The Rustler of Wind River Part 10

"It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the hand that wore it"--she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his eyes--"to have kept the knowledge from!"

"I lost it," said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow, "and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his life down for it."

"It might have been expected--of a man," said she.

"But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circ.u.mstance of its return to you, Miss Landcraft," he said, cold now in his word, and lofty. "You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path, and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as evidence of a shadowy conquest, maybe, among my wild and lawless kind.

Beyond that you know nothing--you lost it, that was all."

In the door he turned.

"Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald," she said.

"If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a vindication in this country," he said, "just go on thinking of me as a thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss Landcraft."

She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating circ.u.mstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.

But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now believed, remorse a.s.sailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired, for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in the full knowledge that he was a _man!_ Only a man would have come, bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to explain.

She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his hand.

"He is gone," she said.

"Very well," he nodded, shortly.

"I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my engagement with Major King, to--"

"Impossible! nonsense!"

"To save you embarra.s.sment in your future relations with him," she concluded, unshaken.

The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that boiled in his breast.

"I tell you, miss, you can't break your engagement to Major King! That is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a soldier's word and a soldier's honor in this matter, miss. It is inc.u.mbent on you to see that both are redeemed."

"I'm in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I'm old enough."

"A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What's the occasion of this change in the wind? Surely not--"

Colonel Landcraft's brows drew together over his thin nose, making small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and bristling hair. He held his words suspended while he searched her face for justification of his pent arraignment.

"Nonsense!" said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as if relief had come. "Put the notion out of your head, for you are going to marry Major King."

"I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it is final."

His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke.

But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to the army and a glory to the nation.

"You'll marry Major King, or die a maid!" he declared.

"Very well, father," she returned, in ambiguous concession.

She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking, as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold, outlandish pet.i.tion.

CHAPTER VII

THROWING THE SCARE

Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald's place the following day, from Sam Hatcher's ranch across the river, bringing news that three homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give any further particulars; he did not know the victims' names.

Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new procedure in the cattle barons' land; this scourge had been fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given him.

The word had gone out to them to be on guard. Now death had begun to leap upon them from the roadside gra.s.s. Perhaps his own turn would come tonight or tomorrow. He could not be more watchful than his neighbors had been; no man could close all the doors.

The price of life in that country for such men as himself always had been unceasing vigilance. When a man stood guard over himself day and night he could do no more, and even at that he was almost certain, some time or other, to leave a c.h.i.n.k open through which the waiting blow might fall. After a time one became hardened to this condition of life. The strain of watching fell away from him; it became a part of his daily habit, and a man grew careless about securing the safeguards upon his life by and by.

"Them fellers," said Banjo, feeling that he had lowered himself considerably in carrying the news involving their swift end to Macdonald, "got about what was comin' to 'em I reckon, Mac. Why don't a man like you hitch up with Chadron or Hatcher, or one of the good men of this country, and git out from amongst them runts that's nosin'

around in the ground for a livin' like a drove of hogs?"

"Every man to his liking, Banjo," Macdonald returned, "and I don't like the company you've named."

They never quarreled over the point, but Banjo never ceased to urge the reformation, such as he honestly believed it to be, upon Macdonald at every visit. The little troubadour felt that he was doing a generous and friendly turn for a fallen man, and squaring his own account with Macdonald in thus laboring for his redemption.

Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring when the musician, heading for Chadron's after playing for a dance, had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse into it. On that occasion Banjo's wits had been mixed with liquor, but his sense of grat.i.tude had been perfectly clear ever since.

Macdonald's door was the only one in the nesters' colony that stress or friendship ever had constrained him to enter. Even as it was, with all the big debt of grat.i.tude owing, his intimacy with a man who had opened an irrigation ditch was a thing of which he did not boast abroad.

Banjo made but a night's stop of it with Macdonald. Early in the morning he was in the saddle again, with a dance ahead of him to play for that night at a ranch twenty miles or more away. He lingered a little after shaking hands with his host, trying the violin case as if to see that it was secure, and fidgeting in his saddle, and holding back on the start. Macdonald could see that there was something unsaid in the little man's mind which gave him an uneasiness, like indigestion.

"What is it, Banjo?" he asked, to let it be known that he understood.

"Mac, did you ever hear tell of a feller named Mark Thorn?" Banjo inquired, looking about him with fearful caution, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.

"Yes, I've heard of him."

"Well, he's in this country."

"Are you sure about that, Banjo?" Macdonald's face was troubled; he moved nearer the musician as he made the inquiry, and laid his hand on his arm.

"He's here. He's the feller you've got to watch out for. He cut acrosst the road yisterday afternoon when I was comin' down here, and when he seen me he stopped, for I used to know him up north and he knew it wasn't no use to try to duck and hide his murderin' face from me. He told me he was ranchin' up in Montany, and he'd come down here to collect some money Chadron owed him on an old bill."

"Pretty slim kind of a story. But he's here to collect money from Chadron, all right, and give him value received. What kind of a looking man is he?"

"He's long and lean, like a rail, with a kind of a bend in him when he walks, and the under lid of his left eye drawed like you'd pulled it down and stuck a tack in it. He's wearin' a cap, and he's kind of whiskered up, like he'd been layin' out some time."

"I'd know him," Macdonald nodded.