Hidden Gold Part 25

Santry stifled an exclamation of rage in answer to a quick look from his friend.

"Kidnaped from his own range in broad daylight," the latter went on. "I represent his friends, who mean to find him right away, and it has occurred to me that you may be able to a.s.sist us in our search."

"Just why has that idea occurred to you?" Rexhill asked calmly, as though out of mere curiosity. "I'd like to know."

A bit baffled by this att.i.tude of composure, Trowbridge hesitated, for it was not at all what he had expected to combat. If the Senator had flown into a pa.s.sion, the cattleman would have responded with equal heat; now he was less sure of himself and his ground. It was barely possible, after all, that Tug Bailey had shot Jensen out of personal spite; or, at the worst, had been the tool of Moran alone. One could hardly a.s.sociate the thought of murder with the very prosperous looking gentleman, who so calmly faced them and twirled his eyegla.s.ses between his fingers.

"Why should that idea have occurred to you?" the Senator asked again.

"So far as I am informed, Wade is also liable to arrest for complicity in the Jensen murder; in addition to which he has effected a jail delivery and burglarized my office. It seems to me, if he has been kidnaped as you say, that I am the last person to have any interest in his welfare, or his whereabouts. Why do you come to me?"

This was too much for Santry's self-restraint.

"What's the use of talkin' to him?" he demanded. "If he ain't done it himself, don't we know that Moran done it for him? To h.e.l.l with talkin'!" He shook a gnarled fist at Rexhill, who paid no attention whatever to him, but deliberately looked in another direction.

"That is why we are here," said Trowbridge, when he had quieted Santry once more. "Because we have good reason to believe that, if these acts do not proceed from you, they do proceed from your agent, and you're responsible for what he does, if I know anything about law. This man Moran has carried things with a high hand in this community, but now he's come to the end of his rope, and he's going to be punished. That means that you'll get yours, too, if he's acted under your orders." The cattleman was getting into his stride now that the first moments of his embarra.s.sment were pa.s.sed. His voice rang with authority, which the Senator was quick to recognize, although he gave no evidence that he was impressed. "Has Moran been acting for you, that's what we want to know?"

"My dear fellow,"--Rexhill laughed rumblingly,--"if you'll only stop for an instant to think, you'll see how absurd this is."

"A frank answer to a frank question," Trowbridge persisted. "Has he been acting for you? Do you, at this moment, know what has become of Wade, or where he is?"

"That's the stuff!" growled Santry, whose temples were throbbing under the effort he put forth to hold himself within bounds.

"I do not!" the Senator said, bluntly. "And I'll say freely that I would not tell you if I did."

Santry's hands opened and shut convulsively. He was in the act of springing upon Rexhill when Trowbridge seized him.

"You're a liar!" he roared, struggling in his friend's grasp. "Let me at him. By the great horned toad, I'll make him tell!"

"Put that man out of this room!" Rexhill had arisen in all of his ponderous majesty, roused to wrath at last. His pudgy finger shook as he pointed to the door, and his fat face was congested. "I'm not here to be insulted by a jail-bird. Put him out!"

Trowbridge's eyes gleamed exultantly, although he still kept a tight hold on Santry, for this was the sort of thing he had expected to meet.

He had not thought that Rexhill would confess complicity in the kidnaping this early in the game; but he had looked for an outburst of anger which would give him the chance he wanted to free his own mind of the hate that was in it. He had wanted the chance to make Rexhill feel that his hour of atonement was close at hand, and getting nearer every minute.

"Easy, now!" he admonished. "We're going, both of us, but we won't be put out. You've said just what I looked for you to say. You've denied knowledge of this thing. I think with Santry here that you're a liar, a G.o.d-forsaken liar." He drew closer to the Senator, who seemed about to burst with pa.s.sion, and held him with a gaze his fury could not daunt.

"May Heaven help you, Senator, when we're ready to prove all this against you. If you're in Crawling Water then, we'll ride you to h.e.l.l on a rail."

"Now," Trowbridge said to Santry, when they were downstairs again, "you get out of town hot-foot. Ride to my place. Take this!" He scribbled a few lines on the back of an envelope. "Give it to my foreman. Tell him to meet me with the boys where the trail divides. We'll find Wade, if we have to trade our beds for lanterns and kill every horse in the valley."

The two men shook hands, and Santry's eyes were fired with a new hope.

The old man was grateful for one thing, at least: the time for action had arrived. He had spent his youth on the plains in the days when every man was a law unto himself, and the years had not lessened his spirit.

"I'll be right after you, Bill," Trowbridge concluded. "I'm going first to break the news to Miss Purnell. She'd hear it anyway and be anxious.

She'd better get it straight from me."

Lem Trowbridge had seen only one woman faint, but the recollection was indelibly impressed upon his mind. It had happened in his boyhood, at the ranch where he still lived, when a messenger had arrived with word of the death of the elder Trowbridge, whose horse had stepped into a prairie-dog hole and fallen with his rider. The picture of his mother's collapse he could never forget, or his own horrible thought that she, too, had pa.s.sed away, leaving him parentless. For months afterwards he had awakened at night, crying out that she was dead.

The whole scene recurred to him when he told Dorothy of Wade's disappearance, and saw her face flush and then pale, as his mother's had done. The girl did not actually faint, for she was young and wonderfully strong, but she came so near to it that he was obliged to support her with his arm to keep her on her feet. That was cruel, too, for he loved her. But presently she recovered, and swept from his mind all thought of himself by her piteous appeal to him to go instantly in search of Wade.

"We'll find him, Dorothy, don't you worry," he declared, with an appearance of confidence he was far from feeling. "I came around to tell you myself because I wanted you to know that we are right on the job."

"But how can you find him in all those mountains, Lem? You don't even know which side of the range they've hidden him on."

He reminded her that he had been born in Crawling Water Valley, and that he knew every draw and canyon in the mountains; but in his heart he realized that to search all these places would take half a lifetime. He could only hope that chance, or good fortune, might lead them promptly to the spot they sought.

"Do you think that Senator Rexhill knows where Gordon is?" she asked.

"Is he in this, too?"

"I don't know for sure," he answered. "I believe Moran is acting under Rexhill's orders, but I don't know how much Rexhill knows of the details. If I knew that, it would be fairly easy. I'd...." His strong hands gripped the back of a chair until his knuckles showed white under their tan. "I'd choke it out of him!"

"Oh, if there was only something I could do!" Dorothy wailed helplessly.

"A woman never can do anything in a crisis but _wait_!" Her distress was so pitiable to witness that Trowbridge averted his gaze.

"We'll do all that can be done, Dorothy," he a.s.sured her. "Trust me for that. Besides--" A thought had just flashed into his head which might relieve her sense of helplessness. "Besides, we're going to need you here in town to keep us informed of what goes on."

"If I learn anything, how can I get word to you?" she asked, her face brightening somewhat. "You'll be up in the hills."

"I'll try to keep a man at the big pine all the time. If you find out anything send word to him."

"Oh, yes, I will, I will. That'll be something anyhow." Her eyes sparkling with tears, she gave him both her hands. "Good-by, Lem!"

"Good-by, Dorothy," he said solemnly, wringing her hands. "I know just how it is. We'll find him for you!"

CHAPTER XVI

TRAPPED

When Wade first opened his eyes, after he had been stricken senseless, he was first conscious of his throbbing head, and on seeking the reason of the pain, was amazed to find his fingers stained with the blood which matted his hair. With an exclamation he struggled to his feet, still too dazed to think clearly, but sufficiently aroused to be startled by the predicament in which he found himself.

He was at the bottom of a rock-walled fissure, about six feet wide by twenty feet in length. There was no way to climb out of this natural prison, for its granite sides, fifteen feet in height, were without crack, projection, or other foothold; indeed, in the light of the afternoon sun, one _facade_ shone smooth as gla.s.s. If he should be left there without sustenance, he told himself, he might as well be entombed; then, to his delight, he caught the sound of splashing water. At least, he would not perish of thirst, for at one end of the rocky chamber a tiny stream fell down the face of the cliff, to disappear afterward through a narrow cleft. A draught of the cool water refreshed him somewhat, and when he had bathed his head as well as he could, he sat down on the warm sand to think over the situation.

Now that his brain was clearing he felt sure that his capture was the work of Moran, doubtless planned as a revenge for the events of their last meeting, although what shape this revenge was to take the cattleman could not guess. He feared that he would either be shot or left to starve in this _cul-de-sac_ in the hills. The thought of all that he and his friends had suffered through Moran lashed the ranchman temporarily to fury; but that he soon controlled as well as he could, for he found its only result was to increase the pain in his head, without aiding to solve the problem of escape. The prospect of getting out of his prison seemed remote, for one glance at its precipitate walls had shown him that not even a mountain goat could scale them. Help, if it came at all, must come through Santry, who could be counted on to arouse the countryside. The thought of the state the old man must be in worried Wade; and he was too familiar with the vast number of small canyons and hidden pockets in the mountains to believe that his friends would soon find him. Before help could reach him, undoubtedly Moran would show his hand, in which for the present were all the trumps.

It was characteristic of the cattleman that, with the full realization of his danger, should come a great calm. He had too lively an imagination to be called a man of iron nerve, for that quality of courage is not so often a virtue as a lack of sensitiveness. He who is courageous because he knows no fear is not so brave by half as he who gauges the extent of his peril and rises superior to it. Wade's courage was of the latter sort, an ascendancy of the mind over the flesh.

Whenever danger threatened him, his nerves responded to his need with the precision of the taut strings of a perfectly tuned fiddle under a master hand. He had been more nervous, many a time, over the thought of some one of his men riding a dangerous horse or turning a stampede, than he was now that his own life seemed threatened.

Shrugging his broad shoulders, he rolled and smoked a cigarette. The slight exhilaration of the smoke, acting on his weakened condition, together with the slight dizziness still remaining from the blow on his head, was far from conducing to clear thinking, but he forced himself to careful thought. He was less concerned about himself than he was about Santry and Dorothy; particularly Dorothy, for he had now come to appreciate how closely she had come into his life. Her sympathy had been very sweet to him, but he told himself that he would be sorry to have her worry about him now, when there was so little chance of their seeing each other again. He had no great hope of rescue. He expected to die, either by violence or by the slower process of starvation, but in either case he meant to meet his fate like a man.

Of Helen Rexhill, he thought now with a sense of distaste. It was altogether unlikely that she had been privy to her father's depredations, but certainly she countenanced them by her presence in Crawling Water, and she had shown up so poorly in contrast with Dorothy Purnell that Wade could not recall his former tenderness for his early sweetheart. Even if great good fortune should enable him to escape from his prison, the interests of the Rexhill family were too far removed from his own to be ever again bridged by the tie of love, or even of good-feeling. He could not blame the daughter for the misdeeds of her parent, but the old sentiment could never be revived. It was not for Helen that the instinct of self-preservation stirred within him, nor was it in her eyes that he would look for the light of joy over his rescue, if rescue should come.

He smoked several cigarettes, until the waning of his supply of tobacco warned him to economize against future cravings. Realizing that even if his friends were within a stone's throw of him they would not be likely to find him unless he gave some sign of his presence, he got to his feet and, making a trumpet out of his hands, shouted loudly. He repeated this a dozen times, or more, and was about to sink back upon the sand when he heard footsteps approaching on the ground overhead. He had little idea that a friend was responding to his call, but being unarmed he could do no more than crouch against the wall of the cliff while he scanned the opening above him.

Presently there appeared in the opening the head of a Texan, Goat Neale, whom Wade recognized as a member of Moran's crew and a man of some note as a gunfighter.

"How," drawled the Texan, by way of greeting. "Feelin' pretty good?"