They rode from the devastated fields and angled southwest across the range. Harris pointed out the calves along their course.
"Look at those chunky little youngsters," he said. "Nearly every one is good red stock. Only a scattering few that threw back to off-color shades. This grading-up process doesn't take long to show."
When some ten miles from the Three Bar he dismounted on a ridge and she joined him, listening with entire indifference to his optimistic plans.
"We're only scratched," he said. "It won't matter in the end."
"This is the end," she dissented. "The Three Bar is done."
"It's just the start," he returned. "It's the end for them! Don't you see? They staked everything on one big raid that would smash the Three Bar and discourage the rest from duplicating our move. That would give Slade a new lease of life—delay the inevitable for a few more years. They made one final attempt and lost."
"Did they lose?" she inquired. "I thought they'd won."
"They're through!" he asserted positively. "Slade is locked up. Inside of a week the sheriff would have cleaned out the Breaks. It was my fault this happened. With Slade locked up and Morrow dead it didn't occur to me that anything was planned ahead. If the albino had lived he'd never have run his neck into a noose by a raid like this. But Lang was born without brains. Slade could hire him for anything."
"Can you prove this on Slade?" she demanded. It was the first sign of interest she had shown. Deep under her numbed indifference a thought persisted,—a hope that Slade, the man who had brought about the raid, should be made to pay. Harris shook his head.
"As usual, Slade's in the clear," he said. "There's been a rumor afloat which would be considered sufficient cause for Lang's men to raid the Three Bar without other incentive."
He resumed his glowing plans for reconstruction.
"That's their last shot," he said. "We're only delayed—that's all. We lost a few fences. Posts are free for the cutting and most of the wire can be restrung. New wire is cheap. The corral poles are scattered right on the spot; only the posts broken off. We can set more posts and throw up the new corrals in two days. The homestead cabins are only charred. The old buildings at the ranch are gone. I'll put a crew in the hills getting out new logs and there'll be enough out-of-job peelers riding grub-line to rebuild the whole place. We can put up a few tents for the hands till the new bunk house is built. We've got our land. The hay is tramped flat right now but the roots aren't hurt. Next spring will show the whole flat coming up with a heavy stand of hay."
"You're a good partner, Cal," she said. "You've done your best. But the whole thing would only happen over again. Slade's too strong for us."
"Slade's through!" he asserted again. "He's locked up and when he gets out his hands will be tied. Inside of a month the law will be in the saddle for the first time in years. Public sentiment is running that way. All it ever needed was a start. Once Alden gets a grip on things, with folks behind him, he'll never lose it again. From now on you'll see every wild one cut short in his career. Folks will be busy pointing them out instead of helping them cover it up."
He painted the future of the Three Bar as the foremost outfit within a hundred miles, but her mind was busy with a future so entirely different from the one he portrayed that she scarcely grasped his words. She felt a vague sense of relief that there was no decision for her to make. It had been made for her and against her will, but it was done. Always she had heard her parents speak of the day when they should go back home; and she had always felt that the day would come when she too would live in the place from which they had come,—with frequent trips back to the range. The love for the ranch had delayed her departure from year to year. But now the old familiar buildings were gone and there were no ties to hold her here, or even to call her back once she was gone.
Harris rose and pointed, rousing her from her abstraction. Down in the valley below them filed a long line of dusty horsemen. Behind them came two men wrangling a pack string carrying equipment for a long campaign.
"There is the law!" he said. "That's what I brought you here to see. It's what we've been waiting for. That is the first outfit of its sort ever to ride these hills. There have been gangs organized by one brand or another that rode out and imposed justice of their own, according to their own ideas—and the next day perpetrated some injustice against men whose ideas were opposed to theirs. But that little procession stands for organized law!"
She turned and looked behind her as her ear caught the thud of hoofs and jangle of equipment. The Three Bar men were just topping the ridge.
They had caught up a number of the horses released from the pasture lot by the stampede. Calico and her own little horse, Papoose, were among them. Waddles and Moore brought up the rear with a pack train loaded with the bed rolls saved from the bunk-house fire.
Harris knew that action, not inaction was the best outlet for her energies, temporarily smothered by the shock of the raid. It was not in her nature to sit with folded hands among the ruins of the ranch and patiently wait for news.
"I thought maybe you'd like to go," he said. "The jaunt will do you good."
She showed the first sign of interest she had evidenced.
"And we're going to the Breaks," she stated.
"That's where," he said. "We'll order them to give up and stand trial. They won't. Then we'll clean them out. Hunt them down like rats! We've only been waiting for folks to wake up to the fact that they were sick of having the country run by men like Slade and harassed by the wild bunch—and till after we'd picked up Slade. The way it's transpired we'd maybe have done better to ride over a week ago."
The little band in the valley was drawing near. She recognized Carp, Bentley and another Slade man riding with the sheriff at their head.
"What's Bentley doing there?" she asked.
"One of Carp's men," Harris said. "If any of them get away from us Carp will hound them down. He wears the U. S. badge and won't be stopped by any feeling about crossing the Utah or Idaho lines. Rustling is of no interest to him. That's the sheriff's job. But Carp will round them up for obstructing the homestead laws."
The Three Bar men came up and halted. Harris and the girl changed mounts and led their men down to join the file of riders below. As she rode she speculated as to Carlos Deane's sensations if he could but know that she rode at the head of thirty men to raid the stronghold Harris had once pointed out to him from the rims.
For hours they rode at a shuffling trot that covered the miles. It was well after sundown when they halted in a sheltered valley. Waddles cooked a meal over an open fire. Bed rolls were spread and the men were instantly asleep. Three hours before sunup the cook was once more busy round a fire. The men slept on, undisturbed by the sounds, but when he issued the summons to rise they rolled out. In a space of five minutes every man was eating his meal; for they were possessed of that characteristic which marks only the men who live strenuously and much in the open,—the ability to fall instantly asleep after a hard day and to wake as abruptly, every faculty alert with the opening of their eyes.
The meal was bolted. The men detailed to guard the horses hazed them into a rope corral. Saddles were hastily cinched on and the men rode off through the gloom, leaving Waddles and three others to pack and follow later in the day. Each man lashed a generous lunch on his saddle before riding off.
They held a stiff trot and in an hour out from camp they struck rough going, the choppy nature of the country announcing that they were in the edge of the Breaks. The horses slid down into cut-bank washes and bad-land cracks, following the bottoms to some feasible point of ascent in the opposite wall. Daylight found them twenty miles from camp and the horses were breathing hard. They turned into a coulee threaded by a well-worn trail. Three miles along this Bentley turned to the right up a branching gulch with eight men. Another mile and Carp led a similar detachment off to the left. Billie rode with the sheriff and Harris at the head of the rest, holding to the beaten trail.
"They had hours the start of us," Harris said. "They'd catch up fresh horses on the range and keep on till they got in sometime in the night."
He motioned to Billie.
"You fall back," he said. The men had drawn their rifles from the scabbards. "They never did post a guard. It wouldn't occur to Lang that such a force could be mustered and start out short of a month. If he thought so they'd be out of here and scattered instead of having a lookout along the trail. But there's just a chance. So for a little piece you'd better bring up the rear."
She started to dissent but the sheriff seconded Harris's advice.
"You move along back, Billie," he said. He patted her shoulder and smiled. "I'm a-running this layout and if you don't mind the old sheriff he'll have to picket you."
She nodded and pulled Papoose out of the trail till the others filed by, riding with Horne in rear of the rest.
The party halted while Harris dismounted to examine the trail. It was hard-packed but the scant signs showed that shod horses had come in since any had gone out.
"At least, there's some of them back," he said. "Likely all."
"Lang is busy gloating over the fact that the Three Bar is sacked," Alden said. "Figuring that the whole country will be afraid of him now and that his friends will stand by—without a thought that his neck will maybe get stretched a foot long before night."
Harris turned up a side pocket and the men waited while he and the sheriff climbed a ridge on foot to investigate. Harris motioned to the girl.
"Come along up where you can see," he said and she followed them up the ridge. Two hundred yards from the horses they came out on a crest which afforded a view of the basin that sheltered Lang's stockade.
From behind a sage-clump Harris trained his glasses on the group a mile out across the shallow basin. Smoke rose from the chimney of the main building. Two men stood before a teepee near the stockade. There were two other tents inside the structure, with a number of men moving about them. Three sat on the ground with their backs against the log walls of the main house. Thirty or more horses fed in a pasture lot and a little band of eight or ten stood huddled together inside the stockade at the far end from the tents.
He handed his glasses to the girl.
"We'll be starting," he said. "By the time we get fixed the rest will be closing in. You stay here and watch the whole thing."
"I'm going along," she said.
The sheriff demurred.
"It will be dirty business down there—once we start," he said. "Business for men; and you're a better man than most of us, girl; but you surely didn't reckon that Cal and me would let you go careening down in gunshot of that hornet's nest."
"I'm as good a shot as there is in the hills," she said. "And it was my ranch they burned."
The sheriff shoved back his hat and pushed his fingers through his mop of gray hair.
"Fact," he confessed. "Every word. But there's swarms of men in this country—and such a damn scattering few of girls that we just can't take the risk. That's how it is. If you don't promise to stay out of it we'll have to detail a couple of the boys to ride guard on you till it's over with."
She knew that the other men would back Harris and Alden in their verdict. She nodded and watched them turn back toward the horses. She wanted to lead her men down in a wild charge on the stockade, shooting into it as she rode, avenging the sack of the Three Bar in a smashing fight.
But there was nothing spectacular in the attack of Harris and the sheriff. They went about it as if hunting vermin, cautiously and systematically, taking every possible advantage of the enemy with the least possible risk to their men.
An hour after the two men had left her she saw a figure off to the right. She trained the glasses on it and saw that it was Alden moving toward the buildings. She swept the glasses round the edge of the circular basin. From all sides, from the mouth of every coulee that opened into it, dark specks were converging upon the stockade. Some of them stood erect, others crouched, while a few sprawled flat and crawled for short distances before rising and moving on.
From her point of vantage it seemed that those round the buildings must see them as clearly as she did herself; but she knew they were keeping well out of sight, taking advantage of every concealing wave of ground and all inequalities of surface. The advance was slower as they closed in on the stockade. There was a sudden commotion among the men at the buildings. They were moving swiftly under cover. Some of the attacking force had been seen. The majority of the rustlers took to the stockade. Four ran into the main cabin.
It was as if she gazed upon the activities of battling ants, the whole game spread out in the field of her glasses. There came a lull in the action and she knew that the sheriff had raised his voice to summon them to come out without their guns and go back as prisoners to stand trial for every crime under the sun.
Not a shot had been fired. One after another she picked up the men with her glasses. Occasionally one moved, hitching himself forward to some point which afforded a better view. One or two knelt in the bottom of shallow draws, peering from behind some sheltering bush. Inside the stockade she could see Lang's men kneeling or flattened on the ground as they gazed through cracks in the walls.
She made out Harris, crouching in a draw. A thin haze of smoke spurted from his position. Three similar puffs showed along the face of the stockade. Then the sounds of the shots drifted to her,—faint, snappy reports. Harris had dropped flat and shifted his position the instant he fired. A dozen shots answered the smoke-puffs along the stockade.
Throughout the next half-hour there was not a shot fired in the flat; no general bombardment, no wild shooting, but guerilla warfare where every man held his fire for a definite human target. A man shifted his position in the stockade, raised to peer from a hole breast high, and she saw him pitch down on the ground before the sound of the shot reached her. One of her men had noted the darkening of the crack and had searched him out with a rifle shot. Three shots answered it from the main cabin.
The thud of hoofs on the trail below drew her eyes that way. Waddles was riding out into the basin. He had brought the pack string up to some point near at hand and deserted it to the care of the others while he rode on ahead to join in the fight. He was almost within gunshot of the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze. She watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot. He had discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white shirt and overalls giving him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a shallow ravine. The figures were small from distance, even when viewed through the glasses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and lessening the personal element and the grim reality of the scene. Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest.
Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of gravel round it. The man who had fired the shot went down as the sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown.
She presently noted one of her men sitting under a sheltering bank and eating his lunch. She looked at her watch; it was after three,—the day more than half gone and less than a hundred shots had been fired. Five men were down in the stockade.
The sun was sinking and the higher points along the west edge of the basin were sending long shadows out across the flats before there was further action except for an occasional shifting of positions. Those remaining alive in the stockade were saddling the bunch of horses kept inside. These were led close under the fence on her side where she could no longer see them.
The shadows lengthened rapidly and her view through the glasses was beginning to blur when the gates of the stockade swung back and five horses dashed out, running at top speed under the urge of the spurs. A rider leaned low upon the neck of each horse and they scattered wide as they fanned out across the basin, a wild stampede for safety, every man for himself.
She saw one man lurch sidewise and slip to the ground; another straightened in the saddle, swung for two jumps, and slid off backwards across the rump of his mount. She saw the great striped bug which was Waddles rise to his knees in the path of a third. The rider veered his mount and swung from the saddle, clinging along the far side of the running horse. Then man and horse went down together and neither rose. Waddles had shot straight through the horse and reached the mark on the other side. The shooting ceased when six shots had been fired. Four riderless horses were careening round the basin. Five hits out of six, she reflected; perhaps six straight hits.
The stockade was empty, leaving only the four in the house to be accounted for. The dark specks in the brush were working closer to the house, effectually blocking escape. Then she could no longer make them out. The building showed only as a darker blot in the obscurity. A tiny point of light attracted her eye. It grew and spread. She knew that one of her men had crawled up under cover of night and fired the house. It was now but a question of minutes, but the sight oppressed her. She thought of the burning buildings on the Three Bar and rose to make her way back to the pocket where the horses had been left in the care of a deputy.
"It will be over in an hour," she told the horse guard.
All through the day she had scarcely moved and she was tired. The hours of inactivity had proved more wearing than a day in the saddle. Harris and the sheriff came in with their detail.
There were no prisoners.
"So they wouldn't give up even when they was burnt out," the horse guard commented. "I thought maybe a few would march out and surrender."
"I'd sort of hoped we'd have one or two left over so we could put on a trial," the sheriff said. "There was three come out. But the light was poor and all. Maybe they did aim to surrender. It's hard to say. But if they did—why, some of the Three Bar boys read the signs wrong. Anyway, there won't be any trial."
They rode to the sheltered box canyon where Waddles had left the pack train. A little later Bentley's men rode up and five minutes behind them came Carp with the rest. The bed rolls were spread among the stunted cedars on the floor of the canyon and all hands turned in. At daylight the long return journey to the Three Bar was commenced. The horses were tired and the back trip was slow. They camped for the night twenty miles out from the ranch and before noon of the next day the sheriff and the marshals had split off with their men, leaving the Three Bar crew to ride the short intervening space to the ranch alone.
As she neared the edge of the Crazy Loop valley the girl dreaded the first glimpse of the pillaged ranch. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder at the speed with which Harris had planned and executed the return raid while the Three Bar still burned.
"How did you get word to them all?" she asked. "Did you have it all planned before?"
"It was Carp," he said. "One of Lang's men rode down to inquire for Morrow and told Carp the cows were gathered for the run and held near the Three Bar. They figured Carp was a pal of Morrow's and all right. It was near morning then. Carp sent Bentley fanning for Coldriver to see if the sheriff was back and to bring out the posse if he hadn't turned up. He started out for the Three Bar himself. The run was under way when he came in sight so he cut over and headed the mule teams at the forks and turned them back, then kept on after the boys at Brill's. Sent word to me by Evans to meet them where we did."
She did not hear the latter part of his explanation for they had reached the edge of the valley and she looked down upon the ruins of her ranch.
"Now I'm ready to go," she said. "I'll go and see what Judge Colton wants."
"He wanted you to get away before anything like this occurred," Harris said. "I knew that maybe we'd have tough going for a while at some critical time and wanted you to miss all of that—to come back and find the Three Bar booming along without having been through all the grief. So I wrote him to urge you to come."
"Well, I'm going now," she said. "I don't need to be urged."
Three of the homesteaders had been detailed to stay at the ranch. They were putting up a temporary fence across the lower end to hold range stock back from the trampled crops until a permanent one could be built and linked up with the side fences which still stood intact. She showed no interest in this. The sight below turned her weak and sick. She wanted but to get away from it all.
Harris pointed as they rode down the slope. The little cabin that old Bill Harris had first erected on the Three Bar, and which had later sheltered the Warrens when they came into possession of the brand, stood solid and unharmed among the blackened ruins which hemmed it in on all sides.
"Look, girl!" he exclaimed triumphantly.
"Look at that little house. The Three Bar was started with that! We have as much as our folks started with—and more. They even had to build that. We'll start where our folks did and grow."
Harris sat on a baggage truck and regarded the heap of luggage somberly. Way off in the distance a dark blot of smoke marked the location of the onrushing train which would take the Three Bar girl away.
"Some day you'll be wanting to come back, old partner," he predicted hopefully.
Billie shook her head. There is a certain relief which floods the heart when the worst has passed. Looking forward and anticipating the possible ruin of the Three Bar, she had thought such a contingency would end her interest in life and she had resolutely refused to look beyond it into the future. Now that it was wrecked in reality she found that she looked forward with a faint interest to what the future held in store for her,—that it was the past in which her interest was dead.
"Not dead, girl; only dormant," Harris said, when she remarked upon this fact. "Like a seed in frozen ground. In the spring it will come to life and sprout. The Three Bar isn't hurt. We're in better shape than ever before and a clear field out in front; for the country is cleaned up and the law is clamped on top."
She honestly tried to rouse a spark of interest deep within her, some ray of enthusiasm for the future of the Three Bar. But there was no response. She assured herself again that the old brand which had meant so much to her meant less than nothing now. That part of her was dead.
The trail of smoke was drawing near and there was a rhythmic clicking along the rails. Harris leaned and kissed her.
"Just once for luck," he said, and slipped from his seat on the truck as the train roared in. It halted with a screech of brakes and he handed her up the steps.
"Good-by, little fellow," he said. "I'll see you next round-up time."
As the train slid away from the station she looked from her window and saw him riding up the single street on the big paint-horse. The train cleared the edge of the little town and passed the cattle chute. A long white line through the sage marked the course of the Coldriver Trail. Three wagons, each drawn by four big mules, moved toward the cluster of buildings which comprised the town, the freighters on their way to haul out materials for the rebuilding of the ranch.
The work was going on but she no longer had a share in it. She was looking ahead and planning a future in which the Three Bar played no part.
Deane was with Judge Colton, her father's old friend, to meet her at the station. The news of the Three Bar fight had preceded her and the press had given it to the world, including her part of it. As they rode toward the Colton home she told the Judge she had come to stay and Deane was content. After the strenuous days she had just passed through she needed a long period of rest, he reflected; but the older man smiled when he suggested this.
"What she needs now is action," he said. "And no rest at all. If it was me I'd try to wear her down instead of resting her up—keep her busy from first to last. Cal Warren's girl isn't the sit-around type."
Deane acted on this and no day passed without his having planned a part of it to help fill her time. Her interest in the new life was genuine and she was conscious of no active regret at parting from the old. It was so different as to seem part of another world. The people she met, their mode of life, their manner of speech; all were foreign to the customs of the range. And this very dissimilarity kept her interest alive until she grew to feel that she belonged.
All through the fall and early winter she had scarcely an idle hour. Her days here were almost as fully occupied as they had been before. And in the late winter, after having visited other school friends who lived farther east, she found herself anticipating the return to the Colton home as eagerly as always in the past she had looked forward to seeing the Three Bar after a long period away from it.
The grip of winter was receding and a few of the hardier trees were putting out buds when she returned. Every evening Deane was with her and together they planned the next, as once she and Harris had planned before her fireplace in the old ranch house. For the first time in her life she was glad to be sheltered and pampered as were other girls. Gliding servants anticipated her wishes and carried them out. But with it all there was a growing restlessness within her,—a vague dissatisfaction for which she could not account. She groped for an answer but the analysis could not be expressed or definitely cleared in her mind.
She sat in the Colton library waiting for Deane to come and take her to a lakeside clubhouse for the evening. Tiny leaves showed on the trees and the lawn was a smooth velvet green.
Slade's words of the long ago recurred to her.
"A soft front lawn to range in," she quoted aloud. The reason for her restlessness came with the words.
Deane planned with her of evenings but the planning was all of play. No word of work crept into it. If only he would accept her as wholly into that part of his life as he did into the rest. She suddenly felt that he was excluding her from something it was her right to share. Their planning together was not constructive but something which led nowhere, a restless, hectic rush for amusements which she enjoyed but which could not make up the whole of her life. Always she had said that men went to extremes and made of their wives either drudges or little tinsel queens. They never followed the middle course and made them full partners through thick and thin.
And suddenly she longed to sit for just one evening before the fire and plan real work with Cal Harris. He had been the one man she had known who had asked that she work with him, instead of insisting that she work for him,—or that he should work for her. She had drifted along, expecting that that same state of affairs would go on indefinitely, believing that he filled the void left by old Cal Warren. But now she knew he held that place he had created for himself. They had worked together and she had deserted the sinking ship to play the part of the tinsel queen.
The men would be just in from the horse round-up and breaking out the remuda, preparatory to starting after the calves. She pictured Waddles bawling the summons to feed from the cook-house door. She was conscious of a flare—half of resentment, half of apprehension—toward Harris for not having sent a word of affairs at the ranch.
"There's millions of miles of sage just outside," she quoted. "And millions of cows—and girls." Perhaps he had gone in search of them. Perhaps, after all, he had found that the road to the outside was not really closed as he had once told her it was.
Judge Colton entered the room and interrupted her reverie by handing her a paper. In the first black headline she saw Slade's name and Harris's; an announcement of the last chapter of the Three Bar war.
The first line of the article stated that Slade, the cattle king, had been released. There was insufficient proof to convict on any count. She felt a curious little shiver of fear for Harris with Slade once more at large. The article retold the old tale of the fight and portrayed Slade, on his release, viewing the range which he had once controlled and finding a squatter family on every available ranch site.
She had a flash of sympathy for Slade as she thought his sensations must have been similar to her own when she had looked upon the ruins of the Three Bar. But this was blotted out by the knowledge that he had only met the same treatment he had handed to so many others; that he had dropped into the trap he had built for her. She found no real sympathy for Slade,—only fear for Harris since Slade was freed. The old sense of responsibility for her brand had been worn too long to be shed at will. She knew that now.
"I suppose you'll be surprised to hear that I'm going back," she said.
Her father's old friend smiled across at her and puffed his pipe.
"Surprised!" he said. "Why, I've known all along you'd be going back before long. I could have told you that when you stepped off the train."
He left her alone with Deane when the younger man arrived. She plunged into her subject at once.
"I'm sorry," she said. "But I'm going home. I'm not cut out for this—not for long at one time. In ten days they'll be rounding up the calves and I'll have to be there. I want to smell the round-up fire and slip my twine on a Three Bar calf; to throw my leg across a horse and ride, and feel the wind tearing past. I'm longing to watch the boys topping off bad ones in the big corral and jerking Three Bar steers. It will always be like that with me. So this is good-by."
Four days later, in the early evening, the stage pulled into Coldriver with a single passenger. The boys were in from a hundred miles around for one last spree before round-up time. As the stage rolled down the single street the festivities were in full swing. From one lighted doorway came the blare of a mechanical piano accompanied by the scrape of feet; the sound of drunken voices raised in song issued from the next; the shrill laughter of a dance-hall girl, the purr of the ivory ball and the soft clatter of chips, the ponies drowsing at the hitch rails the full length of the street, the pealing yelp of some over-enthusiastic citizen whose night it was to howl; all these were evidences of the wide difference between her present surroundings and those of the last eight months. She gazed eagerly out of the stage window. It was good to get back.
Both the driver and the shotgun guard who rode beside him were new men on the job since she had left and neither of them knew the identity of their passenger. As the stage neared the rambling log hotel where she would put up for the night a compact group of riders swung down the street. Her heart seemed to stop as she recognized the big paint-horse at their head. She had not fully realized how much she longed to see Cal Harris. As they swept past she recognized man after man in the light that streamed from the doorways and dimly illuminated the wide street.
Instead of dismounting in a group they suddenly split up, as if at a given signal, scattering the length of the block and dismounting singly. There was something purposeful in this act and a vague apprehension superseded the rush of gladness she had experienced with the first unexpected view of the Three Bar crew. Men who stood on the board sidewalks turned hastily inside the open doors as they glimpsed the riders, spreading the news that the Three Bar had come to town. The driver pulled up in front of the one hotel.
"It'll come off right now," he said. "Slade's in town."
"Sure," the guard replied. "Why else would Harris ride in at night like this unless in answer to Slade's threat to shoot him down on sight? Get the girl inside."
The reason for the scattering was now clear to her. Slade, on his release, had announced that he would kill Harris on sight whenever he appeared in town. Slade had many friends. The Three Bar men were scattered the length of the street to enforce fair play.
The guard opened the door and motioned her out but she shook her head.
"I'm going to stay here," she asserted.
Her answer informed him of the fact that she was no casual visitor but one who knew the signs and would insist on seeing it through. He nodded and shut the door.
Harris had dismounted at the far end of the block and was strolling slowly down the board sidewalk on the opposite side. Groups of men packed the doorways, each one striving to appear unconcerned, as if his presence there was an accident instead of being occasioned by knowledge that something of interest would soon transpire. A man she knew for a Slade rider moved out to the edge of the sidewalk across the street from Harris. She saw the lumbering form of Waddles edging up beside him. Other Three Bar boys were watching every man who showed a disposition to detach himself from the groups in the doors. The blare of the piano and all sounds of revelry had hushed.
The girl felt the clutch of stark fear at her heart. She had come too late. Harris was to meet Slade. It seemed that she must die with him if he should pass out before she could speak to him again and tell him she was back. She had a wild desire to run to him,—at least to lean from the window and call out to him to mount Calico and ride away. But she knew he would not. She was frontier bred. Even the knowledge that she was in town might unsteady him now. She sat without a move and the driver and guard outside supposed her merely a curious on-looker interested in the scene.
"A hundred on Harris," the driver offered.
The guard grunted a refusal.
"I'd bet that way myself," he said.
From this she knew that the two men were hoping Harris would be the one to survive; but the fact that their proffered bets backed their sentiments was no proof that they felt the conviction of their desire. She knew the men of their breed. No matter how small the chance, their money would inevitably be laid on the side of their wishes, never against them, as if the wagering of a long shot was proof of their confidence and might in some way exercise a favorable influence on the outcome. No man had ever stood against Slade. She noted Harris's gun. He carried it with the same awkward sling as of old, on the left side in front with the butt to the right.
"Fifty on Slade," a voice offered from the doorway of the hotel. The guard started for the spot but the bet was snapped up by another. Wild fighting rage swept through her at the thought that to all these men it was but a sporting event.
Her eyes never once left Harris as he came down the street. When almost abreast of the stage Slade stepped from a doorway twenty feet in before him and stopped in his tracks. Harris turned on one heel and stood with his left side quartering toward Slade,—the old pose she remembered so well. There was a tense quiet the length of the street.
"Those you hire do poor work from behind," Harris said. "Maybe you sometimes take a chance yourself and work from in front." His thumb was hooked in the opening of his shirt just above the butt of his gun.
Slade held a cigarette in his right hand and raised it slowly to his lips. He removed it and flicked the ash from the end, then inspected the results and snapped it again,—and the downward move of his wrist was carried through in a smooth sweep for his gun. It flashed into his hand but his knees sagged under him as a forty-five slug struck him an inch above the buckle of his belt. Even as he toppled forward he fired, and Harris's gun barked again. Then the Three Bar men were vaulting to their saddles. Evans careened down the street, leading the paint-horse, and within thirty seconds after Slade's first move for his gun a dozen riders were turning the corner on the run. Before the spectators had time to realize that it was over, the Three Bar men were gone. Slade had many friends in town.
The girl had seen Harris's draw, merely a single pull from left to right and by his quartering pose the gun had been trained on Slade at the instant it cleared the holster; not one superfluous move, even to the straightening of his wrist. The driver's voice reached her.
"Fastest draw in the world for the few that can use it," he said.
The guard opened the door. The girl was sitting with her head bowed in her hands.
"Don't take it that way, Ma'am," he counseled. "He was a hard one—Slade."
But he had misread his signs. She felt no regret for Slade, only a wave of thankfulness, so powerful as almost to unnerve her, over Harris's escape, untouched. She accused herself of callousness but the spring of her sympathy, usually so ready, seemed dry as dust when she would have wasted a few drops on Slade.
The next day, in the late afternoon, Harris looked up and saw a chap-clad rider on the edge of the valley. She had ridden over unannounced on a horse she had borrowed from Brill. She answered the wave of his hat and urged the horse down the slope. He met her at the mouth of the lane and together they walked back to the new buildings of the ranch. The men breaking horses in the new corrals were the same old hands. The same old Waddles presided over the new cook shack. Her old things, rescued from the fire, were arranged in the living room of the new house. A row of new storerooms and the shop stood on the site of the old. And in the midst of all the improvements the old cabin first erected on the Three Bar stood protected by a picket fence on which a few vines were already beginning to climb.
"It didn't take long to throw them up, with all hands working, along in the winter when there wasn't much else to do," he said.
After the men had quit work to greet the returning Three Bar boss she went over every detail of the new house. The big living room and fireplace were modeled closely along the lines of her old quarters; heads and furs were on the walls, pelts and Indian rugs on the floors. Running water had been piped down from a sidehill spring. The new house was modernized. Then Harris saddled Calico and Papoose and they rode down to the fields.
As they turned into the lane they heard the twang of Waddles's guitar from the cook shack, the booming voice raised in song in mid-afternoon, a thing heretofore unheard of in the annals of Three Bar life.
"There'll be one real feast to-night," Harris prophesied. "Waddles will spread himself."
They rode past the meadow, covered with a knee-deep stand of alfalfa hay.
"It was only tramped down," he said. "She came up in fine shape this spring. We'll put up a thousand tons of hay."
He held straight on past the meadow, turned off below the lower fence and angled southwest across the range. The calves and yearlings along their route gave proof that the grading-up of the Three Bar herds was already having its effect. Ninety per cent. were straight red stock with only a few throwbacks to off-color strains. The two spoke but little and near sunset they rode out and dismounted on the ridge from which, almost a year before, they had viewed the first move of organized law in the Coldriver strip.
A white-topped wagon came toward them up the valley along the same route followed by the file of dusty riders on that other day. A woman held the reins over the team and a curly-haired youngster jostled about on the seat by her side. A man wrangled a nondescript drove of horses and cows in the rear.
"That's the way we both came into this country first, you and I," Harris said. "Just like that little shaver on the seat."
"Will they find a place to settle?" she asked, with a sudden hope that the newcomers would find a suitable site for a home.
"Maybe not close around here," he said. "Most of the good sites you can get water on are picked up. But they'll find a place either here or somewhere else a little further on."
He slipped an arm about her shoulders.
"It's been right lonesome planning without a little partner to talk it all over with at night," he said. "Have you come back for keeps to help me make the Three Bar the best outfit in three States? I can't hold down that job alone."
She nodded and leaned against him.
"That's what they wanted—old Bill and Cal," she said. "But it's nice that we want it too. I've come for keeps; and the road to the outside is closed."
They stood and watched the sun pitch over the far edge of the world; and down in the valley below them the hopeful squatters were looking for a place to camp.