The Rustler of Wind River Part 22

Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.

"Oh, if I'd 'a' come down here place of saddlin' that horse!" she lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.

"He'd have been gone, even then--I was past here and didn't hear him,"

Frances said.

Still the vision persisted in her disturbed imagination of that other night, of one leaning low in the saddle, his fleet horse stretching its neck in desperation for the distant refuge; the dash of pursuing hoofs; the sound of shots up the river; the prayer that she sent to heaven in his behalf.

"Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron was repeating, with accusing conviction.

They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs, binding her as if her feet were set in lava.

Somebody that knew the "lay of the land." Great G.o.d! could he fight that way, was it in Alan Macdonald to make a hawk's dash like that? It was hard to admit the thought, to give standing to the doubtful accusation. But those whom they called "rustlers" must have borne Nola away. Beyond the homesteaders up the river were the mountains and the wild country where no man made his home; except them and the cattlemen and the cowboys attending the herds, that country was unpeopled. There was n.o.body to whom the deed could be charged but the enemies that Chadron had made in his persecution of the homesteaders.

Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words, and his a.s.sociation with them, seemed to convict him there in the silence of that black-walled court of night.

It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his a.s.sociates by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree the blame, even pa.s.sive knowledge of the intent, of that base offense.

At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together, she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses.

They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.

She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.

The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate by and by on Frances' arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow of her life.

Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic night.

Frances was in the saddle at daybreak. She had left Mrs. Chadron in an uneasy sleep, watched over by Maggie. Banjo had not returned; no word had reached them from any source. Alvino let Frances out through the gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the abductor's trail as far as possible without being led into strange country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pa.s.s that way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there.

The tracks of the raider's horse were deep in the soft soil. She followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road, angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a trampling in the lose earth--testimony of the fight that Nola had made to get away--Frances started at the sight of something caught on a clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning.

Presently a.s.sured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with it in her hand.

Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther.

But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was heading for the homesteaders' settlement, and that he had taken the road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and place.

She felt again that surge of indignation that had fired her heart early in the sad night past. The man who had lurked in the garden waiting his chance to s.n.a.t.c.h Nola away, was certain of the protection to which he fled. It was the daring execution of one man, but the planning of many, and at the head of them one with fire in his wild soul, quick pa.s.sion in his eyes, and mastery over his far-riding band.

It could be no other way.

When she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post.

She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the homesteaders' settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald's claim to lie somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.

She halted when she saw them, and they jerked up their horses also, with startled suddenness, like men riding in the expectation of danger and surprise. Macdonald came forward in a moment, with respectful salute, a look amounting almost to frightened questioning in his face.

For the sun was not up yet, although its flame was on the heavens, and it was a strange, wild place to meet a woman of Frances Landcraft's caste unattended, and with the shadow of a trouble in her face that made it old, like misery.

But there was no question of the unfriendliness of that face for Alan Macdonald and the men who came riding at his back. It was as cold as the gray earth beneath her horse's hoofs, and its severity was reflected in the very pose of her body, even in the grip of her slender thighs as they clasped her saddle, sitting there like a dragoon outrider who had appeared to bar their way.

Frances was wearing the brown corduroy riding-habit that she had worn on the day when she first spoke to him. Her brown hair had fallen down until it hid her ears, for she had ridden hard, and a strand of it blew from beneath her cowboy hat in unheeded caress across her cheek.

Macdonald saw her stiffen in the saddle and lift herself a little from her seat as he drew near, his companions stopping a little distance back. Her eyes were stern and reproachful; a little frown troubled her white forehead.

"I was starting out to find you, Mr. Macdonald," she said, severely.

"If there is any service, Miss Landcraft--"

"Don't talk emptiness, and don't pretend!" she said, a flash of anger in her face. "It isn't a man's way to fight, it's a coward's! Bring her back home!"

"I don't know what you mean." There was such an astonished helplessness in his manner that it would have convinced any unprejudiced mind of his innocence in itself.

"Oh!"--impatiently--"I can't hurt you, I'm alone. You'd just as well tell me how much money you're going to demand, so I can set their minds at rest."

Macdonald's face was hot; his eyes felt as if they swam in fire. He put out his hand in a gesture almost a command, his heavy eyebrows gathered in a frown, an expression of sternness in his homely face that made it almost majestic.

"If you'll be good enough to tell me what your veiled accusations point to, Miss Landcraft, then I can answer you by either yes or no."

She unbent so far as to relate briefly what she believed they knew better than herself already. But behind her high air as she talked there was a secret warm feeling for the strength of this man. It was a quality of fine steel in the human mind and body such as she never had seen so beautifully blended before. In her own father there was something of it, but only a reflection on water compared to this. It seemed the temper of the desert, she thought, like that oriental spirit which spread Islam's dark creed over half the world.

When she had finished the relation of Nola's ravishment, he sat with head drooped in dusty silence a moment. Then he looked her in the eyes with such a steady blaze of indignation that she felt her own rage kindle to meet it. His clear, steady gaze was an arraignment, an accusation on the ugly charge of perversion of the truth as she knew it to be in the bottom of her conscience when she had laid the crime at the homesteaders' hands. If he saw her at all, she thought, it was as some small despicable thing, for his eyes were so unflinching, as they poured their steady fire into her own, that he seemed to be summing up the final consequences which lay behind her, along the dusty highway to the ranchhouse by the river.

"In the first place," said he, speaking slowly, "there are no cattle thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some of them, and judge for yourself."

He beckoned to Tom La.s.siter and the three with him, and they joined him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it.

"These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this deed, but there's not one among us that wouldn't put down his life to keep that young woman from harm and give her back to her home. We have our grievances against Saul Chadron, G.o.d knows! and they are grave enough. But we don't fight that way, Miss Landcraft."

"If you're innocent, then prove it by forcing the men that carried her off, or the man, if there was only one, to bring her back home. Then I'll believe you. Maybe others will, too. What are you riding the road so early for, all armed and suspicious, if you're such honest men?"

"We're goin' to the agency after ammunition to defend our homes, and our wives and children--such of us as Saul Chadron and his hired hounds has left children to, colonel's daughter," Tom La.s.siter answered, reproof in his kind old eyes.

Frances had unrolled the bit of evidence that she had picked up from the bushes, and was holding it on the horn of her saddle now, quite unconscious of what her hands were doing, for she had forgotten the importance of her find in the heat of that meeting. Macdonald spurred forward, pointing to the thing in her hand.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, a sharp note of concern in his voice that made her start.

She told him. He took it from her and turned to his comrades.

"It's Mark Thorn's cap!" he said, holding it up, his fingers in the crown.

Tom La.s.siter nodded his slow head as the others leaned to look.

"Saul Chadron's chickens has come home to roost," he said.

Frances understood nothing of the excitement that sprung out of the mention of the outlaw's name, for Mark Thorn and his b.l.o.o.d.y history were alike unknown to her. Her resentment mounted at being an outsider to their important or pretended secret.

"Well, if you know whose cap it is, it ought to be easy for you to find the owner," she said, unable to smother the sneer in her words.

"He isn't one of us," said a homesteader, with grim shortness.

"Oh!" said she, tossing her lofty head.