For a time she lay there in the darkness, shaken and bruised by the fall, a sharp pain shooting through one of her legs just above the ankle. During those minutes of daze voices came to her from the slit of light above. The painted face of an Apache leaned over the edge of the wall and looked into the gulf.
The girl made not the least movement. She did not stir to relieve the pain of her leg. Scarcely did she dare breathe lest the sound of it might reach those above.
The Apaches began to fire into the fissure. Ramona noiselessly dragged herself close to the overhanging wall. Shot after shot was flung into the cavern at random. Fortunately for Ramona the strain of the situation relaxed abruptly. A wave of light-headedness seemed to carry her floating into space. She fainted.
When she came to herself no sound reached the girl from above. The Indians had no doubt concluded that their victim was not in the cavern and taken up the pursuit again. But she knew the cunning of the Apache. Probably one or two braves had been left to watch the cleft. She lay quite still and listened. All she could hear was the fearful beating of her heart.
For hours she lay there without making a sound. The patience of the Apache is proverbial. It was possible they knew where she was and were waiting for her to deliver herself to them.
'Mona had one ghastly comfort. The little revolver she had brought along with which to shoot rattlesnakes was still in its scabbard by her side. If they would give her only a moment or two of warning, she would never fall alive into the hands of the redskins.
Time was unmarked for her in the darkness of the cavern. She could not tell whether it was still morning or whether the afternoon was nearing an end. Such a day, so full of dreadful horrors, so long from morning till night, she had never before passed. It seemed to her that a week of hours had come and gone before the light above began to fade.
* * *
CHAPTER XXXV
THE DESERT
It was only recently that Clint Wadley had become a man of wealth, and life in the Panhandle was even yet very primitive according to present-day standards. There was no railroad within one hundred and fifty miles of the A T O ranch. Once in two weeks one of the cowboys rode to Clarendon to get the mail and to buy small supplies. Otherwise contact with the world was limited to occasional visits to town.
As a little girl Ramona had lived in a one-room house built of round logs, with a stick-and-mud chimney, a door of clapboards daubed with mud at the chinks, and a dirt floor covered with puncheons. She had slept in a one-legged bedstead fitted into the wall, through the sides and ends of which bed, at intervals of eight inches, holes had been bored to admit of green rawhide strips for slats. She had sat on a home-made three-legged stool at a home-made table in homespun clothes and eaten a dish of cush[8] for her supper. She had watched her aunt make soap out of lye dripping from an ash-hopper. The only cooking utensils in the house had been a Dutch oven, a three-legged skillet, a dinner-pot, a tea-kettle, a big iron shovel, and a pair of pot-hooks suspended from an iron that hung above the open fire.
But those were memories of her childhood in southern Texas. With the coming of prosperity Clint had sent his children to Tennessee to school, and Ramona had been patiently trained to the feebleness of purpose civilization in those days demanded of women of her class and section. She had been taught to do fancy needlework and to play the piano as a parlor accomplishment. It had been made plain to her that her business in life was to marry and keep the home fires burning, and her schooling had been designed, not to prepare her as a mate for her future husband, but to fit her with the little graces that might entice him into choosing her for a wife.
Upon her return to the ranch Ramona had compromised between her training and her inheritance. She took again to horseback riding and to shooting, even though she read a good deal and paid due attention to her pink-and-white complexion.
So that when she looked up from the cavern in which she was buried and caught a gleam of a star in the slit of blue sky above, she was not so helpless as her schooling had been designed to make her. The girl was compact of supple strength. Endurance and a certain toughness of fiber had come to her from old Clint Wadley.
She began the climb, taking advantage of every bit of roughness, of every projection in the almost sheer wall. A knob of feldspar, a stunted shrub growing from a crevice, a fault in the rock structure, offered here and there toe-or hand-holds. She struggled upward, stopped more than once by the smooth surface against which her soft warm body was pressing. On such occasions she would lower herself again, turn to the right or the left, and work toward another objective.
Ramona knew that the least slip, the slightest failure of any one of her muscles, would send her plunging down to the bottom of the crevasse. The worst of it was that she could not put any dependence upon her injured leg. It might see her through or it might not.
It was within a few feet of the top, just below the arrowweed bush, that she came to an impasse. The cold wall offered no hand-hold by which she could gain the few inches that would bring her within reach of the bunched roots. She undid her belt, threw one end of it over the body of the bush, and worked it carefully down until she could buckle it. By means of this she went up hand over hand till she could reach the arrowweed. Her knee found support in the loop of the belt, and in another moment she had zigzagged herself inch by inch over the edge to the flat surface above.
No sign of the Apaches was to be seen. 'Mona recovered her belt and began to move up the rock spur toward the summit of the hill. A sound stopped her in her tracks. It was the beating of a tom-tom.
She knew the Indians must be camped by the lake. They were probably having a feast and dances. In any case she could not strike direct for home. She must keep on this side of the hill, make a wide circuit, and come in from the west.
Already her leg was paining her a good deal. Since five o'clock in the morning she had eaten nothing. Her throat was parched with thirst. But these were details that must be forgotten. She had to tramp more than twenty miles through the desert regardless of her physical condition.
The girl went at it doggedly. She limped along, getting wearier every mile of the way. But it was not until she discovered that she was lost to all sense of direction that she broke down and wept. The land here was creased by swales, one so like another that in the darkness she had gone astray and did not know north from south.
After tears came renewed resolution. She tried to guide herself by the stars, but though she could hold a straight course there was no assurance in her mind that she was going toward the A T O. Each step might be taking her farther from home. A lime kiln burned in her throat. She was so worn out from lack of food and the tremendous strain under which she had been carrying on that her knees buckled under her weight as she stumbled through the sand. The bad ankle complained continuously.
In this vast solitude there was something weird and eerie that shook her courage. Nor was the danger all fantastic imaginings. The Indians might yet discover her. She might wander far from beaten trails of travel and die of thirst as so many newcomers had done. Possibilities of disaster trooped through her mind.
She was still a child, on the sunny side of seventeen. So it was natural that when she sat down to rest her ankle she presently began to sob again, and that in her exhaustion she cried herself to sleep.
When her eyes opened, the sun was peeping over the desert horizon. She could tell directions now. The A T O ranch must be far to the northeast of where she was. But scarcely a mile from her ran a line of straggling brush. It must be watered by a stream. She hobbled forward painfully to relieve the thirst that was already a torment to her.
She breasted the rise of a little hill and looked down a gentle slope toward the thicket. For a moment her heart lost a beat. A trickle of smoke was rising from a camp-fire and a man was bending over it. He was in the clothes of a white man. Simultaneously there came to her the sound of a shot.
From her parched throat there came a bleating little cry. She h
urried forward, and as she went she called again and still again. She was pitifully anxious lest the campers ride away before they should discover her.
A man with a gun in his hand moved toward her from the creek. She gave a little sobbing cry and stumbled toward him.
Cush is made of old corn bread and biscuits in milk, beaten to a batter and fried in bacon grease with salt. [8]
* * *
CHAPTER XXXVI
HOMER DINSMORE ESCORTS RAMONA
"I'm lost!" cried Ramona.
"Where from?" asked Dinsmore.
"From the A T O."
"You're Clint Wadley's daughter, then?"
She nodded. "We met Indians. I ... got away."
The girl knelt beside the brook, put her hands on two stones that jutted up from the water, and drank till her thirst was assuaged.
"I'm hungry," she said simply, after she had risen.
He led her back to the camp-fire and on the way picked up the bird he had shot. 'Mona saw that he noticed her limp, though he said nothing about it.
"I had an accident," she explained. "Fell down a rock wall while I was getting away from the 'Paches."
"They're out again, are they—the devils?" He asked another question. "You said 'we.' Who was with you when the Indians took after you?"
"Quint Sullivan. I was on the other side of Crane Lake from him and heard shots. I saw Quint running for the horses with the 'Paches after him."
"Did he get away?"
She shuddered. "He reached the horses. They rode after him. I don't know whether...." Her voice thinned away.
The man at the camp-fire turned, and at sight of them dropped a sudden, startled oath.
Ramona looked at him, then at Dinsmore. A faint tremor passed through her slight body. She knew now who these men were.
"What's she doin' here?" demanded Gurley.
"She's lost. The 'Paches are out, Steve."
"Where are they?"
"Up at Crane Lake last night."
"Are they headed this way?"
"Don't know. She"—with a jerk of his thumb toward Ramona—"bumped into 'em an' got away."
"We'd better light a shuck out o' here," said Gurley, visibly disturbed.
"Why? They ain't liable to come this way more than any other. We'll have breakfast an' talk things over. Fix up this bird, Steve. Cook it in the skillet. She's hungry."
Ramona observed that both the men referred to her as she whenever any reference was made to her.
While they ate breakfast the girl told the story of her experience. Dinsmore watched her with a reluctant admiration. The lines of her figure drooped with weariness, but fatigue could not blot out the grace of her young vitality.
"When can we start for home?" Ramona asked after she had eaten.
"For the A T O?" asked the lank, sallow outlaw brutally. "What's ailin' you? Think we're goin' to take you home with the 'Paches between us an' there? We ain't plumb crazy."
"But I must get home right away. My father—he'll be frightened about me."
"Will he?" jeered Gurley. "If he knew you was in such good company he'd be real easy in his mind." The man flashed a look at her that made the girl burn with shame.
"We could go round an' miss the 'Paches," suggested Ramona timidly.
"Forget that notion," answered Gurley, and there was a flash of cruelty in his eyes. "Mebbe you misremember that I'm obligated to you, miss, for what that condemned Ranger Roberts did to me when I fell over the box in front of the store. We'll settle accounts whilst you're here, I reckon."
The girl appealed to Dinsmore. "You're not going to let him ... mistreat me, are you?"
The pathos of her situation, the slim, helpless, wonderful youth of the girl, touched the not very accessible heart of Dinsmore.
"You bet I'm not. He'll cut out that kind o' talk right now," he said.
The eyes of Ramona met his, and she knew she was safe. This man had the respect for a good woman that was characteristic of the turbulent West in its most lawless days. He might be a miscreant and a murderer, but he would fight at the drop of a hat in response to the appeal of any woman who was "straight."
"Playin' up to Clint, are you, Homer?" sneered the other man. "You better take her straight home like she wants, since you're so friendly to the family."
"That's exactly what I'm goin' to do," retorted Dinsmore. "Any objections?"
Gurley dropped his sneer instantly. His alarm voiced itself in a wheedling apology. "I didn't go for to rile you, Homer. O' course you cayn't do that. We got to stick together. The Indians is one reason. An' there's another. No need for me to tell you what it is."
"You'll have to wait for me in the cañon till I get back. It's not far from here to you-know-where. I'm goin' to take the horses an' see this girl back to her home."
"You're good," Ramona said simply.
"You're not figurin' on takin' my horse, are you?" Gurley burst out with an oath.
"You've done guessed it, Steve. You'll have to hoof it into the cañon."
"Like hell I will. Take another think, my friend."
The eyes of the men clashed, one pair filled with impotent rage, the other cold and hard as polished steel on a frosty morning.
Gurley yielded sullenly. "It's no square deal, Homer. We didn't bring her here. Why cayn't she go along with us an' hole up till the 'Paches are gone an' till ... things kinda settle down?"
"Because she's got no business with folks like us. Her place is back at the A T O, an' that's where I aim to take her. She's had one hell of a time, if you ask me. What that kid needs is for her home folks to tuck her up in bed an' send her to sleep. She's had about all the trouble a li'l' trick like her can stand, I shouldn't wonder."
"You ain't her nurse," growled Gurley.
"That's why I'm goin' to take her home to those that are. 'Nuff said, Steve. What I say goes."
"You act mighty high-heeled," grumbled the other man.
"Mebbeso," replied Dinsmore curtly. "Saddle the horses, Steve."
"I dunno as I'm yore horse-rustler," mumbled Gurley, smothering his sullen rage. None the less he rose slowly and shuffled away toward the hobbled horses.
'Mona touched Dinsmore on the sleeve. Her soft eyes poured gratitude on him. "I'll remember this as long as I live. No matter what anybody says I'll always know that you're good."
The blood crept up beneath the tan of the outlaw's face. It had been many years since an innocent child had made so naïve a confession of faith in him. He was a bad-man, and he knew it. But at the core of him was a dynamic spark of self-respect that had always remained alight. He had ridden crooked trails through all his gusty lifetime. His hand had been against every man's, but at least he had fought fair and been loyal to his pals. And there had never been a time when a good woman need be afraid to look him in the face.
"Sho! Nothin' to that. I gotta take you home so as you won't be in the way," he told her with a touch of embarrassed annoyance.
No man alive knew this country better than Homer Dinsmore. Every draw was like its neighbor, every rolling rise a replica of the next. But the outlaw rode as straight a course as if his road had been marked out for him by stakes across the plains. He knew that he might be riding directly toward a posse of Rangers headed for Palo Duro to round up the stage robbers. He could not help that. He would have to take his chance of an escape in case they met such a posse.
The sun climbed high in the heavens.
"How far do you think we are now from the ranch?" asked Ramona.
"Most twenty miles. We've been swingin' well to the left. I reckon we can cut in now."
They climbed at a walk a little hill and looked across a wide sweep of country before them. Ramona gave a startled cry and pointed an outstretched finger at some riders emerging from a dry wash.
"'Paches!" cried Dinsmore. "Back over the hill, girl."
They turned, but too late. On the breeze there came to them a yell that sent the blood from 'Mona's heart.
* * *
CHAPTER XXXVII
ON A HOT TRAIL
Roberts picked up from the fort a Mescalero Apache famous as a trailer. He reckoned to be rather expert in that line himself, but few white men could boast of such skill as old Guadaloupe had.
Jumbo Wilkins was one of the posse Jack had hastily gathered. "I'm good an' glad I was in town an' not out herdin' vacas, Tex. A fellow kinda needs a little excitement oncet in a while. I got a hunch we're goin' to git these birds this time."
"You're the greatest little optimist I ever did see, Jumbo," answered the Ranger with a smile. "We're goin' to strike a cold trail of men who know every inch of this country an' are ridin' hell-for-leather to make a get-away. We're liable to ride our broncs to shadows an' never see hair or hide of the fellows we want. I'd like to know what license you've got for yore hunch."
"You're such a lucky guy, Tex. If you was lookin' for a needle in a haystack you'd find it in yore mouth when you picked up a straw to chew on."
"Lucky, nothin'. A man makes his own luck, I always did tell you, an' I haven't bumped into any yet. You don't see any big bunch of fat cows with my brand on 'em, do you? I'm pluggin' along for a dollar a day with a promise from Cap Ellison that I'll probably cash in soon with my boots on. Old Man Luck always hides behind the door when I pass, if there's any such Santa Claus in the business."
"All the way you look at it. Didn't Clint Wadley offer you the job of bossin' the best cow-ranch in the Panhandle?"
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