by Unknown
"I want to show you our new colt, Jack," she said to the deputy. This matter-of-fact statement came a little shyly and a little tremulously from her lips. Her heart was beating furiously.
The officer rose at once. "Just a minute," he said, and went into the house.
He unlocked the door of the room where Clanton was and glanced in. The prisoner lay on the bed in the moonlight, the blankets drawn over him. From his deep, regular breathing Jack judged him to be asleep. He relocked the door and joined Pauline.
The face of the girl was very white in the moonlight. Her big eyes flashed at him a question. Had he discovered that his prisoner was free?
They walked slowly toward the corral. From it Goodheart could see the front of the house, but not the cellar entrance at the side. Neither of them spoke until they reached the fence. He turned and leaned his elbows against it, facing the house.
Pauline was under great nervous tension. Her lips were dry and her throat parched. If the guard at the rear caught sight of the prisoner while he was escaping, Clanton would certainly be shot down. She knew Jim better than to hope that he would let himself be taken again alive.
The conscience of the girl troubled her too. She was doing this to save the life of a friend, but it was impossible not to feel a sense of treachery toward this other friend whose approval was so much more vital to her happiness. Would Jack think that she had conspired against his honor in an underhanded way? He was a man of strict principles. Would he cast her off and have no more to do with her?
She woke from her worries to discover that an emotional climax was imminent. Jack was telling her, in awkward, broken phrases, of his love for her. Polly had waited a long time for his confession, but coming at this hour it filled/her with shame and distress. What an evil chance that he should be blurting out the story of his faith and trust in her while she was in the act of betraying him!
"Don't, Jack, don't!" she begged.
"It's all right," he said gently. "I know you don't care for me. But I had to tell you. Just had to do it. Couldn't keep still any longer. It's all right, Polly. I can stand it. I didn't go for to worry you."
She wept.
Her tears distressed him. He urged her to forget his presumption. She had been so good to him that he had spoken in spite of himself.
Pauline found she could not let him deceive himself. If she let him go now, perhaps he might never come back.
"You goose!"
Though the words came smothered through her handkerchief, he gained incredible comfort from them.
"Polly!" he cried.
"Don't you say a word, Jack," she ordered. "Let me do the talking."
"If you'll tell me that--that--you care anything for--for--"
"--For a big stupid who is too modest ever to think enough of himself," she completed. "Well, I do. I care a great deal for him."
"You don't mean--"
"I do, too. That's just what I mean. No, you keep back there till I'm through, Jack. I want to find out if you love me as much as I do you."
"Polly!" he cried a second time.
Her small face was very serious and white in the moonshine.
"Suppose we don't agree about something. Say I do a thing that seems right to me, but it doesn't seem right to you. What then?"
"It'll seem right to me if you do it," he answered.
"That's just a compliment."
"No, it's the truth. Whatever you do seems right to me."
"But suppose I do something that you think is wrong. Perhaps it may seem to you disloyal."
"If you do it because you think you ought to I'll not find it disloyal."
"Sure, Jack?"
"Certain sure," he answered.
"It's a promise?"
"It's a promise."
Little imps of mischief bubbled into the brown eyes. "Then why don't you kiss me, goose?"
He caught her to him with a fierce rapture.
There came to them the sudden sound of drumming hoofs. A shot rang out in the night. Goodheart, with the first kiss of his sweetheart almost on his lips, flung Pauline aside and ran to the house.
The other guard met him at the front steps. "By God, he's gone!" the man cried.
"Clanton?"
"Yep."
"Can't be. He was handcuffed, tied to the bed, and locked in. I've got the key in my pocket."
The deputy sheriff took the steps at one bound, flung himself across the parlor, and unlocked the door. One glance showed him the empty bed, the displaced rug, and the trapdoor. He stepped forward and picked up the bits of rope and the handcuffs.
"Some one cut the rope and freed him," he said, confounded at the impossibility of the thing that had occurred.
"Must of slipped his hands out of the cuffs, looks like," the guard suggested.
"He got me to give him a bigger size--complained they chafed his wrists."
"Some trick that, if he has got kid hands."
The chill eyes of Goodheart gimleted into those of his assistant. "Did you do this, Brad? God help you if you did."
A light step sounded on the threshold. Pauline came into the room. "I did it, Jack," she said.
"You!"
"I came up through the trapdoor when I was in the cellar. I cut the rope and told him there was a horse saddled in the aspens."
Thoughts raced in his bewildered mind. She had planned all this carefully. Almost under his very eyes she had done it. Then she had lured him from the house to give Clanton a better chance. She had let him make love to her so that she could keep him at the corral while the prisoner escaped. It was all a trick. Even now she was laughing up her sleeve at the way she had made a fool of him.
"You saddled the horse and left it there." His statement was a question, too.
"Yes. I had to save him. I knew he was innocent."
All the explanations she had intended shriveled up before the scorn in his eyes. He brushed past her without a word and strode out of the house.
Pauline went to her room and flung herself on the bed. After a time her father came in and sat down beside the girl. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
"I know what you think, dad," she said without turning her head. "But I couldn't help it, I had to do it."
"It may make you trouble, ma petite."
"I can't help that. Jim didn't kill Mr. Webb. I know it."
"After a fair trial a jury said he did, Polly. We have to take their word for it."
"You think I did wrong then."
"You did what you think was right. In my heart is no blame for you."
He comforted her as best he could and left her to sleep. But she did not sleep. All through the night she lay and listened. She was miserably unhappy. Her head and her heart ached. Jack had promised that she should be the judge of what was right for her to do, and at the first test he had failed her. She made excuses for him, but the hurt of her disappointment could not be assuaged.
In the early morning she heard the clatter of horses' hoofs in the yard. During the night she had not undressed. Now she rose and went out to meet her lover. He was at the stable, a gaunt figure, hollow-eyed, dusty, and stern. He had failed to recapture his prisoner.
"Jack," she pleaded, reaching out a hand timidly toward him.
Again he rejected her advance in grim silence. Swinging to the saddle, he rode out of the gate and down the road toward Live-Oaks.
With a little whimper Polly moved blindly to the house through her tears.
Chapter XXXII
Jim Takes a Prisoner
After Goodheart left the room where his prisoner was confined, Clanton waited a few moments till the sound of his footsteps had died away. He rose, moved noiselessly across the floor, and raised the trapdoor slowly. The creaking of the rusty hinges seemed to Jim to be shouting aloud the news of his escape. The young fellow descended into the cellar and stood there without moving till his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. He groped his way to the door, which Pauline had left open an inch or two. C
arefully he edged through and crouched in the gloom at the foot of the steps.
Not far away some one was whistling cheerfully. Clanton recognized the tune as the usual musical offertory of Brad. He was giving "Uncle Ned" to an unappreciative world.
The fugitive crept up the steps and peered over the top. Brad was sitting on a bench against the wall. Evidently he was quite comfortable and had no intention of moving. The guard was so near that it would not be a fair risk to try to make a dash across the moonlit open for the aspen grove. He was so far that before the prisoner could reach him his gun would be in action. There was nothing to do but wait. Jim huddled against the sustaining wall while with the passing minutes his chance of escape dipped away.
Pierre Roubideau came round the corner of the house and joined Brad. The guard made room for him on the bench. If Roubideau sat down, the man in the shadow knew he was lost. They would sit there and chat till Goodheart came back and discovered his absence.
The rancher hesitated while he felt for his pipe. "Reckon I left it in the kitchen," he said.
Brad followed him round the corner of the house. Clanton waited no longer. They might return, or they might not. He did not intend to stay to find out.
Swiftly he ran toward the aspens. Half the distance he had covered when a voice called sharply to halt. The guard had turned and caught sight of him.
The feet of the running man slapped the ground faster. As he dodged into the trees a bullet flew past him. Yet a moment, and he had flung himself astride the bronco waiting there and had electrified that sleepy animal into life.
The pony struck its stride immediately. It took the rising ground at a gallop, topped the hill, and disappeared over the brow. The rider plunged into the thick mesquite. He knew that Goodheart would pursue, but he knew, too, that the odds were a hundred to one against capture if he could put a mile or two between him and the Roubideau ranch. A man could vanish in any one of fifty draws. He could find a temporary hiding-place up any gulch under cover of the matted brush. Therefore he turned toward the mountains.
Since he was unarmed, it was essential that Clanton should get into touch with his associates of the chaparral at once. Until he had a six-gun strapped to his side and a carbine under his leg he would not feel comfortable. All night he traveled, winding in and out of cañons, crossing divides, and dipping down into little mountain parks. He knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he moved toward his destination in the line of greatest economy.
Morning found him descending from a mountain pass to the Ruidosa.
"Breakfast soon, you wall-faced old Piute," Jim told his mount. "You're sure a weary caballo, but we got to keep hitting the trail till we cross that hogback."
A thin film of smoke rose from a little valley to the left. Clanton drew up abruptly. He had no desire to meet now any strangers whose intentions had not been announced.
Swiftly, with a pantherish smoothness of motion, he slid from the cowpony and moved to the edge of a bluff that looked down into the arroyo below. He crept forward and peered through a clump of cactus growing at the edge of the escarpment.
The camp-fire was at the very foot of the bluff. A man was stooped over it cooking breakfast.
The heart of the fugitive lost a beat, then raced wildly. The camper was Devil Dave Roush. A rifle lay beside him. His revolver was in a cartridge belt that had been tossed on a boulder within reach of his hand.
Clanton wriggled back without a sound from the edge of the cliff and rose to his feet. A savage light of triumph blazed in his eyes. The enemy for whom he had long sought was delivered into his hands. He ran back to the bronco and untied the reata from the tientos. Deftly he coiled the rope and adjusted the loop to suit him. Again he stole to the rim rock and waited with the stealthy, deadly patience of the crouched cougar.
Roush rose. His arms fell to his sides. Instantly the rope dropped, uncoiling as it flew. With perfect accuracy the loop descended upon its victim and tightened about his waist, pinning the arms close to the body.
Clanton, hauled in the rawhide swiftly. Dragged from his feet, Roush could make no resistance. Before he could gather his startled wits, he found himself dangling in midair against the face of the rock wall.
The man above fastened the end of the rope to the roots of a scrub oak and ran down the slope at full speed. In less than half a minute he was standing breathless in front of his prisoner.
Already shaken with dread, Roush gave way to panic fear at sight of him.
"Goddlemighty! It's Clanton!" he cried.
Jim buckled on the belt and appropriated the rifle. His grim face told Roush all he needed to know.
There had been a time when Roush, full of physical life and energy, had boasted that he feared no living man. In his cups he still bragged of his bad record, of his accuracy as a gunman, of his gameness. But he knew, and his associates suspected, that Devil Dave had long since drunk up his courage. His nerves were jumpy and his heart bad. Now he begged for his life abjectly. If he had been free from the rope that held him dangling against the wall, he would have crawled like a whipped cur to the feet of his enemy.
At a glance Clanton saw Roush had been camping alone. The hobbled horse, the blankets, the breakfast dishes, all told him this. But he took no chances. First he saddled the horse and brought it close to the camp-fire. When he sat down to eat the breakfast the rustler had cooked, it was with his back to the bluff and the rifle across his knees.
"This here rope hurts tur'ble--seems like my wrists are on fire," whined the man. "You let me down, Mr. Clanton, and I'll explain eve'ything. I want to be yore friend. I sure do. I don't feel noways onfriendly to you. Mebbe I used to be a bad lot, but I'm a changed man now."
Go-Get-'Em Jim said nothing. He had not spoken once, and his silence filled the roped man with terror. The shifting eyes of Devil Dave read doom in the cold, still ones of his enemy.
Sometimes Roush argued in a puling whimper. Sometimes his terror rose to the throat and his entreaties became shrieks. He died a dozen deaths while his foe watched him with a chill stillness more menacing than any threats.
The first impulse of Clanton had been to stamp out the life of this man just as he would that of a diamond-backed rattlesnake; but he meant to take his time about it and to see that the fellow suffered. Not until he was halfway through the meal did the memory of his pledge to Pauline jump to his mind. Quickly he pushed it from him. He had not meant to include Roush in his promise. As soon as he had made an end of this ruffian he would turn over a new leaf. But not yet. Roush was outside the pale. His life belonged to Jim. He would be a traitor to the memory of his sister if he let the villain go.
The lust for vengeance swelled in the young man's blood like a tide. It was his right to kill; more, it was his duty. So he tried to persuade himself. But deep within him a voice was making itself heard. It whispered that if he killed Roush now, he could never look Pauline Roubideau in the face again. She had fought gallantly for his soul, and at last he had pledged his honor to a new course. Not twelve hours ago she had risked her reputation to save his life. If he failed her now, it would be a betrayal of all the desires and purposes that had of late been stirring in him.
Clammy beads of sweat stood on his forehead. He had been given a new chance, and it warred with every inherited instinct of his nature. The fight within was cruel and bitter. But when he rose, his breakfast forgotten, it was won. He would let Roush go unhurt. He would do it for the sake of Polly Roubideau, who had been such a good friend to him.
Devil Dave, ghastly with fear, was still pleading for his life. Clanton, who had heard nothing of what the fellow had been saying in the past ten minutes, came to a sudden alert attention.
"I'll go into court an' swear it if you'll let me be. I'll tell the jedge an' the jury that Joe Yankie told me an' Albeen an' Dumont that he bushwhacked Webb an' then cut his stick so that you-all got the blame. Honest to God, I will, Mr. Clanton. Jest you trust me an' see."
"When did Yankie tell yo
u that?"
"He done told us at the camp-fire one night. He made his brags how you got the blame for it an' would have to hang."
"Albeen heard him say it--an' Dumont too?"
"Tha's right, Mr. Clanton. An' I'll sure take my Bible oath on it."
Go-Get-'Em Jim whipped out the forty-five from its holster and fired. Roush dropped screaming to the ground. He thought he had been shot. The bullet had cut the rope above his head.
"Get up," ordered Clanton in disgust.
Roush rose stiffly.
Jim swung to the saddle of the horse beside him. "Hit the dust," he told his captive.