Frances could see in her lively imagination the frightened maid's gesture toward the colonel's office door. Now the girl's feet sounded along the hall in hasty retreat as Chadron laid his hearty knock against the colonel's panels.

Frances smiled behind her friend's back. The impatient disregard by civilians of the forms which her father held in such esteem always was a matter of humor to her. She expected now to hear explosions from within her father's sacred place, and when the sound failed to reach her she concluded that some subordinate hand had opened the door to Chadron's summons.

"I'll hurry"—Nola dashed into her own room, finishing from the door—"I want to catch him before he goes and find out what's wrong."

Frances went below to see about breakfast for her tardy guest, a little fluttering of excitement in her own breast. She wondered what could have brought the cattleman to the post so early—he must have left long before dawn—and in such haste to see her father, all buckled about with his arms. She trusted that it might not be that Alan Macdonald was involved in it, for it was her constant thought to hope well for that bold young man who had heaved the homesteaders' world to his shoulders and stood straining, untrusted and uncheered, under its weight.

True, he had not died in defense of her glove, but she had forgiven him in her heart for that. A reasonable man would not have imperiled his life for such a trifle, and a reasonable woman would not have expected it. There was a great deal more sense in Alan Macdonald living for his life's purpose than in dying for a foolish little glove. So she said.

The white gossamer fichu about her throat moved as with a breath in the agitation of her bosom as she passed down the stairs; her imperious chin was lowered, and her strong brown eyes were bent like a nun's before the altar. Worthy or unworthy, her lips moved in a prayer for Alan Macdonald, strong man in his obscure place; worthy or unworthy, she wished him well, and her heart yearned after him with a great tenderness, like a south wind roaming the night in gentle quest.

Major King, in attendance upon his chief, had opened the door to Saul Chadron at the colonel's frowning nod. Without waiting for the password into the mysteries of that chamber, Chadron had entered, his heavy quirt in hand, gauntlets to his elbows, dusty boots to his knees. Colonel Landcraft stood at his desk to receive him, his brows bent in a disfavoring frown.

"I've busted in on you, colonel, because my business is business, not a mess of reportin' and signin' up on nothing, like your fool army doin's." Chadron clamped with clicking spurs across the severe bare floor as he made this announcement, the frown of his displeasure in having been stopped at the door still dark on his face.

"I'm waiting your pleasure, sir," Colonel Landcraft returned, stiffly.

"I want twenty-five troopers and a cannon, and somebody that knows how to use it, and I want 'em right away!"

Chadron gave the order with a hotness about him, and an impatience not to be denied.

"Sir!" said Colonel Landcraft, throwing his bony shoulders back, his little blue eyes growing very cold and unfriendly.

"Them damn rustlers of Macdonald's are up and standin' agin us, and I tell you I want troopers, and I want 'em on the spot!"

Colonel Landcraft swallowed like an eagle gorging a fish. His face grew red, he clamped his jaw, and held his mouth shut. It took him some little time to suppress his flooding emotions, and his voice trembled even when he ventured to trust himself to speak.

"That's a matter for your civil authorities, sir; I have nothing to do with it at all."

"You ain't got—nothing—?" Chadron's amazement seemed to overcome him. He stopped, his eyes big, his mouth open; he turned his head from side to side in dumbfounded way, as if to find another to bear witness to this incredible thing.

"I tell you they're threatenin' my property, and the property of my neighbors!" protested Chadron, stunned, it seemed, that he should have to stop for details and explanations. "We've got millions invested—if them fellers gobbles up our land we're ruined!"

"Sir, I can sympathize with you in your unfortunate business, but if I had millions of my own at stake under similar conditions I would be powerless to employ, on my own initiative, the forces of the United States army to drive those brigands away."

Chadron looked at him hard, his hat on his head, where it had remained all the time, his eyes staring in unspeakable surprise.

"The hell you would!" said he.

"You and your neighbors surely can raise enough men to crush the scoundrels, and hang their leader to a limb," the colonel suggested. "Call out your men, Chadron, and ride against him. I never took you for a man to squeal for help in a little affair like this."

"He's got as many as a hundred men organized, maybe twice that"—Chadron multiplied on the basis of damage that his men had suffered—"and my men tell me he's drillin' 'em like soldiers."

"I'm not surprised to hear that," nodded the colonel; "that man Macdonald's got it in him to do that, and fight like the devil, too."

"A gang of 'em killed three of my men a couple of days ago when I sent 'em up there to his shack to investigate a little matter, and Macdonald shot my foreman up so bad I guess he'll die. I tell you, man, it's a case for troopers!"

"What has the sheriff and the rest of you done to restore order?"

"I took twenty of my men up there yisterday, and a bunch of Sam Hatcher's from acrosst the river was to join us and smoke that wolf out of his hole and hang his damn hide on his cussed bob-wire fence. But hell! they was ditched in around that shack of his'n, I tell you, gentlemen, and he peppered us so hard we had to streak out of there. I left two of my men, and Hatcher's crew couldn't come over to help us, for them damn rustlers had breastworks throwed up over there and drove 'em away from the river. They've got us shut out from the only ford in thirty miles."

"Well, I'll be damned!" said the colonel, warming at this warlike news.

"Macdonald's had the gall to send me notice to keep out of that country up the river, and to run my cattle out of there, and it's my own land, by God! I've been grazin' it for eighteen years!"

"It looks like a serious situation," the colonel admitted.

"Serious!" There was scorn for the word and its weakness in Chadron's stress. "It's hell, I tell you, when a man can't set foot on his own land!"

"Are they all rustlers up there in the settlement? are there no honest homesteaders among them who would combine with you against this wild man and his unlawful followers?" the colonel wanted to know.

"Not a man amongst 'em that ain't cut the brand out of a hide," Chadron declared. "They've been nestin' up there under that man Macdonald for the last two years, and he's the brains of the pack. He gits his rake-off out of all they run off and sell. Me and the other cattlemen we've been feedin' and supportin' 'em till the drain's gittin' more'n we can stand. We've got to put 'em out, like a fire, or be eat up. We've got to hit 'em, and hit 'em hard."

"It would seem so," the colonel agreed.

"It's a state of war, I tell you, colonel; you're free to use your troops in a state of war, ain't you? Twenty-five troopers, with a little small cannon"—Chadron made illustration of the caliber that he considered adequate for the business with his hands—"to knock 'em out of their ditches so we could pick 'em off as they scatter, would be enough; we can handle the rest."

"If there is anything that I can do for you in my private capacity, I am at your command," offered Colonel Landcraft, with official emptiness, "but I regret that I am powerless to grant your request for troops. I couldn't lift a finger in a matter like this without a department order; you ought to understand that, Chadron."

"Oh, if that's all that's bitin' you, go ahead—I'll take care of the department," Chadron told him, with the relieved manner of one who had seen a light.

"Sir!"

If Chadron had proposed treason the colonel could not have compressed more censure into that word.

"That's all right," Chadron assured him, comfortably; "I've got two senators and five congressmen back there in Washington that jigger when I jerk the gee-string. You can cut loose and come into this thing with a free hand, and go the limit, the department be damned if they don't like it!"

Colonel Landcraft's face was flaming angrily. He snapped his dry old eyelids like flints over the steel of his eyes, and stood as straight as the human body could be drawn, one hand on his sword hilt, the other pointing a trembling finger at Chadron's face.

"You cattlemen run this state, and one or two others here in the Northwest, I'm aware of that, Chadron. But there's one thing that you don't run, and that's the United States army! I don't care a damn how many congressmen dance to your tune, you're not big enough to move even one trooper out of my barracks, sir! That's all I've got to say to you."

Chadron stood a little while, glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or three of the old states where the slipping heritage of individual liberty was born. Now here was a colonel in his way; one little old gray colonel!

"All right," Chadron said at length, charging his words with what he doubtless meant to be a significant foreboding, measuring Colonel Landcraft with contemptuous eye. "I can call out an army of my own. I came to you because we pay you fellers to do what I'm askin' of you, and because I thought it'd save me time. That's all."

"You came to me because you have magnified your importance in this country until you believe you're the entire nation," the colonel replied, very hot and red.

Chadron made no answer to that. He turned toward the military door, but Colonel Landcraft would not permit his unsanctified feet, great as they were and free to come and go as they liked in other places, to pass that way. He frowned at Major King, who had stood by in silence all the time, like a good soldier, his eyes straight ahead. Major King touched Chadron's arm.

"This way, sir, if you please," he said.

Chadron started out, wrathfully and noisily. Half-way to the door he turned, his dark face sneering in contemptuous scorn.

"Yes, you're one hell of a colonel!" he said.

Major King was holding the door open; Chadron swung his big body around to face it, and passed out. Major King saluted his superior officer and followed the cattleman into the hall, closing the sacred door behind him on the wrathful little old soldier standing beside his desk. King extended his hand, sympathy in gesture and look.

"If I was in command of this post, sir, you'd never have to ask twice for troops," he said.

Chadron's sudden interest seemed to give him the movement of a little start. His grip on the young officer's hand tightened as he bent a searching look into his eyes.

"King, I believe you!" he said.

Nola came pattering down the stairs. Chadron stood with open arms, and swallowed her in them as she leaped from the bottom tread. Major King did not wait to see her emerge again, rosy and lip-tempting. There was unfinished business within the colonel's room.

A few minutes later Nola, excited to her finger-ends, was retailing the story of the rustlers' uprising to Frances.

"Mother's all worked up over it; she's afraid they'll burn us out and murder us, but of course we'd clean them up before they'd ever get that far down the river."

"It looks to me like a very serious situation for everybody concerned," Frances said. "If your father brings in the men that you say he's gone to Meander to telegraph for, there's going to be a lot of killing done on both sides."

"Father says he's going to clean them out for good this time—they've cost us thousands of dollars in the past three years. Oh, you can't understand what a low-down bunch of scrubs those rustlers are!"

"Maybe not," Frances said, giving it up with a little sigh.

"I've got to go back to mother this morning, right away, but that little fuss up the river doesn't need to keep you from going home with me as you promised, Frances."

"I shouldn't mind, but I don't believe father will want me to go out into your wild country. I really want to go—I want to look around in your garden for a glove that I lost there on the night of the ball."

"Oh, why didn't you tell me?" Nola's face seemed to clear of something, a shadow of perplexity, it seemed, that Frances had seen in it from time to time since her coming there. She looked frankly and reprovingly at Frances.

"I didn't miss it until I was leaving, and I didn't want to delay the rest of them to look for it. It really doesn't matter."

"It's a wonder mother didn't find it; she's always prowling around among the flowers," said Nola, her eyes fixed in abstracted stare, as if she was thinking deeply of something apart from what her words expressed.

What she was considering, indeed, was that her little scheme of alienation had failed. Major King, she told herself, had not returned the glove to Frances. For all his lightness in the matter, perhaps he cared deeply for Frances, and would be more difficult to wean than she had thought. It would have to be begun anew. That Frances was ignorant of her treachery, as she now fully believed, made it easier. So the little lady told herself, surveying the situation in her quick brain, and deceiving herself completely, as many a shrewder schemer than she, when self-entangled in the devious plottings of this life.

On the other hand there sat Frances across the table—they were breakfasting alone, Mrs. Landcraft being a strict militarist, and always serving the colonel's coffee with her own hand—throwing up a framework of speculation on her own account. Perhaps if she should go to the ranch she might be in some manner instrumental in bringing this needless warfare to a pacific end. Intervention at the right time, in the proper quarter, might accomplish more than strife and bloodshed could bring out of that one-sided war.

No matter for the justice of the homesteaders' cause, and the sincerity of their leader, neither of which she doubted or questioned, the weight of numbers and resources would be on the side of the cattlemen. It could result only in the homesteaders being driven from their insecure holdings after the sacrifice of many lives. If she could see Macdonald, and appeal to him to put down this foolish, even though well-intended strife, something might result.

It was an inconsequential turmoil, it seemed to her, there in that sequestered land, for a man like Alan Macdonald to squander his life upon. If he stood against the forces which Chadron had gone to summon, he would be slain, and the abundant promise of his life wasted like water on the sand.

"I'll go with you, Nola," she said, rising from the table in quick decision.



CHAPTER XII

"THE RUSTLERS!"

"I've stood up for that man, and I've stood by him," said Banjo Gibson, "but when a man shoots a friend of my friend he ain't no friend of mine. I'm done with him; I won't never set a boot-heel inside of his door ag'in."

Banjo was in Mrs. Chadron's south sitting-room, with its friendly fireplace and homely things, including Mrs. Chadron and her apparently interminable sock. Only now it was a gray sock, designed not for the mighty foot of Saul, but for Chance Dalton, lying on his back in the bunkhouse in a fever growing out of the handling that he had gone through at Macdonald's place.

Banjo had arrived at the ranch the previous evening. He was sitting now with his fiddle on his knee, having gone through the repertory most favored by his hostess, with the exception of "Silver Threads." That was an afternoon melody, Banjo maintained, and one would have strained his friendship and shaken his respect if he had insisted upon the musician putting bow to it in the morning hours.

"Yes," sighed Mrs. Chadron, "it was bad enough when he just shot cowboys, but when it come to Chance we felt real grieved. Chance he ain't much to look at, but he's worth his weight in gold on the ranch."

"Busted his right arm all to pieces, they tell me?"

"Right here." Mrs. Chadron marked across her wrist with her knitting needle, and shook her head in heavy sadness.

"That'll kind of spile him, won't it?"

"Well, Saul says it won't make so much difference about him not havin' the use of his hand on that side if it don't break his nerve. A man loses confidence in himself, Saul says, most always when he loses the hand or arm he's slung his gun with all his life. He takes the notion that everybody's quicker'n he is, and just kind of slinges back and drops out of the game."

"Do you expect Saul he'll come back here with them soldiers he went after?"

"I expect he'll more'n likely order 'em right up the river to clear them rustlers out before he stops or anything," she replied, in high confidence.

"The gall of them low-down brand-burners standin' up to fight a man on his own land!" Banjo's indignation could not have been more pointed if he had been a lord of many herds himself.

"There comes them blessed girls!" reported Mrs. Chadron from her station near the window. Banjo crossed over to see, his fiddle held to his bosom like an infant. Nola and Frances were nearing the gate.

"That colonel girl she's a up-setter, ain't she?" Banjo admired.

"She's as sweet as locus' blooms," Mrs. Chadron declared, unstintingly.

"But she's kind of distant; nothing friendly and warm-hearted like your little Nola, mom."

"She's a little cool to strangers, but when she knows a body she comes out."

Banjo nodded, drawing little whispers of melody from his fiddle-strings by fingering them against the neck.

"I noticed when she smiles she seems to change," he said. "It's like puttin' bow to the strings. A fiddle's a glum kind of a thing till you wake it up; she's that way, I reckon."

"Well, git ready for dinner—or lunch, as Nola calls it—they'll be starved by this time, ridin' all the way from the post in this chilly wind. I'm mighty afraid we're goin' to have some weather before long."

"Can't put it off much longer," Banjo agreed, thinking of the hardship of being caught out in one of those sweeping blizzards, when the sudden cold grew so sharp that a man's banjo strings broke in the tense contraction. That had happened to him more than once, and it only seemed to sharpen the pleasure of being snowed in at a place like Alamito, where the kitchen was fat and the hand of the host free. He smiled as he turned to the kitchen to wash his face and soap his hair.

They passed a very pleasant afternoon at the ranchhouse, in spite of Mrs. Chadron's uneasiness on account of their defenseless state. At that season Chadron and his neighbors could not draw very heavily on their scattered forces following the divided herds spread out over the vast territory for the winter grazing.

The twenty men gathered in a hurry-call by Chadron to avenge the defeat of Chance Dalton, who had in their turn been met and unexpectedly repulsed by the homesteaders, as Chadron had related in his own way to Colonel Landcraft, were lying in camp several miles up the river. That is, all that were left of them fit for duty after the fight. A good many of them were limping, and would limp for many a day.

They were waiting the arrival of the troops, which they expected with the same confidence Mrs. Chadron had held before Nola brought her an explanation that covered the confusion of refusal.

Neither of the young women knew of the tiff between the colonel and Chadron, for the colonel was a man who kept his family apart from his business. Chadron had not seen fit to uncover his humiliation to his daughter, but had told her that he was acting on the advice of Colonel Landcraft in sending to his friends in Cheyenne for men to put down the uprising of rustlers himself.

So there were comfortable enough relations between them all at the ranch as the day bent to evening and the red sunset changed to gray. Banjo played for them, as he had done that other afternoon, and sang his sentimental songs in voice that quavered in the feeling passages. Chadron had not left anybody to guard the house, because he knew very well that Macdonald considered nothing beyond defense, and that he would as quickly burn his own mother's roof above her head as he would set torch to that home by the riverside.

"Sing us that dreamy one, Banjo," Nola requested, "the one that begins 'Come sit by my side little—' you know the one I mean."

A sentimental tenderness came into Banjo's face. He turned his head so that he could look out of the window into the thickening landscape beyond the corral gate, gray and mysterious and unfriendly now as a twilight sea. Nola touched Frances' arm to prime her for the treat.

"Watch his face," she whispered, smiling behind her hand.

Banjo struck the chords of his accompaniment; the sentimental cast of his face deepened, until it seemed that he was about to come to tears. He sang:

Come sit by my side litt-ul dau-ling, And lay your brown head on my breast, Whilse the angels of twilight o-round us Are singing the flow-ohs to rest.

Banjo must have loved many ladies in many lands, for that is the gift and the privilege of the troubadour. Now he seemed calling up their vanished faces out of the twilight as he sang his little song. What feeling he threw into the chorus, what shaking of the voice, what soft sinking away of the last notes, the whang of the banjo softened by palm across the strings!

The chorus:

O, what can be sweet-o than dreaming Tho dream that is on us tonight! Pre-haps do you know litt-ul dau-ling, Tho future lies hidded from sight.

There was a great deal more of that song, which really was not so bad, the way Banjo sang it, for he exalted it on the best qualities that lived in his harmless breast; not so bad that way, indeed, as it looks in print. Frances could not see where the joke at the little musician's expense came in, although Nola was laughing behind his unsuspecting back as the last notes died.

Mrs. Chadron wiped her eyes. "I think it's the sweetest song that ever was sung!" she said, and meant it, every word.

Banjo said nothing at all, but put away his instrument with reverent hands, as if no sound was worthy to come out of it after that sweet agony of love.

Mrs. Chadron got up, in her large, bustling, hospitable way, sentimentally satisfied, and withal grossly hungry.

"Supper'll be about ready now, children," she said, putting her sock away in its basket, "and while you two are primpin' I'll run down to the bunkhouse and take some chicken broth to Chance that Maggie made him."

"Oh, poor old Chance!" Nola pitied, "I've been sitting here enjoying myself and forgetting all about him. I'll take it down to him, mother—Banjo he'll come with me."

Banjo was alert on the proposal, and keen to go. He brought Nola's coat at her mother's suggestion, for the evening had a feeling of frost in it, and attended her to the kitchen after the chicken broth as gallantly as if he wore a sword.

Mrs. Chadron came back from her investigations in the kitchen in a little while to Frances, who waited alone before the happy little fire in the chimney. She sighed as she resumed her rocking-chair by the window, and crossed her seldom idle hands over her comfortably inelegant front.

"It'll be some little time before supper's ready to set down to," she announced regretfully. "Maggie's makin' stuffed peppers, and they're kind of slow to bake. We can talk."

"Of course," Frances agreed, her mind running on the hope that had brought her to the ranch; the hope of seeing Macdonald, and appealing to him in pity's name for peace.

"That thievin' Macdonald's to blame for Chance, our foreman, losin' the use of his right hand," Mrs. Chadron said, with asperity. "Did Nola tell you about the fight they had with him?"

"Yes, she told me about it as we came."

"It looks like the devil's harnessed up with that man, he does so much damage without ever gittin' hurt himself. He had a crowd of rustlers up there with him when Chance went up there to trace some stock, and they up and killed three of our cowboys. Ain't it terrible?"

"It is terrible!" Frances shuddered, withholding her opinion on which side the terror lay, together with the blame.

"Then Saul went up there with some more of the men to burn that Macdonald's shack and drive him off of our land, and they run into a bunch of them rustlers that Macdonald he'd fetched over there, and two more of our men was killed. It looks like a body's got to fight night and day for his rights now, since them nesters begun to come in here. Well, we was here first, and Saul says we'll be here last. But I think it's plumb scan'lous the way them rustlers bunches together and fights. They never was known to do it before, and they wouldn't do it now if it wasn't for that black-hearted thief, Macdonald!"

"Did you ever see him?" Frances asked.

"No, I never did, and don't never want to!"

"I just asked you because he doesn't look like a bad man."

"They say he sneaked in here the night of Nola's dance, but I didn't see him. Oh, what 'm I tellin' you? Course you know that—you danced with him!"

"Yes," said Frances, neither sorry nor ashamed.

"But you wasn't to blame, honey," Mrs. Chadron comforted, "you didn't know him from Adamses off ox."

Frances sat leaning forward, looking into the fire. The light of the blaze was on her face, appealingly soft and girlishly sweet. Mrs. Chadron laid a hand on her hair in motherly caress, moved by a tenderness quite foreign to the vindictive creed which she had pronounced against the nesters but a little while before.

"I'm afraid you're starved, honey," she said, in genuine solicitude, thus expressing the nearest human sympathy out of her full-feeding soul.

"I'm hungry, but far from starving," Frances told her, knowing that the confession to an appetite would please her hostess better than a gift. "When do you expect Mr. Chadron home?"

"I don't know, honey, but you don't need to worry; them rustlers can't pass our men Saul left camped up the valley."

"I wasn't thinking of that; I'm not afraid."

Mrs. Chadron chuckled. "Did I tell you about Nola?" she asked. Then, answering herself, before Frances could more than turn her head inquiringly; "No, of course, I never. It was too funny for anything!"

"What was it?" Frances asked, in girlish eagerness. Mrs. Chadron's smile was reflected in her face as she sat straight, and turned expectantly to her hostess.

"The other evening when she and her father was comin' home from the postoffice over at the agency they run acrosst that sneak Macdonald, afoot in the road, guns so thick on him you couldn't count 'em. Saul asked him what he was skulkin' around down this way for, and the feller he was kind of sassy about it, and tried to pass Nola and go on. He had the gall to tip his hat to her, just like she was low enough to notice a brand-burner! Well, she give him a larrup over the face with her whip that cut the hide! He took hold of her bridle to shove her horse out of the way so he could run, I reckon, and she switched him till he squirmed like a puppy-dog! I laughed till I nearly split when Saul told me!"

Mrs. Chadron surrendered again to her keen appreciation of the humor in that situation. Frances felt now that she understood the attitude of the cattlemen toward the homesteaders as she never had even sensed it before. Here was this motherly woman, naturally good at heart and gentle, hardened and blinded by her prejudices until she could discuss murder as a thing desired, and the extirpation of a whole community as a just and righteous deed.

There was no feeling of softness in her breast for the manful strivings of Alan Macdonald to make a home in that land, not so much for himself—for it was plain that he would grace a different world to far better advantage—but for the disinherited of the earth. To Mrs. Chadron he was a thing apart from her species, a horrible, low, grisly monster, to whom the earth should afford no refuge and man no hiding-place. There was no virtue in Alan Macdonald; his fences had killed his right to human consideration.

In a moment Mrs. Chadron was grave again. She put out her hand in that gentle, motherly way and touched Frances' hair, smoothing it from her forehead, pleased with the irrepressible life of it which sprung it back after the passage of her palm like water in a vessel's wake.

"I let on to you a little while ago that I wasn't uneasy, honey," she said, "but I ain't no hand at hidin' the truth. I am uneasy, honey, and on pins, for I don't trust them rustlers. I'm afraid they'll hear that Saul's gone, and come sneakin' down here and burn us out before morning, and do worse, maybe. I don't know why I've got that feelin', but I have, and it's heavy in me, like raw dough."

"I don't believe they'd do anything like that," Frances told her.

"Oh, you don't know 'em like we do, honey, the low-down thieves! They ort to be hunted like wolves and shot, wherever they're found."

"Some of them have wives and children, haven't they?" Frances asked, thinking aloud, as she sat with her chin resting in her hand.

"Oh, I suppose they litter like any other wolves," Mrs. Chadron returned, unfeelingly.

"Si a tu ventana llega una paloma," sang Maggie in the kitchen, the snapping of the oven door coming in quite harmoniously as she closed it on the baking peppers. Mrs. Chadron sighed.

"Tratala con carina que es mi persona," sounded Maggie, a degree louder. Mrs. Chadron sat upright, with a new interest in life apart from her uneasy forebodings about the rustlers. Maggie was in the dining-room, spreading the cloth. The peppers were coming along.

Somebody burst into the kitchen; uncertain feet came across it; a cry broke Maggie's song short as she jingled the silver in place on the cloth. Banjo Gibson stumbled into the room where the low fire twinkled in the chimney, reeling on his legs, his breath coming in groans.

Maggie was behind him, holding the door open; the light from the big lamp on the dining-table fell on the musician, who weaved there as if he might fall. His hat was off, blood was in his eyes and over his face from a wound at the edge of his hair.

"Nola—Nola!" he gasped.

Mrs. Chadron, already beside him, laid hold of him now and shook him.

"Tell it, you little devil—tell it!" she screamed.

Frances, with gentler hand, drew Banjo from her.

"What's happened to Nola?" she asked.

"The rustlers!" he said, his voice falling away in horror.

"The rustlers!" Mrs. Chadron groaned, her arms lifted above her head. She ran in wild distraction into the dining-room, now back to the chimney to take down a rifle that hung in its case on a deer prong over the mantel.

"Nola, Nola!" she called, running out into the garden. Her wild voice came back from there in a moment, crying her daughter's name in agony.

Banjo had sunk to the floor, his battered face held in his hands.

"My God! they took her!" he groaned. "The rustlers, they took her, and I couldn't lift a hand!"

Frances beckoned to Maggie, who had followed her mistress to the kitchen door.

"Give him water; stop the blood," she ordered sharply.

In a moment she had dashed out after Mrs. Chadron, and was running frantically along the garden path toward the river.



CHAPTER XIII

THE TRAIL AT DAWN

Frances stopped at the high wire fence along the river bank. It was dark there between the shrubs of the garden on one hand and the tall willows on the other, but nothing moved in them but her own leaping heart. She called Mrs. Chadron, running along the fence as she cried her name.

Mrs. Chadron answered from the barn. Frances found her saddling a horse, while Maggie's husband, an old Mexican with a stiff leg, muttered prayers in his native tongue as he tightened the girths on another.

Mrs. Chadron was for riding in pursuit of Nola's abductors, although she had not mounted a horse in fifteen years. There was no man about the place except crippled old Alvino, and wounded Dalton lying in the men's quarters near at hand. Neither of them was serviceable in such an emergency, and Banjo, willing as he would be, seemed too badly hurt to be of any use.

Frances pressed her to dismiss this intention. Even if they knew which way to ride, it would be a hopeless pursuit.

"There's only one way to go—towards the rustlers' settlement," Mrs. Chadron grimly returned.

She was over her hysterical passion now, and steadied down into a state of desperate determination to set out after the thieves and bring Nola back. She did not know how it was to be accomplished, but she felt her strength equal to any demand in the pressure of her despair. She was lifting her foot to the stirrup, thinly dressed as she was, her head bare, the rifle in her hand, when Frances took her by the arm.

"You can't go alone with Alvino, Mrs. Chadron."

"I've got to go, I tell you—let loose of me!"

She shook off Frances' restraining hand and turned to her horse again. With her hand on the pommel of the saddle she stopped, and turned to Alvino.

"Go and fetch me Chance's guns out of the bunkhouse," she ordered.

Alvino hitched away, swinging his stiff leg, with laborious, slow gait.

"You couldn't do anything against a crowd of desperate men—they might kill you!" Frances said.

"Let 'em kill me, then!" She lifted her hand, as if taking an oath. "They'll pay for this trick—every man, woman, and child of them'll bleed for what they've done to me tonight!"

"Let Alvino go to the camp up the river where Mr. Chadron left the men, and tell them; they can do more than you."

"You couldn't drive him alone out of sight of the lights in the house with fire. He'd come back with some kind of a lie before he'd went a mile. I'll go to 'em myself, honey—I didn't think of them."

"I'll go with you."

"Wait till Alvino comes with them guns—I can use 'em better than I can a rifle. Oh, why don't the man hurry!"

"I'll run down and see what—"

But Alvino came around the corral at that moment. He had stopped to light a lantern, in his peculiar Mexican mode of estimating the importance of time and occasion, and came flashing it in short, violent arcs as he swayed to swing his jointless leg.

Frances led out the other horse and was waiting to mount when Alvino came panting up, the belt with its two revolvers over his arm. Mrs. Chadron jerked it from him with something hard and sharp on her tongue like a curse. Banjo Gibson came into the circle of light, a bandage on his head.

"I didn't even see 'em. They knocked me down, and when I come to she was gone!"

Banjo's voice was full of self-censure, and his feet were weak upon the ground. He began to talk the moment the light struck him, and when he had finished his little explanation he was standing beside Mrs. Chadron's saddle.

"Go to the house and lie down, Banjo," Mrs. Chadron said; "I ain't time to fool with you!"

"Are you two aimin' to go to the post after help?" Banjo steadied himself on his legs by clinging to the horse's mane as he spoke.

"We're goin' up the river after the men," Mrs. Chadron told him.

"No, I'll go after the men; that's a man's job," Banjo insisted. "I know right where they're camped at, you couldn't find 'em between now and morning."

There was no arguing Banjo out of it, no brushing the little man aside. He was as firm as a man three times his weight, and he took Mrs. Chadron by the arm, like a son, and led her away from the horse with a manner at once so firm and yet considerate that it softened her stern heart and plunged her into tears.

"If you bring Nola back to me I'll give her to you, Banjo! I'll give her to you!" she sobbed, as she belted him with Chance Dalton's guns.

"If any reward in this world could drive me through hell fire to lay my hands on it, you've named it," he said.

Frances saw that Mrs. Chadron could be reasoned with now, and she was grateful to Banjo for his opportune arrival. For the night was vast and unfriendly over that empty land, and filled with a thousand shudderful dangers. She was afraid of it, afraid to leave the lights of the house behind her and ride out into it, no matter for all the peril that poor little Nola might be facing in that cruel hour.

Banjo rode away. They stood clinging to each other in the dim circle of Alvino's lantern-light, listening to his horse until the distance muffled its feet on the road.

Frances was chilled with the horror of that brigandish act. Every movement of the wind in the bushes made her skin crinkle and creep; every sound of animals in barn and corral was magnified into some new danger. Mrs. Chadron was in far worse state, with reason, certainly, for being so. Now that the stimulation of her first wild outburst had been exhausted, she stood wilted and weak, shivering with her hands over her eyes, moaning and moaning in piteous low wail.

Frances took the lantern from old Alvino's shaking hand.

"Let's go and look for their tracks," she suggested, forcing a note of eagerness into her words, "so we can tell the men, when they come back to pick up the trail, how many there were and which way they went."

"Oh, if Chance was only able to go after them, if he was only able!" Mrs. Chadron wailed, following Frances as she hurried along the wire fence that cut the garden from the river.

"It was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron said, "for that gate down there back of the house is open. That's the way they come and went—somebody that knowed the lay of the land."

Frances felt her heart die within her as the recollection of another night in that garden flashed like red fire in her mind. There was a picture, as she stopped with closed eyes, struck cold and shuddering by a fear she dared not own, of one flying, bent into the shadows, along the garden path toward that gate. Someone who knew the "lay of the land!"

"Did you hear something?" Mrs. Chadron whispered, leaning close to her where she had stopped, stock-still, as if she had struck a wall.

"I thought I—I—saw something," Frances answered, in faint, sick voice.

The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the soft ground beyond it they found tracks.

"Only one man!" said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.

"There's only one track," said Frances, her breath so feeble, her heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.

Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he led them to the willows where the ravisher's horse had been concealed.

"One shoe was lost," said he, pointing, "left one, hind foot."

Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.

"Oh, if I'd 'a' come down here place of saddlin' that horse!" she lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.

"He'd have been gone, even then—I was past here and didn't hear him," Frances said.

Still the vision persisted in her disturbed imagination of that other night, of one leaning low in the saddle, his fleet horse stretching its neck in desperation for the distant refuge; the dash of pursuing hoofs; the sound of shots up the river; the prayer that she sent to heaven in his behalf.

"Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron was repeating, with accusing conviction.

They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs, binding her as if her feet were set in lava.

Somebody that knew the "lay of the land." Great God! could he fight that way, was it in Alan Macdonald to make a hawk's dash like that? It was hard to admit the thought, to give standing to the doubtful accusation. But those whom they called "rustlers" must have borne Nola away. Beyond the homesteaders up the river were the mountains and the wild country where no man made his home; except them and the cattlemen and the cowboys attending the herds, that country was unpeopled. There was nobody to whom the deed could be charged but the enemies that Chadron had made in his persecution of the homesteaders.

Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words, and his association with them, seemed to convict him there in the silence of that black-walled court of night.

It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his associates by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree the blame, even passive knowledge of the intent, of that base offense.

At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together, she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses. They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.

She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.

The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate by and by on Frances' arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow of her life.

Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic night.

Frances was in the saddle at daybreak. She had left Mrs. Chadron in an uneasy sleep, watched over by Maggie. Banjo had not returned; no word had reached them from any source. Alvino let Frances out through the gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the abductor's trail as far as possible without being led into strange country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pass that way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there.

The tracks of the raider's horse were deep in the soft soil. She followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road, angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a trampling in the lose earth—testimony of the fight that Nola had made to get away—Frances started at the sight of something caught on a clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning. Presently assured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with it in her hand.

Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther. But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was heading for the homesteaders' settlement, and that he had taken the road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and place.

She felt again that surge of indignation that had fired her heart early in the sad night past. The man who had lurked in the garden waiting his chance to snatch Nola away, was certain of the protection to which he fled. It was the daring execution of one man, but the planning of many, and at the head of them one with fire in his wild soul, quick passion in his eyes, and mastery over his far-riding band. It could be no other way.

When she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post.

She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the homesteaders' settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald's claim to lie somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.

She halted when she saw them, and they jerked up their horses also, with startled suddenness, like men riding in the expectation of danger and surprise. Macdonald came forward in a moment, with respectful salute, a look amounting almost to frightened questioning in his face. For the sun was not up yet, although its flame was on the heavens, and it was a strange, wild place to meet a woman of Frances Landcraft's caste unattended, and with the shadow of a trouble in her face that made it old, like misery.

But there was no question of the unfriendliness of that face for Alan Macdonald and the men who came riding at his back. It was as cold as the gray earth beneath her horse's hoofs, and its severity was reflected in the very pose of her body, even in the grip of her slender thighs as they clasped her saddle, sitting there like a dragoon outrider who had appeared to bar their way.

Frances was wearing the brown corduroy riding-habit that she had worn on the day when she first spoke to him. Her brown hair had fallen down until it hid her ears, for she had ridden hard, and a strand of it blew from beneath her cowboy hat in unheeded caress across her cheek.

Macdonald saw her stiffen in the saddle and lift herself a little from her seat as he drew near, his companions stopping a little distance back. Her eyes were stern and reproachful; a little frown troubled her white forehead.

"I was starting out to find you, Mr. Macdonald," she said, severely.

"If there is any service, Miss Landcraft—"

"Don't talk emptiness, and don't pretend!" she said, a flash of anger in her face. "It isn't a man's way to fight, it's a coward's! Bring her back home!"

"I don't know what you mean." There was such an astonished helplessness in his manner that it would have convinced any unprejudiced mind of his innocence in itself.

"Oh!"—impatiently—"I can't hurt you, I'm alone. You'd just as well tell me how much money you're going to demand, so I can set their minds at rest."

Macdonald's face was hot; his eyes felt as if they swam in fire. He put out his hand in a gesture almost a command, his heavy eyebrows gathered in a frown, an expression of sternness in his homely face that made it almost majestic.

"If you'll be good enough to tell me what your veiled accusations point to, Miss Landcraft, then I can answer you by either yes or no."

She unbent so far as to relate briefly what she believed they knew better than herself already. But behind her high air as she talked there was a secret warm feeling for the strength of this man. It was a quality of fine steel in the human mind and body such as she never had seen so beautifully blended before. In her own father there was something of it, but only a reflection on water compared to this. It seemed the temper of the desert, she thought, like that oriental spirit which spread Islam's dark creed over half the world.

When she had finished the relation of Nola's ravishment, he sat with head drooped in dusty silence a moment. Then he looked her in the eyes with such a steady blaze of indignation that she felt her own rage kindle to meet it. His clear, steady gaze was an arraignment, an accusation on the ugly charge of perversion of the truth as she knew it to be in the bottom of her conscience when she had laid the crime at the homesteaders' hands. If he saw her at all, she thought, it was as some small despicable thing, for his eyes were so unflinching, as they poured their steady fire into her own, that he seemed to be summing up the final consequences which lay behind her, along the dusty highway to the ranchhouse by the river.

"In the first place," said he, speaking slowly, "there are no cattle thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some of them, and judge for yourself."

He beckoned to Tom Lassiter and the three with him, and they joined him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it.

"These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this deed, but there's not one among us that wouldn't put down his life to keep that young woman from harm and give her back to her home. We have our grievances against Saul Chadron, God knows! and they are grave enough. But we don't fight that way, Miss Landcraft."

"If you're innocent, then prove it by forcing the men that carried her off, or the man, if there was only one, to bring her back home. Then I'll believe you. Maybe others will, too. What are you riding the road so early for, all armed and suspicious, if you're such honest men?"

"We're goin' to the agency after ammunition to defend our homes, and our wives and children—such of us as Saul Chadron and his hired hounds has left children to, colonel's daughter," Tom Lassiter answered, reproof in his kind old eyes.

Frances had unrolled the bit of evidence that she had picked up from the bushes, and was holding it on the horn of her saddle now, quite unconscious of what her hands were doing, for she had forgotten the importance of her find in the heat of that meeting. Macdonald spurred forward, pointing to the thing in her hand.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, a sharp note of concern in his voice that made her start.

She told him. He took it from her and turned to his comrades.

"It's Mark Thorn's cap!" he said, holding it up, his fingers in the crown.

Tom Lassiter nodded his slow head as the others leaned to look.

"Saul Chadron's chickens has come home to roost," he said.

Frances understood nothing of the excitement that sprung out of the mention of the outlaw's name, for Mark Thorn and his bloody history were alike unknown to her. Her resentment mounted at being an outsider to their important or pretended secret.

"Well, if you know whose cap it is, it ought to be easy for you to find the owner," she said, unable to smother the sneer in her words.

"He isn't one of us," said a homesteader, with grim shortness.

"Oh!" said she, tossing her lofty head.

There was a pallor in Macdonald's weathered face, as if somebody near and dear to himself was in extreme peril.

"She may never see home again," he said. Then quickly: "Which way did he go, do you know?"

She told him what she knew, not omitting the lost horseshoe. Tom Lassiter bent in his saddle with eagerness as she mentioned that particular, and ran his eyes over the road like one reading the pages of a book.

"There!" he said, pointing, "I've been seein' it all the way down, Alan. He was headin' for the hills."

Frances could not see the print of the shoeless hoof, nor any peculiarity among the scores of tracks that would tell her of Nola's abductor having ridden that far along the road. She flushed as the thought came to her that this was a trick to throw her attention from themselves and the blame upon some fictitious person, when they knew whose hands were guilty all the time. The men were leaning in their saddles, riding slowly back on their trail, talking in low voices and sharp exclamations among themselves. She spurred hotly after them.

"Mr. Chadron hasn't come home yet," she said, addressing Macdonald, who sat straight in his saddle to hear, "but they expect him any hour. If you'll say how much you're going to demand, and where you want it paid, I'll carry the word to him. It might hurry matters, and save her mother's life."

"I'm sorry you repeated that," said Macdonald, touching his hat in what he plainly meant a farewell salute. He turned from her and drew Tom Lassiter aside. In a moment he was riding back again the way that he had come.

Frances looked at the unaccountable proceeding with the eyes of doubt and suspicion. She did not believe any of them, and had no faith in their mysterious trackings and whisperings aside, and mad gallopings off to hidden ends. As for Tom Lassiter and his companions, they ranged themselves preparatory to continuing their journey.

"If you're goin' our way, colonel's daughter," said Tom, gathering up his bridle-reins, "we'll be proud to ride along with you."

Frances was looking at the dust-cloud that rose behind Macdonald. He was no longer in sight.

"Where has he gone?" she inquired, her suspicion growing every moment.

"He's gone to find that cowman's child, young lady, and take her home to her mother," Tom replied, with dignity. He rode on. She followed, presently gaining his side.

"Is there such a man as Mark Thorn?" she asked after a little, looking across at Lassiter with sly innuendo.

"No, there ain't no man by that name, but there's a devil in the shape of a human man called that," he answered.

"Is he—what does he do?" She reined a little nearer to Lassiter, feeling that there was little harm in him apart from the directing hand.

"He hires out to kill off folks that's in the way of the cattlemen at so much a head, miss; like some hires out to kill off wolves. The Drovers' Association hires him, and sees that he gits out of jail if anybody ever puts him in, and fixes it up so he walks safe with the blood of no knowin' how many innocent people on his hands. That's what Mark Thorn does, ma'am. Chadron brought him in here a couple of weeks ago to do some killin' off amongst us homesteaders so the rest 'd take a scare and move out. He give that old devil a list of twenty men he wanted shot, and Alan Macdonald's got that paper. His own name's at the top of it, too."

"Oh!" said she, catching her breath sharply, as if in pain. Her face was white and cold. "Did he—did he—kill anybody here?"

"He killed my little boy; he shot him down before his mother's eyes!"

Tom Lassiter's guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road ahead of him.

"Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!"

"He was a little tow-headed feller, and he had his mother's eyes, as blue as robins' eggs," said Tom, his reminiscent sorrow so poignant that tears sprung to her eyes in sympathy and plashed down unheeded and unchecked. "He'd 'a' been fifteen in November. Talkin' about fightin', ma'am, that's the way some people fights."

"I'm sorry I said that, Mr. Lassiter," she confessed, hanging her head like a corrected child.

"He can't hear you now," said Tom.

They rode on a little way. Tom told her of the other outrages for which Thorn was accountable in that settlement. She was amazed as deeply as she was shocked to hear of this, for if any word of it had come to the post, it had been kept from her. Neither was it ever mentioned in Chadron's home.

"No," said Tom, when she mentioned that, "it ain't the kind of news the cattlemen spreads around. But if we shoot one of them in defendin' our own, the news runs like a pe-rairie fire. They call us rustlers, and come ridin' up to swipe us out. Well, they's goin' to be a change."

"But if Chadron brought that terrible man in here, why should the horrible creature turn against him?" she asked, doubt and suspicion grasping the seeming fault in Lassiter's tale.

"Chadron refused to make settlement with him for the killin' he done because he didn't git Macdonald. Thorn told Alan that with his own bloody tongue."

Lassiter retailed to her eager ears the story of Macdonald's capture of Thorn, and his fight with Chadron's men when they came to set the old slayer free, as Lassiter supposed.

"They turned him loose," said he, "and you know now what I meant when I said Chadron's chickens has come home to roost."

"Yes, I know now." She turned, and looked back. Remorse was heavy on her for the injustice she had done Macdonald that day, and shame for her sharp words bowed her head as she rode at old Tom Lassiter's hand.

"He'll run the old devil down ag'in," Tom spoke confidently, as of a thing that admitted no dispute, "and take that young woman home if he finds her livin'. Many thanks he'll git for it from them and her. Like as not she'll bite the hand that saves her, for she's a cub of the old bear. Well, let me tell you, colonel's daughter, if she was to live a thousand years, and pray all her life, she wouldn't no more than be worthy at the end to wash that man's feet with her tears and dry 'em on her hair, like that poor soul you've read about in the Book."

Frances slowed her horse as if overcome by a sudden indecision, and turned in her saddle to look back again. Again she had let him go away from her misunderstood, his high pride hurt, his independent heart too lofty to bend down to the mean adjustment to be reached through argument or explanation. One must accept Alan Macdonald for what his face proclaimed him to be. She knew that now. He was not of the mean-spirited who walk among men making apology for their lives.

"He's gone on," said Lassiter, slowing his horse to her pace.

"I'm afraid I was hasty and unjust," she confessed, struggling to hold back her tears.

"Yes, you was," said Lassiter, frankly, "but everybody on the outside is unjust to all of us up here. We're kind of outcasts because we fence the land and plow it. But I want to tell you, Macdonald's a man amongst men, ma'am. He's fed the poor and lifted up the afflicted, and he's watched with us beside our sick and prayed with us over our dead. We know him, no matter what folks on the outside say. Well, we'll have to spur up a little, ma'am, for we're in a hurry to git back."

They approached the point where the road to the post branched.

"There's goin' to be fightin' over here if Chadron tries to drive us out," Tom said, "and we know he's sent for men to come in and help him try it. We don't want to fight, but men that won't fight for their homes ain't the kind you'd like to ride along the road with, ma'am."

"Maybe the trouble can be settled some other way," she suggested, thinking again of the hope that she had brought with her to the ranch the day before.

"When we bring the law in here, and elect officers to see it put in force for every man alike, then this trouble it'll come to an end. Well, if you ever feel like we deserve a good word, colonel's daughter, we'd be proud to have you say it, for the feller that stands up for the law and the Lord and his home agin the cattlemen in this land, ma'am, he's got a hard row to hoe. Yes, we'll count any good words you might say for us as so much gold. 'And the Levite, thou shalt not forsake him, for he hath no part nor inheritance with thee.'"

Tom's voice was slow and solemn when he quoted that Mosaic injunction. The appeal of the disinherited was in it, and the pain of lost years. It touched her like a sorrow of her own. Tears were on her cheeks again as she parted from him, giving him her hand in token of trust and faith, and rode on toward the ranchhouse by the river.



CHAPTER XIV

WHEN FRIENDS PART

Banjo had returned, with fever in his wound. Mrs. Chadron was putting horse liniment on it when Frances entered the sitting-room where the news of the tragedy had visited them the night past.

"I didn't go to the post—I saw some men in the road and turned back," Frances told them, sinking down wearily in a chair before the fire.

"I'm glad you turned back, honey," Mrs. Chadron said, shaking her head sadly, "for I was no end worried about you. Them rustlers they're comin' down from their settlement and gatherin' up by Macdonald's place, the men told Banjo, and no tellin' what they might 'a' done if they'd seen you."

Mrs. Chadron's face was not red with the glow of peppers and much food this morning. One night of anxiety had racked her, and left hollows under her eyes and a flat grayness in her cheeks.

Banjo had brought no other news. The men had scattered at daybreak to search for the trail of the man who had carried Nola away, but Banjo, sore and shaken, had come back depressed and full of pains. Mrs. Chadron said that Saul surely would be home before noonday, and urged Frances to go to her room and sleep.

"I'm steadier this morning, I'll watch and wait," she said, pressing the liniment-soaked cloth to Banjo's bruised forehead.

Banjo contracted his muscles under the application, shriveling up on himself like a snail in a fire, for it was hot and heroic liniment, and strong medicine for strong beasts and tougher men. Banjo's face was a picture of patient suffering, but he said nothing, and had not spoken since Frances entered the room, for the treatment had been under way before her arrival and there was scarcely enough breath left in him to suffice for life, and none at all for words. Frances had it in mind to suggest some milder remedy, but held her peace, feeling that if Banjo survived the treatment he surely would be in no danger from his hurt.

The door of Nola's room was open as Frances passed, and there was a depression in the counterpane which told where the lost girl's mother had knelt beside it and wet it with her tears. Frances wondered whether she had prayed, lingering compassionately a moment in the door.

The place was like Nola in its light and brightness and surface comfort and assertive color notes of happiness, hung about with the trophies of her short but victorious career among the hearts of men. There were photographs of youths on dressing-table, chiffonier, and walls, and flaring pennants of eastern universities and colleges. Among the latter, as if it was the most triumphant trophy of them all, there hung a little highland bonnet with a broken feather, of the plaid Alan Macdonald had worn on the night of Nola's mask.

Frances went in for a nearer inspection, and lifted the little saucy bit of headgear from its place in the decorations of Nola's wall. There could be no doubting it; that was Alan Macdonald's bonnet, and there was a bullet hole in it at the stem of the little feather. The close-grazing lead had sheared the plume in two, and gone on its stinging way straight through the bonnet.

An exclamation of tender pity rose above her breath. She fondled the little headdress and pressed it to her bosom; she laid it against her cheek and kissed it in consolation for its hurt—the woman's balsam for all sufferings and heartbreaks, and incomparable among the panaceas of all time.

In spite of her sympathy for Nola in her grave situation, facing or undergoing what terrors no one knew, there was a bridling of resentment against her in Frances' breast as she hung the marred bonnet back in its place. It seemed to her that Nola had exulted over both herself and Alan Macdonald when she had put his bonnet on her wall, and that she had kept it there after the coming of Frances to that house in affront to friendship and mockery of the hospitality that she professed to extend.

Nola had asked her to that house so that she might see it hanging there; she had arranged it and studied it with the cunning intent of giving her pain. And how close that bullet had come to him! It must have sheared his fair hair as it tore through and dashed the bonnet from his head.

How she suffered in picturing his peril, happily outlived! How her heart trembled and her strong young limbs shook as she lived over in breathless agony the crisis of that night! He had carried her glove in his bonnet—she remembered the deft little movement of stowing it there just the moment before he bent and flashed away among the shadows. Excuse enough for losing it, indeed!

But he had not told her of his escape to justify the loss; proudly he had accepted the blame, and turned away with the hurt of it in his unbending heart.

She went back and took down the jaunty little cap again, and kissed it with compensatory tenderness, and left a jewel trembling on its crown from the well of her honest brown eye. If ever amends were made to any little highland bonnet in this world, then Alan Macdonald's was that bonnet, hanging there among the flaring pennants and trivial little schoolgirl trophies on Nola Chadron's wall.

Chadron came home toward evening at the head of sixty men. He had raised his army speedily and effectively. These men had been gathered by the members of the Drovers' Association and sent to Meander by special train, horses, guns, ammunition, and provisions with them, ready for a campaign.

The cattlemen had made a common cause of this sectional difficulty. Their indignation had been voiced very thoroughly by Mrs. Chadron when she had spoken to Frances with such resentment of the homesteaders standing up to fight. That was an unprecedented contingency. The "holy scare," such as Mark Thorn and similar hired assassins spread in communities of homesteaders, had been sufficient up to that day. Now this organized front of self-defense must be broken, and the bold rascals involved must be destroyed, root and branch.

Press agents of the Drovers' Association in Cheyenne were sowing nation-wide picturesque stories of the rustlers' uprising. The ground was being prepared for the graver news that was to come; the cattlemen's justification was being carefully arranged in advance.

Frances shuddered for the homesteaders when she looked out of her window upon this formidable force of lean-legged, gaunt-cheeked gun-fighters. They were men of the trade, cowboys who had fought their employers' battles from the Rio Grande to the Little Missouri. They were grim and silent men as they pressed round the watering troughs at the windmill with their horses, with flapping hats and low-slung pistols, and rifles sheathed in leather cases on their saddles.

She hurried down when she saw Chadron dismount at the gate. Mrs. Chadron was there to meet him, for she had stood guard at her window all day watching for his dust beyond the farthest hill. Frances could hear her weeping now, and Chadron's heavy voice rising in command as she came to the outer door.

Chadron was in the saddle again, and there was hurrying among his men at barn and corral as they put on bridles which they had jerked off, and tightened girths and gathered up dangling straps. Chadron was riding among them, large and commanding as a general, with a cloud in his dark face that seemed a threat of death.

Mrs. Chadron was hurrying in to make a bundle of some heavy clothing for Nola to protect her against the night chill on her way home, which the confident soul believed her daughter would be headed upon before midnight. Saul the invincible was taking the trail; Saul, who smashed his way to his desires in all things. She gave Frances a hurried word of encouragement as they passed outside the door.

Chadron was talking earnestly to his men. "I'll give fifty dollars bonus to the man that brings him down," she heard him say as she drew near, "and a hundred to the first man to lay eyes on my daughter."

Frances was hurrying to him with the information that she had kept for his ear alone. She was flushed with excitement as she came among the rough horsemen like a bright bloom tossed among rusty weeds. They fell back generously, not so much to give her room as to see her to better advantage, passing winks and grimaces of approval between themselves in their free and easy way. Chadron gave his hand in greeting as she spoke some hasty words of comfort.

"Thank you, Miss Frances, for your friendship in this bad business," he said, heartily, and with the best that there was in him. "You've been a great help and comfort to her mother, and if it wouldn't be askin' too much I'd like for you to stay here with her till we bring my little girl back home."

"Yes, I intended to stay, Mr. Chadron; I didn't come out to tell you that." She looked round at the admiring faces, too plainly expressive of their approbation, some of them, and plucked Chadron's sleeve. "Bend down—I want to tell you something," she said, in low, quick voice.

Chadron stooped, his hand lightly on her shoulder, in attitude of paternal benediction.

"It wasn't Macdonald, it was Mark Thorn," she whispered.

Chadron's face displayed no surprise, shadowed no deeper concern. Only there was a flitting look of perplexity in it as he sat upright in his saddle again.

"Who is he?" he asked.

"Don't you know?" She watched him closely, baffled by his unmoved countenance.

"I never heard of anybody in this country by that name," he returned, shaking his head with a show of entire sincerity. "Who was tellin' you about him—who said he was the man?"

A little confused, and more than a little disappointed over the apparent failure of her news to surprise from Chadron a betrayal of his guilty connection with Mark Thorn, she related the adventure of the morning, the finding of the cap, the meeting with Macdonald and his neighbors. She reserved nothing but what Lassiter had told her of Thorn's employers and his bloody work in that valley.

Chadron shook his head with an air of serious concern. There was a look of commiseration in his eyes for her credulity, and shameful duping by the cunning word of Alan Macdonald.

"That's one of Macdonald's lies," he said, something so hard and bitter in his voice when he pronounced that name that she shuddered. "I never heard of anybody named Thorn, here or anywheres else. That rustler captain he's a deep one, Miss Frances, and he was only throwin' dust in your eyes. But I'm glad you told me."

"But they said—the man he called Lassiter said—that Macdonald would find Nola, and bring her home," she persisted, unwilling yet to accept Chadron's word against that old man's, remembering the paper with the list of names.

"He's bald-faced enough to try even a trick like that!" he said.

Chadron looked impatiently toward the house, muttering something about the slowness of "them women," avoiding Frances' eyes. For she did not believe Saul Chadron, and her distrust was eloquent in her face.

"You mean that he'd pretend a rescue and bring her back, just to make sympathy for himself and his side of this trouble?"

"That's about the size of it," Chadron nodded, frowning sternly.

"Oh, it seems impossible that anybody could be so heartless and low!"

"A man that'd burn brands is low enough to go past anything you could imagine in that little head of yours, Miss Frances. Do you mind runnin' in and tellin'—no, here she comes."

"Couldn't this trouble between you and the homesteaders—"

"Homesteaders! They're cattle thieves, born in 'em and bred in 'em, and set in the hide and hair of 'em!"

"Couldn't it be settled without all this fighting and killing?" she went on, pressing her point.

"It's all over now but the shoutin'," said he. "There's only one way to handle a rustler, Miss Frances, and that's to salt his hide."

"I'd be willing—I'd be glad—to go up there myself, alone, and take any message you might send," she offered. "I think they'd listen to reason, even to leaving the country if you want them to, rather than try to stand against a ga—force like this."

"You can't understand our side of it, Miss Frances,"—Chadron spoke impatiently, reaching out for the bundle that his wife was bringing while she was yet two rods away—"for you ain't been robbed and wronged by them nesters like we have. You've got to live it to know what it means, little lady. We've argued with 'em till we've used up all our words, but their fences is still there. Now we're goin' to clear 'em out."

"But Macdonald seemed hurt when I asked him how much money they wanted you to pay as Nola's ransom," she said.

"He's deep, and he's tricky—too deep and too slick for you." Chadron gathered up his reins, leaned over and whispered: "Don't say anything about that Thorn yarn to her"—a sideways jerk of the head toward his wife—"her trouble's deep enough without stirrin' it."

Chadron had the bundle now, and Mrs. Chadron was helping him tie it behind his saddle, shaking her head sadly as she handled the belongings of her child with gentle touch. Tears were running down her cheeks, but her usually ready words seemed dead upon her tongue.

From the direction of the barn a little commotion moved forward among the horsemen, like a wave before a breeze. Banjo Gibson appeared on his horse as the last thong was tied about Nola's bundle, his hat tilted more than its custom to spare the sore place over his eye.

The cowboys looked at his gaudy trappings with curious eyes. Chadron gave him a short word of greeting, and bent to kiss his wife good-bye.

"I'm with you in this here thing, Saul," said Banjo; "I'll ride to hell's back door to help you find that little girl!"

Chadron slewed in his saddle with an ugly scowl.

"We don't want any banjo-pickers on this job, it's men's work!" he said.

Banjo seemed to droop with humiliation. Chuckles and derisive words were heard among Chadron's train. The little musician hung his bandaged head.

"Oh, you ortn't be hard on Banjo, he means well," Mrs. Chadron pleaded.

"He can stay here and scratch the pigs," Chadron returned, in his brutal way. "We've got to go now, old lady, but we'll be back before morning, and we'll bring Nola. Don't you worry any more; she'll be all right—they wouldn't dare to harm a hair of her head."

Mrs. Chadron looked at him with large hope and larger trust in her yearning face, and Banjo slewed his horse directly across the gate.

"Before you leave, Saul, I want to tell you this," he said. "You've hurt me, and you've hurt me deep! I'll leave here before another hour passes by, and I'll never set a boot-heel inside of your door ag'in as long as you live!"

"Oh hell!" said Chadron, spurring forward into the road.

Chadron's men rode away after him, except five whom he detailed to stay behind and guard the ranch. These turned their horses into the corral, made their little fire of twigs and gleaned brush in their manner of wood-scant frugality, and over it cooked their simple dinner, each man after his own way.

Banjo led his horse to the gate in front of the house and left it standing there while he went in to get his instruments. Mrs. Chadron was moved to a fresh outburst of weeping by his preparations for departure, and the sad, hurt look in his simple face.

"You stay here, Banjo; don't you go!" she begged. "Saul he didn't mean any harm by what he said—he won't remember nothing about it when he comes back."

"I'll remember it," Banjo told her, shaking his head in unbending determination, "and I couldn't be easy here like I was in the past. If I was to try to swaller a bite of Saul Chadron's grub after this it'd stick in my throat and choke me. No, I'm a-goin', mom, but I'm carryin' away kind thoughts of you in my breast, never to be forgot."

Banjo hitched the shoulder strap of the instrument from which he took his name with a jerking of the shoulder, and settled it in place; he took up his fiddle box and hooked it under his arm, and offered Mrs. Chadron his hand. She was crying, her face in her apron, and did not see. Frances took the extended hand and clasped it warmly, for the little musician and his homely small sentiments had found a place in her heart.

"You shouldn't leave until your head gets better," she said; "you're hardly able to take another long ride after being in the saddle all night, hurt like you are."

Banjo looked at her with pain reflected in his shallow eyes.

"The hurt that gives me my misery is where it can't be seen," he said.

"Where are you goin', Banjo, with the country riled up this way, and you li'ble to be shot down any place by them rustlers?" Mrs. Chadron asked, looking at him appealingly, her apron ready to stem her gushing tears.

"I'll go over to the mission and stay with Mother Mathews till I'm healed up. I'll be welcome in that house; I'd be welcome there if I was blind, and had m' back broke and couldn't touch a string."

"Yes, you would, Banjo," Mrs. Chadron nodded.

"She's married to a Injun, but she's as white as a angel's robe."

"She's a good soul, Banjo, as good as ever lived."

Frances took advantage of Banjo's trip to the reservation to send a note to her father apprising him of the tragedy at the ranch. Banjo buttoned it inside his coat, mounted his horse, and rode away.

Mrs. Chadron watched him out of sight with lamentations.

"I wish he'd 'a' stayed—it 'd 'a' been all right with Saul; Saul didn't mean any harm by what he said. He's the tender-heartedest man you ever saw, he wouldn't hurt a body's feelin's for a farm."

"I don't believe Banjo is a man to hold a grudge very long," Frances told her, looking after the retreating musician, her thoughts on him but hazily, but rather on a little highland bonnet with a bullet hole in its crown.

"No, he ain't," Mrs. Chadron agreed, plucking up a little brightness. "But it's a bad sign, a mighty bad sign, when a friend parts from you with a hurt in his heart that way, and leaves your house in a huff and feels put out like Banjo does."

"Yes," said Frances, "we let them go away from us too often that way, with sore hearts that even a little word might ease."

She spoke with such wistful regret that the older woman felt its note through her own deep gloom. She groped out, tears blinding her, until her hand found her young friend's, and then she clasped it, and stood holding it, no words between them.



CHAPTER XV

ONE ROAD

Twenty-four hours after Banjo's departure a messenger arrived at the ranchhouse. It was one of the cowboys attached to the ranch, and he came with his right arm in a sling. He was worn, and beaten out by long hours in the saddle and the pain of his wound.

He said they had news of Nola, and that Chadron sent word that she would be home before another night passed. This intelligence sent Mrs. Chadron off to bedroom and kitchen to make preparations for her reception and restoration.

As she left the room Frances turned to the messenger, who stood swinging his big hat awkwardly by the brim. She untied the sling that held his wounded arm and made him sit by the table while she examined his injury, concerning which Mrs. Chadron, in her excitement, had not even inquired.

The shot had gone through the forearm, grazing the bone. When Frances, with the aid of Maggie, the Mexican woman with tender eyes, had cleansed and bound up the wound, she turned to him with a decisive air of demand.

"Now, tell me the truth," she said.

He was a bashful man, with a long, sheepish nose and the bluest of harmless eyes. He started a little when she made that demand, and blushed.

"That's what the boss told me to say," he demurred.

"I know he did; but what's happening?"

"Well, we ain't heard hide nor hair of her"—he looked round cautiously, lest Mrs. Chadron surprise him in the truth—"and them rustlers they're clean gone and took everything but their houses and fences along—beds and teams and stock, and everything."

"Gone!" she repeated, staring at him blankly; "where have they gone?"

"Macdonald's doin' it; that man's got brainds," the cowboy yielded, with what he knew to be unlawful admiration of the enemy's parts. "He's herdin' 'em back in the hills where they've built a regular fort, they say. Some of us fellers caught up to a few of the stragglers last night, and that's when I got this arm put on me."

"Have any of the rustlers been killed?"

"No," he admitted, disgustedly, "they ain't! We've burnt all the shacks we come to, and cut their fences, but they all got slick and clean away, down to the littlest kid. But the boss's after 'em," he added, with brisk hopefulness, "and you'll have better news by mornin'."

Chadron himself was the next rider to arrive at that anxious house, and he came as the messenger of disaster. He arrived between midnight and morning, his horse spur-gashed, driven to the limit, himself sunken-eyed from his anxiety and hard pursuit of his elusive enemy.

Mrs. Chadron was asleep when he entered the living-room where Frances was keeping lonely watch before the chimney fire.

"What's happened?" she asked, hastening to meet him.

Chadron stood there gray and dusty, his big hat down hard on his head, his black eyes shooting inquiry into the shadowed room.

"Where is she?" he whispered.

"Upstairs, asleep—I've only just been able to persuade her to lie down and close her eyes."

"Well, there's no use to wake her up for bad news."

"You haven't found Nola?"

"I know right where she is. I could put my hand on her if I could reach her."

"Then why—?"

"Hell!" said Chadron, bursting into a fire of passion, "why can't I fly like an eagle? Young woman, I've got to tell you I've been beat and tricked for the first time in my life! They've got my men hemmed in, I tell you—they've got 'em shut up in a canyon as tight as if they was nailed in their coffins!"

If Chadron had been clearer of sight and mind in that moment of his towering anger, he would have seen her cheeks flush at his words, and her nostrils dilate and her breath come faster. But he was blind; his little varnish of delicacy was gone. He was just a ranting, roaring, dark-visaged brute with murder in his heart.

"That damned Macdonald done it, led 'em into it like they was blind! He's a wolf, and he's got the tricks of a wolf, he skulked ahead of 'em with a little pack of his rustlers and led 'em into his trap, then the men he had hid there and ready they popped up as thick as grass. They've got fifty of my men shut up there where they can't git to water, and where they can't fight back. Now, what do you think of that?"

"I'll tell you what I think," she said, throwing up her head, her eyes as quick and bright as water in the sun, "I think it's the judgment of God! I glory in the trick Alan Macdonald played you, and I pray God he can shut your hired murderers there till the last red-handed devil dies of thirst!"

Chadron fell back from her a step, his eyes staring, his mouth open, his hand lifted as if to silence her. He stood so a moment, casting his wild look around, fearful that somebody else had heard her passionate denunciation.

"What in the hell do you mean?" he asked, crouching as he spoke, his teeth clenched, his voice smothered in his throat.

"I mean that I know you're a murderer—and worse! You hired those men, like you hired Mark Thorn, to come here and murder those innocent men and their families!"

"Well, what if I did?" he said, standing straight again, his composure returning. "They're thieves; they've been livin' off of my cattle for years. Anybody's got a right to kill a rustler—that's the only cure. Well, they'll not pen them men of mine up there till they crack for water, I'll bet you a purty on that! I'm goin' after soldiers, and this time I'll git 'em, too."

"Soldiers!" said she, in amazement. "Will you ask the United States government to march troops here to save your hired assassins? Well, you'll not get troops—if there's anything that I can say against you to keep you from it!"

"You keep out of it, my little lady; you ain't got no call to mix up with a bunch of brand-burnin' thieves!"

"They're not thieves, and you know it! Macdonald never stole an animal from you or anybody else; none of the others ever did."

"What do you know about it?" sharply.

"I know it, as well as I know what's in your mind about the troops. You'll go over father's head to get them. Well, by the time he wires to the department the facts I'm going to lay before him, I'd like to see the color of the trooper you'll get!"

"You'll keep your mouth shut, and hold your finger out of this pie before you git it burnt!"

"I'll not keep my mouth shut!" She began moving about the room, picking up her belongings. "I'm going to saddle my horse and go to the post right now, and the facts of your bloody business will be in Washington before morning."

"You're not goin'—to the—post!" Chadron's words were slow and hard. He stood with his back to the door. "This house was opened to you as a friend, not as a traitor and a spy. You're not goin' to put your foot outside of it into any business of mine, no matter which way you lean."

All day she had been dressed ready to mount and ride in any emergency, her hat, gloves and quirt on the table before the fireplace. In that sober habit she appeared smaller and less stately, and Saul Chadron, with his heavy shoulders against the closed door, towered above her, dark and angrily determined.

"I'm going to get my horse," said she, standing before him, waiting for him to quit the door.

"You're goin' to stay right in this house, there's where you're goin' to stay; and you'll stay till I've cleaned out Macdonald and his gang, down to the last muddy-bellied wolf!"