CHAPTER I.
A MIDNIGHT ALARM.
“O-u-e-e!”
Piercing and shrill, from the tense stillness of the night sounded this eerie wail.
In terrified alarm, Sam Bowser rose in his bed to his elbow.
As he remained thus, trying to decide whether the awesome shriek was a cry of distress from some human being or was an imagining of his mind, his wife awoke.
“What was that?” she gasped, excitedly.
“You heard it, too?”
“I—I thought I heard something. It sounded like the very soul being drawn from some woman. U-ugh! It makes me shiver to think of it.”
“Well, there aren’t any women nearer than thirty miles, except you, so it couldn’t be that.”
“But some one might be carrying a woman off or murdering her. Just because Amy Hawks is the nearest one we know of, doesn’t make it so there mightn’t be some poor creature being killed.”
To this, the man made no response, and together they listened intently for a repetition of the awful wail.
“Guess it must have been some coyote got kicked while he was smelling round the cattle. This is the fi——”
But the words literally stuck in Bowser’s mouth.
Again the shriek, bloodcurdling in its gruesomeness, rang out ere he could finish what he purposed to say.
This time there was no mistaking the cry.
It seemed to come from a woman in awful distress and to be close at hand.
“There’s some mischief afoot!” exclaimed the man, as, heedless of his wife’s protests, he leaped from his bed, seized his rifle and rushed to the door.
Yet, when he threw it open, there was nothing to be seen!
The silence and the darkness of the night were overwhelming—as only the silence and darkness of the plains of Arizona can be.
Sam Bowser was the owner of the Double Cross ranch. With no neighbors nearer than thirty miles, he and his wife, Sarah, lived in the home ranch house. This building faced the South. To the right, and some sixty feet distant, was the bunkhouse, where the cowpunchers lived when not on the range. To the North and between the two houses was a horse corral. Directly back of this was a second corral for the cattle, so large that it seemed more like a big pasture enclosed by barbed wire than a yard.
Only the day before had Bowser’s men driven the pick of his herds back to the home ranch in order that they might be shipped away to the great cattle markets of the Middle West.
Scarcely had the ranch owner opened the door than lights blazed in the bunkhouse, followed an instant later by the rush of the cowpunchers, as, guns in their hands, they crept cautiously from their shanty to learn the cause of the alarm.
“Steady, boys! Don’t go to shooting up the country!” warned Bowser, running across the yard to join his men.
“What did you make of it, Sam?” demanded a tall, leathery cowpuncher, who served as foreman.
“You’ve got me, Sandy. The missus ’lows it’s some woman being murdered.”
“But there ain’t any women round here,” protested another of the men, who had been christened “Pinky” by his fellows because of his fondness for decorating his saddle and bridle with anything of the color.
“That’s just what I told her,” declared the ranchman, evidently glad to learn his opinion found support. “But she ’lowed that didn’t make any difference, that one or a dozen could be brought here. I sort of had an idea, it might have been a coyote.”
“Wal, it warn’t no coyote,” drawled the third of the boys attached to the Double Cross outfit, who revelled in the title of Deadshot Pete. “I been on these plains too long not to know every tone and variation of the songs them sneaks sing.”
“Then what was it?” demanded Sandy. “Seems to me, if it was some man or woman being done to death, they’d keep up more of a continuous yelling.”
“Unless it’s too late,” commented Deadshot, significantly.
This suggestion that perhaps the gruesome wails which had roused them all from their sleep might have been the dying protests or appeals for help of some human being caused the men to become silent.
“Don’t see how we can do any good so long as we don’t hear the thing again to give us a definite idea of its direction,” remarked the ranchman, after a period of several minutes peering into the darkness and listening had been productive of neither sight nor sound. “Guess we’d better get back to our bunks and wait till daylight.”
“Reckon you’re right, Sam,” returned his foreman. “It’s either too late, as Deadshot says, or we must hear it again so’s we can get our bearings.”
But neither the owner nor the outfit of the Double Cross was destined to get any more sleep that night!
While talking, the men had been looking toward the South.
Chancing to turn so that he was facing the cattle corral, Pinky suddenly uttered an exclamation of wild fear, then clutched Sandy by the arm, wheeling him about, as he pointed Northward with trembling hand.
Amazed at such action on the part of their bunkmate, the others followed his gaze.
Apparently floating through the air, directly above the cattle corral, was a white spectre!