The Rustler of Wind River

by Ogden, George W

  “Sir, I have no wish to coerce the lady”—Major King’s voice shook, his words were low—“as she seems to have no preference for me, sir. Miss Landcraft perhaps has placed her heart somewhere else.”

  “She has no right to act with such treachery to me and you, sir,” the colonel said. “I’ll not have it! Where else, sir—who?”

  “Spare me the humiliation of informing you,” begged Major King, with averted face, with sorrow in his voice.

  “Oh, you slanderous coward!” Frances assailed him with scorn of word and look. Colonel Landcraft was shaking a trembling finger at her, his face thrust within a foot of her own.

  “I’ll not have it! you’ll not—who is the fellow, who?”

  “There is nothing to conceal, there is no humiliation on my part in speaking his name, but pride—the highest pride of my heart!”

  She stood back from them a little, her lofty head thrown back, her face full of color now, the strength of defense of the man she loved in her brave brown eyes.

  “Some low poltroon, some sneaking civilian—”

  “He is a man, father—you have granted that. His name is—”

  “Stop!” thundered the colonel. “Heaven and hell! Will you disgrace me by making public confession of your shame? Leave this room, before you drive me to send you from it with a curse!”

  In her room Frances heard the horses come to the door to carry her father away. She had sat there, trembling and hot, sorry for his foolish rage, hurt by his narrow injustice. Yet she had no bitterness in her heart against him, for she believed that she knew him best. When his passion had fallen he would come to her, lofty still, but ashamed, and they would put it behind them, as they had put other differences in the past.

  Her mother had gone to him to share the last moments of his presence there, and to intercede for her. Now Frances listened, her hot cheek in her hand, her eyes burning, her heart surging in fevered stroke. There was a good deal of coming and going before the house; men came up and dismounted, others rode away. Watching, her face against the cool pane, she did not see her father leave. Yet he had not come to her, and the time for his going was past.

  Her heart was sore and troubled at the thought that perhaps he had gone without the word of pacification between them. It was almost terrifying to her to think of that. She ran down the stairs and stood listening at his closed door.

  That was not his voice, that heavy growl, that animal note. Saul Chadron’s; no other. Her mother came in through the front door, weeping, and clasped Frances in her arms as she stood there, shadowy in the light of the dim hall lamp.

  “He is gone!” she said.

  Frances did not speak. But for the first time in her life a feeling of bitterness against her father for his hardness of heart and unbending way of injustice lifted itself in her breast. She led her mother to her own room, giving her such comfort as she could put into words.

  “He said he never marched out to sure defeat before,” Mrs. Landcraft told her. “I’ve seen him go many a time, Frances, but never with such a pain in my heart as tonight!”

  And Saul Chadron was the man who had caused his going, Frances knew, a new illumination having come over the situation since hearing his voice in the colonel’s office a few minutes past. Chadron had been at Meander, telegraphing to the cattlemen’s servants in Washington all the time. He had demanded the colonel’s recall, and the substitution of Major King, because he wanted a man in authority at the post whom he could use.

  This favoritism of Chadron made her distrustful at once of Major King. There must be some scheming and plotting afoot. She went down and stood in the hall again, not even above bending to listen at the keyhole. Chadron was talking again. She felt that he must have been talking all the time that she had been away. It must be an unworthy cause that needed so much pleading, she thought.

  “Well, he’ll not shoot, I tell you, King; he’s too smart for that. He’ll have to be trapped into it. If you’ve got to have an excuse to fire on them—and I can’t see where it comes in, King, damn my neck if I can—we’ve got to set a trap.”

  “Leave that to me,” returned Major King, coldly.

  “How much force are you authorized to use?”

  “The order leaves that detail to me. ‘Sufficient force to restore order,’ it says.”

  “I think you ort to take a troop, at the least, King, and a cannon—maybe two.”

  “I don’t think artillery will be necessary, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll leave it to you, King, but I’d hate like hell to take you up there and have that feller lick you. You don’t know him like I do. I tell you he’d lay on his back and fight like a catamount as long as he had a breath left in him.”

  “Can you locate them in the night?”

  “I think we’d have to wait up there somewheres for daybreak. I’m not just sure which cañon they are in.”

  There was silence. Frances peeped through the keyhole, but could see nothing except thick smoke over bookcases and files.

  “Well, we’ll not want to dislodge them before daylight, anyway,” said King.

  “If Macdonald can back off without a fight, he’ll do it,” Chadron declared, “for he knows as well as you and I what it’d mean to fire on the troops. And I want you to git him, King, and make sure you’ve got him.”

  “It depends largely on whether the fellow can be provoked into firing on us, Chadron. You think he can be; so do I. But in case he doesn’t, the best we can do will be to arrest him.”

  “What good would he be to me arrested, King? I tell you I want his scalp, and if you bring that feller out of there in a sack you’ll come back a brigadier. I put you where you’re at. Well, I can put you higher just as easy. But the purty I want for my trouble is that feller’s scalp.”

  There was the sound of somebody walking about, in quick, nervous strides. Frances knew that Major King had got up from his usurped place at the desk—place unworthily filled, this low intrigue with Chadron aside, she knew—and was strutting in the shadow of his promised glory.

  “Leave it to me, Chadron; I’ve got my own account to square with that wolf of the range!”

  A sharp little silence, in which Frances could picture Chadron looking at King in his covert, man-weighing way. Then Chadron went on:

  “King, I’ve noticed now and then that you seemed to have a soft spot in your gizzard for that little girl of mine. Well, I’ll throw her in to boot if you put this thing through right. Is it a go?”

  “I’d hesitate to bargain for the young lady without her being a party to the business,” King replied, whether from wisdom born of his recent experience, or through lack of interest in the proposal Frances could not read in his even, well-pitched voice.

  “Oh, she’d jump at you like a bullfrog at red flannel,” Chadron assured him. “I could put your uniform on a wooden man and marry him off to the best girl in seven states. They never think of lookin’ under a soldier’s vest.”

  “You flatter me, Mr. Chadron, and the uniform of the United States army,” returned King, with barely covered contempt. “Suppose we allow events to shape themselves in regard to Miss Chadron. She’ll hardly be entertaining marriage notions yet—after her recent experience.”

  Chadron got up so quickly he overturned his chair.

  “By God, sir! do you mean to intimate you wouldn’t have her after what she’s gone through? Well, I’ll put a bullet through any man that says—”

  “Oh, hold yourself in, Chadron; there’s no call for this.”

  King’s cold contempt would have been like a lash to a man of finer sensibilities than Saul Chadron. As it was, Frances could hear the heavy cattleman breathing like a mad bull.

  “When you talk about my little girl, King, go as easy as if you was carryin’ quicksilver in a dish. You told me she was all right a little while ago, and I tell you I don’t like—”

  “Miss Chadron was as bright as a redbird when I saw her this afternoon,” King assured him, calmly. “She
has suffered no harm at the hands of Macdonald and his outlaws.”

  “He’ll dance in hell for that trick before the sun goes down on another day!”

  “His big play for sympathy fell flat,” said King, with a contemptuous laugh. “There wasn’t much of a crowd on hand when he arrived at the ranch.”

  Silence. A little shifting of feet, a growl from Chadron, and a curse.

  “But as for your proposal involving Miss Chadron, I am honored by it,” said King.

  “Any man would be!” Chadron declared.

  “And we will just let it stand, waiting the lady’s sanction.”

  That brightened Chadron up. He moved about, and there was a sound as if he had slapped the young officer on the back in pure comradeship and open admiration.

  “What’s your scheme for drawin’ that feller into firin’ on your men?” he asked.

  “We’ll talk it over as we go,” said King.

  A bugle lifted its sharp, electrifying note in the barracks.

  “Boots and saddles!” Chadron said.

  “Yes; we march at nine o’clock.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE TRAIL OF THE COFFEE

  “You done right to come to the mission after me, for I’d ride to the gatepost of hell to turn a trick agin Saul Chadron!”

  Banjo’s voice had a quaver of earnestness in it that needed no daylight to enforce. The pitchy night made a bobbing blur of him as he rode his quick-stepping little horse at Frances Landcraft’s side.

  “Yes, you owe him one,” Frances admitted.

  “And I’ll pay him before mornin’ or it won’t be no fault of mine. That there little ten-cent-size major he’d ’a’ stopped you if he’d ’a’ known you was goin’, don’t you suppose?”

  “I’m sure he would have, Mr. Gibson.”

  “Which?” said Banjo.

  “Banjo,” she corrected.

  “Now, that sounds more comfortabler,” he told her. “I didn’t know for a minute who you meant, that name’s gittin’ to be a stranger to me.”

  “Well, we don’t want a stranger along tonight,” said she, seriously.

  “You’re right, we don’t. That there horse you’re ridin’ he’s a good one, as good as any in the cavalry, even if he ain’t as tall. He was an outlaw till Missus Mathews tamed him down.”

  “How did she do it—not break him like a bronco-buster?”

  “No, she done it like she tames Injuns and other folks, by gentle words and gentler hands. Some they’ll tell you she’s sunk down to the ways of Injuns, clean out of a white man’s sight in the dirt and doin’s of them dead-horse eatin’ ’Rapahoes. But I know she ain’t. She lets herself down on a level to reach ’em, and git her hands under ’em so she can lift ’em up, the same as she puts herself on my level when she wants to reach me, or your level, or anybody’s level, mom.”

  “Her eyes and her soft ways tell you that, Banjo, as plain as any words.”

  “She’s done ten times as much as that big-backed buffalo of a preacher she’s married to ever done for his own people, or ever will. He’s clim above ’em with his educated ways; the Injun’s ironed out of that man. You can’t reach down and help anybody up, mom, if you go along through this here world on stilts.”

  “Not very well, Banjo.”

  “You need both of your hands to hold your stilts, mom; you ain’t got even a finger to spare for a low-down feller like me.”

  “You’re not a low-down fellow, Banjo. Don’t be calling yourself names.”

  “I was low-down enough to believe what they told me about Macdonald shootin’ up Chance Dalton. I believed it till Missus Mathews give me the straight of it. One of them Injun police fellers told her how that job was put up, and how it failed to work.”

  “A man named Lassiter told me about it.”

  They rode along in silence a long time after that. Then Banjo—

  “Well, I hope we don’t bust out onto them cavalry fellers too sudden and meet a flock of bullets. I’d never forgive the man that put a bullet through my fiddle.”

  “We’ll go slowly, and keep listening; I can tell cavalry from cowboys as far as I can hear.”

  “I bet a purty you can, brought up with ’em like you was.”

  “They’ll not be able to do anything before daylight, and when we overtake them we’ll ride around and get ahead while they’re waiting for morning. I don’t know where the homesteaders are, but they’ll be sending out scouts to locate them, and we can watch.”

  They were following the road that the cavalry had taken an hour in advance of them. Listening now, they rode on without words. Now and then a bush at the roadside flipped a stirrup, now and again Banjo’s little horse snorted in short impatience, as if expressing its disapproval of this journey through the dark. Night was assertive in its heaviness, but communicative of its mysteries in its wild scents—the silent music of its hour.

  There are those who, on walking in the night, can tell the hour by the smell, the taste, the elusive fine aroma of the quiet air. Before midnight it is like a new-lit censer; in the small hours the smell of old camp fires comes trailing, and the scent of rain upon embers.

  But Frances Landcraft was not afraid of the night as she rode silently through it with Banjo Gibson at her side. There was no shudder in it for her as there had been on the night that Nola was stolen; it could not have raised up a terror grim enough to turn her back upon the road.

  Her one thought was that she must reach Macdonald before Chadron and King could find him, and tell him that the troops were coming, and that he was to be trapped into firing upon them. She knew that many lives depended upon her endurance, courage, and strategy; many lives, but most of all Alan Macdonald’s life. He must be warned, at the cost of her own safety, her own life, if necessary.

  To that end the troops must be followed, and a desperate dash at daylight must be made into Macdonald’s camp. Perhaps it would be a race with the cavalry at the last moment.

  Banjo said it was beginning to feel like morning. An hour past they had crossed the river at the ford near Macdonald’s place, and the foothills stood rough and black against the starry horizon. They were near them now, so near that the deeper darkness of their timbered sides fell over them like a cold shadow.

  Suddenly she checked Banjo with a sharp word.

  “I heard them!” she whispered.

  Banjo’s little horse, eager for the fellowship of its kind as his master was for his own in his way, threw up its head and whinnied. Banjo churned it with his heels, slapped it on the side of the head, and shut off the shrill call in a grunt, but the signal had gone abroad. From the blackness ahead it was answered, and the slow wind prowling down from the hills ahead of dawn carried the scent of cigarettes to them as they waited breathlessly for results.

  “They’re dismounted, and waiting for daylight,” she said. “We must ride around them.”

  They were leaving the road, the low brush rasping harshly on their stirrups—as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances—when a dash of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate. Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to know what they should do.

  “Keep that little fool horse still!” she said.

  Now the patrol, which had stopped to hail, was coming on again. Banjo’s horse was not to be sequestered, nor his craving for companionship in that lonesome night suppressed. He lifted his shrill nicker again, and a shot from the outriders of cavalry was the answer.

  “Answer them, tell them who you are Banjo—they all know you—and I’ll slip away. Good-bye, and thank you for your brave help!”

  “I’ll go with you, they’ll hear one as much as they’ll hear two.”

  “No, no, you can help me much better by doing as I tell you. Tell them that a led horse got away from you, and that’s the noise of it running away.”

  She waited for no more words, for the patrol was very near, and now and then one of them fire
d as he rode. Banjo yelled to them.

  “Say, you fellers! Stop that fool shootin’ around here, I tell you!”

  “Who are you?” came the answer.

  “Banjo, you darned fool! And I tell you right now, pardner, the first man that busts my fiddle with a bullet’ll have to mix with me!”

  The soldiers came up laughing, and heard Banjo’s explanation of the horse, still dimly heard, galloping off. Frances stopped to listen. Presently she heard them coming on again, evidently not entirely satisfied with Banjo’s story. But the parley with him had delayed them; she had a good lead now.

  In a little swale, where the greasewood reached above her head, she stopped again to listen. She heard the troopers beating the bushes away off to one side, and knew that they soon would give it up. When they passed out of her hearing, she rode on, slowly, and with caution.

  She was frontiersman enough to keep her direction by the north star—Colonel Landcraft had seen to that particular of her education himself—but Polaris would not tell her which way to go to find Alan Macdonald and his dusty men standing their vigil over their cooped-up enemies. Nothing but luck, she knew, could lead her there, for she was in a sea of sage-brush, with the black river valley behind her, the blacker hills ahead, and never a mark of a trail to follow anywhere.

  She had rounded the cavalry troop and left it far behind; the silence which immersed the sleeping land told her this. No hoof but her own mount’s beat the earth within sound, no foot but hers strained saddle-leather within reach of her now, she believed.

  There was only one thing to do; ride slowly in the direction that she had been holding with Banjo, and keep eyes, ears, and nose all on the watch. The ways of the range were early; if there was anybody within a mile of her to windward she would smell the smoke of his fire when he lit it, and see the wink of it, too, unless he built it low.