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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.

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

"I am listening, sir."

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

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

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

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

"Go on, sir," the colonel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I ask you to consider—"

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

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

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

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

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

"Sir—"

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

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

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

The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.

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

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

Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the door he turned.

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

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

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

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

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

"He is gone," she said.

"Very well," he nodded, shortly.

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

"Impossible! nonsense!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VII

THROWING THE SCARE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I've heard of him."

"Well, he's in this country."

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

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

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

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

"I'd know him," Macdonald nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VIII

AFOOT AND ALONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chadron jerked his head in expression of lofty disdain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IX

BUSINESS, NOT COMPANY

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

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

"Es un extranjero," replied Maggie, forgetting her English in her excitement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then what'd you sneak—"

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

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

"I got him last night."

"You got—him?" Chadron lifted himself from his chair on his bent legs in the excitement of the news.

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

"The hell you say!"

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

"How did you do it?"

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

"Where did it happen at?"

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

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

"Fifty yards, more 'r less."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Huh!" Chadron grunted, noncommittally.

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

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

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

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

"If hell's got fire in it!"

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

"I'll hang around—"

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Earn it before you collect it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Grab your gun!" Chadron whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Drop that gun!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You'll have a chance, Thorn."

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER X

"HELL'S A-GOIN' TO POP"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Which?" said he.

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

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

"Put 'em up—high!" Dalton ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, he got away."

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

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



CHAPTER XI

THE SENOR BOSS COMES RIDING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course," said Nola, positively.

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

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

"No, I never did."

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

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

"How?"

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

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

"Oh, you little goose!" said she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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