66CHAPTER VIA BOLD CIVILIAN
Colonel Landcraft was a slight man, and short of stature for a soldierly figure when out of the saddle. His gray hair was thinning in front, and his sharp querulous face was seamed in frowning pattern about the eyes. His forehead was fashioned on an intention of massiveness out of keeping with his tapering face, which ran out in a disappointing chin, and under the shadow of that projecting brow his cold blue eyes seemed as unfriendly as a winter sky.Early in his soldiering days the colonel had felt the want of inches and pounds, a shortage which he tried to overcome by carrying himself pulled up stiffly, giving him a strutting effect that had fastened upon him and become inseparable from his mien. This air of superior brusqueness was sharpened by the small fierceness of his visage, in which his large iron-gray mustache branched like horns.Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling only to himself.67He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms. He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant—he could figure it out as straight as a bayonet—of the heavy-handed signer himself. His years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope he grieved.There he was in those Septembral days, galloping along toward the age limit and retirement. Within a few weeks he would be subject to call before the retiring board any day, and there was nothing in his short-remaining time of service to shore up longer the hope of advancement in rank as compensatory honor in his retirement. He was a testy little old man, charged for instant explosion, and it was generally understood by everybody but the colonel himself that the department had sent him off to Fort Shakie to get him out of the way.On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron’s ball, when Major King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official business to the army post at Cheyenne. Instead of telegraphing to his68own post the intelligence of his return, and calling for a proper equipage to meet him at the railroad end, he had chosen to come back in this secret and unexpected way.That was true to the colonel’s manner. Perhaps he hoped to catch somebody overstepping the line of decorum, regulations, forms, either in the conduct of the post’s business or his own household. For the colonel was as much a tyrant in one place as the other. So he eliminated himself, wrapped to the bushy eyebrows in his greatcoat, for there was a chilliness in the afternoon, and clouds were driving over the sun.His austerity silenced the talkative driver, and when the stage reached the hotel the colonel parted from him without a word and clicked away briskly on his military heels—built up to give him stature—to see what he might surprise out of joint at the post.Perhaps it was a shock to his valuation of his own indispensability to find everything in proper form at the post. The sentry paced before the flagstaff, decorum prevailed. There was not one small particular loose to give him ground for flying at the culpable person and raking him with his blistering fire.Colonel Landcraft turned into his own house with a countenance somewhat fallen as a consequence of this discovery. It seemed to bear home to him the fact that the United States Army would get along very neatly and placidly without him.69The colonel occupied one wing of his sprawling, commodious, and somewhat impressive house as official headquarters. This room was full of stiff bookcases, letter files, severe chairs. The colonel’s desk stood near the fireplace in a strong light, with nothing ever unfinished left upon it. It was one of the colonel’s greatest satisfactions in life that he always was ready to snap down the cover of that desk at a moment’s notice and march away upon a campaign to the world’s end—and his own—leaving everything clear behind him.A private walk led up to a private door in the colonel’s quarters, where a private in uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder, made a formal parade when the colonel was within, and accessible to the military world for the transaction of business. This sentinel was not on duty now, the return of the colonel being unlooked-for, and nobody was the wiser in that household when the master of it let himself into the room with his key.The day was merging into dusk, or the colonel probably would have been aware that a man was hastening after him along the leaf-strewn walk as he passed up the avenue to his home. He was not many rods behind the colonel, and was gaining on him rapidly, when the crabbed old gentleman closed his office door softly behind him.The unmilitary visitor—this fact was betrayed by both his gait and his dress—turned sharply in upon the private walk and followed the colonel to his door.70He was turning through the letters and telegrams which had arrived during his absence when the visitor laid hand to the bell.No sound of ringing followed this application to the thumbscrew arrangement on the door, for the colonel had taken the bell away long ago. But there resulted a clucking, which brought the colonel to the portal frowning and alert, warming in the expectation of having somebody whom he might dress down at last.“Colonel Landcraft, I beg the favor of a word in private,” said the stranger at the door.The colonel opened the door wider, and peered sharply at the visitor, a frown gathering on his unfriendly face.“I haven’t the honor”—he began stiffly, seeing that it was an inferior civilian, for all civilians, except the president, were inferior to the colonel.“Macdonald is my name. I am a rancher in this country; you will have heard of me,” the visitor replied.“Nothing to your credit, young man,” said the colonel, tartly. “What do you want?”“A man’s chance,” said Macdonald, earnestly. “Will you let me explain?”Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.“I’ll make a light,” said the colonel, lowering the window-shades before he struck the match. When he had the flame of the student’s lamp on top of his71desk regulated to conform to his exactions, the colonel faced about suddenly.“I am listening, sir.”“At the beginning, sir, I want you to know who I am,” said Macdonald, producing papers. “My father, Senator Hampden Macdonald of Maine, now lives in Washington. You have heard of him. I am Alan Macdonald, late of the United States consular service. It is unlikely that you ever heard of me in that connection.”“I never heard of you before I came here,” said the colonel, unfavorably, unfolding the credentials which the visitor had placed on his desk, and skimming them with cursory eye. Now he looked up from his reading with a sudden little jerk of the head, and stood at severe attention. “And the purpose of this visit, sir?”“First, to prove to you that the notorious character given me by the cattlemen of this country is slanderous and unwarranted; secondly, to ask you to give me a man’s chance, as I have said, in a matter to which I shall come without loss of words. I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman; I do not acknowledge any moral or social superiors in this land.”The colonel, drew himself up a notch, and seemed to grow a little at that. He looked hard at the tall, fair-haired, sober-faced man in front of him, as if searching out his points to justify the bold claim upon respectability that he had made. Macdonald72was dressed in almost military precision; the colonel could find no fault with that. His riding-breeches told that they had been cut for no other legs, his coat set to his shoulders with gentlemanly ease. Only his rather greasy sombrero, with its weighty leather band, and the bulging revolvers under his coat seemed out of place in the general trimness of his attire.“Go on, sir,” the colonel said.“I had the honor of meeting Miss Landcraft last night at the masquerade given by Miss Chadron—”“How was that, sir? Did you have the effrontery to force yourself into a company which despises you, at the risk of your life and the decorum of the assemblage?”“I was drawn there,” Macdonald spoke slowly, meeting the colonel’s cold eye with steady gaze, “by a hope that was miraculously realized. I did risk my life, and I almost lost it. But that is nothing unusual—I risk it every day.”“You saw Miss Landcraft at the ball, danced with her, I suppose, talked with her,” nodded the colonel, understandingly. “Macdonald, you are a bold, a foolishly bold, man.”“I saw Miss Landcraft, I danced with her, I talked with her, and I have come to you, sir, after a desperate ride through the night to save my life as the penalty of those few minutes of pleasure, to request the privilege of calling upon Miss Landcraft and paying my court to her. I ask you to give me a man’s chance to win her hand.”73The audacity of the request almost tied the colonel’s sharp old tongue. For a moment he stood with his mouth open, his face red in the gathering storm of his sudden passion.“Sir!” said he, in amazed, unbelieving voice.“There are my credentials—they will bear investigation,” Macdonald said.“Damn your credentials, sir! I’ll have nothing to do with them, you blackguard, you scoundrel!”“I ask you to consider—”“I can consider nothing but the present fact that you are accused of deeds of outlawry and violence, and are an outcast of society, even the crude society of this wild country, sir. No matter who you are or whence you sprung, the evidence in this country is against you. You are a brigand and a thief, sir—this act of barbaric impetuosity in itself condemns you—no civilized man would have the effrontery to force himself into my presence in such a manner and make this insane demand.”“I am exercising a gentleman’s prerogative, Colonel Landcraft.”“You are a vulture aspiring to soar among eagles, sir!”“You have heard only the cattlemen’s side of the story, Colonel Landcraft,” said Macdonald, with patience and restraint. “You know that every man who attempts to build a fence around his cabin in this country, and strikes a furrow in the ground, is a rustler according to their creed.”74“I am aware that there is narrowness, injustice even, on the drovers’ side,” the colonel admitted, softening a little, it seemed. “But for all that, even if you were an equal, and an honest man, the road to Miss Landcraft’s heart is closed to assault, no matter how wild and sudden. She is plighted to another man.”“Sir—”“It is true; she will be married in the Christmas holidays. Go your way now, Macdonald, and dismiss this romantic dream. You build too high on the slight favor of a thoughtless girl. A dance or two is nothing, sir; a whispered word is less. If you were the broad man of the world that you would have me believe, you have known this. Instead, you come dashing in here like a savage and claim the right to woo her. Preposterous! She is beyond your world, sir. Go back to your wild riding, Macdonald, and try to live an honest man.”Macdonald stood with his head bent, brows gathered in stubborn expression of resistance. Colonel Landcraft could read in his face that there was no surrender, no acknowledgment of defeat, in that wild rider’s heart. The old warrior felt a warming of admiration for him, as one brave man feels for another, no matter what differences lie between them. Now Macdonald lifted his face, and there was that deep movement of laughter in his eyes that Frances had found so marvelous on the day of their first meeting.75“Perhaps her heart is untouched, sir, in spite of the barricade that has been raised between it and the world,” he said.The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.“Macdonald, you’re a strange man, a stubborn man, and a strong one. There is work for a man like you in this life; why are you wasting it here?”“If I live six months longer the world beyond these mountains will know,” was all that Macdonald said, taking up the papers which he had submitted to the colonel, and placing them again in his pocket.Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.“Running off other men’s cattle never will do it, Macdonald.”The door of the colonel’s room which gave into the hall of the main entrance opened without the formality of announcement. Frances drew back in quick confusion, speaking her apology from behind the door.“I ask your pardon, father. I heard voices here and wondered who it could be—I didn’t know you had come home.”“Your appearance is opportune, Miss Landcraft,” her father told her, with no trace of ill-humor. “Come in. Here is this wild Alan Macdonald come bursting in upon us from his hills.”The colonel indicated him with a wave of the hand, and Macdonald bowed, his heart shrinking when he saw how coldly she returned his greeting from her place at the door.76“He has come riding,” the colonel continued, “with a demand on me to be allowed to woo you, and carry you off to his cave among the rocks. Show him the door, and add your testimony to my assurance—which seems inadequate to satisfy the impetuous gentleman—that his case is hopeless.”The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the hall from which Frances came, was the world’s door for entering that house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away.“This way, Mr. Macdonald, please,” said she, politely cold, unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or a hot hasty kiss given in it—and received.In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man’s course and77the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been indorsed by her was evident, he believed.“There was nothing for me to conceal,” said he, as the door opened upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; “I came in a man’s way, as I thought—”“You came in a man’s way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of attempting to win a woman’s hand, when you lack the man’s strength or the man’s courage to defend even the glove that covers it,” she said. Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful.Macdonald started. “Then it has come back to you?”“It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the hand that wore it”—she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his eyes—“to have kept the knowledge from!”“I lost it,” said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow, “and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his life down for it.”“It might have been expected—of a man,” said she.“But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its return to you, Miss Landcraft,” he said, cold now in his word, and lofty. “You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path, and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as evidence of a shadowy conquest,78maybe, among my wild and lawless kind. Beyond that you know nothing—you lost it, that was all.”In the door he turned.“Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald,” she said.“If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a vindication in this country,” he said, “just go on thinking of me as a thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss Landcraft.”She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired, for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in the full knowledge that he was aman!Only a man would have come, bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to explain.79She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his hand.“He is gone,” she said.“Very well,” he nodded, shortly.“I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my engagement with Major King, to—”“Impossible! nonsense!”“To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him,” she concluded, unshaken.The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that boiled in his breast.“I tell you, miss, you can’t break your engagement to Major King! That is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a soldier’s word and a soldier’s honor in this matter, miss. It is incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed.”“I’m in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I’m old enough.”“A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What’s the occasion of this change in the wind? Surely not—”Colonel Landcraft’s brows drew together over his thin nose, making small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and bristling hair.80He held his words suspended while he searched her face for justification of his pent arraignment.“Nonsense!” said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as if relief had come. “Put the notion out of your head, for you are going to marry Major King.”“I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it is final.”His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke. But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to the army and a glory to the nation.“You’ll marry Major King, or die a maid!” he declared.“Very well, father,” she returned, in ambiguous concession.She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking, as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold, outlandish petition.
Colonel Landcraft was a slight man, and short of stature for a soldierly figure when out of the saddle. His gray hair was thinning in front, and his sharp querulous face was seamed in frowning pattern about the eyes. His forehead was fashioned on an intention of massiveness out of keeping with his tapering face, which ran out in a disappointing chin, and under the shadow of that projecting brow his cold blue eyes seemed as unfriendly as a winter sky.
Early in his soldiering days the colonel had felt the want of inches and pounds, a shortage which he tried to overcome by carrying himself pulled up stiffly, giving him a strutting effect that had fastened upon him and become inseparable from his mien. This air of superior brusqueness was sharpened by the small fierceness of his visage, in which his large iron-gray mustache branched like horns.
Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling only to himself.67He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms. He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.
If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant—he could figure it out as straight as a bayonet—of the heavy-handed signer himself. His years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope he grieved.
There he was in those Septembral days, galloping along toward the age limit and retirement. Within a few weeks he would be subject to call before the retiring board any day, and there was nothing in his short-remaining time of service to shore up longer the hope of advancement in rank as compensatory honor in his retirement. He was a testy little old man, charged for instant explosion, and it was generally understood by everybody but the colonel himself that the department had sent him off to Fort Shakie to get him out of the way.
On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron’s ball, when Major King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official business to the army post at Cheyenne. Instead of telegraphing to his68own post the intelligence of his return, and calling for a proper equipage to meet him at the railroad end, he had chosen to come back in this secret and unexpected way.
That was true to the colonel’s manner. Perhaps he hoped to catch somebody overstepping the line of decorum, regulations, forms, either in the conduct of the post’s business or his own household. For the colonel was as much a tyrant in one place as the other. So he eliminated himself, wrapped to the bushy eyebrows in his greatcoat, for there was a chilliness in the afternoon, and clouds were driving over the sun.
His austerity silenced the talkative driver, and when the stage reached the hotel the colonel parted from him without a word and clicked away briskly on his military heels—built up to give him stature—to see what he might surprise out of joint at the post.
Perhaps it was a shock to his valuation of his own indispensability to find everything in proper form at the post. The sentry paced before the flagstaff, decorum prevailed. There was not one small particular loose to give him ground for flying at the culpable person and raking him with his blistering fire.
Colonel Landcraft turned into his own house with a countenance somewhat fallen as a consequence of this discovery. It seemed to bear home to him the fact that the United States Army would get along very neatly and placidly without him.
69
The colonel occupied one wing of his sprawling, commodious, and somewhat impressive house as official headquarters. This room was full of stiff bookcases, letter files, severe chairs. The colonel’s desk stood near the fireplace in a strong light, with nothing ever unfinished left upon it. It was one of the colonel’s greatest satisfactions in life that he always was ready to snap down the cover of that desk at a moment’s notice and march away upon a campaign to the world’s end—and his own—leaving everything clear behind him.
A private walk led up to a private door in the colonel’s quarters, where a private in uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder, made a formal parade when the colonel was within, and accessible to the military world for the transaction of business. This sentinel was not on duty now, the return of the colonel being unlooked-for, and nobody was the wiser in that household when the master of it let himself into the room with his key.
The day was merging into dusk, or the colonel probably would have been aware that a man was hastening after him along the leaf-strewn walk as he passed up the avenue to his home. He was not many rods behind the colonel, and was gaining on him rapidly, when the crabbed old gentleman closed his office door softly behind him.
The unmilitary visitor—this fact was betrayed by both his gait and his dress—turned sharply in upon the private walk and followed the colonel to his door.70He was turning through the letters and telegrams which had arrived during his absence when the visitor laid hand to the bell.
No sound of ringing followed this application to the thumbscrew arrangement on the door, for the colonel had taken the bell away long ago. But there resulted a clucking, which brought the colonel to the portal frowning and alert, warming in the expectation of having somebody whom he might dress down at last.
“Colonel Landcraft, I beg the favor of a word in private,” said the stranger at the door.
The colonel opened the door wider, and peered sharply at the visitor, a frown gathering on his unfriendly face.
“I haven’t the honor”—he began stiffly, seeing that it was an inferior civilian, for all civilians, except the president, were inferior to the colonel.
“Macdonald is my name. I am a rancher in this country; you will have heard of me,” the visitor replied.
“Nothing to your credit, young man,” said the colonel, tartly. “What do you want?”
“A man’s chance,” said Macdonald, earnestly. “Will you let me explain?”
Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.
“I’ll make a light,” said the colonel, lowering the window-shades before he struck the match. When he had the flame of the student’s lamp on top of his71desk regulated to conform to his exactions, the colonel faced about suddenly.
“I am listening, sir.”
“At the beginning, sir, I want you to know who I am,” said Macdonald, producing papers. “My father, Senator Hampden Macdonald of Maine, now lives in Washington. You have heard of him. I am Alan Macdonald, late of the United States consular service. It is unlikely that you ever heard of me in that connection.”
“I never heard of you before I came here,” said the colonel, unfavorably, unfolding the credentials which the visitor had placed on his desk, and skimming them with cursory eye. Now he looked up from his reading with a sudden little jerk of the head, and stood at severe attention. “And the purpose of this visit, sir?”
“First, to prove to you that the notorious character given me by the cattlemen of this country is slanderous and unwarranted; secondly, to ask you to give me a man’s chance, as I have said, in a matter to which I shall come without loss of words. I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman; I do not acknowledge any moral or social superiors in this land.”
The colonel, drew himself up a notch, and seemed to grow a little at that. He looked hard at the tall, fair-haired, sober-faced man in front of him, as if searching out his points to justify the bold claim upon respectability that he had made. Macdonald72was dressed in almost military precision; the colonel could find no fault with that. His riding-breeches told that they had been cut for no other legs, his coat set to his shoulders with gentlemanly ease. Only his rather greasy sombrero, with its weighty leather band, and the bulging revolvers under his coat seemed out of place in the general trimness of his attire.
“Go on, sir,” the colonel said.
“I had the honor of meeting Miss Landcraft last night at the masquerade given by Miss Chadron—”
“How was that, sir? Did you have the effrontery to force yourself into a company which despises you, at the risk of your life and the decorum of the assemblage?”
“I was drawn there,” Macdonald spoke slowly, meeting the colonel’s cold eye with steady gaze, “by a hope that was miraculously realized. I did risk my life, and I almost lost it. But that is nothing unusual—I risk it every day.”
“You saw Miss Landcraft at the ball, danced with her, I suppose, talked with her,” nodded the colonel, understandingly. “Macdonald, you are a bold, a foolishly bold, man.”
“I saw Miss Landcraft, I danced with her, I talked with her, and I have come to you, sir, after a desperate ride through the night to save my life as the penalty of those few minutes of pleasure, to request the privilege of calling upon Miss Landcraft and paying my court to her. I ask you to give me a man’s chance to win her hand.”
73
The audacity of the request almost tied the colonel’s sharp old tongue. For a moment he stood with his mouth open, his face red in the gathering storm of his sudden passion.
“Sir!” said he, in amazed, unbelieving voice.
“There are my credentials—they will bear investigation,” Macdonald said.
“Damn your credentials, sir! I’ll have nothing to do with them, you blackguard, you scoundrel!”
“I ask you to consider—”
“I can consider nothing but the present fact that you are accused of deeds of outlawry and violence, and are an outcast of society, even the crude society of this wild country, sir. No matter who you are or whence you sprung, the evidence in this country is against you. You are a brigand and a thief, sir—this act of barbaric impetuosity in itself condemns you—no civilized man would have the effrontery to force himself into my presence in such a manner and make this insane demand.”
“I am exercising a gentleman’s prerogative, Colonel Landcraft.”
“You are a vulture aspiring to soar among eagles, sir!”
“You have heard only the cattlemen’s side of the story, Colonel Landcraft,” said Macdonald, with patience and restraint. “You know that every man who attempts to build a fence around his cabin in this country, and strikes a furrow in the ground, is a rustler according to their creed.”
74
“I am aware that there is narrowness, injustice even, on the drovers’ side,” the colonel admitted, softening a little, it seemed. “But for all that, even if you were an equal, and an honest man, the road to Miss Landcraft’s heart is closed to assault, no matter how wild and sudden. She is plighted to another man.”
“Sir—”
“It is true; she will be married in the Christmas holidays. Go your way now, Macdonald, and dismiss this romantic dream. You build too high on the slight favor of a thoughtless girl. A dance or two is nothing, sir; a whispered word is less. If you were the broad man of the world that you would have me believe, you have known this. Instead, you come dashing in here like a savage and claim the right to woo her. Preposterous! She is beyond your world, sir. Go back to your wild riding, Macdonald, and try to live an honest man.”
Macdonald stood with his head bent, brows gathered in stubborn expression of resistance. Colonel Landcraft could read in his face that there was no surrender, no acknowledgment of defeat, in that wild rider’s heart. The old warrior felt a warming of admiration for him, as one brave man feels for another, no matter what differences lie between them. Now Macdonald lifted his face, and there was that deep movement of laughter in his eyes that Frances had found so marvelous on the day of their first meeting.
75
“Perhaps her heart is untouched, sir, in spite of the barricade that has been raised between it and the world,” he said.
The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.
“Macdonald, you’re a strange man, a stubborn man, and a strong one. There is work for a man like you in this life; why are you wasting it here?”
“If I live six months longer the world beyond these mountains will know,” was all that Macdonald said, taking up the papers which he had submitted to the colonel, and placing them again in his pocket.
Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.
“Running off other men’s cattle never will do it, Macdonald.”
The door of the colonel’s room which gave into the hall of the main entrance opened without the formality of announcement. Frances drew back in quick confusion, speaking her apology from behind the door.
“I ask your pardon, father. I heard voices here and wondered who it could be—I didn’t know you had come home.”
“Your appearance is opportune, Miss Landcraft,” her father told her, with no trace of ill-humor. “Come in. Here is this wild Alan Macdonald come bursting in upon us from his hills.”
The colonel indicated him with a wave of the hand, and Macdonald bowed, his heart shrinking when he saw how coldly she returned his greeting from her place at the door.
76
“He has come riding,” the colonel continued, “with a demand on me to be allowed to woo you, and carry you off to his cave among the rocks. Show him the door, and add your testimony to my assurance—which seems inadequate to satisfy the impetuous gentleman—that his case is hopeless.”
The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the hall from which Frances came, was the world’s door for entering that house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away.
“This way, Mr. Macdonald, please,” said she, politely cold, unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or a hot hasty kiss given in it—and received.
In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man’s course and77the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been indorsed by her was evident, he believed.
“There was nothing for me to conceal,” said he, as the door opened upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; “I came in a man’s way, as I thought—”
“You came in a man’s way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of attempting to win a woman’s hand, when you lack the man’s strength or the man’s courage to defend even the glove that covers it,” she said. Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful.
Macdonald started. “Then it has come back to you?”
“It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the hand that wore it”—she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his eyes—“to have kept the knowledge from!”
“I lost it,” said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow, “and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his life down for it.”
“It might have been expected—of a man,” said she.
“But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its return to you, Miss Landcraft,” he said, cold now in his word, and lofty. “You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path, and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as evidence of a shadowy conquest,78maybe, among my wild and lawless kind. Beyond that you know nothing—you lost it, that was all.”
In the door he turned.
“Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald,” she said.
“If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a vindication in this country,” he said, “just go on thinking of me as a thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss Landcraft.”
She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.
But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired, for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in the full knowledge that he was aman!Only a man would have come, bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to explain.
79
She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his hand.
“He is gone,” she said.
“Very well,” he nodded, shortly.
“I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my engagement with Major King, to—”
“Impossible! nonsense!”
“To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him,” she concluded, unshaken.
The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that boiled in his breast.
“I tell you, miss, you can’t break your engagement to Major King! That is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a soldier’s word and a soldier’s honor in this matter, miss. It is incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed.”
“I’m in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I’m old enough.”
“A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What’s the occasion of this change in the wind? Surely not—”
Colonel Landcraft’s brows drew together over his thin nose, making small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and bristling hair.80He held his words suspended while he searched her face for justification of his pent arraignment.
“Nonsense!” said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as if relief had come. “Put the notion out of your head, for you are going to marry Major King.”
“I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it is final.”
His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke. But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to the army and a glory to the nation.
“You’ll marry Major King, or die a maid!” he declared.
“Very well, father,” she returned, in ambiguous concession.
She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking, as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold, outlandish petition.
81CHAPTER VIITHROWING THE SCARE
Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald’s place the following day, from Sam Hatcher’s ranch across the river, bringing news that three homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give any further particulars; he did not know the victims’ names.Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new procedure in the cattle barons’ land; this scourge had been fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given him.The word had gone out to them to be on guard. Now death had begun to leap upon them from the roadside grass. Perhaps his own turn would come tonight or tomorrow. He could not be more watchful than his neighbors had been; no man could close all the doors.The price of life in that country for such men as himself always had been unceasing vigilance. When a man stood guard over himself day and night he could do no more, and even at that he was almost certain, some time or other, to leave a chink open82through which the waiting blow might fall. After a time one became hardened to this condition of life. The strain of watching fell away from him; it became a part of his daily habit, and a man grew careless about securing the safeguards upon his life by and by.“Them fellers,” said Banjo, feeling that he had lowered himself considerably in carrying the news involving their swift end to Macdonald, “got about what was comin’ to ’em I reckon, Mac. Why don’t a man like you hitch up with Chadron or Hatcher, or one of the good men of this country, and git out from amongst them runts that’s nosin’ around in the ground for a livin’ like a drove of hogs?”“Every man to his liking, Banjo,” Macdonald returned, “and I don’t like the company you’ve named.”They never quarreled over the point, but Banjo never ceased to urge the reformation, such as he honestly believed it to be, upon Macdonald at every visit. The little troubadour felt that he was doing a generous and friendly turn for a fallen man, and squaring his own account with Macdonald in thus laboring for his redemption.Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring when the musician, heading for Chadron’s after playing for a dance, had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse into it. On that83occasion Banjo’s wits had been mixed with liquor, but his sense of gratitude had been perfectly clear ever since. Macdonald’s door was the only one in the nesters’ colony that stress or friendship ever had constrained him to enter. Even as it was, with all the big debt of gratitude owing, his intimacy with a man who had opened an irrigation ditch was a thing of which he did not boast abroad.Banjo made but a night’s stop of it with Macdonald. Early in the morning he was in the saddle again, with a dance ahead of him to play for that night at a ranch twenty miles or more away. He lingered a little after shaking hands with his host, trying the violin case as if to see that it was secure, and fidgeting in his saddle, and holding back on the start. Macdonald could see that there was something unsaid in the little man’s mind which gave him an uneasiness, like indigestion.“What is it, Banjo?” he asked, to let it be known that he understood.“Mac, did you ever hear tell of a feller named Mark Thorn?” Banjo inquired, looking about him with fearful caution, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.“Yes, I’ve heard of him.”“Well, he’s in this country.”“Are you sure about that, Banjo?” Macdonald’s face was troubled; he moved nearer the musician as he made the inquiry, and laid his hand on his arm.“He’s here. He’s the feller you’ve got to watch out84for. He cut acrosst the road yisterday afternoon when I was comin’ down here, and when he seen me he stopped, for I used to know him up north and he knew it wasn’t no use to try to duck and hide his murderin’ face from me. He told me he was ranchin’ up in Montany, and he’d come down here to collect some money Chadron owed him on an old bill.”“Pretty slim kind of a story. But he’s here to collect money from Chadron, all right, and give him value received. What kind of a looking man is he?”“He’s long and lean, like a rail, with a kind of a bend in him when he walks, and the under lid of his left eye drawed like you’d pulled it down and stuck a tack in it. He’s wearin’ a cap, and he’s kind of whiskered up, like he’d been layin’ out some time.”“I’d know him,” Macdonald nodded.“You couldn’t miss him in a thousand, Mac. Well, I must be rackin’ along.”Banjo scarcely had passed out of sight when three horsemen came galloping to Macdonald’s gate. They brought news of a fresh tragedy, and that in the immediate neighborhood. A boy had been shot down that morning while doing chores on a homestead a little way across the river. He was the son of one of the men on the death-list, and these men, the father among them, had come to enlist Macdonald’s aid in running down the slayer.The boy’s mother had seen the assassin hastening away among the scant bushes on the slope above the85house. The description that she gave of him left no doubt in Macdonald’s mind of his identity. It was Mark Thorn, the cattlemen’s contract killer, the homesteaders’ scourge.It was a fruitless search that day, seeking old Mark Thorn among the hills which rose brokenly a few miles back from the river and climbed to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil’s darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him dead at the handles of his plow.Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an institution of destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power strong enough to circumvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, bloody-muzzled great beasts of dark forests, that86struck deeper fear into the hearts of primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer, from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage, combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five remained on the evening of the third.It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads. When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the backing of the Drovers’ Association, which had an arm as long in that land as the old Persian king’s. He would strike there, like the ghost of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows’ blood, and slink away as silently as a wolf out of the sheepfold at dawn when his allotted task was done.Better to go home and guard what was left, they said. All of them were men for a fight, but it was87one thing to stand up to something that a man could see, and quite another to fight blindfolded, and in the dark. Catching Mark Thorn was like trying to ladle moonlight with a sieve. The country wasn’t worth it, they were beginning to believe. When Mark Thorn came in, it was like the vultures flying ahead of the last, devastating plague.The man whose boy had been shot down beside the little grass-roofed barn was the last to leave.“I’ll stick to it for a year, Alan, if you think it’s any use,” he said.He was a gaunt man, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes; gray, worn, unwashed, and old; one of the earth’s disinherited who believed that he had come into his rood of land at last. Now the driving shadow of his restless fate was on him again. Macdonald could see that it was heavy in his mind to hitch up and stagger on into the west, which was already red with the sunset of his day.Macdonald was moved by a great compassion for this old man, whose hope had been snatched away from him by the sting of a bullet in the dawn. He laid his hand on the old homesteader’s sagging thin shoulder and poured the comfort of a strong man’s sympathy into his empty eyes.“Go on back, Tom, and look after the others,” he said. “Do your chores by dark, morning and night, and stick close to cover all days and watch for him. I’ll keep on looking. I started to get that old hyena, and I’ll get him. Go on home.”88The old man’s eyes kindled with admiration. But it died as quickly as it had leaped up, and he shook his long hair with a sigh.“You can’t do nothin’ agin him all alone, Alan.”“I think I’ll have a better chance alone than in a crowd, Tom. There’s no doubt that there were too many of us, crashing through the brush and setting ourselves up against the sky line every time we rode up a hill. I’ll tackle him alone. Tell the neighbors to live under cover till they hear I’ve either got him or he’s got me. In case it turns out against me, they can do whatever seems best to them.”
Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald’s place the following day, from Sam Hatcher’s ranch across the river, bringing news that three homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give any further particulars; he did not know the victims’ names.
Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new procedure in the cattle barons’ land; this scourge had been fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given him.
The word had gone out to them to be on guard. Now death had begun to leap upon them from the roadside grass. Perhaps his own turn would come tonight or tomorrow. He could not be more watchful than his neighbors had been; no man could close all the doors.
The price of life in that country for such men as himself always had been unceasing vigilance. When a man stood guard over himself day and night he could do no more, and even at that he was almost certain, some time or other, to leave a chink open82through which the waiting blow might fall. After a time one became hardened to this condition of life. The strain of watching fell away from him; it became a part of his daily habit, and a man grew careless about securing the safeguards upon his life by and by.
“Them fellers,” said Banjo, feeling that he had lowered himself considerably in carrying the news involving their swift end to Macdonald, “got about what was comin’ to ’em I reckon, Mac. Why don’t a man like you hitch up with Chadron or Hatcher, or one of the good men of this country, and git out from amongst them runts that’s nosin’ around in the ground for a livin’ like a drove of hogs?”
“Every man to his liking, Banjo,” Macdonald returned, “and I don’t like the company you’ve named.”
They never quarreled over the point, but Banjo never ceased to urge the reformation, such as he honestly believed it to be, upon Macdonald at every visit. The little troubadour felt that he was doing a generous and friendly turn for a fallen man, and squaring his own account with Macdonald in thus laboring for his redemption.
Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring when the musician, heading for Chadron’s after playing for a dance, had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse into it. On that83occasion Banjo’s wits had been mixed with liquor, but his sense of gratitude had been perfectly clear ever since. Macdonald’s door was the only one in the nesters’ colony that stress or friendship ever had constrained him to enter. Even as it was, with all the big debt of gratitude owing, his intimacy with a man who had opened an irrigation ditch was a thing of which he did not boast abroad.
Banjo made but a night’s stop of it with Macdonald. Early in the morning he was in the saddle again, with a dance ahead of him to play for that night at a ranch twenty miles or more away. He lingered a little after shaking hands with his host, trying the violin case as if to see that it was secure, and fidgeting in his saddle, and holding back on the start. Macdonald could see that there was something unsaid in the little man’s mind which gave him an uneasiness, like indigestion.
“What is it, Banjo?” he asked, to let it be known that he understood.
“Mac, did you ever hear tell of a feller named Mark Thorn?” Banjo inquired, looking about him with fearful caution, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.
“Yes, I’ve heard of him.”
“Well, he’s in this country.”
“Are you sure about that, Banjo?” Macdonald’s face was troubled; he moved nearer the musician as he made the inquiry, and laid his hand on his arm.
“He’s here. He’s the feller you’ve got to watch out84for. He cut acrosst the road yisterday afternoon when I was comin’ down here, and when he seen me he stopped, for I used to know him up north and he knew it wasn’t no use to try to duck and hide his murderin’ face from me. He told me he was ranchin’ up in Montany, and he’d come down here to collect some money Chadron owed him on an old bill.”
“Pretty slim kind of a story. But he’s here to collect money from Chadron, all right, and give him value received. What kind of a looking man is he?”
“He’s long and lean, like a rail, with a kind of a bend in him when he walks, and the under lid of his left eye drawed like you’d pulled it down and stuck a tack in it. He’s wearin’ a cap, and he’s kind of whiskered up, like he’d been layin’ out some time.”
“I’d know him,” Macdonald nodded.
“You couldn’t miss him in a thousand, Mac. Well, I must be rackin’ along.”
Banjo scarcely had passed out of sight when three horsemen came galloping to Macdonald’s gate. They brought news of a fresh tragedy, and that in the immediate neighborhood. A boy had been shot down that morning while doing chores on a homestead a little way across the river. He was the son of one of the men on the death-list, and these men, the father among them, had come to enlist Macdonald’s aid in running down the slayer.
The boy’s mother had seen the assassin hastening away among the scant bushes on the slope above the85house. The description that she gave of him left no doubt in Macdonald’s mind of his identity. It was Mark Thorn, the cattlemen’s contract killer, the homesteaders’ scourge.
It was a fruitless search that day, seeking old Mark Thorn among the hills which rose brokenly a few miles back from the river and climbed to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil’s darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.
As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him dead at the handles of his plow.
Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an institution of destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power strong enough to circumvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.
There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, bloody-muzzled great beasts of dark forests, that86struck deeper fear into the hearts of primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer, from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.
Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage, combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five remained on the evening of the third.
It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads. When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the backing of the Drovers’ Association, which had an arm as long in that land as the old Persian king’s. He would strike there, like the ghost of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows’ blood, and slink away as silently as a wolf out of the sheepfold at dawn when his allotted task was done.
Better to go home and guard what was left, they said. All of them were men for a fight, but it was87one thing to stand up to something that a man could see, and quite another to fight blindfolded, and in the dark. Catching Mark Thorn was like trying to ladle moonlight with a sieve. The country wasn’t worth it, they were beginning to believe. When Mark Thorn came in, it was like the vultures flying ahead of the last, devastating plague.
The man whose boy had been shot down beside the little grass-roofed barn was the last to leave.
“I’ll stick to it for a year, Alan, if you think it’s any use,” he said.
He was a gaunt man, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes; gray, worn, unwashed, and old; one of the earth’s disinherited who believed that he had come into his rood of land at last. Now the driving shadow of his restless fate was on him again. Macdonald could see that it was heavy in his mind to hitch up and stagger on into the west, which was already red with the sunset of his day.
Macdonald was moved by a great compassion for this old man, whose hope had been snatched away from him by the sting of a bullet in the dawn. He laid his hand on the old homesteader’s sagging thin shoulder and poured the comfort of a strong man’s sympathy into his empty eyes.
“Go on back, Tom, and look after the others,” he said. “Do your chores by dark, morning and night, and stick close to cover all days and watch for him. I’ll keep on looking. I started to get that old hyena, and I’ll get him. Go on home.”
88
The old man’s eyes kindled with admiration. But it died as quickly as it had leaped up, and he shook his long hair with a sigh.
“You can’t do nothin’ agin him all alone, Alan.”
“I think I’ll have a better chance alone than in a crowd, Tom. There’s no doubt that there were too many of us, crashing through the brush and setting ourselves up against the sky line every time we rode up a hill. I’ll tackle him alone. Tell the neighbors to live under cover till they hear I’ve either got him or he’s got me. In case it turns out against me, they can do whatever seems best to them.”
89CHAPTER VIIIAFOOT AND ALONE
Mark Thorn had not killed anybody since shooting the man at the plow. There were five deaths to his credit on that contract, although none of the fallen was on the cattlemen’s list of desirables to be removed.Five days had passed without a tragedy, and the homesteaders were beginning to draw breath in the open again, in the belief that Macdonald must have driven the slayer out of the country. Nothing had been seen or heard of Macdonald since the evening that he parted company with Tom Lassiter, father of the murdered boy.Macdonald, in the interval, was hard on the old villain’s trail. He had picked it up on the first day of his lone-handed hunt, and once he had caught a glimpse of Thorn as he dodged among the red willows on the river, but the sight had been too transitory to put in a shot. It was evident now that Thorn knew that he was being hunted by a single pursuer. More than that, there were indications written in the loose earth where he passed, and in the tangled brushwood where he skulked, that he had stopped running away and had turned to hunt the hunter.For two days they had been circling in a constantly tightening ring, first one leading the hunt, then the90other. Trained and accustomed as he was to life under those conditions, Thorn had not yet been able to take even a chance shot at his clinging pursuer.Macdonald was awake to the fact that this balance in his favor could not be maintained long. As it was, he ascribed it more to luck than skill on his part. This wild beast in human semblance must possess all the wild beast’s cunning; there would be a rift left open in this straining game of hide and seek which his keen eyes would be sure to see at no distant hour.The afternoon of that day was worn down to the hock. Macdonald had been creeping and stooping, running, panting, and lying concealed from the first gleam of dawn. Whether by design on the part of Thorn, or merely the blind leading of the hunt, Macdonald could not tell, the contest of wits had brought them within sight of Alamito ranchhouse.Resting a little while with his back against a ledge which insured him from surprise, Macdonald looked out from the hills over the wide-spanning valley, the farther shore of which was laved in a purple mist as rich as the dye of some oriental weaving. He felt a surge of indignant protest against the greedy injustice of that manorial estate, the fair house glistening in the late sun among the white-limbed cottonwoods. There Saul Chadron sat, like some distended monster, his hands spread upon more than he could honestly use, or his progeny after him for a thousand years, growling and snapping at all whose91steps lagged in passing, or whose weary eyes turned longingly toward those grassy vales.There had been frost for many nights past; the green of the summerland had merged into a yellow-brown, now gold beneath the slanting sunbeams. A place of friendly beauty and sequestered peace, where a man might come to take up his young dreams, or stagger under the oppression of his years to put them down, and rest. It seemed so, in the light of that failing afternoon.But the man who sat with his back against the ledge, his ears strained to find the slightest hostile sound, his roaming eyes always coming back with unconscious alertness and frowning investigation to the nearer objects in the broken foreground, had tasted beneath the illusive crust of that land, and the savor was bitter upon his lips. He questioned what good there was to be got out of it, for him or those for whom he had taken up the burden, for many a weary year to come.The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft: “There must be millions behind the cattlemen.” He felt that he never had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never to overturn.There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a lion for the92bounty upon his head. And in the event that a lucky shot should rid the earth of that foul thing, how much would it strengthen his safety, and his neighbors’, and fasten their weak hold upon the land?Little, indeed. Others could be hired out of those uncounted millions of the cattlemen’s resources to finish what Mark Thorn had begun. The night raids upon their fields would continue, the slanders against them would spread and grow. Colonel Landcraft believed him to be what malicious report had named him; there was not a doubt of that. And what Frances thought of him since that misadventure of the glove, it was not hard to guess.But that was not closed between them, he told himself, as he had told himself before, times unnumbered. There was a final word to be said, at the right time and place. The world would turn many times between then and the Christmas holidays, when Frances was to become the bride of another, according to the colonel’s plans.Macdonald was weary from his night vigils and stealthy prowlings by day, and hungry for a hot meal. Since he had taken the trail of Mark Thorn alone he had not kindled a fire. Now the food that he had carried with him was done; he must turn back home for a fresh supply, and a night’s rest.It did not matter much, anyway, he said, feeling the uselessness of his life and strife in that place. It was a big and unfriendly land, a hard and hopeless place for a man who tried to live in defiance of the93established order there. Why not leave it, with its despair and heart-emptiness? The world was full enough of injustices elsewhere if he cared to set his hand to right them.But a true man did not run away under fire, nor a brave one block out a task and then shudder and slink away, when he stood off and saw the immensity of the thing that he had undertaken. Besides all these considerations, which in themselves formed insuperable reasons against retreat, there had been some big talk into the ear of Frances Landcraft. There was no putting down what he had begun. His dream had taken root there; it would be cruel cowardice to wrench it up.He got up, the sun striking him on the face, from which the west wind pressed back his hat brim as if to let the daylight see it. The dust of his travels was on it, and the roughness of his new beard, and it was harsh in some of its lines, and severe as an ashlar from the craftsman’s tool. But it was a man’s face, with honor in it; the sun found no weakness there, no shame concealed under the sophistries and wiles by which men beguile the world.Macdonald looked away across the valley, past the white ranchhouse, beyond the slow river which came down from the northwest in toilsome curves, whose gray shores and bars were yellow in that sunlight as the sands of famed Pactolus. His breast heaved with the long inspiration which flared his thin nostrils like an Arab’s scenting rain; he revived with a new vigor94as the freedom of the plains met his eyes and made them glad. That was his place, his land; its troubles were his to bear, its peace his to glean when it should ripen. It was his inheritance; it was his place of rest. The lure of that country had a deep seat in his heart; he loved it for its perils and its pains. It was like a sweetheart to bind and call him back. A man makes his own Fortunate Isles, as that shaggy old gray poet knew so well.For a moment Mark Thorn was forgotten as Macdonald repeated, in low voice above his breath:Lo! These are the isles of the watery milesThat God let down from the firmament.Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man’s trust;Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust—Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining soul. Its fight was his fight, and there was gladness in the thought.His alertness as he went down the slope, and the grim purpose of his presence in that forbidden place, did not prevent the pleading of a softer cause, and a sweeter. That rare smile woke in his eyes and unbent for a moment the harshness of his lips as he thought of brown hair sweeping back from a white forehead, and a chin lifted imperiously, as became one born to countenance only the exalted in this life.95There was something that made him breathe quicker in the memory of her warm body held a transitory moment in his arms; the recollection of the rose-softness of her lips. All these were waiting in the world that he must win, claimed by another, true. But that was immaterial, he told his heart, which leaped and exulted in the memory of that garden path as if there was no tomorrow, and no such shadow in man’s life as doubt.Of course, there remained the matter of the glove. A man might have been expected to die before yielding it to another, as she had said, speaking out of a hot heart, he knew. There was a more comfortable thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of living to win the hand that it had covered.Chadron’s ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him, although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light. He cut his course to bring himself into the public highway—a government road, it was—that ran northward up the river, the road along which Chadron’s men had pursued him the night of the ball. He meant to strike it some miles to the north of Chadron’s homestead, for he was not looking for any more trouble than he was carrying that day.He proceeded swiftly, but cautiously, watching for his man. But Mark Thorn did not appear to be abroad in that part of the country. Until sundown96Macdonald walked unchallenged, when he struck the highway a short distance south of the point where the trail leading to Fort Shakie branched from it.Saul Chadron and his daughter Nola came riding out of the Fort Shakie road, their horses in that tireless, swinging gallop which the animals of that rare atmosphere can maintain for hours. As he rode, Chadron swung his quirt in unison with the horse’s undulations, from side to side across its neck, like a baton. He sat as stiff and solid in his saddle as a carved image. Nola came on neck and neck with him, on the side of the road nearer Macdonald.Macdonald was carrying a rifle in addition to his side arms, and he was a dusty grim figure to come upon suddenly afoot in the high road. Chadron pulled in his horse and brought it to a stiff-legged stop when he saw Macdonald, who had stepped to the roadside to let them pass. The old cattleman’s high-crowned sombrero was pinched to a peak; the wind of his galloping gait had pressed its broad brim back from his tough old weathered face. His white mustache and little dab of pointed beard seemed whiter against the darkness of passion which mounted to his scowling eyes.“What in the hell’re you up to now?” he demanded, without regard for his companion, who was accustomed, well enough, to his explosions and expletives.Macdonald gravely lifted his hand to his hat, his eyes meeting Nola’s for an instant, Chadron’s challenge97unanswered. Nola’s face flared at this respectful salutation as if she had been insulted. She jerked her horse back a little, as if she feared that violence would follow the invasion of her caste by this fallen and branded man, her pliant waist weaving in graceful balance with every movement of her beast.Macdonald lowered his eyes from her blazingly indignant face. Her horse was slewed across the narrow road, and he considered between waiting for them to ride on and striking into the shoulder-high sage which grew thick at the roadside there. He thought that she was very pretty in her fairness of hair and skin, and the lake-clear blueness of her eyes. She was riding astride, as all the women in that country rode, dressed in wide pantaloonish corduroys, with twinkling little silver spurs on her heels.“What’re you prowlin’ down here around my place for?” Chadron asked, spurring his horse as he spoke, checking its forward leap with rigid arm, which made a commotion of hoofs and a cloud of dust.“This is a public highway, and I deny your right to question my motives in it,” Macdonald returned, calmly.“Sneakin’ around to see if you can lay hands on a horse, I suppose,” Chadron said, leaning a little in towering menace toward the man in the road.Macdonald felt a hot surge of resentment rise to his eyes, so suddenly and so strongly that it dimmed his sight. He shut his mouth hard on the words98which sprang into it, and held himself in silence until he had command of his anger.“I’m hunting,” said he, meeting Chadron’s eye with meaning look.“On foot, and waitin’ for dark!” the cattleman sneered.“I’m going on foot because the game I’m after sticks close to the ground. There’s no need of naming that game to you—you know what it is.”Macdonald spoke with cutting severity. Chadron’s dark face reddened under his steady eyes, and again the big rowels of his spurs slashed his horse’s sides, making it bound and trample in threatening charge.“I don’t know anything about your damn low business, but I’ll tell you this much; if I ever run onto you ag’in down this way I’ll do a little huntin’ on my own accord.”“That would be squarer, and more to my liking, than hiring somebody else to do it for you, Mr. Chadron. Ride on—I don’t want to stand here and quarrel with you.”“I’m goin’ to clear you nesters out of there up the river”—Chadron waved his hand in the direction of which he spoke—“and put a stop to your rustlin’ before another month rolls around. I’ve stood your fences up there on my land as long as I’m goin’ to!”“I’ve never had a chance to tell you before, Mr. Chadron”—Macdonald spoke as respectfully as his deep detestation of the cattleman would allow—“but if you’ve got any other charge to bring against me99except that of homesteading, bring it in a court. I’m ready to face you on it, any day.”“I carry my court right here with me,” said Chadron, patting his revolver.“I deny its jurisdiction,” Macdonald returned, drawing himself up, a flash of defiance in his clear eyes.Chadron jerked his head in expression of lofty disdain.“Go on! Git out of my sight!” he ordered.“The road is open to you,” Macdonald replied.“I’m not goin’ to turn my back on you till you’re out of sight!”Chadron bent his great owlish brows in a scowl, laid his hand on his revolver and whirled his horse in the direction that Macdonald was facing.Macdonald did not answer. He turned from Chadron, something in his act of going that told the cattleman he was above so mean suspicion on his part. Nola shifted her horse to let him pass, her elbows tight at her sides, scorn in her lively eyes.Again Macdonald’s hand went to his hat in respectful salute, and again he saw that flash of anger spread in the young woman’s cheeks. Her fury blazed in her eyes as she looked at him a moment, and a dull color mounted in his own face as he beheld her foolish and unjustified pride.Macdonald would have passed her then, but she spurred her horse upon him with sudden-breaking temper, forcing him to spring back quickly to the100roadside to escape being trampled. Before he could collect himself in his astonishment, she struck him a whistling blow with her long-thonged quirt across the face.“You dog!” she said, her clenched little white teeth showing in her parted lips.Macdonald caught the bridle and pushed her horse back to its haunches, and she, in her reckless anger, struck him across the hand in sharp quick blows. Her conduct was comparable to nothing but that of an ill-bred child striking one whose situation, he has been told, is the warrant of his inferiority.The struggle was over in a few seconds, and Macdonald stood free of the little fury, a red welt across his cheek, the back of his hand cut until the blood oozed through the skin in heavy black drops. Chadron had not moved a hand to interfere on either side. Only now that the foolish display of Nola’s temper was done he rocked in his saddle and shook the empty landscape with his loud, coarse laugh.He patted his daughter on the shoulder, like a hunter rewarding a dog. Macdonald walked away from them, the only humiliation that he felt for the incident being that which he suffered for her sake.It was not so much that a woman had debased herself to the level of a savage, although that hurt him, too, but that her blows had been the expression of the contempt in which the lords of that country held him and his kind. Bullets did not matter so much, for a man could give them back as hot as they101came. But there was no answer, as he could see it in that depressing hour, for such a feudal assertion of superiority as this.It was to the work of breaking the hold of this hard-handed aristocracy which had risen from the grass roots in the day of its arrogant prosperity—a prosperity founded on usurpation of the rights of the weak, and upheld by murder—that he had set his soul. The need of hastening the reformation never had seemed greater to him than on that day, or more hopeless, he admitted in his heart.For hour by hour the work ahead of him appeared to grow greater. Little could be expected, judging by the experiences of the past few days, from those who suffered most. The day of extremest pressure in their poor affairs was being hastened by the cattlemen, as Chadron’s threat had foretold. Would they when the time came to fight do so, or harness their lean teams and drive on into the west? That was the big question upon which the success or the failure of his work depended.As he had come down from the hillside out of the sunshine and peace to meet shadow and violence, so his high spirits, hopes, and intentions seemed this bitter hour steeped in sudden gloom. In more ways than one that evening on the white river road, Alan Macdonald felt that he was afoot and alone.
Mark Thorn had not killed anybody since shooting the man at the plow. There were five deaths to his credit on that contract, although none of the fallen was on the cattlemen’s list of desirables to be removed.
Five days had passed without a tragedy, and the homesteaders were beginning to draw breath in the open again, in the belief that Macdonald must have driven the slayer out of the country. Nothing had been seen or heard of Macdonald since the evening that he parted company with Tom Lassiter, father of the murdered boy.
Macdonald, in the interval, was hard on the old villain’s trail. He had picked it up on the first day of his lone-handed hunt, and once he had caught a glimpse of Thorn as he dodged among the red willows on the river, but the sight had been too transitory to put in a shot. It was evident now that Thorn knew that he was being hunted by a single pursuer. More than that, there were indications written in the loose earth where he passed, and in the tangled brushwood where he skulked, that he had stopped running away and had turned to hunt the hunter.
For two days they had been circling in a constantly tightening ring, first one leading the hunt, then the90other. Trained and accustomed as he was to life under those conditions, Thorn had not yet been able to take even a chance shot at his clinging pursuer.
Macdonald was awake to the fact that this balance in his favor could not be maintained long. As it was, he ascribed it more to luck than skill on his part. This wild beast in human semblance must possess all the wild beast’s cunning; there would be a rift left open in this straining game of hide and seek which his keen eyes would be sure to see at no distant hour.
The afternoon of that day was worn down to the hock. Macdonald had been creeping and stooping, running, panting, and lying concealed from the first gleam of dawn. Whether by design on the part of Thorn, or merely the blind leading of the hunt, Macdonald could not tell, the contest of wits had brought them within sight of Alamito ranchhouse.
Resting a little while with his back against a ledge which insured him from surprise, Macdonald looked out from the hills over the wide-spanning valley, the farther shore of which was laved in a purple mist as rich as the dye of some oriental weaving. He felt a surge of indignant protest against the greedy injustice of that manorial estate, the fair house glistening in the late sun among the white-limbed cottonwoods. There Saul Chadron sat, like some distended monster, his hands spread upon more than he could honestly use, or his progeny after him for a thousand years, growling and snapping at all whose91steps lagged in passing, or whose weary eyes turned longingly toward those grassy vales.
There had been frost for many nights past; the green of the summerland had merged into a yellow-brown, now gold beneath the slanting sunbeams. A place of friendly beauty and sequestered peace, where a man might come to take up his young dreams, or stagger under the oppression of his years to put them down, and rest. It seemed so, in the light of that failing afternoon.
But the man who sat with his back against the ledge, his ears strained to find the slightest hostile sound, his roaming eyes always coming back with unconscious alertness and frowning investigation to the nearer objects in the broken foreground, had tasted beneath the illusive crust of that land, and the savor was bitter upon his lips. He questioned what good there was to be got out of it, for him or those for whom he had taken up the burden, for many a weary year to come.
The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft: “There must be millions behind the cattlemen.” He felt that he never had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never to overturn.
There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a lion for the92bounty upon his head. And in the event that a lucky shot should rid the earth of that foul thing, how much would it strengthen his safety, and his neighbors’, and fasten their weak hold upon the land?
Little, indeed. Others could be hired out of those uncounted millions of the cattlemen’s resources to finish what Mark Thorn had begun. The night raids upon their fields would continue, the slanders against them would spread and grow. Colonel Landcraft believed him to be what malicious report had named him; there was not a doubt of that. And what Frances thought of him since that misadventure of the glove, it was not hard to guess.
But that was not closed between them, he told himself, as he had told himself before, times unnumbered. There was a final word to be said, at the right time and place. The world would turn many times between then and the Christmas holidays, when Frances was to become the bride of another, according to the colonel’s plans.
Macdonald was weary from his night vigils and stealthy prowlings by day, and hungry for a hot meal. Since he had taken the trail of Mark Thorn alone he had not kindled a fire. Now the food that he had carried with him was done; he must turn back home for a fresh supply, and a night’s rest.
It did not matter much, anyway, he said, feeling the uselessness of his life and strife in that place. It was a big and unfriendly land, a hard and hopeless place for a man who tried to live in defiance of the93established order there. Why not leave it, with its despair and heart-emptiness? The world was full enough of injustices elsewhere if he cared to set his hand to right them.
But a true man did not run away under fire, nor a brave one block out a task and then shudder and slink away, when he stood off and saw the immensity of the thing that he had undertaken. Besides all these considerations, which in themselves formed insuperable reasons against retreat, there had been some big talk into the ear of Frances Landcraft. There was no putting down what he had begun. His dream had taken root there; it would be cruel cowardice to wrench it up.
He got up, the sun striking him on the face, from which the west wind pressed back his hat brim as if to let the daylight see it. The dust of his travels was on it, and the roughness of his new beard, and it was harsh in some of its lines, and severe as an ashlar from the craftsman’s tool. But it was a man’s face, with honor in it; the sun found no weakness there, no shame concealed under the sophistries and wiles by which men beguile the world.
Macdonald looked away across the valley, past the white ranchhouse, beyond the slow river which came down from the northwest in toilsome curves, whose gray shores and bars were yellow in that sunlight as the sands of famed Pactolus. His breast heaved with the long inspiration which flared his thin nostrils like an Arab’s scenting rain; he revived with a new vigor94as the freedom of the plains met his eyes and made them glad. That was his place, his land; its troubles were his to bear, its peace his to glean when it should ripen. It was his inheritance; it was his place of rest. The lure of that country had a deep seat in his heart; he loved it for its perils and its pains. It was like a sweetheart to bind and call him back. A man makes his own Fortunate Isles, as that shaggy old gray poet knew so well.
For a moment Mark Thorn was forgotten as Macdonald repeated, in low voice above his breath:
Lo! These are the isles of the watery milesThat God let down from the firmament.Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man’s trust;Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust—
Lo! These are the isles of the watery milesThat God let down from the firmament.Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man’s trust;Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust—
Lo! These are the isles of the watery miles
That God let down from the firmament.
Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man’s trust;
Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust—
Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining soul. Its fight was his fight, and there was gladness in the thought.
His alertness as he went down the slope, and the grim purpose of his presence in that forbidden place, did not prevent the pleading of a softer cause, and a sweeter. That rare smile woke in his eyes and unbent for a moment the harshness of his lips as he thought of brown hair sweeping back from a white forehead, and a chin lifted imperiously, as became one born to countenance only the exalted in this life.95There was something that made him breathe quicker in the memory of her warm body held a transitory moment in his arms; the recollection of the rose-softness of her lips. All these were waiting in the world that he must win, claimed by another, true. But that was immaterial, he told his heart, which leaped and exulted in the memory of that garden path as if there was no tomorrow, and no such shadow in man’s life as doubt.
Of course, there remained the matter of the glove. A man might have been expected to die before yielding it to another, as she had said, speaking out of a hot heart, he knew. There was a more comfortable thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of living to win the hand that it had covered.
Chadron’s ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him, although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light. He cut his course to bring himself into the public highway—a government road, it was—that ran northward up the river, the road along which Chadron’s men had pursued him the night of the ball. He meant to strike it some miles to the north of Chadron’s homestead, for he was not looking for any more trouble than he was carrying that day.
He proceeded swiftly, but cautiously, watching for his man. But Mark Thorn did not appear to be abroad in that part of the country. Until sundown96Macdonald walked unchallenged, when he struck the highway a short distance south of the point where the trail leading to Fort Shakie branched from it.
Saul Chadron and his daughter Nola came riding out of the Fort Shakie road, their horses in that tireless, swinging gallop which the animals of that rare atmosphere can maintain for hours. As he rode, Chadron swung his quirt in unison with the horse’s undulations, from side to side across its neck, like a baton. He sat as stiff and solid in his saddle as a carved image. Nola came on neck and neck with him, on the side of the road nearer Macdonald.
Macdonald was carrying a rifle in addition to his side arms, and he was a dusty grim figure to come upon suddenly afoot in the high road. Chadron pulled in his horse and brought it to a stiff-legged stop when he saw Macdonald, who had stepped to the roadside to let them pass. The old cattleman’s high-crowned sombrero was pinched to a peak; the wind of his galloping gait had pressed its broad brim back from his tough old weathered face. His white mustache and little dab of pointed beard seemed whiter against the darkness of passion which mounted to his scowling eyes.
“What in the hell’re you up to now?” he demanded, without regard for his companion, who was accustomed, well enough, to his explosions and expletives.
Macdonald gravely lifted his hand to his hat, his eyes meeting Nola’s for an instant, Chadron’s challenge97unanswered. Nola’s face flared at this respectful salutation as if she had been insulted. She jerked her horse back a little, as if she feared that violence would follow the invasion of her caste by this fallen and branded man, her pliant waist weaving in graceful balance with every movement of her beast.
Macdonald lowered his eyes from her blazingly indignant face. Her horse was slewed across the narrow road, and he considered between waiting for them to ride on and striking into the shoulder-high sage which grew thick at the roadside there. He thought that she was very pretty in her fairness of hair and skin, and the lake-clear blueness of her eyes. She was riding astride, as all the women in that country rode, dressed in wide pantaloonish corduroys, with twinkling little silver spurs on her heels.
“What’re you prowlin’ down here around my place for?” Chadron asked, spurring his horse as he spoke, checking its forward leap with rigid arm, which made a commotion of hoofs and a cloud of dust.
“This is a public highway, and I deny your right to question my motives in it,” Macdonald returned, calmly.
“Sneakin’ around to see if you can lay hands on a horse, I suppose,” Chadron said, leaning a little in towering menace toward the man in the road.
Macdonald felt a hot surge of resentment rise to his eyes, so suddenly and so strongly that it dimmed his sight. He shut his mouth hard on the words98which sprang into it, and held himself in silence until he had command of his anger.
“I’m hunting,” said he, meeting Chadron’s eye with meaning look.
“On foot, and waitin’ for dark!” the cattleman sneered.
“I’m going on foot because the game I’m after sticks close to the ground. There’s no need of naming that game to you—you know what it is.”
Macdonald spoke with cutting severity. Chadron’s dark face reddened under his steady eyes, and again the big rowels of his spurs slashed his horse’s sides, making it bound and trample in threatening charge.
“I don’t know anything about your damn low business, but I’ll tell you this much; if I ever run onto you ag’in down this way I’ll do a little huntin’ on my own accord.”
“That would be squarer, and more to my liking, than hiring somebody else to do it for you, Mr. Chadron. Ride on—I don’t want to stand here and quarrel with you.”
“I’m goin’ to clear you nesters out of there up the river”—Chadron waved his hand in the direction of which he spoke—“and put a stop to your rustlin’ before another month rolls around. I’ve stood your fences up there on my land as long as I’m goin’ to!”
“I’ve never had a chance to tell you before, Mr. Chadron”—Macdonald spoke as respectfully as his deep detestation of the cattleman would allow—“but if you’ve got any other charge to bring against me99except that of homesteading, bring it in a court. I’m ready to face you on it, any day.”
“I carry my court right here with me,” said Chadron, patting his revolver.
“I deny its jurisdiction,” Macdonald returned, drawing himself up, a flash of defiance in his clear eyes.
Chadron jerked his head in expression of lofty disdain.
“Go on! Git out of my sight!” he ordered.
“The road is open to you,” Macdonald replied.
“I’m not goin’ to turn my back on you till you’re out of sight!”
Chadron bent his great owlish brows in a scowl, laid his hand on his revolver and whirled his horse in the direction that Macdonald was facing.
Macdonald did not answer. He turned from Chadron, something in his act of going that told the cattleman he was above so mean suspicion on his part. Nola shifted her horse to let him pass, her elbows tight at her sides, scorn in her lively eyes.
Again Macdonald’s hand went to his hat in respectful salute, and again he saw that flash of anger spread in the young woman’s cheeks. Her fury blazed in her eyes as she looked at him a moment, and a dull color mounted in his own face as he beheld her foolish and unjustified pride.
Macdonald would have passed her then, but she spurred her horse upon him with sudden-breaking temper, forcing him to spring back quickly to the100roadside to escape being trampled. Before he could collect himself in his astonishment, she struck him a whistling blow with her long-thonged quirt across the face.
“You dog!” she said, her clenched little white teeth showing in her parted lips.
Macdonald caught the bridle and pushed her horse back to its haunches, and she, in her reckless anger, struck him across the hand in sharp quick blows. Her conduct was comparable to nothing but that of an ill-bred child striking one whose situation, he has been told, is the warrant of his inferiority.
The struggle was over in a few seconds, and Macdonald stood free of the little fury, a red welt across his cheek, the back of his hand cut until the blood oozed through the skin in heavy black drops. Chadron had not moved a hand to interfere on either side. Only now that the foolish display of Nola’s temper was done he rocked in his saddle and shook the empty landscape with his loud, coarse laugh.
He patted his daughter on the shoulder, like a hunter rewarding a dog. Macdonald walked away from them, the only humiliation that he felt for the incident being that which he suffered for her sake.
It was not so much that a woman had debased herself to the level of a savage, although that hurt him, too, but that her blows had been the expression of the contempt in which the lords of that country held him and his kind. Bullets did not matter so much, for a man could give them back as hot as they101came. But there was no answer, as he could see it in that depressing hour, for such a feudal assertion of superiority as this.
It was to the work of breaking the hold of this hard-handed aristocracy which had risen from the grass roots in the day of its arrogant prosperity—a prosperity founded on usurpation of the rights of the weak, and upheld by murder—that he had set his soul. The need of hastening the reformation never had seemed greater to him than on that day, or more hopeless, he admitted in his heart.
For hour by hour the work ahead of him appeared to grow greater. Little could be expected, judging by the experiences of the past few days, from those who suffered most. The day of extremest pressure in their poor affairs was being hastened by the cattlemen, as Chadron’s threat had foretold. Would they when the time came to fight do so, or harness their lean teams and drive on into the west? That was the big question upon which the success or the failure of his work depended.
As he had come down from the hillside out of the sunshine and peace to meet shadow and violence, so his high spirits, hopes, and intentions seemed this bitter hour steeped in sudden gloom. In more ways than one that evening on the white river road, Alan Macdonald felt that he was afoot and alone.