybe. But I can't keep dying every day on that account. Here in town a man was run over just the other day by a railroad train."

Kate said little either way. She heard all that Belle could urge and held in her heart all the men said. But when Jim asked her what she wanted to do she told him, simply, whatever he wanted to do. Then Belle would call her a ninny, and Laramie would kiss her, and Belle in disgust would disappear.

There came one morning the crowning sensation in the suspense of the situation. Barb Doubleday drove into town in the buckboard, headed his team into Kitchen's barn to put up and gave McAlpin a cigar.

An earthquake, where one had never been known, could not have stirred the town more. When McAlpin ran up street to the Mountain House to be first with his news, he was reviled as a vender of stories calculated to start a shooting.

But McAlpin, with a cigar in his mouth—where no cigar, except a free cigar, was ever seen—his face bursting red with import, stuck to his guns. He walked straight to the billiard room bar, and attracted attention by brusquely ordering his own drink. This, it was known, always meant something serious.

When Sawdy saw the commotion about the barn boss, he walked in and after listening began a stern cross-examination.

"Explain?" McAlpin echoed scornfully. "I don't explain. No, he wasn't drinking! Nor he wasn't crazy!" McAlpin took the burning cigar from his mouth. "That's the cigar he give me, right there—and a bum one. Barb never smoked a good one in his life—you know that, Henry? I don't explain—I drink. Hold on!" he exclaimed, as he emptied his glass with a single gulp. He was looking across the street and pointing. "Who's that over there comin' out of the lumber yard with Barb Doubleday right now—blanked if it ain't! It's Jim Laramie, that's who it is."

Doubleday had in fact run into Laramie in the lumber yard. With nothing more than a greeting, he opened his mind: "I want a talk with you, Jim," he said bluntly. "Where's Kate?"

Not even the freedom of the bar fully established could hold McAlpin after he had seen Laramie and Doubleday walk out of the lumber yard and start down Main Street together. McAlpin had the reputation of having missed no important shooting in Sleepy Cat for years. He had been witness in more than one inquest and did not mean to imperil his importance by slacking now. As he hastened out to trail the long-day bitter enemies, he was framing in his mind the preliminary answers for the coroner. He would be compelled to testify, he felt, that the dead man had showed no sign of intoxication or excitement when he drove his team into the barn—for in the circumstances, the barn boss already figured Barb as the inevitable victim.

Thus ruminating, he trailed the unsuspecting pair as far as Belle's. At Belle's without sign of heated argument, they knocked and entered the cottage together. This left McAlpin across the street with nobody but the butcher to talk to, while he listened intently for the first shot.

Lefever was bolder. He followed the two men unceremoniously to Belle's porch and bluffed Belle herself into admitting him to the living room. Laramie had gone into the back part of the house to hunt up Kate; Barb, alone, sat in the rocking chair, chewing an unlighted cigar.

Lefever greeted the big cattleman effusively; Barb's response was cold. He looked Lefever over critically: "What'you doing?" he asked, without warm interest in any possible answer.

"Buying a relinquishment now and again, Barb."

"Railroad man, eh?" muttered Barb, irrelevantly.

"No, no. I've quit that game; I've got a claim up near you. I'm going to try to live the life of a small but dishonest rancher, Barb."

"You ought to do well at that, eh?"

"Why, yes and no. But I'm thinking, if I can't figure out the game, some of my neighbors can help me catch on—what?"

Barb's retort—if he had one—to Lefever's continued laugh, was cut off by Laramie's entrance with Kate. John saw that he was de trop, that it was a family conference, and only extracting from Laramie a promise to see him—about nothing whatever—before leaving town he made what he termed a graceful getaway. Kate and Laramie faced her father. Belle, too, was for going out. Doubleday stopped her: "No secrets, Belle; stay if you want to."

All sat down. Kate was for a chair, but Laramie domineering, made her sit with him on the sofa. Barb spoke first: "This Falling Wall fight is off," he began briefly. "Anyway, I quit on it. I've got to, Jim. The settlers there are in to stay," declared Barb philosophically. "They've got to be reco'nized." The settlers, in this instance, meant Jim Laramie, since practically everyone else had been driven or frightened out. But all understood what was intended; for if the fighting ceased the park would fill up.

"Since yesterday," Doubleday went on, "I've found out something else." He was speaking directly to Laramie. "That man Stone," he exclaimed, "has been robbing me."

The old man paused. No one made any comment. Abe Hawk had long ago told Laramie as much. "He's been misbranding on me—him and that rascally Van Horn have been selling my steers to the railroad camps on the Reservation. I've got the evidence from some Indians that came over yesterday with the hides. Last night," continued the victim coolly, "I fired Stone. He went right over to Van Horn's. I told him that's where he belongs. I'm through with 'em both."

"Why don't you have 'em arrested?" demanded Belle.

"I might, yet," muttered Barb vaguely.

Laramie held his peace; but even Kate realized that would never do. "Jim and me has had our differences," added Barb, "but they're ended. If you two get married——"

"There ain't goin' to be any 'if,' Barb," interposed Laramie, "there's just going to be 'married,' and married right off."

"Well, that's for you and the girl to say; but when you say it, you've got to have a house to live in. I met Jim," added her father, speaking now to Kate, "over in the lumber yard this morning. When you get your house up, turn the bill in to me."

Kate's kisses confused and stopped her father. Belle made ready a good dinner. The four ate together. Belle was excited, Kate happy and Laramie content. But for the old man it was somehow hard to fit in. Having had his say, he relapsed into grim silence and taciturn responses. Even his presence would have repressed Belle but for Kate's happy laugh. She looked at her father, talked to him, thought of him, studied him, and throwing off lingering doubts—for she never felt she quite knew her father—enjoyed him, eating as he was in peace with her husband-to-be.

When Laramie's cigars were lighted after the dinner, Barb seemed to feel more at his ease. He told stories of his old railroad days and laughed when Kate and Belle and Laramie laughed. Later, his daughter and his new son-in-law walked up street with him. They went with him on his errands and then to the barn. McAlpin, personally, hitched up the ponies, both in compliment to a new customer and to hear every word that passed in the talk.

"Damme," he muttered to the hostler in the harness room, "y' can't get around old Barb. Look at him. What do I mean? Don't he fight Laramie five years 'n' get licked? Now he turns him into his son-in-law and gets the Falling Wall range anyway—can y' beat it? Coming right along, sir!" he shouted, as Barb in the gangway bellowed for more speed. And with a flutter of activity, real and feigned, McAlpin and his helper fastened the traces.

When ready, the wiry team and the long narrow buckboard looked small for Barb, who cautiously clambered into the seat and gingerly distributed his bulk upon it. Laramie had taken the reins from McAlpin; he passed them to Barb who, as he squared himself so as not to fall off his slender perch, was huskily demanding when Laramie and Kate would be out. At the last minute, Kate insisted on and was given, a good-by kiss. She and Jim promised to go out next day. Barb spoke to the horses. They jumped half-way out of the barn. Kate, with Laramie following, hurried forward to see her father drive away.

The broad back, topped by the powerful shoulders and neck, and the big hat bobbing up and down with the spring of the buckboard, the little team plunging at their bits, and her father heedless of their antics—all this was a familiar sight, but never had it been so pleasing. The setting sun touched with gold the thin cloud of dust that rose from the wheels. It was the close of a beautiful day and it had been next to the happiest in her life, Kate thought, while she stood, watching and thinking. The ponies reaching a turn in the road dashed ahead and her father disappeared.



CHAPTER XL

BRADLEY RIDES HARD

The evening was spent at Belle's. Lefever came in late with congratulations. He told them about his trip and the wonders.