Brand Blotters Part 28

"And if they don't believe that you are going out of the sheep business--what then?"

"I shall have to take my chance of that."

She seemed about to speak, but changed her mind, nodded, swung to the saddle, and rode forward. After a few minutes Bellamy followed slowly. He was unarmed, not having doubted that his letter to the cattleman would make his journey safe. That he should have waited for an answer was now plain, but the contract called for an immediate delivery of the sheep, as he had carefully explained in his note to Farnum.

Presently he heard again the clatter of a horse's hoofs in the loose shale and saw Melissy returning.

"Well?" he asked as she drew up.

"I've told them. I think they believe me, but I'm going through the gorge with you."

He looked up quickly to protest, but did not. He knew that her thought was that her presence beside him would protect him from attack. The rough chivalry of Arizona takes its hat off to a woman, and Melissy Lee was a favorite of the whole countryside.

So together they pa.s.sed into the gulch, Bellamy walking by the side of her horse. Neither of them spoke. At their heels was the soft rustle of many thousands of padding feet.

Once there came to them the sound of cheering, and they looked up to see a group of vaqueros waving their hats and shouting down. Melissy shook her handkerchief and laughed happily at them. It was a day to be remembered by these riders.

They emerged into a roll of hill-tops upon which the setting sun had cast a weird afterglow of radiance in which the whole world burned. The cactus, the stunted shrubbery, the painted rocks, seemed all afire with some magic light that had touched their commonness to a new wonder.

A sound came to them from below. A man, rifle in hand and leading a horse, was stealthily crossing the trail to disappear among the large boulders beyond.

Melissy did not speak, scarce dared to draw breath, for the man beneath them was Boone. There was something furtive and lupine about him that suggested the wild beast stalking its kill. No doubt he had become impatient to see the end of his foe and had ridden forward. He had almost crossed the path before he looked up and caught sight of them standing together in the fireglow of the sunset.

Abruptly he came to a standstill.

"By G.o.d! you slipped through, did you?" he said in a low voice of concentrated bitterness.

Bellamy did not answer, but he separated himself from the girl by a step or two. He knew quite well what was coming, and he looked down quietly with steady eyes upon his foe.

From far below there came the faint sound of a horse breaking its way through brush. Boone paused to listen, but his eye never wandered from the bareheaded, motionless figure silhouetted against the skyline in the ruddy evening glow. He had shifted his rifle so that it lay in both hands, ready for immediate action.

Melissy, horror-stricken, had sat silent, but now she found her voice.

"He is unarmed!" she cried to the cowpuncher.

He made no answer. Another sound in the brush, close at hand, was distracting his attention, though not his gaze.

Just as he whipped up his rifle Melissy sprang forward. She heard the sound of the explosion fill the draw, saw Bellamy clutch at the air and slowly sink to the ground. Before the echoes had died away she had flung herself toward the inert body.

The outlaw took a step or two forward, as if to make sure of his work, but at the sound of running footsteps he changed his mind, swung to the saddle and disappeared among the rocks.

An instant later Bob Farnum burst into view.

"What's up?" he demanded.

Melissy looked up. Her face was perfectly ashen. "Phil Norris ... he shot Mr. Morse."

Farnum stepped forward. "Hurt badly, Mr. Morse?"

The wounded man grinned faintly. "Scared worse, I reckon. He got me in the fleshy part of the left arm."

CHAPTER XIII

OLD ACQUAINTANCES

"You wanted to see me?"

The voice had the soft, slow intonation of the South, and it held some quality that haunted the memory. Or so Melissy thought afterward, but that may have been because of its owner's appeal to sympathy.

"If you are Miss Yarnell."

"Ferne Yarnell is my name."

"Mr. Bellamy asked me to call on you. He sent this letter of introduction."

A faint wave of color beat into the cheek of the stranger. "You know Mr.

Bellamy then?"

"Yes. He would have been here to meet you, but he met with an accident yesterday."

"An accident!" There was a quick flash of alarm in the lifted face.

"He told me to tell you that it was not serious. He was shot in the arm."

"Shot. By whom?" She was ashen to the lips.

"By a man called Duncan Boone."

"I know him. He is a dangerous man."

"Yes," Melissy nodded. "I don't think we know how very dangerous he is. We have all been deceived in him till recently."

"Does he live here?"

"Yes. The strange thing is that he and Mr. Bellamy had never met in this country until a few days ago. There used to be some kind of a feud between the families. But you must know more about that than I do."

"Yes. My family is involved in the feud. Mr. Bellamy is a distant cousin of mine."

"So he told me."

"Have you known him long?"

Melissy thought that there was a little more than curiosity in the quick look the young woman flung at her.