The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  He waited, repeating the call. His blue eyes clouded with anxiety and he fumbled the adjustments, coaxing the current into perfect action before he called again. Answer came, and Swan bent over the table, listening, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the opposite wall of the dugout. Then, his fingers flexing delicately, swiftly, he sent the message that told how completely his big heart matched the big body:

  “Send doctor and trained nurse to Quirt ranch at once. Send men to Bear Top Pass, intercept man with young woman, or come to rescue if he don’t cross. Have three men here with evidence to convict if we can save the girl who is valuable witness. Girl being abducted in fear of what she can tell. They plan to charge her with insanity. Urgent. Hurry. Come ready to fight.

  “S.V.”

  Swan had a code, but codes require a little time in the composition of a message, and time was the one thing he could not waste. He heard the gist of the message repeated to him, told the man at the other station that lives were at stake, and threw off the current.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  KIDNAPPED

  Lorraine had once had a nasty fall from riding down hill at a gallop. She remembered that accident and permitted Snake to descend Granite Ridge at a walk, which was fortunate, since it gave the horse a chance to recover a little from the strain of the terrific pace at which she had ridden him that morning. At first it had been fighting fury that had impelled her to hurry; now it was fear that drove her homeward where Lone was, and Swan, and that stolid, faithful Jim. She felt that Senator Warfield would never dare to carry out his covert threat, once she reached home. Nevertheless, the threat haunted her, made her glance often over her shoulder.

  At the Thurman ranch, which she was passing with a sickening memory of the night when she and Swan had carried her father there, Al Woodruff rode out suddenly from behind the stable and blocked the trail, his six-shooter in his hand, his face stony with determination. Lorraine afterwards decided that he must have seen or heard her coming down the ridge and had waited for her there. He smiled with his lips when she pulled up Snake with a startled look.

  “You’re in such a hurry this morning that I thought the only way to get a chance to talk to you was to hold you up,” he said, in much the same tone he had used that day at the ranch.

  “I don’t see why you want to talk to me,” Lorraine retorted, not in the least frightened at the gun, which was too much like her movie West to impress her much. But her eyes widened at the look in his face, and she tried to edge away from him without seeming to do so.

  Al stopped her by the simple method of reaching out his left hand and catching Snake by the cheek-piece of the bridle. “You don’t have to see why,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. I’ve made up my mind that I’ve got to have you with me—always. This is kinda sudden, maybe, but that’s the way the game runs, sometimes. Now, I want to tell yuh one or two things that’s for your own good. One is that I’ll have my way, or die getting it. Don’t be scared; I won’t hurt you. But if you try to break away, I’ll shoot you, that’s all. I’m going to marry you, see, first. Then I’ll make love to you afterwards. I ain’t asking you if you’ll marry me. You’re going to do it, or I’ll kill you.”

  Lorraine gazed at him fascinated, too astonished to attempt any move toward escape. Al’s hand slipped from the bridle down to the reins, and still holding Snake, still holding the gun muzzle toward her, still looking her straight in the eyes, he threw his right leg over the cantle of his saddle and stepped off his horse.

  “Put your other hand on the saddle horn,” he directed. “I ain’t going to hurt you if you’re good.”

  He twitched his neckerchief off—Lorraine saw that it was untied, and that he must have planned all this—and with it he tied her wrists to the saddle horn. She gave Snake a kick in the ribs, but Al checked the horse’s first start and Snake was too tired to dispute a command to stand still. Al put up his gun, pulled a hunting knife from a little scabbard in his boot, sliced two pairs of saddle strings from Lorraine’s saddle, calmly caught and held her foot when she tried to kick him, pushed the foot back into the stirrup and tied it there with one of the leather strings. Just as if he were engaged in an everyday proceeding, he walked around Snake and tied Lorraine’s right foot; then, to prevent her from foolishly throwing herself from the horse and getting hurt, he tied the stirrups together under the horse’s belly.

  “Now, if you’ll be a good girl, I’ll untie your hands,” he said, glancing up into her face. He freed her hands, and Lorraine immediately slapped him in the face and reached for his gun. But Al was too quick for her. He stepped back, picked up Snake’s reins and mounted his own horse. He looked back at her appraisingly, saw her glare of hatred and grinned at it, while he touched his horse with the spurs and rode away, leading Snake behind him.

  Lorraine said nothing until Al, riding at a lope, passed the field at the mouth of Spirit Canyon where the blaze-faced roan still fed with the others. They were feeding along the creek quite close to the fence, and the roan walked toward them. The sight of it stirred Lorraine out of her dumb horror.

  “You killed Fred Thurman! I saw you,” she cried suddenly.

  “Well, you ain’t going to holler it all over the country,” Al flung back at her over his shoulder. “When you’re married to me, you’ll come mighty close to keeping your mouth shut about it.”

  “I’ll never marry you! You—you fiend! Do you think I’d marry a cold-blooded murderer like you?”

  Al turned in the saddle and looked at her intently. “If I’m all that,” he told her coolly, “you can figure out about what’ll happen to you if you don’t marry me. If you saw what I done to Fred Thurman, what do you reckon I’d do to you?” He looked at her for a minute, shrugged his shoulders and rode on, crossing the creek and taking a trail which Lorraine did not know. Much of the time they traveled in the water, though it slowed their pace. Where the trail was rocky, they took it and made better time.

  Snake lagged a little on the upgrades, but he was well trained to lead and gave little trouble. Lorraine thought longingly of Yellowjacket and his stubbornness and tried to devise some way of escape. She could not believe that fate would permit Al Woodruff to carry out such a plan. Lone would overtake them, perhaps,—and then she remembered that Lone would have no means of knowing which way she had gone. If Hawkins and Senator Warfield came after them, her plight would be worse than ever. Still, she decided that she must risk that danger and give Lone a clue.

  She dropped a glove beside the trail, where it lay in plain sight of any one following them. But presently Al looked over his shoulder, saw that one of her hands was bare, and tied Snake’s reins to his saddle and his own horse to a bush. Then he went back down the trail until he found the glove. He put it into his pocket, came silently up to Lorraine and pulled off her other glove. Without a word he took her wrists in a firm clasp, tied them together again to the saddle horn, pulled off her tie, her hat, and the pins from her hair.

  “I guess you don’t know me yet,” he remarked dryly, when he had confiscated every small article which she could let fall as she rode. “I was trying to treat yuh white, but you don’t seem to appreciate it. Now you can ride hobbled, young lady.”

  “Oh, I could kill you!” Lorraine whispered between set teeth.

  “You mean you’d like to. Well, I ain’t going to give you a chance.” His eyes rested on her face with a new expression; an awakening desire for her, an admiration for the spirit that would not let her weep and plead with him.

  “Say! you ain’t going to be a bit hard to marry,” he observed, his eyes lighting with what was probably his nearest approach to tenderness. “I kinda wish you liked me, now I’ve got you.”

  He shook her arm and laughed when she turned her face away from him, then remounted his horse. Snake moved reluctantly when Al started on. Lorraine felt hope slipping from her. With her hands tied, she could do nothing at all save sit there and ride wherever Al Woodruff chose to lead her horse.
He seemed to be making for the head of Spirit Canyon, on the side toward Bear Top.

  As they climbed higher, she could catch glimpses of the road down which her father had driven almost to his death. She studied Al’s back as he rode before her and wondered if he could really be cold-blooded enough to kill without compunction whoever he was told to kill, whether he had any personal quarrel with his victim or not. Certainly he had had no quarrel with her father, or with Frank.

  It was long past noon, and she was terribly hungry and very thirsty, but she would not tell Al her wants if she starved. She tried to guess at his plans and at his motive for taking her away like this. He had no camping outfit, a bulkily rolled slicker forming his only burden. He could not, then, be planning to take her much farther into the wilderness; yet if he did not hide her away, how could he expect to keep her? His motive for marrying her was rather mystifying. He did not seem sufficiently in love with her to warrant an abduction, and he was too cool for such a headlong action, unless driven by necessity. She wondered what he was thinking about as he rode. Not about her, she guessed, except when some bad place in the trail made it necessary for him to stop, tie Snake to the nearest bush, lead his own horse past the obstruction and come back after her. Several times this was necessary. Once he took the time to examine the thongs on her ankles, apparently wishing to make sure that she was not uncomfortable. Once he looked up into her sullenly distressed face and said, “Tired?” in a humanly sympathetic tone that made her blink back the tears. She shook her head and would not look at him. Al regarded her in silence for a minute, led Snake to his own horse, mounted and rode on.

  He was a murderer; he had undoubtedly killed many men. He would kill her if she attempted to escape—“and he could not catch me,” Lorraine was just enough to add. Yet she felt baffled; cheated of the full horror of being kidnapped.

  She had no knowledge of a bad man who was human in spots without being repentant. For love of a girl, she had been taught to believe, the worst outlaw would weep over his past misdeeds, straighten his shoulders, look to heaven for help and become a self-sacrificing hero for whom audiences might be counted upon to shed furtive tears.

  Al Woodruff, however, did not love her. His eyes had once or twice softened to friendliness, but love was not there. Neither was repentance there. He seemed quite satisfied with himself, quite ready to commit further crimes for sake of his own safety or desire. He was hard, she decided, but he was not unnecessarily harsh; cruel, without being wantonly brutal. He was, in short, the strangest man she had ever seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “OH, I COULD KILL YOU!”

  Before sundown they reached the timberland on Bear Top. The horses slipped on the pine needles when Al left the trail and rode up a gentle incline where the trees grew large and there was little underbrush. It was very beautiful, with the slanting sun-rays painting broad yellow bars across the gloom of the forest. In a little while they reached the crest of that slope, and Lorraine, looking back, could only guess at where the trail wound on among the trees lower down.

  Birds called companionably from the high branches above them. A nesting grouse flew chuttering out from under a juniper bush, alighted a short distance away and went limping and dragging one wing before them, cheeping piteously.

  While Lorraine was wondering if the poor thing had hurt a leg in lighting, Al clipped its head off neatly with a bullet from his six-shooter, though Lorraine had not seen him pull the gun and did not know he meant to shoot. The bird’s mate whirred up and away through the trees, and Lorraine was glad that it had escaped.

  Al slid the gun back into his holster, leaned from his saddle and picked up the dead grouse as unconcernedly as he would have dismounted, pulled his knife from his boot and drew the bird neatly, flinging the crop and entrails from him.

  “Them juniper berries tastes the meat if you don’t clean ’em out right away,” he remarked casually to Lorraine, as he wiped the knife on his trousers and thrust it back into the boot-scabbard before he tied the grouse to the saddle by its blue, scaley little feet.

  When he was ready to go on, Snake refused to budge. Tough as he was, he had at last reached the limit of his energy and ambition. Al yanked hard on the bridle reins, then rode back and struck him sharply with his quirt before Snake would rouse himself enough to move forward. He went stiffly, reluctantly, pulling back until his head was held straight out before him. Al dragged him so for a rod or two, lost patience and returned to whip him forward again.

  “What a brute you are!” Lorraine exclaimed indignantly. “Can’t you see now tired he is?”

  Al glanced at her from under his eyebrows. “He’s all in, but he’s got to make it,” he said. “I’ve been that way myself—and made it. What I can do, a horse can do. Come on, you yella-livered bonehead!”

  Snake went on, urged now and then by Al’s quirt. Every blow made Lorraine wince, and she made the wincing perfectly apparent to Al, in the hope that he would take some notice of it and give her a chance to tell him what she thought of him without opening the conversation herself.

  But Al did not say anything. When the time came—as even Lorraine saw that it must—when Snake refused to attempt a steep slope, Al still said nothing. He untied her ankles from the stirrups and her hands from the saddle horn, carried her in his arms to his own horse and compelled her to mount. Then he retied her exactly as she had been tied on Snake.

  “Skinner knows this trail,” he told Lorraine. “And I’m behind yuh with a gun. Don’t forget that, Miss Spitfire. You let Skinner go to suit himself—and if he goes wrong, you pay, because it’ll be you reining him wrong. Get along there, Skinner!”

  Skinner got along in a businesslike way that told why Al Woodruff had chosen to ride him on this trip. He seemed to be a perfectly dependable saddle horse for a bandit to own. He wound in and out among the trees and boulders, stepping carefully over fallen logs; he thrust his nose out straight and laid back his ears and pushed his way through thickets of young pines; he went circumspectly along the edge of a deep gulch, climbed over a ridge and worked his way down the precipitous slope on the farther side, made his way around a thick clump of spruces and stopped in a little, grassy glade no bigger than a city lot, but with a spring gurgling somewhere near. Then he swung his head around and looked over his shoulder inquiringly at Al, who was coming behind, leading Snake.

  Lorraine looked at him also, but Al did not say anything to her or to the horse. He let them stand there and wait while he unsaddled Snake, put a drag rope on him and led him to the best grazing. Then, coming back, he very matter-of-factly untied Lorraine and helped her off the horse. Lorraine was all prepared to fight, but she did not quite know how to struggle with a man who did not take hold of her or touch her, except to steady her in dismounting. Unconsciously she waited for a cue, and the cue was not given.

  Al’s mind seemed intent upon making Skinner comfortable. Still, he kept an eye on Lorraine, and he did not turn his back to her. Lorraine looked over to where Snake, too exhausted to eat, stood with drooping head and all four legs braced like sticks under him. It flashed across her mind that not even her old director would order her to make a run for that horse and try to get away on him. Snake looked as if he would never move from that position until he toppled over.

  Al pulled the bridle off Skinner, gave him a half-affectionate slap on the rump, and watched him go off, switching his tail and nosing the ground for a likable place to roll. Al’s glance went on to Snake, and from him to Lorraine.

  “You sure do know how to ride hell out of a horse,” he remarked. “Now he’ll be stiff and sore tomorrow—and we’ve got quite a ride to make.”

  His tone of disapproval sent a guilty feeling through Lorraine, until she remembered that a slow horse might save her from this man who was all bad,—except, perhaps, just on the surface which was not altogether repellent. She looked around at the tiny basin set like a saucer among the pines. Already the dusk was painting deep shadows in the woods
across the opening, and turning the sky a darker blue. Skinner rolled over twice, got up and shook himself with a satisfied snort and went away to feed. She might, if she were patient, run to the horse when Al’s back was turned, she thought. Once in the woods she might have some chance of eluding him, and perhaps Skinner would show as much wisdom going as he had in coming, and take her down to the sageland.

  But Skinner walked to the farther edge of the meadow before he stopped, and Al Woodruff never turned his back to a foe. An owl hooted unexpectedly, and Lorraine edged closer to her captor, who was gathering dead branches one by one and throwing them toward a certain spot which he had evidently selected for a campfire. He looked at her keenly, even suspiciously, and pointed with the stick in his left hand.

  “You might go over there by the saddle and set down till I get a fire going,” he said. “Don’t go wandering around aimless, like a hen turkey, watching a chance to duck into the brush. There’s bear in there and lion and lynx, and I’d hate to see you chawed. They never clean their toe-nails, and blood poison generally sets in where they leave a scratch. Go and set down.”

  Lorraine did not know how much of his talk was truth, but she went and sat down by his saddle and began braiding her hair in two tight braids like a squaw. If she did get a chance to run, she thought, she did not want her hair flying loose to catch on bushes and briars. She had once fled through a brush patch in Griffith Park with her hair flowing loose, and she had not liked the experience, though it had looked very nice on the screen.

  Before she had finished the braiding, Al came over to the saddle and untied his slicker roll and the grouse.