The Collected Westerns of William MacLeod Raine: 21 Novels in One Volume

by Unknown

  Before he answered, Dave chewed a meditative cud. "Maybeso you're right--and maybe 'way off. Say you're wrong. Say Meldrum has nothing to do with this. In that case it is in the hills that we have got to find Miss Beulah."

  "But he has. I feel sure he has. Mr. Ryan says Rutherford thinks so, too."

  "Both you and Hal have got that crook Meldrum in yore minds. You've been thinking a lot about him, so you jump to the conclusion that what you're afraid of has happened. The chances are ten to one against it. But we'll say you're right. Put yourself in Meldrum's place. What would he do?"

  Beaudry turned a gray, agonized face on his friend. "I don't know. What--what would he do?"

  "The way to get at it is to figure yourself in his boots. Remember that you're a bad, rotten lot, cur to the bone. You meet up with this girl and get her in yore power. You've got a grudge against her because she spoiled yore plans, and because through her you were handed the whaling of yore life and are being hounded out of the country. You're sore clear through at all her people and at all her friends. Naturally, you're as sweet-tempered as a sore-headed bear, and you've probably been drinking like a sheepherder on a spree."

  "I know what a devil he is. The question is how far would he dare go?"

  "You've put yore finger right on the point, son. What might restrain him wouldn't be any moral sense, but fear. He knows that once he touched Miss Rutherford, this country would treat him like a rattlesnake. He could not even be sure that the Rutherfords would not hunt him down in Mexico."

  "You think he would let her alone, then?"

  The old-timer shook his head. "No, he wouldn't do that. But I reckon he'd try to postpone a decision as long as he could. Unless he destroyed her in the first rush of rage, he wouldn't have the nerve to do it until he had made himself crazy drunk. It all depends on circumstances, but my judgment is--if he had a chance and if he didn't think it too great a risk--that he would try to hold her a prisoner as a sort of hostage to gloat over."

  "You mean keep her--unharmed?"

  They were already in the saddle and on the road. Dave looked across at his white-faced friend.

  "I'm only guessing, Roy, but that's the way I figure it," he said gently.

  "You don't think he would try to take her across the desert with him to Mexico."

  Ryan shook his head.

  "No chance. He couldn't make it. When he leaves the hills, Miss Rutherford will stay there."

  "Alive?" asked Beaudry from a dry throat.

  "Don't know."

  "God!"

  "So that whether Miss Beulah did or did not meet Meldrum, we have to look for her up among the mountains of the Big Creek watershed," concluded Dingwell. "I believe we'll find her safe and sound. Chances are Meldrum isn't within forty miles of her."

  They were riding toward Lonesome Park, from which they intended to work up into the hills. Just before reaching the rim of the park, they circled around a young pine lying across the trail. Roy remembered the tree. It had stood on a little knoll, strong and graceful, reaching straight toward heaven with a kind of gallant uprightness. Now its trunk was snapped, its boughs crushed, its foliage turning sere. An envious wind had brought it low. Somehow that pine reminded Beaudry poignantly of the girl they were seeking. She, too, had always stood aloof, a fine and vital personality, before the eyes of men sufficient to herself. But as the evergreen had stretched its hundred arms toward light and sunshine, so Beulah Rutherford had cried dumbly to life for some vague good she could not formulate.

  Were her pride and courage abased, too? Roy would not let himself believe it. The way of youth is to deny the truth of all signposts which point to the futility of beauty and strength. It would be a kind of apostasy to admit that her sweet, lissom grace might be forever crushed and bruised.

  They rode hard and steadily. Before dusk they were well up toward the divide among the wooded pockets of the hills. From one of these a man came to meet them.

  "It's Hal Rutherford," announced Ryan, who was riding in front with Dingwell.

  The owner of the horse ranch nodded a greeting as he drew up in front of them. He was unshaven and gaunt. Furrows of anxiety lined his face.

  "Anything new, Hal?" asked Dave.

  "Not a thing. We're combing the hills thorough."

  "You don't reckon that maybe a cougar--?" Ryan stopped. It occurred to him that his suggestion was not a very cheerful one.

  Rutherford looked at the little Irishman from bleak eyes. The misery in them was for the moment submerged in a swift tide of hate. "A two-legged cougar, Pat. If I meet up with him, I'll take his hide off inch by inch."

  "Meaning Meldrum?" asked Roy.

  "Meaning Meldrum." A spasm of pain shot across the face of the man. "If he's done my little girl any meanness, he'd better blow his head off before I get to him."

  "Don't believe he'd dare hurt Miss Beulah, Rutherford. Meldrum belongs to the coyote branch of the wolf family. I've noticed it's his night to howl only when hunters are liable to be abed. If he's in this thing at all, I'll bet he's trying to play both ends against the middle. We'll sure give him a run for his white alley," Dingwell concluded.

  "Hope you're right, Dave," Rutherford added in a voice rough with the feeling he could not suppress: "I appreciate it that you boys from the Lazy Double D came after what has taken place."

  Dave grinned cheerfully. "Sho, Hal! Maybe Beaudry and I aren't sending any loving-cups up to you and yours, but we don't pull any of that sulk-in-the-tent stuff when our good friend Beulah Rutherford is lost in the hills. She went through for us proper, and we ain't going to quit till we bring her back to you as peart and sassy as that calf there."

  "What part of the country do you want us to work?" asked Ryan.

  "You can take Del Oro and Lame Cow Creeks from the divide down to the foothills," Rutherford answered. "I'll send one of the boys over to boss the round-up. He'll know the ground better than you lads. Make camp here to-night and he'll join you before you start. To-morrow evening I'll have a messenger meet you on the flats. We're trying to keep in touch with each other, you understand."

  Rutherford left them making camp. They were so far up in the mountains that the night was cool, even though the season was midsummer. Unused to sleeping outdoors as yet, Roy lay awake far into the night. His nerves were jumpy. The noises of the grazing horses and of the four-footed inhabitants of the night startled him more than once from a cat-nap. His thoughts were full of Beulah Rutherford. Was she alive or dead to-night, in peril or in safety?

  At last, in the fag end of the night, he fell into sound sleep that was untroubled. From this he was wakened in the first dim dawn by the sound of his companions stirring. A fire was already blazing and breakfast in process of making. He rose and stretched his stiff limbs. Every bone seemed to ache from contact with the hard ground.

  While they were eating breakfast, a man rode up and dismounted. A long, fresh zigzag scar stretched across his forehead. It was as plain to be seen as the scowl which drew his heavy eyebrows together.

  "'Lo, Charlton. Come to boss this round-up for us?" asked Dingwell cheerily.

  The young man nodded sulkily. "Hal sent me. The boys weren't with him." He looked across the fire at Beaudry, and there was smouldering rage in his narrowed eyes.

  Roy murmured "Good-morning" in a rather stifled voice. This was the first time he had met Charlton since they had clashed in the arcade of the Silver Dollar. That long deep scar fascinated him. He felt an impulse to apologize humbly for having hit him so hard. To put such a mark on a man for life was a liberty that might well be taken as a personal affront. No wonder Charlton hated him--and as their eyes met now, Roy had no doubt about that. The man was his enemy. Some day he would even the score. Again Beaudry's heart felt the familiar drench of an icy wave.

  Charlton did not answer his greeting. He flushed to his throat, turned abruptly on his heel, and began to talk with Ryan. The hillman wanted it clearly understood that the feud he cherished was only temporarily ab
andoned. But even Roy noticed that the young Admirable Crichton had lost some of his debonair aplomb.

  The little Irishman explained this with a grin to Dave as they were riding together half an hour later. "It's not so easy to get away with that slow insolence of his while he's wearing that forgit-me-not young Beaudry handed him in the mix-up."

  "Sort of spoils the toutensemble, as that young Melrose tenderfoot used to say--kinder as if a bald-haided guy was playing Romeo and had lost his wig in the shuffle," agreed Dave.

  By the middle of the forenoon they were well up in the headwaters of the two creeks they were to work. Charlton divided the party so as to cover both watersheds as they swept slowly down. Roy was on the extreme right of those working Del Oro.

  It was a rough country, with wooded draws cached in unexpected pockets of the hills. Here a man might lie safely on one of a hundred ledges while the pursuit drove past within fifty feet of him. As Roy's pinto clambered up and down the steep hills, he recalled the advice of Dave to ride a buckskin "that melts into the atmosphere like a patch of bunch grass." He wished he had taken that advice. A man looking for revenge could crouch in the chaparral and with a crook of his finger send winged death at his enemy. A twig crackling under the hoof of his horse more than once sent an electric shock through his pulses. The crash of a bear through the brush seemed to stop the beating of his heart.

  Charlton had made a mistake in putting Beaudry on the extreme right of the drive. The number of men combing the two creeks was not enough to permit close contact. Sometimes a rider was within hail of his neighbor. More often he was not. Roy, unused to following the rodeo, was deflected by the topography of the ridge so far to the right that he lost touch with the rest.

  By the middle of the afternoon he had to confess to himself with chagrin that he did not even know how to reach Del Oro. While he had been riding the rough wooded ridge above, the creek had probably made a sharp turn to the left. Must he go back the way he had come? Or could he cut across country to it? It was humiliating that he could not even follow a small river without losing the stream and himself. He could vision the cold sneer of Charlton when he failed to appear at the night rendezvous. Even his friends would be annoyed at such helplessness.

  After an hour's vain search he was more deeply tangled in the web of hills. He was no longer even sure how to get down from them into the lower reaches of country toward which he was aiming.

  While he hesitated on a ridge there came to him a faint, far cry. He gave a shout of relief, then listened for his answer. It did not come. He called again, a third time, and a fourth. The wind brought back no reply. Roy rode in the direction of the sound that had first registered itself on his ears, stopping every minute or two to shout. Once he fancied he heard again the voice.

  Then, unexpectedly, the cry came perfectly clear, over to the right scarcely a hundred yards. A little arroyo of quaking aspens lay between him and the one who called. He dismounted, tied his horse to a sapling, and pushed through the growth of young trees. Emerging from these, he climbed the brow of the hill and looked around. Nobody was in sight.

  "Where are you?" he shouted.

  "Here--in the prospect hole."

  His pulses crashed. That voice--he would have known it out of a million.

  A small dirt dump on the hillside caught his eye. He ran forward to the edge of a pit and looked down.

  The haggard eyes of Beulah Rutherford were lifted to meet his.

  Chapter XXII

  Miss Rutherford Speaks her Mind

  For the first time in over a year an itinerant preacher was to hold services in the Huerfano Park schoolhouse. He would speak, Beulah Rutherford knew, to a mere handful of people, and it was to mitigate his disappointment that she rode out into the hills on the morning of her disappearance to find an armful of columbines for decorating the desk-pulpit. The man had written Miss Rutherford and asked her to notify the community. She had seen that the news was carried to the remotest ranch, but she expected for a congregation only a scatter of patient women and restless children with three or four coffee-brown youths in high-heeled boots on the back row to represent the sinners.

  It was a brave, clean world into which she rode this summer morning. The breeze brought to her nostrils the sweet aroma of the sage. Before her lifted the saw-toothed range into a sky of blue sprinkled here and there with light mackerel clouds. Blacky pranced with fire and intelligence, eager to reach out and leave behind him the sunny miles.

  Near the upper end of the park she swung up an arroyo that led to Big Flat Top. A drawling voice stopped her.

  "Oh, you, Beulah Rutherford! Where away this glad mo'ning?"

  A loose-seated rider was lounging in the saddle on a little bluff fifty yards away. His smile reminded her of a new copper kettle shining in the sun.

  "To find columbines for church decorations," she said with an answering smile.

  "Have you been building a church since I last met up with you?"

  "There will be services in the schoolhouse tomorrow at three P.M., conducted by the Reverend Melancthon Smith. Mr. Charlton is especially invited to attend."

  "Maybe I'll be there. You can't sometimes 'most always tell. I'm going to prove I've got nothing against religion by going with you to help gather the pulpit decorations."

  "That's very self-sacrificing of you." She flashed a look of gay derision at him as he joined her. "Sure you can afford to waste so much time?"

  "I don't call it wasted. But since you've invited me so hearty to your picnic, I'd like to be sure you've got grub enough in the chuck wagon for two," he said with a glance at her saddle-bags.

  "I'm not sure. Maybe you had better not come."

  "Oh, I'm coming if you starve me. Say, Beulah, have you heard about Jess Tighe?"

  "What about him?"

  "He had a stroke last night. Doc Spindler thinks he won't live more than a few hours."

  Beulah mused over that for a few moments without answer. She had no liking for the man, but it is the way of youth to be shocked at the approach of death. Yet she knew this would help to clear up the situation. With the evil influence of Tighe removed, there would be a chance for the park to develop along more wholesome lines. He had been like a sinister shadow that keeps away the sunlight.

  She drew a deep breath. "I don't wish him any harm. But it will be a good thing for all of us when he can't make us more sorrow and trouble."

  "He never made me any," Charlton answered.

  "Didn't he?" She looked steadily across at him. "You can't tell me he didn't plan that express robbery, for instance."

  "Meaning that I was in the party that pulled it off?" he asked, flushing.

  "I know well enough you were in it--knew it all along. It's the sort of thing you couldn't keep out of."

  "How about Ned? Do you reckon he could keep out of it?" She detected rising anger beneath his controlled voice.

  "Not with you leading him on." Her eyes poured scorn on him. "And I'm sure he would appreciate your loyalty in telling me he was in it."

  "Why do you jump on me, then?" he demanded sulkily. "And I didn't say Ned was in that hold-up--any more than I admit having been in it myself. Are you trying to make trouble with me? Is that it?"

  "I don't care whether I make trouble with you or not. I'm not going to pretend and make-believe, if that's what you want. I don't have to do it."

  "I see you don't," he retorted bluntly. "I suppose you don't have to mind your own business either."

  "It is my business when Ned follows you into robbery."

  "Maybe I followed him," he jeered.

  She bit back the tart answer on her tongue. What was the use of quarreling? It used to be that they were good friends, but of late they jangled whenever they met. Ever since the Western Express affair she had held a grudge at him. Six months ago she had almost promised to marry him. Now nothing was farther from her thoughts.

  But he was still very much of the mind that she should.

  "What's t
he matter with you, Boots?" he wanted to know roughly. "You used to have some sense. You weren't always flying out at a fellow. Now there's no way of pleasing you."

  "I suppose it is odd that I don't want my friends to be thieves," she flung out bitterly.

  "Don't use that word if you mean me," he ordered.

  "What word shall I substitute?"

  He barely suppressed an oath. "I know what's ailing you? We're not smooth enough up here for you. We're not educated up to your standard. If I'd been to Cornell, say--"

  "Take care," she warned with a flash of anger in her black eyes.

  "Oh, I don't know. Why should I cull my words so careful? I notice yours ain't hand-picked. Ever since this guy Beaudry came spying into the park, you've had no use for me. You have been throwing yourself at his head and couldn't see any one else."