Part 2

Two rooms opened off the larger one, which was at once kitchen, dining and living quarters. One of these had a bunk in each corner--a man’s room, with blankets tumbled as they were last slept in. They laid the stiff body on one bunk and closed the door. Bill looked at his watch.

“It lacks hours till daylight,” said he. “Let’s put up our horses an’ start a fire.”

They walked back to the house under a sky now beginning to show stars. A south wind whistled forlornly down that cut in the Bad Lands. Pines loomed in dark patches against white canyon walls. Frost-crisp snow crunched underfoot. The south wind would soften that soon, but for the present the frost still had its teeth bare. Bill found wood in a box and stoked a kitchen range. He looked with distaste at the crimson-stained floor. Eventually he found a piece of canvas and covered that dark patch on the raw wood. Lamp in hand, while the fire crackled, he roamed about the room, examining floor, walls, doorways, windows. Charlie Shaw pulled off his boots, put his feet on the oven door, rolled a cigarette, and watched this survey. Bill set the lamp on a table and joined him by the stove.

“There was only one shot fired,” he said at last. “Jed never even drawed his gun. It was laid there by his hand after he was down. They fought first. Jed’s face is marked. His knuckles is skinned.”

He slumped in a chair by the stove, chin on his breast. Passion had flared and death taken its toll in that room. An atmosphere intangible but sobering, with a touch of the sinister, remained. Charlie felt it as something unpleasant. How it affected young Bill, he did not know. The boy stared at the stove, his dark face darker still with the shadow of brooding. They sat waiting in silence for the dawn, each occupied with his own obscure thoughts.

Young Bill drew out his watch again. In an hour it would be day. He looked at Charlie.

“I’m goin’ after Munson,” he said.

Charlie nodded. There was no use trying to dissuade a man with that look in his eyes, no use to speak of the law and county officers. But he did. And young Bill only shook his head, as Charlie suspected he would.

“The law,” he said slowly, “is a long way off. An’ I’m here. There’s a woman in this, too.”

There generally was, Charlie reflected, a woman somewhere in the background of things like this.

“I should never have left here,” young Mather said again. “Munson was afraid of me. I thought he was afraid of Jed. Seems like he wasn’t. I got to make it good. I expect we better feed ourselves. It’s a long way back to the Wineglass on an empty stomach.”

“I’m not hungry,” Charlie replied. “But a cup of coffee wouldn’t do no harm.”

They had that. There was food, cold meat and bread. But coffee seemed to satisfy them. They resaddled their mounts. The cloud bank of the night had become scattered wraiths, fleeing across a luminous sky. Touches of color streaked the east.

“I forgot,” Mather said from his saddle. “I was goin’ to send a horse back for the old man to ride home. You could take him.”

“It’ll be three or four days before we move a wheel, maybe longer,” Charlie answered. “Can’t work cattle in snowbanks. Your old man can stay at the wagon, or, if he wants to ride home, there’s plenty of extra horses there. Somebody ought to send word to Benton about this killin’. Listen, kid. Your business is your own. I’m askin’ you friendly. What are you aimin’ to do?”

“Find Munson an’ Dolly.”

“Yeah. But how? An’ what about when you find ’em?”

“Munson has a place about two miles down this bottom,” said young Bill. “I expect they'll be there. Munson’ll claim self-defense. What I’ll do--well, that depends.”

“If you’re goin’ straight to that place, I'll be along,” Charlie said, wondering, as he uttered the words, why he should, what impulse prompted him to commit himself so, what curious motive prompted him to ride with this grave-faced boy on a blood feud. For it was nothing else, now.

“You ain’t interested in this,” young Bill answered.

“I’m interested in _you_,” Charlie told him. “Gosh darn it, I don’t blame you, but these family feuds are hell. I’ll ride as far as this feller’s place with you just for luck. If he ain’t there and you still aim to camp on his trail, I’ll go back to the round-up.”

“All right,” young Bill muttered “That’s white of you. But don’t mix in, Charlie. ’Tain’t your funeral.”

Light grew as they rode down a winding bottom between high walls of earth, where stunted trees clung precariously. Snow masked short sagebrush. A white world with pines black on the rim of the canyon. Their horses floundered deep. The hard crust tinkled as hoofs broke through.

“Hell of a May mornin’, this is.” Charlie Shaw thought of weak cattle dying by the hundred in this untimely burst of arctic weather. What Bill Mather thought lay behind the mask of his unsmiling face.

The canyon wound a tortuous course. The sun laid a sparkling beam on the western bank. A log cabin stood on the flat. A small corral looped from the end of a low stable. A pole fence, from wall to wall of the gorge above and below the buildings, inclosed a few acres of pasture.

Mather rode straight for the house. Considering the circumstances and his errand, Charlie reckoned that foolhardy, but he said nothing. Between house and stable Bill drew rein for a moment, looking down. Fresh tracks in the snow. Some one had walked to the stable. The footprints were paralleled by the track of a horse leading away, past the house toward the canyon wall, where a cleft notch lifted to the upper levels. Then young Bill rode on to the door and swung down.

Charlie crowded at his heels when he shoved open the door. Light streamed through frosted windows. A shaft of sunshine played on the figure of a man lying on the floor.

Unlike Jed Mather, this dead man lay on his back. The rawhide-bound handle of a knife stood up above his breast, like a pin thrust in a cushion.

“Ah,” young Bill whispered, “she beat me to it.”

They stared at the corpse.

“This Munson?” Charlie asked.

Young Bill nodded.

“I gave her that knife once,” said he. “Made it myself out of an old flat file. Look! Didn't I say they must ’a’ fought?”

Munson’s face was bruised, marked by knuckles. Charlie laid a hand on him. He was cold, rigid.

“Let’s get outa here,” young Mather said. “Gives me the creeps. But I was right. He got what he deserved.”

He walked the fresh tracks to the stable, looked in, came back on the trail of the horse, mounted, and followed the hoof marks into that notch. A barrier of poles lay in the mouth. The bars were down. They breasted that steep slope. Their horses were blown when they reached the plateau above. The trail in the snow turned sharply southward, skirting the canyon’s rim. It led straight to the Mather ranch and dipped into the canyon again and doubled back to the stable. Only--at a point two hundred yards above the ranch the trail stopped under a cottonwood tree. There was trampled snow there, and foot marks, as if some one had tarried there.

Smoke lifted from the stovepipe. They dismounted. A face pressed briefly at the window. Then the door opened and a girl faced them.

“Somethin’ about her gets men crazy.” Charlie remembered that. He looked at this girl and he wondered. No Helen to lure a Paris. A mop of tawny, yellow hair. White skin with freckled spots across the bridge of a straight nose. But her cheek bones were too high, her mouth too wide. Her eyes were twin heralds of temper. Steel-bright blue eyes that looked on young Bill with surprise, anger, resentment. She was like a willow for slenderness. How could that slight arm drive home a knife?

He got light on that a moment later. Bill Mather’s dark face went pale. He caught the girl by the wrists.

“What happened?” he demanded.

One quick wrench of her body and she was free. Her right hand popped on Bill’s cheek, and red welts sprang out on his dark skin. She stood poised, her hands clenched--like a young lioness.

“Dolly!” Bill’s tone was like a cry. “What happened?”

She stared at him. The blaze went out of her eyes. Her bosom heaved. The poised tensity went out of her body.

“Nothing, nothing,” she said, in a tone tremulous like a frightened child’s. “Munson an’ Jed fought, an’ your dad got scared an’ lit out. Jed beat him. After _he_ come back an’ shot Jed through a window. That was yesterday. He took me down to his place. I got away in the evenin’. I saw the light here an’ I was afraid to come in till I saw you leave this morning. I didn’t know who it was. If you’d only stayed home, Bill!”

Young Bill put his arms around her.

“’S all right, Dolly,” he murmured. “I didn’t know. You said--you know, you said----”

“Bill,” she lifted her face. “Don’t you know me yet, at all? Take me away from here--take me away.”

Bill patted her shoulder. Her face was buried against his breast. He put one hand on her forehead and tilted her head back--and kissed her.

“You killed him?” he whispered.

“I did,” she gritted. “I’ve carried that knife you made for me for six months. I jabbed it into him the first time he tried to lay his hands on me. Will they hang me, Bill?”

“Hang you! Good Lord!” Young Bill threw back his head and laughed--the first time Charlie had ever heard him laugh like that, a laugh of sheer relief and happiness. “They ought to give you a medal. Go get your clothes together, Dolly. We’re goin’ away from here for good, you an’ me together.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September 7, 1927 issue of _The Popular Magazine_]