Chapter 1

mine. I found out that they had knifed me; had helped pluck me to feather their own nests. It hurt, Dick; hurt like hell. Losing the big ranch in the South was a jolt, I'll admit; seeing those fellows take it over and split it two ways between them, sort of knocked the props out from under me. I believed in them, you see. After that I just wanted to get away and sort of think things over."

"You went to Europe?"

"I did not. I don't know how that report got out, but if people chose to think I had gone to take a hand in the fighting over there, I saw no need to contradict a harmless rumor. I took a horse and beat it up into the coast mountains. I tell you, Dick, I wanted to think! And I found out before I was through thinking that I was sick of the old life, that I was sick of people, the sort of people you and I knew, that there was nothing in the world but horses that I cared the snap of my finger about, that the only life worth living--for me--was a life in the open. I drifted up this way. I've been living my own life in my own way for five years. I am happier at it than I used to be. That's all of the flat little story, Dick."

"You might have let me know, it seems to me," said Farris a bit stiffly.

"So I might," answered Lee thoughtfully. "I was going to in the first place. But you'll remember that you were off somewhere travelling when the bubble broke. When Dick Farris travels," and his grave smile came back to him, "let no mad letter think that it can track him down. Then I hit my stride in this sort of life; I grew away from the old news; the years passed as years do after a man is twenty-five; and I just didn't write. But I didn't forget, Dickie, old man," he said warmly, and his hand rested on Farris's shoulder. "You can put it in that old black pipe of yours and smoke it, that I didn't forget. Some day I planned to hit town again, heeled you know, and remind you of auld lang syne."

"You are a fool, David Burrill Lee," said Farris with conviction. "Look here: you can take a new start, pull yourself together, come back--where you belong."

But Lee shook his head.

"That's like the old Dick Farris I used to know," he said gently. "But this is where I belong, Dick. I don't want to start over, I don't want to come back to the sort of thing we knew. The only thing in the world I do want is right here. And I don't see that it would do any good for you to go stirring up any memories about the old Lee that was shot 'somewhere in France.'"

When Farris had to go and claim a dance, Lee watched him with eyes soft with affection. Then he, too, left the room and went back to the outer door, to his old spot, looking for Judith.

"The only thing I want is right here," he repeated softly.

He watched Farris join Marcia and Judith. He noted the eager excitement in Marcia's eyes, saw her turn impulsively to Farris. The artist shook his head and left them, ostensibly going in search of his partner. Marcia was speaking excitedly to Judith. Lee frowned.

Once more that night he held Judith in his arms. He meant to make amends for his brusque way with her before. But again the magic of her presence was like a glorious mist, shutting them in together, shutting all of the world out. They spoke little and the music had its will with them. Judith did not know that she sighed as the dance ended. She seemed moving in a dream as Lee led her through the door. They were out in the courtyard, the stars shining softly down on them. In the subdued light here he stood still, looking down into her pleasure-flushed face. Again the insistent tremor shot down his blood.

Here in this tender light she looked to him the masterpiece of God striving for the perfect in a woman's form. Her gown, gently stirred by the warm breeze, seemed a part of her, elusive, alive, feminine. The milk-white of bare throat and shoulder and rounded arm, the rise and fall of her breast, the soft lure of her eyes, the tender smile upon her lips, drew him slowly closer, closer to her. She lifted her face a little, raising her eyes until they shone straight into his.

"Judith," he said very quietly, very gravely, making her wonder at the tone and the words to follow: "You have had your way with me to-night. Do you understand all that means? And now--I am going to have my way with you!"

He caught her in his arms, crushed her to him, kissed her. Then he let her go and stood, stern-faced, watching her.

For a moment he thought that the hand at her side was rising to strike him full in the face. But he did not move.

Had such been Judith's intention, suddenly it changed.

"So," she cried softly, "this is the sort of fine gentleman into which a dress-suit has made Bud Lee, horse foreman! For so great an honor surely any woman would thank him!"

She made him a slow, graceful courtesy, and laughed at him. And so she left him, her laughter floating back, taunting him.

Lee watched her until she had gone from his sight. Then he turned and went down the knoll, into the night.

XIX

BUD LEE SEEKS CROOKED CHRIS QUINNION

Going down the knoll to the bunk-house, Bud Lee cursed himself at every stride. He cursed Carson when the cattle foreman, turning to follow him, addressed a merry remark to him concerning his "lady-killing clothes." The words reminded him of Judith's and he didn't cherish the remembrance. In the bunk-house Carson watched him curiously over his old pipe as Lee began ripping off his dress-suit.

"A feller called you up a while ago," said Carson, still bright-eyed with interest but pretending that that interest had to do with the new wall telephone recently installed. "Sandy Weaver, it was. Said----"

"What did he want?" demanded Lee, swinging suddenly on Carson, his coat balled up in his hand and hurled viciously under a bunk.

"Wasn't I telling you?" Carson grunted. "What's eating you, Bud? You ac' mighty suspicious, like a man that had swallered poison or else was coming down with the yeller jaundice or else was took sudden an' powerful bad with love. They all treats a man similar----"

"Damn it," growled Lee irritably, "can't you tell me what Weaver said?"

"Said, call him up, real pronto," replied Carson cheerfully. "Say, Bud, where in heck _did_ you get that outfit? By cripes, if I had a regalia like that I'd be riding herd in 'em ev'ry Sunday! On the square now----"

But Lee wasn't listening to him and Carson knew it. He had gone quickly to the telephone, had rung the one bell for "Central," and a moment later was speaking with Sandy Weaver of the Golden Spur saloon. Carson sucked at his pipe and kept his eyes on Lee's face.

The ensuing conversation, only one side of which came to Carson, was brief. Most of the talking was done by Sandy Weaver. Lee asked three questions; the third a simple,

"Sure of it, Sandy?"

Then he jammed the receiver back upon its hook, and with no remark continued his hurried dressing. When he had come in, his face had been flushed; now it was suddenly red, the hot red of rage. His eyes, when they met Carson's once, were stern, bright with the same quick anger. When he had drawn on his working garb and stuffed his trousers into his boots, he went to his bunk and tossed back the blanket. From the straw mattress he took a heavy, old style Colt revolver. Carson, still watching him, saw him spin the cylinder, slip a box of fresh cartridges into his pocket and turn to the door.

"Riding, Bud?" He got to his feet, stuffed his pipe into his pocket and reached for his hat. "Care if I mosey along?"

"What for?" asked Lee curtly.

"Oh, hell, what's the use being a hawg," Carson grumbled deep down in his brown throat. "If you're on your way to little ol' Rocky hunting trouble, if they's going to be shooting-fun, why can't you let me in on it?"

Lee stood a moment framed in the doorway, frowning down at Carson. Then he turned on his heel and went out, saying coolly over his shoulder:

"Come on if you want to. Quinnion's in town."

As their horses' hoofs hammered the winding road for the forty miles into Rocky Bend the two riders were for the most part silent. All of the explanation which Lee had to give, or cared to give, was summed up in the brief words:

"Quinnion's in town."

To Judith, Lee had said that night they fought together at the Upper End that he had recognized Quinnion's voice; "I played poker with that voice not four months ago." That he had had ample reason to remember the man as well, he had not gone on to mention. But Carson knew.

Carson had sat at Lee's left hand that night, across the table from Chris Quinnion, and had seen the look of naked hatred in two pairs of eyes when Lee had risen to his feet and coolly branded Quinnion as a crook and a card sharp. For a little the two men had glared at each other, their muscles corded and ready, their eyes alert and suspicious, their hands close to their pockets. Then Quinnion had sneered in that evil voice of his: "You got the drop on me this time. Look out for the next." He too had risen and with Lee's eyes hard upon him had gone out of the room. And Carson had been disappointed in a fight. But now--now that Bud Lee in this mood was going straight to Rocky Bend and Quinnion, Carson filled his deep lungs with a sigh of satisfaction. Life had grown dull here of late; there wasn't a fresh scar on his battered body.

Though the railroad had at last slipped through it, Rocky Bend was still a bad little town and proud of its badness. To the northeast lay the big timber tracts into which the Western Lumber Company was tearing its destructive way; only nine miles due west were the Rock Creek mines, running full blast; on the other sides it was surrounded by cattle ranges where a lusty brood of young untamed devils were constrained to give themselves soberly to their work during the long, dusty days. But at night, always on a Saturday evening, there came into Rocky Bend from lumber-camps, mines, and cow outfits a crowd of men whose blood ran red and turbulent, seeking a game of cards, a "whirl at the wheel," a night of drinking or any other amusement which fate might vouchsafe them. Good men and bad, they were all hard men and quick. Otherwise they would not have come into Rocky Bend at all.

Lee and Carson riding out of the darkness into the dim light of the first of the straggling street-lamps, passed swiftly between the rows of weather-boarded shacks and headed toward the Golden Spur saloon.

Though the hour was late there were many saddle-ponies standing with drooping heads here and there along the board sidewalks; from more than one barroom came the gay ragtime of an automatic piano or the scrape and scream of a fiddle. Men lounged up and down the street, smoking, calling to one another, turning in here or there to have a drink or watch a game.

The two newcomers, watching each man or group of men, rode on slowly until they came to the building on whose false front was a gigantic spur in yellow paint. Here they dismounted, tied their horses, and went in. Carson, with a quick eye toward preparedness for what might lie on the cards, looked for Lee's gun. It wasn't in his pocket; it wasn't in his waistband, ready to hand. It wasn't anywhere that Carson could see. At the door he whispered warningly:

"Better be ready, Bud. Ain't lost your gun, have you?"

Lee shook his head and stepped into the room. At the long bar were three or four men, drinking. Quinnion was not among them. There were other men at the round tables, playing draw, solo, stud horse. One glance showed that Quinnion was not in the room. But there were other rooms at the rear for those desiring privacy. Lee, nodding this way and that to friends who accosted him, made his way straight to the bar.

"Hello, Sandy," he said quietly.

Sandy Weaver, the bartender, looked at him curiously. A short, heavy, blond man was Sandy Weaver, who ran a fair house and gave his attention strictly to his own business. Save when asked by a friend to do him a favor, such a favor as to keep an eye on another man.

"Hello, Bud," returned Sandy, putting out a red hand. All expression of interest had fled from his placid face. "Come in right away, eh? Hello, Carson. Have somethin'; on me, you know."

Lee shook his head.

"Not to-night, Sandy," he said. "Thanks just the same."

"Me," grinned Carson, "I'll go you, Sandy. Same thing--you know."

Sandy shoved out whiskey-bottle and glass. Then he turned grave eyes to Lee.

"One of these fellers can tend bar while we talk if you want, Bud," he offered.

"You say Quinnion has been talking?" asked Lee.

"Yes. Considerable. All afternoon an' evening, I guess. I didn't hear him until I called you up."

"Then," continued the man from Blue Lake ranch, "I don't see any call for you and me to whisper, Sandy. What did he say?"

"Said you was a liar, Bud. An' a skeerd-o-your-life damn bluff."

A faint, shadowy smile touched Lee's eyes.

"Just joshing, Sandy. But that wasn't all, was it?"

"No," said Sandy, wiping his bar carefully. "There was the other word, Bud. An'--say, Billy, tell him what Quinnion had to say down to the Jailbird."

Lee turned his eyes to Billy Young. Young, a cattleman from the Up and Down range, shifted his belt and looked uncomfortable.

"Damn if I do!" he blurted out. "It ain't none of my funeral. An' if you ask me, I don't like the sound of that kind of talk in my mouth. Maybe I can't find my way to church of a Sunday for staggerin' with red-eye, but I ain't ever drug a nice girl's name into a barroom."

"So," said Lee very quietly, "that's it, is it?"

"Yes," said Sandy Weaver slowly, "that's it, Bud. Us boys knowed ol' Luke Sanford an' liked him. Some of us even knowed his girl. All of us know the sort she is. When Quinnion started his talk--oh, it's a song an' dance about you an' her all alone in some damn cabin, trying to crawl out'n the looks of things by accusin' Quinnion of tryin' to shoot you up!--well, folks jus' laughed at him. More recent, somebody must have took him serious an' smashed him in the mouth. He looks like it. But," and Sandy shrugged his thick shoulders elaborately, "if it's up to anybody it's up to you."

For a moment Bud Lee, standing very straight, his hat far back, his eyes hard and cold, looked from one to another of the men about him. In every face he saw the same thing; their contempt for a man like Quinnion, their wordless agreement with Sandy that it "was up to Bud Lee." Lee's face told them nothing.

"Where is he?" he asked presently.

"Mos' likely down to the Jailbird," said Billy, Young. "That's where he hangs out lately."

Lee turned and went out, Carson at his heels, all eyes following him. In his heart was a blazing, searing rage. And that rage was not for Quinnion alone. He thought of Judith as he had seen her that very night, a graceful, gray-eyed slip of a girl, the sweetest little maid in all of the world known to him--and of how he, brutal in the surge of love for her, had swept her into his arms, crushed her to him, forced upon her laughing lips the kiss of his own.

"My God," he said within himself, "I was mad. It would be a good thing if I got Quinnion to-night--and he got me. Two of a kind," he told himself sneeringly.

As he made his way down the ill-lighted street, his hat drawn over his eyes now. Bud Lee for a moment lost sight of the rows of rude shanties, the drowsing saddle-ponies, the street-lamps, and saw only the vision of a girl. A girl clean and pure, a girl for a man to kneel down to in worship, a girl who, as he had seen her last, was a fairylike creature born of music and soft laughter and starlight, a maid indescribably sweet. In the harshness of the mood which gripped him, she seemed to him superlatively adorable; the softness of her eyes at the moment before he had kissed her haunted him. As he strode on seeking Quinnion, who had spoken evil of her, he carried her with him in his heart.

The horrible thing was that her name had already been bandied about from a ruffian's lips. Lee winced at that even as he had winced at the remembrance of having been brutally rough with her himself. But what was past was past; Quinnion had talked and must talk no more.

"He'll start something the minute he sees you," cautioned Carson, his own revolver loose in the belt under his coat, his hard fingers like talons gripped about the butt. "Keep your eye peeled, Bud. Better cool off a speck before you tie into him. You're too mad, I tell you, for straight, quick shooting."

Lee made no answer. Side by side the two men went on. They had left the sidewalk and walked down the middle of the rusty, rut-gouged street. Every man they met, every figure standing in the shadows, received their quick, measuring looks.

"Most likely," suggested the cattle foreman, "by now he's got drunk an' gone to sleep it off."

But Lee knew better than that. Quinnion wasn't the sort that got drunk. He'd drink until the alcohol stirred up all of the evil in his ugly heart; then he'd stop, always sure of his eye and his hand. It was far more likely that with a crowd of his own sort he was gambling in the card-room of the Last Chance saloon, the Jailbird saloon as "white" men called it. For there was an ill-famed hang-out at the far end of the straggling town, just at the edge of the Italian settlement, that of late had come to be frequented by such as Quinnion; men who were none too well loved by the greater part of the community, men who, like Quinnion, had served time in jail or penitentiary. Black Steve, who was both proprietor and bartender, and who looked like a low-class Italian, though he spoke the vernacular of the country, was the god of the "dago" quarter, the friend of those who had gotten entangled with the law. Only last year he had killed his man in his own saloon, then gone clear, through the combined perjury of his crowd.

The street grew steadily gloomier, filled with shadows. In front of the Jailbird the only light came from within and made scant war on the lurking darkness without. Lee's ears were greeted with the crazy whine of an old accordion, and with men's voices lifted in laughter. He shoved the swing door open with his shoulder, Carson pushed the other half back, and the two stood on the threshold, their eyes swiftly seeking Quinnion.

As though their presence had been a command for silence, a sudden hush fell over the Jailbird. The accordion man drew out a last gasping note and turned black round eyes upon them. Black Steve, oily and perspiring behind his bar, caressed a heavy black mustache and looked at them out of cold, expressionless eyes.

The first glance had shown Lee that Quinnion was not there. At least not in the main room, but there were the card-rooms at the rear. He gave no sign of having felt the hostility of the many eyes turned upon him, but went quickly down through the room, turning neither to right nor left.

"Hol' on there," came the big booming voice of Steve. "What you fellers want, huh?"

Lee gave him no answer but strode on. Carson, at Lee's heels like a grim old dog, showed his teeth a little. Steve, striking the bar with a heavy hand, shouted in menacing tones:

"Hol' on, I say! Nobody goin' to break in on a play that's running in my card-rooms. If you fellers want anything, you ask me."

"Go ahead, Bud," said Carson jocosely. "It's only the ol' black calf bawling same as usual."

But Lee needed no urging. He had heard voices beyond the closed door in front of him, among them a certain high-pitched, snarling, indescribably evil voice which he knew. He put his hand on the knob and found that the door was locked. With no waste of time, he drew back a step, lifted his foot and drove his heel smashing into the lock. Then, throwing himself forward, driving his shoulder into the door, he burst it off its hinges.

At last he had found Quinnion.

Here were half a dozen men, not playing cards, but interrupted in a quiet talk. Standing on the far side of the table was a man who was as evil a thing to see as was his voice to hear; his face twisted, drawn to the left side, the left eye a mere slit of malevolence, the uneven teeth showing in an eternal, mirthless grin, a man whose hands, when his arms were lax as now, hung almost to his knees, a man twisted morally, mentally, and physically.

Bud Lee had eyes only for this man. But suddenly Carson had seen another man, seeking to screen himself behind the great, misshapen bulk of Quinnion, and with new eagerness was crying:

"It's Shorty, Bud! He's mine!"

But Shorty was no man's yet. At his back was a window; it was closed and the shade was drawn, but to Shorty it spelled safety. Head first he went through it, tearing the green shade down, crashing through the glass, leaving discussion behind him. With a bellow of rage Carson went after him, forgetful in the instant that there was another matter on hand to-night. Shorty, consigned to Carson's care and the grain-house, had slipped away and had laughed at him. Ever since, Carson had been yearning for the chance to get his two hands on Shorty's fat throat. Before the smash and tinkle of falling glass had died away Carson, plunging as Shorty had plunged, was lost to the bulging eyes which sought to follow him, gone head first into the darkness without.

Lee kept his eyes hard on Quinnion's. He moved a little, so that the wall was at his back. His coat was unbuttoned; his left hand was in his pocket, his arm holding back his coat a little on that side. The right hand was lax at his side, like Quinnion's.

He had seen the other men, though his eyes had seemed to see only one man. One of them he knew; the others he had seen. They were the sort to be found in Quinnion's company. They were the nucleus of what was spoken of as Quinnion's crowd.

"Quinnion," said Lee quietly, "you are a damned dirty-mouthed liar."

The words came like little slaps in the face. Of the four men still in the room with Quinnion three of them moved swiftly to one side, their eyes on their leader's face, which showed nothing of what might lie in his mind.

"I have taken the trouble," went on Lee coolly, when Quinnion, leering back at him, made no reply, "to ride forty miles to-night for a little talk with you. You are a crook and a card-cheat. I told you that once before. You have been telling men that I am a coward and a four-flusher. For that I am going to run you out of town to-night. Or kill you."

Then Quinnion laughed at him.

"Just for that?" he jeered. "Or because I've been tellin' a true story about you an'----"

He didn't get her name out. Perhaps he hadn't expected to. His eyes had been watchful. Now, as he threw himself to one side, he whipped out his gun, dropping to one knee, his body partly concealed by the table. At the same second Bud Lee's right hand, no longer lax, sped to the revolver gripped under the coat at his left arm-pit.

It was a situation by no means new to the four walls of the Jailbird nor to the men concerned. It was a two-man fight, with as yet no call for the four friends of Quinnion to interfere. It would take the spit and snarl of a revolver, the flash of flame, the acrid smell of burning-powder to switch their sympathetic watching into actual participation. No new situation certainly for Chris Quinnion who took quick stock of the table with its heavy top and screened his body with it; no new situation for Steve, the big bartender who was at the shattered door almost as Bud Lee sent it rocking drunkenly.

Since a fight like this in a small room may end in three seconds and yet remain a fight for men to talk of at street corners for many a day thereafter, it is surely a struggle baffling adequate description. For while you speak of it, it is done; while a dock ticks, two guns may carry hot lead, and cut in two two threads of life.

Quinnion was down and shooting, with but ten steps or less between him and the man whom he sought to kill; Bud Lee was standing, tall and straight, back to wall, his first bullet ripping into the boards of the table, sending a flying splinter to stick in Quinnion's face, close to a squinting, slitted eye; and as the two guns spoke like one, a third from the open barroom shattered the lamp swinging from the ceiling between Lee and Quinnion. Steve, the bartender, had taken a hand.

The card-room was plunged in darkness so thick that Lee's frowning eyes could no longer make out Quinnion's head above the table, so black that to Quinnion's eyes the tall form of Lee against the wall was lost in shadow.

XX

THE FIGHT AT THE JAILBIRD

As Steve fired his shot into the lamp, Bud Lee understood just what would be Steve's next play; the bartender had given his friends brief respite from the deadly fire of the Blue Lake man, and now would turn his second shot through the flimsy wall itself on the man standing there. Lee did not hesitate now, but with one leap was across the room, avoiding the table, seeking to come to close quarters with Quinnion and have the thing over and done with. In the bitterness still gnawing at his heart, he told himself again that it would be no calamity to the world if the two men who had insulted Judith Sanford went down together.

Again Steve fired. His bullet ripped into the wall, tearing a hole through the partition where a brief instant ago Lee had stood. The light out in the barroom was extinguished. In the cardroom it was utterly, impenetrably dark now, only a vague square of lesser darkness telling where was the window through which Shorty had fled.

A red flare of flame from where Quinnion crouched, and Lee stood very still, refusing the temptation to fire back. For Quinnion's bullet had sped wide of the mark, striking the wall a full yard to Lee's left. Quinnion's eyes had not found him, would not find him soon if he stood quite motionless. The fight was still to be made, Quinnion's friends would be taking a hand now, Steve had already joined issue. There were six of them against him and with one shot fired from his heavy Colt there were but five left. No shot to be wasted.

A little creaking of a floorboard, a vague, misty blur almost at his side, and still Lee saved his fire. Quickly he lifted the big revolver, held welded to a grip of steel, throwing it high above his head and striking downward. There was almost no sound; just the thudding blow as the thick barrel struck a heavy mat of hair, and with no outcry a man went down to lie still. At the same moment the dim square of the window showed a form slipping through; one man was seeking safety from a quarrel not his own. And as he went, there came again a soft thudding blow and Carson's dry voice outside, saying calmly:

"Shorty got away, but you don't, pardner. Give 'em hell, Bud. I'm in the play again."

"Two men down," grunted Lee to himself with grim satisfaction. "And old Carson back on the job. Only two to our one now."

The form in the window crumpled and under Carson's quick hands was jerked out. Suddenly it was very still in the little room. Steve did not fire a third time; Quinnion held his fire. For Lee had made no answer and they were taking heavy chances with every shot now, chances of shooting the wrong man. Each of the four watchful men in the narrow apartment breathed softly.

Once more Lee lifted his gun above his head. As he held it thus, he put out his left hand gently, inch by inch, gropingly. Extended full length, it touched nothing. Slowly he moved it in a semi-circle, the gun in his right hand always ready to come crashing down. His fingers touched the wall, then moving back assured him that no one was within reach. Lifting a foot slowly, he took one cautious step forward, toward the spot where he had last seen Quinnion. Again his arm, circling through the darkness, sought to locate for him one of the men who must be very near him now. Suddenly it brushed a man's shoulder.

There was a sharp, muttered exclamation, and again a flare of red flame as this man fired. But he had misjudged Bud Lee's position by a few inches, the bullet cut through Lee's coat, and Lee's clubbed revolver fell unerringly, smashing into the man's forehead. There was a low moan, a revolver clattered to the floor, a body fell heavily.

"A new situation," thought Lee. Three men down before a clock could tick off as many minutes and not a single man shot. It was a place for a man like Charlie Miller with his old pick-handle.

"Bud," called Carson's voice sharply, "are you all right?"

"Yes," answered Lee briefly, and as he answered moved sharply to one side so that his voice might not draw a shot from Quinnion or the other men. There came two spurts of flame, one from each of the corners of the room opposite him, the reports of the two shots reverberating loudly. But this was mere guesswork--shooting at no more definite thing than a man's voice, and Lee having moved swiftly had little fear. And he knew pretty well where those two men were now.

So did Carson, who from without fired in twice through the window. Then again it grew so silent that a clock ticking somewhere out in the barroom was to be heard distinctly, so that again the men guarded their breathing.

Lee thought that he knew where Quinnion was, in the corner at his right close to the rear wall. Not square in the corner, of course, for having fired he was fox enough to shift his position a little. True, no sound had told of such a movement. But Quinnion could be trusted to make no sound at a time like this. Lee, equally silent, again set a slow foot out, moving cautiously toward the spot where his eyes sought Quinnion in the dark.

He was calculating swiftly now: Quinnion had fired twice from the screen of the table just as Steve shot out the light; he had fired again just now, it was a fair bet that at least one of the other shots had been his. That meant that he had fired four times. If Quinnion still carried his old six-shooter he had but two shots at most left to him, for there had been no time which he would risk in reloading.

Lee swept off his hat and tossed it out before him to the spot where he believed Quinnion was and dropped swiftly to his knee as he did so. There was a snarl, Quinnion's evil snarl, and a shot that sped high above his head. His hat had struck Quinnion full in the face. Then Lee again sprang onward, again struck out with his clubbed revolver. The blow missed Quinnion's head but caught him heavily on the shoulder and sent him staggering back against the wall. Lee could hear the bulk of his body crashing against the boards. And again leaping, he struck the second time at Quinnion. This time there was no snarl, but a falling weight and stillness.

There was a sound of a chair violently thrown down, the scuffle of hasty feet and in the door the faint blur of a flying figure seeking refuge in the bar. Lee flung the crippled door shut after the fugitive and then with his left hand struck a match, his revolver ready in his right.

Holding the tiny flame down toward the floor, he made out two prone bodies. One, that of the first man he had struck down, a man whom he knew by name as Lefty Devine, a brawler and boon companion of Quinnion. The other Quinnion himself. Devine lay very still, clearly completely stunned. Quinnion moved a little.

Carson's weather-beaten face peered in at the window.

"Better do the hot foot, Bud," he grunted softly, "while the trail's open. Steve will be mixing in again."

But Lee seemed in no haste now. When the match had burned out, he dropped it and slipped fresh cartridges into his gun. That done, he stooped, gathered up Quinnion's feebly struggling body in his arms and carried it to the window.

"Here," he said coolly to Carson. "Take him through."

"What the hell do you want of him?" Carson wanted to be told. "Ain't going to scalp him, are you, Bud?"

"Take him out," commanded Lee with no explanation. Carson obeyed, jerking the now complaining Quinnion out hastily and unceremoniously. Lee followed as Steve threw open the barroom door.

"It's a new one on me, just the same," said Carson dryly as he watched Lee stoop and gather Quinnion up in his arms. "After a little party like this one, I'm generally travelling on an' not stopping to pick flowers an' gather sooveneers! You ain't got cannibal blood in you, have you, Bud?"

While Carson was cudgelling his brains for the answer and Steve was making cautious examination of the card-room, Lee with his burden in his arms passed through the darkness lying at the rear of the saloon and out into the street. Carson followed to take care of a sortie should Steve and the rest not have had all they wanted for one night. He chuckled, remarking to himself that Bud Lee and Quinnion were the very picture of a young mother and her babe in arms.

Not until they again reached the Golden Spur did Lee's burden completely recover consciousness. Many a man on the street looked wonderingly after them, demanded to know "what was up," and, receiving no answer, swung in behind Carson.

In the Golden Spur the arrivals were greeted by a heavy silence. Sandy Weaver forgot to set out the drinks which had just been ordered by three men who, in their turn, forgot that they had ordered. Men at the tables playing cards put down their hands and rose or turned expectantly in their seats.

Lee put Quinnion down on the floor. The man lay there a moment blinking at the lights above him and at the faces around him. At length his eyes came to Lee.

"Damn you," he muttered, trying to rise, and slowly getting to his feet with the aid of a chair, "I'll get you----"

Then Bud Lee gave his brief explanation, cutting Quinnion's ugly snarl in two.

"This is Quinnion's farewell party," he said bluntly. "He is a liar and a crook and an undesirable citizen. I have told him all that before. He took it upon himself to say about town that I am all of those things which he is himself. I have damn near killed him for it; I am going to give him ten minutes to get out of town. If he doesn't do it, I am going to kill him. And in that ten minutes he is going to find time to eat his words."

"I'll see you in--" began Quinnion, as something of the old bluster came back to him.

"Shut up!" snapped Lee. "Carson, let me have your gun."

Carson, wondering, gave it. Lee dropped it on the floor at Quinnion's foot.

"Pick that gun up and we'll finish what we've begun," he said coolly to Quinnion. "I won't shoot until you've got it in your hand and have straightened up. Then I'll kill you. Unless first you admit that you are the contemptible liar every one knows you are, and second, get out of town and stay out. It's up to you, Quinnion."

Knowing Quinnion, the men moved swiftly so that they did not stand behind either him or Lee. Sandy Weaver, shifting a few feet along his bar, shook his head and sighed.

"It'll be both of them," he muttered.

Quinnion turned his head a little, his red-rimmed eyes going from face to face, his tongue moving back and forth between his lips. For an instant his eyes dropped to the gun at his feet, and a little spasmodic contraction of his body showed that he was tempted to take up the weapon. But he hesitated, and again turned to Lee.

"It's up to you," repeated Lee. "If you're not a coward after all, pick it up." Lee's hands were at his sides, his own revolver in his pocket. Quinnion was tempted. The evil lights in his eyes danced like witch-fires. Again he hesitated; but his hesitation was brief. With his whining, ugly laugh he lurched to the bar.

"Gimme a drink, Sandy," he commanded.

"Neither now nor after a while," Sandy told him briefly. "I ain't dirtyin' my glasses that-a-way."

"There you are," jeered Quinnion, with a sullen sort of defiance. "You swat me over the head while I ain't lookin' an' then bring me in here where they're all your friends. If I drop you I get all mussed up with their bullets. No, thanks."

"For the last time," said Lee, and his low voice was ominous, "I tell you what to do. If you don't do it, I'll kill you just the same. You've got your chance. Count ten seconds, Sandy."

"One," said Sandy, watching the clock on the wall, "two, three, four, five, six, seven----"

"Curse you!" cried Quinnion then, a look of fear at last in his eyes. "I'll get you for this some day, Bud Lee. Now you've got me----"

"Keep on counting, Sandy," commanded Lee.

"Eight," said Sandy, "nine----"

"I lied!" snapped Quinnion. "An' I'm leavin' town for a while."

And lurching as he walked, he made his way out of the room, his eyes on the floor, his face a burning red.

"Carson and I are riding back to the ranch as soon as our horses rest up and get some grain," said Lee, his fingers slowly rolling a brown cigarette. "We'll mosey out now, see Quinnion on his way and drop back to make up a little game of draw for a couple of hours. Strike you about right, Billy? And you, Watson? And you, Parker?"

They listened to him, took the cue from him, and allowed what lay between him and Chris Quinnion to lie in silence. But there was not a man there but in his own fashion was saying to himself:

"It's a good beginning. But where's the end going to be?"

XXI

BURNING MEMORY

As June had slipped by, so did July and August. On Blue Lake ranch life flowed smoothly. Men were too busy with each day's work to sit into the nights prophesying trouble ahead. And in truth it seemed that if Bayne Trevors had ever actively opposed the success of the Sanford venture he had by now accepted the role of inactivity forced upon him by circumstance. He was with the Western Lumber Company, as director and district superintendent, seemingly giving all his dynamic force to the legitimate affairs of the company.

But there were those who placed no faith in the obvious. Bud Lee kept in touch with Rocky Bend and learned that Quinnion had not come back; that no one knew where he had gone. Carson's man, Shorty, was sought by Emmet Sawyer and his disappearance was like that of a pricked bubble; it seemed that Shorty had no actual physical existence or that, if he had, he had taken it into some other corner of the world. Quinnion's friends had also gone from Rocky Bend, like Quinnion leaving behind them no sign to show where they had gone.

Knowing Quinnion as he did, and having his own conception of the character of Bayne Trevors, Bud Lee said to himself that too great a quiet portended strife to come. If Quinnion was the man to carry in his breast the hate that drove him to the murder of Judith's father, then he was the man to remember the humiliation he had suffered at Lee's hands, to remember and to strike back when the time was ripe.

Judith had heard of the night in Rocky Bend, a lurid and wonderfully distorted account from Mrs. Simpson, who had received it in a letter from her daughter.

"So that was what Bud Lee did after he kissed me!" mused Judith.

She sent immediately for Carson and forced from him the full story. Dismissing Carson, she remained for a long while alone. Only one remark had she made to the cattle foreman, and that a little aside from the issue occupying his mind:

"Keep your weather eye open for what's in the wind," she told him briefly. "Behind Quinnion is Trevors, and the year isn't over yet."

The ranch was stocked to its utmost capacity. Carson had bought another herd of cattle; Lee had added to his string of horses. The dry season was on them, herds were moved higher up the slopes into the fresh pastures. Carson, converted now to the silos, was a man with one idea and that idea ensilage. Again the alfalfa acreage was extended, so that each head of cattle might have its daily auxiliary fodder. Carson now agreed with Judith in the matter of holding back sales for the high prices which would come at the heels of the lean months.

The man Donley, who had brought to the ranch the pigeons carrying cholera, was tried in Rocky Bend. The evidence, though circumstantial, was strong against him, and the prosecution was pushed hard. But it was little surprise to any one at the ranch when the trial resulted in a hung jury. The ablest lawyer in the county had defended Donley, and finally, late in August, secured his acquittal. The man himself did not have ten dollars in the world; the attorney taking his case was a high-priced lawyer. Obviously, to Judith Sanford at least, Bayne Trevors was standing back of every play his hirelings made.

Doc Tripp had the hog-cholera in hand. And every day, out with the live stock whose well-being was his responsibility, he worked as he had never worked before, watchful, eager, suspicious. "If they'll drop cholera down on us out of the blue sky," he snapped, "I'd like to know what they won't try."

For the first few days following the dance Bud Lee had within his soul room but for one emotion: he had held Judith in his arms. He had set his lips on hers. He went hot and cold with the remembrance. Being a man, he made his man-suppositions of the emotions that rankled in her breast. He imagined her contempt of a man who by his strength had forced her lips to wed his; he pictured her scorn, her growing hatred. He told himself that he should go, rid the ranch of his presence, take his departure without a word with her. For, already, he had fitted her into his theory of the perfect woman, lifting her high above himself and above the human world. It was a continued insult for him to remain here.

But, after careful thought, he remembered what Judith had already told him; he was one of the men whom she could trust to do her work for her, one of the men she most needed, a man whom she would need sorely if Bayne Trevors were lying quiet now but to strike harder, expectedly, later.

Judith did not dismiss him, as at first he had been sure she would. So he stayed on, remaining away from the ranch headquarters, sleeping when he could in the cabin above the lake, spending his days with his horses, avoiding her but keeping her personality in his soul, her interests in his heart. When the winter had passed, when she had made her sales and had the money in hand for the payments upon the mortgages, then he would go. Whereat, no doubt, the high gods smiled.

As time passed, there came about a subtle change in the attitude of the outfit toward Pollock Hampton, whom they had been at the beginning prone to accept as a "city guy." It began to appear that under his lightness there was often a steady purpose; that if he didn't know everything about a ranch, he was learning fast; that in his outspoken admiration of things rough and manly and primal there were certain lasting qualities. Whereas formerly his being thrown from a spirited mount was almost a daily occurrence, now he rode rather well. With tanned face and hard hands, he was, as Carson put it, "growing up."

He came to Judith one day serious-faced, thoughtful-eyed.

"Look here, Judith," he began abruptly, "I'm no outsider just looking on at this game. You're the chief owner and the boss and I'm not kicking at that any longer. Your dad raised you to this sort of thing and you have a way of getting by with it. But, on the other hand, I'm part owner and you've got to consider me."

Judith smiled at him.

"What now, Pollock?" she asked.

"You're the boss," he repeated stoutly. "But I've got a right to be next in authority. Under you, you know. Why, by cripes, I go around feeling as if I had to take orders from Carson or Tripp or any other of the foremen!"

"'By cripes' is good!" laughed Judith. "Go ahead."

"That's all," he insisted. "You can tell them, when you get a chance, that I am your little old right-hand man. Suppose," he suggested vaguely, "that you left the ranch a day or so. Or even longer, some time. There's got to be some one here who is the head when there is need for it."

Judith mirthfully acquiesced. Hampton's interest was sufficiently heavy for him to be entitled to some consideration. Besides, she had come to experience a liking for the boy and had seen in him the change for the better which his new life was working in him. Further, she meant to make it her business that she did not leave the ranch for a day or so, or an hour or so, when she should be there. Consequently, within a week Pollock Hampton was known humorously from one end to the other of the big ranch as the Foreman-at-Large.

Marcia Langworthy, visiting in southern California, wrote brief, sunny notes to Hampton, intricate letters to Judith. The mystery of Bud Lee of which she had had a glimpse when the artist, Dick Farris, and Lee recognized each other as old friends had piqued her curiosity in a way which allowed that young daughter of Eve no rest until she had made her own investigations. She wrote at length, telling Judith all that she had learned of Lee. How he had been quite the rage, my dear. Oh, tremendously rich, with great ranch in the South, a wonderful adobe hacienda of the old Spanish days, where, like a young king, he had entertained lavishly. How, believing in his friends, he had lost everything, then had dropped out of the world, content equally to allow that world to believe him soldiering in France or dead in the trenches and to take his wage as a common laborer. Wasn't it too romantic for anything?

In due course, following up her letters, Marcia herself came back to the Blue Lake ranch, Judith's guest now. The major and Mrs. Langworthy were visiting in the East--it seemed that they always visited somewhere--and Marcia would stay at the ranch indefinitely. Hampton drove into Rocky Bend for her and held the girl's breathless admiration all the way home, handling the reins of his young team in a thoroughly reckless, shivery manner.

"Isn't he splendid?" cried Marcia when she slipped away with Judith to her room.

Under the bright approval of Marcia's eyes Hampton flushed with pleasure. Could Mrs. Langworthy have seen them together she would have nudged the major and whispered in his ear.

During the two months after the dance, Bud Lee and Judith had seen virtually nothing of each other. When routine duties or a necessary report brought them for a few minutes into each other's society there was a marked constraint upon them. Never had the man lost the stinging sense of his offense against her; never had Judith condescended to be anything but cool and brief with him. While no open reference was made to what was past, still the memory of it must lie in each heart, and though Lee held his eyes level with hers and drank deep of the warm loveliness of her, he told himself angrily that he was beneath her contempt. The chivalry within him, so great and essential a part of the man's nature, was a wounded thing, hurt by his own act. The old feeling of camaraderie which had sprung up between them at times was gone now; they could no longer be "pardners" as they had been that night in the old cabin.

He told himself curtly that he did not regret that; that now it was inevitable that they should be less than strangers since they could not be more than friends. That the girl was ready to forgive him, that she had never been as harsh with him as he was himself, that there was a golden, delicious possibility that she should feel as he did--so mad an idea had not come to Bud Lee, horse foreman.

A few days after Marcia's arrival there came to the ranch a letter which was addressed:

Pollock Hampton, Esq., General Manager, Blue Lake Ranch.

It was from Doan, Rockwell & Haight, big stock-buyers of Sacramento, submitting an unsolicited order for a surprisingly large shipment of cattle and horses. The price offered was ridiculously low, even for this season of low figures due to the fact that many overstocked ranches were throwing their beef-cattle and range horses on the market. So low, in fact, that Judith's first surmise when Hampton brought it to her was that the typist taking the company's dictation had made an error.

Judith tossed the note into the waste-basket. Then she retrieved it to frown at it wonderingly, and, finally, to file it. It began by having for her no significance worthy of speculation. It soon began to puzzle her. Finally, it faintly disturbed her.

Here were two points of interest. First: Doan, Rockwell & Haight was the company to which Bayne Trevors, when general manager, had made many a sacrifice sale. Because the Blue Lake had knocked down to them before, did they still count confidently upon continued mismanagement? Surely they must know that the management of the ranch had changed. And this brought her to the second point: How did it come about that they had addressed, not her, but Pollock Hampton? Was this just a trifle?

Long ago Judith had told herself that she must keep her two eyes wide open for seeming trifles. In spite of her, though she scoffed at her "nerves," the girl had the uneasy conviction that this offer had been prompted by Trevors; that Trevors, for purposes of his own, had given instructions that the letter be addressed to Hampton; that this was the first sign of a fresh campaign directed against her from the dark; that trouble was again beginning.

Thoughtfully she smoothed out the letter, impaling it on her file.

XXII

PLAYING THE GAME

Pollock Hampton, Foreman-at-Large, came and went on the ranch, carrying orders, taking always a keen interest in whatever work fell to hand, an interest of a fresh kind, in that it was born of a growing understanding. The men grew to like him; Bud Lee tactfully sought to acquaint him with many ranch matters which would prove of value to him. Carson, however, grown nervous over the new method in stock-raising still in its experimental stage, was given to take any suggestion from Hampton in the light of a personal affront.

"Damn him," he growled deep in his throat when Hampton had ridden out with word to shift one of the herds into a fresh pasture, an act on which Carson had already decided, "some day I'll just take him between my thum' an' finger an' anni-hilate him."

The greater bulk of the stock had been steadily shifted higher in the hills. The hogs grazed on the slopes at the north of the Lower End; cattle and horses had been pushed eastward to the little valleys in the mountains about the lake. Even the plateau, where the old cabin stood, was now stocked with Lee's prize string of horses. Then, one day Hampton came galloping through the herds of shorthorns, seeking Carson.

"Crowd them down to the Lower End again," he shouted above the din. "Cut out the scrawny ones and haze the rest into the pens."

Carson's steel-blue eyes snapped, his teeth showed like a dog's.

"Drunk?" he sneered. "What's eating you?"

"Do as you're told," retorted Hampton hotly. "Those are orders from headquarters and it's up to you to obey them. Get me?"

"If ever I do get you, sonny," grunted Carson, "there won't be enough of you left for the dawgs to quarrel over. Orders or no orders, I ain't going to do no such fool thing."

Hampton reined his horse in closer, staring frowningly at the old cattleman. The purplish color of rage mounted in Carson's tanned cheeks.

"You'll do what you're told or go get your time," he announced tersely. "We've got an order for five hundred beef cows and we're selling immediately."

Carson's jaw dropped.

"What?" he demanded, not quite believing his ears. "Say that again, will you?"

"I said it once," retorted Hampton. "Now get busy."

"Who are we selling to? I ain't heard about it."

"An oversight, my dear Mr. Carson," laughed Hampton, his own anger risen. "Quite an oversight that you were not consulted. We are selling to Doan, Rockwell & Haight. Ever heard of them?"

"Who says we're selling?"

"I say so. And, if you've got to have all the news, Miss Sanford says so."

"She does, does she? Hm-m. First I knew of it. What figger?"

"Really, does that concern you? If the price suits me and Miss Sanford, who own the stock, does it in any way affect you? I don't want to quarrel with you, Carson, and I do appreciate that you are a good man in your way. But just because you have worked here a long time, don't make the mistake of thinking that you own the ranch."

With that he whirled his horse, and was gone. Carson, with puckered brows, stared after him.

But orders were orders, and Carson though the heart was sore, barked out his commands to his herders to turn the cattle back toward the lower fields. He had been converted to the new way, he had grown to dream of the fat prices his cow brutes would fetch in the winter market, he knew that prices now were rock-bottom low, that Doan, Rockwell & Haight were close buyers who before now had cut the throat of the Blue Lake ranch in sacrifice sales when Bayne Trevors ran the outfit.

"We're standing to lose thousan's an' thousan's of dollars," he told himself in disgust. "All we've spent on irrigation an' fences an' silos an' ditches, all gone to heck in a han'-basket. Not counting thousan's of more dollars lost in selling at what we can get this time of year. It makes me sick, damn throwin'-up sick."

Riding down a long, winding trail, out through a patch of chaparral into a rocky gorge, Hampton turned east again toward the higher plateau. Taking the roundabout way which led from the far side of the lake and along the flank of the mountain to the table-land, he came to a scattering band of horses and Tommy Burkitt.

"Where's Lee?" called Hampton.

Burkitt grinned at him by way of greeting, and then pointed across the plateau to a ravine leading to a still higher, smaller, shut-in valley. Hampton galloped on and a quarter of an hour later came up with Lee. The horse foreman was sitting still in his saddle, his eyes taking stock of a fresh bit of pasture into which he planned turning his horses a little later. It was one of a dozen small meadows on the mountain creeks where the cañon walls widened out into an oval-shaped valley, less than a half-mile long, where there was much rich grass.

"Hello, Hampton," called Lee pleasantly. "What's the word?"

The perspiration streaming down Hampton's face had in no way dampened his ardor.

"Big doings," he cried warmly. "We're cutting loose, Bud, at last and piling up the shining ducats! You're to gather up a hundred of the most likely cayuses you've got and shove them down to the Lower End. We're selling pretty heavily to Doan, Rockwell & Haight."

A new flicker came into Lee's eyes. Then they went hard as polished agate.

"I didn't quite get you, Hampton," he said softly. "You say we're selling a hundred horses? Now?"

Hampton nodded, understanding nothing of what lay in Lee's heart.

"On the jump, just as fast as we can get them on the run," he said triumphantly. "Judith wanted me to tell you."

"I see," answered Lee slowly.

His eyes left Hampton's flushed face and went to the distant cliffs. It was no way of Bud's to hide his eyes from a man, and yet now he did hide them. He did not want Hampton to see what they showed so plainly, in spite of his attempt to master his emotion. He was hurt. Long ago he had offended Judith, and she had waited until now to repay his rude insult with this cool little slap in the face. She had not consulted him, she had not mentioned a sale to him, and now she sent Hampton and did not even come to him with a word of explanation. It was quite as if she had said:

"You are just a servant of mine, like the rest, Bud Lee, and I treat you accordingly."

Until Judith had come, there had been nothing that this man loved as he did his work among his horses. He watched them as day after day they grew into clean-blooded perfection; he appraised their values; he saw personally to their education, helping each one of them individually to become the true representative of the proudest species of animal life. Had he turned his eye now to the herd down yonder he could have seen the animal he had selected for a brood-mare next year, the three-year-old destined to draw all eyes as he stepped daintily among the best of the single-footers in Golden Gate Park, the rich red bay gelding that he would mate for a splendid carriage team. . . . Oh, he knew them all like human friends, planned the future for each, the sale of each would be no sorrow but rather a triumph of success. And now, to see them lumped and sold to Doan, Rockwell & Haight--even that hurt. But most of all did Judith's treatment of him cut, cut deep.

"You're a fool, Bud Lee," he told himself softly. "Oh, God, what a fool!"

"The buyers will be here the first thing to-morrow," said Hampton. "Judith says we're to have everything ready for them."

"I'll not keep her waiting," answered Lee quietly. And with a quick touch of the spur he whirled his horse and left Hampton abruptly, going straight to the plateau.

"Round 'em up, Tommy," he said sharply. "Every damned hoof of them: They go back to the corrals."

Though quick questions surged up in Tommy's brain, none of them was asked just yet, for he had seen the look on Lee's face.

It was early in the afternoon when Hampton carried his messages to Carson and Lee. It was after dark when Lee, his work done, his heart still sore and heavy, came into the men's bunk-house. It was very still, though close to a dozen men were in the room. Lee's eyes found Carson and he guessed the reason for the silence. Carson was in a towering rage that flamed red-hot in his eyes; under the spell of his dominating emotion, the men sat and stared at him.

"Well, what's wrong?" asked Lee coolly from the door.

"Good goddlemighty!" growled Carson snappishly. "You stan' there an' ask what's the matter. If they's anything that ain't the matter an' you'll spell its name to me I'll put in with you. The whole outfit's going to pot, an' I, for one, don't care how soon it goes."

"Rather a nice way for a cattle foreman to talk about his ranch, isn't it?" asked Lee colorlessly.

"Cattle foreman?" sniffed Carson with further expletives. "Now will you stan' on your two feet an' explain to me how in blue blazes a man can be a cattle foreman when there ain't no cattle!"

"So that's it, is it? I didn't know how close you were selling off----"

"Don't say _me_ selling! Why, I got silage to run my cow brutes all winter, what with the dry feed in them cañons----"

Lee didn't hear the rest. It had been his intention to come in and smoke with the boys, and perhaps play a game of whist. Anything to keep from thinking. But now, moving on impulse, he turned and left the shack, going swiftly up the knoll to the ranch-house.

Just stepping into the courtyard soft under the moon, tinkling with the play of the fountains, stirred his heart to quicker beating. He had not set foot here for over two months, not since that night which he knew he should forget and yet to whose memory he clung desperately. This was the first time in many a long week that he had gone out of his way to seek Judith. And now words which Judith herself had spoken to him one day were now at least a part of the cause sending him to speak with her. She had said that he was loyal, that she needed loyal men. He still took her wage, he was still a Blue Lake ranch-hand, he still owed her his loyalty, though it came from a sore heart.

If she were hard driven in some way which she had not seen fit to confide to him, if she were forced to make this tremendous sale, if she were mad or had at last lost her nerve, frightened at the thought of the heavy sums of money to be raised at the end of the winter, well, then it still could do no harm for him to speak his mind to her. Hampton had told him the price which the horses were to bring; it was pitifully small and Lee meant to tell her so, to tell her further that he would guarantee an enormous gain over it if she gave him time. He would be doing his part though she called him meddler for his pains. Marcia Langworthy, hidden in a big chair on the veranda, watched him approach with interest, though Lee was unconscious of her presence. He had lifted a hand to rap at the door when she called to him, saying:

"Good evening, Mr. Mysterious Lee. Have you forgotten me?"

Though he had pretty well forgotten her, it was not necessary to tell her that he had. He came toward her, putting out his hand.

"Good evening, Miss Langworthy," he said cordially. "I haven't seen much of you this time, have I? Two reasons, you know: busy all day and half the night, for one thing, and for another, Hampton has monopolized you, hasn't he?"

Marcia laughed softly.

"To a man your size the second reason is absurd. . . . Will you sit down? You see, I am taking it for granted that you come here to see me. Unless," and her eyes twinkled brightly up at him, "you were surreptitiously calling on Mrs. Simpson?"

"I'd love to talk with you," he assured her. "But, as I've just hinted, my work here has got into the habit of running away with me into the night. I really came up for a word with Miss Sanford."

"Oh, didn't you know?" asked Marcia. "Judith isn't here."

"Isn't here?" He frowned. "No, I didn't know. I haven't seen much of her lately and didn't know her plans. Where is she?"

"In San Francisco. Her lawyers sent for her, you know. Something about a tangle in her father's business. Funny you hadn't heard; she left Saturday night."

Saturday? This was Tuesday evening. Judith had been away three full days. Lee, thinking hurriedly, thought that he saw now the explanation of Judith's ordering a sale like this. Her lawyers had found what Marcia called a "tangle" in Luke Sanford's affairs; there had been an insistent call for a large sum of money to straighten it out, and Judith had accepted the only solution.

Still, it didn't seem like Judith to sell like this at a figure so ridiculously low. Doan, Rockwell & Haight were not the only buyers on the coast. Lee himself could get more for the horses if he had two days' time to look around; the cattle were worth a great deal more than they were being sold for, even with the market down.

"Did she have an idea what the trouble was before she left?" he asked finally.

"Why," said Marcia, "I don't know. You see, she slipped out late Saturday night after we'd all gone to bed. There was a message for her over the telephone; she got up, dressed, saddled her own horse and rode into Rocky Bend alone, just leaving a note for me that she might be gone a week or two."

Just why he experienced a sense of uneasiness even then, Lee did not know. It was like Judith to act swiftly when need be; to go alone and on the spur of the minute to catch her train; to slip out quietly without disturbing her guest.

"You have heard from her since?" he demanded abruptly.

"Not a word," said Marcia. "She doesn't like letter-writing and so I haven't expected to hear from her."

Lee chatted with her for a moment, then claiming work still to be done, turned to go back down the knoll. A new thought upon him, he once more came to Marcia's side.

"I expect I'd better see Hampton," he said. "Do you know where he is?"

"Where he has been every night since Judith left," laughed Marcia. "He's old Mr. Business Man these days. In the office."

There Lee found him. Hampton, his hair ruffled, Judith's table littered with market reports, and many sheets of paper covered with untidy figures, looked up at Lee's entrance.

"Hello, Bud," he said, reaching for cigarette and match. "Got everything ready for to-morrow?"

"Why didn't you tell me Miss Sanford had gone away?" was Lee's sharp rejoinder. Hampton flushed.

"Devil take those two eyes of yours, Bud," he said testily. "They've got a way of boring through a man until he feels like they were scorching the furniture behind him. Well, I'll tell you. While Judith is away I am running this outfit. And if the men think I'm coming straight from her with an order they obey it. If they get the notion she isn't here, they're apt to ask questions. That's why."

"This sale to Doan, Rockwell & Haight," said Lee quickly. "You didn't cook that up, did you, Hampton?"

"Lord, no!" cried Hampton. From its place on a file he took a yellow slip of paper, tossing it to Lee. "She sent me that this morning."

It was a Western Union telegram, saying briefly:

POLLOCK HAMPTON, Blue Lake Ranch.

Am forced to sell heavily. Sending Doan, Rockwell & Haight Wednesday morning, one hundred horses; as many beef cattle as Carson can round up. Accept terms made in their letter to you last week.

JUDITH SANFORD.

The date-line upon the message gave the sending point as San Francisco.

"They wrote _you_ a letter offering to buy?" said Lee thoughtfully, his eyes rising slowly from the paper in his fingers. "How'd it happen they didn't write to _her_?"

"Well, it's a natural enough mistake, isn't it? Knowing that she and I were both part-owners, knowing that we were both here, isn't it quite to be expected that they would write to the man instead of to the woman? Of course I gave her the letter as soon as I had opened it."

"Of course," answered Lee.

But his thoughts were not with his answer. They were with Bayne Trevors. He knew that Trevors had long ago sold to these people; he knew, too, that at least two of the heavy shareholders in the Western Lumber Company were interested in Doan, Rockwell & Haight. Tom Rockwell himself was second vice-president of the lumber company.

"Have you had any other word from Miss Sanford?" he asked.

"No."

"Know who her lawyers are?"

"No. I don't."

"Anything in her papers here that would tell us?"

"No. Her papers are in the safe yonder and it's locked and I don't know the combination."

"Know what hotel she is stopping at in the city?"

"No. Look here, Bud; what are you driving at? I don't get you."

"No?" answered Lee absently.

What Bud Lee was thinking was: "Here are too many coincidences!" Little things, each one in itself safe from suspicion. But when he meditated that the offer had come from this particular firm, that it had come just a few days before Judith's first departure from the ranch, that it had been addressed not to her but to Hampton, so that he must have the opportunity to read it, that she had been called suddenly to the city, that that call had come after the house was quiet, its occupants in bed, that no letter had come since she had left, that no one knew where to reach her--when he passed all of these things in review the bitterness in his heart died under them and the first anxiety sprang up anew, grown almost into fear for her.

"There's just one thing, Hampton," he said, his eyes hard on the boy's face. "We don't sell a single hoof in the morning. Not a cow nor a horse until Judith is here herself."

Hampton, new in his role of general manager, flushed hotly, his own eyes showing fight.

"I like you, Lee," he said sharply, his tone that of master to man. "And I don't want us to quarrel. But Judith wired me to sell, I've wired the buyers an acceptance and we do sell in the morning!"

For a full minute Bud Lee stood stone still, staring into Hampton's face. Then, tossing the telegram to the table, he turned and went out. His face had gone suddenly white.

"They've got you somehow, Judith girl," he whispered through tense lips. "But the fight is still to be made. And, by God, there's a day of squaring accounts coming for a man named Bayne Trevors!"

He went to the bunk-house, neither seeing Marcia nor hearing her when she called after him, and with a word to Carson brought the irate cattle foreman hurriedly outside.

XXIII

THE WRATH OF POLLOCK HAMPTON

Bayne Trevors's way had ever been to play safe, the way of a coward or a wise man. Even now, no doubt he was giving an account of himself in legitimate endeavor at the lumber camp, putting in his appearance at his regular hour, safe miles lying between him and that which might occur upon the Blue Lake ranch, establishing alibis, conducting himself like the man he wished the world to think him. But in the mind of Bud Lee there was no question, no doubt. Bayne Trevors, or one of Bayne Trevors's gang, was even at this instant holding Judith somewhere until this colossal deal could be put over. Trevors or one of his gang--and Lee's face went whiter, his hands shut tighter into hard fists, as there came to his mind the picture of Quinnion's twisted face and evil, red-rimmed eyes.

"Well?" snapped Carson. "What now?"

"There's going to be no sale in the morning," said Lee, and at the new strange tone in Lee's voice Carson jerked up his head, thrusting it forward, peering at the other through the moon-lit night.

"Say it again," muttered Carson. "Who said so? Miss Judith?"

"She isn't here," replied Lee briefly. "Hasn't been here since Saturday night."

Now, with more cause than ever, did Carson stare at him.

"Then what did Pollock Hampton say sell for? By cripes, if this is one of that young hop-o'-my-thumb's jokes, I'm going up to the house an' murder him. That's all. An' right now."

Lee laid a hand on Carson's arm.

"Hold on, old-timer," he said shortly. "We'll have a talk with him after a while. Now I want to talk with you."

Contenting himself with the coldest of brief outlines, Bud Lee told Carson of Judith's absence and of his own suspicions. Carson, who had listened to him gravely, at the end shook his head.

"That's a pretty bald play, Bud," he said slowly. "I don't believe Trevors would get that coarse in his work. It doesn't look like him a little bit."

"Does this sale look the least little bit like Judith?" demanded Lee sharply. "Is it her style to go over our heads this way, Carson? If she's got to sell heavily, why pick out this particular set of buyers? Why is the deal rushed through while she's away? I tell you there's a nigger in the wood-pile and it's up to you and me to smoke him out. Come up to the house with me."

Marcia did not see them as they drew near in the moonlight. For, with a plan shaping in his brain, Lee judged best that they should not be seen. He and Carson passed in a wide arc about the left end of the courtyard, around the end of the house and so to a door opening front the office to the back of the house. This door he found unlocked and pushed quietly open.

Hampton lifted swift eyes, sensing something stern and ominous in this silent approach.

"We want to talk things over with you," began Lee.

"If you've come to bulldoze me out of that deal in the morning," retorted Hampton, "you might as well keep still. I'm going to sell."

"I don't know that you'd exactly call it bull-dozing," smiled Lee, determined to be pleasant with the young fellow as long as possible. "But you've got sense enough to listen to reason, Hampton."

"Have I?" jeered Pollock. "Thanks."

"If Miss Sanford wants the deal to go through," continued Lee, "why, then, of course, through it goes. If she doesn't, there's going to be no sale."

"I tell you she wired me to sell; I showed you the telegram----"

"But you didn't prove to me that she sent it. You didn't know yourself whether it had been sent by her or Doan, Rockwell & Haight, or by Bayne Trevors or the devil himself." He took up the telephone and said into it, "Western Union, Rocky Bend. . . . That you, Benton? This is Lee of the Blue Lake. We want to get in communication with Miss Judith Sanford, somewhere in San Francisco. Send this message to every hotel there, will you? And rush it: '_Must have word with you immediately. Important. Telephone_.' Got it? Oh, sign it, Carson and--and Tripp. Rush it, I tell you, Benton. And if you get in touch with Miss Sanford in any way, tip us off here, will you? Thanks."

"She might be visiting with friends," muttered Hampton, little pleased at the thought that Lee and Carson were seeking to rob him of his newly acquired importance.

"Where's Mrs. Simpson?" asked Lee.

"Gone to bed," answered Hampton.

"And Miss Langworthy is still on the veranda. Now Hampton, Carson and I want a look at Miss Sanford's room. Come with us, will you?"

"I'm damned if I will!" cried the boy hotly. "I don't know what you are up to, but I'm boss here and I'm giving orders, not taking them. If there's any reason in all this, I've got the right to know what it is."

"Yes," answered Lee thoughtfully. "You've got the right. I just don't like the looks of affairs, Hampton. I don't believe all that I hear. I don't believe Miss Sanford sent that wire. I don't believe she is in San Francisco. I do believe that your friend Trevors has got hold of her somehow, and that he is playing you for a sucker. That's our reason in this. Now will you come with us to her room?"

"Trevors?" said Hampton. Then he laughed. "You are like the rest, Bud. Trevors is a gentleman, and you try to make him a crook. Such a scheme as you imagine is absurd and ridiculous. And I won't go prying with you into Judith's room."

"Come on, Carson," said Lee. "If Hampton wants to stay here, let him."

But the young fellow was on his feet, his face flushed, his eyes excited.

"You'll get out of this house and do it quick!" he cried sharply. "If you think for one little minute that I'll stand for your high-handed actions, you're mistaken."

At a look from Lee, Carson stepped quickly forward, so that Hampton stood between them.

"You come with us," and now Lee no longer sought to be pleasant. "And keep still or we'll stop your mouth with a yard of cloth. This way, Carson."

With right and left arms gripped, with lagging feet and furious eyes, Hampton went between them to the door. For an instant only did he struggle; then, with a snort of disgust, seeing the futility of making a fool of himself, he went quietly.

Just what he expected as a result of a visit to the girl's room, Lee did not know. He hoped for some sign to tell him something, anything.

Quietly the three went through the house until they came to Judith's dainty blue-and-white bedroom. Here all had been set in order by Mrs. Simpson. A great vase of rosebuds, brought by José this morning, accepted by Mrs. Simpson with suspicion and searched carefully for a lurking scorpion or a coiled rattlesnake, stood on a table by the window. On entering the room a sort of awkward shyness fell over both Lee and Carson. Hampton, freed now and standing alone, though under Carson's hard eye, stared at them angrily.

"When you get through with this foolishness," he told them stiffly, "you can either apologize or call for your time."

Neither answered. Carson little by little had come to share Lee's uncertainty and anxiety; and now, like Lee, sought eagerly to find a sign--something to tell that Judith had been lured away by Trevors or Quinnion; or that she had been overpowered here and taken out, perhaps through a window.

But Judith had gone Saturday night, and Mrs. Simpson had done her work thoroughly. It might be well to call the housekeeper and question her. Had she found a chair overturned, a rug rumpled, a table shoved a little from its accustomed place? But, again, it would be as well not to start suspicion and surmise in other minds; if, after all, there were no true cause for it. Judith _might_ be in San Francisco; she _might_ have sent the order to sell.

"Chances is we're smelling powder where there wasn't no shot," said Carson hesitatingly.

"Bright boy!" mocked Hampton. "You'll make a great little gumshoe artist one of these days."

Had Bud Lee not loved Judith as he did, with his whole heart and soul, it well might have been that he and Carson and Hampton would have gone out of the room knowing no more than when they had come in. But it seemed to Lee that the room which knew Judith so intimately, was seeking to open its dumb lips to whisper to him of danger to her. He had come here troubled for her; he stood, looking about him frowningly, his heart heavy, fear mounting within him. And at length he found a sign.

At the far end of the room, in a corner, was Judith's writing-table, on which were several opened letters, pen and ink, a pad of paper. Lee stepped to it. If she had been lured away after nightfall, then some message had come to her. If that message had come by word of mouth, there was no need seeking it; if it had been a note, fate might have kept it here.

Impaled on a sharp file was a sheet of note-paper. The note was brief, typewritten, even to the signature--that of Doc Tripp. It ran:

DEAR JUDITH:

I am afraid of a new trouble. Have spotted another one of T's gang working for us. Also have got a bullet-hole in my right hand. Nothing serious so far. Come down right away. Don't let any one see you as I want to spring a surprise on them. Am not even using the telephone, as I've a notion they are watching me. Hurry.

TRIPP.

"Come back to the office," said Lee bluntly. And well in front of Carson and Hampton, who stared wonderingly at the paper in his hand, he went to the office telephone and called for Tripp.

"How's your hand?" he asked when Tripp answered.

"All right," replied Tripp. "Why?"

"Get it hurt?"

"No."

"Did you write Miss Sanford a hurry-up note within the last few days?"

"No."

"Sure of that, Doc? Typewritten note?"

"Of course I'm sure," snapped Tripp. "What's wrong?"

"God knows," answered Lee shortly. "But you'd better come up here and come on the jump. Also, keep your mouth shut until you can get a chance to talk with me or Carson."

He clicked up the receiver and turned terrible eyes on the two men watching him.

"They've got her," he said slowly. "They've got her, Carson. They've had her since Saturday night!"

Carson read the note. Only then did it pass into Hampton's hands. The boy, angered at the way in which he had been ignored, insulted in his sense of dignity by those words of Lee's to Tripp, "Talk with me or Carson," seeing the reins of power being snatched from his hands, was speechless with wrath.

"You fellows have butted in all I'll stand for!" he cried at them, his shut fists shaking. "I tell you I'm running this outfit and what I say goes. I don't believe that Trevors or any man living would do a trick like that. I tell you it's ridiculous. And, no matter where Judith is, when she is not here I run the ranch. I need money; she needs money; we've got a fair chance to sell; I've passed my word we are going to sell; and by God, we are going to sell."

In another mood, Hampton would not have spoken this way. In another mood and with time for argument, Bud Lee would have expostulated with him. Now, however, Lee said tersely:

"Carson, it's up to you and me. Get the boys out, to the last man of them. Turn every hoof of cattle and horses back into the Upper End. We've got to do it to-night. Get them into the little valley above the plateau. We can hold them there, even if they try to force our hands, which will be like them. I take this to be Trevors's last big play. And, by thunder, he has mighty near gotten away with it!"

"Don't you dare do it!" blazed out young Hampton. "Carson, you take orders from me. Get out of this house and leave the stock where they are. In the morning----"

"Go ahead, Carson," cut in Lee's hard voice. "I'll take care of Hampton here."

"You will, will you?" cried Hampton.

With one bound he was at the table, jerking open a drawer. As his hand sought the weapon lying there, Bud Lee was on him, throwing him back. Carson looked at them a moment, then went to the door.

"You're right, Bud," he said calmly as he went out.

Lee, forcing himself to show a calmness like Carson's, said gently to Hampton:

"Can't you see the play? It's up to you to kick in and stop it. There's a telephone; call up the buyers in Rocky Bend. They're there now, or at least their drivers are, if they're coming out here in the morning. Tell them the deal is off."

"Can't I see?" said Hampton, writhing out of Lee's hands, on his way to the door. "You bet I can see! If you and Carson think that you can run me----"

Then, for good and all, Lee gave over trying to reason with Hampton. There was too much to be done to waste time. He drew Hampton back, forcing him against the wall. As he tried to call out, Lee's hand over his mouth smothered his words.

"You're coming with me," he said sharply. "Right now."

Though he struggled, Hampton was little more than a baby in the horse foreman's muscular grip. Tripped, with a heel behind his calf, he fell heavily, Lee upon him. Both arms were pinioned behind him, and Lee's neckerchief thrust into his mouth. He writhed in impotent rage. His outcries died in his throat, the loudest of them not reaching Marcia's ears above the creaking of her rocking-chair. Lee still held Hampton's tied hands gripped in his own. So the two men went out the back door, down toward the corrals.

Seeing men hurrying from the bunk-house to the stables under Carson's snapping orders. Lee called out for Tommy Burkitt. And in a moment, with bulging eyes, Burkitt came running.

"Bring out three horses, Tommy," Lee commanded, giving no explanation. "Hurry, and keep your mouth shut."

Burkitt obeyed Lee as he always did, silently and unquestioningly. Very soon he returned, riding, leading two saddled horses.

"Get into the saddle, Hampton," said Lee sternly. "There's no time for nonsense. Get up or I'll put you up."

"Curse you," Hampton said in smothered anger, his tone making clear the meaning of the indistinct mutter. But he climbed into the saddle.

"Come on, Tommy." Lee, too, was up, his hand on Hampton's reins. "We're going up to the old cabin. You're going to ride herd on Hampton while I do something else. I'll tell you everything when we get there."

So they rode into the night, headed toward the narrow passes of the Upper End, Hampton and Lee side by side, Tommy Burkitt staring after them as he followed. No longer were Bud Lee's thoughts with his captive, nor with the herds Carson's men were driving back to the higher pastures. They were entirely for Judith, and they were filled with fear. She had been gone for three full days; she was somewhere in the clutch of Trevors or of one of his cutthroats. He thought of her, of Quinnion's red-rimmed, evil eyes, and as he had not prayed in all the years of his life Bud Lee prayed that night.

XXIV

A SIGNAL-FIRE?

Lee left Hampton securely bound and under Tommy Burkitt's watchful eyes in the old cabin, and rode straight back to the ranch-house. Marcia was not yet in bed and he made his first call upon her. Marcia was delighted, then vaguely perturbed, as he made known his errand without giving any reason. He wanted to see the note from Judith. Marcia brought it, wondering. He carried it with him to Judith's office and compared it carefully with scraps of her handwriting which he found there. The result of his study was what he had expected: the writing of the note to Marcia was sufficiently like Judith's to pass muster to an uncritical eye, looking, in fact, what it purported to be, a very hasty scrawl. But Lee decided that Judith had not written it. He slipped it into his pocket.

Tripp was waiting for him, impatient and worried, when he came back from the Upper End. From Tripp he learned that one of the men, a fellow the boys called Yellow-jacket, had unexpectedly asked for his time Saturday afternoon and had left the ranch, saying that he was sick.

"He's the chap who brought the fake note from you," said Lee. "It's open and shut, Doc. Another one of Trevors's men that we ought to have fired long ago. The one thing I can't get, is why he didn't do a finished job of it and hang around until Miss Sanford left, then get away with the note. It would have left no evidence behind him."

"She must have locked her door and windows when she went out," was Tripp's solution. "And probably he didn't hang around wasting time and taking chances."

Tripp's boyish face had lost its youthful look. His eyes, meeting Lee's steadily, had in them an expression like Lee's.

"If it's Quinnion--" Tripp began. Then he stopped abruptly.

Lee and Tripp were together in the office not above fifteen minutes. Then Tripp left to return to the Lower End, to get the rest of the men out, to help in the big drive of cattle and horses which must be returned to the shut-in valleys of the Upper End. Lee went to the bunk-house, slipped revolver and cartridges into his pockets, took a rifle and rode again to the old cabin.

"It's Trevors's big, last play," he told himself gravely, over and over. "He'll be backing it up strong, playing his hand for all that there's in it, and he'll have taken time and care to fill in his hand so that we're bucking a royal flush. And there's only one way to beat a royal flush, and that's with a gun. But I can't quite see the whole play, Trevors; I can't quite see it."

There were enough men to do the night's work without him and Tommy Burkitt, and Lee gave no thought now to Carson, swearing in the darkness of some shadow-filled gorge. He did not know what the morrow's work would be for him, but he made his preparations none the less, eager for the coming dawn. He fried many slices of bacon while Hampton glared at him and Tommy watched him interestedly; he made a light, compact lunch, such as best "sticks to a man's ribs," wrapped it in heavy paper and slipped the package into the bosom of his shirt. He completed his equipment with a fresh bag of tobacco and many matches. He loaded his rifle, added a plentiful supply of ammunition to his outfit from the box on the shelf. Then he went outside to be alone, to frown at the black wall of the night, to think, to await the dawn.

"I'm coming to you, Judith girl," he whispered over and over to himself. "Somehow."

Dawn trembled over the mountain-tops, grew pale rose and warm pink and glorious red in the eastern sky, and Bud Lee, throwing down his coiled rope which had been put into service a dozen times during the night, said shortly:

"Here we camp, boys. I'll leave you my fried bacon, Tommy, and take the raw with me. You're not even to light a fire. And you're to stick here until I come for you."

They had travelled deeper and deeper into the fastnesses of the mountains, mounting higher and higher until now, in a nest of crags and cliffs, on a flank of Devil's Mountain, they could look far to the westward and catch brief glimpses of the river from Blue Lake slipping out of the shadows. They had gone a way which Lee knew intimately, travelling a trail which brought them again and again under broken cliffs, where they must use hands and feet manfully, and now and then make service of a loop of rope cast up over an outjutting crag.

"They'll never follow us here, Tommy," he said confidently. "If they do, you've got the drop on them and you've got a rifle. You know what to do, Tommy, old man."

"I know, Bud," said Tommy, his eyes shining. For never before had Bud Lee called him that--"old man."

Long ago the gag had been removed from Hampton's mouth. Long ago, consequently, Hampton had said his say, had made his promises. When he got out of this--glory to be! wouldn't he square the deal, though! Did Lee know what kidnapping was? That there were such things as laws, such places as prisons?

"Here," said Lee not unkindly, "I'll loosen the rope about your wrists. That's all the chances we're going to take with you. Come, be a sport, my boy. You're the right sort inside; just as soon as this fracas is over, when you know that we were right and that all this is a put-up job on you, your friend Trevors playing you for a sucker and getting Miss Sanford out of the way, you'll say we were right and I know it."

"That so?" snapped Hampton. "You just start now and keep going, Bud Lee, if you don't want to do time in the jug."

Tommy Burkitt, staring back across the broken miles of mountain, cañon, and forest, his eyes frowning, was muttering:

"Look at that, Bud. What do you make of it?"

For a little Lee did not answer. He and Tommy and Hampton, standing among the rocks, turned their eyes together toward the hills rimming in the northern side of Blue Lake ranch.

"I make out," said Lee slowly, "that Trevors means business and that Carson has got his work cut out for him this morning, Tommy."

For the thing which had caught the boy's eyes was a blaze on the ridge, its flames leaping and ricking at the thinning darkness, its smoke a black smudge on the horizon, staining the glow of the dawn. And farther along the same ridge was a second blaze, smaller with distance, but growing as it licked at the dry brush. Still farther a third.

"If that fire ever gets a good start," muttered Lee heavily, "it's going to sweep the ranch. God knows where it will stop. And just how Carson is going to fight fire with one hand and hold his stock with the other, I don't know."

But even then he turned his eyes away from the ranch, sweeping the ragged jumble of mountains about him. Judith was gone. Judith needed him and he did not dare try to estimate the soreness of her need. What did it matter that Carson and Tripp and the rest had their problems to face back there? There was only one thing all of the wide world that mattered. And did not even know where she was, north, south, east, or west! Somewhere in these mountains, no doubt. But where, when a man might ride a hundred miles this way or that and have no sign if he passed within calling distance of her?

In his heart Bud Lee prayed, as he had prayed last night, asking God that he might come to Judith. And it seemed to him, standing close to God on the rocky heights, that his prayer had been heard and answered. For, far off to the east, still farther in the solitude of the mountains, rising from a rugged peak, a thin line of smoke rose into the paling sky.

It might be that Judith was there. It might be that she was scores of miles from the beckoning smoke. But Lee had asked a sign and there, like a slender finger pointing to the brightening sky, was a sign.

He stooped swiftly for rifle and rope and packet of bacon.

"Where you goin', Bud?" asked Tommy.

"To Judith," answered Bud Lee gently.

For in his heart was that faith which is born of love.

XXV

THE TOOLS WHICH TREVORS USED

To Judith life had changed from a pleasant game in the sunshine to a hideous nightmare. In a few dragging hours she had come to know incredulity, anxiety, misery, dejection, black hopelessness, and icy terror. She had come to look through a man's eyes at that which lay in his heart, to feel for the first time in her fearless life that the fortitude was slipping out of her bosom, that the strength was melting in her.

She lay on a rude bed of fir-boughs, an utter, impenetrable blackness like a palpable weight on her eyeballs. When it was silent about her, and for the most part silence reigned with the oppressive gloom, she yearned so for a little sound that she moved her foot along the rock floor under her or snapped a dry twig between her fingers or even listened eagerly for the coming of the terrible woman who was her jailer.

Gropingly, again and again she went over in her thoughts the long journey here, seeking fruitlessly to know whether she had come north, south, or east from the ranch-house. It was one of these three directions, for there were no such mountains as these to the west, no such monster cliffs, no deep cavern reaching into the bowels of the earth The sense that, even were she freed, she had no slightest idea where she was, which way she must go, stunned her.

"Will I go mad after a while?" she wondered miserably. "Am I already going mad? Oh, God, have mercy on me----"

From the instant when, Saturday night, she had been gripped suddenly in a man's strong arms, when another man had smothered her outcry, she had known in her heart that Bayne Trevors was taking his desperate chance in the game. But in the darkness she had had only the two vague blurs of their bodies to guess at. They had been masked; her own eyes were covered, a bandage brought tightly over them, her mouth gagged, her hands tied behind her, her body lifted into the saddle--all in a moment. Neither man had spoken. Then, tied in the saddle, she only knew that she was riding, that one man rode in front of her, leading her horse, the other following close behind. The sense of direction which she had lost in those first five minutes she had never been given opportunity to regain. She might, even now, be a gunshot from her own ranch; she might be twenty miles from it.

For the greater part of that Saturday night they had ridden; and when trails died under them and rocks rose steeply, they walked, she and one man. The other stayed with the horses. Not once did she hear a man's voice; she did not know whether it was Trevors himself, or Quinnion, or some utter stranger who forced her into this hiding.

They had climbed cliffs, now going down into chasms, now following roaring creeks or making their way along the spine of some rocky ridge. The one man with her was masked, his eyes rather guessed at than seen through the slits of his bandanna handkerchief. He had jerked the bandage from her eyes, since blindfolded she would make such poor progress. But still he guarded his tongue.

"He would speak," she thought, "but that I would recognize his voice. Trevors or Quinnion? Which?"

Feeling the first quick spurt of hope when she saw that there was but one man to deal with, she was aquiver to seize the first opportunity for flight. But that hope died swiftly as she recognized that no such opportunity was to be granted her. Once she paused, looking to a possible leap over a low ledge and escape in a thick bit of timber. But the two eyes through the slits in the improvised mask had been keen and quick, a heavy hand was laid on her arm, she felt the fingers bite into her flesh as he sought to drive into her a full comprehension of his grim determination that she should not escape.

It was when they had clambered high upon a mass of tumbled boulders, topping a ridge, that Judith had seen the man's face. Docilely she had obeyed his gestures for an hour; now, suddenly maddened at the silence and the mask over his face, she sprang unexpectedly upon him, shoving him from the rock on which he had stepped, snatching off his mask as she did so. For the first time she heard his voice, cursing her coolly as he gripped and held her.

It was Bayne Trevors, at last come out the open, his eyes hard on hers.

"It's just as well that you know whom you are up against," he said as he held her with his hand heavy on her shrinking shoulder.

Summoning all of the reckless fearlessness which was her birthright, she laughed at him coolly, laughed as the two stood against the sky-line, upon the barren breast of a lonesome land.

"So you are a fool, after all, Bayne Trevors!" she jeered at him. "Fool enough to mix first-hand in a dangerous undertaking."

Trevors shrugged.

"Yes?" He slipped the handkerchief into his pocket and stared at her with a glint of anger in the blue-gray of his eyes. He lifted his broad shoulders. "Or wise man enough to do my own work when needs be, and when I'd have no bungling? I'm going to square with you, girl. Square with you for meddling, for a bullet-hole in each shoulder. If there's a fool in our little junketing party, it's a girl who thought she could handle a man's-size job."

They went on, over the ridge and down. Judith made no second attempt to surprise him, for always his eyes watched her. Nor did she seek to hold back or in any way to hamper him now. For, swiftly adjusting herself to the new conditions, she made her first decision: Trevors did think her a "fool of a girl," Trevors did sneer at her helplessness in that man's way of his. Let him think her a little fool; let him hold her in his contempt; let him grow to think her cowed and afraid and helpless. Then, when the time came----

Again she had been blindfolded; seeing the look in Trevors's eyes, she had offered no objection. Again she had followed him in a darkness made at sunrise by a bandage across her eyes. Again, the bandage removed, she winked at the sunlight. Again they climbed ridges, dropped down into tiny valleys, fought their way along thunderous ravines where the water was lashed into white foam. Again blindfolded, again trudging on, her whole body beginning to tremble with fatigue, the weakness of hunger upon her. And at length, out of a cañon, making a perilous way up the steep walls of rock, they came to the mouth of the black cavern in which she lay now, waiting for the sound of a stirring foot.

Only an instant had Judith stood upon the ledge outside the cave before she was thrust into the black interior. But in that instant her eager eyes had made out, upon a tiny bit of table-land across the chasm of the gorge, a cabin, sending aloft a plume of smoke.

Then, after an hour, the terrible woman had come to whom Trevors had intrusted her, bringing food and water in her hard, blackened hands, carrying the flickering fires of madness in her unfathomable eyes. A lantern set on the floor made rude shadows, and out of them crept this woman, leering at Trevors, peering at Judith, licking her thin lips, and chuckling to herself.

"I have brought her back to you, Ruth," he said, speaking softly, more softly than Judith had thought the man could speak. "You will know what to do with her. And you will not let her escape you again."

The mad woman, for only too plainly was her reason strangely misshapen, stood in silence, her great muscular body looming high above Judith's, a giant of a woman, bigger than Trevors even, broad and heavy, her forearms thick and corded, her bare throat like the bull neck of a prize-fighter.

"I will know, I will know," she said, her eyes filled with cunning, her voice a strange singsong oddly at variance with the coarse bigness of her body. "Oh, no, she will never escape from me again."

"I will have a man on the ledge outside night and day," went on Trevors. "But we cannot be so sure of others as we are of ourselves, Ruth. You know that, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, I know," she answered quickly. As she spoke she suddenly shot out her long arm so that her great, bony hand fastened like a big claw on the girl's shoulder. "I have got her again! She is mine, all mine. Oh, I will keep her well."

In a little while Trevors left. He had not returned. Mad Ruth, still gripping Judith's shoulder, half led her, half thrust her farther back in the cavern. Judith made no resistance. Always, even when terror was uppermost she held one thought in mind: "If I can make them think me a little fool and a weakling, my chance may come after a while."

As the two women passed around a bend in the sinuous tunnel-like cave, the faint rays of the lantern they had left behind them died out, and heavy darkness shut them in. Judith could barely make out the huge form towering over her. But Ruth, whether her eyes were like a cat's and accustomed to this sombre place, or whether a hand on a rock wall or a foot on the uneven floor under her told her which way to go, moved on without hesitation. Judith estimated roughly that they had come fifty yards from the outside ledge in front of the cave when she was pushed down and felt the rude bed of fir-boughs under her.

"So," grunted the woman, for the first time removing her hard hand from the girl's shoulder, "I've got you again, my pretty. And this time you don't play any more little tricks on your old mother."

She was gone swiftly, all but silently, through the gloom, her form vaguely outlined against the lantern's glimmer, to bring the food and water which she had set down when she came in. Judith drank and ate.

It was only little by little, in fragments which she obtained during the slow days which followed, that she came to understand Trevors's scheme. And the scheme was in keeping with the man; so far as it was possible, Bayne Trevors was still playing safe.

Mad Ruth was an odd mixture of crazed suspicion, shrewd cunning, cruelty, and madness. Perhaps very long ago--Judith came to believe that it had occurred at the time when she had gone mad, for God knows what reason--Mad Ruth had had a little daughter. The girl had been lost to her, whether through death when an infant, or some tragic accident when a young girl, Judith never knew. But Ruth's heart had been bound up in that baby of hers; when madness came, it centred and turned upon the return of her child, "Who had run away from her, but who would come back some time." Trevors, having learned of her mad passion, had shaped it to his purpose.

But that was not all. Judith had been brought to the cave early Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon there came to the cave a well-dressed man carrying a little black bag in his hand. He talked with Ruth; he took up the lantern and came to look at Judith.

"So I'll know you again," he laughed. Then he went away. In fragments which through long, empty hours her busy mind pieced together, bridging the gaps, she grasped the rest of Trevors's plan. This man was a physician, sent here from some one of the many mining towns in the mountains, probably from a camp twenty or thirty miles away. He, too, was a Trevors hireling. Should Judith ever accuse Trevors of having brought her here, there was another story to be told. And this man would tell it: How he had been summoned here to attend a girl who had had a fall, who had wandered delirious through the mountains until Ruth had found her; whom he had treated here, not daring at first to move her for fear of permanent shock to her reason; who could give them no help to establish her identity; who had a thousand absurd fears and fancies and accusations to make; who in her babbling had at one time accused Bayne Trevors of having forcibly abducted her; who at another had cried that it was a man named Carson, a man named Lee, who had brought her here.

Judith spent many a long hour exploring her prison, hoping to find a way out. So far as she knew she had but one person to reckon with, Mad Ruth. True, Trevors had said that he'd have a man on the ledge outside day and night; Judith had never seen such a person, had never heard his voice, and began to believe that it was a bit of bluff on Trevors's part. But she had never again been where she could look out of the cave's mouth, since Mad Ruth had her own pallet on the floor at the narrowest part of the cave where it was like the neck of a monster bottle, and always at the first sound of the girl's approach, was on her feet to thrust her back. Clearly there was no way out of this place of shadows except that through which she had come.

Judith sought an explanation of her imprisonment, and after long groping she came very near the truth: Trevors would work his will with Hampton through Hampton's faith in him and admiration for him. And, in her absence, Hampton was the head of Blue Lake ranch.

Sunday night, hearing Mad Ruth moving cautiously, Judith raised herself on her elbow, listening. She was confident that the woman was moving toward the cave's mouth; she hoped wildly that Mad Ruth was tricked into believing her asleep and was going out. Her shoes in her hands, her stockinged feet falling lightly, Judith moved toward the mad woman's couch.

Ruth was going out; was in fact even now slipping out of the narrow throat of the cave and to the ledge. But Judith could not see her. For a new, unexpected obstacle was in her way. Her outthrust hands touched not rock walls but heavy wooden panels; she knew then that the narrow neck of the cave was fitted with a heavy door and that it had been drawn shut, fastened from without. In a sudden access of fury and despair she beat at it with her two hands, crying out bitterly.

It was so dark, so inky black, and as still, save for her own outcry, as a tomb sealed and forgotten. Such darkness, smothering hope, suddenly was filled with vague terrors; for one worn-out and nervous as Judith was, the darkness seemed to harbor a thousand ugly things which watched her and mocked at her despair and reached out vile hands toward her. She called loudly, and for answer had the crazed laugh of Mad Ruth which floated in to her from without, but which seemed to drop down from the void above.

"Judith, Judith," the girl whispered after the first outburst, when she found that she was shaking pitifully. "You've got to do better than this; I'm ashamed of you."

She went back to her couch, where she sat down seeking to hold her jangling nerves in check. But, despite her intention, she sat shaking, listening, listening--praying for even the footfall of her jailer.

When Ruth was with her she attempted in a hundred ways to gauge the woman's warped brain, to seek some way to get the better of her, to gain her trust and so to slip away. But she found that here was the usual cunning born of madness, and that Ruth's one idea was to keep the girl who had escaped her once but who must never escape again. There were times when suspicion awakened in Ruth's mind, and she broke into violent rage, so that her big body shook and her eyes in the lantern-light were cruel and murderous, when Judith shrank back, and tried to change the woman's thoughts. For more than once had Mad Ruth cried out:

"I'll kill you! Kill you with my own hands to keep you here. To keep you mine, mine, mine!"

The woman carried no weapon, but after her two hands had once gripped the girl's shoulders, shaking her, Judith knew that Ruth needed no weapon. Hers was a strength greater than Trevors's, greater than two men's. If Mad Ruth saw fit to kill Judith with her two hands, she could do it.

Sunday passed and Sunday night; Monday and Monday night. Judith knew that she had accomplished nothing, except perhaps to make Ruth believe that she was very much of a coward. In Ruth's mad brain that was little enough, since this did not allay her cunning watchfulness. Then Judith began to do something else, something actively. Just to be occupied, was something. Her fingers selected the largest, thickest branch from her bed of fir-boughs. It was perhaps a couple of inches in diameter and heavy, because it was green. Silently, cautious of a twig snapped, she began with her fingers to strip the branch, tough and pliable. Then the limb must be cut into a length which would make it a club to be used in a cramped space. She found a bit of stone, hard granite, which had scaled from the walls and which had a rough edge. With this, working many a quiet hour, she at last cut in two the fir-bough. She lifted it in her hands, to feel the weight of it, before she thrust it under her bed to lie hidden there against possible need. Poor thing as it was, she felt no longer utterly defenseless.

Once Mad Ruth, lighting the lantern, had dropped a good match. When she had gone, Judith secured it hastily, hiding it as if it were gold. She knew that now and then Mad Ruth went down the cliffs and to the cabin across the chasm. Always at night and at the darkest hour. When she heard her go, Judith rose swiftly and went to the heavy door. Always she found it locked; her shaking at it hardly budged the heavy timbers. But though she could not see it, she studied it with her fingers until she had a picture of it in her mind. A picture that only increased her hopelessness. Barehanded she could never hope to break it down or push it aside. And above it and below, and on each side, were the solid walls of stone.

She no longer knew what day it was. She scarcely knew if it were day or night. But, setting herself something to do so that she would not go mad, mad as Mad Ruth, she secured for herself another weapon. Another bit of stone which her groping fingers had found and hidden with her club; a jagged, ugly rock half the size of a man's head. Some little scraps of bread and meat, hoarded from her scanty meals, she hid in her blouse.

"If I could stun her, just stun her," she got into the way of whispering to herself. "Not kill her outright--just stun her----"

At last, seeing that she must work her own salvation with the crude weapons given her, Judith told herself that she could wait no longer. Another day and another and she would be weak from the confinement and poor food and nervous, wakeful hours. She must act while the strength was in her. And, if Trevors had spoken the truth, if there were a man to deal with outside--well, she must shut her mind to that until she came to it.

Mad Ruth was gone again, and Judith stood by the thick door, her heart beating furiously while she waited. It seemed to her eager impatience that Ruth would never come back. Then after a long, long time she heard a little scraping sound upon the rock ledge outside, the sound of a quick step. And then, before she heard the snarling, ugly voice which she had heard once and had never forgotten, she knew that this time she had waited too long, that it was not Ruth coming.

One man--and there might be others. She stepped back to her bed, hid the two weapons and waited. She must make no mistakes now.

The door was flung open. Outside it was dark, pitch-dark. But evidently the man entering had no fear of being seen. He threw down a bundle of dry fagots, and set fire to them. The blaze, leaping up, casting wavering gleams to where Judith stood, showed her plainly the twisted, ugly face of Quinnion, his red-rimmed eyes peering at her, filled with evil light.

XXVI

JUDITH'S PERIL

"The better to see you by, my dear!" was Quinnion's word of greeting. Judith made no answer. She drew a little farther back into the shadows, a little closer to the things she had hidden among the fir-branches.

"Ho," sneered Quinnion, his mood from the first plain enough to read in the glimpses of his face and in the added harshness of his voice. "Timid little fawn, huh? By God, a man would say from the bluff you put up that it was all a dream about findin' you an' the han'some Lee in the cabin together! Stan' off all you damn please; I've come to tame you, you little beauty of the big innocent eyes!"

Not drunk; no, Quinnion was never drunk. But, as he came a step closer, the heavy air of the cave grew heavier with the whiskey he carried, whiskey enough to stimulate the evil within him, not to quench it.

"Stand back!" cried Judith, with a sharp intake of breath. "I want to talk with you, Chris Quinnion."

"So you know who I am, do you? Well, much good it'll do you."

"I know who you are and what you are," she told him defiantly, suddenly sick of her long hours of playing baby, knowing at the moment less fear than hatred and loathing. "Listen to me: Bayne Trevors has come out in the open at last; he has made his big play and is going to lose out on it. Your one chance now is to let me go and to go yourself. Go fast and far, Chris Quinnion. For when the law knows the sort Bayne Trevors is and how you have worked hand and glove with him, it will know just how much his word was worth when he swore you were with him when father was killed! Coward and cur and murderer!"

Quinnion laughed at her.

"Little pussy-cat," he jeered. "You've got claws, have you? And you spit and growl, do you? Want me to let you go back to that swaggering lover of yours, do you? Back to Lee----"

"That's enough, Quinnion," she said sharply.

"Is it?" He laughed at her again, and again came on toward her, the red-rimmed evil of his eyes driving quick fear at last into her. "Enough? Why, curse you and curse him, I haven't begun yet! When I'm through with you I'll go fast enough. And he can have you then an' damn welcome to him!"

"Stop!" cried Judith.

His laughter did not reach her ears now, but as he kicked the fire at his foot and the flames leaped up and showed his face, she read the laughter in his soul; read it through the gleaming eyes, the twisted mouth which showed the teeth at one side in a horrible leer. His long arms thrust out before him, he came on.

"Oh, my God!" cried Judith. "My God!"

Then suddenly she was silent. She thought that she had known the uttermost of fear and now for the first time did she fully know what terror was. His strength was many times her strength, his brutality was unbounded, she was alone with him. There was no one to call to, not even Ruth, the mad woman.

She was shaking now, shaking so that she could barely stand. Quinnion came on, his long arms out. . . .

She felt the strength die out of her body, grew for a moment blind and dizzy and sick. She tried again to call out to him, to plead with him. But her voice stuck in her throat.

He was gloating over her, a look strangely like Mad Ruth's in his eyes. Good God! He was like Mad Ruth; the same eyes, the same long, powerful arms, the same look of cunning! In a flash there came to her a suspicion which was near certainty: this man was blood of Mad Ruth's blood, bone of her bone; her son, and, like her, tainted with madness.

He shot out a long arm, his hand barely brushing her shoulder. She shrank back. He stood, content to pause a moment, to gloat further over her.

"You little beauty," he said, panting. "You little white and pink and brown beauty!"

Judith had shuddered when he touched her. But a strange thing had happened to her. His touch had angered her so that she almost forgot to be afraid, angered her so that the loathing was gone in white hot hatred, giving her back her old strength.

Now, though he had the brutal force of a strong man, Quinnion did not have the swiftness of movement of an alert, desperate girl. Before he could grasp her motive she leaped toward him and toward the bed of boughs, found the ragged stone, and lifting it high above her head flung it full into his face. The man staggered back, crying out in throaty harshness, a cry of blind rage. But he did not fall, did not pause more than a brief instant.

A little dazed, with blood in his eyes, he lunged toward her. She had found the club now and struck with all her might, again beating into his face and again and again. He sought to grapple with her and she beat him back. She saw his hand go to his hip and heard him curse her, and she leaped in on him and, panting with the blow, struck again. He flung up his arm. She struck once more. Taking the blow full across the face, Quinnion reeled back, stumbled at an uneven spot in the rock floor, balanced, almost falling. . . .

Only a moment he held thus. But there was a chance to pass him in the narrow way, and she took her chance, her heart beating wildly. And as she shot by she struck again.

She heard him after her, shouting curses, stumbling a little, coming on. The door was open, thank God, the door was open! She shot through. If she could but take time to close it! But there was no time for that; he was almost at her heels. And outside was the ledge and the dizzy climb down.

If she slipped, if she fell, well, it would just be a clean death and nothing more. Quinnion was but a few steps behind her. He had not fired. Had he perhaps dropped his gun back there in the darkness? Or was he so sure of taking her, alive and struggling, into his arms in another moment?

She was on the ledge. It was dark, pitch-dark.

But she found a handhold, threw herself flat down and thrust her feet out over the edge, less afraid of what lay below than what came on behind her. She was gripping the ledge now with her hands, already torn and bleeding, her feet swinging, touching sheer rock wall, slipping, seeking a foothold. Quinnion was just there, above her. She must move her hands so that he could not reach her. It seemed an eternity that she hung there, seeking a place somewhere to set her feet.

She found it, another, lesser ledge which she had almost missed, and knew that this way she had clambered upward with Bayne Trevors. If she could only find another step and another before Quinnion came upon her! She held her club in her teeth; she must not let that go.

Quinnion was over the ledge, following her. She heard his heavy breathing, heard him cursing her again. She was going so slowly, so slowly, and Quinnion would know the way better than she. Quinnion would make better time in the dark.

She moved along this lower ledge. At each instant she wondered if it were to be her last, if she were going to fall, if a swift drop through the darkness would be the end of life.

Suddenly there was scarce room in the girl's breast for hatred of Chris Quinnion, so filled was it with the love of life. She wanted to see the sun come up again, she wanted the sweet breath of the dawn in her nostrils, the beauty of a sun-lit world in her eyes. She thought of Bud Lee.

Clinging to the rocks, hanging on desperately, taking a score of desperate chances momentarily, she made her way on and down. She found scant handhold and, almost falling, dropped her club, heard it strike, strike again. Black as the night was, its gloom was less than that of the cavern to which Judith had grown accustomed; little by little she began to make out the broken surface of the cliffs. The chasm below was a pool of ink; above were the little stars; in the eastern sky, low down, was a promise of the rising moon.

The surge of quickening hope came into her heart. Had she hurt Quinnion more than she had guessed? For, slowly as she made her hazardous way down, it seemed to her that Quinnion came even more slowly. Could she but once get down into the gorge below, could she slip along the course of the racing stream, she might run and the sound of her steps would be lost even to her own ears in the sound of the water; the sight of her flying body would be lost to Quinnion's eyes.

Then she heard him laughing above her. Laughing, with a snarl and a curse in his laugh, and something of malicious triumph. Was he so certain of her then?

"Ruth!" called Quinnion. "Oh, Ruth! The girl's gettin' away. Goin' down the rocks. Head her off at the bottom."

Judith had found, because her fate was good to her, the long slanting crack in the wall of rock up which she had come that day with Bayne Trevors. There was still danger of a fall, but the danger was less now than it had been ten seconds ago. She could move more swiftly now and confidence had begun to com to her that she could elude Quinnion. But now, suddenly, she heard Mad Ruth's voice screaming a shrill answer to Quinnion's shout; knew that Ruth had been in her cabin across the gorge and was running to intercept her at the foot of the cliffs.

Well, still there was a race to be run and the odds not entirely uneven. Ruth must descend the other side of the cañon, get down into the gorge, make the crossing, which, so far as Judith knew, might be farther up or farther down stream, come to the cliffs below Judith before Judith herself made her way down.

Again Judith took what risks the night and the rocks offered her and thanked God in her soul that it was given her to take a chance in the open, to use her own muscles in her own fight, not to lie longer, playing the part of a do-nothing. Now and then, across the void, there floated to her a little moaning cry from the mad woman's lips. Now and then she heard a curse from Quinnion above; often from above her, from below her own feet, from across the chasm, dropping stones, falling almost sheer, told of haste and death which might come from an unlucky step.

Fast as Judith went now, having a fair sort of cliff trail under her, Mad Ruth went faster. The gorge measured a scant fifty feet between them and the girl's alert senses told her that already Ruth was on a level with her. Ruth was winning in the desperate race. She knew her way down so perfectly, her heart was so filled with madness, that danger was nothing to her.

Down and down climbed Judith, caution wedded to haste, as she told herself that she had a chance yet, that that chance must not be tossed away in a fall, though it were but a few feet. She must have no sprained ankle if she meant to see the sun rise to-morrow.

The flush had brightened in the sky where the moon was so near the ridge. The moon, too, had joined in the race; with one quick glance toward it, Judith again discarded caution for haste. She must get down into the floor of the cañon before the moonlight did; she must be running before its radiance showed her out to Quinnion and Ruth.

Her hands were cut and bleeding, her heart was beating wildly, already her body was sore and bruised. But these things she did not know. She only knew that Quinnion was still coming on above her, and coming more swiftly now, quite as swiftly as she herself moved, since his feet, too, were in the better trail; that Mad Ruth had completed the descent across the chasm and by now must be crossing the stream upon some fallen log or rude bridge; that one minute more, or perhaps two, would decide her fate.

She could see the stream, glinting palely in the starlight. It seemed very near; its thunder filled her ears. Down she went and down, down until at last she was not ten feet above its surface, with a strip of gently sloping bank just under her. She stooped, took firm hold upon a knob of boulder, prepared to swing down and drop to the bottom. And, as she stooped, she heard a little whining moan just under her and straightened up, tense and terrified. Mad Ruth was there before her. Mad Ruth was waiting.

XXVII

ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS

And Quinnion was coming on. She was trapped, caught between the two of them. She heard Quinnion laugh again; he, too, had heard Ruth.

"Oh, God help me!" whispered Judith. "God help me now!"

There was no time to hesitate. If she stood here, Quinnion would in a moment wrap his arms about her; if she dropped down, she would be in the frenzied clutch of Mad Ruth.

A second she crouched, peering down into the gloom below her, seeking to make out the form of the mad woman. Then she did not merely drop, but jumped, landing fair upon the waiting figure, striking with her boots on Mad Ruth's ample shoulders. A scream of rage from Ruth, a little, strangling cry from Judith, and the two fell together. Ruth clutched as she went down and a hand closed over the girl's ankle. Judith rolled, struck again with the free boot, twisted sharply and felt the grip torn loose from her ankle. She was free.

She jumped up and ran and knew that Ruth was running just behind her, screaming terribly. Judith fell, and her heart grew sick within her. But again she was up just as Ruth's hand clutched at her skirt, clutched and was torn away as Judith ran on. Quinnion cursed from above as she had not yet heard him curse. Ruth reviled both her and Quinnion for having let her go.

Judith was running swiftly and felt that she could get the better of the heavier, older woman in a race of this sort. She stumbled and fell, and fear again gripped her; it seemed so long before she could rise and clamber over a fallen log and race on. But the darkness which tricked her protected her at the same time, playing no favorites now. Ruth, too, had fallen; Ruth, too, was frenzied at the brief delay.

Stumbling, falling, rising, staggering back from a tree into which she had run full tilt, bruised and torn, the girl ran on. At every free step hope shot upward in her heart; at every fall she grew sick with dread.

The cañon broadened rapidly, the ground underfoot grew less broken and littered with boulders and logs. Through tangles of brush she went blindly, throwing herself forward, falling, rising, falling, rising again. It was a nightmare of a race, with Ruth always just there, almost at her heels. She turned as far away from the stream as she could, keeping under the cliffs where there was less brush; where the way was more open; where the shadows were thickest.

She was outdistancing Mad Ruth. Ruth's weird voice came from a greater distance; the woman was ten, maybe twenty, feet behind her.

The moon at last rose pale gold above the eastern ridge. And now Judith could thank God for it. For the cañon had widened more and more, the banks of the river were studded with big trees, there were wide open spaces between them through which she shot like a frightened deer, turning this way and that, darting about a clump of little firs, plunging into the shadows under great sky-seeking cedars, running as she had never run before and as she knew Mad Ruth could not run.

Free! She was free. The triumph of it danced in her blood. On she ran and now Quinnion's voice and Ruth's were confused with the roar of the river. On she ran and on and on, and but faintly there came to her the sound of breaking brush somewhere behind her. Never had her blood sung within her as it sang now; never had the dim, moonlit solitudes of the mountains opened their sheltering arms to one more grateful to slip into them, like a wounded child into the soothing embrace of its mother.

Now again she turned so that her flying steps brought her close to the water's edge. Louder and louder grew its shouting voice in her ears, little by little drowning out the sounds of Ruth and Quinnion behind her. Now, in all the glorious night, there was no sound to reach her but the sound of running water and her own beating feet. She was free.

But still she ran, summoning all of the reserve of strength and will-power which was hers to command. The sky was brightening to the climbing moon. She must round many a sweeping curve of the river, pass under many a sheltering, shadowing tree before she dared slow her steps.

When she felt that she was overtaxing herself, she dropped from the wild pace she had set herself into a little jogging trot. When her whole body cried out at the effort demanded of it, she slowed down to a brisk walk. She was shot through with pain, her throat ached, she was growing dizzy. But on she went stubbornly. It was a full hour after the last sound of pursuit had died out after her that she flung herself down at the water's edge to drink and bathe her arms and face in the cold stream. And, even then, she chose a spot where the shadow of a great pine lay like ink over the bank.

The moon was high in the sky, the world bright with it, when Judith left the valley into which the cañon had widened and made her way slowly upward along a timbered ridge to the west. Of Quinnion and Mad Ruth she now had no fear. Their chance of coming upon her was less than negligible. She could creep into a clump of thick-standing young trees and, even if they should come, could watch them go past. But as they had dropped out of her world, another matter had entered it. The mountains had befriended her; they had opened their arms to her and that was all that she had asked of them. They had mothered her, drawing her into hiding against their bosom. But it was a barren, barren breast. And already she was hungry, daring to eat but sparingly of her handful of bread and meat.

From this ridge, finding an open crest, she stood looking out over the world. Mile after mile of mountain and cañon and cliff fell away on every side. She sought eagerly for a landmark: to see yonder in the distance Old Baldy or Copper Mountain or Three Fools' Peak, any one of the mountains or ridges known to her. And in the end she could only shake her head and sigh wearily and slip down where she was to fall asleep, thanking God that she was free, asking God to lead her aright in the morning.

The stars watched over her, a pale, worn-out girl sleeping alone in the heart of the wilderness; the night breezes sang through the century-old tree-tops; and Judith, having striven to the utter-most, slept in heavy dreamlessness.

With the cool dawn she awoke shivering and hungry. Her hair had tumbled about her face, and sitting up she braided it with numb, sore fingers. She looked at her hands; they well stained with blood from many cuts. Her skirt was torn and soiled; her stockings were in strips; her knees were bruised. But as she rose to her feet and once more searched the riddle of a crag-broken world, her heart was light with thankfulness.

Last night the one friend she had with her was the north star. To-day she would seek to push on toward the west. In that direction she believed the Blue Lake ranch lay, though at best it was a guess. But going westward she could follow the course of the bigger streams, and soon or late, if her strength held, she would come to some open valley where men ran stock. Now, she would go down into the little meadow lying a mile away yonder and seek to find something to eat. If she could but dig a few wild onions, wild potatoes, they would keep her alive. West she would go, if for no other reason than because thus she would be setting her back squarely upon the cavern where Quinnion and Ruth were.

The sun rolled into a clear blue sky and warmed her. She made her way down the long flank of the mountain and into the tiny meadow. For upward of two hours she remained there, nibbling at roots which she dug up with a broken stick, seeking edible growths which she knew, finding little, but enough to keep the life in her, the heart warm in her breast. Then she went on, over a ridge again, down into a cañon and along the stream which rose here and flowed westward.

By noon she was faint and sick and had to stop often to rest, her legs shaking under her. Again she made a scant meal. She had stumbled on a tiny field of wild potatoes and ate what she could of them, thinking longingly of a match for a fire. The match which Ruth had dropped she still had, but she carefully reserved it now, thinking how perhaps a trout, caught in a pool, might save her life.

In her already half-starved condition and with the demands constantly put on her strength, she would grow weaker and weaker if help did not soon come. But she was still filled with the glory of freedom.

It was a heart-weary, trembling Judith who late that afternoon made her way upward along another ridge, seeking anxiously to find from this lookout some landmark which she had sought in vain last night. In her blouse were the few roots she had brought with her from the field discovered at noon. Lying in a little patch of dry grass, resting, she watched the day go down and the night drift into the mountains, filling the ravines, creeping up the slopes, rising slowly to the peak to which she had climbed, seeping into her soul. Never had the passing of the day seemed to her so majestic a thing, truly filled with awe. Never until now had the solitudes seemed so vast, so utterly, stupendously big. Never until now, as she lay staring up into the limitless sky, having given up the world about her as unknown, had she drunk to the lees of the cup of loneliness.

So great was the weariness of her tired body that as she lay still, watching the stars come out one by one, she was half-resigned to lie so and let death come to find her. It seemed to her that there in the rude arms of Mother Earth a human life was a matter of no greater consequence than the down upon a moth's wing. But she rested a little and this mood, foreign to her intrepid heart, passed, and she sat up, again resolute, again ready to make her fight as long as life beat through her blood. At last she took the one match from her pocket. She scarcely dared breathe when, with dry grass and twigs piled against a rock, her dress shielding them from the wind, she rubbed the match softly against her boot. A sputtering flame, making the blue light of burning sulphur, died down, creating panic in her breast, then flared, crackled, licked at the grass. She had a fire and she knew how to use it!

When a log was blazing, assuring her that her fire was safe, she rose swiftly and went in search of the tree she meant to burn. She found a giant pine, pitch-oozing, standing in a rocky open space where there was little danger of the fire spreading. Fagged out and eager as she was, she had not come to the point of forgetting what a great forest-fire meant.

She went back to her burning log, for a blazing dry branch which she carried swiftly to the tree. Then she piled dry grass and dead twigs, logs as heavy as she could carry, bits of brush. The flames licked at the tree, ran up it, seemed to fall away, sprang at it again, hungering. Now and then a long tongue of fire went crackling high up along the side of the tree. Judith went back to a spot where, in a ring of boulders, there was another grassy plot, threw herself down an lay staring at the tongues of fire which were climbing higher and higher.

Some one would see her beacon. A forest ranger, perhaps, whose duty it was to ride fast and far to battle with the first spark threatening the wooded solitudes; perhaps some crew in a logging-camp, than whom none knew better the danger of spreading fires; perhaps some cow-boy, even one of her own men--perhaps Quinnion and Ruth? She then would hide among the rocks until they had come and gone. Even now, against the sleep falling upon her, she drew farther back through the tumbled boulders. Perhaps, Bud Lee. . . .

She went to sleep beyond the circle of bright light, tired and hungry and striving against a returning hopelessness, her young body curled up in the nest she had found, a cheek cuddled against her arm, wondering vaguely if some one would see her fire and come--if that some one might be Bud Lee.

XXVIII

BACON, KISSES, AND A CONFESSION

Throughout the night the tree blazed unseen. Judith's eyes were closed in the heavy sleep of exhaustion. The flames roared and leaped high skyward, burning branches felt crashingly, to lie smouldering on the rocky soil, the upstanding trunk glowed, vivid against the sky-line.

In the early morning at least two pairs of eyes found the plume of smoke above the still burning giant pine. A man named Greene, one of the government forest rangers, blazing a new trail over Devil's Ridge, came out upon a height, saw it and watched it frowningly across the miles. It called him to a hard ride, perhaps to a difficult journey on foot after he must leave his horse. He turned promptly from the work in hand, ran to his horse, swung up and sped back to his cabin, to telephone to the nearest station, passing the word. Then with axe and shovel, he began his slow way toward the beacon.

Bud Lee, from the mountain-top where he and Burkitt had taken Hampton, saw it. Lee judged roughly that it was separated from him by four or five miles of broken country, impassable to a man on horseback, to be covered laboriously foot in a matter of weary hours.

Lee and Greene approached the signal smoke from different quarters. Lee from the west, Greene from the northeast. They fought their way on toward it with far different emotions in their breasts. Greene with the desire to do a day's work and kill a forest-fire in its beginning. Lee with the passionate hope of finding Judith. Lee reached his journey's end first.

As he came pantingly up the last climb he discharged his rifle again and again, to tell her that he was coming, to put hope into her. And, because he was a lover and a lover must be filled with dread when she is out of his sight, he felt a growing anxiety. She had lighted the fire last night; what might have happened to her since then? Had she been wandering, lost all these days? If nothing else, then had she waited here half the night and in the end had she gone on plunging deep into some cañon hidden to him? Would he find her well? Would he find her at all?

Suddenly he called out, shouting mightily, and began running, though the way was steep. He had seen Judith, he had found her. She was standing among the scattered boulders, her back to a great rock. She was waving to him. Her lips were moving, though he could not see that yet, could not hear her tremulous:

"Oh, thank God, thank God!"

"Judith," he called, "Judith!"

Now, near enough to see her distinctly, he saw that her face was white, that the hand she held out was shaking, that her clothes were torn, that she looked pitifully in need of him. But at last, when he stood at her side, one of the old rare smiles came into Judith's tired eyes, her lips curved, and she said quietly:

"Good morning, Bud Lee. You were very good--to come to me."

"Oh, Judith," he cried sharply. But no other word came to his lips then. The brave little smile had gone, the whiteness of her face smote him to the heart. And now she was shaking from head to foot, and he knew why she had not stepped out to meet him, why she had kept her back to the rock. He thought that she was going to fall, he saw two big tears start from the suddenly closed eyelids, and with a little inarticulate cry he took her into his arms.

"If you had not come, Bud Lee," she whispered faintly, "I should have died, I think."

Very tenderly he gathered her up so that her little boots were swung clear of the flinty ground and she lay quiet in his arms. He stood a moment holding her thus, looking with eyes alternately hard and tender into her face. He wanted to hold her thus always, to watch the glad color come back into her cheeks, to carry her, like a baby, back across the weary miles and home. And, oddly, perhaps, the thought came back to him and hurt him as it had never hurt him before, that he had once been brutal with her, that he had crushed her in his arms and forced upon her lips his kiss. He had been brutal with Judith, when now he could kill a man for laying a little finger on her.

"I have been a brute with you, a brute," he muttered to himself. But Judith heard him, her eyes fluttered open and into them came again her glorious smile.

"Because you kissed me that night, Bud Lee?" she asked him.

"Don't!" he cried sharply. "Don't even remember it, Judith."

"Do you know so little of a girl, Bud Lee," she went on slowly, "to think that a man can so easily--find her lips with his unless--unless she wants to be kissed?"

He almost doubted his ears; he could hardly believe that he had seen what he had seen in Judith's eyes. They were closed now, she lay quiet in his arms, it seemed that she had fainted, or, was asleep, so very white and still was she. He had forgotten that he must carry her to where he could lay her down and bring water to her, give her something to eat. He just stood motionless, holding her to him, staring hungrily down at her.

"Are you going to play--I'm your baby--all day, Bud Lee?" she asked softly.

He carried her swiftly away from the ring of boulders and to a little grassy, level spot where he put her down with lingering tenderness. Judith had not been angry with him all these months! Judith had let him kiss her because she wanted to be kissed--by him!

He raked some coals out of the ashes, hastily set some slices of bacon to fry, cursed himself for not having brought coffee and milk and sugar and a steak and a flask of whiskey and enough other articles to load a mule. He ran down into the cañon and brought water in his hat, swearing at himself all the way up that he had not brought a cup. He put his arm about her while she drank; kept his arm about her, kneeling at her side, while he gave her a little, crisp slice of bacon, held his arm there when she had finished, watching her solicitously.

"The two nicest things in the world, Mr. Man," she said, with a second attempt at the old Judith brightness, "are half-burnt bacon and Bud Lee!"

Then, because, though he had been slow to believe, he was not a fool, and now did believe, he kissed her. And Judith's lips met his lingeringly. Judith's two arms rose, slipped about his neck, holding him tight to her.

The faintest of flushes had come at last into a her cheeks. He saw it and grew glad as he held her so that he could look into her face. But now she laid a hand against his breast, holding him back from her.

"That's all now," she told him, her eyes soft upon him. "Just one kiss for each slice of bacon, Mr. Lee. But--I'm so hungry!"

For a little there was nothing to do but for Judith to rest and get some of her strength back. Lee made of his coat and vest a seat for her against a rock, sat at her side, his arm about her, made her lean against him and just be happy. Not yet would he let her tell him of the horrors through which she had gone. And he saw no need of telling her anything immediately of conditions as he had left them at the ranch. Time enough for that when she was stronger, when they were near Blue Lake.

Greene, the forester, came at last up the mountain. He noted the isolated tree, nodded at it approvingly, made a brief tour around the charred circle, extinguishing a burning brand here and there.

"What sort of a fool would want to climb way up here to start a fire, anyway?" he grumbled.

Then, unexpectedly, he came upon the happiest-looking man he had ever seen, with his arms about an amazingly pretty girl. Not just the sort of thing a lone forest ranger counts upon stumbling upon on the top of a mountain. Greene stared in bewilderment. Bud Lee turning a flaming red. Judith smiled.

"Good morning, stranger," said Lee. "Fine day, isn't it?"

Judith laughed. Greene continued to stare. Lee went a trifle redder.

"If you two folks just started that fire for fun," grunted Greene finally, "why, then, all I've got to say is you've got a blamed queer idea of fun. Here I've been busting myself wide open to get to it."

"Haven't got a flask of brandy on you, have you?" asked Lee.

"Yes, I have. And what's more I'm going to take a shot at it right now. If nobody asks you, I need it!"

Now, Lee heard for the first time something of Judith's adventure. For, recognizing the ranger in Greene, she told him swiftly why she had started the fire, of her trouble with Quinnion, of the cave where Quinnion had attacked her and of Mad Ruth. Greene's eyes lighted with interest. He swept off his hat and came forward, suddenly apologetic and very human, proffering his brandy, insisting with Lee upon her taking a sip of it.

Yes, he knew Mad Ruth, he knew where her cabin was. He could find the cave from Judith's description. Also, he knew of Quinnion and would be delighted to break a record getting back to his station and to White Rock. White Rock was in the next county, but so, for that matter, was the cave. He'd get the sheriff and would lose no time cornering Quinnion if the man had not already slipped away.

"I don't know you two real well," said Greene, with a quick smile at the end, "but if you don't mind, pardner," and he put out his hand to Lee, "I'd like to congratulate you! I don't know a man that's quite as lucky this morning as you are!"

"Thank you," laughed Judith. She rose and shook hands too. "We're at Blue Lake ranch for the present. Come and see us."

"Then you're Miss Sanford?" said Greene. He laughed. "I've heard of you more than once. Greene's my name."

"Lee's mine," offered Lee.

"Bud Lee, eh? Oh, you two will do! So long, friends. I'm off to look up Quinnion."

And, swinging his axe blithely, Greene took his departure.

"There are other things in the world besides just cliffs to stare at," said Judith. "And I would like a bath and a change of clothes and a chance to brush my hair. And the bacon doesn't taste so good as it did and I want an apple and a glass of milk."

So at last they left the mountain-top and made their slow way down.

As they went Lee told her something of what had happened at the ranch, how Carson would hold off the buyers, how Tommy Burkitt was assuming charge of Pollock Hampton. And when they came near enough to Burkitt's and Hampton's hiding-place, Lee fired a rifle several times to get Burkitt's attention. Finally they saw the boy, standing against the sky upon a big rock, waving to them. From Lee's shouts, from his gestures, chiefly from the fact that Judith was there, Burkitt understood and freed Hampton, the two of them coming swiftly down a to Judith and Lee.

Hampton's face was hot with the anger which had grown overnight. He came on stiffly, chafing his wrists.

"These two fools," he snapped to Judith, "have made an awful mess of things. They've queered the deal with Doan, Rockwell & Haight, they've made themselves liable to prosecution for holding me against my will, they've----"

"Wait a minute, Pollock," said Judith quietly. "It's you who have made a mistake."

Briefly, she told him what had happened. As word after word of her account fell upon Hampton's ears, his eyes widened, the stiffness of his bearing fell away, the glint of anger went out of his eyes, a look of wonder came into them. And when she had finished, Hampton did not hesitate. He turned quickly and put out two hands, one to Lee, one to Burkitt.

"I was a chump, same as usual," he grunted. "Forget it if you can. I can't."

They went on more swiftly now, the four of them together, Judith insisting that that last sip of brandy had put new life into her. In a little, seeing that Judith did in fact have herself in hand, Bud Lee, with a hidden pressure of her hand, left them, hurrying on ahead, trying to reach Carson or some of the men in Pocket Valley and to get horses.

As he drew nearer the ranch Lee saw smoke rising from the north ridge. Again he could turn his thoughts a little to what lay in front of him, wondering what luck Carson had had in his double task of fighting fire and holding off the buyers.

At any rate, the Blue Lake stock had not been driven off. The bawling of the big herds told him that before he saw the countless tossing horns. Then, dropping down into Pocket Valley from above, he found his own string of horses feeding quietly. Beyond, the cattle. At first he thought that the animals had been left to their own devices. He saw no rider anywhere. Hurrying on, he shouted loudly. After he had called repeatedly, there floated to him from somewhere down on the lower flat an answering yell. And presently Carson himself came riding to meet him.

Carson's face was smeared with blood; one bruised, battered, discolored eye was swelling shut, but in his uninjured eye there was triumphant gladness.

"We got the sons-o'-guns on the run, Bud," he announced from afar. "Killed their pesky fires out before they got a good start, crippled a couple of 'em, counting Benny, the cook, in on the deal, chased their deputy sheriff off with a flea in his ear, an' set tight, holding our own."

"Where'd you get the eye, Carson?" demanded Lee.

Carson grinned broadly, an evil grin of a distorted, battered face.

"You want to take a good look at ol' Poker Face," he chuckled. "He won't cheat no more games of crib for a coon's age. I jus' nacherally beat him all to hell, Bud."

"Where are the rest of the men?" Lee asked.

"Watching the fires an' seeing no more don't get started."

Then Lee told him of Judith. Carson's good eye opened wide with interest. Carson's bruised lips sought to form for a whistle which managed to give them the air of a maidenly pout.

"He had the nerve!" he muttered. "Trevors had the nerve! Bud, we ought to make a little call on that gent."

Then, seeing Lee's face, Carson realized that anything he might have to remark on this score was superfluous. Lee had already thought of that.

They roped a couple of the wandering horses, improvised hackamores from the rope cut in two, and went to meet Judith. Carson snatched eagerly at her hand and squeezed it and looked inexpressible things from his one useful eye. He gave his saddled horse to her, watched her and Lee ride on to the ranch, and sent Tommy to the old cabin for another rope, while he rounded up some more horses in a narrow cañon for Burkitt and Hampton.

"You damn' fool," he said growlingly to Hampton, "look what you've done."

"Of course I'm a damn fool," replied Hampton, by now his old cheerful self. "I've apologized to Judith and Lee and Burkitt. I apologize to you. I'll tell you confidentially that I'm a sucker and a Come-on-Charlie. I haven't got the brains of a jack-rabbit."

Carson went away grumbling. But for the first time he felt a vague respect for Pollock Hampton.

"He'll be a real man some day," thought Carson, "if the fool-killer don't pick him off first."

"You may come and see me this evening," Judith told Bud Lee as he left her to Marcia's arms. "I'll be eating and sleeping and taking baths until then. Thank you for the bacon--and the water--and----"

She smiled at him from Marcia's excited embrace. Bud Lee, the blood tingling through him, left her.

"Before I come to you, Judith girl," he whispered to himself as he went, "I'll have to have little talk with Bayne Trevors."

XXIX

LEE AND OLD MAN CARSON RIDE TOGETHER

Bud Lee, riding alone toward the Western Lumber Camp, turned in his saddle to glance back as he heard hoof-beats behind him. It was Carson, and the old cattleman was riding hard. Lee frowned. Then for an instant a smile softened his stern eyes.

"Good little old Carson," he muttered.

Carson came to his side, saying merely in his dry voice:

"Mind if I come along, Bud? You an' me have rid into one thing an' another more'n just once."

"This is my fight," said Lee coolly.

"Who said it wasn't?" demanded the other querulously. "Only you ain't got any call to be a hawg, Bud. Besides, I got a right to see if there's a fair break, ain't I? Say, look at them cow brutes back yonder! Don't it beat all how silage, when you use it right, shapes 'em up?"

Few enough words were said as the miles were flung behind them; few were needed. A swift glance showed Carson that Lee carried a revolver in his shirt; his own gun rode plainly in evidence in front of his hip. What little conversation rose between them was of ranch matters. They spoke of success now with confidence. These two foremen alone could see the money in late winter and early spring from their cattle and horses to carry the Blue Lake venture over the rapids. Then there were the other resources of the diversified undertaking, the hogs, the prize stock, the olives, poultry, dairy products. And soon or late Western Lumber would pay the price for the timber tract, soon, if they saw that they had to pay it or lose the forests which they had so long counted upon. Lumber values were mounting every day.

Neither man, when it chanced that Bayne Trevors's name was casually mentioned, suggested: "Why not go to the law?" For to them it was very clear that, once in the courts, the man who had played safe would laugh at them. Against Judith's oath that he had kidnapped her would stand Trevors's word that he had done nothing of the kind, coupled with his carefully established perjured alibi and the lying testimony of the physician who had visited Judith in the cave. This man and that might be rounded up, Shorty and Benny and Poker Face, and if any of them talked--which perhaps none of them would--at most they would say that they had no orders from anybody but Quinnion. And where was Quinnion, who stood as a buckler between Trevors and prosecution? And what buckler in all the world can ever stand between one man and another?

Now and then Carson sent a quick questioning glance toward Lee's inscrutable face; now and then he sighed, his thoughts his own. Bud Lee, knowing his companion as he did, shrewdly guessed that Carson was hoping that events might so befall that there would be an open, free-for-all fight and that he might not be forced to play the restless part of a mere onlooker. Bud Lee hoped otherwise.

"There's two ways to get a man," said Carson meditatively, out of a long silence. "An' both is good ways: with a gun or with your hands."

"Yes," agreed Bud quietly.

"If it works out gun way," continued Carson, still with that thoughtful, half-abstracted look in his eyes, "it don't hurt to remember, Bud, that he shoots left-handed an' from the hip."

Lee merely nodded. Carson did not look up from the bobbing ears of his horse as he continued:

"If it works out the other way an' it's just fists, it don't hurt to remember how Trevors put out Scotty Webb last year in Rocky Bend. Four-footed style, striking with his boot square in Scotty's belly."

Trevors's name was not again referred to even in the vaguest terms. The road in front of them, at last dropping down into the valley in which the lumber-camp was, straightened out into a lane that ran between stumps to the clutter of frame buildings.

"Something doing at the office," offered Carson, as they drew near. "Directors' meeting, likely."

Two automobiles stood in the road ten steps from the closed door of the unpretentious shack which bore the printed legend, "Office, Western Lumber Company." The big red touring-car certainly belonged to Melvin, the company's president. Carson looked curiously at Lee.

Bud dismounted, dropped his horse's reins, shifted the revolver from his shirt to his belt where it was at once unhidden and loosely held, ready for a quick draw. Then he went up the three steps, Carson at his heels, his gun also unhidden and ready. From within came voices, one in protest, Bayne Trevors's ringing out, filled with mastery followed by a laugh. Lee set his hand to the door. Then, only because it was locked from within, did he knock sharply.

"Who is it?" came the sharp inquiry. But the man who made it and who was standing by the door, threw it open.

"What do you want?" he demanded again. "We're busy."

"I want to see Trevors," said Lee coolly.

"You can't. He----"

Lee shoved the man aside and strode on. Carson, close at Lee's heels, his eyes glittering, stepped a little aside when once he was within the room and took his place with his back against the wall close to the door.

It was a big, bare, barn-like room, furnished simply with one long table and half a dozen chairs. Here were five men besides Bayne Trevors. All except Trevors and the man who had opened the door were seated; Trevors, at the far end of the room, was standing, an oratorical arm slowly dropping to his side.

His eyes met Lee's, ran quickly to Carson's, came back to Lee's and rested there steadily. Beyond the slow falling of his extended arm, he did not move. The muscles of his face hardened, the look of triumph which just now had stood in his eyes changed slowly and in its place came an expression that was twin to that in Bud Lee's eyes, just a look of inscrutability with a hint of watchfulness under it, and the hardness of agate. While a man might have drawn a deep breath into his lungs and expelled it, neither Lee nor Trevor stirred.

"What the devil is this?" demanded Melvin from across the table. "Hold-up or what?" He rapped the table resoundingly.

"Shut up!" snapped Carson. "It's just a two-man play, Melvin: Lee an' Trevors."

"Oh," said Melvin, and sank back, making no further protest. He was no stranger to Carson or to Bud Lee, and he sensed what might be between Lee and a man like Trevors. Then shrugging his shoulders, he said carelessly: "I'm not the man to get in other men's way, and you know it, Carson. But you might tell your friend Bud Lee that Bayne Trevors is rather a big man influentially to mix things with. I've just resigned this morning and Trevors is our new president."

"Thanks," returned Carson dryly. "I don't think that'll make much difference though, Melvin. Most likely you'll have two presidents resigning the same day."

At last Lee spoke.

"Trevors," he said quietly, "maybe the law can't get you. But I can. For reasons which both you and I understand you are going to clear out of this part of the country."

"Am I?" asked Trevors. The look of his eyes did not alter, the poise of his big body did not shift, his hands, both at his sides again, might have been carved in bronze.

Then suddenly he laughed and threw out his arms in a wide gesture and again dropped them, saying shortly:

"You're playing the game the way I thought you would. You've got a gun. I am unarmed--begin your shooting and be damned to you!"

He even stepped forward, his eyes fearlessly upon Lee's, and settled his big frame comfortably in a chair by the table.

"Go ahead," he concluded. "I'm ready."

"That's as it should be!" Lee's voice was vibrant. His hard eyes brightened. With a quick jerk he drew the revolver from his belt and dropped it to the floor at Carson's feet.

Carson, though he stooped for it quickly, did not shift his watchful eyes from Trevors. For Carson had known more fights in his life than he had years; he knew men, and looked to Trevor for just the sort of thing Trevors did.

As Lee stepped forward, Trevors snatched open the drawer of the table at his side, quick as light, and whipped out the weapon which lay there.

"Go slow, Trevors!" came old Carson's dry voice. "I've got you covered already, two-gun style."

Trevors, even with his finger crooking to the trigger, paused and saw the two guns in Carson's brown hands trained unwaveringly upon him. There was much deadly determination in Carson's eyes. Again Trevors laughed, drawing back his empty hand.

"You yellow dog!" grunted Bud Lee, his tone one of supreme disgust. "You damned yellow dog!"

Trevors shrugged.

"You see, gentlemen--two to one, with the odds all theirs."

"You lie!" spat out Carson. "It's one to one an' I see the game goes square." He stepped forward, removed the weapon from the table under Trevors's now suddenly changeful eyes, and went back to his place with his back to the wall.

"For God's sake!" cried the one nervous man in the room, he who had opened the door. "This is murder!"

Melvin smiled, a smile as cheerless as the gleam of wintry starlight on a bit of glass.

"Will you fight him, Trevors?" he asked. "With your hands?"

"Yes," answered Trevors. "Yes."

"Move back the table," commanded Melvin, on his feet in an instant. "And the chairs. Get them back."

The table was dragged to the far end of the room; the chairs were piled upon it.

"Now," and Melvin's watch was in his hand, his voice coming with metallic coldness, "it's to a finish, is it? Three-minute rounds, fair fighting, no----"

But now at last Bayne Trevors's blood was up, his slow anger had kindled, he was moving his feet restlessly.

"Damn it," he shouted, "whose fight is this but mine and Lee's? If he wants a fight, let him come and get it; a man's fight and rules and rounds and time be damned! Am I to dance around here and sidestep and fence just for you to look on? . . . Carson!"

"Well?" said Carson.

"Lee challenges me, doesn't he? Then I'm the man to name the sort of fight, am I not? Is that fair?"

"Meaning just what?" asked Carson.

"Meaning that I am going to get him, get him any way I can! You let us fight this out our way, any way, and no interference!"

"Talk to Bud there," rejoined the old cattleman calmly. "It ain't my scrap."

"Then, Lee," snapped Trevors, "come on if you want such a fight as you'd get if you and I were alone in the mountains, with no man to watch, a fight where a man can use what weapons God gave him, any weapon he can lay his mind to, his eye to, his hand to! Or," and at last the sneer came, "do you want a pair of padded gloves and somebody to fan you?"

Carson shifted his glance to Bud Lee's face. Lee merely nodded.

"Then," cried Carson sternly, "go to it! No man steps in, an' you two can fight it out like coyotes or mountain-lions for all of me."

"Your word there will be no interference?" asked Trevors. "For you're just a fool and not a liar, Carson."

"My word," was the answer.

XXX

THE FIGHT

Bayne Trevors slipped out of his coat and vest, tossing them to the pile of chairs on the table. He loosened his soft shirt-collar and was ready. All of Bud Lee's simple preparations had been made when he threw his broad hat aside.

Then came the little pause which is forerunner to the first blow, when two men measure each other, seeking each to read the other's purpose.

"It ought to be a pretty even break," muttered Melvin, his interest obviously that of a sporting man who would travel a thousand miles to see a fight for a champion's belt. "Trevors has the weight by forty pounds; Lee has the reach by a hair; both quick-footed; both hard; Lee, maybe a little harder. Don't know. Even break. The sand will do it--sand or luck."

The two men drew slowly together. Their hands came up, their fists showed glistening knuckles, their jaws were set, their feet moved cautiously. Then suddenly Bud Lee sprang in and struck.

Struck tentatively with his left hand that grazed Trevors's cheek and did no harm; struck terribly with his right hand that drove through the other man's guard and landed with the little sound of flesh on flesh on Trevors's chest. Trevors's grunt and his return blow came together; both men reeled back a half-pace from the impact, both hung an instant upon an unsteady balance, both sprang forward. And as they met the second time, they battled furiously, clinging together, striking mercilessly, giving and taking with only the sound of scuffing boot-heels and soft thuds and little coughing grunts breaking the silence. Bayne Trevors gave back a stubborn step, striking right and left as he did so; caught himself, hurled himself forward so that now it was Bud Lee who was borne backward by the sheer weight of his opponent. There was a gash on Lee's temple from which a thin stream of blood trickled; Trevors's mouth was bleeding.

"Under his guard, Trevors!" shouted Melvin, on the table now, his face red, his eyes shining. "Under, under!"

"Remember, Bud! Remember!" cried Carson.

"That's it, that's it!" Melvin clapped his two big hands and came perilously near falling from his point of vantage as Trevors's fists drove into Lee's body and Lee went reeling back. "Give him hell! A hundred dollars on Trevors!"

"Take you!" called Carson without withdrawing his eyes from the two forms reeling up and down, back and forth across the room.

"Done!" cried Melvin. "Trevors, a hundred dollars----"

He broke off, forgetful of his own words. The two men met again, clung to each other in a ludicrous embrace, broke asunder, and Lee struck so that his fist, landing fair upon Trevors's chin, hurled the bigger man back, stumbling, falling----

But not fallen. For his back found the wall and saved him. As Lee came on, rushing at him like a man gone mad, Trevors slipped aside and struck back, for the critical moment gaining time to breathe. He spat, wiped his bloody mouth with the back of his hand and again eluded a rushing attack by ducking and stepping to one side. And ever, when he sought to save his own body, he struck back, grunting audibly with the effort.

They fought everywhere, up and down, back and forth, until every foot of the floor felt their heavy boots, until each of them was fighting with all of the force that lay in him, fighting with that swelling anger which grows at leaps and bounds when two men strive body to body, when the hot breath of one mingles with the hot breath of the other, when red rage looking out of one pair of eyes sees its reflection in the other. Again and again Melvin muttered: "An even break! By God, an even break!" And over and over did Carson's heart rise in his breast as he saw Bud Lee drive Trevors, and over and over did his heart sink when he saw Lee sway and reel under the sledge-hammer blows beating at face and body.

In the beginning there had been in Bud Lee's mind but the one thought: This man had laid his hands upon Judith; this man must be punished and punished by none other in God's wide world than Bud Lee. Now all cool thought had fled, leaving just the hot desire to beat at that which beat at him, to strike down that which strove to strike him down, to master his enemy, to see the great, powerful body prone at his feet. Now he was fighting for that simplest, most potent reason in the world, just because he was fighting. And, though he knew that he had found a man as quick and hard and strong as himself, still he told himself, that he must fight a winning fight--there was some good reason why he must fight a winning fight.

His whole body was bruised and battered and sore. A glancing blow now shot him through with pain. Trevors knew how to put his weight behind his blows, and his weight was well over two hundred pounds. It was like being hammered with a two-hundred-pound sledge.

Give and take it was from the first blow, with none of the finesse of a boxers' match, with less thought of escaping punishment than of inflicting it. More than once had Bud Lee felt that he was falling only to catch his balance and come back at Trevors; more than once had Trevors gone reeling backward, smashing into the wall. Many a time did Melvin count his money won and lost. And Carson, crouching now, tense, eager, a little fearful, muttered constantly to himself.

"They've both got the sand!" grunted Melvin. "Which one draws the luck?"

But luck stood by and did not enter into the battle that grew ever hotter as Bud Lee's and Trevors's gorge rose higher at every blow. It was to be simply the best man wins, and none of the six men who watched knew from the beginning until the end who the best man was. What tricks Trevors knew, he used, and they were met by what cunning lay in Bud Lee; what strength, what resistance, what power to endure was each panting body was called upon to the reserve.

Already the spring had gone out of their steps. They came at each other for the most part more slowly, more cautiously, but more determined not to give over. Faces glistening with sweat, grimy with the dust their pounding feet beat up from the floor, the roots of Lee's hair red where with a bloody hand he had pushed it back, Trevors's lips swollen and ugly, they fought on until the men who looked at them wondered just where lay the limits upon which each depended.

"Lee's tough," Carson whispered to himself. "Riding every day an' working . . . Trevors has been setting in a chair. . . . Bud'll wear him out. . . . My God! Bud, look out! Foot work. . . ."

Yes, foot work, but not as Carson expected it, not the thing Bud Lee looked for when he sensed rather than read in Trevors's eyes that a fresh trick was coming. He was ready for a lifted boot, and, instead, Trevors, rushing down upon him, threw grappling arms about him, heedless of the fist smashing again into his cut lips. Trevors doubled and twisted and got a grip about Lee's middle, at him, seeking to throw him.

Down they went together with no particular advantage to either man. But as they rolled apart and Lee threw out an arm to lift himself Trevors saw the chance he sought and mightily, brutally, cursing as he jumped up for it, he drove the heel of his boot down upon Lee's hand on the floor.

From Lee's white lips burst an involuntary groan as it seemed to him that every bone in his hand had been crushed, from Carson a choking cry of rage, from Trevors a short laugh as he called out sharply:

"Hands off, Carson! Our fight--any way----"

Again on their feet, Trevors a second first and with the advantage clearly his now rushed Lee, seeking to finish what he had begun. And Bud Lee, his face white and drawn, looking ghastly with the blood smears across it, moving swiftly but not swiftly enough, went down, Trevors's weight against him, Trevors's fist beating into his side just below the arm-pit.

"Five hundred on Trevors!" shouted Melvin. Carson did not hear him.

"At him, Bud, go at him!" he was crying over and over. "That's the last dirty trick he's got. Get him, Buddie. Oh, for Gawd's sake, Buddie, go get him!"

Trevors was upon him again, but Lee slipped aside, even rolled over, managed to get to his feet. Again Trevors bore down upon him, a new leaping fire in his eyes. Again, though barely in time, Bud Lee slipped away from him. He drew Trevors's harsh laugh after him and Trevors's questing, eager fists. Lee put up his arm, his right arm, guarding his face, and drew away, back and back. Carson was almost whimpering, calling whiningly:

"Stand up to him, Bud! Oh, go get him, Buddie!"

Still up and down the room they went, Trevors rushing at Lee, Lee taking what blows he must, striking out but little, seeking now only to pull himself together, to get his head clear of daze and dizziness. Stepping backward, he again got the wall at his shoulders, slipped to one side, strove only to get the empty room behind him, succeeded and let Trevors drive him, drive until again his back was to a wall.

"Run away, will you?" panted Trevors. "I've got you, damn you. Got you right."

Lee didn't answer. He was thinking dully that Bayne Trevors was near telling the truth, that Bud Lee was almost beaten--almost. That was as far as a gentleman ever went--just to that desperate "almost beaten." Not quite. No! not quite. Never that.

Both men were nearly spent; Carson saw that while he cursed softly in his corner; Melvin saw it and watched for the end, wondering just how it would come. Trevors should swing for the point of the jaw, put all that was in him into a final, smashing blow, beat through an insufficient guard, do it now, quickly. For both Carson and Melvin saw another thing, a thing which both had sensed at the outset: Bud Lee was harder than Bayne Trevors. Lee, slipping away at every step was getting something back which had nearly gone from him; Trevors was breathing in noisy jerks; save for the vital fact that he now had two hands to Bud Lee's one, Trevors was showing more signs of weariness than Lee.

"Bud'll get him--somehow," whispered Carson. "Good old Bud. Somehow."

What Carson and Melvin sensed Trevors knew. He saw that Lee was having less trouble in eluding him now, that Lee's feet were quicker, lighter than his, that Lee was beginning to strike back viciously at him, and when the blow landed, Trevors's big body rocked, shot through with pain. There came to him the thought which was Melvin's, but it came in Trevors's way: Now, quickly, before Lee was ready for it, must come the end. So, for the third time that day Bayne Trevors, with much at stake, resorted to "what weapons God gave him, what weapons he could lay his mind to, his eyes to, his hands to"--his feet to. Resorting to the old trick which came up from South American ports in disreputable windjammers, which is known to the San Francisco waterfront, he raised a heavy boot, striking for Lee's stomach, seeking with one low, horrible blow to double up his already handicapped antagonist in writhing pain on the floor.

"An' I gave my word!" bellowed Carson, the sweat on his own tortured brow. "Oh, my Gawd."

But just that one brief instant too late did Bayne Trevors lift his foot. For Bud Lee had expected this, never had forgotten it, had prayed within his soul that the man he fought would use it. Just by that fraction of time which has no name was he quicker than Trevors, and he knew it. Now, as he read the sinister purpose in Trevors's glaring eyes, as he glimpsed the raised boot as it left the floor, he lowered his own head, averted it ever so little, stooped--and his hand closed like locked iron about the calf of Trevors's leg. A stifled cry from the bulkier man, a little grunt of effort from Lee, Lee straining, heaving mightily, and Trevors went back, toppled, fought for his slipping balance, and fell. As he went down Lee was upon him, Lee's arm about his neck, Lee's weight flung upon him, Lee holding his body between a powerful pair of knees which rode him as they rode daily some struggling Blue Lake colt.

Now Bud's left arm, defying the agony of a broken hand, was around him, Lee's legs were about the frantically fighting body, and at last Lee's right hand went its sure way to the thick, bared, pulsing throat. Trevors's right arm was caught at his side, held there by the body upon his. His left hand beat at Lee's face, struck and battered again only to come back like a steam-driven piston to hammer again. But Bud Lee's pain-racked body clung on, his thumb and fingers sank and sank deeper into the corded muscles of the heaving throat, crooked like talons, white and hard and relentless.

Trevors's eyes were terrible, filled with hatred, red-flecked with rage. He sought, with a great sudden heave, to roll over. But he could not shake off the legs which were like stubborn tentacles about him, could not free his throat of the tensing clutch. He tore at the wrist, smote again at Lee's head, set his own hand to Lee's throat. In an instant his hand was back at the hand worrying him, but he was unable to drag it away.

His face went white, flamed red, grew purplish. His eyes bulged up at Lee's, his deep chest contracted spasmodically. Lee, summoning the force within him, drove thumb and fingers deeper.

"Got enough?" he panted.

For the last time Trevors strained with him and they rolled like death-locked mountain-lions. But still Lee's left arm was about Trevors's neck, his legs about the tossing body, his hand at Trevors's throat. Trevors's breath caught, failed him. . . .

Then and then only did a new look come into the bulging eyes. A look of more than fear, of utter, desperate terror. Trevors threw up his hand weakly, then let it fall so that it struck the floor heavily, a dead weight.

Lee's grip at the strangling throat relaxed. But he did not move his hand.

"Got enough?" he panted again.

The answer came brokenly, weakly, almost inarticulate. But it did come and the men drawn close heard it:

"Yes."

"You'll get out of the country?"

"Yes."

Bud Lee drew back and rose, going to the door swiftly. He stooped for his hat and passed out. And as Bayne Trevors got unsteadily to his feet and sank slumping into the chair offered him, two big tears formed in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. The first tears in many a year, the tears of a strong man broken for the first time in his life.

"Sand did it!" grunted Melvin. "Just sand, Carson."

"I'll stick aroun' an' see he moves on, Bud," Carson followed Lee to say. "Oh, he'll go. But I'll just tell him how the boys is headed this way by now an' it's tar an' feathers for him if he don't mosey right along. That's something he couldn't stand right now. An', Bud----"

He put out his hand and locked Lee's in a grip that made the sore fingers wince. Then, swinging upon the heel of his boot, he went back to collect a hundred dollars from Melvin and help Bayne Trevors shape his plans.

But Bud Lee did not wait. He was on his horse, swaying a little, an arm caught in a rude sling, glad to be out in the late sunlight.

"Fog along, little horse," he was saying dully. "Fog right along. She's waiting, little horse. Judith is waiting! Think of that. That's right--fog right along."