Jane found herself on the pinto racing through the night, ducking under cedars until she was clear of the timber, crashing through brush, leaping washes and at her side, silent, close, protecting her, an arm ready to grasp her body should her horse fall, rode Tom Beck.
They made straight across the flat toward the foot of the trail. To their right was shooting and behind them a sharp volley rattled. A stray bulletzingedangrily, close over their heads.
"You've got to get out of this, ma'am," Beck cried. "There'll be hell to pay before mornin'. There's nothing they won't do now."
"Tom! You came!"
Her eyes were blinded by tears as she turned her face to him, trying to put into words the forgiveness which she deemed unnecessary and which she knew was the one essential to Tom Beck, which she knew would be almost impossible to convey convincingly. But through the tears she saw the flash of a gun before them and an answering flash. A lengthy flicker of lightning showed two figures. One, Dick Hilton, horse drawn back on his hocks, revolver lifted. They saw him shoot again and they saw that other figure, Baldy Bowen, who was there to block the trail, crumple in his saddle and sag forward, struggle heavily to regain his position and then, as his frightened horse moved quickly, plunge in an ungainly mass to the ground.
Beck raised his gun as Hilton's horse leaped for the trail. He shot but the instant of light had passed, making the world darker by contrast. They saw fire shoot from scrambling hoofs.
The burst of rain had ceased, the interval of fury broken; the storm still swirled, roaring, above them, but it was dry and black, threatening, holding in reserve its strength....
The sound of another horse, cutting in before them, running frantically, and Beck's gun hand went up only to poise arrested as a voice came to them with the singing of a rope end that flayed the animal's flanks.
"Go; go! Take me after him!"
It was Bobby Cole's cry. She had seen. She was riding on the trail of the man who would have been her betrayer.
They dismounted hastily and stooped over the figure that lay quiet on the rocks. Jane stilled her sobbing as Beck rolled the body over and felt and listened.
"Dead," he said huskily.
"Dead!" echoed Jane. "Dick killed him! Oh ... beastly!"
Fresh firing behind them. The shout of a man and an answer. More shots, coming closer.
"You've got to get out," Beck said lowly, lifting her from her knees beside the dead rider. "There'll be hell here to-night and it's no place for you. You bring the law!"
"I feel as though I should stay. There'll be others killed and it's my fight!"
Hers was a cry of anguish, but he replied:
"You'll save lives by bringin' help. And hurry, ma'am, hurry!"
His only thought was to get her to safety.
A rifle crashed twice not a hundred yards from them and they heard a running horse grunt as spurs raked his sides.
"Get up and get out!" he cried hoarsely, fearful that she might insist on lingering in this place which, this night, was well named Devil's Hole.
"There's only one of 'em ahead of you. He's bound only to make his get-away.... An' the Catamount, she'll clear your way if he does turn back!"
He lifted her bodily to her horse.
"It seems my place to stay!" she cried as shots peppered the storm. "To stay with you, Tom!"
"It's your place to get out! Ride!"
He swung his hat across the pinto's hind quarters and the animal leaped into the trail. He heard Jane cry out to him to stop.
"Go on!" he shouted. "Go on! It's your job to bring help!"
And he heard her go on, the horse floundering up the steep rise, and knew that she obeyed. Then he turned and looked out across the flat.
Far down toward Cole's cabin was a shot. A riderless horse went past him, blowing with excitement. He crouched behind a boulder, gun in his hands, peering into the darkness. Others would not travel that trail that night so long as he was on guard....
The fight had been carried in both directions, further up into the Hole, on down toward the Gap. HC riders, partially assembled and identified, had closed on the outlaws, cut them off from the trail and for the space of many minutes there was no revealed action, each waiting for the others to show themselves.
Again in the distance was the mutter of thunder and a brilliant, prolonged flash of lightning. The wind had subsided to breathless silence as if the heavens marshaled their forces for fresh outbursts. Beck started up as the clouds flared, looking quickly about. He saw a horse with an empty saddle. He saw a man standing waist deep in brush, a rifle at his hip, ready to fire. He could not recognize the man. Darkness; again, a silent lighting of the skies, and with that the stillness was broken. There was the sharp crack of a rifle far to his left, up toward the head of the Hole. None replied to the shot. A moment later the clouds sent out their flare again ... and this time two shots echoed.
Beck started up with a low cry. Above on the trail he had seen Jane Hunter's pinto, making for the high country, and those two stabs of yellow flame had been aimed upward and toward the wall to which her path clung.
It seemed to the man an age until lightning again revealed the earth. He had an impression of a horseman far toward the top of the trail and behind him another, riding hard; and lastly, Jane's pinto toiling bravely up the sharp climb.
And as darkness cut in again two more fangs of flame darted toward her!
Jane Hunter, without protection, wholly revealed by the lightning, was a target for merciless men, for men who had nothing to lose and at least a fighting chance to gain by stopping her!
He had believed that she was going to safety; he had underestimated the maliciousness of those men she had driven into the open that afternoon. He had neglected to consider the fact that on the trail she was without protection of any sort and that lightning would make her stand out like a cameo! He forgot his mental stress, he relegated his duty as sentinel to inconsequence, for she was in great danger and needed help! It was a joy to know that the life in his body, the blood in his flesh, might be the one thing she needed, for only by offering those possessions could he atone for his faithlessness. He had no idea that he could regain that desire to possess her. He only wanted her to know that what he had to give was hers; that was all!
Then another rider was on the trail: Tom Beck, roweling his horse, fanning his shoulders with the rein ends, crying aloud to him for speed, his gun in his holster, a useless thing.
He rode with abandon in the darkness, urging the horse to a speed that mocked safety. Stones were scattered by the animal's spurning feet and he heard them strike below, the sounds becoming fainter as he mounted the steep rise. Lightning again and the viper spits down there in the flat licked out for the woman ahead. Beck swore aloud and beat his horse's flanks with his hat.
The darkness, though it handicapped speed and enhanced the danger of his race, was relief. When it was dark they could not fire....
And he knew they were waiting down there, rifles ready, straining to see in the next burst of light....
He begged of the Almighty to send rain, to hold back the lightning, but no rain came; the flares continued. He heard another shot, closer, from behind, and knew it was the rifleman he had seen standing in the brush firing at those who menaced Jane Hunter's safety.
He was gaining on the pinto, slowly, with agonizing slowness. His big brown horse drove on, but, when in darkness and without perspective, it seemed as though his hoofs beat upon a treadmill. The animal's excited breathing became more clearly defined.... The pinto ahead crawled slowly and awkwardly like a dying animal, many minutes from shelter....
One of those spurts of flame stung toward Beck. He heard, almost as he saw it, the spatter of a bullet on the rock behind him. He lay low on his horse's mane.
The glimmer of lightning, unaccompanied now by thunder, became almost continuous. Against the white face of the mountain the riders were like silhouette targets. Below there were stabs of fire from a dozen places, like fire-flies on a summer night, but carrying death.
Two bullets, close together, snarled past him, one above, the other just ahead, perhaps in a line behind his horse's ears. He hoped wildly that they were directing all their fire at him, that he was drawing it from the girl above but even as this hope mounted the skies coruscated again and he saw that the pinto was stopped, saw that Jane was slipping to the narrow trail, her body wedged between the cliff and the body of the horse.
For an interminable time blackness seemed to hold. The big brown, whose breath was now laboring with exhaustion as well as with excitement, gasped scarcely a dozen breaths before the greeny light came again but to his rider it was an aeon of time. Tom Beck passed through the veriest depths of torment in that interval and unconsciously he shouted into the night incoherent cries of suffering. He had been too late! He had sent her to physical suffering, to her death, perhaps, and before he could make her understand that he blamed himself as only a just man who has been unjust can crush himself with execration!
But light came and he saw her, still alive, still safe!
The pinto was down, hind feet over the trail. Wounded, he had tried to turn back, tail to the abyss as a mountain bred animal will turn. He had moved on unsteady limbs, his hind feet slipped over the edge and moaning, head back, eyes bulging, he clawed with his fore hoofs to stay his fall. Clinging to the reins, calling aloud her encouragement, the girl helped with voice and limbs.
For an interval she balanced the pull of the animal's own weight....
And when Tom Beck could see again she was alone on the trail, one arm raised to her face as she cringed from the bullets that spattered all about!
He cursed his horse, lashing furiously, spurring in the shoulders without mercy. He came up to her and she faced him, lips tight and in the dance of cloud fire he saw her eyes wide, nostrils distended.
"Get up here!" he muttered and lifted her to his saddle horn, winding his arms about her, bowing his head and shoulders over hers to take the missiles in his own body first.
She clutched him frantically, her warm arms around his neck, her trembling limbs across his thigh with his hand hooked beneath the knees, her soft breast cleaving to his and, slipping through his opened shirt the little gold locket that was at her throat pressed against his heart.... It was cold from the night and he felt it send a tingle through his body. Even then he wondered, with the strange sharpness which stressed thought will give to irrelevant matters, what it contained!
"Tom! It's good to have you!"
Good to have him! With death singing all about her it was good to have him; it was her first thought!
"It would be good to die for you!" he said.
"No, no!"—sharply. "Not that, Tom! Live for me ... live for me!"
She felt him start and shudder and sway and a moan broke from his lips as a searching, tearing thing ripped at the small of his back, burrowing devilishly into his very vitals. She clutched him closer, not understanding.
"It's all I've got to give you," he muttered unnaturally. "My life's all I've got, ma'am. I'd be proud to give it.... It's a little thing to give to pay ... a debt like I owe you....
"You keep your body behind mine ... always ... until we get to the top...."
"Tom!"—in alarm. "You're hit.... Oh, Tom!" She shook him, hitching herself about that she might see his face. "Tom!"
"A scratch," he said. "Just a—"
The horse threw up his head and recoiled as a bullet sang past.
"A—scratch," he finished.
The girl looked about wildly. She knew there was no shelter there, not a ledge behind which they could hide, not a tree that would screen them. The wall rose straight on one side, fell sheer on the other. There was no place to go but up; they could not turn there and go down for there was no room ... the pinto, shot through the belly, had tried that!
The firing below grew more rapid. It did not wait for the lightning flashes now. Those spats of yellow fire struck upward continuously; in darkness, blindly; in light searching intelligently as the riders moved upward, nearer safety. H C men closed in on those who shot at the figures on the trail, aiming at the flurries of viper light, meeting counter fire as they drew nearer the murderous group of men.
"Fireflies!" Beck muttered as he looked down again. "Lightnin' bugs let loose from hell!"
When there was no fire in the clouds those light points looked so harmless, down there in the soft, velvet darkness! Well they might have been insects, bedecking a summer night ... but from them came the whining, droning, searching projectiles that flew to find his life and Jane Hunter's life!
Fifty yards further was the first rise of rock that would protect them from below. Fifty yards, and the horse, under added burden, was sobbing as he staggered.
Beck swayed forward and regained his balance with an effort that cost him a groan, but his arms, tight about Jane Hunter's body did not relax a trifle; they held like tough, green wood. The girl cried out to him again, that he was hurt....
"It's nothin', ... my life," he replied. "It's all I could do ... for doubtin' you. I couldn't ask you to ... love me.... I could die for you ... that's all, ma'am...."
"Tom, Tom! Keep your head; keep your head one minute longer; we'll be safe.... Safe, then...."
Thirty yards to the place where the trail ran between uprising walls of rock; thirty yards to that shelter; thirty yards to safety....
But she looked down at those deadly fireflies playing on the flat, and did not see a hatless man, crouched forward, run down the trail toward them, pistol in his hand....
Dick Hilton, who had escaped the Hole only to realize that there was no escape, was waiting to vent the last drop of poison in his heart.... Nor did Jane see, nor did Hilton suspect, that waiting there for him was another stalker, who had followed and lost him, who had turned back, who had seen the travelers up the trail and who waited their approach screened by timber....
Bobby Cole's heart leaped as she saw him run crouching to meet Tom Beck, and her gun leaped to position ... and she waited there in the darkness for the next flash of light ... as men waited below ... as Jane Hunter waited, with her heart racing in despair; as Dick Hilton, gibbering under his breath, waited....
The big brown horse stumbled and Tom Beck cried aloud in fear and pain, cried drunkenly, as his blood drenched the saddle. Twenty yards to the shelter of solid rock ... ten ... five....
And a scarecrow figure leaped from it at them, revealed by a long, green glimmer.
"Damn you, Beck! Damn you, you've ruined me; you drove me to this.... Now, take th—"
His gun had whipped up even as the gun of the girl they saw behind him whipped up.
Neither fired.
Down below had come those winking fangs again and Hilton's voice trailed into a rising, rasping gasp as missiles from his compatriots drilled his body.
His pistol dropped to the rock. He put his hands to his stomach.
"Damn your—"
He choked on the word, and as he choked he took one blind step forward, over the brink. As he fell he threw up his hands and sailed downward into the depths, into the coming darkness....
The brown horse had halted, but as Jane Hunter slipped to the ground, holding Beck's sagging body with all her strength, he stepped forward, in behind the rocks: their haven....
"Oh, they got him!" Bobby sobbed. "They got him...."
She might have meant Hilton, but if so the pity, the regret in her voice was a mourning of her dead love, not the dead lover; or she might have meant Tom Beck and the tone might have been sympathy for the woman she had come to understand, the woman who had respect for her and who she could respect....
They let Tom's body to the trail. The horse moved off. Hastily Bobby ripped open his shirt....
"Through the hips," she whispered. "Through the hips....
"Look!"—starting up. "He's movin' his foot. It didn't get his spine; it didn't get his spine...."
She tore open her shirt and tugged at the undergarment beneath it. She stuffed it into the wound deftly, staying the blood while Jane Hunter, Beck's head in her lap, cried aloud.
"Listen!" Bobby knelt beside the other woman, hands on her shoulders, peering into her face.... "You're safe here. They've got 'em cut off from this trail below....
"My horse is fresh. I'm goin' to your ranch for help. He ain't goin' to die, ma'am.... I promise you that.... He ain't goin' to die!"
She was gone and Jane Hunter, half faint, clinging to that promise as the last, the only thing in life, lowered her lips to her lover's eyes.
It was the first day that Tom Beck could lie on his back. For weeks he had lain on his face there in the living room of the ranch house, nursed back to health by Jane Hunter's gentle hands. Now the doctor had turned him over, with the promise that he would not only be sitting up but walking before long, and the Veterans' Society had been in session.
That was what Two-Bits called it: The Veterans' Society. Every afternoon they had gathered there, Two-Bits with his slowly healing back, Jimmy Oliver, after his leg had mended and he could hobble with a cane, Joe Black, whose arm was just out of its sling and, occasionally, Riley, who rode up the creek holding gingerly his one shoulder, to fight the battle over again.
Summer was ripening and the golden sunlight spilled down onto peaceful mountains from a mighty sweep of sky. A gentle breeze bent the tall cottonwoods, making them whisper, making the birds in their branches sing in lazy contentment. Unmolested cattle ranged in prospering hundreds. The work was up, fall and beef ride were coming ... and other years to bring their toll of happiness and well being, for after its one paroxysm of strife the country had settled back to easier ways, to a better, more wholesome manner of living.
There were memories, true, kept fresh by such things as this Veterans' Society, and the three graves in Devil's Hole where rested the bodies of Sam McKee, Dad Hepburn and Dick Hilton, for there was none to claim what remained of them. Under the cottonwoods slept Baldy Bowen, his grave surrounded by white pickets and his head marked by a stone.
But even now those memories were less poignant than they had been weeks before. Interest in the range war was waning and though it would be talked about across bar and bunk house stove for many winters the thrill of it was gone ... as the horror of it was largely gone for those who had suffered most.
Two-Bits had lingered after the departure of the rest and sat in a chair beside Tom's cot. Beck's face was pale, but his eyes were alive and as of old, evidence of satisfactory convalescence.
"So you think thereisa hell, Tommy?" he asked.
Beck grunted assent.
"Yeah. I know there's a hell, Two-Bits."
"My brother always said there was. He said it was an awful place, Tommy. I'll bet two bits th' old Devil was sorry to see Hepburn an' Hilton an' Sam McKee comin' in that mornin'! I'll bet he says to hisself: 'Here's some right smart competition for me!'"
Beck laughed silently.
"Sometimes I get feelin' mighty sorry for 'em," the lanky cow-boy continued. "I use to hate Webb somethin' awful an' I sure did think Hepburn was about th' lowest critter that walked.... God ought to 've made him crawl! Sam McKee never was no good. He was th' meanest man I ever saw....
"But, shucks, Tommy, I hate to think of 'em bein' blistered all th' time!"
"That ain't the kind of hell I referred to, Two-Bits. I don't know much about that kind, with brimstone and fire and all the rest....
"There's a hell, though, Tommy. It's when a man lets the weakness in him run off with what strength he has, when he don't trust those who deserve to be trusted, when he's suspicious of those his heart tells him are above suspicion."
Two-Bits swallowed, setting his Adam's apple leaping. His eyes widened.
"Gosh, you talk just like th' Reverend!" he said, and Beck laughed until his wound hurt him.
"Well, if they ain't in hell, they're under an awful lot of rocks," he added. "That's all I care, to have 'em out of her way."
"Yes, it makes it smoother. Real folks, men who deserve the name, won't do anything but trust her and help her."
"Not after the way she made 'em come out of their holes! That trial must've been grand, Tommy! I'd 've give two bits to seen it an' heard it!
"She won't have no trouble no more. Everybody knows she's got more head than most men on this here creek. But she's got somethin' else! She's got a ... a gentle way with her that makes everybody want to do things for her.
"Look at how she treated Cole. Why, anybody else 'd run him off! 'Stead of that she gets Bobby Cole to file on that claim an' helps 'em to build a good house an' wants 'em to stay. You can bet your life that HC cattle'll get water there now. That catamount ... hell, she'dcarryit for 'em if there wasn't any other way to get it to 'em!"
"Yes, Bobby's changed."
"Should say she is changed! She's got a different look to her, not so hard an' horstile as she used to be; she's plumb doe-cyle now!
"I expect she's glad she didn't kill Hilton. If she hadn't changed she'd been glad to do it. But, bein' like she is now, she wouldn't want to hurt nobody.... Unless that somebody wanted to hurt Miss Hunter."
His eyes roved off down the road and settled on a swiftly moving horse, the great sorrel who was bringing Jane Hunter back to the ranch after a ride far down the creek.
"Speakin' of Hell, Tommy: there mebby ain't any like the Reverend claims there is, but there's a Heaven! I'll bet two bits there is! I'll gamble on it because I know an angel that stepped right down that there, now, solid gold ladder....
"She's comin' up th' road.... An' Mister Two-Bits Beal,esquire, is goin' to drift out of here!"
With a broad wink, which set a suggestion of a flush into Beck's cheeks, he took his hat and departed.
Jane entered, drawing the pin from her hat; then stopped on the threshold with a cry.
"Oh, the doctor's been here!"
"Yes, and he's rolled the old carcass over," Beck answered.
She stood looking down at him for a moment and then dropped quickly to her knees.
"It's so good to look into your eyes again," she whispered, and though her own eyes were bright there were tears in her voice.
Beck's gaze wavered and he slowly withdrew the hand that she had taken.
"You mustn't look like that!" he said, turning his face from her. "It's more than I've deserved, it's more than I have a right to!"
She put her hands on his shoulders, gently, bearing no weight upon them, and said soberly:
"Look at me, Tom Beck!"
He obeyed, rather reluctantly.
"I have waited, oh, so long, to talk to you! I promised the doctor that nothing should disturb you until you were well. That's one reason why I brought you into the house, instead of leaving you with the men: so you could be quiet.
"But there was another reason, a greater: I wanted you here, in this room, in my house, near me, where I could see and feel and help you, because seeing and touching and helping you helped me!
"I needed your help, Tom! I shall always need you near me!"
"Nobody would agree with you," he protested. "You're the most capable man in the country. You sure can look out for yourself."
"But looking out for myself isn't all. That's just a tiny part of life,"—indicating how small it was with a thumb and fore-finger. "It belongs to the side of me which owns this ranch, which is a cattle woman, which wants to fatten steers and raise calves and prosper....
"There's the other part, the big part, the part that is really worth while: It's my heart, Tom. It's my heart that needs you!"
His brows puckered.
"I wish you wouldn't!" he said huskily. "I can't help that part, I had my chance ... an' I threw it away."
"And I picked it up! Tom, that morning when you were crawling back from Cathedral Tank, across the desert, I was at the round-up camp. I went there to tell you, to make you understand—"
"That's what hurts: that you had to ride thirty miles to tell me, to make me understand. Why, ma'am, I hadn't any right to have you do that for me. It was me who should have come crawlin' to you!"
She took his hand again.
"Look at me!"
"Yes, ma'am," striving to lighten his manner.
"Yes,Jane!" she insisted.
"Jane," very softly.
"You are very foolish, sticking to an abstract idea of how you should have conducted yourself. You wanted to die for me once; you want to put me off now because you think you wronged me.
"Don't you see what a wrong that would be! Don't you see that?"
She leaned forward, hands clasped at her chin, and tears swam upward into her eyes.
"I am saying the things I've waited so long to say.
"You have lain here ever since that black night when they carried you in and I had to feel your heart to know whether you lived. I've tried to say nothing that would disturb you, tried to keep your mind off the thing that has occupied mine. But I know you've been thinking; I know you've been uneasy. I have seen that in the looks, the words, the way you've laughed, rather forced and weakly at times. I have known what you thought....
"You are very foolish to be concerned with an idea of how you should have conducted yourself. You wanted to die for me once; you want to put me off now because you think you wronged me.
"I am not forgiving you because there is nothing to forgive. My pride was hurt and by yielding to it I shook your faith in me. It was weak for me to yield to pride; it was foolish for you to give way to suspicion. It was not I who yielded, Tom; it was that other girl, the girl who came to you to be hurt and ridiculed and made strong! And it was not the Tom Beck who loved me that suspected; it was that other man, the one who held himself back, who did not take chances, who, perhaps, would have denied himself the finest thing in life if he had always walked on ground with which he was familiar....
"And now to carry this breach from the past into the future.... Don't you see what a wrong that would be? Don't you see how you would be harming yourself? You, who wanted to die for me, would be refusing to live for me! And I who need you would walk alone.... Don't you see what a horrible thing that would be to both of us ... my lover?"
She leaned forward, hands clasped at her breast, and the tears swam into her eyes. She was very beautiful, very gentle and tender, but as he looked he felt rather than saw the strength that was in her: the character that had stood alone, that had been herself in the face of the loss of love and position, and that, by so standing, had triumphed.
For a breathless instant she poised so, with unsteady lips, and she saw the want come into his face, saw the old reserve, the old resolution to punish himself melt away.
"I want you, Jane!" he whispered.
The evening shadows had come before she rose from her knees and drew up a chair to sit stroking his hand.
His eyes rested on her hungrily and after a time they concentrated on the locket at her throat.
"Say! Now that you've done me the honor to give me a second chance at lovin' you, there's somethin' I want to ask."
"Ask it."
"What's in that locket?"
She laughed as she caught it in her fingers.
"My luck!"
"I understand that. It brought me luck, too, but there's something else. Won't you tell me?"
She unclasped the trinket and held it in her hand, turning it over slowly. Then she sprung the catch and held it so he could see.
Behind the disc of mica lay a piece of oat straw.
"That is the last straw," she said simply.
He did not understand.
"The one you would not draw that day, which seems so long ago!"
His face brightened.
"You kept it?"
"I clung to it as though it were ... the last straw!
"Why, Tom, can't you see what it has meant? If you had drawn you would have been my foreman. You would have protected me, fought for me, taken care of me. I'd never have been forced to stand alone, never been forced to try to do something for myself, by myself. Your refusal put on me the responsibility of being a woman or a leech....
"I drew the last straw that day. I drew the responsibility of keeping the HC on its feet. I feel that I have helped to do that...."
"You have."
"Through sickness and through death, through dark days and storms. I have done something! I have walked alone, unaided....
"And I have made you love me, Tom....Thatis the biggest thing I have done. To be worthy of your love was my greatest undertaking. By being worthy, by winning you, I have justified my being here, my walking the earth, my breathing the air...."
"Sho!" he cried in embarrassment, and took the locket and fingered it.
His hand dropped to the blanket and he stared upward as though a fresh idea had occurred to him.
"Say, I wonder if the Reverend was a regular preacher?" he asked.
"Why? He was a doer of good works. Why consider his actual standing?"
"Yeah. But I mean, could he marry folks, do you s'pose?"
He looked at her again and in his eyes was that amused twinkle, the laugh of a man assured, content, self sufficient ... and behind it was the tenderness that comes to a strong man's eyes only when he looks upon the woman who has given him love for love.
"If he could he'd be glad to," he said, "and I suspect that he'd throw a little variety into the ceremony ... something, likely, about your fightin' a good fight!"
THE END