The Collected Westerns of William MacLeod Raine: 21 Novels in One Volume

by Unknown

  "Why do they call it Mantrap Gulch?"

  "It got its name before my time in the days when outlaws hid here. A hunted man came to Lost Cañon, a murderer wanted by the law for more crimes than one. He was well treated by the settlers. They gave him shelter and work. He was safe, and he knew it. But he tried to make his peace with the law outside by breaking the law of the valley. He knew that two men were lying hid in a pocket gulch, opening from the valley-- men who were wanted for train robbery. He wrote to the company offering to betray these men if they would pay him the reward and see that he was not punished for his crimes.

  "It seems he was suspected. His letter was opened, and the exits from the valley were both guarded. Knowing he was discovered, he tried to slip out by the river way. He failed, sneaked through the settlement at night, and slipped into the cañon here. At this end of it he found armed men on guard. He ran back and found the entrance closed. He was in a trap. He tried to climb one of the walls. Do you see that point where the rock juts out?"

  "About five hundred feet up? Yes."

  "He managed to climb that high. Nobody ever knows how he did it, but when morning broke there he was, like a fly on a wall. His hunters came and saw him. I suppose he could hear them laughing as their voices came echoing up to him. They shot above him, below him, on either side of him. He knew they were playing with him, and that they would finish him when they got ready. He must have been half crazy with fear. Anyhow, he lost his hold and fell. He was dead before they reached him. From that day this has been called Mantrap Gulch."

  The ranger looked up at the frowning walls which shut out the sunlight. His imagination pictured the drama-- the hunted man's wild flight up the gulch; his dreadful discovery that it was closed; his desperate attempt to climb by moonlight the impossible cliff, and the tragedy that overtook him.

  The girl spoke again softly, almost as if she were in the presence of that far-off Nemesis. "I suppose he deserved,it. It's an awful thing to be a traitor; to sell the people who have befriended you. We can't put ourselves in his place and know why he did it. All we can say is that we're glad-- glad that we have never known men who do such things. Do you think people always felt a sort of shrinking when they were near him, or did he seem just like other men?"

  Glancing at the man who rode beside her, she cried out at the stricken look on his face. "It's your heart again. You're worn out with anxiety and privations. I should have remembered and come slower," she reproached herself.

  "I'm all right-- now. It passes in a moment," he said hoarsely.

  But she had already slipped from the saddle and was at his bridle rein. "No-- no. You must get down. We have plenty of time. We'll rest here till you are better."

  There was nothing for it but to obey. He dismounted, feeling himself a humbug and a scoundrel. He sat down on a mossy rock, his back against another, while she trailed the reins and joined him.

  "You are better now, aren't you?" she asked, as she seated herself on an adjacent bowlder.

  Gruffly he answered: "I'm all right."

  She thought she understood. Men do not like to be coddled. She began to talk cheerfully of the first thing that came into her head. He made the necessary monosyllabic responses when her speech put it up to him, but she saw that his mind was brooding over something else. Once she saw his gaze go up to the point on the cliff reached by the fugitive.

  But it was not until they were again in the saddle that he spoke.

  "Yes, he got what was coming to him. He had no right to complain."

  "That's what my father says. I don't deny the justice of it, but whenever I think of it, I feel sorry for him."

  "Why?"

  Despite the quietness of the monosyllable, she divined an eager interest back of his question.

  "He must have suffered so. He wasn't a brave man, they say. And he was one against many. They didn't hunt him. They just closed the trap and let him wear himself out trying to get through. Think of that awful week of hunger and exposure in the hills before the end!"

  "It must have been pretty bad, especially if he wasn't a game man. But he had no legitimate kick coming. He took his chance and lost. It was up to him to pay."

  "His name was David Burke. When he was a little boy I suppose his mother used to call him Davy. He wasn't bad then; just a little boy to be cuddled and petted. Perhaps he was married. Perhaps he had a sweetheart waiting for him outside, and praying for him. And they snuffed his life out as if he had been a rattlesnake."

  "Because he was a miscreant and it was best he shouldn't live. Yes, they did right. I would have helped do it in their place."

  "My father did," she sighed.

  They did not speak again until they had passed from between the chill walls to the warm sunshine of the valley beyond. Among the rocks above the trail, she glimpsed some early anemones blossoming bravely.

  She drew up with a little cry of pleasure. "They're the first I have seen. I must have them."

  Fraser swung from the saddle, but he was not quick enough. She reached them before he did, and after they had gathered them she insisted upon sitting down again.

  He had his suspicions, and voiced them. "I believe you got me off just to make me sit down."

  She laughed with deep delight. "I didn't, but since we are here we shall." And she ended debate by sitting down tailor-fashion, and beginning to arrange her little bouquet.

  A meadow lark, troubadour of spring, trilled joyously somewhere in the pines above. The man looked up, then down at the vivid creature busy with her flowers at his feet. There was kinship between the two. She, too, was athrob with the joy note of spring.

  "You're to sit down," she ordered, without looking up from the sheaf of anemone blossoms she was arranging.

  He sank down beside her, aware vaguely of something new and poignant in his life.

  CHAPTER V

  JED BRISCOE TAKES A HAND

  Suddenly a footfall, and a voice:

  "Hello, Arlie! I been looking for you everywhere."

  The Texan's gaze took in a slim dark man, goodlooking after a fashion, but with dissipation written on the rather sullen face.

  "Well, you've found me," the girl answered coolly.

  "Yes, I've found you," the man answered, with a steady, watchful eye on the Texan.

  Miss Dillon was embarrassed at this plain hostility, but indignation too sparkled in her eye. "Anything in particular you want?"

  The newcomer ignored her question. His hard gaze challenged the Southerner; did more than challenge-- weighed and condemned.

  But this young woman was not used to being ignored. Her voice took on an edge of sharpness.

  "What can I do for you, Jed?"

  "Who's your friend?" the man demanded bluntly, insolently.

  Arlie's flush showed the swift, upblazing resentment she immediately controlled. "Mr. Fraser-- just arrived from Texas. Mr. Fraser, let me introduce to you Mr. Briscoe."

  The Texan stepped forward to offer his hand, but Briscoe deliberately put both of his behind him.

  "Might I ask what Mr. Fraser, just arrived from Texas, is doing here?" the young man drawled, contriving to make an insult of every syllable.

  The girl's eyes flashed dangerously. "He is here as my guest."

  "Oh, as your guest!"

  "Doesn't it please you, Jed?"

  "Have I said it didn't please me?" he retorted smoothly.

  "Your looks say it."

  He let out a sudden furious oath. "Then my looks don't lie any."

  Fraser was stepping forward, but with a gesture Arlie held him back. This was her battle, not his.

  "What have you got to say about it?" she demanded.

  "You had no right to bring him here. Who is he anyhow?"

  "I think that is his business, and mine."

  "I make it mine," he declared hotly. "I've heard about this fellow from your father. You met up with him on the trail. He says his name is Fraser. You don't even know whether that is true. He may be a spy. H
ow do you know he ain't?"

  "How do I know you aren't?" she countered swiftly.

  "You've known me all my life. Did you ever see him before?"

  "Never."

  "Well, then!"

  "He risked his life to save ours."

  "Risked nothing! It was a trick, I tell you."

  "It makes no difference to me what you tell me. Your opinion can't affect mine."

  "You know the feeling of the valley just now about strangers," said Briscoe sullenly.

  "It depends on who the stranger is."

  "Well, I object to this one."

  "So it seems; but I don't know any law that makes me do whatever you want me to." Her voice, low and clear, cut like a whiplash.

  Beneath the dust of travel the young man's face burned with anger. "We're not discussing that just now. What I say is that you had no right to bring him here-- not now, especially. You know why," he added, almost in a whisper.

  "If you had waited and not attempted to brow-beat me, I would have shown you that that is the very reason I had to bring him."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Never mind what I mean. You have insulted my friend, and through him, me. That is enough for one day." She turned from him haughtily and spoke to the Texan. "If you are ready, Mr. Fraser, we'll be going now."

  The ranger, whose fingers had been itching to get at the throat of this insolent young man, turned without a word and obediently brought the girl's pony, then helped her to mount. Briscoe glared, in a silent tempest of passion.

  "I think I have left a glove and my anemones where we were sitting," the girl said sweetly to the Texan.

  Fraser found them, tightened the saddle girth, and mounted Teddy. As they cantered away, Arlie called to him to look at the sunset behind the mountains.

  From the moment of her dismissal of Briscoe the girl had apparently put him out of her thoughts. No fine lady of the courts could have done it with more disdainful ease. And the Texan, following her lead, played his part in the little comedy, ignoring the other man as completely as she did.

  The young cattleman, furious, his teeth set in impotent rage, watched it all with the lust to kill in his heart. When they had gone, he flung himself into the saddle and rode away in a tumultuous fury.

  Before they had covered two hundred yards Arlie turned to her companion, all contrition. "There! I've done it again. My fits of passion are always getting me into trouble. This time one of them has given you an enemy, and a bad one, too."

  "No. He would have been my enemy no rnatter what you said. Soon as he put his eyes on me, I knew it."

  "Because I brought you here, you mean?"

  "I don't mean only that. Some folks are born to be enemies, just as some are born to be friends. They've only got to look in each other's eyes once to know it."

  "That's strange. I never heard anybody else say that. Do you really mean it?"

  "Yes."

  "And did you ever have such an enemy before? Don't answer me if I oughtn't to ask that," she added quickly.

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "In Texas. Why, here we are at a ranch!"

  "Yes. It's ours, and yours as long as you want to stay. Did you feel that you were enemies the moment you saw this man in Texas?"

  "I knew we were going to have trouble as soon as we looked at each other. I had no feeling toward him, but he had toward me."

  "And did you have trouble?"

  "Some, before I landed him. The way it turned out he had most of it."

  She glanced quickly at him. "What do you mean by 'landed'?"

  "I am an officer in the Texas Rangers."

  "What are they? Something like our forest rangers?"

  "No. The duty of a Texas Ranger is to enforce the law against desperadoes. We prevent crime if we can. When we can't do that, we hunt down the criminals."

  Arlie looked at him in a startled silence.

  "You are an officer of the law-- a sort of sheriff?" she said, at last.

  "Yes, in Texas. This is Wyoming." He made his distinction, knowing it was a false one. Somehow he had the feeling of a whipped cur.

  "I wish I had known. If you had only told me earlier," she said, so low as to be almost a whisper.

  "I'm sorry. If you like, I'll go away again," he offered.

  "No, no. I'm only thinking that it gives Jed a hold, gives him something to stir up his friends with, you know. That is, it would if he knew. He mustn't find out."

  "Be frank. Don't make any secret of it. That's the best way," he advised.

  She shook her head. "You don't know Jed's crowd. They'd be suspicious of any officer, no matter where he came from."

  "Far as I can make out, that young man is going to be loaded with suspicions of me anyhow," he laughed.

  "It isn't anything to laugh at. You don't know him," she told him gravely.

  "And can't say I'm suffering to," he drawled.

  She looked at him a little impatiently, as if he were a child playing with gunpowder and unaware of its potentialities.

  "Can't you understand? You're not in Texas with your friends all around you. This is Lost Valley-- and Lost Valley isn't on the map. Men make their own law here. That is, some of them do. I wouldn't give a snap of my fingers for your life if the impression spread that you are a spy. It doesn't matter that I know you're not. Others must feel it, too."

  "I see. And Mr. Briscoe will be a molder of public opinion?"

  "So far as he can he will. We must forestall him."

  "Beat him to it, and give me a clean bill of moral health, eh?"

  She frowned. "This is serious business, my friend."

  "I'm taking it that way," he said smilingly.

  "I shouldn't have guessed it."

  Yet for all his debonair ease the man had an air of quiet competence. His strong, bronzed face and neck, the set of his shoulders, the light poise of him in the saddle, the steady confidence of the gray eyes, all told her as much. She was aware of a curiosity about what was hidden behind that stone-wall face of his.

  "You didn't finish telling me about that enemy in Texas," she suggested suddenly.

  "Oh, there ain't much to tell. He broke out from the pen, where I had put him when I was a kid. He was a desperado wanted by the authorities, so I arrested him again."

  "Sounds easy."

  "He made some trouble, shot up two or three men first." Fraser lifted his hand absently.

  "Is that scar on your hand where he shot you?" Arlie asked.

  He looked up in quick surprise. "Now, how did you know that?"

  "You were talking of the trouble he made and you looked at your hand," she explained. "Where is he now? In the penitentiary?"

  "No. He broke away before I got him there."

  She had another flash of inspiration. "And you came to Wyoming to get him again."

  "Good gracious, ma'am, but you're ce'tainly a wizard! That's why I came, though it's a secret."

  "What is he wanted for?"

  "Robbing a train, three murders and a few other things."

  As she swung from her pony in front of the old-fashioned Southern log house, Artie laughed at him over her shoulder.

  "You're a fine officer! Tell all you know to the first girl you meet!"

  "Well, you see, the girl happened to be-- you!"

  After the manner of the old-fashioned Southern house a wide "gallery" bisected it from porch to rear. Saddles hung from pegs in the gallery. Horse blankets and bridles, spurs and saddlebags, lay here and there in disarray. A disjointed rifle which some one had started to clean was on the porch. Swiftly Arlie stripped saddle, bridle, and blanket from her pony and flung them down as a contribution to the general disorder, and at her suggestion Fraser did the same. A half-grown lad came running to herd the horses into a corral close at hand.

  "I want you when you've finished feeding, Bobbie," Arlie told the lad. Then briefly to her guest: "This way, please."

  She led him into a large, cheerful living room, into
which, through big casement windows, the light streamed. It was a pleasant room, despite its barbaric touch. There was a grizzly bear skin before the great open, stone fireplace, and Navajo rugs covered the floor and hung on the walls. The skin of a silver-tip bear was stretched beneath a writing desk, a trophy of Arlie's rifle, which hung in a rack above. Civilization had furnished its quota to the room in a piano, some books, and a few photographs.