CHAPTER III — A DISCOVERY

The roan, having been much refreshed by a few hours on grass, proved to be a good traveller. The two men took a road-gait and held it steadily till they reached a telephone-line which stretched across the desert and joined two outposts of civilization. Steve strapped on his climbing spurs and went up a post lightly with his test outfit. In a few minutes he had Moreno on the wire and was in touch with one of his rangers.

“Hello! This you, Ferguson? This is Fraser. No, Fraser—Lieutenant Fraser. Yes. How many of the boys can you get in touch with right away? Two? Good. I want you to cover the Arivaca cut-off. Kinney is headed that way in a rig. His sister is with him. She is not to be injured under any circumstances. Understand? Wire me at the Mal Pais mines to-morrow your news. By the way, Tom Long and some of the boys are headed down that way with notions of lynching Kinney. Dodge them if you can and rush your man up to the Mal Pais. Good-bye.”

“Suppose they can't dodge them?” ventured Neill after Steve had rejoined him.

“I reckon they can. If not—well, my rangers are good boys; I expect they won't give up a prisoner.”

“I'm right glad to find you are going to the Mal Pais mines with me, lieutenant. I wasn't expecting company on the way.”

“I'll bet a dollar Mex against two plunks gold that you're wondering whyfor I'm going.”

Larry laughed. “You're right. I was wondering.”

“Well, then, it's this way. What with all these boys on Kinney's trail he's as good as rounded up. Fact is, Kinney's only a weak sister anyhow. He turned State's witness at the trial, and it was his testimony that convicted Struve. I know something about this because I happened to be the man that caught Struve. I had just joined the rangers. It was my first assignment. The other three got away. Two of them escaped and the third was not tried for lack of sufficient evidence. Now, then: Kinney rides the rods from Yuma to Marfa and is now or had ought to be somewhere in this valley between Posa Buena and Taylor's ranch. But where is Struve, the hardier ruffian of the two? He ain't been seen since they broke out. He sure never reached Ft. Lincoln. My notion is that he dropped off the train in the darkness about Casa Grande, then rolled his tail for the Mal Pais country. Your eyes are asking whys mighty loud, my friend; and my answer is that there's a man up there mebbe who has got to hide Struve if he shows up. That's only a guess, but it looks good to me. This man was the brains of the whole outfit, and folks say that he's got cached the whole haul the gang made from that S. P. hold-up. What's more, he scattered gold so liberal that his name wasn't even mentioned at the trial. He's a big man now, a millionaire copper king and into gold-mines up to the hocks. In the Southwest those things happen. It doesn't always do to look too closely at a man's past.

“We'll say Struve drops in on him and threatens to squeak. Mebbe he has got evidence; mebbe he hasn't. Anyhow, our big duck wants to forget the time he was wearing a mask and bending a six-gun for a living. Also and moreover, he's right anxious to have other folks get a chance to forget. From what I can hear he's clean mashed on some girl at Amarillo, or maybe it's Fort Lincoln. See what a twist Strove's got on him if he can slip into the Mal Pais country on the q. t.”

“And you're going up there to look out for him?”

“I'm going in to take a casual look around. There's no telling what a man might happen onto accidentally if he travels with his ear to the ground.”

The other nodded. He could now understand easily why Fraser was going into the Mal Pais country, but he could not make out why the ranger, naturally a man who lived under his own hat and kept his own counsel, had told him so much as he had. The officer shortly relieved his mind on this point.

“I may need help while I'm there. May I call on you if I do, seh?”

Neill felt his heart warm toward this hard-faced, genial frontiersman, who knew how to judge so well the timbre of a casual acquaintance.

“You sure may, lieutenant.”

“Good. I'll count on you then.”

So, in these few words, the compact of friendship and alliance was sealed between them. Each of them was strangely taken with the other, but it is not the way of the Anglo-Saxon fighting man to voice his sentiment. Though each of them admired the stark courage and the flawless fortitude he knew to dwell in the other, impassivity sat on their faces like an ice-mask. For this is the hall-mark of the Southwest, that a man must love and hate with the same unchanging face of iron, save only when a woman is in consideration.

They were to camp that night by Cottonwood Spring, and darkness caught them still some miles from their camp. They were on no road, but were travelling across country through washes and over countless hills. The ranger led the way, true as an arrow, even after velvet night had enveloped them.

“It must be right over this mesa among the cottonwoods you see rising from that arroyo,” he announced at last.

He had scarcely spoken before they struck a trail that led them direct to the spring. But as they were descending this in a circle Fraser's horse shied.

“Hyer you, Pinto! What's the matter with—”

The ranger cut his sentence in two and slid from the saddle. When his companion reached him and drew rein the ranger was bending over a dark mass stretched across the trail. He looked up quietly.

“Man's body,” he said briefly.

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

Neill dismounted and came forward. The moon-crescent was up by now and had lit the country with a chill radiance. The figure was dressed in the coarse striped suit of a convict.

“I don't savvy this play,” Fraser confessed softly to himself.

“Do you know him?”

“Suppose you look at him and see if you know him.”

Neill looked into the white face and shook his head.

“No, I don't know him, but I suppose it is Struve.”

From his pocket the ranger produced a photograph and handed it to him.

“Hyer, I'll strike a match and you'll see better.”

The match flared up in the slight breeze and presently went out, but not before Neill had seen that it was the face of the man who lay before them.

“Did you see the name under the picture, seh?”

“No.”

Another match flared and the man from the Panhandle read a name, but it was not the one he had expected to see. The words printed there were “James Kinney.”

“I don't understand. This ain't Kinney. He is a heavy-set man with a villainous face. There's some mistake.”

“There ce'tainly is, but not at this end of the line. This is Kinney all right. I've seen him at Yuma. He was heading for the Mal Pais country and he died on the way. See hyer. Look at these soaked bandages. He's been wounded—shot mebbe—and the wound broke out on him again so that he bled to death.”

“It's all a daze to me. Who is the other man if he isn't Kinney?”

“We're coming to that. I'm beginning to see daylight,” said Steve, gently. “Let's run over this thing the way it might be. You've got to keep in mind that this man was weak, one of those spineless fellows that stronger folks lead around by the nose. Well, they make their getaway at Yuma after Struve has killed a guard. That killing of Dave Long shakes Kinney up a lot, he being no desperado but only a poor lost-dog kind of a guy. Struve notices it and remembers that this fellow weakened before. He makes up his mind to take no chances. From that moment he watches for a chance to make an end of his pardner. At Casa Grande they drop off the train they're riding and cut across country toward the Mal Pais. Mebbe they quarrel or mebbe Struve gets his chance and takes it. But after he has shot his man he sees he has made a mistake. Perhaps they were seen travelling in that direction. Anyhow, he is afraid the body will be found since he can't bury it right. He changes his plan and takes a big chance; cuts back to the track, boards a freight, and reaches Fort Lincoln.”

“My God!” cried the other, startled for once out of his calm.

The officer nodded. “You're on the trail right enough. I wish we were both wrong, but we ain't.”

“But surely she would have known he wasn't her brother, surely—”

The ranger shook his head. “She hadn't seen the black sheep since she was a kid of about seven. How would she know what he looked like? And Struve was primed with all the facts he had heard Kinney blat out time and again. She wasn't suspecting any imposition and he worked her to a fare-you-well.”

Larry Neill set his teeth on a wave of icy despair.

“And she's in that devil's power. She would be as safe in a den of rattlers. To think that I had my foot on his neck this mo'ning and didn't break it.”

“She's safe so long as she is necessary to him. She's in deadly peril as soon as he finds her one witness too many. If he walks into my boys' trap at the Arivaca cut-off, all right. If not, God help her! I've shut the door to Mexico and safety in his face. He'll strike back for the Mal Pais country. It's his one chance, and he'll want to travel light and fast.”

“If he starts back Tom Long's party may get him.”

“That's one more chance for her, but it's a slim one. He'll cut straight across country; they're following the trail. No, seh, our best bet is my rangers. They'd ought to land him, too.”

“Oh, ought to,” derided the other impatiently. “Point is, if they don't. How are we going to save her? You know this country. I don't.”

“Don't tear your shirt, amigo,” smiled the ranger. “We'll arrive faster if we don't go off half-cocked. Let's picket the broncs, amble down to the spring, and smoke a cigarette. We've got to ride twenty miles for fresh hawsses and these have got to have a little rest.”

They unsaddled and picketed, then strolled to the spring.

“I've been thinking that maybe we have made a mistake. Isn't it possible the man with Miss Kinney is not Struve?” asked Neill.

“That's easy proved. You saw him this mo'ning.” The lieutenant went down into his pocket once more for a photograph. “Does this favor the man with Miss Kinney?”

Under the blaze of another match, shielded by the ranger's hands, Larry looked into the scowling, villainous face he had seen earlier in the day. There could be no mistaking those leering, cruel eyes nor the ratlike, shifty look of the face, not to mention the long scar across it. His heart sank.

“It's the man.”

“Don't you blame yourself for not putting his lights out. How could you tell who he was?”

“I knew he was a ruffian, hide and hair.”

“But you thought he was her brother and that's a whole lot different. What do you say to grubbing here? We've got to go to the Halle ranch for hawsses and it's a long jog.”

They lit a fire and over their coffee discussed plans. In the midst of these the Southerner picked up idly a piece of wrapping-paper. Upon it was pencilled a wavering scrawl:

Bleeding has broke out again. Can't stop it. Struve shot me and left me for dead ten miles back. I didn't kill the guard or know he meant to. J. KINNEY.

Neill handed the paper to the ranger, who read it through, folded it, and gave it back to the other.

“Keep that paper. We may need it.” His grave eyes went up the trail to where the dark figure lay motionless in the cold moonlight. “Well, he's come to the end of the trail—the only end he could have reached. He wasn't strong enough to survive as a bad man. Poor devil!”

They buried him in a clump of cottonwoods and left a little pile of rocks to mark the spot.

After her precipitate leave-taking of the man whose team she had bought or borrowed, Margaret Kinney nursed the fires of her indignation in silence, banking them for future use against the time when she should meet him again in the event that should ever happen. She brought her whip-lash snapping above the backs of the horses, and there was that in the supple motion of the small strong wrist which suggested that nothing would have pleased her more than having this audacious Texan there in place of the innocent animals. For whatever of inherited savagery lay latent in her blood had been flogged to the surface by the circumstances into which she had been thrust. Never in all her placid life had she known the tug of passion any closer than from across the footlights of a theatre.

She had had, to be sure, one stinging shame, but it had been buried in far-away Arizona, quite beyond the ken of the convention-bound people of the little Wisconsin town where she dwelt. But within the past twelve hours Fate had taken hold of her with both hands and thrust her into Life. She sensed for the first time its roughness, its nakedness, its tragedy. She had known the sensations of a hunted wild beast, the flush of shame for her kinship to this coarse ruffian by her side, and the shock of outraged maiden modesty at kisses ravished from her by force. The teacher hardly knew herself for the same young woman who but yesterday was engrossed in multiplication tables and third readers.

A sinister laugh from the man beside her brought the girl back to the present.

She looked at him and then looked quickly away again. There was something absolutely repulsive in the creature—in the big ears that stood out from the close-cropped head, in the fishy eyes that saw everything without ever looking directly at anything, in the crooked mouth with its irregular rows of stained teeth from which several were missing. She had often wondered about her brother, but never at the worst had she imagined anything so bad as this. The memory would be enough to give one the shudders for years.

“Guess I ain't next to all that happened there in the mesquite,” he sneered, with a lift of the ugly lip.

She did not look at him. She did not speak. There seethed in her a loathing and a disgust beyond expression.

“Guess you forgot that a fellow can sometimes hear even when he can't see. Since I'm chaperooning you I'll make out to be there next time you meet a good-looking lady-killer. Funny, the difference it makes, being your brother. You ain't seen me since you was a kid, but you plumb forgot to kiss me.”

There was a note in his voice she had not heard before, some hint of leering ribaldry in the thick laugh that for the first time stirred unease in her heart. She did not know that the desperate, wild-animal fear in him, so overpowering that everything else had been pushed to the background, had obscured certain phases of him that made her presence here such a danger as she could not yet conceive. That fear was now lifting, and the peril loomed imminent.

He put his arm along the back of the seat and grinned at her from his loose-lipped mouth.

“But o' course it ain't too late to begin now, my dearie.”

Her fearless level eyes met squarely his shifty ones and read there something she could dread without understanding, something that was an undefined sacrilege of her sweet purity. For woman-like her instinct leaped beyond reason.

“Take down your arm,” she ordered.

“Oh, I don't know, sis. I reckon your brother—”

“You're no brother of mine,” she broke in. “At most it is an accident of birth I disown. I'll have no relationship with you of any sort.”

“Is that why you're driving with me to Mexico?” he jeered.

“I made a mistake in trying to save you. If it were to do over again I should not lift a hand.”

“You wouldn't, eh?”

There was something almost wolfish in the facial malignity that distorted him.

“Not a finger.”

“Perhaps you'd give me up now if you had a chance?”

“I would if I did what was right.”

“And you'd sure want to do what was right,” he snarled.

“Take down your arm,” she ordered again, a dangerous glitter in her eyes.

He thrust his evil face close to hers and showed his teeth in a blind rage that forgot everything else.

“Listen here, you little locoed baby. I got something to tell you that'll make your hair curl. You're right, I ain't your brother. I'm Nick Struve—Wolf Struve if you like that better. I lied you into believing me your brother, who ain't ever been anything but a skim-milk quitter. He's dead back there in the cactus somewhere, and I killed him!”

Terror flooded her eyes. Her very breathing hung suspended. She gazed at him in a frozen fascination of horror.

“Killed him because he gave me away seven years ago and was gittin' ready to round on me again. Folks don't live long that play Wolf Struve for a lamb. A wolf! That's what I am, a born wolf, and don't you forget it.”

The fact itself did not need his words for emphasis. He fairly reeked the beast of prey. She had to nerve herself against faintness. She must not swoon. She dared not.

“Think you can threaten to give me up, do you? 'Fore I'm through with you you'll wish you had never been born. You'll crawl on your knees and beg me to kill you.”

Such a devil of wickedness she had never seen in human eyes before. The ruthlessness left no room for appeal. Unless the courage to tame him lay in her she was lost utterly.

He continued his exultant bragging, blatantly, ferociously.

“I didn't tell you about my escape; how a guard tried to stop me and I put the son of a gun out of business. There's a price on my head. D'ye think I'm the man to give you a chance to squeal on me? D'ye think I'll let a pink-and-white chit send me back to be strangled?” he screamed.

The stark courage in her rose to the crisis. Not an hour before she had seen the Texan cow him. He was of the kind would take the whip whiningly could she but wield it. Her scornful eyes fastened on him contemptuously, chiseled into the cur heart of him.

“What will you do?” she demanded, fronting the issue that must sooner or later rise.

The raucous jangle of his laugh failed to disturb the steadiness of her gaze. To reassure himself of his mastery he began to bluster, to threaten, turning loose such a storm of vile abuse as she had never heard. He was plainly working his nerve up to the necessary pitch.

In her first terror she had dropped the reins. Her hands had slipped unconsciously under the lap-robe. Now one of them touched something chilly on the seat beside her. She almost gasped her relief. It was the selfsame revolver with which she had tried to hold up the Texan.

In the midst of Struve's flood of invective the girl's hand leaped quickly from the lap-robe. A cold muzzle pressed against his cheek brought the convict's outburst to an abrupt close.

“If you move I'll fire,” she said quietly.

For a long moment their gazes gripped, the deadly clear eyes of the young woman and the furtive ones of the miscreant. Underneath the robe she felt a stealthy movement, and cried out quickly: “Hands up!”

With a curse he threw his arms into the air.

“Jump out! Don't lower your hands!”

“My ankle,” he whined.

“Jump!”

His leap cleared the wheel and threw him to the ground. She caught up the whip and slashed wildly at the horses. They sprang forward in a panic, flying wildly across the open plain. Margaret heard a revolver bark twice. After that she was so busy trying to regain control of the team that she could think of nothing else. The horses were young and full of spirit, so that she had all she could do to keep the trap from being upset. It wound in and out among the hills, taking perilous places safely to her surprise, and was at last brought to a stop only by the narrowing of a draw into which the animals had bolted.

They were quiet now beyond any chance of farther runaway, even had it been possible. Margaret dropped the lines on the dashboard and began to sob, at first in slow deep breaths and then in quicker uneven ones. Plucky as she was, the girl had had about all her nerves could stand for one day. The strain of her preparation for flight, the long night drive, and the excitement of the last two hours were telling on her in a hysterical reaction.

She wept herself out, dried her eyes with dabs of her little kerchief, and came back to a calm consideration of her situation. She must get back to Fort Lincoln as soon as possible, and she must do it without encountering the convict. For in the course of the runaway the revolver had been jolted from the trap.

Not quite sure in which direction lay the road, she got out from the trap, topped the hill to her right, and looked around. She saw in all directions nothing but rolling hilltops, merging into each other even to the horizon's edge. In her wild flight among these hills she had lost count of direction. She had not yet learned how to know north from south by the sun, and if she had it would have helped but little since she knew only vaguely the general line of their travel.

She felt sure that from the top of the next rise she could locate the road, but once there she was as uncertain as before. Before giving up she breasted a third hill to the summit. Still no signs of the road. Reluctantly she retraced her steps, and at the foot of the hill was uncertain whether she should turn to right or left. Choosing the left, from the next height she could see nothing of the team. She was not yet alarmed. It was ridiculous to suppose that she was lost. How could she be when she was within three or four hundred yards of the rig? She would cut across the shoulder into the wash and climb the hillock beyond. For behind it the team must certainly be.

But at her journey's end her eyes were gladdened by no sight of the horses. Every draw was like its neighbor, every rolling rise a replica of the next. The truth came home to a sinking heart. She was lost in one of the great deserts of Texas. She would wander for days as others had, and she would die in the end of starvation and thirst. Nobody would know where to look for her, since she had told none where she was going. Only yesterday at her boarding-house she had heard a young man tell how a tenderfoot had been found dead after he had wandered round and round in intersecting circles. She sank down and gave herself up to despair.

But not for long. She was too full of grit to give up without a long fight. How many hours she wandered Margaret Kinney did not know. The sun was high in the heavens when she began. It had given place to flooding moonlight long before her worn feet and aching heart gave up the search for some human landmark. Once at least she must have slept, for she stared up from a spot where she had sunk down to look up into a starry sky that was new to her.

The moon had sailed across the vault and grown chill and faint with dawn before she gave up, completely exhausted, and when her eyes opened again it was upon a young day fresh and sweet. She knew by this time hunger and an acute thirst. As the day increased, this last she knew must be a torment of swollen tongue and lime-kiln throat. Yesterday she had cried for help till her voice had failed. A dumb despair had now driven away her terror.

And then into the awful silence leaped a sound like a messenger of hope. It was a shot, so close that she could see the smoke rise from an arroyo near. She ran forward till she could look down into it and caught sight of a man with a dead bird in his hand. He had his back toward her and was stooping over a fire. Slithering down over the short dry grass, she was upon him almost before she could stop.

“I've been lost all night and all yesterday,” she sobbed.

He snatched at the revolver lying beside him and whirled like a flash as if to meet an attack. The girl's pumping heart seemed to stand still. The man snarling at her was the convict Struve.

“So you've been lost! And now you're found—come safe back to your loving brother. Ain't that luck for you? Hunted all over Texas till you found him, eh? And it's a powerful big State, too.”

She caught sight of something that made her forget all else.

“Have you got water in that canteen?” she asked, her parched eyes staring at it.

“Yes, dearie.”

“Give it me.”

He squatted tailor-fashion on the ground, put the canteen between his knees, and shoved his teeth in a crooked grin.

“Thirsty?”

“I'm dying for a drink.”

“You look like a right lively corpse.”

“Give it to me.”

“Will you take it now or wait till you get it?”

“My throat's baked. I want water,” she said hoarsely.

“Most folks want a lot they never get.”

She walked toward him with her hand outstretched.

“I tell you I've got to have it.”

He laughed evilly. “Water's at a premium right now. Likely there ain't enough here to get us both out of this infernal hole alive. Yes, it's sure at a premium.”

He let his eye drift insolently over her and take stock of his prey, in the same feline way of a cat with a mouse, gloating over her distress and the details of her young good looks. His tainted gaze got the faint pure touch of color in her face, the reddish tinge of her wavy brown hair, the desirable sweetness of her rounded maidenhood. If her step dragged, if dusky hollows shadowed her lids, if the native courage had been washed from the hopeless eyes, there was no spring of manliness hid deep within him that rose to refresh her exhaustion. No pity or compunction stirred at her sweet helplessness.

“Do you want my money?” she asked wearily.

“I'll take that to begin with.”

She tossed him her purse. “There should be seventy dollars there. May I have a drink now?”

“Not yet, my dear. First you got to come up to me and put your arms round—”

He broke off with a curse, for she was flying toward the little circle of cottonwoods some forty yards away. She had caught a glimpse of the water-hole and was speeding for it.

“Come back here,” he called, and in a rage let fly a bullet after her.

She paid no heed, did not stop till she reached the spring and threw herself down full length to drink, to lave her burnt face, to drink again of the alkali brackish water that trickled down her throat like nectar incomparably delicious.

She was just rising to her feet when Struve hobbled up.

“Don't you think you can play with me, missie. When I give the word you stop in your tracks, and when I say 'Jump!' step lively.”

She did not answer. Her head was lifted in a listening attitude, as if to catch some sound that came faintly to her from a distance.

“You're mine, my beauty, to do with as I please, and don't you forget it.”

She did not hear him. Her ears were attuned to voices floating to her across the desert. Of course she was beginning to wander in her mind. She knew that. There could be no other human beings in this sea of loneliness. They were alone; just they two, the degenerate ruffian and his victim. Still, it was strange. She certainly had imagined the murmur of people talking. It must be the beginning of delirium.

“Do you hear me?” screamed Struve, striking her on the cheek with his fist. “I'm your master and you're my squaw.”

She did not cringe as he had expected, nor did she show fight. Indeed the knowledge of the blow seemed scarcely to have penetrated her mental penumbra. She still had that strange waiting aspect, but her eyes were beginning to light with new-born hope. Something in her manner shook the man's confidence; a dawning fear swept away his bluster. He, too, was now listening intently.

Again the low murmur, beyond a possibility of doubt. Both of them caught it. The girl opened her throat in a loud cry for help. An answering shout came back clear and strong. Struve wheeled and started up the arroyo, bending in and out among the cactus till he disappeared over the brow.

Two horsemen burst into sight, galloping down the steep trail at breakneck speed, flinging down a small avalanche of shale with them. One of them caught sight of the girl, drew up so short that his horse slid to its haunches, and leaped from the saddle in a cloud of dust.

He ran toward her, and she to him, hands out to meet her rescuer.

“Why didn't you come sooner? I've waited so long,” she cried pathetically, as his arms went about her.

“You poor lamb! Thank God we're in time!” was all he could say.

Then for the first time in her life she fainted.

The other rider lounged forward, a hat in his hand that he had just picked up close to the fire.

“We seem to have stampeded part of this camping party. I'll just take a run up this hill and see if I can't find the missing section and persuade it to stay a while. I don't reckon you need me hyer, do you?” he grinned, with a glance at Neill and his burden.

“All right. You'll find me here when you get back, Fraser,” the other answered.

Larry carried the girl to the water-hole and set her down beside it. He sprinkled her face with water, and presently her lids trembled and fluttered open. She lay there with her head on his arm and looked at him quite without surprise.

“How did you find me?”

“Mainly luck. We followed your trail to where we found the rig. After that it was guessing where the needle was in the haystack It just happened we were cutting across country to water when we heard a shot.”

“That must have been when he fired at me,” she said.

“My God! Did he shoot at you?”

“Yes. Where is he now?” She shuddered.

“Cutting over the hills with Steve after him.”

“Steve?”

“My friend, Lieutenant Fraser. He is an officer in the ranger force.”

“Oh!” She relapsed into a momentary silence before she said: “He isn't my brother at all. He is a murderer.” She gave a sudden little moan of pain as memory pierced her of what he had said. “He bragged to me that he had killed my brother. He meant to kill me, I think.”

“Sho! It doesn't matter what the coyote meant. It's all over now. You're with friends.”

A warm smile lit his steel-blue eyes, softened the lines of his lean, hard face. Never had shipwrecked mariner come to safer harbor than she. She knew that this slim, sun-bronzed Westerner was a man's man, that strength and nerve inhabited his sinewy frame. He would fight for her because she was a woman as long as he could stand and see.

A touch of color washed back into her cheeks, a glow of courage into her heart. “Yes, it's all over. The weary, weary hours—and the fear—and the pain—and the dreadful thirst—and worst of all, him!”

She began to cry softly, hiding her face in his coat-sleeve.

“I'm crying because—it's all over. I'm a little fool, just as—as you said I was.”

“I didn't know you then,” he smiled. “I'm right likely to make snap-shot judgments that are 'way off.”

“You knew me well enough to—” She broke off in the middle, bathed in a flush of remembrance that brought her coppery head up from his arm instantly.

“Be careful. You're dizzy yet.”

“I'm all right now, thank you,” she answered, her embarrassed profile haughtily in the air. “But I'm ravenous for something to eat. It's been twenty-four hours since I've had a bite. That's why I'm weepy and faint. I should think you might make a snap-shot judgment that breakfast wouldn't hurt me.”

He jumped up contritely. “That's right. What a goat I am!”

His long, clean stride carried him over the distance that separated him from his bronco. Out of the saddle-bags he drew some sandwiches wrapped in a newspaper.

“Here, Miss Margaret! You begin on these. I'll have coffee ready in two shakes of a cow's tail. And what do you say to bacon?”

He understood her to remark from the depths of a sandwich that she said “Amen!” to it, and that she would take everything he had and as soon as he could get it ready. She was as good as her word. He found no cause to complain of her appetite. Bacon and sandwiches and coffee were all consumed in quantities reasonable for a famished girl who had been tramping actively for a day and a night, and, since she was a child of impulse, she turned more friendly eyes on him who had appeased her appetite.

“I suppose you are a cowboy like everybody else in this country?” she ventured amiably after her hunger had become less sharp.

“No, I belong to the government reclamation service.”

“Oh!” She had a vague idea she had heard of it before. “Who is it you reclaim? Indians, I suppose.”

“We reclaim young ladies when we find them wandering about the desert,” he smiled.

“Is that what the government pays you for?”

“Not entirely. Part of the time I examine irrigation projects and report on their feasibility. I have been known to build dams and bore tunnels.”

“And what of the young ladies you reclaim? Do you bore them?” she asked saucily.

“I understand they have hitherto always found me very entertaining,” he claimed boldly, his smiling eyes on her.

“Indeed!”

“But young ladies are peculiar. Sometimes we think we're entertaining them when we ain't.”

“I'm sure you are right.”

“And other times they're interested when they pretend they're not.”

“It must be comforting to your vanity to think that,” she said coldly. For his words had recalled similar ones spoken by him twenty-four hours earlier, which in turn had recalled his unpardonable sin.

The lieutenant of rangers appeared over the hill and descended into the draw. Miss Kinney went to meet him.

“He got away?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am. I lost him in some of these hollows, or rather I never found him. I'm going to take my hawss and swing round in a circle.”

“What are you going to do with me?” she smiled.

“I been thinking that the best thing would be for you to go to the Mal Pais mines with Mr. Neill.”

“Who is Mr. Neill?”

“The gentleman over there by the fire.”

“Must I go with him? I should feel safer in your company, lieutenant.”

“You'll be safe enough in his, Miss Kinney.”

“You know me then?” she asked.

“I've seen you at Fort Lincoln. You were pointed out to me once as a new teacher.”

“But I don't want to go to the Mal Pais mines. I want to go to Fort Lincoln. As to this gentleman, I have no claims on him and shall not trouble him to burden himself with me.”

Steve laughed. “I don't reckon he would think, it a terrible burden, ma'am. And about the Mal Pais—this is how it is. Fort Lincoln is all of sixty miles from here as the crow flies. The mines are about seventeen. My notion was you could get there and take the stage to-morrow to your town.”

“What shall I do for a horse?”

“I expect Mr. Neill will let you ride his. He can walk beside the hawss.”

“That won't do at all. Why should I put him to that inconvenience? I'll walk myself.”

The ranger flashed his friendly smile at her. He had an instinct that served him with women. “Any way that suits you and him suits me. I'm right sorry that I've got to leave you and take out after that hound Struve, but you may take my word for it that this gentleman will look after you all right and bring you safe to the Mal Pais.”

“He is a stranger to me. I've only met him once and on that occasion not pleasantly. I don't like to put myself under an obligation to him. But of course if I must I must.”

“That's the right sensible way to look at it. In this little old world we got to do a heap we don't want to do. For instance, I'd rather see you to the Mal Pais than hike over the hills after this fellow,” he concluded gallantly.

Neill, who had been packing the coffee-pot and the frying-pan, now sauntered forward with his horse.

“Well, what's the program?” he wanted to know.

“It's you and Miss Kinney for the Mal Pais, me for the trail. I ain't very likely to find Mr. Struve, but you can't always sometimes tell. Anyhow, I'm going to take a shot at it,” the ranger answered.

“And at him?” his friend suggested.

“Oh, I reckon not. He may be a sure-enough wolf, but I expect this ain't his day to howl.”

Steve whistled to his pony, swung to the saddle when it trotted up, and waved his hat in farewell.

His “Adios!” drifted back to them from the crown of the hill just before he disappeared over its edge.

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