CHAPTER XXII--A FACE IN THE STORM

An interruption--a voice as hoarse as the croak of a vulture--rose above the din of other voices:

"Tolley! You other fellers! Put 'em up! H'ist 'em!"

Tolley halted--it seemed in midflight. Even the gun hand of Tom Hicks relaxed. From the other side of the room old Steve Siebert commanded the situation--and the group of desperate men. The black muzzle of his gun gaped like the mouth of a cannon. Hunt did not stand between him and Tolley's crowd. The old man steadied the barrel of his weapon on the edge of the table behind which he sat and covered the bunch perfectly.

"H'ist 'em!" he said again, and as Tolley's gun clattered to the floor and Hicks thrust back his weapon into his sheath, he added: "I don't aim to mix in what ain't my business, as a usual thing. But when I see seven skunks goin' after two boys--an' one o' them a parson and not ironed a-tall--I reckon on takin' a hand. Put 'em up!"

The ruffians obeyed. Seven pairs of hands reached for the smoke-begrimed ceiling. Several startled faces appeared under the archway between the barroom and the dance hall. One was the desert-bitten countenance of Andy McCann. He would not have sat to drink in the same room with his one-time partner; but Steve Siebert's voice had stung McCann to action. Steve saw him.

"Andy, you derned old rat!" Steve cried, "shut that office door and lock it. Then, just frisk them rustlers and remove their irons. There ain't goin' to be no shootin'. Whatever the row is, it's goin' to be settled plumb peaceful."

McCann snarled at the other old pocket-hunter like a tiger cat; but he obeyed--and not without some enjoyment of the chagrin of Tolley and his gangsters.

"It takes us old sourdoughs to be slick," he chuckled, when he had dumped an armful of guns on an empty table. "You boys ain't dry behind the ears yet when it comes to shootin' scrapes."

"There ain't goin' to be no shootin'," repeated Steve Siebert. "Not 'nless them fellers start it with their mouths," and he grinned such a toothless grin that he almost lost his grip on the pipestem clamped in one corner of his mouth.

"Now, what's it all about? What's the row? What gal you talkin' about? Who's the feller that was killed? I'm sort o' curious."

Joe Hurley stood erect again. He laughed.

"Great saltpeter!" he exclaimed, "you certainly are a friend in need, old-timer."

"Come on," rejoined Steve. "Let's have the pertic'lars."

It was the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt who took upon himself the explanation.

"Nell Blossom!" cried Steve. "That leetle songbird? You mean to say all this row is over her?"

"Mr. Tolley has made the statement that Miss Blossom was the cause of this Beckworth's death. His horse went over the cliff into the canyon. Whether or not the man went with it----"

"He did!" cried Andy McCann, smiting his thigh resoundingly with his palm. "By gravy! Is that what's eatin' all you fellers?"

"Say! Who's runnin' this court, I'd like to know?" demanded Steve Siebert angrily.

"Aw, shut up--you old lizard," said McCann, flaming at him. "'Tain't no court. It ain't nothin' like it. Put up your gun. It's all off. Dick the Devil ain't dead at all. At least he wasn't killed that time he went over the cliff. He's Dick the Devil sure 'nough, and he's got more luck than a hanged man."

"Just what do you mean?" Hunt asked.

"Why, we seen him--me and that old rat sittin' there with his gun, makin' goo-goo eyes. Sure! And me and him pulled Dick out of the river. He went clean over his horse's head and landed in the river--same's a bird. He might have been drowned if me and that ground owl there hadn't got him out. But he never said one word about Nell Blossom bein' with him or havin' anything to do with his comin' down that cliff. No, sir!"

"Nary a word," agreed the surprised Siebert. "Nary a word."

"What--what became of him?" stammered Hunt, a great weight lifted from his heart.

"He went along with me to the edge of the desert," said Siebert slowly. "He dried out at my fire that night. Next morning he lit out to hit the Lamberton trail. That's all I know about Dick."

"And it's more than I knowed," grunted Andy McCann. "That old rat there might have garroted Dick for his money. But it sure wasn't Nell Blossom that croaked Dick the Devil--if he's dead at all."

Here Hunt stepped between the two old prospectors. It looked as though somebody had to separate them or there might have been a shooting, after all!

But it was Joe Hurley who had the last word. He set up the overturned table and walked over to the bar.

"To show that there's no hard feelings," he drawled, "this'll be on me. Get busy, Tolley, on the right side of this bar. And hereafter, you think twice before you say anything you're not dead sure of about Nell Blossom. Somebody'd better drag Sam Tubbs out from under that table. He don't want to miss this."

There sounded a sudden rush of heavily shod feet outside the barroom door. As Hunt had expected, an angry crowd from Colorado Brown's burst in.

"Just in season, boys," Hurley continued. "All a mistake about our Nell. Tolley just proved himself to be as careless with the truth as he always is. Isn't that so, Tolley?"

Tolley grunted.

* * * * *

The winter weather forecast by the return of Steve Siebert and Andy McCann from the desert held off the next morning when Betty Hunt and Nell started on their usual ride into the hills.

Nell had heard a garbled report but few of the particulars of the incident which the night before had threatened bloodshed at the Grub Stake. She knew that the parson had again done something that was sure to endear him to the Passonians in general. And his courageous act had been in her cause. But she had failed to learn of the disproval of Dick Beckworth's reported death.

She said nothing to Betty about the incident. She had begun to shrink from discussing the rougher side of the life of Canyon Pass with the parson's sister. As Joe Hurley would have expressed it, Nell Blossom was becoming "right gentled" through her association with Betty Hunt.

Betty herself, in Nell's company, managed to put aside those more serious thoughts and anxieties of mind that ruffled her natural composure at other times. Since the day, weeks before, when she had been forced to wreck Joe Hurley's hope of happiness, the cloud of despondency that overshadowed her life seemed at times greater than she could live under.

Nor could the Eastern girl put aside such thoughts of the Westerner as at first amazed and startled, then revealed to the honest soul of Betty Hunt that the unfortunate circumstance in her past life that made it impossible for her to make Joe happy, likewise barred her own heart from happiness.

Wicked as her strict upbringing made the fact seem, she had to admit that she had fallen under the spell of Joe Hurley's generous character, that she loved him. She could not deny this discovery, although it filled her mind with confusion. Wedded to a man she hated and in love with a man she could not wed!

In any event, this was a secret--like the other that so disturbed her--which under no circumstances could she confide to either her brother or any friend. At first she felt the discovery a degrading one. Brought up as she had been under the grim puritanism of her Aunt Prudence Mason, the idea of a married woman admitting that she loved a man other than the one she was married to was a sin. The idea of divorce was as foreign to her religious training as was the thought of fratricide.

She was cheerful on the surface at least when she and Nell rode out of Canyon Pass and through the East Fork. They climbed the canyon wall on that side by a tortuous path on which only a burro or a very sure-footed pony was safe. It was Nell, when they were once on the summit, who discovered the threat of a weather change.

The air was very keen. Many of the bushes by the way had shriveled during the night as though before a furnace blast.

"Black frost," said the younger girl. "Old Steve and Andy know their little book. Sam says Steve told him there was a blizzard coming. We won't ride far to-day, Betty."

"A blizzard? Only fancy," murmured the Eastern girl.

She was not much impressed. She had no experience--even of New England winter storms--to enable her to judge the nature of a storm in these Western mountains.

But Nell should have known better than to lead the way into a gulch which quite shut them in from sight of the surrounding country. A blizzard is a chancy thing; and often the first storm of a Western winter is the worst of all.

They rode to a spring at which deer drank; they saw many tracks, but there were none of the pretty creatures in sight. Birds fluttered through the chaparral with strange cries, and the rabbits ran back and forth as though much disturbed by domestic happenings.

"I never saw them jacks so queer acting," said Nell thoughtfully. "We'd better ride home, Betty."

"Why?" asked the other girl gayly. "You are not afraid they will attack us, are you?"

"Not that," and the Western-born young woman smiled. "But there's something comin', I reckon--just as Steve and Andy say."

Before they rode up out of the gulch they heard something slashing like a multitude of knives through the dead leaves overhead. When they rode out into the open they beheld the thick cloud that had almost reached the zenith, and out of that cloud came not snow, but ice!

Fine particles of the sharpest crystal were driven in a thick haze through the singing air. Nell instantly whipped off her neckcloth and tied it across her nose and mouth, warning Betty to follow her example.

"Get this in your lungs, Betty, and you'll have pneumonia as sure as sure!" she shouted.

Frightened, they urged their ponies on to the beginning of the rough path down the canyon wall. Although they were soon somewhat sheltered from the driving ice-storm there were bare places where the two girls suffered the full force of the gale.

"I know a place!" cried Nell in a muffled voice. "We got to hole up till this stops. Come on!"

It had grown dark of a sudden. Nell pulled her pony off the path, and he picked his way daintily to a cavity in the wall. Here an overhanging rock offered some shelter. At least, the girls were out of the steady beat of the storm.

They dismounted and got behind the ponies, between their warm bodies and the rock itself. If Betty was the more frightened of the two, she showed it no more than did Nell Blossom.

The air became thicker and the whine of the wind rose to a shriek which all but drowned their voices when they tried to communicate with each other. It was such a manifestation of the storm king as Betty Hunt had never seen before.

They were but a little way off the path. Suddenly both girls, in spite of the wind, heard the clatter of shod hoofs. Another horse was coming down the path. In a moment they dimly saw the looming figure of a man leading the animal.

"Who is it?" gasped Betty, but if Nell heard the question she did not answer.

Nell clutched Betty's wrist for silence. The girls stared at the man beating his way downward. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, but they could see the long, black, curling hair flowing from beneath it. He turned his face toward them, and Betty beheld the keen face and heavy mustache of the stranger she had seen hiding from the sheriff and his posse weeks before near the trail to Hoskins!

The man progressed so slowly, and he was so near, that the Eastern girl could study his features now with more certainty. There was something in the contour of his face that reminded her of Andy Wilkenson!

Could it be he? Was it possible that this fugitive--the man the officers had accused of a crime--was the debonair Andy who had so enthralled her girlish mind and heart back there at Grandhampton Hall?

She had not forgotten Wilkenson's observations about Crescent City. Betty had never ceased to fear that he might appear to her in this part of the great West. But here--now--and in this dramatic manner?

Much shaken, she turned to look at Nell Blossom. She suddenly realized that the other girl was sagging against her shoulder very strangely. She glanced down into Nell's muffled face.

The younger girl's eyes were closed. She was as pallid as death itself. Nell Blossom had fainted!