The Lure of the Dim Trails Part 5

Tamale stirred restlessly with head uplifted and ears pointed straight before up the steep bluff. Old Ironsides, Thurston's mount, was not the sort to worry about anything but his feed, and paid no attention. Bob turned and glanced the way Tamale was looking; saw nothing, and settled down again on the small of his back.

"He sees a badger or something," he Said. "Go on, Bud, with the chorus."

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Lift up your gates and sing."

"Lift up your hands d.a.m.n quick!" mimicked a voice just behind. "If yuh ain't got anything to do but lay in the shade of a rock and yawp, we'll borrow your cayuses. You ain't needin' 'em, by the looks!"

They squirmed around until they could stare into two black gun-barrels--and then their hands went up; their faces held a particularly foolish expression that must have been amusing to the men behind the guns.

One of the gun-barrels lowered and a hand reached out and quietly took possession of Tamale's reins; the owner of the hand got calmly into Bob's saddle. Bob gritted his teeth. It was evident their movements had been planned minutely in advance, for, once settled to his liking, the fellow tested the stirrups to make sure they were the right length, and raising his gun pointed it at the two in a business-like manner that left no doubt of his meaning. Whereupon the man behind them came forward and appropriated Old Ironsides to his own use.

"Too bad we had to interrupt Sunday-school," he remarked ironically.

"You can go ahead with the meetin' now--the collection has been took up." He laughed without any real mirth in his voice and gathered up the reins. "If yuh want our horses, they're up on the bench. I don't reckon they'll ever turn another cow, but such as they are you're quite welcome. Better set still, boys, till we get out uh sight; one of us'll keep an eye peeled for yuh. So long, and much obliged." They turned and rode warily down the slope.

"Now, wouldn't that jar yuh?" asked Bob in deep disgust His hands dropped to his sides; in another second he was up and shooting savagely.

"Get behind the rock, Bud," he commanded.

Just then a rifle cracked, and Bob toppled drunkenly and went limply to the gra.s.s.

"My G.o.d!" cried Thurston, and didn't know that he spoke. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up Bob's revolver and fired shot after shot at the galloping figures. Not one seemed to do any good; the first shot hit a two-year-old square in the ribs. After that there were no cattle within rifle range.

One of the outlaws stopped, took deliberate aim with the stolen Winchester and fired, meaning to kill; but he miscalculated the range a bit and Thurston crumpled down with a bullet in his thigh. The revolver was empty now and fell smoking at his feet. So he lay and cursed impotently while he watched the marauders ride out of sight up the valley.

When the rank timber-growth hid their flying figures he crawled over to where Bob lay and tried to lift him.

"Art you hurt?" was the idiotic question he asked.

Bob opened his eyes and waited a breath, as if to steady his thought.

"Did I get one, Bud?"

"I'm afraid not," Thurston confessed, and immediately after wished that he had lied and said yes. "Are you hurt?" he repeated senselessly.

"Who, me?" Bob's eyes wavered in their directness. "Don't yuh bother none about me," evasively.

"But you've got to tell me. You--they--" He choked over the words.

"Well--I guess they got me, all right. But don't let that worry yuh; it don't me." He tried to speak carelessly and convincingly, but it was a miserable failure. He did not want to die, did Bob, however much he might try to hide the fact.

Thurston was not in the least imposed upon. He turned away his head, pretending to look after the outlaws, and set his teeth together tight.

He did not want to act a fool. All at once he grew dizzy and sick, and lay down heavily till the faintness pa.s.sed.

Bob tried to lift himself to his elbow; failing that, he put out a hand and laid it on Thurston's shoulder. "Did they--get you--too?" he queried anxiously.

"The d.a.m.n coyotes!"

"It's nothing; just a leg put out of business," Thurston hurried to a.s.sure him. "Where are you hurt, Bob?"

"Aw, I ain't any X-ray," Bob retorted weakly but gamely. "Somewheres inside uh me. It went in my side but the Lord knows where it wound up. It hurts, like the devil." He lay quiet a minute. "I wish--do yuh feel--like finishing--that song, Bud?"

Thurston gulped down a lump that was making his throat ache. When he answered, his voice was very gentle:

"I'll try a verse, old man."

"The last one--we'd just come to the last. It's most like church. I--I never went--much on religion, Bud; but when a fellow's--going out over the Big Divide."

"You're not!" Thurston contradicted fiercely, as if that could make it different. He thought he could not bear those jerky sentences.

"All right--Bud. We won't fight over it. Go ahead. The last verse."

Thurston eased his leg to a better position, drew himself up till his shoulders rested against the rock and began, with an occasional, odd break in his voice:

"I saw the holy city Beside the tideless Sea; The light of G.o.d was on its street The gates were open wide.

And all who would might enter And no one was denied."

"Wonder if that there--applies--to bone-headed--cowpunchers," Bob muttered drowsily. "'And all--who would--" Thurston glanced quickly at his face; caught his breath sharply at what he saw there written, and dropped his head upon his arms.

And so Park and his men, hurrying to the sound of the shooting, found them in the shadow of the rock.

CHAPTER VII. AT THE STEVENS PLACE

When the excitement of the outrage had been pushed aside by the insistent routine of everyday living, Thurston found himself thrust from the fascination of range life and into the monotony of invalidism, and he was anything but resigned. To be sure, he was well cared for at the Stevens ranch, where Park and the boys had taken him that day, and Mrs.

Stevens mothered him as he could not remember being mothered before.

Hank Graves rode over nearly every day to sit beside the bed and curse the Wagner gang back to their great-great-grandfathers and down to more than the third generation yet unborn, and to tell him the news. On the second visit he started to give him the details of Bob's funeral; but Thurston would not listen, and told him so plainly.

"All right then, Bud, I won't talk about it. But we sure done the right thing by the boy; had the best preacher in Sh.e.l.lanne out, and flowers till further notice: a cross uh carnations, and the boys sent up to Minot and had a spur made uh--oh, well, all right; I'll shut up about it, I know how yuh feel, Bud; it broke us all up to have him go that way. He sure was a white boy, if ever there was one, and--ahem!"

"I'd give a thousand dollars, hard coin, to get my hands on them Wagners. It would uh been all off with them, sure, if the boys had run acrost 'em. I'd uh let 'em stay out and hunt a while longer, only old Lauman'll get 'em, all right, and we're late as it is with the calf roundup. Lauman'll run 'em down--and by the Lord! I'll hire Bowman myself and ship him out from Helena to help prosecute 'em. They're dead men if he takes the case against 'em, Bud, and I'll get him, sure--and to h.e.l.l with the cost of it! They'll swing for what they done to you and Bob, if it takes every hoof I own."

Thurston told him he hoped they would be caught and--yes, hanged; though he had never before advocated capital punishment.

But when he thought of Bob, the care-naught, whole-souled fellow.

He tried not to think of him, for thinking unmanned him. He had the softest of hearts where his friends were concerned, and there were times when he felt that he could with relish officiate at the Wagners'

execution.

He fought against remembrance of that day; and for sake of diversion he took to studying a large, pastel portrait of Mona which hung against the wall opposite his bed. It was rather badly; done, and at first, when he saw it, he laughed at the thought that even the great, still plains of the range land cannot protect one against the ubiquitous picture agent. In the parlor, he supposed there would be crayon pictures of grandmothers and aunts-further evidence of the agent's glibness.

He was glad that it was Mona who smiled down at him instead of a grand-mother or an aunt. For Mona did smile, and in spite of the cheap crudity the smile was roguish, with little dimply creases at the corners of the mouth, and not at all unpleasant. If the girl would only look like that in real life, he told himself, a fellow would probably get to liking her. He supposed she thought him a greater coward than ever now, just because he hadn't got killed. If he had, he would be a hero now, like Bob. Well, Bob was a hero; the way he had jumped up and begun shooting required courage of the suicidal sort. He had stood up and shot, also and had succeeded only in being ridiculous; he hoped n.o.body had told Mona about his. .h.i.tting that steer. When he could walk again he would learn to shoot, so that the range stock wouldn't suffer from his marksmanship.

After a week of seeing only Mrs. Stevens or sympathetic men acquaintances, he began to wonder why Mona stayed so persistently away.

Then one morning she came in to take his breakfast things out. She did not, however, stay a second longer than was absolutely necessary, and she was perfectly composed and said good morning in her most impersonal tone. At least Thurston hoped she had no tone more impersonal than that.

He decided that she had really beautiful eyes and hair; after she had gone he looked up at the picture, told himself that it did not begin to do her justice, and sighed a bit. He was very dull, and even her companionship, he thought, would be pleasant if only she would come down off her pedestal and be humanly sociable.

When he wrote a story about a fellow being laid up in the same house with a girl--a girl with big, blue-gray eyes and ripply brown hair--he would have the girl treat the fellow at least decently. She would read poetry to him and bring him flowers, and do ever so many nice things that would make him hate to get well. He decided that he would write just that kind of story; he would idealize it, of course, and have the fellow in love with the girl; you have to, in stories. In real life it doesn't necessarily follow that, because a fellow admires a girl's hair and eyes, and wants to be on friendly terms, he is in love with her.

For example, he emphatically was not in love with Mona Stevens. He only wanted her to be decently civil and to stop holding a foolish grudge against him for not standing up and letting himself be shot full of holes because she commanded it.