The Boss of the Lazy Y Part 30

"Wait!" she cried as Taggart gave her arms an extra vicious twitch; "you may have it!"

He released her with a greedy, satisfied grin and stood crouching and alert while she turned her back to him and fumbled in her bodice, where she had kept the diagram since the discovery of its former hiding place by Telza.

She turned presently and gave him the paper, and he seized it eagerly and examined it, gloating over it.

"That's it," he said; "that's the clearing!"

She was holding her arms, where he had squeezed them, her face flushed with rage at the indignity he had offered her. She stood rigid, defiant.

"If that is all you came for, you may go," she said; "go instantly!"

He jammed the paper into his pocket and grinned at her.

"It ain't all," he said. "I owe you somethin' for the way you've treated me. I'm goin' to pay it. You've been too much of a lady to talk to me, but you'll live here with that--"

He reached suddenly out and seized her hands again, attempting to throw an arm around her. She evaded the arm and wrenched herself free, slipping past him and darting to the other side of the table. He stood opposite her, his hands on the table as he leaned toward her, grinning at her, brutally and b.e.s.t.i.a.lly, and pausing so as to prolong his enjoyment of her predicament.

"I'll get you, d.a.m.n you!" he said; "I've got the time and you can't get out." He seized the kerosene lamp on the table and walking backward, placed it on a shelf at the side of the wall near the stove. Then with a chuckle of satisfaction and mockery he again went to the table seizing its edge in his hands and shoving it against her so that she was forced to retreat from its advance.

She divined instantly that he intended to force her against one of the walls and thus corner her, and she opposed her strength to his, pushing with all her power against the table in an effort to r.e.t.a.r.d its advance.

It was to no purpose, for he was a strong man and his pa.s.sions were aroused, and in spite of her brave struggle the table continued to move and she to retreat before it.

"Oh!" she said, in a panic of fear and dread, her face flushed, her eyes wide and bright, her breath coming in great panting sobs; "Oh! you beast! You beast!"

He did not answer. His eyes were burning with a wanton fire, they glowed with the fierce, fell purpose of animal desire; he breathed shrilly, rapidly, gaspingly, though the strength that he had been compelled to use to overmatch hers had not been great.

She did not succeed in r.e.t.a.r.ding the advance of the table, but she did succeed in directing its course a little, so that instead of backing her against the wall, as he no doubt intended to do, she brought up finally against the stove in the corner.

There was a fire in the stove--she had kept it going to keep Calumet's supper warm--and when she felt her body against it she reached around and secured a flat iron. The handle burned her hand, but she lifted it and hurled it with all her force at his head. He dodged, laughing derisively. She seized another and threw it, and this he dodged also.

She was reaching for the teakettle when he shoved the table aside and lunged at her, and she dropped the kettle with a scream of horror and slipped around the stove to the wall near the sitting-room door, reaching the latter and trying frantically to unbar it.

She heard Bob's voice on the other side of the door; he was calling, "Betty! Betty!" in shrill, scared accents, and when Taggart leaped at her, seizing her by the shoulders as she worked with the fastenings of the door, she screamed to Bob to get the rifle from Malcolm's room, directing him to go out the front way, go around to the kitchen and shoot Taggart through one of the windows.

How long she struggled with Taggart there by the door she did not know.

It might have been an hour or merely a minute. But she fought him, clawing at his face with her hands, biting him, kicking him. And she remembered that he was getting the better of her, that his breath was in her face and that he was dragging her toward the lamp on the shelf, evidently intending to extinguish it--that he had almost reached it, was, indeed, reaching a hand out to grasp it, when there came a flash from the window, the crash of breaking gla.s.s, and the roar of an exploding firearm.

She also remembered thinking that Bob had taken a desperate chance in shooting at Taggart when she was so close to him, and she had a vivid recollection of Taggart releasing her and staggering back without uttering a sound. She caught a glimpse of his face as he sank to the floor; there was a gaping hole in his forehead and his eyes were set and staring with an expression of awful horror and astonishment. Then the kitchen darkened, she felt the floor rising to meet her, and she knew no more.

CHAPTER XXIII

FOR THE ALTARS OF HIS TRIBE

The first sound that Betty heard when consciousness began to return to her was a loud pounding at the kitchen door.

She had fallen to the floor just beneath the shelf on which the lamp sat, and she raised herself on an elbow and looked around. At first she did not remember what had happened, and then she saw Taggart, lying face upward on the floor near her, the frightful hole in his forehead, and she shuddered as recollection in a sickening flood came to her.

Bob, dear Bob, had not failed her.

She got up, trembling a little, breathing a prayer of thankfulness, shrinking from the Thing that lay on the floor at her feet with its horror-stricken eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, making her way to the kitchen door, for the pounding had grown louder and more insistent, and she could hear a voice calling hoa.r.s.ely to her.

But it did not seem to be Bob's voice; it was deeper and more resonant, and vibrated clearly, strongly, and with pa.s.sion. It was strangely familiar, though, and she shook a little with a nameless anxiety and antic.i.p.ation as she fumbled at the fastenings of the door and swung it open.

It was not Bob, but Calumet, who stepped in. One of his heavy pistols was in his right hand; with the left he had helped her to swing the door open, and he stood, for the first brief instant following his entrance, his arms extended, gazing sharply at Taggart. Then, quickly, apparently satisfied that he need have no concern for his enemy, he turned to Betty, placed both hands on her shoulders--the heavy pistol in his right resting on her--she felt the warmth of the barrel as it touched the thin material of her dress and knew then that it had been he who had fired the shot that had been the undoing of her a.s.sailant--and holding her away from him a little peered searchingly at her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Calumet stepped in.]

His face was pale, his lips stiff and white, and his eyes were alight with the wanton fire that she had seen in them many times, though now there was something added to their expression--concern and thankfulness.

"G.o.d!" he said, after a little s.p.a.ce, during which she looked at him with shining eyes. She no longer gave any thought to Taggart; the struggle with him was an already fading nightmare in her recollection; he had been eliminated, destroyed, by the man who stood before her--by the man whose presence in the kitchen now stirred her to an emotion that she had never before experienced--by the man who had come back to her. And that was all that she had cared for--that he would come back.

With a short laugh he released her and stepped over to where Taggart lay, looking down at him with a cold, satisfied smile.

"I reckon you won't bother n.o.body any more," he said.

He turned to Betty, the pale stiffness of his lips softening a little as she smiled at him.

"I want to thank you," he said, "for sendin' Toban after me. He caught me. I wasn't ridin' so fast an' I heard him comin'. I knowed who it was, an' stopped to have it out with him. He yelled that he didn't want me; that you'd sent him after me. We met Dade an' Malcolm--we'd pa.s.sed Double Fork an' nothin' was bogged down. So we knowed somebody'd framed somethin' up. I come on ahead." He grinned.

"Toban's been braggin' some about his horse, but I reckon that don't go any more. That black horse can run." He indicated Taggart. "I reckon he come here just to bother you," he said.

She told him about the diagram and he started, stepping quickly to where Taggart lay, searching in his pockets until he found the paper.

Then he went to the door. Standing in it, he looked as he had looked that day when he had humiliated Neal Taggart in her presence. The gentleness which she had seen in him some hours before--and which she had welcomed--had disappeared; his lips had become stiff and pale again, his eyes were narrowed and brilliant with the old destroying fire. She grew rigid and drew a deep, quivering breath, for she saw that the pistol was still in his hand.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I reckon old Taggart will still be waitin' in the timber grove," he said with a short, grim laugh. "They've bothered me enough. I'm goin'

to send him where I sent his coyote son."

At that word she was close to him, her hands on his shoulders.

"Don't!" she pleaded; "please don't!" She shuddered and cast a quick, shrinking glance at the man on the floor. "There has been enough trouble tonight," she said. "You stay here!" she commanded, trying to pull him away from the door, but not succeeding.

He seized her face with his hands in much the same manner in which he had seized it in his father's office on the night of his return to the Lazy Y--she felt the cold stock of the pistol against her cheek and shuddered again. A new light had leaped into his eyes--the suspicion that she had seen there many times before.

"Are you wantin' old Taggart to get away with the idol?" he demanded.

"He can't!" she denied. "He hasn't the diagram, has he? You have just put it in your pocket!"

A quick embarra.s.sment swept over him; he dropped his hands from her face. "I reckon that's right," he admitted. "But I'm goin' to' send him over the divide, idol or no idol."

"He won't be in the timber grove," she persisted; "he must have heard the shooting and he wouldn't stay."

"I reckon he won't be able to run away from that black horse," he laughed. "I'll ketch him before he gets very far."

"You shan't go!" she declared, making a gesture of impotence. "Don't you see?" she added. "It isn't Taggart that I care about--it's you. I don't want you to be shot--killed. I won't have it! If Taggart hasn't gone by this time he will be hidden somewhere over there and when he sees you he will shoot you!"