by Lauran Paine
Duncan said dryly: “I know. I just came over that north country.” He pursed his lips, studied Marianne a moment, then added: “You had it all planned, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And supposing you’d failed?”
She let that defiant expression soften a little toward him. “I didn’t plan on failing, Mister Duncan. You see, I know Matthew Berryhill and Jack Thorne. They are good men, but what I needed for this job was a tough man. You were the only one around, so I planned not to fail just as I also planned to free you and accompany you.”
“You could’ve been shot, you know.”
“Mister Duncan ... there are worse things than dying.”
He stood there assessing her for a while, then he smiled. “You’re quite a woman, Marianne. I don’t know as I ever before met one like you.”
She did not return his smile nor acknowledge his sincere compliment. She simply turned, walked to her horse, thrust the Winchester into its saddle boot, watched Father Peter finish lashing the saddlebags aft of her cantle, then she swung up. She and the old priest exchanged a long, warm look. He smiled and she impulsively put a hand down to him.
“You’ll tell Sheriff Berryhill, Father?”
“Aye. As soon as the both of us get back to Leesville.” Father Peter’s smile dwindled a little as an unpleasant thought occurred to him. “He’s not going to like it at all, Marianne ... but we knew that, didn’t we?”
She squeezed his hand and nodded.
Father Peter stepped back until she’d reined around to face Duncan. He said: “Good luck, the both of you.” Then stood there as he watched them silently ride up northward out of the arroyo.
Upon the overhead lip of land Duncan halted to look back and see that the old priest got astride his animal without difficulty.
Father Peter gathered his reins and threw Duncan a casual wave as he turned his beast toward the upward and southward trail.
Without taking his eyes off Father Peter, Duncan said to Marianne: “He’s quite a man ... quite a man.”
“You don’t know him, Mister Duncan, so you have no idea of just how right you are. He’s one of the finest men you’ll ever know.”
Duncan did not attempt to push on, instead he swung, studied the beautiful girl wryly, and said: “Let’s get a couple of things straight right now. First off ... I make the decisions and give the orders. Next ... my name is Todd and your name is Marianne.”
“All right.”
“All right, what?”
“All right, Todd.”
Duncan lifted his reins and started forward toward the battlemented mountains dead ahead. After a while he said: “Do you know this country up in here?”
“Yes, I’ve been riding these hills since I was a little girl.”
“Have you any idea where young Parton might have gone, up here?”
“Father Peter followed his tracks as far as Bear Springs. That’s a meadow on ahead of us about two miles. After that, I’m afraid we’ll have to await daylight to track him farther.”
“Ride on ahead,” directed Duncan. “Make for this Bear Springs, and I’ll follow you.”
Marianne dutifully passed around Duncan, struck out in an angling, easterly way and almost at once passed out of the prairie’s pale light into forest gloom. She cut back and forth until she came upon a game trail, and afterward she did not leave this trail.
The forest was dark and fragrant. It was also carpeted with a spongy, ageless turf upon which their mounts did not make a sound. Once, they startled a fat brown bear out of his bed, and as he went crashing away down the hillside some aroused birds in the overhead treetops drowsily complained about this interruption of their slumber.
Duncan watched Marianne ride. She was lithe and shapely up there on her saddle and she handled her mount as only experienced riders can. She did not now seem at all like a town girl, and this set him to wondering about her. When she’d visited him at the jailhouse, she’d been attired in a dress. She’d seemed then entirely citified and feminine.
He decided, before this hunt was over, he would find out more about her, more about her dead father, too.
It was pleasant riding up in this forest with her, so pleasant he almost forgot why he was up in here. Almost forgot, too, that somewhere out on the plain below a furious sheriff and his burly deputy would be cursing a blue streak over his abduction and escape.
Chapter Eleven
They got to Bear Springs after midnight. Under a failing moon it was difficult to examine the ground but Duncan found all he had to see to know that Jeremiah Parton’s son had been gone from this place at least one full day.
Here, he and Marianne had an argument. She was for remaining at the springs and he was for pushing on. She reminded him of what he’d said back in the arroyo, but he argued that this was no longer pertinent, that what they must do now was steal a march upon her father’s slayer.
“If he hasn’t gotten over the rims, we might be ambushed!” she exclaimed.
“Listen ... that man is wounded and he’ll be dog-tired from all his riding and hiding. I expect he’ll be sleeping like a log on ahead somewhere.”
“He’d hear us nonetheless, or his horse would.”
“Not on these pine needles he wouldn’t.”
“Well,” said Marianne, her temper up. “You go ahead if you wish, but I’m staying here until sunup.”
Duncan stood up. “I don’t know the way or I would,” he snapped.
“There are game trails. They lead on around the slope and over the top out. It’s a long way and it’s hard riding. My guess is that despite his lead, he’ll be on this side of the rimrocks.”
“Your guess,” snorted Duncan. “You get up onto that horse and lead out, or I’ll put you up there. I told you back on the range, I’d make the decisions and give the orders. You agreed to that. Now I’m telling you ... get on that horse!”
Marianne whirled and glared. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.
Duncan teetered where he stood, restrained by inhibitions from laying a hand on her, and, as moments passed, sorry he’d said that because it put him in a position where, if she didn’t obey him, he would have to back up his words with action, or ignominiously back down. And Todd Duncan wasn’t the backing-down kind.
They stood less than twenty feet apart with the little spring and its scuffed ground between them.
He tried temporizing and softened his voice to her. “Marianne, you point the way and I’ll ride well ahead, so if there’s shooting, you’ll be plumb out of it. But try to understand ... Berryhill will pick up my trail come daylight. He’ll be in these hills by noon. Whatever we do, we’ve got to do now.”
“Berryhill couldn’t find us in here. Not if we knew he was trying to. Dawn will help us go directly to my father’s killer. Besides, these animals need a rest.”
“They can rest after we find Parton,” Duncan said, his control slipping. “We’ve wasted enough time. Get on that horse.”
“No!”
He looked at her. He dropped his reins and took a reluctant step forward, his face grim as though he were going into battle.
She saw his expression and said quickly, almost in horror: “No! Don’t you dare try!”
He kept on walking.
She reached for one of her split reins, doubled it, and raised it. “If you touch me, you’ll wish you hadn’t, Todd Duncan.”
He stopped with two feet separating them. She stood there ready to lash out at him with that upraised leather strap.
“Don’t make me do it this way,” he said.
They stood glaringly adamant, both of them breathing hard. Both of them stubbornly dogged in their resolve. Their eyes locked and their bodies tense.
Marianne abruptly turned, toed in, and sprang up over leather, refusing to look down at him and becoming very oc
cupied in adjusting her reins with meticulous attention.
He did not say a word. He went back to his own animal, mounted it, and swung away from Bear Springs. At the clearing’s edge where thick forest closed down again with its powerful darkness he twisted to gaze at her.
“This same trail?” he asked.
“Yes. Keep going until I tell you differently.”
He settled back around and kneed out his horse. There was a dim paleness where the trail went crookedly in and out among immense red-barked pines. There were interminable little feeder trails coming into this main trail, but it was not difficult even in the weak light of early morning to determine which was the main trail and which was not.
After an hour’s riding Duncan halted, got down, and paced ahead with a match flare to make certain they were not following just a trail. They weren’t. The tracks of a shod horse lay there plainly evident in six inches of ancient dust. He got back astride, said nothing to Marianne, and struck out again.
This main trail went easterly around the mountainside until a granite switchback was encountered, then it twisted back upon itself at a higher altitude and went westerly again. In this manner it seesawed back and forth always climbing, but never so steep it could not be easily navigated. It was an ancient thoroughfare, and where it crossed bare rock, it was cut a foot deep indicating that men and animals had used it for hundreds of years.
Those lesser trails that came into it here and there rose up out of cañons as though they had been made by animals seeking water and returning from this quest to pass along again over the central trail way. There was an occasional windfall pine or fir tree to be skirted, and once a recently tumbled small tree had to be jumped. But generally this was a good trail.
It wound around a brushy knoll, then broke out, when Duncan least expected it, into a water-grass meadow. Here, after passing a sentinel pine of great girth and age, lay a little fry-pan lake. And here, too, they startled a band of night-feeding elk that fled from them, but without any panic.
“From here on,” Marianne said, “there are alternating marshes and meadows. He could be at any one of them.”
Duncan bobbed his head up and down. “How far before these meadows peter out and we’re back on that mountainside again?”
“About two miles, I’d guess. There’s a fine big meadow ahead about a mile from this little skillet lake.”
“He may be there,” Duncan said, and kept on riding even though his horse would have stopped.
“If he isn’t,” retorted Marianne, “he’ll have made it over the rimrocks and down the other side.”
Duncan stayed on the trail. He rode easily in the saddle but vigilant. He did not believe young Parton would be lying along here any place for the elemental reason that any seasoned Westerner would know, from the widening, broadening landforms roundabout, there would be an even larger, more lush, and well-watered meadow on ahead through the last fringe of trees.
Marianne, though, had her misgivings. Twice she murmured warnings and twice Duncan ignored them as he slouched along watching the trees press in, then drop back again, always becoming thinner in their stands, less grim and forbidding in their grouped darkness.
The trail dropped down, crossed a brawling little white-water creek, went up a dusty trail through another spit of pines, then, where those trees fell away again, going east and west on around, there lay a large meadow with a lake at its far end. Stars were in that lake; the water was like glass. Behind it rose up a solid, rough rock wall upon whose towering heights stood some ragged old bull pines looking for all the world like dejected, vanquished giants, against the paling easterly sky.
“If he hasn’t gone on by now,” Duncan said, drawing rein in the last tree fringe so Marianne could come up even with him, “he’ll be somewhere hereabouts.”
Marianne said nothing as she ran a slow, careful look ahead.
Duncan swung down, handed up his reins, and said: “Stay here and don’t make any noise. I’ll see if I can locate his horse.”
He went twistingly in among the trees southward until he was shielded, then he began passing carefully around this large emerald meadow with its twenty-acre lake and its great depth of solitude, moving as an Indian would have moved. He would go ahead fifty or a hundred feet, then halt to test the area roundabout where he stood motionlessly. Moving each time from shadow to shadow, from tree to tree.
In this manner he got within sight of an old tumble-down line rider’s log cabin and here he saw what he was seeking. A grazing horse was moving drowsily from one hummock of tufted grass to another.
Duncan got as close as he dared to this animal, saw caked sweat stains, glided on nearer to the cabin, saw a saddle with the blanket and bridle hanging from a tree where porcupines could not get at it, and paused to check the gun Marianne had given him.
The horse threw up its head, swung around, and sniffed the little vagrant breeze coming on from the direction of Marianne and their own horses, and whinnied.
Duncan froze.
For a long time there was no reaction to this obvious call of one horse to another horse, but from within the shack came the unmistakable rattle of spur rowels. Duncan swore fiercely to himself. The horse had awakened his owner and there was only one way to approach that cabin because, excepting the north wall, there was neither a door nor a window, and approaching it now across a grassy starlit meadow would be an invitation for the man in there to shoot him.
He debated whether or not to go back for Marianne and their animals. He thought, if he allowed that unseen man to rest easy for a little while, his vigilance might slacken. He also thought that if that man should get out of the cabin, without Duncan seeing him, and find Marianne with their two horses, he could very easily put Duncan afoot in these mountains, which would be a prime disaster.
Duncan went back the way he’d come, found Marianne standing with their animals, her Winchester cradled but ready, and explained to her what he’d found. She seemed not the least surprised.
“I’m familiar with that cabin,” she told Duncan. “The cowmen use it when their cattle are ranging the mountains during the summer. It was built by trappers about fifty years ago.”
“Well,” growled Duncan, “they built it to stand off Indians from the looks of it. There’s only one way in and one way out.” He paused to look at her a thoughtful moment. “I’ll trade you guns,” he said, holding out the six-gun. “If we can’t surprise him in there, this will turn into a rifle duel because the range is too great for six-guns.”
She dutifully handed over the Winchester, took his six-gun, and waited for his next directive.
“We’ll lead our horses around through the trees and you’ll stay with them. If he gets out and runs off our stock ... ”
“I understand,” she calmly said. “Lead out.”
He went back the way he’d come but slower this time because the horses had to be watched lest they scent that grazing animal and call to it.
The sky was steadily paling now, up where those forlorn old bull pines stood watch atop their dizzying heights. There was a clean scent to this predawn time of day, a definite fragrance of virgin country, but for now Duncan ignored everything but the excitement he felt at nearing the end of the trail.
Up ahead in the cabin was the one man who would clear him of a murder charge, and this time no steel bars separated him from Duncan as had been the case with Jeremiah Parton back in Leesville. He meant to get the truth out of this one if he had to half kill him to do it.
They came to a coarse stand of mountain laurel and buckbrush. Here, too, was some fire plant and some wiry sage interspersed with high country, red-barked manzanita. Duncan made their horses fast here and instructed Marianne to stay close enough to clamp a hand over their nostrils should they hear or smell that other animal and attempt to call out. She seemed, for the first time, to be uneasy. Duncan noticed this and it a
nnoyed him. He frowned over at her.
“Doggone it, girl,” he said roughly. “You’ve held up fine so far. Don’t go getting all rubbery-legged now.”
Marianne’s eyes flashed fire points. “If you think I’m afraid, you’re badly mistaken.”
“You’re giving a pretty good imitation of it,” he growled. “Now, you listen to me ... if he gets out of that cussed shack, I’ll try and head him off. But if I can’t, if he gets away, I’m going to have to concentrate on keeping him away from his horse. That means he’ll probably try to get our horses. If you see anything at all that looks suspicious, shoot. You understand?”
“Of course I understand. Do you propose to stand here talking all night?”
“It’s morning,” Duncan said, hoisting the carbine.
“All right ... all morning then.”
He made a slow smile at her. This was better, he thought, knowing she was mad. He tipped his hat, stepped away, turned, and swung along through the forest fringe going back around to the front of that slowly decaying, old log house.
The moon left, sinking behind a thick mountain battlement. On Duncan’s right stars still lay thick in that still water twenty-acre lake. Parton’s grazing horse was moving leisurely downcountry in the direction where their horses had been when he’d scented them before. This pleased Duncan. The farther from the cabin the animal went the better.
A porcupine, evidently attracted by the salty scent of horse sweat on leather, came grumpily waddling along. It never did actually see Duncan with its weak, watery eyes, but it smelled him, halted, bristled, made its bitterly complaining grunting sounds, then went protestingly on its way.
Chapter Twelve
A panther screamed from the overhead heights, bringing the hair along Duncan’s neck erect. He thought the big cat had probably scented that grazing horse and had been stalking him on his downward prowl, when man scent had also come up to him, making the cougar both fearful and angry.
