by Unknown
"I had a little luck," admitted Dave modestly.
"Betcha," agreed Steve. "I was just startin' over to haul the fat guy off Dave when he began bleatin' for us to come help him turn loose the bear. I kinda took my time then."
"Onct I went to a play called 'All's Well That Ends Well,'" said Byington reminiscently. "At the Tabor Grand the-á-ter, in Denver."
"Did it tell how a freckled cow-punch rode a fat tinhorn on his spurs?" asked Hart.
"Bet he wears stovepipes on his laigs next time he mixes it with Dave," suggested one coffee-brown youth. "Well, looks like the show's over for to-night. I'm gonna roll in." Motion carried unanimously.
CHAPTER IV
THE PAINT HOSS DISAPPEARS
Wakened by the gong, Dave lay luxuriously in the warmth of his blankets. It was not for several moments that he remembered the fight or the circumstances leading to it. The grin that lit his boyish face at thought of its unexpected conclusion was a fleeting one, for he discovered that it hurt his face to smile. Briskly he rose, and grunted "Ouch!" His sides were sore from the rib squeezing of Miller's powerful arms.
Byington walked out to the remuda with him. "How's the man-tamer this glad mo'nin'?" he asked of Dave.
"Fine and dandy, old lizard."
"You sure got the deadwood on him when yore spurs got into action. A man's like a watermelon. You cayn't tell how good he is till you thump him. Miller is right biggity, and they say he's sudden death with a gun. But when it come down to cases he hadn't the guts to go through and stand the gaff."
"He's been livin' soft too long, don't you reckon?"
"No, sir. He just didn't have the sand in his craw to hang on and finish you off whilst you was rippin' up his laigs."
Dave roped his mount and rode out to meet Chiquito. The pinto was an aristocrat in his way. He preferred to choose his company, was a little disdainful of the cowpony that had no accomplishments. Usually he grazed a short distance from the remuda, together with one of Bob Hart's string. The two ponies had been brought up in the same bunch.
This morning Dave's whistle brought no nicker of joy, no thud of hoofs galloping out of the darkness to him. He rode deeper into the desert. No answer came to his calls. At a canter he cut across the plain to the wrangler. That young man had seen nothing of Chiquito since the evening before, but this was not at all unusual.
The cowpuncher returned to camp for breakfast and got permission of the foreman to look for the missing horses.
Beyond the flats was a country creased with draws and dry arroyos. From one to another of these Dave went without finding a trace of the animals. All day he pushed through cactus and mesquite heavy with gray dust. In the late afternoon he gave up for the time and struck back to the flats. It was possible that the lost broncos had rejoined the remuda of their own accord or had been found by some of the riders gathering up strays.
Dave struck the herd trail and followed it toward the new camp. A horseman came out of the golden west of the sunset to meet him. For a long time he saw the figure rising and falling in the saddle, the pony moving in the even fox-trot of the cattle country.
The man was Bob Hart.
"Found 'em?" shouted Dave when he was close enough to be heard.
"No, and we won't--not this side of Malapi. Those scalawags didn't make camp last night. They kep' travelin'. If you ask me, they're movin' yet, and they've got our broncs with 'em."
This had already occurred to Dave as a possibility. "Any proof?" he asked quietly.
"A-plenty. I been ridin' on the point all day. Three-four times we cut trail of five horses. Two of the five are bein' ridden. My Four-Bits hoss has got a broken front hoof. So has one of the five."
"Movin' fast, are they?"
"You're damn whistlin'. They're hivin' off for parts unknown. Malapi first off, looks like. They got friends there."
"Steelman and his outfit will protect them while they hunt cover and make a getaway. Miller mentioned Denver before the race--said he was figurin' on goin' there. Maybe--"
"He was probably lyin'. You can't tell. Point is, we've got to get busy. My notion is we'd better make a bee-line for Malapi right away," proposed Bob.
"We'll travel all night. No use wastin' any more time."
Dug Doble received their decision sourly. "It don't tickle me a heap to be left short-handed because you two boys have got an excuse to get to town quicker."
Hart looked him straight in the eye. "Call it an excuse if you want to. We're after a pair of shorthorn crooks that stole our horses."
The foreman flushed angrily. "Don't come bellyachin' to me about yore broomtails. I ain't got 'em."
"We know who's got 'em," said Dave evenly. "What we want is a wage check so as we can cash it at Malapi."
"You don't get it," returned the big foreman bluntly. "We pay off when we reach the end of the drive."
"I notice you paid yore brother and Miller when we gave an order for it," Hart retorted with heat.
"A different proposition. They hadn't signed up for this drive like you boys did. You'll get what's comin' to you when I pay off the others. You'll not get it before."
The two riders retired sulkily. They felt it was not fair, but on the trail the foreman is an autocrat. From the other riders they borrowed a few dollars and gave in exchange orders on their pay checks.
Within an hour they were on the road. Fresh horses had been roped from the remuda and were carrying them at an even Spanish jog-trot through the night. The stars came out, clear and steady above a ghostly world at sleep. The desert was a place of mystery, of vast space peopled by strange and misty shapes.
The plain stretched vaguely before them. Far away was the thin outline of the range which enclosed the valley. The riders held their course by means of that trained sixth sense of direction their occupation had developed.
They spoke little. Once a coyote howled dismally from the edge of the mesa. For the most part there was no sound except the chuffing of the horses' movements and the occasional ring of a hoof on the baked ground.
The gray dawn, sifting into the sky, found them still traveling. The mountains came closer, grew more definite. The desert flamed again, dry, lifeless, torrid beneath a sky of turquoise. Dust eddies whirled in inverted cones, wind devils playing in spirals across the sand. Tablelands, mesas, wide plains, desolate lava stretches. Each in turn was traversed by these lean, grim, bronzed riders.
They reached the foothills and left behind the desert shimmering in the dancing heat. In a deep gorge, where the hill creases gave them shade, the punchers threw off the trail, unsaddled, hobbled their horses, and stole a few hours' sleep.
In the late afternoon they rode back to the trail through a draw, the ponies wading fetlock deep in yellow, red, blue, and purple flowers. The mountains across the valley looked in the dry heat as though made of _papier-mâché_. Closer at hand the undulations of sand hills stretched toward the pass for which they were making.
A mule deer started out of a dry wash and fled into the sunset light. The long, stratified faces of rock escarpments caught the glow of the sliding sun and became battlemented towers of ancient story.
The riders climbed steadily now, no longer engulfed in the ground swell of land waves. They breathed an air like wine, strong, pure, bracing. Presently their way led them into a hill pocket, which ran into a gorge of piñons stretching toward Gunsight Pass.
The stars were out again when they looked down from the other side of the pass upon the lights of Malapi.
CHAPTER V
SUPPER AT DELMONICO'S INTERRUPTED
The two D Bar Lazy R punchers ate supper at Delmonico's. The restaurant was owned by Wong Chung. A Cantonese celestial did the cooking and another waited on table. The price of a meal was twenty-five cents, regardless of what one ordered.
Hop Lee, the waiter, grinned at the frolicsome youths with the serenity of a world-old wisdom.
"Bleef steak, plork chop, lamb chop, hlam'neggs, clorn bleef hash, Splanish stew," h
e chanted, reciting the bill of fare.
"Yes," murmured Bob.
The waiter said his piece again.
"Listens good to me," agreed Dave. "Lead it to us."
"You takee two--bleef steak and hlam'neggs, mebbe," suggested Hop helpfully.
"Tha's right. Two orders of everything on the me-an-you, Charlie."
Hop did not argue with them. He never argued with a customer. If they stormed at him he took refuge in a suddenly acquired lack of understanding of English. If they called him Charlie or John or One Lung, he accepted the name cheerfully and laid it to a racial mental deficiency of the 'melicans. Now he decided to make a selection himself.
"Vely well. Bleef steak and hlam'neggs."
"Fried potatoes done brown, John."
"Flied plotatoes. Tea or cloffee?"
"Coffee," decided Dave for both of them. "Warm mine."
"And custard pie," added Bob. "Made from this year's crop."
"Aigs sunny side up," directed his friend.
"Fry mine one on one side and one on the other," Hart continued facetiously.
"Vely well." Hop Lee's impassive face betrayed no perplexity as he departed. In the course of a season he waited on hundreds of wild men from the hills, drunk and sober.
Dave helped himself to bread from a plate stacked high with thick slices. He buttered it and began to eat. Hart did the same. At Delmonico's nobody ever waited till the meal was served. Just about to attack a second slice, Dave stopped to stare at his companion. Hart was looking past his shoulder with alert intentness. Dave turned his head. Two men, leaving the restaurant, were paying the cashier.
"They just stepped outa that booth to the right," whispered Bob.
The men were George Doble and a cowpuncher known as Shorty, a broad, heavy-set little man who worked for Bradley Steelman, owner of the Rocking Horse Ranch, what time he was not engaged on nefarious business of his own. He was wearing a Chihuahua hat and leather chaps with silver conchas.
At this moment Hop Lee arrived with dinner.
Dave sighed as he grinned at his friend. "I need that supper in my system. I sure do, but I reckon I don't get it."
"You do not, old lizard," agreed Hart. "I'll say Doble's the most inconsiderate guy I ever did trail. Why couldn't he 'a' showed up a half-hour later, dad gum his ornery hide?"
They paid their bill and passed into the street. Immediately the sound of a clear, high voice arrested their attention. It vibrated indignation and dread.
"What have you done with my father?" came sharply to them on the wings of the soft night wind.
A young woman was speaking. She was in a buggy and was talking to two men on the sidewalk--the two men who had preceded the range-riders out of the restaurant.
"Why, Miss, we ain't done a thing to him--nothin' a-tall." The man Shorty was speaking, and in a tone of honeyed conciliation. It was quite plain he did not want a scene on the street.
"That's a lie." The voice of the girl broke for an instant to a sob. "Do you think I don't know you're Brad Steelman's handy man, that you do his meanness for him when he snaps his fingers?"
"You sure do click yore heels mighty loud, Miss." Dave caught in that soft answer the purr of malice. He remembered now hearing from Buck Byington that years ago Emerson Crawford had rounded up evidence to send Shorty to the penitentiary for rebranding through a blanket. "I reckon you come by it honest. Em always acted like he was God Almighty."
"Where is he? What's become of him?" she cried.
"Is yore paw missin'? I'm right sorry to hear that," the cowpuncher countered with suave irony. He was eager to be gone. His glance followed Doble, who was moving slowly down the street.
The girl's face, white and shining in the moonlight, leaned out of the buggy toward the retreating vaquero. "Don't you dare hurt my father! Don't you dare!" she warned. The words choked in her tense throat.
Shorty continued to back away. "You're excited, Miss. You go home an' think it over reasonable. You'll be sorry you talked this away to me," he said with unctuous virtue. Then, swiftly, he turned and went straddling down the walk, his spurs jingling music as he moved.
Quickly Dave gave directions to his friend. "Duck back into the restaurant, Bob. Get a pocketful of dry rice from the Chink. Trail those birds to their nest and find where they roost. Then stick around like a burr. Scatter rice behind you, and I'll drift along later. First off, I got to stay and talk with Miss Joyce. And, say, take along a rope. Might need it."
A moment later Hart was in the restaurant commandeering rice and Sanders was lifting his dusty hat to the young woman in the buggy.
"If I can he'p you any, Miss Joyce," he said.
Beneath dark and delicate brows she frowned at him. "Who are you?"
"Dave Sanders my name is. I reckon you never heard tell of me. I punch cows for yore father."
Her luminous, hazel-brown eyes steadied in his, read the honesty of his simple, boyish heart.
"You heard what I said to that man?"
"Part of it."
"Well, it's true. I know it is, but I can't prove it."
Hart, moving swiftly down the street, waved a hand at his friend as he passed. Without turning his attention from Joyce Crawford, Dave acknowledged the signal.
"How do you know it?"
"Steelman's men have been watching our house. They were hanging around at different times day before yesterday. This man Shorty was one."
"Any special reason for the feud to break out right now?"
"Father was going to prove up on a claim this week--the one that takes in the Tularosa water-holes. You know the trouble they've had about it--how they kept breaking our fences to water their sheep and cattle. Don't you think maybe they're trying to keep him from proving up?"
"Maybeso. When did you see him last?"
Her lip trembled. "Night before last. After supper he started for the Cattleman's Club, but he never got there."
"Sure he wasn't called out to one of the ranches unexpected?"
"I sent out to make sure. He hasn't been seen there."
"Looks like some of Brad Steelman's smooth work," admitted Dave. "If he could work yore father to sign a relinquishment--"
Fire flickered in her eye. "He'd ought to know Dad better."
"Tha's right too. But Brad needs them water-holes in his business bad. Without 'em he loses the whole Round Top range. He might take a crack at turning the screws on yore father."
"You don't think--?" She stopped, to fight back a sob that filled her soft throat.
Dave was not sure what he thought, but he answered cheerfully and instantly. "No, I don't reckon they've dry-gulched him or anything. Emerson Crawford is one sure-enough husky citizen. He couldn't either be shot or rough-housed in town without some one hearin' the noise. What's more, it wouldn't be their play to injure him, but to force a relinquishment."
"That's true. You believe that, don't you?" Joyce cried eagerly.
"Sure I do." And Dave discovered that his argument or his hopes had for the moment convinced him. "Now the question is, what's to be done?"
"Yes," she admitted, and the tremor of the lips told him that she depended upon him to work out the problem. His heart swelled with glad pride at the thought.
"That man who jus' passed is my friend," he told her. "He's trailin' that duck Shorty. Like as not we'll find out what's stirrin'."
"I'll go with you," the girl said, vivid lips parted in anticipation.
"No, you go home. This is a man's job. Soon as I find out anything I'll let you know."
"You'll come, no matter what time o' night it is," she pleaded.
"Yes," he promised.
Her firm little hand rested a moment in his brown palm. "I'm depending on you," she murmured in a whisper lifted to a low wail by a stress of emotion.
CHAPTER VI
BY WAY OF A WINDOW
The trail of rice led down Mission Street, turned at Junipero, crossed into an alley, and trickled along a dusty road to the outskirts o
f the frontier town.
The responsibility Joyce had put upon him uplifted Dave. He had followed the horse-race gamblers to town on a purely selfish undertaking. But he had been caught in a cross-current of fate and was being swept into dangerous waters for the sake of another.
Doble and Miller were small fish in the swirl of this more desperate venture. He knew Brad Steelman by sight and by reputation. The man's coffee-brown, hatchet face, his restless, black eyes, the high, narrow shoulders, the slope of nose and chin, combined somehow to give him the look of a wily and predacious wolf. The boy had never met any one who so impressed him with a sense of ruthless rapacity. He was audacious and deadly in attack, but always he covered his tracks cunningly. Suspected of many crimes, he had been proved guilty of none. It was a safe bet that now he had a line of retreat worked out in case his plans went awry.
