CHAPTER XXIX--HIS LAST CARD

Hunt lingered in his sister's room after Joe Hurley had left them. They were talking when Maria came up to take away the tea things. The Mexican woman was greatly excited.

"Those bad men! She get it now--in the neck you say, si? My goodness, yes! He no run you out of town lak' he say, Señor Hunt."

"Who is this who wants to run me out?" asked Hunt good-naturedly. "I must be getting awfully unpopular in some quarters."

"Those bad man at Tolley's Grub Stake. Ah, yes, Señor! She hate you--my goodness, yes!"

Betty began to be troubled--as she always was when she heard her brother's peace threatened.

"Have you heard something new, Maria?" she asked the woman.

"Cholo, he hear. He come just now from the sheriff. A man come to town and he say he want those bad man."

"What bad man? Not my brother?" cried Betty.

"_Madre de Dios!_ Is the Señor Hunt bad?" gasped Maria. "Why, it is Dick the Deevil I say."

"Ah-ha!" muttered Hunt, with more interest than surprise. He did not look at Betty. "This man has something against Dick Beckworth?"

"Cholo whisper to me, jus' now, before I come up here, that the sheriff weel arres' Dick the Deevil. For robbery and swindle, you say. Si!"

"This is news!" ejaculated Hunt, putting on his coat and hat. "I must go down and get the particulars."

"Oh, Ford!"

What Betty might have said--how much she might have betrayed of her secret to her brother at that moment--will never be known. Before he could turn to look at her anguished face the house shook, and an atmospheric tremor seemed to pass over the town. An "airquake" was the better term for it! And with it they heard a continuous thundering roar that seemed to mingle with, yet almost drown, the chorus of the rivers which had been a monotone in their ears all day.

Maria screamed and flew out of the room. Hunt exclaimed:

"Something's blown up at one of the mines, perhaps. But Joe is all right. He could not have got far away from the hotel."

It was not until he ran down and reached the street that he learned the truth. Nell had pulled in her wet and exhausted pony before the hotel and was surrounded by the excited populace. Joe was with her, and Hunt, seeing both safe, was relieved.

The parson listened to her story with amazement and some of the dread that the older inhabitants of Canyon Pass felt. Something like this had happened twenty years before. She had seen a great landslide--a large part of the Overhang she thought--fall into the canyon. Already the rivers were backing up. Filled as they were by the recent unseasonable rains, the flood, if the canyon bed was really closed by the landslide, would soon rise into the town.

Hunt and Hurley joined a party that launched a big batteau to go down the Runaway to the first turn in the canyon wall to see just what the danger was. Most of the other inhabitants of Canyon Pass were crowding into Main Street. It might be that all would have to get back to the headlands where the mines were in order to escape the flood.

Betty, alone in her room in the hotel, saw the people milling about below and could only guess what it meant. She did not dare go down to ask about the catastrophe, and Maria did not return. But as she sat there, trembling not altogether from fear of what might happen to the town, she saw the knob of her door turn slowly. There was somebody in the hall--somebody coming in!

In her terror--terror of she knew not what--the girl could not move. She could only watch the frail door sag slowly open. She saw a hand with a sparkling diamond upon it. But it was a man's hand. A shoulder appeared as the door was thrust farther inward.

Then she saw the face of the intruder.

"Andy Wilkenson!"

Betty did not know that her voice was audible. But as the man slid in with the sleekness of a cat and closed the door behind him, he whispered:

"So you know me all right, do you? Then that makes it easier. You've got to hide me, Betty. They are after me. I got out of the Grub Stake through a window--just in time."

He laughed. There was a reckless gayety in his manner that was forced; but it seemed to Betty more terrible than if he had shown fear.

"You wouldn't want them to get your husband, would you, honey?" he went on, his back against the door, his eyes glittering. "And there's going to be high water. I can't get away at once. I've got to hide. You'll have to keep me here." He chuckled. "A girl wouldn't give her hubby up to the sheriff, would she? I----"

"Go away!" she gasped.

"Not a chance!" exclaimed Dick lightly. "That sheriff will comb the town. But he will never come into your bedroom, honey. And I'm going to stay here till the flurry is over."

He took a step into the room. Betty shrank from him. Her eyes were now aflame--and there was something besides fear in them.

"I will give you time to get out, Andy Wilkenson," she said hoarsely. "But no more. All I have to do is to raise this window and scream----"

"Dare to!" he snapped. "I'll stay right here. You're my wife----"

"Nobody will believe that if I deny it!" she exclaimed.

"So you think I can't prove it?" He laughed again. "I know that you would deny it if you could. I know that you even tore up the marriage certificate that old minister gave you. But I went back to him and got a copy. And I have got a copy of the license record, and all. Think I'm a fool? You may have fooled me about your aunt's money; but one never knows when such a moment as this may come. If you give me up to the sheriff, I'll tell 'em all just who and what you are. Mrs. Andy Wilkenson! Sounds good, don't it? And 'Andy Wilkenson' is Dick Beckworth. Being married under an assumed name don't make the tie any less binding, Betty. You are married to me hard and fast, and I'm going to turn the fact to good account. Don't doubt it!"

"I--I'll call my brother," said Betty weakly.

"I bet he doesn't know, either. Nor that Joe Hurley you've been chumming around with," and Dick chuckled hugely. "Oh, I've got you, my girl. You had the chance to call me, and call me good, that time. But it's my turn now. You are going to hide me here, and then help me get away. I know your breed. You'd die rather than let the story of our marriage get to the people of Canyon Pass."

The girl sat huddled in the chair by the window. She stared at him with an intensity of horror that seemed to have paralyzed her whole body. And what he said--his final declaration--she knew was true.

She would much rather die than have it revealed to all Canyon Pass that Dick the Devil was the discarded husband of the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt's sister!

The smile with which Dick watched the agonized girl marked the cruelty that was the underlying trait of his whole character. He knew she suffered. He knew how she suffered now. And he exulted in it.

But he was, too, fearful for his own safety. The crime he had committed miles away across the sheep range, and which had set the sheriff on his track, was a most despicable one. It was, too, in this community a crime that might easily excite the passions of the rougher element. Men had been lynched for much less than Dick Beckworth's crime!

With night coming on, the waters about the town rising, and no means for quick egress before morning at least, Dick the Devil realized that his only hope lay with this tortured girl. Aside from the satisfaction it gave him to make her shield him, he was quite aware that no better place than Betty Hunt's room could be imagined in which he might hide from the officers.

"There's a closet," he said finally, seeing the small door in the partition. "Put me in that. You can let your brother in if you like--or Joe Hurley." He sneered at her. "They'll never believe the proper Betty Hunt has a man hidden in her room. What's that?"

He hissed the question, grabbing the handle of the closet door, and looked back at the one opening from the hall. There was a light step outside; the door-knob rattled.

"Quick!" breathed Dick. "Don't say a word----"

He tried to open the closet door. Although it was a spring latch, it was likewise locked. All Betty's little valuables were in the closet, and she had the key.

"The key!" shrilled the man. "You fool! Do you want me to give the thing away? As sure as you are alive I'll tell them you're my wife. Quick!"

Betty did not move. She shook her head. The door-knob was again rattled. A muffled voice cried:

"Betty!"

The knob turned--as it had before, slowly, hesitatingly. The door was pushed inward. Dick the Devil snatched a pistol from its sling under his left armpit, with the motion of a rattlesnake about to strike.

Nell Blossom stepped into the room and closed the door swiftly behind her. She had seen Betty. Her cry of "Betty! what's happened?" was answered by a sigh from Dick of such relief that it seemed like a sob.

Alert as she could be, Nell wheeled to look at the man. Although there was no light in the room and the evening was drawing on, the singer knew that half-crouching figure at first glance. She saw, too, the flash of the weapon in the gambler's hand.

"Dick Beckworth! I might have known you'd come sneaking to a girl's room to hide," said Nell, her voice quite unshaken. "Put away that gun. I'm not the sheriff."

Dick was silent. But he had the grace to put away his gun. Nell said to Betty:

"Has he scared you, honey? Don't you mind. Dick the Devil has got his comeupance this time, I reckon. The minute he steps out of this house they'll nab him. Somebody saw him sneak in by the back way. But nobody thought of his daring to come into your room. Come on, you, get out! Take your miserable carcass off to some other part of the house."

"Oh, Nell!" breathed Betty.

"Don't you be afraid, honey," said the cabaret singer again. "This rascal knows me, I reckon. It's too bad he wasn't killed--like I thought he was--back last spring when I was fool enough to be caught by his sleek ways and talk. Oh, yes! I played the fool. And I come pretty near believing since that time that there wasn't any decent men in the world. All because of that whelp."

For once Dick Beckworth had nothing to say. At another time he might have flouted the girl. But the moment was not propitious. He stood and glared from Nell to Betty, and back again; but said nothing.

"Come! Beat it!" said Nell harshly. "Don't you hear me?"

"I am going to remain here," Dick said in a low voice. "Right here."

"Not much!" Nell wheeled to open the door. "I'll call 'em up. They are watching for you below."

"Nell!" gasped Betty.

"You better speak for me," sneered Dick. "I don't reckon that you two girls will turn me over to the sheriff. Don't forget, Nellie, that once I was your honey-boy."

The mining-camp girl's whole person seemed to fire under this spur. Her face blazed. She was tense with wrath--wrath that she could not for the moment audibly express.

But when she did speak her voice was as hard as ice and her accents as cold:

"Dick Beckworth, you get out of here! March!"

"Not much."

Nell had been riding. She never went abroad on horseback without wearing her belt and gun. The latter flashed into her hand too quickly for Dick to have again produced his weapon, had he so desired.

"Put 'em up!" was Nell's concise command. "Don't flutter a finger wrong. I been thinking for months that I saw you go over that cliff to your death. Maybe I worried some over being the possible cause of your taking that drop. But I feel a whole lot different about you now, Dick Beckworth. Keep your hands up and march out of this room."

The man, sneering, his countenance torn with emotion, his eyes as glittering as those of an angered serpent, came forward into the middle of the room again. He was staring at Betty rather than at Nell. He said to the former:

"You going to let me go out, Betty?"

"Oh! Oh! I----"

"Don't mind even to answer him--the dog!" Nell muttered. "I swear, after this, I would not lift a hand to stop the boys from stringing him up."

"Is that so?" queried Dick, turning to her again. "You think you've got things your own way, don't you? I'll show you. Betty! tell this girl what and who I am and why I am not going to leave this room. Tell her, my dear, why you can't bear to see me given up to the sheriff."

"You dog!" ejaculated Nell.

"Tell her, Betty," commanded Dick, but without raising his voice.

The parson's sister, fairly writhing in her chair, put up her clasped hands to Nell. She whispered brokenly:

"Don't--don't send him out. Don't tell, Nell. I--I couldn't bear it!"

"In the name of common sense," queried the singer, "what do you mean? This fellow's frightened you out of your wits."

"No, no! For my sake----"

"You're crazy. He can't hurt you. I have him under my gun. If he makes a move----"

"Betty!" shot in Dick.

"For Ford's sake let him stay!" begged Betty, and sank back in her chair again, almost at the point of collapse.