Chapter 14

Dora was a long time finding that for which she was searching among the clothes hanging on a row of nails, and Susie, rolling her eyes in that direction, was sure, very sure, that she saw Teacher dab at her lashes with the frilly ruffle of a petticoat before she turned around.

"When did he say he was going?"

"He didn't say; but to-day or to-morrow, I should think."

"If he cared so much because I am cool to him, he certainly would have asked me why I treated him so. But he didn't care enough to ask."

Teacher's voice sounded queer even to herself, and she seemed intensely interested in buttoning her boots.

"Pooh! I know why. It's because he thinks you like that Smith."

"Smith!"

"Yes, Smith."

The jangle of Ling's triangle interrupted the fascinating conversation.

"How perfectly foolish!" gasped Dora.

"Not to Smith," Susie replied dryly, "nor to Mr. Ralston."

Susie looked at the unoccupied chairs at the table as she and Dora seated themselves. Ralston's, Tubbs's, Smith's, and McArthur's chairs were vacant.

"Looks like you're losin' your boarders fast, Ling," she remarked.

"Good thing," Ling answered candidly.

The Indian woman gulped her coffee, but refused the food which was passed to her. A strange faintness, accompanied by nausea, was creeping upon her. Her vision was blurred, and she saw Meeteetse Ed, at the opposite end of the table, as through a fog. She pushed back her chair and went into the living-room, swaying a little as she walked. A faint moan caught Susie's ear, and she hastened to her mother.

The woman was lying on the floor by the bench where she sewed, her head pillowed on her rag-rug.

"Mother! Why, what's the matter with your hand? It's swelled!"

"I heap sick, Susie!" she moaned. "My arm aches me."

"Look!" cried Susie, who had turned back her sleeve. "Her arm is black--a purple black, and it's swellin' up!"

"Oh, I heap sick!"

"What did you do to your arm, Mother? Did you have the bandage off?"

"Yes, it come off, and I pin him up," said Ling, who was standing by.

A paroxysm of pain seized the woman, and she writhed.

"It looks exactly like a rattlesnake bite! I saw a fellow once that was bit in the ankle, and it swelled up and turned a color like that," declared Susie in horror. "Mother, you haven't been foolin' with snakes, or been bit?"

The woman shook her head.

"I no been bit," she groaned, and her eyes had in them the appealing look of a sick spaniel.

Dora and Susie helped her to her room, and though they tried every simple remedy of which they had ever heard, to reduce the rapidly swelling arm, all seemed equally unavailing. The woman's convulsions hourly became more violent and frequent, while her arm was frightful to behold--black, as it was, from hand to shoulder with coagulated blood.

"If only we had an idea of the cause!" cried Dora, distracted.

"Mother, can't you imagine anything that would make your arm bad like this? Try to think."

But though drops of perspiration stood on the woman's forehead, and her grip tore the pillow, she obstinately shook her head.

"I be better pretty soon," was all she would say, and tried to smile at Susie.

"If only some one would come!" Dora went to the open window often and listened for Ralston's voice or McArthur's--the latter having gone for his mail.

The strain of watching the woman's suffering told on both of the girls, and the night by her bedside seemed centuries long. Toward morning the paroxysms appeared to reach a climax and then to subside. They were of shorter duration, and the intervals between were longer.

"She's better, I'm sure," Dora said hopefully, but Susie shook her head.

"I don't think so; she's worse. There's that look behind, back of her eyes--that dead look--can't you see it? And it's in her face, too. I don't know how to say what I mean, but it's there, and it makes me shiver like cold." The girl looked in mingled awe and horror at the first human being she ever had seen die.

Unable to endure the strain any longer, Dora went into the fresh air, and Susie dropped on her knees by the bedside and took her mother's limp hand in both of hers.

"Oh, Mother," she begged pitifully, "say something. Don't go away without sayin' something to Susie!"

With an effort of will, the woman slowly opened her dull eyes and fixed them upon the child's face.

"Yas," she breathed; "I _want_ to say something."

The words came slowly and thickly.

"I no--get well."

"Oh, Mother!"

Unheeding the wail, perhaps not hearing it, she went on, stopping often between words:

"I steal--from you--my little girl. I bad woman, Susie. It is right I die. I take de money--out of de bank dat MacDonald leave us--to give to Smith. De hold-ups steal de money on--de road. I have de bad heart--Susie--to do dat. I know now."

"You mustn't talk like that, Mother!" cried Susie, gripping her hand convulsively. "You thought you'd get it again and put it back. You didn't mean to steal from me. I know all about it. And I've got the money. Mr. Ralston found a check you had thrown away--you'd signed your name on it in the wrong place. When we saw the date, and what a lot of money it was, and found you had gone to town, we guessed the rest. It was easy to see Smith in that. So we held you up, and got it back. We knew there was no danger to anybody, but, of course, we felt bad to worry and frighten you."

"I'm glad," said the woman simply. She had no strength or breath or time to spare. "Dey's more. I tell you--I kill Smith--if he lie. He lie. He bull-dog white man. I make de strong medicine to kill him--and I get de poison in my arm when de bandage slip. Get de bottles and de knife behind de lookin'-glass--I show you."

Susie quickly did as she was bid.

"De lemon bottle is de love-charm of de Sioux. One teaspoonful--no more, Little Coyote's woman say. De other bottle is de bad medicine. Be careful. Smith--make fool--of me--Susie." What else she would have said ended in a gurgle. Her jaw dropped, and she died with her glazing eyes upon Susie's face.

Susie pulled the gay Indian blanket gently over her mother's shoulders, as if afraid she would be cold. Then she slipped a needle and some beads and buckskin, to complete an unfinished moccasin, underneath the blanket. Her mother was going on a long journey, and would want occupation. There were no tears in Susie's eyes when she replaced the bottles and the skinning knife with the discolored blade behind the mirror.

The wan little creature seemed to have no tears to shed. She was unresponsive to Dora's broken words of sympathy, and the grub-liners' awkward condolences--they seemed not to reach her heart at all. She heard them without hearing, for her mind was chaos as she moved silently from room to room, or huddled, a forlorn figure, on the bench where her mother always had sat.

Breakfast was long since over and the forenoon well advanced when she finally left the silent house and crept like the ghost of her spirited self down the path to the stable and into the roomy stall where her stout little cow-pony stood munching hay.

In her sorrow, the dumb animal was the one thing to which she turned. He lifted his head when she went in, and threw his cropped ears forward, while his eyes grew limpid as a horse's eyes will at the approach of some one it knows well and looks to for food and affection.

They had almost grown up together, and the time Susie had spent on his back, or with him in the corral or stall, formerly had been half her waking hours. They had no fear of each other; only deep love and mutual understanding.

"Oh, Croppy! Croppy!" her childish voice quavered. "Oh, Croppy, you're all I've got left!" She slipped her arms around his thick neck and hid her face in his mane.

He stopped eating and stood motionless while she clung to him, his ears alert at the sound of the familiar voice.

"What _shall_ I do!" she wailed in an abandonment of grief.

In her inexperience, it seemed to Susie, that with her mother's death all the world had come to an end for her. Undemonstrative as they were, and meagre as had been any spoken words of affection, the bond of natural love between them had seemed strong and unbreakable until Smith's coming. They had been all in all to each other in their unemotional way; and now this unexpected tragedy seemed to crush the child, because it was something which never had entered her thoughts. It was a crisis with which she did not know how to cope or to bear. The world could never be blacker for her than it was when she clung sobbing to the little sorrel pony's thick neck that morning. The future looked utterly cheerless and impossible to endure. She had not learned that no tragedy is so blighting that there is not a way out--a way which the sufferer makes himself, which comes to him, or into which he is forced. Nothing stays as it is. But it appeared to Susie that life could never be different, except to be worse.

She had talked much to McArthur of the outside world, and questioned him, and a doubt had sprung up as to the feasibility of searching for her kinsfolk, as she had planned. There were many, many trails and wire fences to bewilder one, and people--hundreds of people--people who were not always kind. His answers filled her with vague fears. To be only sixteen, and alone, is cause enough for tears, and Susie shed them now.

McArthur, with a radiant face, was riding toward the ranch to which he had become singularly attached. His saddle-pockets bulged with mail, and his elbows flapped joyously as he urged his horse to greater speed. He looked up eagerly at the house as he crossed the ford, and his kind eyes shone with happiness when he rode into the stable-yard and swung out of the saddle.

He heard a sound, the unmistakable sound of sobbing, as he was unsaddling. Listening, he knew it came from somewhere in the stable, so he left his horse and went inside.

It was Susie, as he had thought. She lifted her tear-stained face from the pony's mane when he spoke, and he knew that she was glad to see him.

"Oh, pardner, I thought you'd _never_ come!"

"The mail was late, and I stayed with the Major to wait for it. What has gone wrong?"

"Mother's dead," she said. "She was poisoned accidentally."

"Susie! And there was no one here?" The news seemed incredible.

"Only Teacher and me--no one that knew what to do. We sent Meeteetse for a doctor, but he hasn't come yet. He probably got drunk and forgot what he went for. It's been a terrible night, pardner, and a terrible day!"

McArthur looked at her with troubled eyes, and once more he stroked her hair with his gentle, timid touch.

"Everything just looks awful to me, with Dad and mother both gone, and me here alone on this big ranch, with only Ling and grub-liners. And to think of it all the rest of my life like this--with nobody that I belong to, or that belongs to me!"

Something was recalled to McArthur with a start by Susie's words. He had forgotten!

"Come, Susie, come with me."

She followed him outside, where he unbuckled his saddle-pocket and took a daguerreotype from a wooden box which had come in the mail. The gilt frame was tarnished, the purple velvet lining faded, and when he handed the case to Susie she had to hold it slanting in the light to see the picture.

"Dad!"

She looked at McArthur with eyes wide in wonder.

"Donald MacDonald, my aunt Harriet's brother, who went north to buy furs for the Hudson Bay Company!" McArthur's eyes were smiling through the moisture in them.

"We've got one just like it!" Susie cried, still half unable to believe her eyes and ears.

"I was sure that day you mimicked your father when he said, 'Never forget you are a MacDonald!' for I have heard my aunt say that a thousand times, and in just that way. But I wanted to be surer before I said anything to you, so I sent for this."

"Oh, pardner!" and with a sudden impulse which was neither Scotch nor Indian, but entirely of herself, Susie threw her arms about his neck and all but choked him in the only hug which Peter McArthur, A.M., Ph.D., could remember ever having had.

XXI

THE MURDERER OF WHITE ANTELOPE

It was nearly dusk, and Ralston was only a few hundred yards from the Bar C gate, when he met Babe, highly perfumed and with his hair suspiciously slick, coming out. Babe's look of disappointment upon seeing him was not flattering, but Ralston ignored it in his own delight at the meeting.

"What was your rush? I was just goin' over to see you," was Babe's glum greeting.

"And I'm here to see you," Ralston returned, "but I forgot to perfume myself and tallow my hair."

"Aw-w-w," rumbled Babe, sheepishly. "What'd you want?"

"You know what I'm in the country for?"

Babe nodded.

"I've located my man, and he's going to drive off a big bunch to-night. There's two of them in fact, and I'll need help. Are you game for it?"

"Oh, mamma!" Babe rolled his eyes in ecstasy.

"He has a horror of doing time," Ralston went on, "and if he has any show at all, he's going to put up a hard fight. I'd like the satisfaction of bringing them both in, single-handed, but it isn't fair to the Colonel to take any chances of their getting away."

"Who is it?"

"Smith."

"That bastard with his teeth stickin' out?"

Ralston laughed assent.

"Pickin's!" cried Babe, with gusto. "I'd like to kill that feller every mornin' before breakfast. Will I go? Will I? _Will_ I?" Babe's crescendo ended in a joyous whoop of exultation. "Wait till I ride back and tell the Colonel, and git my ca'tridge belt. I take it off of an evenin' these tranquil times."

Ralston turned his horse and started back, so engrossed in thoughts of the work ahead of him that it was not until Babe overtook him that he remembered he had forgotten to ask Babe's business with him.

"Well, I guess the old Colonel was tickled when he heard you'd spotted the rustlers," said Babe, as he reined in beside him. "He wanted to come along--did for a fact, and him nearly seventy. He'd push the lid off his coffin and climb out at his own funeral if somebody'd happen to mention that thieves was brandin' his calves."

"You said you had started to the ranch to see me."

"Oh, yes--I forgot. Your father sent word to the Colonel that he was sellin' off his cattle and goin' into sheep, and wanted the Colonel to let you know."

"The poor old Governor! It'll about break his heart, I know; and I should be there. At his time of life it's a pretty hard and galling thing to quit cattle--to be forced out of the business into sheep. It's like bein' made to change your politics or religion against your will."

"'Fore I'd wrangle woolers," declared Babe, "I'd hold up trains or rob dudes or do 'most any old thing. Say, I've rid by sheep-wagons when I was durn near starvin' ruther than eat with a sheep-herder or owe one a favor. Where do you find a man like the Colonel in sheep?" demanded Babe. "You don't find 'em. Nothin' but a lot of upstart sheep-herders, that's got rich in five years and don't know how to act."

"Oh, you're prejudiced, Babe. Not all sheepmen are muckers any more than all cattlemen are gentlemen."

"I'm not prejudiced a-_tall_!" declared Babe excitedly. "I'm perfectly fair and square. Woolers is demoralizin'. Associate with woolers, and it takes the spirit out of a feller quicker'n cookin.' In five years you won't be half the man you are now if you go into sheep. I'll sure hate to see it!" His voice was all but pathetic as he contemplated Ralston's downfall.

"I think you will, though, Babe, if I get out of this with a whole hide."

"You'll be so well fixed you can git married then?" There was some constraint in Babe's tone, which he meant to be casual.

Ralston's heart gave him a twinge of pain.

"I s'pose you've had every chance to git acquainted with the Schoolmarm," he observed, since Ralston did not reply.

"She doesn't like me, Babe."

"_What_!" yelled Babe, screwing up his face in a grimace of surprise and unbelief.

"She would rather talk to Ling than to me--at least, she seems far more friendly to any one else than to me."

"Say, she must be loony not to like you!"

Ralston could not help laughing outright at Babe's vigorous loyalty.

"It's not necessarily a sign of insanity to dislike me."

"She doesn't go that far, does she?" demanded Babe.

"Sometimes I think so."

"You don't care a-tall, do you?"

"Yes," Ralston replied quietly; "I care a great deal. It hurts me more than I ever was hurt before; because, you see, Babe, I never loved a woman before."

"Aw-w-w," replied Babe, in deepest sympathy.

Smith had congratulated himself often during the day upon the fact that he could not have chosen a more propitious time for the execution of his plans--at least, so far as the Bar C outfit was concerned. His uneasiness passed as the protecting darkness fell without their having seen a single person the entire day.

When the last glimmer of daylight had faded, Tubbs and Smith started on the drive, heading the cattle direct for their destination. They were fatter than Smith had supposed, so they could not travel as rapidly as he had calculated, but he and Tubbs pushed them along as fast as they could without overheating them.

The darkness, which gave Smith courage, made Tubbs nervous. He swore at the cattle, he swore at his horse, he swore at the rocks over which his horse stumbled; and he constantly strained his roving eyes to penetrate the darkness for pursuers. Every gulch and gully held for him a fresh terror.

"Gee! I wisht I was out of this onct!" burst from him when the howl of a wolf set his nerves jangling.

"What'd you say?" Smith stopped in the middle of a song he was singing.

"I said I wisht I was down where the monkeys are throwin' nuts! I'm chilly," declared Tubbs.

"Chilly? It's hot!"

Smith was light-hearted, sanguine. He told himself that perhaps it was as well, after all, that the hold-ups had got off with the "old woman's" money. She might have made trouble when she found that he meant to go or had gone with Dora.

"You can't tell about women," Smith said to himself. "They're like ducks: no two fly alike."

He felt secure, yet from force of habit his hand frequently sought his cartridge-belt, his rifle in its scabbard, his six-shooter in the holster under his arm. And while he serenely hummed the songs of the dance-halls and round-up camps, two silent figures, so close that they heard the clacking of the cattle's split hoofs, Tubbs's vacuous oaths, Smith's contented voice, were following with the business-like persistency of the law.

The four mounted men rode all night, speaking seldom, each thinking his own thoughts, dreaming his own dreams. Not until the faintest light grayed the east did the pursuers fall behind.

"We're not more'n a mile to water now"--Smith had made sure of his country this time--"and we'll hold the cattle in the brush and take turns watchin'."

"It's a go with me," answered Tubbs, yawning until his jaws cracked. "I'm asleep now."

Ralston and Babe knew that Smith would camp for several hours in the creek-bottom, so they dropped into a gulch and waited.

"They'll picket their horses first, then one of them will keep watch while the other sleeps. Very likely Tubbs will be the first guard, and, unless I'm mistaken, Tubbs will be dead to the world in fifteen minutes--though, maybe, he's too scared to sleep." Ralston's surmise proved to be correct in every particular.

After they had picketed their horses, Smith told Tubbs to keep watch for a couple of hours, while he slept.

"Couldn't we jest switch that programme around?" inquired Tubbs plaintively. "I can't hardly keep my eyes open."

"Do as I tell you," Smith returned sharply.

Tubbs eyed him with envy as he spread down his own and Tubbs's saddle-blankets.

"I ain't what you'd call 'crazy with the heat.'" Tubbs shivered. "Couldn't I crawl under one of them blankets with you?"

"You bet you can't. I'd jest as lief sleep with a bull-snake as a man," snorted Smith in disgust, and, pulling the blankets about his ears, was lost in oblivion.

"I kin look back upon times when I've enj'yed myself more," muttered Tubbs disconsolately, as he paced to and fro, or at intervals climbed wearily out of the creek-bottom to look and listen.

Ralston and Babe had concealed themselves behind a cut-bank which in the rainy season was a tributary of the creek. They were waiting for daylight, and for the guard to grow sleepy and careless. With little more emotion than hunters waiting in a blind for the birds to go over, the two men examined their rifles and six-shooters. They talked in undertones, laughing a little at some droll observation or reminiscence. Only by a sparkle of deviltry in Babe's blue eyes, and an added gravity of expression upon Ralston's face, at moments, would the closest observer have known that anything unusual was about to take place. Yet each realized to the fullest extent the possible dangers ahead of them. Smith, they knew to be resourceful, he would be desperate, and Tubbs, ignorant and weak of will as he was, might be frightened into a kind of frenzied courage. The best laid plans did not always work out according to schedule, and if by any chance they were discovered, and the thieves reached their guns, the odds were equal. But it was not their way to talk of danger to themselves. That there was danger was a fact, too obvious to discuss, but that it was no hindrance to the carrying out of their plans was also accepted as being too evident to waste words upon.

While the east grew pink, they talked of mutual acquaintances, of horses they had owned, of guns and big game, of dinners they had eaten, of socks and saddle blankets that had been stolen from them in cow outfits--the important and trivial were of like interest to these old friends waiting for what, as each well knew, might be their last sunrise.

Ralston finally crawled to the top of the cut-bank and looked cautiously about.

"It's time," he said briefly.

"_Bueno_." Babe gave an extra twitch to the silk handkerchief knotted about his neck, which, with him, signified a readiness for action.

He joined Ralston at the top of the cut-bank.

"Not a sign!" he whispered. "Looks like you and me owned the world, Dick."

"We'll lead the horses a little closer, in case we need them quick. Then, we'll keep that bunch of brush between us and them, till we get close enough. You take Tubbs, and I'll cover Smith--I want that satisfaction," he added grimly.

It was a typical desert morning, redolent with sage, which the night's dew brought out strongly. The pink light changing rapidly to crimson was seeking out the draws and coulees where the purple shadows of night still lay. The only sound was the cry of the mourning doves, answering each other's plaintive calls. And across the panorama of yellow sand, green sage-brush, burning cactus flowers, distant peaks of purple, all bathed alike in the gorgeous crimson light of morning, two dark figures crept with the stealthiness of Indians.

From behind the bush which had been their objective-point they could hear and see the cattle moving in the brush below; then a horse on picket snorted, and as they slid quietly down the bank they heard a sound which made Babe snicker.

"Is that a cow chokin' to death," he whispered, "or one of them cherubs merely sleepin'?"

In sight of the prone figures, they halted.

Smith, with his hat on, his head pillowed on his saddle, was rolled in an old army blanket; while Tubbs, from a sitting position against a tree, had fallen over on the ground with his knees drawn to his chin. His mouth, from which frightful sounds of strangulation were issuing, was wide open, and he showed a little of the whites of his eyes as he slumbered.

"Ain't he a dream?" breathed Babe in Ralston's ear. "How I'd like a picture of that face to keep in the back of my watch!"