The Duke Of Chimney Butte Part 15

Kerr himself must have done that job.

One man had little chance of stopping such a.s.saults, now they had begun, on a front of twenty miles. But Lambert vowed that if he ever did have the good fortune to come up on one of these sneaks while he was at work, he'd fill his hide so full of lead they'd have to get a derrick to load him into a wagon.

It didn't matter so much about the fence, so long as they didn't get any of the stock. But stragglers from the main herd would find a big gap like that in a few hours, and the rustlers lying in wait would hurry them away. One such loss as that and he would be a disgraced man in the eyes of Vesta Philbrook, and the laughing-stock of the rascals who put it through. He rode in search of the Iowa boy who was with the cattle, his job being to ride among them continually to keep them accustomed to a man on horseback. Luckily he found him before sundown and sent him for wire. Then he stood guard at the cut until the damage was repaired.

After that fence-cutting became a regular prank on Kerr's side of the ranch. Watch as he might, Lambert could not prevent the stealthy excursions, the vindictive destruction of the hated barrier. All these breaches were made within a mile on either side of the first cut, sometimes in a single place, again along a stretch, as if the person using the nippers knew when to deliberate and when to hasten.

Always there was the trace of but one rider, who never dismounted to cut even the bottom wire. That it was the work of the same person each time Lambert was convinced, for he always rode the same horse, as betrayed by a broken hind hoof.

Lambert tried various expedients for trapping this skulker during a period of two weeks. He lay in wait by day and made stealthy excursions by night, all to no avail. Whoever was doing it had some way of keeping informed on his movements with exasperating closeness.

The matter of discovering and punishing the culprit devolved on Lambert alone. He could not withdraw Taterleg to help him; the other man could not be spared from the cattle. And now came the crowning insult of all.

It was early morning, after an all-night watch along the three miles of fence where the wire-cutter always worked, when Lambert rode to the top of the ridge where the first breach in his line had been made. Below that point, not more than half a mile, he had stopped to boil his breakfast coffee. His first discovery on mounting the ridge was a panel of fence cut, his next a piece of white paper twisted to the end of one of the curling wires.

This he disengaged and unfolded. It was a page torn from a medicine memorandum book such as cow-punchers usually carry their time in, and the addresses of friends.

_Why don't you come and get me, Mr. Duke?_

This was the message it bore.

The writing was better, the spelling more exact than the output of the ordinary cow-puncher. Kerr himself, Lambert thought again. He stood with the taunting message in his fingers, looking toward the Kerr ranchhouse, some seven or eight miles to the south, and stood so quite a while, his eyes drawn small as if he looked into the wind.

"All right; I'll take you up on that," he said.

He rode slowly out through the gap, following the fresh trail. As before, it was made by the horse with the notch in its left hind hoof.

It led to a hill three-quarters of a mile beyond the fence. From this point it struck a line for the distant ranchhouse.

Lambert did not go beyond the hill. Dismounting, he stood surveying the country about him, struck for the first time by the view that this vantage-point afforded of the domain under his care. Especially the line of fence was plainly marked for a long distance on either side of the little ridge where the last cut had been made. Evidently the skulker concealed himself at this very point and watched his opening, playing entirely safe. That accounted for all the cutting having been done by daylight, as he was sure had been the case.

He looked about for trace of where the fellow had lain behind the fringe of sage, but the ground was so hard that it would not take a human footprint. As he looked he formulated a plan of his own. Half a mile or more beyond this hill, in the direction of the Kerr place, a small b.u.t.te stood, its steep sides gra.s.sless, its flat top bare. That would be his watchtower from that day forward until he had his hand on this defiant rascal who had time, in his security, to stop and write a note.

That night he scaled the little b.u.t.te after mending the fence behind him, leaving his horse concealed among the huge blocks of rock at its foot. Next day, and the one following, he pa.s.sed in the blazing sun, but n.o.body came to cut the fence. At night he went down, rode his horse to water, turned him to graze, and went back to his perch among the ants and lizards on top of the b.u.t.te.

The third day was cloudy and uneventful; on the fourth, a little before nine, just when the sun was squaring off to shrivel him in his skin, Lambert saw somebody coming from the direction of Kerr's ranch.

The rider made straight for the hill below Lambert's b.u.t.te, where he reined up before reaching the top, dismounted and went crawling to the fringe of sage at the farther rim of the bare summit. Lambert waited until the fellow mounted and rode toward the fence, then he slid down the shale, starting Whetstone from his doze.

Lambert calculated that he was more than a mile from the fence. He wanted to get over there near enough to catch the fellow at work, so there would be full justification for what he intended to do.

Whetstone stretched himself to the task, coming out of the broken ground and up the hill from which the fence-cutter had ridden but a few minutes before while the marauder was still a considerable distance from his objective. The man was riding slowly, as if saving his horse for a chance surprise.

Lambert cut down the distance between them rapidly, and was not more than three hundred yards behind when the fellow began snipping the wire with a pair of nippers that glittered in the sun.

Lambert held his horse back, approaching with little noise. The fence-cutter was rising back to the saddle after cutting the bottom wire of the second panel when he saw that he was trapped.

Plainly unnerved by this _coup_ of the despised fence-guard, he sat clutching his reins as if calculating his chance of dashing past the man who blocked his retreat. Lambert slowed down, not more than fifty yards between them, waiting for the first move toward a gun. He wanted as much of the law on his side, even though there was no witness to it, as he could have, for the sake of his conscience and his peace.

Just a moment the fence-cutter hesitated, making no movement to pull a gun, then he seemed to decide in a flash that he could not escape the way that he had come. He leaned low over his horse's neck, as if he expected Lambert to begin shooting, rode through the gap that he had cut in the fence, and galloped swiftly into the pasture.

Lambert followed, sensing the scheme at a glance. The rascal intended to either ride across the pasture, hoping to outrun his pursuer in the three miles of up-and-down country, or turn when he had a safe lead and go back. As the chase led away, it became plain that the plan was to make a run for the farther fence, cut it and get away before Lambert could come up. That arrangement suited Lambert admirably; it would seem to give him all the law on his side that any man could ask.

There was a scrubby growth of brush on the hillsides, and tall red willows along the streams, making a covert here and there for a horse.

The fleeing man took advantage of every offering of this nature, as if he rode in constant fear of the bullet that he knew was his due. Added to this cunning, he was well mounted, his horse being almost equal in speed to Whetstone, it seemed, at the beginning of the race.

Lambert pushed him as hard as he thought wise, conserving his horse for the advantage that he knew he would have while the fence-cutter stopped to make himself an outlet. The fellow rode hard, unsparing of his quirt, jumping his long-legged horse over rocks and across ravines.

It was in one of these leaps that Lambert saw something fall from the saddle holster. He found it to be the nippers with which the fence had been cut, lying in the bottom of the deep arroyo. He rode down and recovered the tool, in no hurry now, for he was quite certain that the fence-cutter would not have another. He would discover his loss when he came to the fence, and then, if he was not entirely the coward and sneak that his actions seemed to brand him, he would have recourse to another tool.

It did not take them long to finish the three-mile race across the pasture, and it turned out in the end exactly as Lambert thought it would. When the fugitive came within a few rods of the fence he put his hand down to the holster for his nippers, discovering his loss. Then he looked back to see how closely he was pressed, which was very close indeed.

Lambert felt that he did not want to be the aggressor, even on his own land, in spite of the determination he had reached for such a contingency as this. He recalled what Vesta had said about the impossibility of securing a conviction for cutting a fence. Surely if a man could not be held responsible for this act in the courts of the country, it would fare hard with one who might kill him in the commission of the outrage. Let him draw first, and then----

The fellow rode at the fence as if he intended to try to jump it. His horse balked at the barrier, turned, raced along it, Lambert in close pursuit, coming alongside him as he was reaching to draw his pistol from the holster at his saddle bow. And in that instant, as the fleeing rider bent tugging at the gun which seemed to be strapped in the holster, Lambert saw that it was not a man.

A strand of dark hair had fallen from under the white sombrero; it was dropping lower and lower as it uncoiled from its anchorage. Lambert pressed his horse forward a few feet, leaned far over and s.n.a.t.c.hed away the hand that struggled to unbuckle the weapon.

She turned on him, her face scarlet in its fury, their horses racing side by side, their stirrups clashing. Distorted as her features were by anger and scorn at the touch of one so despised, Lambert felt his heart leap and fall, and seem to stand still in his bosom. It was not only a girl; it was _his_ girl, the girl of the beckoning hand.

CHAPTER XII

THE FURY OF DOVES

Lambert released her the moment that he made his double discovery, foolishly shaken, foolishly hurt, to realize that she had been afraid to have him know it was a woman he pursued. He caught her rein and checked her horse along with his own.

"There's no use to run away from me," he said, meaning to quiet her fear. She faced him scornfully, seemingly to understand it as a boast.

"You wouldn't say that to a man, you coward!"

Again he felt a pang, like a blow from an ungrateful hand. She was breathing fast, her dark eyes spiteful, defiant, her face eloquent of the scorn that her words had only feebly expressed. He turned his head, as if considering her case and revolving in his mind what punishment to apply.

She was dressed in riding breeches, with Mexican goatskin chaps, a heavy gray shirt such as was common to cowboys, a costly white sombrero, its crown pinched to a peak in the Mexican fashion. With the big handkerchief on her neck flying as she rode, and the crouching posture that she had a.s.sumed in the saddle every time her pursuer began to close up on her in the race just ended, Lambert's failure to identify her s.e.x was not so inexcusable as might appear. And he was thinking that she had been afraid to have him know she was a girl.

His discovery had left him dumb, his mind confused by a cross-current of emotions. He was unable to relate her with the present situation, although she was unmistakably before his eyes, her disguise ineffectual to change one line of her body as he recalled her leaning over the railing of the car, her anger unable to efface one feature as pictured in his memory.

"What are you going to do about it?" she asked him defiantly, not a hint in her bearing of shame for her discovery, or contrition for her crime.

"I guess you'd better go home."

He spoke in gentle reproof, as to a child caught in some trespa.s.s well-nigh unforgivable, but to whose offense he had closed his eyes out of considerations which only the forgiving understand. He looked her full in the eyes as he spoke, the disappointment and pain of his discovery in his face. The color blanched out of her cheeks, she stared at him a moment in waking astonishment, her eyes just as he remembered them when they drew him on in his perilous race after the train.

Such a flame rose in him that he felt it must make him transparent, and lay his deepest sentiments bare before her gaze. So she looked at him a moment, eye to eye, the anger gone out of her face, the flash of scorn no longer glinting in the dark well of her eye. But if she recognized him she did not speak of it. Almost at once she turned away, as from the face of a stranger, looking back over the way that she had ridden in such headlong flight.

He believed she was ashamed to have him know she recognized him. It was not for him to speak of the straining little act that romance had cast them for at their first meeting. Perhaps under happier circ.u.mstances she would have recalled it, and smiled, and given him her hand.

Embarra.s.sment must attend her here, no matter how well she believed herself to be justified in her destructive raids against the fence.