The council did not last long. When it broke up Houck braced his will to face what he must. It would not be long now. Soon he would know the worst.
Two of the braves went up the hill toward the cavvy. The rest came back to their captive.
They stood beside him in silence. Houck scowled up at them, still defiant.
“Well?” he demanded.
The Utes said nothing. They stood there stolid. Their victim read in that voiceless condemnation an awful menace.
“Onload it,” he jeered. “I’m no squaw. Shoot it at me. Jake Houck ain’t scared.”
Still they waited, the father of Black Arrow with folded arms, a sultry fire burning in his dark eyes.
The two men who had gone to the cavvy returned. They were leading a horse with a rope around its neck. Houck recognized the animal with a thrill of superstitious terror. It was the one about the possession of which he had shot Black Arrow.
The old chief spoke again. “Man-with-loud-tongue claim this horse. Utes give it him. Horse his. Man-with-loud-tongue satisfied then maybe.”
“What are you aimin’ to do, you red devils?” Houck shouted.
Already he guessed vaguely at the truth. Men were arranging a kind of harness of rope and rawhide on the animal.
Others stooped to drag the captive forward. He set his teeth to keep back the shriek of terror that rose to his throat.
He knew now what form the vengeance of the savages was to take.
* * *
CHAPTER XLVII
THE KINGDOM OF JOY
A prince of the Kingdom of Joy rode the Piceance trail on a morning glad with the song of birds and the rippling of brooks. Knee to knee with him rode his princess, slim and straight, the pink in her soft smooth cheeks, a shy and eager light in the velvet-dark eyes. They were starting together on the long, long trail, and the poor young things could vision it only as strewn with sunbathed columbines and goldenrods.
The princess was a bride, had been one for all of twelve hours. It was her present conviction that she lived in a world wonderful, and that the most amazingly radiant thing in it was what had happened to her and Bob Dillon. She pitied everybody else in the universe. They were so blind! They looked, but they did not see what was so clear to eyes from which the veil had been stripped. They went about their humdrum way without emotion. Their hearts did not sing exultant pæans that throbbed out of them like joy-notes from a meadow-lark’s throat. Only those who had come happily to love’s fruition understood the meaning of life. June was not only happy; she was this morning wise, heiress of that sure wisdom which comes only to the young when they discover just why they have been born into the world.
How many joys there were for those attuned to receive them! Her fingers laced with Bob’s, and from the contact a warm, ecstatic glow flooded both their bodies. She looked at his clean brown face, with its line of golden down above where the razor had traveled, with its tousled, reddish hair falling into the smiling eyes, and a queer little lump surged into the girl’s throat. Her husband! This boy was the mate heaven had sent her to repay for years of unhappiness.
“My wife!” It was all still so new and unbelievable that Bob’s voice shook a little.
“Are you sorry?” she asked.
Her shy smile teased. She did not ask because she needed information, but because she could not hear too often the answer.
“You know whether I am. Oh, June girl, I didn’t know it would be like this,” he cried.
“Nor I, Bob.”
Their lithe bodies leaned from the saddles. They held each other close while their lips met.
They were on their way to Pete Tolliver’s to tell him the great news. Soon now the old cabin and its outbuildings would break into view. They had only to climb Twelve-Mile Hill.
Out of a draw to the right a horse moved. Through the brush something dragged behind it.
“What’s that?” asked June.
“Don’t know. Looks kinda queer. It’s got some sort of harness on.”
They rode to the draw. June gave a small cry of distress.
“Oh, Bob, it’s a man.”
He dismounted. The horse with the dragging load backed away, but it was too tired to show much energy. Bob moved forward, soothing the animal with gentle sounds. He went slowly, with no sudden gestures. Presently he was patting the neck of the horse. With his hunting-knife he cut the rawhide thongs that served as a harness.
“It’s a Ute pony,” he said, after he had looked it over carefully. He knew this because the Indians earmarked their mounts.
June was still in the saddle. Some instinct warned her not to look too closely at the load behind that was so horribly twisted.
“Better go back to the road, June,” her husband advised. “It’s too late to do anything for this poor fellow.”
She did as he said, without another look at the broken body.
When she had gone, Bob went close and turned over the huddled figure. Torn though it was, he recognized the face of Jake Houck. To construct the main features of the tragedy was not difficult.
While escaping from Bear Cat after the fiasco of the bank robbery, Houck must have stumbled somehow into the hands of the Ute band still at large. They had passed judgment on him and executed it. No doubt the wretched man had been tied at the heels of a horse which had been lashed into a frenzied gallop by the Indians in its rear. He had been dragged or kicked to death by the frightened horse.
As Bob looked down into that still, disfigured face, there came to him vividly a sense of the weakness and frailty of human nature. Not long since this bit of lifeless clay had straddled his world like a Colossus. To the young cowpuncher he had been a superman, terrible in his power and capacity to do harm. Now all that vanity and egoism had vanished, blown away as though it had never been.
Where was Jake Houck? What had become of him? The shell that had been his was here. But where was the roaring bully that had shaken his fist blasphemously at God and man?
It came to him, with a queer tug at the heartstrings, that Houck had once been a dimpled baby in a mother’s arms, a chirruping little fat-legged fellow who tottered across the floor to her with outstretched fingers. Had that innocent child disappeared forever? Or in that other world to which Jake had so violently gone would he meet again the better self his evil life had smothered?
Bob loosened the bandanna from his throat and with it covered the face of the outlaw. He straightened the body and folded the hands across the breast. It was not in his power to obliterate from the face the look of ghastly, rigid terror stamped on it during the last terrible moments.
The young husband went back to his waiting wife. He stood by her stirrup while she looked down at him, white-faced.
“Who was it?” she whispered.
“Jake Houck,” he told her gravely. “The Utes did it—because he killed Black Arrow, I reckon.”
She shuddered. A cloud had come over the beautiful world.
“We’ll go on now,” he said gently. “I’ll come back later with your father.”
They rode in silence up the long hill. At the top of it he drew rein and smiled at his bride.
“You’ll not let that spoil the day, will you, June? He had it coming, you know. Houck had gone bad. If it hadn’t been the Utes, it would have been the law a little later.”
“Yes, but—” She tried to answer his smile, not very successfully. “It’s rather—awful, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Let’s walk over to the cabin, dear.”
She swung down, into his arms. There she found comfort that dissipated the cloud from her mind. When she ran into the house to throw her arms around Pete Tolliver’s neck, she was again radiant.
“Guess! Guess what!” she ordered her father.
Pete looked at his daughter and at the bashful, smiling boy.
“I reckon I done guessed, honeybug,” he answered, stroking her rebellious hair.
“You’re to come and live with us. Isn’t he, Bob?”
The young husband nodded sheepishly. He felt that it was a brutal thing to take a daughter from her father. It had not occurred to him before, but old Pete would feel rather out of it now.
Tolliver looked at Bob over the shoulder of his daughter.
“You be good to her or I’ll—” His voice broke.
“I sure will,” the husband promised.
June laughed. “He’s the one ought to worry, Dad. I’m the flyaway on this team.”
Bob looked at her, gifts in his eyes. “I’m worryin’ a heap,” he said, smiling.
THE END
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The Fighting Edge Page 24
