"You've had seventy miles of Pink Eye to hold," she reminded him. "You need the rest more than I do."
He laughed bitterly. "Rest? There's no rest for me now for—maybe for months. I'll be back about—about Saturday, I think."
She knew the folly of asking questions, but she noticed that the whisky was not touched.
She seemed to have been asleep only a few minutes when she felt him lean over and gently kiss her. She did not open her eyes until he was fully dressed in his ranch clothes.
"Don't worry," he muttered, seeing she was awake; and went out on tiptoe. Though it was broad daylight, no one was yet stirring about the hotel.
When she awakened later and realised how thoughtlessly in her weariness she had let him go without trying to wring from him his destination, she dressed hurriedly and went to the stables. Pink Eye was gone—Pink Eye, like his master, untirable. It made her thoughtful, and with thought came a sigh that deepened the lines about her eyes.
On Saturday he returned. He rode quietly into the stable yard, handed his horse to the ostler, and sought his room. He was clear-eyed, but heavy with fatigue. Without undressing he dropped to the bed and was asleep before Mary could draw the curtains.
Out in the stable Pink Eye was as weary as his master.
Mary Aikens went into the streets, and in the post office heard the latest gossip—a new case of cattle-thieving off toward Irvine. For hours she walked up and down the streets with a terrible ache at her heart.
That night her husband sent her to a show in the "opera house," while he broke loose up in the Toronto Street den and lined the pockets of the usual sharpers on the look-out for reckless fools. Through a wretched performance she sat without grasping even its general idea, miserable, lonely, trembling with indecision. On her return to the hotel she borrowed a railway time-table from the hotel clerk and took it to her room. For a long time she sat rocking, staring into space, her face pale, her little fists clenched in the fight she was making, and at last carried the time-table down unopened.
She hungered to get away from it all, to sink her streaming eyes in a mother's lap, to feel about her arms that sympathised without questioning. But her pride, and a curious feeling about Jim, kept her to the duty she had undertaken when she stood beside Jim Aikens at the altar.
Cockney and Mary Aikens returned home to find Morton Stamford established at the ranch. He had enlisted Bean Slade's special interest in an effort to maintain himself in a saddle long enough to sink asleep at night, sore but happy, with the thrill of having ridden a horse. For his use Bean had selected a broncho burdened with the name of Hobbles, "because she acts that way," Bean explained. Not a cowboy on the ranch would bind himself to Hobbles' limited capacities—more correctly, to Hobbles' mild manner of getting about. When Stamford had learned that the horn was not a handle, he discovered, as he thought, unsuspected resources in Hobbles. He confided it to Bean.
"Humph!" replied the cowboy. "Yu can't tell me nothin' about Hobbles' speed. She can cover the ground, but look at the way she does it. No self-respectin' cow-puncher wants to get about in a rocking-chair—an' that's about how much lifeshehas."
So Stamford was content to reserve Hobbles' unconventionalities for himself, convinced that under his developing horsemanship Hobbles and he might yet be able to face a ten-mile ride without quailing.
His reception by his host and hostess was bewildering in its fluctuations. At first Mary welcomed him with enthusiasm that was almost pathetic. Cockney closed his lips and went about the chores in the house necessary after a protracted absence.
"I guess the Provincial meals got too much for me," Stamford explained. "My doctor prescribed rest, exercise, no worry. It's the cheapest treatment I ever took. I remembered your invitation, Mrs. Aikens."
Cockney examined his wife with raised brows.
"Or rather," Stamford hastened to correct, "the invitation I twisted your words into that day at Dunmore Junction. Already I feel rewarded, not only in a new vigour that has made me almost reckless——"
"Don't let your recklessness run away with you." advised Cockney quietly, pausing in his efforts to blow the kitchen fire into a flame.
"Already," continued Stamford, "I can ride—ride. At least, to-day I stuck to Hobbles for ten minutes, and almost chose my spot to fall on. Only I didn't see the cactus. If you don't mind, I'll eat off the piano to-night."
"I can assure you, Mr. Stamford," said Mrs. Aikens, "that the H-Lazy Z will be your debtor as long as you can stay. Jim will say the same."
But Jim did not say the same—at least not then. Though Bean Slade and the cook had arrived from the cook-house, Cockney bore the brunt of the kitchen fire. He remained bent over it, blowing and watching, until the flame burned bright.
"There isn't a ranch in the country closed to strangers at any time," he said, slowly rising from his knees and bending to brush them off.
A sensible embarrassment filled the room. Stamford felt the chill of it, but the look he surprised on Mary Aikens' face prompted him to ignore it.
"Of course there's danger of a tenderfoot out-Westing the West when he gets started," he said lightly.
"Don't worry," said Cockney, more genially. "We'll hold you to the conventions."
Stamford was indignant inwardly. Though he had made himself Cockney's guest to prove his faith in his host justified, he felt a twinge of shame at accepting such lukewarm hospitality.
"You know, Mary, I thought I noticed a difference in the last issue of theJournal." Cockney's spirits were unaccountably rising. "It seemed newsier, better written."
"I suppose," said Stamford, "like an old employer of mine, you consider editors necessary evils to justify the existence of the advertising man. Smith will get along all right with theJournal. I figured that an anæmic paper for a few weeks is better than a dead editor for a long time—at least from my point of view. In my efforts to uplift Western journalism I seem to have pitted a puny constitution against a vigorous tradition that all stomachs look alike to the Provincial. This little body was beginning to buck."
Mary Aikens had brought from town another visitor, a small fox-terrier that Cockney had picked up somewhere, he did not remember where. He only knew that when he woke one morning he was forty-seven dollars out and a fox-terrier in. Mary was delighted. It surprised her that she had not thought of it before. Cockney was less enthusiastic. He was oppressed with sundry misgivings of the manner in which he had come by the dog, and out there on the Red Deer was no place for a miserable little creature no decent coyote would make two bites of.
Imp had accepted the ranch from the moment of his arrival as his own special possession, and its occupants as created for his exclusive amusement. He was as keenly interested in the rousing of the kitchen fire as was Cockney, considered Bean Slade a rather boring plaything, favoured Stamford with a tentative sniff, but for his mistress had a deep though undemonstrative affection.
Dakota Fraley lounged over from the bunk-house and stood in the front doorway, tapping on the frame to attract attention.
"Here's something you'll be interested in, Dakota," called Mrs. Aikens. "I managed to get a couple of Montana papers for you. Why, look at Imp!"
Imp, christened more in hope than descriptively, was crawling to Dakota's feet, head outstretched, tail invisible.
Dakota smiled. "They all do it. Never seen the dog yet didn't get on his belly to me. Here! Up you get! Better go back to your missus; she's jealous."
The dog raised himself obediently, but with cringing body, and slunk back to Mrs. Aikens, where he seated himself sideways in the shadow of her skirts, watching Dakota.
"Just came to tell you, Mr. Aikens, that I'd best get Pink Eye out of harness instanter or he'll get himself out, and mess up the ranch in doing it."
Stamford remembered then that, in the fever of his new ranch life, he had forgotten to shave that day. He excused himself and retired to his room, which adjoined the sitting-room on the ground floor. Cockney went with Dakota to the front door.
"Thanks, Dakota!" he was saying. "Pink Eye's going to make a driver all right. I may use him a lot. He's got——"
The rest of the sentence was drowned in the closing of the door, but more of their conversation came to Stamford through the open window.
"Get those cattle, Dakota?"
Dakota shouted to Pink Eye before replying:
"Found a dozen or so."
"Far away?"
"Down toward the railway—east."
The cowboy busied himself pulling Pink Eye to an even keel.
"Funny thing happened," he said. "Spooky rider got through the night-hawks the first night and pretty near stampeded the bunch. General got a shot at him—a big fellow, the boys say, riding a devil of a broncho—but we couldn't find any trace of him when it got light.... We found some tracks though," he added slowly.
There was an appreciable period of silence before Dakota went on: "I got my eye peeled for him. He'll be bucking better shooting eyes than General's next time."
The whip cracked and the buggy rattled off to the stables. Stamford, peeping through the window, his cheeks in a lather, saw Cockney look after the retreating team a moment, then strike away to the stables.
Shaved and freshly clad in a white tennis shirt, Stamford emerged from his room and found Mary Aikens superintending the preparations for the night meal. Bean Slade was peeling potatoes, a big grin on his blushing face, and a large blue apron before him that Mary had insisted on tying under his chin. The cook from the ranch cook-house was mixing something on the table, while the mistress was diving into cupboards and shelves with the stores she had brought from town.
She hastened to meet Stamford in the sitting-room, a strange constraint in her manner. While she nervously set about laying the table, he occupied himself with Imp. He wondered what she had to say to him that required so much courage.
"I'm afraid you'll find time hang heavily on your hands here."
She was leaning across to straighten a corner of the tablecloth, and he could not see her face.
"I'm not afraid of that," he replied, giving Imp a poke.
"We've—we've never had visitors before." A flush stole softly into her cheeks. "You've selected the last ranch to suit your purpose—though it's healthy enough, I suppose. The Double Bar-O now—there are young people there. And the Circle-Arrow further east."
Apparently he was busy poking Imp's fat sides, but beneath his brows he glanced at her again and again as she spoke. For some sudden reason she did not wish him to stay. That suspicion determined his course.
"In five days," he declared, "there have been no premonitory twinges of lonesomeness. And if, with only three of us on the ranch for three days——"
"Only three? What do you mean?"
"Bean Slade, cookie, and I—that was all."
"Weren't—— Where were Dakota and the others?"
"Down south somewhere—Irvine way, I think they said, in search of strays."
"O-oh!"
She stopped on her way to the kitchen and turned into her bedroom.
Stamford became suddenly aware of Bean Slade's lanky, blue-aproned figure lolling in the kitchen doorway.
"Yer shure lucky," said Bean, "gettin' the missus to cook yer meals, 'stead o' cookie. Mebbe we'll miss yu—fer the meals. Not to say cookie here ain't a real shuff when he likes, but he don't like nowhar 'ceptin' here at the ranch-house. Look at that, now!" He turned to watch the cook relentlessly pursue a stray fly that had managed to squirm through the screen door at the back, where a great number of its fellows, attracted by the odour and heat, were jealously prying about for entrance. "One measly li'l insec' gi's him the pip here; out at the cook-house he can sarve flies twenty-seven different ways without overlappin'. But lookee here, Mr. Stamford"—he leaned into the room and spoke in a whisper—"don't yu go fer to tell all yu heard us croakin' out there. The boss mightn't like it."
Stamford felt a glow of elation that Bean, in his innocence, had furnished him with a clue, but before he could follow it up, Mary Aikens came thoughtfully back and went about her work. Bean slunk back into the kitchen and nosed about for his own special fly.
Mary was in the act of reaching to a cupboard, when her hand stopped and she turned to the window. An exciting sense of nervousness and unrest about the ranch made Stamford's heart leap. He moved restlessly in his chair.
"Listen!"
The dull thud of hoofs and the rattle of wheels drew them both to the door. A buckboard was coming drunkenly down the eastern trail, its horses, under the direction of an inexpert—or drunken—driver, uncertain of what was expected of them. The smallest deviation from the beaten track meant that one horse was mounting the ridge and the other the prairie at the side, the wheels following them in jerks from the deep ruts in the black loam worn by the unanimous track of every previous vehicle and horse.
Stamford raised his eyes from the wobbling wheels to the seat of the buckboard. Instantly he felt, rather than saw, that it was the Professor and his sister. Beside him Mary Aikens was puzzled, with a nervous mingling of surprise and amusement. With the instinct of her sex her hand went to her dark hair, and a quick eye fell to the spotless apron and moved on to her neatly clad feet.
When the buckboard was near enough to make out the Professor's extended hands on the lines, his fierce concentration on the horses' ears, his braced feet, and the threatening bounce of his body as the wheel mounted the ridge, the spectators in the ranch-house could not control their laughter. For the sake of politeness Mary temporarily withdrew.
With several stentorian and anxious "whoas" the buckboard came to a stop at the end of the gravel walk, and Isabel Bulkeley, with a sigh of relief, bounded out.
"Amos," she announced, "hereafterIdrive."
The Professor, an amusing figure of mingled satisfaction and relief, protested.
"NowIthink I did that rather well. Take the exact end of the walk and the centre of the buggy—I'm not more than a yard or two out. It's that left horse that dislikes me. I feel as if I must expend myself on that line—and the other horse responds too. When I get time I'm going to invent a separate line for each horse—if only for the use of amateurs. As it is now, if one horse is of a contrary disposition——"
He had leaped over the wheel and was diving a hand into a box in the back of the buckboard, rummaging among bits of rock.
"Isabel! Isabel Bulkeley! Where's that Allosaurus vertebra? Oh—yes, here it is. Goodness, how it frightened me!" He raised his head and beamed on them through his large spectacles. "Do you know, I don't believe I've lost a thing—except confidence in my driving."
An enormous handkerchief emerged from his coat pocket and mopped his forehead. The hand that held the lines gripped them so firmly that the horses were backing on him.
"Whoa!" he shouted, pulling harder. "Mr.—Mr. Stamford, will you give to this equine problem the touch I seem to lack? If you don't, I'm going to drop these flimsy bits of leather and take the brutes in my arms.
"Some day," he went on, when Stamford had taken the reins, "I hope posterity will unearth the bones of that brute on the left—and grind them to dust. Yes, I do. Sometimes I can be really blood-thirsty. But," he grinned, "I wouldn't be surprised if they found mine at the same time, with Gee-Gee—what funny names you give your horses!—with Gee-Gee sitting on my chest enjoying his last laugh."
Mary Aikens, her eyes brimming with tears, had rushed to meet Isabel with a hungry welcome that was pathetic, seizing her hand in both her own; and Isabel, after a moment of surprise she could not conceal, flushed a little and responded with moisture in her eyes. But the few moments of the Professor's dilemmas had served to conceal the little scene that recorded more of the story of Mary Aikens' lonely life than she would willingly have exposed.
They were standing now, hand in hand, laughing on the two men. To Mary it was enough that, for the first time, another woman was to cross the threshold of the H-Lazy Z. Isabel was still, Stamford thought, the fond sister who took as much amusement as anyone from her brother's artlessness.
She turned to her hostess. "This is not merely a flying visit, Mrs. Aikens. Amos—my brother—was dissatisfied with his searching down the river. We hoped you wouldn't mind letting us camp on your ranch here while he pokes about the banks."
Beside the buckboard Professor Bulkeley was making the same request of Cockney, who had come hurriedly up from the stables.
"The Double Bar-O—that is, I believe, the technical name—seems to have been unpopular among dying dinosaurs and their forbears. Whether one should infer from that that they avoided the locality as unhealthy, or found it so healthy they couldn't die there, does not appear in the evidence. All I found there we know as much about already as about last year's weather or the origin of mumps. The further I prodded west, the more promising the outlook. This bit of bone, for instance, is, I believe, of the Upper Jurassic period. The Double Bar-O region is by comparison disreputably modern—not earlier than the Miocene. This bone appears to be blood-cousin to a megalosaurus we received once from England. It has all the——"
"I'm not quite following you, Professor." Cockney was struggling to keep his face straight.
"No, no, of course not. I'm—I'm apt to forget there arepeoplelive in the nineteenth century. I suppose they have their purpose in the scheme of life—for our progeny of the five-hundredth century to worry about, perhaps."
As he was speaking he was pulling from the buckboard the canvas and poles of a tent.
"What's that?" asked Cockney, with a frown.
"Our tent. If we could pitch it somewhere along the bank of the river here——"
"You can pitch it into the river—and that's all."
"But we——"
Cockney kicked the canvas off the trail, drew a cigarette and match from his pockets, lit them in a leisurely way—and dropped both into the canvas. A second match he struck and calmly held to a loose corner. The cloth, dry and brittle in Alberta air, smouldered a moment, then burst into flame.
Stamford solemnly leaned over the blaze to fan it with his hand. Mary stood laughing. Isabel was divided between alarm and wonder. Only the Professor seemed undisturbed. He stood watching the growing blaze with interest.
"As a raw backwoodsman I would suggest starting the blaze on the side toward the wind."
Stamford followed the suggestion with success.
A heavy smoke rose and swirled about them, pungent and stifling. The Professor whiffed it once or twice and turned his back on it.
"Fancy, my dear, thinking of living in a tent that smells like that. I can't imagine any other form of fumigation being sufficient."
"Now," ordered Cockney, "take your suitcases into the house."
The Professor looked at him admiringly. "I wish I could express myself like that. Sometimes I find the language of the lecture-room not exactly suited to buying oatmeal or getting a tooth filled. He means, Isabel, that we must be his guests, in spite of ourselves. On him be the blame."
Cockney burst into a laugh that startled the horses.
"I don't see why you shouldn't find old bones about here, Professor. We seem to have pretty nearly everything else anyone wants. We've opened a sanitorium." He nodded at Stamford. "Might as well add a seminary. From to-day the H-Lazy Z ranks as a public institution."
There was nothing offensive in the tone, but about the laugh was a suggestion of recklessness.
"Of course," stammered the Professor, "I'd be delighted if—if——" He cleared his throat. "General—I mean, Inspector Barker warned me not to suggest it, but I feel I owe it to myself and to the professional nature of my visit to express the hope that—that if there's any consideration——"
"If you suggest such a thing again," interrupted Cockney, angrily looking the Professor up and down, "I'll carry you down and drop you in the river."
The Professor, retreating before the blaze of indignation, tripped over the board edging of the gravel walk and fell.
"I meant no offence," he stammered, where he lay. "It's only my Eastern ignorance, you know."
Cockney reached down and jerked him to his feet.
"Gad!" he exclaimed. "What a waste of muscle! You fellows with brains teeming with junk scorn the good things the Almighty has given you. Here's Stamford dying to have one little fibre of the sinew you ignore—and you thinking only of a lot of old bones that can't affect the price of cattle. Well, heigh-ho! Give me a month of you and I'll show you new things in life to glow over. You've the stature. Maybe you'll learn out here to use it."
The Professor turned to bow over Mary Aikens's hand, and she flushed with embarrassment and pleasure at the courtesy.
"Your husband has offered to share with me some of the fine things of life on the prairie," he said. "It is a prophecy of the scope he has, that I see before me the woman who shares that life with him."
Stamford recalled with a malicious twinkle a moment of intense chagrin in Inspector Barker's office.
"How ingenuous!" he murmured sweetly. "How simple and sweet and natural!"
The Professor's face went red. Isabel's eyes were dancing.
"I owe that to the Professor," Stamford explained to Cockney and Mary.
"One of the things I don't share is my wife," Cockney observed abruptly, and drove away with the buckboard.
Dinner—the night meal was dinner where Cockney gave the orders—was such a time of pleasant chatter and merry banter as the H-Lazy Z had never dreamed of, though there was a recurring element of constraint that puzzled Stamford. Cockney was a mass of varying moods, now laughing uproariously, now moody and watchful; and all the time Mary Aikens was rent by the conflicting emotions of delight, and of sensitiveness to her husband's humours. Afterwards Bean was dismissed, and the two women undertook the kitchen work. Cockney and Stamford smoked, the former the inevitable cigarette, the latter his short curved pipe. The Professor did not smoke; he seemed to have missed most of the habits of man. While the two others talked in the detached but perfectly satisfied periods of smokers, he drifted to the piano and turned over the music.
And presently, so softly and smoothly that no one seemed to know when he commenced, his fingers were moving over the keys to a quiet refrain he had picked up from the pile of music on the piano. When Stamford looked up, suddenly conscious of the melody of it, it was not the Professor he saw, but Mary Aikens standing in the doorway to the kitchen with the dish-towel in her hand, tears in her eyes. So close to the surface had the unexpected arrival of guests brought her emotions that she did not know she was showing them. Stamford heard Cockney draw a sharp breath, and the next instant his host stumbled up and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
A gentle knock interrupted the Professor before he noticed the consternation his wandering fingers caused. The latch lifted and Dakota stepped inside, fumbling his hat, his hair oiled flat from a centre parting, and a pair of fluffy angora chaps held up by a belt several holes tighter than was his wont. He stood there, embarrassed, looking from one to another.
When the music ceased Cockney came from the bedroom. He laughed noisily when he saw Dakota.
"Come in, come in, Dakota. This is civilisation as the old H-Lazy Z never looked for it, eh? Guess you and I will have to take to our glad clothes to keep in line."
There were no introductions—that would have added to the embarrassment of the uncomfortable cowboy.
"'Dakota!'" repeated the Professor interrogatively. "Does it so happen that you come from my own country, the land of the free, where floats—but, ahem! this is not Decoration Day. I can see from the light in your eye that you understand. May I have the honour of shaking your hand?"
Dakota intruded no objections, though he grinned foolishly.
"Your parents little thought," rambled on the Professor, "that the name they gave you in the cradle would be your password the world over. With no offence to my host and hostess, and this eminently agreeable gentleman on my left, I feel that I can take you to my heart—or wherever people take their friends. I must see more of you, my countryman."
Though the flamboyancy of it was flagrant, and delivered with a twinkle, Dakota felt an inclination to expectorate, but bethought himself and coughed behind his hand.
"By the way, Mr.—ah—Dakota, now that I have you two residents together, I must take advantage of it. We have long known that the banks of the Red Deer River are replete with interest for the paleontologist. The region around the Double Bar-O was disappointing. Perhaps your acquaintance with the rocks about here will prepare me for what I will find."
"Looking for old bones, Dakota," explained Cockney, with a grin.
Dakota turned his eyes suspiciously from one to the other several times.
"Seen a few bits o' stone that might 'a' been bones once," he growled—"not such a lot o' them."
"You no doubt are as familiar as anyone with the banks hereabouts?" suggested the Professor.
"I shore oughta be. Seen every blessed foot on both sides for a matter of fifty miles or so a million times."
"Ah! And you've seen the fossils? Where, may I enquire?"
Dakota felt for a cigarette, found he had neglected to put them in his new clothes, and put a match between his lips instead.
"Seen a few to the east——"
"But I've covered the ground myself rather well in that direction. It's the west I'm most interested in. It was several hundred miles to the west, this side of the town of Red Deer, where my hated rivals of the American Museum of Natural History made their discoveries——"
"Not a da—I mean a durn thing to the west, mister," Dakota broke in firmly. "All I ever seen in that direction was within three miles, or at least four. Lots o' them down here just where the cliff starts, enough to keep you going a dozen summers."
"Do you mean you'd advise me not to go further west?"
"You'd be wasting time, that's all."
"Where are the fords—or the ferries—or however one crosses the river?"
Dakota glanced furtively up into the Professor's guileless face and looked across at Cockney before replying.
"Course there ain't no ferries. Never saw a blessed bone on the other side anyway."
"The only ford about here," volunteered Cockney, "is a mile or so to the east."
"West it's all canyon," added Dakota.
"By the way," asked Cockney, "do you ride any better than you drive?"
Professor Bulkeley shrugged his great shoulders.
"I regret to admit that it's not one of my few accomplishments."
"Not ride?" Dakota broke into a relieved laugh. "Then you don't need to worry about anything further away than four miles—you'll never get there. You can't drive over these prairies, you know. They ain't as smooth as they look. Wait till you've tried it."
"Ihavetried it," groaned the Professor feelingly.
"Dakota," said Isabel shyly, "Iride—only a little, I suppose, compared with your Western girls."
"I knew you did, miss," said Dakota gallantly. "I could tell from the cut o' you. But I bet"—he looked the Professor up and down with professional eye—"I bet I could have him riding in a week—only I ain't got time," he added hastily. "I know the shape when I see it. Now, the tenderfoot here"—Stamford squirmed—"he'll never make a rider. Ain't got the right-shaped legs, nor the body-swing. The minute I seed you——"
He became conscious of his unusual loquacity and stopped.
"If you'll teach me Western ways of riding. Dakota," smiled Isabel.
The cowboy grinned and rubbed his hand across his lips in sheer delight.
"Shore, miss." He looked up at the clock. "Is it too late now?"
"They're going to be with us for months, Dakota," laughed Mary Aikens. "We mustn't unfold all our pleasures the first day."
Dakota rose to go, started to stretch, bethought himself, and addressed Cockney.
"About them staples, Mr. Aikens. We can't do much more to the new corrals till we have 'em."
"I forgot them in town, Dakota. We'll have to send one of the boys in for them."
When Dakota was gone Cockney addressed the Professor.
"I wouldn't advise you to try to ford the river in that buckboard."
"I wouldn't advise me to try it without the buckboard," laughed the Professor. "A bath-tub of water gives me a panic. And I'd never feel satisfied if I didn't cover all the ground."
"If it wouldn't be too late then," said Cockney, "I'd let you find out by trying. It's safe enough if you know the trail, and the river isn't high. Better learn to ride."
The Professor glanced guiltily at his sister.
"Amos," she reminded him sternly, "you said you'd learn."
"Isabel," he replied, "I'm funking."
"Let me give you the recipe," said Stamford. "You take Hobbles—it must be Hobbles; she's used to it by now—you take Hobbles to where the ground's soft. You get one able-bodied cowboy to hold her head and another—youmight need two—to lift you into the saddle. Close your eyes, breathe the quickest prayer you know ... and brush the dead grass off your clothes where you landed. The cowboys'll catch Hobbles. One little secret I haven't yet told anyone: sneak your feet from the stirrups while you're praying. It's far easier to fall then."
But the Professor shook his head stubbornly.
"It wouldn't be fair to the Institute to risk losing those old bones out there on the rocks by risking these bones. That, you see, is the comparative values of the products of the Mesozoic and the Quaternary periods. It may be a distortion, but it's my job."
"Then," declared Stamford firmly, "you're not going to save your bones and risk your sister, until we've tried the ford without her. I'm going with you myself."
"How ingenuous! How sim——"
Stamford raised a warning finger.
"Not that, Professor, not that! To date we're even. If you reopen the feud, I swear I'll have the last word, if I have to leave it set in type."
The Professor's eyes twinkled about the room.
"If my dead body is picked up among the cliffs, here's the murderer. I can't always be sure of having Isabel along to protect me."
"I'm afraid, Mr. Stamford," said Isabel, "he's grown rather dependent on me."
"Then he can't learn independence earlier," persisted Stamford.
"And he's going to need it some day," laughed Cockney. "There are other men, Miss Bulkeley."
"The necessity for concentration in a task like mine——" began the Professor.
"Doesn't excuse selfishness," Stamford filled in. "To-morrow I'll be your assistant. We'll risk our valueless lives together on that ford. The little man has spoken."
"Such a quaintly practical way of expressing his devotion to your sex, my dear!" said the Professor to his sister.
They did not go fossil-hunting on the morrow. Instead, the Professor preferred to spend much of the day with his countrymen at the cook-house, while Isabel hunted Dakota up and took her first lesson in an art of which she had little to learn. Stamford, feeling unaccountably out of things, sulked under the pretext of reading.
He was oppressed with a sense of the futility of his mission, where so many side-issues were so much more vital than the purpose of his visit. Just what that purpose was he had to revive by sundry uninteresting reminders. Of mysteries about the H-Lazy Z there were enough to encourage the hope that some day the big thing he was searching for would stumble into the light—and he must be there to see it. Cockney's innocence was not so assertive now as it once was; perhaps in his foolish idea of proving the Police wrong he would only convict himself.
The Professor was frankly extending his information about ranch-life, and the humorous twists to his queries and replies immediately made him a favourite with the cowboys. They tried to express their approval by teaching him to ride, hunting out Stamford at last to put him through his paces as a sample of one week's lessons. The Professor shook his head.
"The difference between us is in the results of failure. A man of his size scarcely ruffles the grass where he lights. The seismometers at my own Institute would record my unseating as my only epitaph worthy of note."
Dakota and Isabel whirled down the slope, Dakota liberally applying his whip without gaining ground. Right on top of the group about Hobbles and Stamford they drew up, so close that Hobbles herself reared a little. Stamford promptly slid off on his back.
"Hobbles," he chided, "we were showing off. I'm disappointed.... I'm also surprised. I'd clean forgotten a horse rears, though I've seen it in pictures. Dakota, should I wrap myself round the pommel when she does that?"
But Dakota was too busy with troubles of his own. When the two riders pulled up, Isabel was off first. With an angry flush she snatched Dakota's quirt from his unresisting hand.
"If you use your whip once more, Dakota, I'll never ride with you again. I don't want to call you a brute, but I got quite as much speed out of my horse without punishing him."
Dakota was staring down into her indignant eyes, too surprised to speak.
Stamford cocked an eye at him. "When you hang and quarter him, Miss Bulkeley, I'd like you to save those chaps. I think they'd become me."
Isabel's anger had already fled before Dakota's helplessness. She laughed apologetically.
"It's all right, Dakota. I suppose I'm not used to Western ways. But I won't get used to that."
Dakota took off his Stetson. "Not used to them! By Samson, miss, there's nothing in the West can beat you! If you could come along with us on the ranges we'd show you life. We're going to be busy out there for the next couple of months."
"Couldn't I come?" asked Isabel innocently.
Dakota looked at the other cowboys, and they all laughed, without explaining.
"Can I come along in my buckboard?" queried the Professor.
Dakota elaborately explained the work of the ranges—tooelaborately, it seemed to Stamford—and the Professor and his sister listened with evident interest, the former asking foolish and wise questions that brought equally varied replies.
"I'm coming out here to the cook-house often," gushed the Professor, as the call came to lunch.
"Shore!" chorused a half-dozen voices.
"And bring your sister," said Dakota.
"We're your debtors for the summer," bowed the Professor, backing away.
"I do love the native," he enthused to Stamford, on the way to the ranch-house.
"The funny part of it is," laughed Stamford, "that Dakota and the H-Lazy Z outfit are the only cowboys about whoaren'tnatives. They're your own countrymen."
"Mr. Stamford," chided Isabel, looking slyly at her brother, "you have a drab soul. Why can't you let Amos enthuse? It's what he grows fat on."
"Is it a prescription you're giving me?" asked Stamford.
The next morning, feeling a little foolish in his new rôle of gallant—as the Professor called it—Stamford stretched his five-feet-odd on the seat of the buckboard beside the towering six-feet-three of his tormentor. Down the river trail, and thence along the edge of the rough beach rock below the corrals, the skeleton buggy bounced eastward to the only ford west of the Double Bar-O. The one consolation to the injured pride of the smaller man was that his companion insisted on letting him drive. Stamford had always considered his accomplishments with the reins as born of necessity rather than of experience, but the Professor frankly refused to expose himself to his own driving.
"I'd even let Isabel do the driving," he confided, "if it weren't that I'd rather die a man's death than live a male baby with a female chaperon."
The ford was used only at long intervals as access to pastures across the river. It was plain enough at its southern entrance to the river flood, but to those who did not know it the course thereafter was a matter of conjecture. Stamford drove into the water with more trepidation than he allowed himself to show, anxiously searching the torrent ahead. Mid-stream the water bubbled through the slats of the buckboard, and the team, terrified by the prospect, pulled up. Stamford urged them on, but Gee-Gee leaped against his mate, forcing him into deep water. The buckboard would have overturned were it not built for almost any situation into which a horse might force it. Stamford stood up to get a shorter hold of the lines, but the Professor swept him back to the seat with one strong arm and took control. Immediately the team seemed to find bottom and courage together.
As they climbed the gently sloping grade on the north side, the Professor lifted his hands and stared at the reins.
"Goodness! How did I get them? Did you—did you give them to me? I hope I didn't use force. Honest, Mr. Stamford, I never did such a thing in my life before. Was I very frightened? Don't tell the women, please. I'm horribly and disgustingly proud." He squared his shoulders. "Say! with practice I believe I could get on to the hang of the thing. Let's get the practice right now when my spirits are high. We'll do that crossing again. It looks shallower up this way."
Before Stamford could voice his protest the team was around and re-entering the water. With much waving of arms and shouting they completed the double passage of the river in safety by a better route.
"There!" The Professor handed the reins back and mopped his forehead with the big handkerchief. "I'm more puffed up than when they Ph.D.'ed me. Will you be good enough to steer for that bulge in the cliff? I like the looks of the flexure there."
All day Stamford yawned and slept and tried to read, and opened his eyes to the blazing sky and heated rocks. The Professor, his round spectacles pressed close to the ground, poked off among the rocks. At lunch-time he reported his delight at the prospects and could scarcely stop to eat, though he managed his share easily enough when he started. In the evening they drove back over the ford, Stamford hot and irritated, the Professor gushing with anticipation.
"You know," he said, "I wondermoreneurasthenics don't give this climate a chance at them."
"Good heavens! You don't think I'm a neurasthenic?"
"No offence, I hope. I knew you were here for your health, and I couldn't see—— You'll forgive me, my dear fellow, but I've dabbled a little in medicine too."
Stamford had not prepared for enquiry into his symptoms.
"I'm just generally run down—overworked, I suppose, trying to stiffen the legs of a dying newspaper."
"You were lucky to have such old friends as the Aikens to see you through."
"But they'renotold friends—very new, in fact. I happened to meet Mrs. Aikens one day at a railway station; she invited me out."
"Ah, Mr. Stamford! Those railway stations!" The Professor's big finger was wagging in his face. "Must I remind you that Mrs. Aikens is married? Oh, you bachelors!"
Stamford jumped. "Great Scott, man! What in thunder has that to do with it?"
The Professor coughed apologetically.
"I thought—well, anyone can see that Mr. Aikens is none too—too eager, shall we say, for visitors. I'm sure it can't be for fear of his wife. She seems much more—more thoughtful of him than he of her—if one may be permitted to discuss his host and hostess. I'm sure I'd rather pay—or live in a tent, and be independent. Dakota, too—though he's a countryman of mine, doesn't seem overjoyed at our presence. May I ask if you received the same impression?"
Stamford chuckled. "Youwere lucky. I had to face Dakota alone. I'm sure my hair went a shade lighter from the first impressionsIreceived."
"Ah—I thought so."
The big fellow settled back in deep thought. Stamford tried to reassure him.
"There's no need to mind Dakota. He's only a third partner and doesn't really count when it comes to a show-down."
"But I'm vastly interested in Dakota," murmured the Professor. "He seems to have something on his mind—some worry."
"Theyalldo," Stamford blurted out.
"Ah!"
Stamford glanced from the corner of his eye at the Professor. He wanted to confide in someone. Dare he tell his suspicions to the simple friend beside him, who seemed to be stumbling on things. He decided against it; it would be no relief to himself and only add to the Professor's worry.
After dinner the Professor announced his intention of strolling across to his friends at the cook-house, but learned from Cockney that only Bean Slade was about the place, the rest having gone out on the ranges for a few days. Bean was finishing some needed repairs about the ranch buildings, and was going to town in a couple of days for the staples.
"Dakota has made a place for your team in the stables," Cockney said casually. "He's afraid to let strange horses loose in the corrals at night: they might hurt themselves."
"That's thoughtful of Dakota," replied the Professor. "I don't know what Inspector Barker would say—he lent them to me, you know, as the safest in Medicine Hat—because it must be stifling some nights in the stables. If I relieved Dakota of all personal responsibility I suppose he'd let them run loose in the corrals? Gee-Gee seems to have a temperament that requires airing."
"The stables are not stifling," said Cockney shortly. "Besides, Dakota looks after that part of the ranch; I don't interfere."
Stamford took it outside and thought it over.
"I'd almost forgotten my daily ride," he said, entering the sitting-room a few minutes later. "I have a premonition that should Hobbles lose track of me for a day she'll forget my weaknesses. Will you come and see I get fair-play, Miss Bulkeley?"
"Hobbles is in the stable, too," said Cockney, "also Miss Bulkeley's horse. The key's hanging inside my bedroom door. Help yourself."
Bean Slade suggested that he, as teacher, accompany the two, but Stamford waved him away with mock rudeness.
"You make me blush, Bean. I'm taking Miss Bulkeley for an evening ride—showing her the sights. One of them may be when Hobbles decides to trot, but I must chance that. I usually last only three trots. Hobbles has the habit now of stopping at the third to let me remount."
He bumped away, the perfect seat of his companion giving his inexperience the laugh.
"I don't see how you do it, Miss Bulkeley, but if I could ride like that I'd be a Mounted Policeman—if they'd take me in. Too bad to waste it in Washington. If everyone in your city rides like you——"
"Don't talk about civilisation, Mr. Stamford," she rebuked. "It sounds so funny out here."
"Can I really be funny so easily? Speaking about civilisation, did you ever see anything to beat this locking up of our horses? What's Dakota afraid of anyway? I'm a funny critter, Miss Bulkeley. I never had an ambition to ride Hobbles out of hours before. Now I'm wild to tear about this lonesome prairie at the most unconventional hours. If you'll turn your back you won't be accessory to a crime. I'd ride away and turn my back to you, only Hobbles wouldn't leave your horse now, and I couldn't make her. I'm making a drawing of this stable key. Yours not to reason why."
He turned himself from her as much as he could and outlined the key in his notebook.
"I was watching the sunset all the time," she told him when he had finished, "and wondering."
"Don't wonder," he warned, with a sigh. "I've started to, and I'm getting more tangled every day. Life was never like this before."
That night he made arrangements with Bean to go to town with him two days later, and retired to bed with a virtuous satisfaction at having beaten his favourite enemy, though when he thought of Cockney he had twinges of conscience.
The second day of fossil-hunting with the Professor was even less interesting and more wearying than the first. There was a limit to the hours Stamford could sleep, and the scorching heat among the rocks made eyes and face sting. After lunch he ended an uncomfortable hour of dozing by hunting up the Professor.
He found him curled in the shadow of a rock, sound asleep, hammer and chisel by his side. Stamford struck the rock a ringing blow with the hammer. With a bound the Professor was on his feet.
"Oh—you, Stamford! This heat—I guess I must have succumbed to it—that and the drone of the mosquitoes. Did you ever feel such a blistering heat, or see such armies of mosquitoes? I believe they've been here all these years probing into these old bones under the impression that they're succulent. They've discovered their mistake since I came," he added ruefully. "Six weeks ago one must have had to hack a way through them in this Edmonton formation. In one short week I've learned that the guiding star to some antediluvian monster is the modern mosquito."
He seized his tools and began to hack a crevice.
"There's a rib here, a big fellow. I'm having a great time tickling it—but the big brute never quivers a hair—if he ever had any. Down there is a tooth. Would you mind taking a look and reporting on the quality of dentistry prevailing in B.C. a million?" He sat back on his heels. "I envy the advantages of those to whom my bones will be fossils. Present palæontological graveyards have not to date yielded up a single gold filling. If you wouldn't mind chalking off any outlines of bones on that patch of rock down there, you could feel that your day was not wasted."
Stamford yawned, made a few desultory marks, and sat down. The Professor continued his hacking without bothering him further.
That night there was music at the H-Lazy Z; the banks of the Red Deer canyon echoed for the first time to sounds prophetic of the day when ranches will give place to farms, farms to towns. Professor Bulkeley played, until he felt every eye fixed breathlessly on him; then he rose in confusion and insisted on Mary Aikens taking his place. To her accompaniment a chorus formed, but in a few minutes it had dwindled to a duet. Stamford and Isabel withdrew to a corner. Cockney sat smoking in gloomy silence. Even the yelping coyotes out on the prairie ceased their shuddering clamour to listen—a space of silence Imp did his resentful best to fill.
Stamford, seated by the screen in his room before climbing between the sheets, heard the voices of brother and sister over his head. After a minute he started to a guilty consciousness that he was straining to hear what they said. Noisily he jerked the window down.
It seemed to him that he had just dropped to sleep when Bean hammered at the screen to waken him for the trip to town.
On the long drive Stamford found the cowboy little more inclined to talk than was the youthful driver who had brought him out. It was a keen disappointment to the self-appointed detective, for he had counted on Bean's affection for him providing the clues that were evading him. The lanky cowboy was willing enough to talk on subjects of no possible interest to Stamford, but of the ranch he had nothing to say.
However, when, the second day afterwards, he and Bean floated on the ferry across the South Saskatchewan and climbed the cut bank toward the northern trail, Stamford felt that his trip was not wasted. For one thing he carried in his pocket a duplicate of the stable key. Also he had had a short conversation with Inspector Barker that clung to the fringes of his consciousness.
"For an invalid, Stamford," mocked the Inspector, "you strike me as no friend of the undertaker's. If I didn't know your holiday was a real loss in dollars and cents, I'd say it was undiluted laziness. I can't imagine anyone, after three months in this dollar-chasing country, sacrificing cash for chronic fatigue. Or is the fair Isabel there?"
"How did you know?" asked Stamford amiably.
"That's the little birdie that tells secrets to us married men. If she hadn't come to the mountain, then the mountain—— How's the Professor getting along with his new friends, the Red Deer dinosaurs? What's more to the point, by the way, have you come across a pair of big dogs that don't seem at home?"
"There's Imp," suggested Stamford.
"Who's Imp?"
"Imp is several degrees short of big—though he certainly doesn't seem at home—unless Dakota's about. Legally he belongs to Mrs. Aikens. As a matter of fact Dakota has him eating out of his hand. The little chap attached himself to our rowdy friend at first glance. Love at first sight. Took to him like a mouse to cheese."
The Inspector was more than amused. He asked so many questions that Stamford realised how easy it was to make the little terrier entertaining. Some of the brightest things he determined to repeat to Isabel Bulkeley.
On the return Bean was more talkative, without saying anything of value for Stamford's purposes.
As they rolled, in the late afternoon, over the gently waving prairie toward the Red Deer, Stamford's weary eyes caught a movement on the top of a rise to the west. It came once, and went, furtively, Stamford was convinced. Without seeming to watch he kept his eyes fixed on the ridge, and after a few minutes was rewarded by the tip of a Stetson, as if someone were lying down, peering over at them. Bean was sleepily flicking the broncos.
When two more Stetsons appeared beside the first, he made his mind up. Calling Bean's wandering senses back to earth, he waved his arms. Instantly the Stetsons disappeared. A moment later Dakota loped over the ridge and down the slope. He drew up several yards away and beckoned Bean to him. From the furtive glances in his direction Stamford knew he was the subject of their early conversation, Dakota questioning, Bean explaining. Then they turned their backs on him. The owners of the other Stetsons did not show themselves.
As Bean clambered back over the wheel Dakota shouted a last word:
"Get cookie to hustle a snack for you. But hurry. We'll wait. You can do it in a couple of hours."
Bean flicked the whip and they started for home on the canter.
"They aren't giving you much rest," sympathised Stamford.
"Naw," replied Bean shortly.
"The work about a ranch is certainly a surprise to me. What does Dakota want you for?"
"It's a hell of a life!" grumbled Bean. Thereafter he kept his lips closed.
An hour later Stamford was eating in the ranch-house, trying to answer with intelligent flippancy the questions poured at him. The promise of the stable key burning a hole in his pocket was filling his mind. To outwit Dakota was his sole ambition at the moment. If he could get Hobbles from the locked stables——
Pleading fatigue, he retired early. For some time he heard the conversation in the sitting-room, subdued for his sake, and then the stair door closed behind the Bulkeleys. The sudden Western night had fallen.
Stamford, softly lifting the screen from his window, with the thrills of a conspirator, climbed through and looked about. Once before he had stood in the midst of the darkened prairie, with no thought then than that he was temporarily but not dangerously lost. What lay before him now he thought he had seen under every aspect from his bedroom window. But there was a difference—a very disturbing difference.
Now, in the eeriest part of the vast prairies he was stepping into an eery and illegitimate adventure. Deliberately he was involving himself in a situation that could bring no satisfaction but that of counter-plotting, and, were he discovered, would expose him to even worse suspicion than he deserved. Most of the exhilaration fled with the touch of the cold night air on his face; the rest of it went before the vividness of his imagination. He marvelled that a mere key should have uplifted him so much, that a prospective ride at such an hour should have gratified one to whom riding was at best nothing more than an unpleasant education.
Had his knees not trembled he would probably have climbed back through the window with a grin of shame at his foolhardiness, but with terror tingling his scalp—— He closed his teeth and struck out stubbornly round the corner of the house, avoiding the noisy gravel walk. Up the slope diagonally he crept, pointing above the stables. A sense of the necessity of concealment, and a dim thought of future needs, impressed him so strongly that he scouted about for a long time back and forth in search of the deepest of the scarcely visible rolls he knew to mark the prairie everywhere.
Dropping down the slope then from above the stables, he applied the key to the padlock. His heart was beating fast, his fingers trembling. The night was crammed with terrors, and anxiety about the fit of the key made him wonder what kink in his brain clothed an adventure like this in attraction.
The key fitted. He realised then that there was no honourable escape but to go on. Fate was a funny thing. He looked back once toward his window in the ranch-house, took a long breath, and stepped into the utter blackness of the stable. The horses sniffed, and for a moment he tried to convince himself that he had accomplished all he wished.
He knew Hobbles' stall, and, speaking gently, advanced in the darkness. By the light of a sulphur match which he struck under the cover of his coat he found saddle and bridle and clumsily fastened them in place. Once off the wooden floors, the horse's feet met only hard, soundless clay, and when he emerged into the night, leading Hobbles, he was satisfied that he could not have wakened the cookie, who alone, he thought, remained in the ranch buildings. Pushing back the loop of the padlock without locking it, he led off to the south-east, avoiding bunk-house and ranch-house.
In the saddle he was more satisfied. No longer was he alarmed, but the exhilaration of exercising a new art alone in the night determined him on one burst of speed. Stopping suddenly at the end of a few hundred yards, he turned his ear back with tingling veins. Back there somewhere in the darkness he imagined the beat of a horse's hoofs—and then sudden silence. Twice more he repeated it with the same result.
Convinced now that he was really frightened into foolish fancies, he rode on.
Out before him a strange lightness in the sky attracted his attention. Five minutes later he could see dimly the lines of dead grass on the crest of a ridge. Riding slowly up a slope, he looked over.
Four hundred yards away, in a deep coulee, a fire was burning. The bottom in which it was kindled was carefully chosen for concealment, and Stamford thrilled with excitement. Between him and the flames a bunch of cattle was kept in hand by a temporary corral, two silhouetted cowboys seated on the top rail. About the fire more cowboys were struggling with a steer that lay on its side, and the smell of burning hair carried to Stamford's nose the work of the branding irons.
He wondered what mystic night rites he was invading.
Seeking a nearer approach than was possible from that direction, he rode back down the slope and skirted about to the opposite side. That side, the south, suited him better, too, for the reason that, if he were detected, he would not seem to have come from the ranch.
Leaving Hobbles with dropped rein in another coulee, he climbed to the ridge. There he could see everything. Though he knew next to nothing of branding, and nothing whatever of its dishonest forms, the hour of the deed, the silence of the operations, and the choice of location, convinced him that it was intended only for the eyes of those immediately concerned.
He had just settled down to watch the thing through, when from only a few yards away rose the startling howl of a coyote. The sound galvanised more startling life into the group of cowboys. Those at the fire dropped their branding irons and rushed for their horses, and the two at the corrals were in their saddles as the howl ceased.
Stamford tumbled down the slope and raced for Hobbles. As he clambered into the saddle he realised with a gasp how hopeless flight was. Even with such a short start he had confidence that Hobbles could hold her own in the dark—buthecouldn't at such a speed. Fifty yards convinced him of it—fifty yards of giving Hobbles her head and concentrating on the horn in front.
He was considering what would happen when they caught him, when a horse raced out of the darkness behind him and shot past—so close that a skirt blew against his legs and he could hear a woman's voice whispering to her mount.
So Mary Aikens, too, was out that night! He forgot his fears and raced on.
But escape was hopeless. From the ridge came the thunder of the pursuing cowboys—and then, close behind him, another horse. It was gaining rapidly, the quirt lashing again and again—Stamford could hear its gushing breath at his hip.... And then he felt himself pushed from the saddle with a force that threw him clear of Hobbles' flying heels. Over and over on the soft earth he rolled, uninjured but too mystified and angry to appreciate it. He was rising to his feet to face his captor, when he realised that the rider who had unhorsed him had not even paused in his pace. Twice he heard the quirt fall, and he remembered that as he left the saddle that quirt had lashed over Hobbles' flank. Without a rider Hobbles would make the ranch.
A short hundred yards back pounded the feet of the pursuing horses. Stamford crept swiftly out of their path and lay still.
When they were past he rose and started on the run for the ranch. Vaguely he felt that in the speed of his return lay safety. Reaching the trail, he ran until his heart threatened to collapse; but he would not stop to rest.
It was still dark when he topped the rise overlooking the ranch buildings and crept carefully down toward the house. Though there seemed little danger of discovery, he kept to the depressions, zig-zagging downward. He was thankful to his instinct for concealment when he suddenly became aware of someone standing before the ranch-house looking up the trail—a woman. He could make out no more than the outline, but it must, of course, be Mary Aikens. He knew that she could have no desire to be discovered by him, and he moved more slowly, waiting for her to go.
His foot struck an unexpected mound and landed him on his face. As he lay in the grass he saw her move swiftly away round the corner of the house. Both the front door and the window of the Aikens' bedroom were in plain sight, but she did not enter either. He ran on openly then.
On the other side of the house no one was in sight. He hastened to the back, but the peg left by the cookie on the outside of the screen door when he departed after his evening's work proved that no one had entered there since.
Stamford leaned against the wall, completely mystified. He looked around, poking in the grass, yet without hope. The woman had vanished.
He remembered Hobbles and, gulping down a desire to cuddle into the bedclothes, hurried to the stable. The mysteries increased—the stable was locked. From the bunk-house came the noisy snoring of the cookie. With his duplicate key he let himself into the stable and found Hobbles—unsaddled—as if she had never been out, though her sides were still slightly warm.
Stamford crept out. It was uncanny.
The soft padding of a horse down the slope to the east, far from the trail, brought him to a sense of his exposure. Diving between two buildings, he waited. The rider turned off toward the corrals, evidently moving with caution, and a few minutes later Cockney Aikens came round the corner of one of the buildings that concealed Stamford, stopped a moment to listen to the snoring of the cook, and passed on to the house.
His steps were still audible when another horse came along the same course, but it did not turn off to the corrals. Stamford slunk further into his hiding-place as Dakota Fraley rode past and drew up before the bunk-house.
To Stamford's amazement Bean Slade came out.
"Who in h—l's been riding about here to-night?" Dakota demanded.
"Nobody—not that I've heard," returned Bean in a whisper.
"You been sleeping so tight, I guess, it ud take a kick on the ear to wake you."
"I heardyoufar enough," returned Bean sharply.
"Bring the lantern."
Dakota dismounted. Bean was a long time with the lantern, striking several matches in vain.
"No ile," he growled, with a curse.
"Never mind. I have matches."
Dakota tried the padlock, unlocked it, and entered the stable. Stamford heard a match scratch and saw a momentary flare through the cracks where the mud had dropped out.
"That shore beats me," muttered Dakota, as they came out. "They're all there. Let's take a look at the corrals."
They went off around the stable, and Stamford, creeping out, slunk up to the depressions in the slope that had become in one night such good friends to him, and returned to the house. He discovered that he had left his screen out, and a few hardy mosquitoes that defied the chilly night were buzzing within. Imp's snuffling grunt came from beneath the door and he opened it noisily and let the little terrier in. As he did so he thought he heard a gentle creak of Cockney's door. He smiled into the darkness and crept into bed, the dog curled up at his feet.