"Old man" Carson—so-called through lack of courtesy and because of the sprinkling of gray through his black hair, a man of perhaps forty-five—filled an unthinkably disreputable pipe with his own conception of "real tobacca" and chuckled so that the second match was required; before he was ready to say his say.
"You just listen to me, you boys!" he said. "I worked with the Down River outfit a year before Trevors sent me word he had a job open here at better pay. That's only seventy-five miles, and news does percolate, give it time. None of you fellers ever saw old Luke Sanford?"
"I'd been working here close to two weeks when he got killed," Bud said as Carson's twinkling eyes went from face to face. "I got my job straight from him, not Trevors."
"That's so," said Carson. "Well, Bud knows the sort Luke Sanford was. He was dead and buried when I come to the Blue Lake, but I'd saw him twice and I'd heard of him more times than that. Quiet man that 'tended to his own business and didn't say so all-fired much 'less he was stirred up. And then—!" He whistled his meaning. "A fighter. All he ever got he fought for. All he ever held on to he fought for. He bucked Western Lumber for a dozen years, first and last. And, by cripes, he nailed their durned hides on his stable-door, too!
"Well, I heard tell about this same Luke Sanford ten years ago and more—about him and his little girl. From what folks said I guess there never was a man wanted a boy-baby worse'n Luke Sanford before Judith come. And I guess there never was a man put more stock in his own flesh and blood than Luke did in her as soon as he got used to her being a she. I don't know just exactly how old she was ten years ago, women folks being so damn' tricky in the looks of their ages, but I'd say she was eight or nine or ten or eleven years old. Anyhow, Luke had took her in hand already."
"Taught her to ride, huh?" asked one of the men.
"You're shouting, Poker Face," nodded Carson with vehemence. "He sure did! Why, that girl's rid real horses since she was the size of a pair of boots. Luke took her everywhere he went, up in the mountains, over the Big Ridge, down valley-ways, into town when he went off on his yearly. And they say Luke wasn't no poky rider, either. You've rode his string, Bud? What are those for horses, huh?"
"I'm a little particular when it comes to a saddle-horse," Bud admitted. "But I never asked any better than old Sanford's string."
"You hear him!" said Carson. "Well, that Judy girl has rid horses like them for a dozen years. And her dad—anyway, folks say so down on the river—showed her his way to ride and his way to shoot and his way to play cards! I guess," and he spoke with slow thoughtfulness, "that she's a real chip off'n the old block. It's my guess number two that she ain't just shooting off her face promiscuous when she says there's something crooked in the deal Trevors has been handing her. And, third bet, there's most likely going to be seven kinds of hell popping around this end of the woods for a spell."
"What are you doing about it, Carson?" asked the man whose unusually vacuous expression gave him his name of Poker Face. "Stick on the job or quit?"
"Me?" Carson sought a match, and when he had found it, held it long in his grimy fingers, staring at it thoughtfully. "Me stay an' let a she-girl boss me? Well, it ain't the play a man might look to me to make, an' I ain't saying it's the trick I'd do every day in the week. But here there's some things to set a man scratching his head: she's a winner, all right, an' I'm the first man to up an' say so. She's got the sand an' she's got the savvy. Take 'em together an' they make what you call gumption. Sure it ain't no woman's job to step in an' run an outfit like this one; a woman ain't nacherally cut out for that sort of thing any more'n a man is to darn socks an' drink tea with lemon in it. Again, tipping it over so's you can look at the other side, like a fair man ought to, what's she going to do? She lands here sudden, striking all four feet in a mess of trouble. She grabs holt of things, seeing they belong to her in a way, an' seeing she's fed Trevors his time. I might go trailing my luck some other-where, if I did the first fool thing that plopped into my nut. But playing fair, I'm going to stick an' do my damnedest to see Luke Sanford's girl put up her scrap. Yes, sir."
"What did she want to fire Trevors for?" asked Benny, the cook.
Carson, looking at him contemptuously, spoke in contemptuous answer about the stem of his pipe. "Any man on the job can answer you that, Cookie. It's been open an' shut the last month Trevors is either crazy or crooked. I said, didn't I, Western Lumber's itching to get its devil-fish legs wropped aroun' Blue Lake timber? They've busted more than one rancher up in the mountains. Trevors is in with 'em. Any man on the ranch that don't know that, don't want to know it!" He removed his pipe at last, and his look upon Benny was full of meaning. "Roll that in your dough, Cookie, an' make biscuits out'n it."
"Go easy there, grandfather," growled Benny.
"That's something I ain't learned," was old Carson's ready answer, lightly given. "I've told you before, if you don't want your name printed plain don't come around asking me to spell it."
Benny growled an answer but did not take up the quarrel. He knew Carson well enough to know that there was no man living readier for a fight or abler to conduct his own part of it. Carson, smaller than Benny, was wiry, quick-footed, hard-eyed. There was something about him that caused a man of Benny's sort to stop and think.
"Qué hay, Bud?" called a voice, and old José, his face shining with his joy—Bud was certain that Judith had actually kissed the leathery cheek and wondered how she could do it!—came down the knoll. "La señorita wants you!"
"Haw!" gurgled Bandy O'Neil facetiously. "It's your manly beauty, Bud! You ol' son-of-a-gun of a lady-killer!"
Bud Lee swung about upon his heel to glare at Bandy. But suddenly conscious of a flush creeping up hotly under his tan, he turned his back and strode away to the house. Bandy's "haw, haw!" followed him. Lee's face was flaming when he entered the office.
"What do you want with me?" he said shortly, angered at Bandy, Judith Sanford and himself.
"Bow, wow!" retorted Judith, looking up from Trevors's table. "Whose dog art thou? Do you want me to think you are as fierce as you look?"
"You sent for me?" he said coolly.
She looked up at him critically. "What's come over you, Lee? I took you for a cool head—Heaven knows I need a few cool heads around me right now!—and here you show up with red in your eye, barking at me."
"Let's pass up what I look like," said Lee stiffly. "What can I do for you. Miss Sanford?"
"Hm," said Judith. "On your high horse, are you? All right, stay there. What I want is some information. How long have you been on the Blue Lake pay-roll?"
"A little over six months," he answered colorlessly.
"Over six months?" A quick look of interest came into her eyes. "Trevors hired you? Or dad?"
"Your father."
"Then"—and a sudden, swift smile came for the first time that morning into the girl's eyes—"you're square! Thank God for one man to be sure of."
She had risen with a quick impetuosity and put out her hand. Lee took it into his own, and felt it shut hard, like a man's.
"Just how do you know I'm square?" he asked slowly.
"Dad was human," she replied softly. "He made some mistakes. But he never made a mistake in a horse foreman yet. He has said to me a dozen times: 'Judy, watch the way a man treats his horse if you want to size him up! And never put your horses into the care of a man who isn't white, clean through.' Dad knew, Bud Lee!"
Lee made no answer. For a little Judith, back at the long table and looking strangely small in the big, bare room before this massive piece of furniture, stared into vacancy with reminiscent eyes. Then, with a little shrug of her shoulders, she turned again to the tall foreman.
"Why did you tell Trevors this morning that you were going to quit work?" she asked with abrupt directness.
"Because," he answered, and by now his flush had subsided and his grave good-humor had come back to him with his customary serenity, "I felt like moving on."
"Because," she insisted, "you know that there was some dirty work afoot and did not care to be messed up in it?"
Now here, most positively, Bud Lee said within himself, was a person to reckon with. How did she know all that? She was just a girl, somewhere, as old Carson put it, between eighteen and twenty-two. What business did a kid like this have knowing so blamed much?
"You've got your rope on the right pair of horns," he said after his brief pause.
"How did you know that Trevors was working the double-cross on this deal?" she demanded.
"I didn't know," he said stiffly. "I just guessed. The same as you. He was spending too much money; he was getting too little to show for it; he was selling too much stock too cheap."
"What's the matter with you?" cried the girl, surprising him with the heat of her words and the sudden darkening of her eyes. "Why do you insist on being so downright stand-offish and stiff and aloof? What have I done to you that you can't be decent? Here I am only putting foot on my own land and you make me feel like an intruder."
"I am answering your questions."
"Like a half-animated trained iceberg, yes. Can't you act like a human being? Oh, I've got your number, Bud Lee, and you are just as narrow between the horns as the rest of the outfit. You are narrow and prejudiced and blindly unreasonable! I know as much about ranching as any man of you; I know more about this outfit because the best man that ever set foot on it, and that's Luke Sanford, taught me every crook, and bend of it; and now, just because I'm a girl and not a boy, you stand off like I had the smallpox; just when I need loyalty and understanding and when, the Lord knows, I've already got a double handful of trouble, I can't count for a minute on men that have been taking my pay for months! Get some of the mildew and cobwebs out of your head and tell me this: What reason in the world is there why you choose to think I haven't any business wearing my own shoes?"
"That's sure putting it straight," said Lee slowly.
"You just bet it's putting it straight!" she announced vigorously. "And you'll find that it's a way I have, putting things straight. I was trained to the business by a better man than you'll ever be, Bud Lee."
"Maybe so," he admitted without heat. "I'll take off my hat to Luke Sanford for a man. And I'll take off my hat to you, if you want to know. But, training or no training, this is no job for a lady, and shooting up Trevors and riding the Prince isn't going to make it so. Sure enough it's none of my butt-in what sort of thing you do. But at the same time there's no call for me to say you're doing fine when I don't see it that way."
"What you're looking for," sniffed Judith contemptuously, "is a female being extinct this one hundred years! You'd have every girl wear tails to her gowns, and duck and dodge behind fans and faint every time she jabbed her thumb with a pin!"
"I can't see that a woman's place is riding bucking broncos and rampsing around. … "
"A woman's place!" she scoffed. "Her place where a blunder-headed man puts her! How do you know what her place is? Do you suppose the blood in a healthy-bodied, healthy-minded woman is any different from your blood? How would you like to be told just what your place is? To be jammed, for instance, into a little bungalow in a city; to be squeezed into a dress-suit and told 'Stay there and look sweet'; to be commanded not to get up a natural sweat, nor to kick over the traces with which some woman had hitched you to the cart of convention. How'd you like it, Bud Lee?"
Bud Lee grinned and a new look crept into his eyes. "Being Bud Lee," he answered frankly, "I wouldn't stand it for one little tick of the clock! If you want me to swap talk with you; all day at ninety bucks a month, all right. I'd say there's two kinds of men, too. There's my kind; there's the Dave Burril Lee kind. You see, he's a sort of relation of mine, is Dave Burril Lee, and I'm not exactly proud of him. He's the kind that wears dress-suits and sticks in a bungalow. He's proud of his name Burril and Lee, both, because big men down South wore 'em before he did, and they were relations. He's swelled up over the way he can dance and ride after a fox, and over the coin he's got in the bank. Then there's Bud Lee who ducks out of that sort of a scrap-heap and beats it for the open."
"I get you!" broke in Judith, her eyes very bright. "And you men here, my men, want me to be the sort of woman that your precious cousin, Dave Burril, is a man? Is that it? Where's your logic this morning?"
"Meaning horse sense?" he smiled. "It's in these few little words: 'What's right for a man may be dead wrong for a woman.'"
"Oh, scat!" she cried impatiently. "What am I wasting time with you for? You're right when you say that if I am paying you ninety dollars a month and grub and blankets I'd better get something out of you besides talk." She swung back to her table. "What was Trevors's latest excuse for selling at a sacrifice?" she asked, her tone dry and businesslike. "Why was he selling those horses at fifty dollars a head?"
"Told me he just had a wire last night from Young Hampton, asking for three thousand," he explained in a similar tone, though his eyes were twinkling at her.
"Pollock Hampton has his nerve!" she snapped. She took up the telephone instrument at her elbow and demanded the Western Union at Rocky Bend. "Judith Sanford speaking," she said crisply. "Repeat the message of last night for the general manager, Blue Lake Ranch."
In a moment she had it. "So Trevors wasn't lying about that part of it," she said reluctantly. And to the Western Union agent, "Take this message:
POLLOCK HAMPTON, Hotel Glennlyn, San Francisco:
Impossible send money now or for some time. Have fired Trevors. Running outfit myself. Need every cent we can raise to pay interest on loans, men's salaries and keep going. This is final.
JUDITH SANFORD, General Manager.
"That may start his gray matter working," she ended as she clicked up the receiver. "Now, Lee, will you stick with me ten days or so and give me time to get a man in your place?"
"Yes, I'll do that, Miss Sanford."
"You will help me in every way you can while you are with me?"
"When I work for a man—or a woman," he added gravely, "I don't hold back anything."
"All right. Then start in right now and tell me about the gang Trevors has taken on. Are they all crooks?"
"I wouldn't say so. I wouldn't put it that strong."
"That little gray, quick-spoken man with the smelly pipe—he's straight, isn't he?"
"That would be old Carson? Yes; he's a good man. You won't find a better."
"Is he going to quit, too? Just because I've come?"
Lee shook his head. "If you work him right Carson will stick right along. Being white clean through, being broader-minded than I am"—and the twinkle came again into his eyes—"Carson'll show you a square deal."
"Has he any love for Bayne Trevors?"
"Maybe you'd better ask Carson."
In a flash she was on her feet and had gone to the door. "Carson!" she called loudly. "Come here, will you?"
There was a little silence, a low sound of laughter, then Carson's sharp voice answering: "I'm coming!"
Judith went back to her chair. She did not speak until Carson's wiry form slipped through the doorway. Then with the old cattleman's shrewd, hard eyes upon her she turned from a clip full of papers she had been looking through and spoke to him quietly:
"You used to work for the Granite Canyon crowd, didn't you, Carson?"
"Yes'm," he answered.
"Cattle foreman there for several years?"
"Yes'm."
"Helped clean out the Roaring Creek gang didn't you, Carson?"
Carson shifted a bit, colored under her fixed eyes, and finally admitted:
"Yes'm."
"Haven't had a real first-class fight for quite a bit, have you, Carson? Not since that gash on your jaw healed? Not since you and Scotty Webb mixed with the Roaring Creekers?"
Carson rubbed his jaw, flashed a quick look at Bud Lee as though for moral support, looked still further embarrassed, and finally choked over his brief:
"No'm."
Judith sat smiling brightly up at his hard features. "I've heard dad talk about that," she said thoughtfully. "I guess I've got at least one real man on the ranch, Carson. Oh, don't dodge like that! I'm not going to put my arms around you and kiss you on the top of your head. But I do love a man that loves a fair fight. … Lee, here, has given me his promise to stick on the job for ten days or so, to give me time to get some one else to look after my horses."
"Yes'm," said Carson, fingering his pipe and looking down.
For a few moments the girl sat still, now and then flashing a quick, keen look from one to the other of her two foremen. Then, abruptly, her eyes on Carson, she snapped: "You've found out, more or less recently, haven't you, that Bayne Trevors is a crook? You've perhaps even guessed that he's been taking money from me with one hand and from the Western Lumber with the other?"
"Yes'm," said Carson. "I doped it up like that."
"Why," cried the girl, "he's fired all of the old men and Heaven knows how many of his sort he's put in their places! Help me clean 'em out, Carson! Where will we begin? I've chucked Trevors and Ward Hannon. Who goes next, Carson?"
"Benny the cook," said Carson gently. "An' I'd be obliged, ma'am, if you'd let me go boot him off'n the ranch."
"That's talking," she said enthusiastically. "You can attend to him. Any one else?"
Carson shook his head. "I got my suspicions," he said. "But that's all I'm dead sure on."
"The others can wait then. Now, I'm taking a gamble on you and Lee. You have all kinds of chances to double-cross me. But I've got to take a chance now and then. I'm going to tell you something: Trevors is trying to sell me out to the Western Lumber people. He is one of their crowd and has been since they bought him up six months ago. They want our timber tract over the north ridge but they don't think they will have to pay the price. They want the lake; they want the water-power of Blue Lake River! They want pretty well all we've got. The ranch outside the stock we've got running on it, is worth a clean million dollars if it is worth a nickel. Well, the Western Lumber Company has offered us exactly two hundred and fifty thousand! Only quarter of what it's worth! They know we're mortgaged; they know the interest we have to pay is heavy; they know Pollock Hampton, for one, is a spender who knows nothing about big business; they think that I, because I'm a girl, am a fool. It looks to them like a melon easy to cut and ripe for the slicing."
She paused a moment, frowning thoughtfully at the floor. Then suddenly she lifted her eyes to Carson's, saying crisply: "Trevors took time at the end to tell me something. That something was that he was going to make me sell. He was excited a bit, I'll admit, or he wouldn't have spoken quite so plainly. And he counted upon the fact of my sex, of course, to feel confident that he could throw a scare into me. He even threatened, if I hadn't come to my senses before the ranch was dry in the summer, to burn me out!"
Carson blinked at her. "How's that?" he asked.
She told him again, coolly indifferent, it seemed to Carson.
"The durned polecat!" whispered the cattle foreman.
"Now then," cried Judith, "you've got your first job cut out for you. Let Bayne Trevors or one of his gang set foot on Blue Lake land, and I'll tell you what I think of you, Carson! Or is the job going to be too big for you?"
Carson smiled deprecatingly. "I'd like to see 'em try it," he said in that soft, whispering voice which upon occasions was characteristic of him. "I sure would, Miss Judy!"
"That's all this morning, Carson," she said quietly. "On your way don't forget to look in on your friend Benny."
Carson went hastily down the knoll, his eyes bright. Judith laughed softly.
"I've got his number, Bud Lee! All that's needed to keep that old mountain-lion on the job is to show him a real fight ahead! And by golly, Mr. Man, there's going to be scrap enough from the very jump to make Carson forget whether he's working for a woman or John W. Satan, Esquire!"
Thank Heaven it was just noon! Judith sprang to her feet, her eyes bright and hard, and ran down to the men's quarters. Coming up from the corral were Carson and Bud Lee.
"Miller with the pay-roll money has been held up and robbed at Squaw Creek," she told them swiftly. "Get some men together, Carson, and try to head the robber off."
The two men, having glanced quickly at each other, stood a moment looking at her curiously.
"That's on the level, is it, Miss Judith?" demanded Carson slowly.
"Of course it's on the level!" she cried impatiently. "Oh, I know what you're thinking. I'm going to phone immediately to the bank at Rocky Bend and have another man sent out with more money. You can count upon getting your pay at six o'clock!"
"I told you, didn't I," muttered Carson, "that I wasn't worrying none personal? But if I was you I'd sure have the money on tap!"
With that he left her, going hastily to round up what men he could find and get them into their saddles. Bud Lee, his eyes still on her, stood where he was.
"Well," demanded the girl, "aren't you going, too?" Suddenly angered by his leisurely air, she added cuttingly: "Not afraid, are you?"
"I was thinking," Lee answered coolly, "that the stick-up gent will most probably figure on a play like that. If he was real wise he'd mosey along toward Rocky Bend and pop off your second man. Two thousand bucks a day would make a real nice little draw."
Judith paused, frowning. There was truth in that. If Trevors really were behind this, he would have chosen his man carefully; he would have planned ahead.
"If you'll do my way," continued Lee thoughtfully, "I'll have just enough time to roll a smoke and saddle little old Climax. He's in the stable now. You're not afraid of my double-crossing you? Even if a smart-headed man had planned the hold-up he wouldn't figure on a play like this. He'd think we'd have a Rocky Bender bring it out or else wait until to-morrow."
"It won't do," she decided quickly. "I want that money here at six o'clock."
"Eighty miles," mused the horse foreman. "Six hours. That's riding right along, but do it my way and I'll gamble you my own string of horses—and they're worth considerable more than a thousand—that I'll be back, heeled, at six."
Judith, quick at decisions, looked him hard in the eye, heard his plan, and three minutes later Bud Lee, a revolver in his shirt, rode away from the ranch-house, headed toward Rocky Bend. Judith already had called up Tripp, and the veterinarian himself, leading the fastest saddle-horse he could get his hands on at brief notice, was also riding toward Rocky Bend, from the Lower End, five miles in advance of Lee at the start. He went at a gentle trot, consulting his watch now and then.
So Bud Lee, riding as once those hard, dare-devil riders rode who carried across the land the mail-bag of the Pony Express, overtook Doc Tripp and changed to a fresh horse at the end of the first fifteen miles. He swung out of his saddle, stretched his long legs, remarked lightly that it was a real fine day, and was gone again upon a fresh mount with twenty-five miles between him and Rocky Bend. The clock at the bank marked forty-three minutes after two as Lee, leaving a sweating horse at the door on Main Street, presented his check at the paying teller's window. The money, in a small canvas bag, was ready.
"Hello, Bud," and "Hello, Dan'l," was the beginning and end of the conversation which ensued. Lee did not stop to count the money. He drew his belt up a hole as he went back to the door, found a fresh horse there fighting its bit and all but lifting the stable-boy off his feet, mounted and sped back along Main Street.
Judith was to send out another man leading still another fresh horse for him so that he could not fail to be back at the ranch-house by six o'clock. As Bud Lee, riding hard but never without thought for the horse which carried him, began the return trip, he drew the heavy caliber revolver from his shirt and thrust it into his belt. When he had left Rocky Bend half a dozen miles behind him and was hurrying on into the outskirts of that country of rolling hills and pine forests, his hand was never six inches from the gun-butt.
The road wound in and out among the pines, always climbing. Lee raced on, his eyes bright and keen, watchful and suspicious of every still shadow or stirring branch. Coming up the two-mile-long Cuesta Grade, he saved his horse a little. From the top of the mountain, before he again followed a winding road back to the river's side, he saw a horseman riding a distant ridge; the glinted upon the rider's rifle.
"Old Carson himself," thought Lee. "Looking for the hold-up man. Shucks! They'll never find him this trip."
Letting his own animal out into its swinging stride as he got down to more level going, he hammered on at his clip of fifteen miles an hour. In the thick shade of the forest, three miles before he came to the line fence of the Blue Lake ranch, he saw another horseman, this one Ed Masters, the "college kid." The young fellow's flushed, eager face passed in a blur as Lee shot by.
Another mile, and Bud Lee was riding through a clearing, with the tall cliffs of Squaw Creek cañon looming high on his left, when suddenly and absolutely without warning, his horse screamed, gathered itself for a wild plunge, staggered, stood a moment trembling terribly, then with a low moan collapsed under him.
Lee swung out and to one side, landing clear as the big brute fell. He did not understand. He had ridden the animal hard but certainly not hard enough for this. And then he saw and his eyes blazed with anger. He had heard no shot, nothing beyond the metallic pounding of the shod hoofs on flinty road, but there from an ugly hole in the neck the saddle-horse was pouring out its blood.
"Smokeless powder and a Maxim silencer!" muttered Lee, his eyes taking note of the ten thousand possible hiding-places on the cliff's.
In his ears there was a little whine as a second bullet sang its way by his head. Again he sought to locate the marksman, again saw nothing but crag and precipice and brushy clump. He took time for that thing which came so hard to him, sent a bullet from his own revolver into his horse's brain, and then slipped out of the clearing into the shelter of the pines.
"Two miles left to the border line," he estimated it. "Afoot."
Stiff from the saddle, he moved on slowly for a little. But as his muscles responded and warmed to the effort, he broke into a trotting run. Only a little now could he keep under cover; if he went on with any degree of speed he must keep to the road and the open. The thought came to him that he might lie under cover until dark. The second thought came to him that he had assured Judith that he would be back on time, and he forged ahead.
For the second time that day he heard the whine of a bullet. He thought that the shot came from the cliffs just at the head of Squaw Creek cañon. But he could not be sure. There was ample protection there for a man hiding, tall brush in a hollow and three or four stunted trees, wind-twisted. He'd make the climb to-morrow and see about it. Now he'd keep right on moving. Little used to travelling save on a horse's back he was shot through with odd little pains when at last he came to the border-line fenced and the waiting horse. Tommy Burkitt held it for him while Lee mounted.
"Somebody up on the cliffs, head of the cañon," panted Lee at Tommy's amazed expression when Lee came running into sight. "Killed my horse. Go after him, Tommy. Tell the other boys." And on he went, pounding out the last fifteen miles, the canvas bag beating safely against his side.
Judith, in the courtyard, watched him ride in. She looked swiftly at him from the watch on her wrist. Her eyes brightened. It lacked seven minutes to six. As Bud dropped the canvas bag into her hands she flashed at him the most wonderful, radiant smile that the long horseman had ever seen. She gripped his lean, brown hand hard in hers.
"Bud, you're a brick!" she cried.
Mrs. Langworthy had just come out with Hampton, Trevors, and the major.
Judith turned from Lee to Trevors but managed to keep half an eye on Mrs. Langworthy.
"You see, it's pay-day with us, Mr. Trevors," she said quietly. "And when pay-day comes we pay our men at six o'clock in spite of hell and high water!"
Bud Lee, leading his horse away, turned for a word. "A man killed a horse for me to-day," he said very gently, and his eyes rested steadily upon Trevors. "If I ever get him, or the man who put him up to it, I'm going to get him right."
Hampton's captive, known to them only as Shorty, a heavy, surly man whose small, close-set eyes burned evilly under his pale brows, rode that night between Hampton and Judith down to the ranch-house. He maintained a stubborn silence after the first outburst of rage. His hands tied behind his back, a rope run round his waist and down on each side through a cinch-ring, he sat idly humped forward, making no protest.
Burkitt and Lee, despite Judith's objections because of Lee's wounded leg, remained at the cabin with Bill Crowdy. Crowdy had lost a deal of blood, and though he complained of little pain, was clearly in sore need of medical attention. Judith, coming to the bunk-side just before she left, assured him very gently that she would send Doc Tripp to him immediately and, further, that she would telephone into Rocky Bend for a physician. Crowdy, like Shorty, refused to talk.
"Aw, hell," he grunted as Lee demanded what influence had brought him with Shorty and Quinnion into this mad project, "let me alone, can't you?"
And Lee let him alone. He and Burkitt sat and smoked and so passed the remaining hours of a long night. The folly of seeking Quinnion in this thick darkness was so obvious that they gave no thought to it, impatiently awaiting the dawn and the coming of the men whom Judith would send.
The events of the rest of the night and of the morrow may be briefly told: Shorty's modest request of a glass of whiskey was granted him. Then, his hands still bound securely by Carson, he was put in the small grain-house, a windowless, ten-by-ten house of logs. An admirable jail this, with its heavy padlock snapped into a deeply embedded staple and the great hasp in place. The key safely in Judith's possession, Shorty was left to his own thoughts while Judith, and Hampton went to the house.
In answer to Judith's call, Doc Tripp came without delay, left brief, disconcerting word that without the shadow of a doubt the hogs were stricken with cholera, and went on with his little bag to see what his skill could do for Bill Crowdy.
"Ought to give him sulphur fumes," grunted Tripp. But his hands were very gentle with the wounded man for all that.
Pollock Hampton had no thought of sleep that night; didn't so much as go to bed. He lay on a couch in the living-room and Marcia Langworthy, tremendously moved at the recital Judith gave of Hampton's heroism, fluttered about him, playing nurse to her heart's delight. The major suggested that Hampton have something and Hampton was glad to accept. Mrs. Langworthy complacently looked into the future and to the maturity of her own plans. In truth, good had come out of evil, and Marcia and Hampton held hands quite unblushingly.
Before daylight Carson, with half a dozen men, had breakfasted, saddled and was ready to ride to the Upper End to begin the search for Quinnion. But before he rode, Carson made the discovery that during the night the staple and hasp on the grain-house door had been wrenched away and that Shorty was gone, leaving behind him no sign of the way of his going. Carson's face was a dull, brick red. Not yet had he brought himself to accept the full significance of events. A hold-up, such as Charlie Miller had experienced, is one thing; a continued series of incidents like these happening upon the confines of the Blue Lake Ranch, was quite another. Hampton, knowing nothing of conditions in the mountains, had been quick to imagine the predicament in which he had found Judith and Bud Lee. To Carson that had been a thing not to be thought of. Now, only too plainly he realized that Shorty had had an accomplice at the ranch headquarters who had come to his assistance.
Carson blamed himself for the escape. And yet, he growled to himself, in a mingling of shame and anger, it would have looked like plumb foolishness to sit out in front of that heavy door all night, when he himself had tied Shorty's hands.
"Quinnion might have let him loose," he mused as he went slowly to the house to tell Judith what had happened. "An' then he mightn't. If he, didn't, then who the devil did?"
Judith received the news sleepily and much more quietly than Carson had expected.
"We'll have to keep our eyes open after this, Carson," was her criticism. Remembering the night when she had been so certain that there had been some one listening to her talk with Tripp she added thoughtfully: "We've got to keep an eye on our own men, Carson. Some one of our crowd, taking my pay, is double-crossing us. Now, get your men on the jump and we won't bother about the milk-spilling. If we are in luck we'll get Shorty yet. And Quinnion, Carson! Don't forget Quinnion. And we've still got Bill Crowdy; we'll get everything out of him that he knows."
The cattleman rode away in heavy silence, headed toward the cabin at the Upper End, his men riding with him, an eager, watchful crowd. But Carson had his doubts about getting Quinnion, his fears that it would be a long time before he ever put a rope again to Shorty's thick wrists.
During the day Emmet Sawyer, the Rocky Bend sheriff, came, and with him Doctor Brannan. Sawyer assured Judith that he would be followed shortly by a posse led by a deputy and that they would hunt through the mountains until they got the outlaws. He listened to all that she had to tell him and then looked up Bud Lee.
"You didn't see Quinnion?" he asked. "Could you swear to him if we ever bring him in? Just by his voice?"
"Yes," answered Lee. "I can. But see if you can't get Crowdy to squeal. We're shy Shorty's real name, too, you know."
To all questions put him, Bill Crowdy answered with stubborn denial of knowledge or not at all. He had been alone; he didn't know any man named Quinnion; he didn't know anything about Shorty. And he hadn't robbed Miller. That canvas bag, then, with the thousand dollars in it? He had found it; picked it up in a gully.
"I won't do any talking," he grunted in final word, "until I get a lawyer to talk to. I know that much, Sawyer, if I don't know a hell of a lot. An' you can get it out'n your head that I'm the kind to snitch on a pal—even if I had one, which I didn't."
Crowdy, at Doctor Brannan's orders, was taken to Rocky Bend where Sawyer promised him a speedy trial, conviction and heavy sentence unless he changed his mind and turned state's evidence. And—to be done with Bill Crowdy for good and all—he never came to stand trial. A mad attempt at escape a week later, another bullet-hole given him in his struggle with his jailer, and with lips still stubbornly locked, he died without "snitching on a pal."
Under fire in the dark cabin with life grown suddenly tense for them, Bud Lee and Judith Sanford had touched hands lingeringly. No one who knew them guessed it; certainly one of them, perhaps both, sought to forget it. There had been that strange thrill which comes sometimes when a man's hand and a woman's meet. Bud Lee grunted at the memory of it; Judith, remembering, blushed scarlet. For, at that moment of deep, sympathetic understanding touched with the romance which young life will draw even from a dark night fraught with danger, there had been in Bud Lee's heart but an acceptance, eager as it was, of a "pardner." For the time being he thought of her—or, rather, he thought that he thought of her, as a man would think of a companion of his own sex. He approved of her. But he did not approve of her as a girl, as a woman.
He had said: "There are two kinds of women." And Judith, knowing that his ideal was an impossible but poetic She, rich in subtle feminine graces, steeped in that vague charm of her sex like a rose in its own perfume, had accepted his friendship during a dark hour, allowing herself to forget that upon the morrow, if morrow came to them at all, he would hold her in that gentle scorn of his.
"A narrow-minded, bigoted fool!" she cried in the seclusion of her bedroom. "I'll show you where you get off, Mr. Bud Lee! Just you wait."
When she and Lee met, she looked him straight in the eye with marked coolness, oddly aloof, and Lee, lifting his hat, was stiff and short-worded.
In the long, quiet hours which came during the few days following the end of a fruitless search for Quinnion and Shorty, he had ample time to analyze his own emotion. He liked her; from the bottom of his heart he liked her. But she was not the lady of his dreams. She rode like a man, she shot like a man, she gave her orders like a man. She was efficient. She was as square as a die; under fire she was a pardner for any man. But she was not a little lady to be thought of sentimentally. He wondered what she would look like if she shed boots and broad hat and riding-habit and appeared before a man in an evening gown—"all lacy and ribbony, you know." He couldn't picture her that way; he couldn't imagine her dallying, as the lady of his dreams dallied, in an atmosphere of rose-leaves, perhaps a volume of Tennyson on her knee.
"Shucks!" he grinned to himself, a trifle shame-facedly. "It's just the springtime in the air."
In such a mood there appeared to Bud Lee a vision. Nothing less. He was in the little meadow hidden from the ranch-house by gentle hills still green with young June. He had been working Lovelady, a newly broken saddle-mare. Standing with his back to a tree, a cigarette in the making in his hands, his black hat far back upon his head, he smilingly watched Lovelady as with regained freedom she galloped back across the meadow to her herd. Then a shadow on the grass drew Lee's eyes swiftly away from the mare and to the vision.
Over the verdant flooring of the meadow, stepping daintily in and out among the big golden buttercups, came one who might well have been that lady of his dreams. A milk-white hand held up a pale-pink skirt, disclosing the lacy flounce of a fine underskirt, pale-pink stockings and mincing little slippers; a pink parasol cast the most delicate of tints upon a pretty face from which big blue eyes looked out a little timorously upon the tall horse foreman.
He knew that this was Marcia Langworthy. He had never known until now just how pretty she was, how like a flower.
Marcia paused, seemed to hesitate, dodged suddenly as a noisy bumblebee sailed down the air. Then the bee buzzed on and Marcia smiled. Still stepping daintily she came on until, with her parasol twirling over her shoulder, she stood in the shade with Lee.
"You're Mr. Lee, aren't you?" asked Marcia. She was still smiling and looked cool and fresh and very alluring.
Lee dropped the makings of his cigarette, ground the paper into the sod with his heel and removed his hat with a gallantry little short of reverence.
"Yes," he answered, his gravity touched with the hint of a responsive smile. "Is there something I can do for you, Miss Langworthy?"
"Oh!" cried Marcia. "So you know who I am? Yet I have never seen you, I think."
"The star doesn't always see the moth, you know," offered Lee, a little intoxicated by the first "vision" of this kind he had seen in many years.
"Oh!" cried Marcia again, and then stopped, looking at him, frankly puzzled. She knew little first-hand of horse foremen. But she had seen Carson, even talked with him. And she had seen other workmen. She would, until now, have summed them all up as illiterate, awkward, and impossibly backward and shy. A second long, curious glance at Lee failed to show that he was embarrassed, though in truth he had had time to be a bit ashamed of that moth-and-star observation of his. Instead, he appeared quite self-possessed. And he was good-looking, remarkably good-looking. And he didn't seem illiterate; quite the contrary, Marcia thought. In an instant she catalogued this tall, dark, calm-eyed man as interesting.
She twirled her parasol at him and laughed softly. A strand of blond hair that was very becoming where it was, against her delicate cheek, she tucked back where it evidently belonged, since there it looked even more becoming.
"Mr. Hampton isn't here, is he?" she asked.
"No. Come to think of it, he did say this morning that he would be out right after lunch to help me break Lovelady. But I haven't seen him."
"He wanted me to stroll out here with him," Marcia explained. "And I wouldn't. It was too hot. Didn't you find it terribly hot about an hour ago, Mr. Lee?"
As a matter of fact Bud Lee had been altogether too busy an hour ago with the capers of Lovelady to note whether it was hot or cold. But he courteously agreed with Miss Langworthy.