by Unknown
He was conscious of no sound that awakened him, yet he was aware of a presence that drew him from drowsiness to an alert attention. Instinctively, his hand crept to his scabbarded weapon.
"Don't shoot me," a voice implored with laughter-- a warm, vivid voice, that struck pleasantly on his memory.
The Texan turned lazily, and leaned on his elbow. She came smiling out of the brush, light as a roe, and with much of its slim, supple grace. Before, he had seen her veiled by night; the day disclosed her a dark, spirited young creature. The mass of blue-black hair coiled at the nape of the brown neck, the flash of dark eyes beneath straight, dark eyebrows, together with a certain deliberation of movement that was not languor, made it impossible to doubt that she was a Southerner by inheritance, if not by birth.
"I don't reckon I will," he greeted, smiling. "Down in Texas it ain't counted right good manners to shoot up young ladies."
"And in Wyoming you think it is."
"I judge by appearances, ma'am."
"Then you judge wrong. Those men did not know I was with dad that night. They thought I was another man. You see, they had just lost their suit for damages against dad and some more for the loss of six hundred sheep in a raid last year. They couldn't prove who did it." She flamed into a sudden passion of resentment. "I don't defend them any. They are a lot of coyotes, or they wouldn't have attacked two men, riding alone."
He ventured a rapier thrust. "How about the Squaw Creek raid? Don't your friends sometimes forget to fight fair, too?"
He had stamped the fire out of her in an instant. She drooped visibly. "Yes-- yes, they do," she faltered. "I don't defend them, either. Dad had nothing to do with that. He doesn't shoot in the back."
"I'm glad to hear it," he retorted cheerfully. "And I'm glad to hear that your friends the enemy didn't know it was a girl they were attacking. Fact is, I thought you were a boy myself when first I happened in and you fanned me with your welcome."
"I didn't know. I hadn't time to think. So I let fly. But I was so excited I likely missed you a mile."
He took off his felt hat and examined with interest a bullet hole through the rim. "If it was a mile, I'd hate to have you miss me a hundred yards," he commented, with a little ripple of laughter.
"I didn't! Did I? As near as that?" She caught her hands together in a sudden anguish for what might have been.
"Don't you care, ma'am. A miss is as good as a mile. It ain't the first time I've had my hat ventilated. I mentioned it, so you wouldn't get discouraged at your shooting. It's plenty good. Good enough to suit me. I wouldn't want it any better."
"What about the man I wounded." she asked apprehensively. "Is he-- is it all right?"
"Haven't you heard?"
"Heard what?" He could see the terror in her eyes.
"How it all came out?"
He could not tell why he did it, any more than he could tell why he had attempted no denial to the sheriff of responsibility for the death of Faulkner, but as he looked at this girl he shifted the burden from her shoulders to his. "You got your man in the ankle. I had worse luck after you left. They buried mine."
"Oh!" From her lips a little cry of pain forced itself. "It wasn't your fault. It was for us you did it. Oh, why did they attack us?"
"I did what I had to do. There is no blame due either you or me for it," he said, with quiet conviction.
"I know. But it seems so dreadful. And then they put you in jail-- and you broke out! Wasn't that it?"
"That was the way of it, Miss Arlie. How did you know?"
"Henry Speed's note to father said you had broken jail. Dad wasn't at home. You know, the round-up is on now and he has to be there. So I saddled, and came right away."
"That was right good of you."
"Wasn't it?" There was a softened, almost tender, jeer in her voice. "Since you only saved our lives!"
"I ain't claiming all that, Miss Arlie."
"Then I'll claim it for you. I suppose you gave yourself up to them and explained how it was after we left."
"Not exactly that. I managed to slip away, through the sage. It was mo'ning before I found the road again. Soon as I did, a deputy tagged me, and said, 'You're mine.' He spoke for me so prompt and seemed so sure about what he was saying, I didn't argue the matter with him." He laughed gayly.
"And then?"
"Then he herded me to town, and I was invited to be the county's guest. Not liking the accommodations, I took the first chance and flew the coop. They missed a knife in my pocket when they searched me, and I chipped the cement away from the window bars, let myself down by the bed linen, and borrowed a cow-pony I found saddled at the edge of town. So, you see, I'm a hawss thief too, ma'am."
She could not take it so lightly as he did, even though she did not know that he had barely escaped with his life. Something about his debonair, smiling hardihood touched her imagination, as did also the virile competence of the man. If the cool eyes in his weatherbeaten face could be hard as agates, they could also light up with sparkling imps of mischief. Certainly he was no boy, but the close-cut waves of crisp, reddish hair and the ready smile contributed to an impression of youth that came and went.
"Willie Speed is saddling you a horse. The one you came on has been turned loose to go back when it wants to. I'm going to take you home with me," she told him.
"Well, I'm willing to be kidnapped."
"I brought your horse Teddy. If you like, you may ride that, and I'll take the other."
"Yore a gentleman, ma'am. I sure would."
When Arlie saw with what pleasure the friends met, how Teddy nickered and rubbed his nose up and down his master's coat and how the Texan put him through his little repertoire of tricks and fed him a lump of sugar from his coat pocket, she was glad she had ridden Teddy instead of her own pony to the meeting.
They took the road without loss of time. Arlie Dillon knew exactly how to cross this difficult region. She knew the Cedar Mountain district as a grade teacher knows her arithmetic. In daylight or in darkness, with or without a trail, she could have traveled almost a bee line to the point she wanted. Her life had been spent largely in the saddle-- at least that part of it which had been lived outdoors. Wherefore she was able to lead her guest by secret trails that wound in and out among the passes and through unsuspected gorges to hazardous descents possible only to goats and cow ponies. No stranger finding his way in would have stood a chance of getting out again unaided.
Among these peaks lay hidden pockets and caches by hundreds, rock fissures which made the country a very maze to the uninitiated. The ranger, himself one of the best trailers in Texas, doubted whether he could retrace his steps to the Speed place.
After several hours of travel, they emerged from a gulch to a little valley known as Beaver Dam Park. The girl pointed out to her companion a narrow brown ribbon that wound through the park.
"There's the road again. That's the last we shall see of it-- or it will be when we have crossed it. Once we reach the Twin Buttes that are the gateway to French Cañon you are perfectly safe. You can see the buttes from here. No, farther to the right."
"I thought I'd ridden some tough trails in my time, but this country ce'tainly takes the cake," Fraser said admiringly, as his gaze swept the horizon. "It puts it over anything I ever met up with. Ain't that right, Teddy hawss?"
The girl flushed with pleasure at his praise. She was mountain bred, and she loved the country of the great peaks.
They descended the valley, crossed the road, and in an open grassy spot just beyond, came plump upon four men who had unsaddled to eat lunch.
The meeting came too abruptly for Arlie to avoid it. One glance told her that they were deputies from Gimlet Butte. Without the least hesitation she rode forward and gave them the casual greeting of cattleland. Fraser, riding beside her, nodded coolly, drew to a halt, and lit a cigarette.
"Found him yet, gentlemen?" he asked.
"No, nor we ain't likely to, if he's reached this far," one of the men
answered.
"It would be some difficult to collect him here," the Texan admitted impartially.
"Among his friends," one of the deputies put in, with a snarl.
Fraser laughed easily. "Oh, well, we ain't his enemies, though he ain't very well known in the Cedar Mountain country. What might he be like, pardner?"
"Hasn't he lived up here long?" asked one of the men, busy with some bacon over a fire.
"They say not."
"He's a heavy-set fellow, with reddish hair; not so tall as you, I reckon, and some heavier. Was wearing chaps and gauntlets when he made his getaway. From the description, he looks something like you, I shouldn't wonder."
Fraser congratulated himself that he had had the foresight to discard as many as possible of these helps to identification before he was three miles from Gimlet Butte. Now he laughed pleasantly.
"Sure he's heavier than me, and not so tall."
"It would be a good joke, Bud, if they took you back to town for this man," cut in Arlie, troubled at the direction the conversation was taking, but not obviously so.
"I ain't objecting any, sis. About three days of the joys of town would sure agree with my run-down system," the Texan answered joyously.
"When you cowpunchers do get in, you surely make Rome howl," one of the deputies agreed, with a grin. "Been in to the Butte lately?"
The Texan met his grin. "It ain't been so long."
"Well, you ain't liable to get in again for a while," Arlie said emphatically. "Come on, Bud, we've got to be moving."
"Which way is Dead Cow Creek?" one of the men called after them.
Fraser pointed in the direction from which he had just come.
After they had ridden a hundred yards, the girl laughed aloud her relief at their escape. "If they go the way you pointed for Dead Cow Creek, they will have to go clear round the world to get to it. We're headed for the creek now."
"A fellow can't always guess right," pleaded the Texan. "If he could, what a fiend he would be at playing the wheel! Shall I go back and tell him I misremembered for a moment where the creek is?"
"No, sir. You had me scared badly enough when you drew their attention to yourself. Why did you do it?"
"It was the surest way to disarm any suspicion they might have had. One of them had just said the man they wanted was like me. Presently, one would have been guessing that it was me." He looked at her drolly, and added: "You played up to me fine, sis."
A touch of deeper color beat into her dusky cheeks. "We'll drop the relationship right now, if you please. I said only what you made me say," she told him, a little stiffly.
But presently she relaxed to the note of friendliness, even of comradeship, habitual to her. She was a singularly frank creature, having been brought up in a country where women were few and far, and where conventions were of the simplest. Otherwise, she would not have confessed to him with unconscious näiveté, as she now did, how greatly she had been troubled for him before she received the note from Speed.
"It worried me all the time, and it troubled dad, too. I could see that. We had hardly left you before I knew we had done wrong. Dad did it for me, of course; but he felt mighty bad about it. Somehow, I couldn't think of anything but you there, with all those men shooting at you. Suppose you had waited too long before surrendering! Suppose you had been killed for us!" She looked at him, and felt a shiver run over her in the warm sunlight. "Night before last I was worn out. I slept some, but I kept dreaming they were killing you. Oh, you don't know bow glad I was to get word from Speed that you were alive." Her soft voice had the gift of expressing feeling, and it was resonant with it now.
"I'm glad you were glad," he said quietly.
Across Dead Cow Creek they rode, following the stream up French Cañon to what was known as the Narrows. Here the great rock walls, nearly two thousand feet high, came so close together as to leave barely room for a footpath beside the creek which boiled down over great bowlders. Unexpectedly, there opened in the wall a rock fissure, and through this Arlie guided her horse.
The Texan wondered where she could be taking him, for the fissure terminated in a great rock slide some two hundred yards ahead of them. Before reaching this she turned sharply to the left, and began winding in and out among the big bowlders which had fallen from the summit far above.
Presently Fraser observed with astonishment that they were following a path that crept up the very face of the bluff. Up-- up-- up they went until they reached a rift in the wall, and into this the trail went precipitously. Stones clattered down from the hoofs of the horses as they clambered up like mountain goats. Once the Texan had to throw himself to the ground to keep Teddy from falling backward.
Arlie, working her pony forward with voice and body and knees, so that from her seat in the saddle she seemed literally to lift him up, reached the summit and looked back.
"All right back there?" she asked quietly.
"All right," came the cheerful answer. "Teddy isn't used to climbing up a wall, but he'll make it or know why."
A minute later, man and horse were beside her.
"Good for Teddy," she said, fondling his nose.
"Look out! He doesn't like strangers to handle him."
"We're not strangers. We're tillicums. Aren't we, Teddy?"
Teddy said "Yes" after the manner of a horse, as plain as words could say it.
From their feet the trail dropped again to another gorge, beyond which the ranger could make out a stretch of valley through which ran the gleam of a silvery thread.
"We're going down now into Mantrap Gulch. The patch of green you see beyond is Lost Valley," she told him,
"Lost Valley," he repeated, in amazement. "Are we going to Lost Valley?"
"You've named our destination."
"But-- you don't live in Lost Valley."
"Don't I?"
"Do you?"
"Yes," she answered, amused at his consternation, if it were that.
"I wish I had known," he said, as if to himself.
"You know now. Isn't that soon enough? Are you afraid of the place, because people make a mystery of it?" she demanded impatiently.
"No. It isn't that." He looked across at the valley again, and asked abruptly: "Is this the only way in?"
"No. There is another, but this is the quickest."
"Is the other as difficult as this?"
"In a way, yes. It is very much more round-about. It isn't known much by the public. Not many outsiders have business in the valley."
She volunteered no explanation in detail, and the man beside her said, with a grim laugh:
"There isn't any general admission to the public this way, is there?"
"No. Oh, folks can come if they want to."
He looked full in her face, and said significantly: "I thought the way to Lost Valley was a sort of a secret-- one that those who know are not expected to tell."
"Oh, that's just talk. Not many come in but our friends. We've had to be careful lately. But you can't call a secret what a thousand folks know."
It was like a blow in the face to him. Not many but their friends! And she was taking him in confidently because he was her friend. What sort of a friend was he? he asked himself. He could not perform the task to which he was pledged without striking home at her. If he succeeded in ferreting out the Squaw Creek raiders he must send to the penitentiary, perhaps to death, her neighbors, and possibly her relatives. She had told him her father was not implicated, but a daughter's faith in her parent was not convincing proof of his innocence. If not her father, a brother might be involved. And she was innocently making it easy for him to meet on a friendly footing these hospitable, unsuspecting savages, who had shed human blood because of the unleashed passions in them!
In that moment, while he looked away toward Lost Valley, he sickened of the task that lay before him. What would she think of him if she knew?
Arlie, too, had been looking down the gulch toward the valley. Now her gaze came slowly round t
o him and caught the expression of his face.
"What's the matter?" she cried.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. An old heart pain that caught me suddenly."
"I'm sorry. We'll soon be home now. We'll travel slowly."
Her voice was tender with sympathy; so, too, were her eyes when he met them.
He looked away again and groaned in his heart.
CHAPTER IV
THE WARNING OF MANTRAP GULCH
They followed the trail down into the cañon. As the ponies slowly picked their footing on the steep narrow path, he asked: