Bruce Standing, a man of that strong, dominant, and self-centred character which is prone to disregard the feelings of others, held both Lynette Brooke and Babe Deveril his prey. But Jim Taggart, whose professional business it appeared to be to bring in the girl, and whose sore and aching head would not for many a day lose record of the fact that it had been Babe Deveril who had forcibly put him out of the running, had his own human purposes to serve, and set his nose to the trail like a bloodhound. And yet, with these two bending every energy to run them to earth, the two fugitives plunging headlong into the friendly darkness were for the moment utterly lost to those who plunged into the same darkness and in the same headlong style after them.
Hand in hand, chance-caught, and running swiftly, Lynette and Deveril were in time to escape the first of their pursuers, a crowd of men who got in one another's way, and who were too lately from the lighted room of the house to see clearly outside. Behind Gallup's House was the little creek which supplied the town with its water; it wound here across a tiny flat, an open space save for its big cottonwoods. The two, knowing that in the first heat of the chase opening at their heels they were running from death, sped like two winged shadows merged into one. After a hundred yards they hurled themselves into breast-high bushes, a thick tangle—a growth which, in such a mad rush as theirs, was no less formidable than a rock wall. They cast quick glances backward; a score of men—appearing, in their widely spread formation and from their cries and the racket ofscuffling boots, to be a hundred—shut off all retreat and made hopeless any thought to turn to right or left.
"Down!" whispered Deveril. "Crawl for it! And quiet!"
On hands and knees they crawled into the thicket. Already hands and faces were scratched, but they did not feel the scratches; already their clothes were torn in many places. In a wild scramble they went on, squeezing through narrow spaces, lying flat, wriggling, getting to hands and knees again. And all the while with nerves jumping at each breaking of a twig. It was only the shouting voices and the pounding boots behind them that drowned in their pursuers' ears the sounds they made.
"Still!" admonished Babe Deveril in a whisper.
And very still they lay, side by side, panting, in the heart of the thicket. A voice called out, not twenty paces behind them:
"They're in there!" And another voice, louder than the first and more insistent, they thanked their stars, boomed:
"No, no! They skirted the brush, off to the left, beating it for the open! After 'em, boys!" And still other voices shouted and, it would seem, every man of them had glimpsed his own tricking shadow and had his own wild opinion.
Thus, for a brief enough moment, the pursuit was baffled.
"Slow and quiet does it!" It was for the third time Babe Deveril's whisper, his lips close to her hair. "I see an opening. Follow close."
Lynette, still lying face down, lifted herself a little way upon her two hands and looked after him.
"String 'em up!" a voice was calling. It was like the voice of a devil down in hell, full of mob malice. Sheshivered. "They're murdering devils. String 'em up!"
"Catch 'em first, you fool," called another voice. Again pounding boots and ... far more sinister sound ... snapping brush where a man was breaking his way straight into the thicket.
Like some grotesque, curiously shaped snake, Babe Deveril was writhing along, ever deeper into the brush tangle, ahead of her. She began crawling after him. Voices everywhere. And now dogs barking. A hundred dogs, it seemed to her taut nerves. She knew dogs; she knew how they went into a frenzy of excited joy when it was a question of a quarry, any quarry; she knew the unfailing certainty of the dog's scent. She began hurrying, struggling to get to her knees again....
"Sh! Down!"
She dropped down again and lay flat, scarce breathing. But once more she saw the vague blot of Deveril's flat form wriggling on ahead of her, almost gone now. It was so dark! She threw herself forward; she threw her arm out and her hand brushed his boot. It was a wonderful thing, to feel that boot. She was not alone. She began again following him; dry, broken, and thorny twigs snared at her; they caught in her clothes and in the laces of her boots; they tore at her skin. Yet this time she was as silent a shadow as the shadow in front of her. On and on and on, on endlessly through an eternity of darkness shot through with dim star glimmerings, and pierced with horrible voices, she went. She came out into an opening; she stood up. She was alone! And those voices and the yelping of dogs and the scuffling of heavy, insensate, merciless boots....
A hard, sudden hand caught her by the wrist. She whipped back, a scream shaping her lips. But in time she clapped a hand over her mouth. She was not alone; this was Babe Deveril, standing upright ... waitingfor her! She brought her hand down and clasped it, tight, over his hand.
"Run for it again," he whispered. "Off that way ... to the right. If we can once get among those trees...."
Side by side, their hearts leaping, they ran. Gradually, but steadily, the harsh noises grew fainter behind them. They gained the fringe of trees; they splashed through the creek; they skirted a second tangle of brush and rounded the crest of a hill. And steadily and swiftly now the sounds of pursuit lessened behind them.
"And now," muttered Deveril, for the first time forsaking his cautious whisper, "if we use what brains God gave us, we are free of that hell pack."
"If they caught up with us?" she questioned him sharply.
"Most likely we'd both be swinging from a cottonwood in ten minutes! There's no sanity in that crowd; it's all mob spirit. If it is true that both Bruce Standing and Jim Taggart are dead.... Well, then, Lynette Brooke, this is no place for you and me to-night! Come on!..."
"Babe Deveril," she returned, and now it was her fingers tightening about his, "I'll never forget that you stood by me to-night!"
Babe Deveril, being himself and no other, a man reckless and unafraid and eminently gay, and, so God made him, full of lilting appreciation of the fair daughters of Eve, felt even at this moment her touch, like so much warm quicksilver trickling through him from head to foot. He gave her, in answer, a hearty pressure of the hand and his low, guarded laughter, saying lightly:
"You interfere with the regular beating of a man's heart, Lynette Brooke! But now you'll never remember to-night for any great measure of hours, unless westep along. They'll hunt us all night. Come, beautiful lady!"
Even then she marvelled at him. He, like herself, was tense and on thequi vive; yet she sensed his utter fearlessness. She knew that if they caught him and put a rope about his neck and led him under a cottonwood branch, he would pay them back to the last with his light, ringing laughter.
In this first wild rush they had had no time to think over what had just happened; no time to cast ahead beyond each step deeper into the night. Where they were going, what they were going to do—these were issues to confront them later; now they were concerned with no consideration other than haste and silence and each other's company. To-night's section of destiny made of them, without any reasoning and merely through an instinctive attraction, trail fellows. True, both carried blurred pictures of what had occurred back there at the Gallup House so few minutes ago, but these were but pictures, and as yet gave rise to no logical speculation. As in a vision, she saw Timber-Wolf sagging and falling as he strove to slew about; Deveril saw Taggart rushing in at her heels, and then going down in a heap as a revolver was flung in his face. Only dully at present were they concerned with the query whether these two men were really dead. When one runs for his life through the woods in a dark night, he has enough to do to avoid limbs and tree trunks and keep on going.
Big Pine occupied the heart of a little upland flat. In ten minutes Lynette and Deveril had traversed the entire stretch of partially level land, and felt the ground begin to pitch sharply under foot. Here was a sudden steep slope leading down into a rugged ravine; their sensation was that of plunging over the brink of some direful precipice, feeling at every instant that they wereabout to go tumbling into an abyss. They were forced to go more slowly, sliding on their heels, ploughing through patches of soil, stumbling across flinty areas.
"Down we go, as straight as we can," said Deveril. "And up on the other side as straight as we can. Then we'll be in a bit of forest land where the devil himself couldn't find us on a night like this.... How are you standing the rough-stuff?"
It was the first time that he had given any indication of realizing that her girl's body might not be equal to the work which they were taking upon them. Swiftly she made her answer, saying lightly, despite her labored breathing:
"Fine. This is nothing."
"If I hadn't forgotten my hat ... among other things," he chuckled, "I'd take it off to you right now, Lynette Brooke!"
They paused and stood a moment in the gloom about the base of a big boulder, listening. Now and then a man shouted; dogs still barked. But the sounds were appreciably fainter, now that they had started down the steeply pitching slope into the ravine.
"We can get away from them to-night," she said. "But to-morrow, when it is light?"
"We'll see. For one thing, a chase like this always loses some of its fine enthusiasm after the first spurt. For another, even if they did pick us up to-morrow, they would have had time to cool off a bit; a mob can't stay hot overnight. But give us a full night's head-start, and I've a notion we've seen the last of them. Ready?"
"Always ready!"
Again they hurried on, straight down into the great cleft through the mountains, swerving into brief détours only for upheaved piles of boulders or for an occasional brushy tangle. In twenty minutes they weredown in the bed of the ravine, and splashing through a little trickle of water; Lynette stooped and drank, while Deveril stood listening; again, climbing now, they went on. The farther side of the cañon was as steep as the one they had come down, and it was tedious labor in the dark to make their way; at times they zigzagged one way and another to lessen the sheerness of their path. And frequently now they stopped and drank deep draughts of the clear mountain air.
Silence shut down about them, ruffled only by the soft wind stirring across the mountain ridges. It was not that they were so soon out of ear-shot of Big Pine; rather, this sudden lull meant that their pursuers, done with the first moments of blind excitement, were now gathering their wits and thinking coolly ... and planning. They would be taking to horseback soon; scouting this way and that, organizing and throwing out their lines like a great net. By now some one man, perhaps Young Gallup, had taken charge and was directing them. The two fugitives, senses sharpened, understood, and again hastened on. They had not won to any degree of security, and felt with quickened nerves the full menace of this new, sinister silence.
Onward and upward they labored, until at last they gained a less steeply sloping timber belt, which stretched close under the peak of the ridge. They walked more swiftly now; breathing was easier; there were more and wider open spaces among the larger, more generously spaced tree trunks.
"We'll strike into the Buck Valley road in a minute now," said Deveril. "Then we'll have easy going...."
"And will leave tracks that they'll see in the morning!"
"Of course. Any fool ought to have thought of that," he muttered, ashamed that it had been she instead of himself who had foreseen the danger.
So they hearkened to the voice of caution and paralleled the road, keeping a dozen or a score of paces to its side, and often tempted, because of its comparative smoothness and the difficult brokenness of the mountainside over which they elected to travel, to yield utterly to its inviting voice. They turned back and glimpsed the twinkling lights of Big Pine; they lost the lights as they forged on; they found them again, grown fainter and fewer and farther away.
"Can you go on walking this way all night?" he asked her once.
"All night, if we have to," she told him simply.
They tramped along in silence, their boots rising and falling regularly. The first tenseness, since human nerves will remain taut only so long, had passed. They had time for thought now, both before and after. Mentally each was reviewing all that had occurred to-night and, building theoretically upon those happenings, was casting forward into the future. The present was a path of hazard, and surely the future lay shut in by black shadows. Yet both of them were young, and youth is the time of golden hopes, no matter how drearily embraced by stony facts. And youth, in both of them, despite the difference of sex, was of the same order: a time of wild blood; youth at its animal best, lusty, vigorous, dauntless, devil-may-care; theirs the spirits which leap, hearts glad and fearless. And when, after a while, now and then they spoke again, there was youth playing up to youth in its own inevitable fashion; confidence asserting itself and begetting more confidence; youth wearing its outer cloakings with its own inimitable swagger.
They had trudged along the narrow mountain road for a full hour or more when they heard the clattering noise of a horse's shod hoofs.
"I knew it," said Deveril sharply. "Damn them."
With one accord he and she withdrew hastily, slipping into the convenient shadows thrown by a clump of trees, and peered forth through a screen of high brush. The hurrying hoof beats came on, up-grade, hence from the general direction of Big Pine. Two men, and riding neck and neck, driving their horses hard. The riders drew on rapidly; were for a fleeting moment vaguely outlined against a field of stars ... swept on.
They came with a rush, with a rush they were gone. But Deveril, who since he was taller, had seen more clearly than Lynette across the brush, turned back to her eagerly, wondering if she had seen what he had—if she had noted that one of the men loomed unusually large in the saddle, and how the smaller at his side rode lopsidedly. In all reason Bruce Standing should be dead by now or, at the very least, bedridden. But when did Timber-Wolf ever do what other men expected of him? If he were alive and not badly hurt; if Lynette knew this, then what? Deveril would tell her, or would not tell her, as circumstances should decide for him.
"Come on!" he cried sharply, certain that Lynette had not seen. "While the night and the dark last. Let's hurry."
On and on they went until the dragging hours seemed endless. They saw the wheeling progress of the stars; they saw the pools of gloom in the woods deepen and darken; they felt, like thick black padded velvet, the silence grow deeper, until it seemed scarcely ruffled by the thin passing of the night air. Thus they put many a weary, hard-won mile between them and Big Pine. Hours of that monotonous lifting of boot after boot, of stumbling and straightening and driving on; of pushing through brush copses, of winding wearily among thebigger boles of the forest, of sliding down steep places and climbing up others, with always the lure of the more easy way of the road tempting and mocking.
"We've got to find water again," said Deveril, out of a long silence. "And we've got to dig ourselves in for a day of it. The dawn's coming."
For already the eastern sky stood forth in contrast against west and south and north, a palely glimmering sweep of emptiness charged with the promise of another day. The girl, too tired for speech, agreed with a weary nod. She could think of nothing now, neither of past nor present nor future, save of water, a long, cool bathing of burning mouth and throat, and after that, rest and sleep. Her whole being was resolved into an aching desire for these two simple balms to jaded nature. Water and then sleep. And let the coming day bring what it chose.
Long ago the mountain air, rare and sweet and clean, had grown cold, but their bodies, warmed by exertion, were unaware of the chill. But now, with fatigue working its will upon every laboring muscle, they began to feel the cold. Lynette began shivering first; Deveril, when they stopped a little while for one of their brief rests, began to shiver with her.
Water was not to be found at every step in these mountains; they labored on another three or four miles before they found it. Then they came to a singing brook which shot under a little log bridge, and there they lay flat, side by side, and drank their fill.
"And now, fair lady, to bed," said Deveril, looking at her curiously and making nothing of her expression, since the starlight hid more than it disclosed, and giving her as little glimpse of his own look. "And when, I wonder, did you ever lay you down to sleep as you must to-night?"
But he did see that she shivered. And yet, bravely enough, she answered him, saying:
"Beggars must not be choosers, fair sir; and methinks we should go down on our knees and offer up our thanks to Our Lady that we live and breathe and have the option of choosing our sleeping places this night."
She had caught his cue, and her readiness threw him into a mood of light laughter; he had drunk deep, and his youthful resilience buoyed him up, and he found life, as always, a game far away and more than worth the candle.
"You say truly, my fair lady," he said in mock gravity. "'Tis better to sleep among the bushes than dangling at the end of a brief stretch of rope."
But with all of their lightness of speech, which, after all, was but the symbol of youth playing up to youth, the prospect was dreary enough, and in their hearts there was little laughter. And the cold bit at them with its icy teeth. A fire would have been more than welcome, a thing to cheer as well as to warm; but a fire here, on the mountainside, would have been a visible token of brainlessness; it would throw its warmth five feet and its betraying light as many miles.
So, in the cold and dark they chose their sleeping place. Into a tangle of fragrant bushes, not twenty paces from the Buck Valley road, they crawled on hands and knees, as they had crawled into that first thicket when pursuit yelped at their heels. Here they came by chance upon a spot where two big pine-trees, standing close together companionably, upreared from the very heart of the brushy tangle. Lynette could scarcely drag her tired body here, caught and retarded by every twig that clutched at her clothing. For the first time in her vigorous life she came to understand the meaning of that ancient expression, "tired to death."She felt herself drooping into unconsciousness almost before her body slumped down upon the earth, thinly covered in fallen leaves.
"I am sleepy," she murmured. "Almost dead for sleep...."
"You wonderful girl...."
"Sh! I can't talk any more. I can't think; I can't move; I can scarcely breathe. Whether they find us in the morning or not ... it doesn't matter to me now.... You have been good to me; be good to me still. And ... good-night, Babe Deveril ... Gentleman!"
He saw her, dimly, nestle down, cuddling her cheek against her arm, drawing up her knees a little, snuggling into the very arms of mother earth, like a baby finding its warm place against its mother's breast. He sat down and slowly made himself a cigarette, and forgot for a long time to light it, lost in his thoughts as he stared at her and listened to her quiet breathing. He knew the moment that she went to sleep. And in his heart of hearts he marvelled at her and called her "a dead-game little sport." She, of a beauty which he in all of his light adventurings found incomparable, had ventured with him, a man unknown to her, into the depths of these solitudes and had never, for a second, evinced the least fear of him. True, danger drove; and yet danger always lay in the hands of a man, her sex's truest friend and greatest foe. In his hands reposed her security and her undoing. And yet, knowing all this, as she must, she lay down and sighed and went to sleep. And her last word, ingenuous and yet packed to the brim with human understanding, still rang in his ears.
"It's worth it," he decided, his eyes lingering with her gracefully abandoned figure. "The whole damn thing, and may the devil whistle through his fingers untilhis fires burn cold! And she's mine, and I'll make her mine and keep her mine until the world goes dead. And my friend, Wilfred Deveril, if you've ever said anything in your life, you've said it now!"
Glancing sunlight, striking at him through a nest of tumbled boulders upon the ridge, woke Babe Deveril. He sat up sharply, stiff and cold and confused, wondering briefly at finding himself here upon the mountainside. Lynette was already sitting up, a huddling unit of discomfort, her arms about her upgathered knees, her hair tousled, her clothing torn, her eyes showing him that, though she had slept, she, too, had awaked shivering and unrested. And yet, as he gathered his wits, she was striving to smile.
"Good morning to you, my friend."
He got stiffly to his feet, stretching his arms up high above his head.
"At least, we're alive yet. That's something, Lynette."
"It's everything!" Emulating him she sprang up, scornfully disregarding cramped body, her triumphant youth ignoring those little pains which shot through her as pricking reminders of last night's endeavors. "To live, to breathe, to be alive ... it's everything!"
"When one thinks back upon the possibilities of last night," he answered, "the reply is 'Yes.' Good morning, and here's hoping that you had no end of sweet dreams."
She looked at him curiously.
"I did dream," she said. "Did you?"
"No. When I slept, I slept hard. And your dreams?"
"Were all of two men. Of you and another man, Timber-Wolf, you call him—Bruce Standing. I heard him call you 'Baby Devil'! That got into my dreams. I thought that we three...."
She broke off, and still her eyes, fathomless, mysterious, regarded him strangely.
"Well?" he demanded. "We three?"
She shivered. And, knowing that he had seen, she exclaimed quickly:
"That's because I'm cold! I'm near frozen. Can't we have a fire?"
"But the dream?" he insisted.
"Dreams are nothing by the time they're told," she answered swiftly. "So why tell them? And the fire?"
"No," he told her, suddenly stubborn, and resentful that he could not have free entrance into her sleeping-life. "We went without it when we needed it most; now the sun's up and we don't need it; since, above everything, there's no breakfast to cook."
"So you woke up hungry, too?"
"Hungry? I was eating my supper when first you showed upon my horizon. And, what with looking at you or trying to look at you, I let half of my supper go by me! I'd give a hundred dollars right this minute for coffee and bacon and eggs!"
"You want a lot for a hundred dollars," she smiled back at him. Her hands were already busy with her tumbled hair, for always was Lynette purely feminine to her dainty finger-tips. "I'd give all of that just for coffee alone."
"Come," said Deveril, "Let's go. Are you ready?"
"To move on? Somewhere, anywhere? And to search for breakfast? Yes; in a minute."
First, she worked her way back through the brush, down into the creek bed, and for a little while, as she bathed her face and neck and arms, and did the most that circumstances permitted at making her morning toilet, she was lost to his following eyes. Slowly he rolled himself a cigarette; that, with a man, may takethe place of breakfast, serving to blunt the edge of a gnawing appetite. Long draughts of icy cold water served her similarly. She stamped her feet and swung her arms and twisted her body back and forth, striving to drive the cold out and get her blood to leaping warmly. Then, before coming back to him, she stood for a long time looking about her.
All the wilderness world was waking; she saw the scampering flash of a rabbit; the little fellow came to a dead halt in a grassy open space, and sat up with drooping forepaws and erect ears; she could fancy his twitching nose as he investigated the morning air to inform himself as to what scents, pleasurable, friendly, inimical, lay upon it.
"In case he is hungry, after nibbling about half the night," she mused, "he knows just where to go for his breakfast."
The rabbit flapped his long ears and went about his business, whatever it may have been, popping into the thicket. There grew in a pretty grove both willows and wild cherry; beyond them a tall scattering of cottonwoods; on the rising slope scrub-pines and juniper. And while she stood there, looking down, she heard some quail calling, and saw half a dozen sparrows busily beginning office hours, as it were, going about their day's affairs. And one and all of these little fellows knew just what he was about, and where to turn to a satisfying menu. When, returning to Deveril, she confided in him something of her findings, which would go to indicate that man was a pretty inefficient creature when stood alongside the creatures of the wild, Deveril retorted:
"Let them eat their fill now; before night we'll be eating them!"
"You haven't even a gun...."
"I could run a scared rabbit to death, I'm that starved! And now suppose we get out of this."
The sun was striking at the tops of the yellow pines on the distant ridge; the light was filtering downward; shadows were thinning about them and even in the ravine below. Walking stiffly, until their bodies gradually grew warm with the exertion, and always keeping to the thickest clump of trees or tallest patch of brush, they began to work their way down into the cañon. The sun ran them a race, but theirs was the victory; it was still half night in the great cleft among the mountains when they slid down the last few feet and found more level land underfoot, and the greensward of the wild-grass meadow fringing the lower stream. The cañon creek went slithering by them, cold and glassy-clear, whitening over the riffles, falling musically into the pools, dimpling and ever ready to break into widening circles, a smiling, happy stream. And in it, they knew, were trout. They stood for a moment, catching breath after the steep descent, looking into it.
"I wonder if you have a pin," said Deveril.
She pondered the matter, struck immediately by the aptness of the suggestion; he could see how she wrinkled her brows as she tried to remember if possibly she had made use of a pin in getting dressed the last time.
"I've a hairpin or two left. I wonder if we could make that do?"
"Just watch and see!" he exclaimed joyously.
In putting her tumbled hair straight just now she had discovered two pins, which, even when her hair had come down about her shoulders, had happened to catch in a little snarl in the thick tresses; these she had saved and used in making her morning toilet. Now she took her hair down again and presented him with the two pins, gathering her hair up in two thick, loose braids, whilewith curious eyes he watched her; and as curiously, the thing done, she watched him busy himself with the pins.
A few paces farther on, creeping forward under the willow branches, they came to a spot where the creek banks were clear of brush along a narrow grassy strip, which, however, was screened from the mountainside by a growth of taller trees. Here Deveril went to work on his improvised fish-hook. One hairpin he put carefully into his pocket; the other he bent rudely into the required shape, making an eye in one end by looping and twisting. The other end, that intended for the hungry mouth of a greedy trout, he regarded long and without enthusiasm.
"Too blunt, to begin with; next, no barb, too smooth; and, finally, the thing bends too easily. Hairpins should be made of steel!"
But at least two of the defects could be simply remedied up to a certain though not entirely satisfactory point. He squatted down and, employing two hard stones, hammered gently at the malleable wire until he flattened out the end of it into a thin blade with sharp, jagged edges. Then, using his pocket-knife, he managed to cut several little slots in this thin blade, so that there resulted a series of roughnesses which were not unlike barbs; whereas he could put no great faith in any one of them holding very securely, at least, taken all together, they would tend toward keeping his hook, if once taken, from slipping out so smoothly. He re-bent his pin and suddenly looked up at her with a flashing grin.
He robbed one of his boots of its string; he cut the first likely willow wand. Without stirring from his spot he dug in the moist earth and got his worm. And then, motioning her to be very still, he crept a few feet farther along the brook, found a pool which pleased him, hid behind a clump of bushes and gently lowered his baitedhook toward the shadowy surface. And before the worm touched the water, a big trout saw and leaped and struck ... and did a clean job of snatching the worm off without having appeared to so much as touch the bent hairpin!
Three quiet sounds came simultaneously: the splash of the falling fish, a grunt from Deveril, a gasp from Lynette. Deveril, thinking she was about to speak, glared at her in savage admonition for silence; she understood and remained motionless. Slowly he crept back to the spot where he had dug his worm, and scratched about until he had two more. One of them went promptly to his hook, while he held the other in reserve. Again he approached his pool, again he lowered his bait about the bush. This time the offering barely touched the water before the trout struck again. Now Deveril was ready for him, deftly manœuvring his pole; his string tautened, his wallow bent, the fat, glistening trout swung above the racing water.... Lynette was already wondering how they were going to cook it!... There was again a splash, and Deveril stood staring at a silly-looking hairpin, dangling at the end of an absurd boot-lace. For now the hairpin failed to present the vaguest resemblance to any kind of a hook; the trout's weight had been more than sufficient to straighten it out so that the fish slipped off.
Gradually, moving on noiseless feet, the girl withdrew; her last glimpse of Deveril, before she slipped out of sight among the willows, showed her his face, grim in its set purpose. He was trying the third time, and she believed that he would stand there without moving all day long, if necessary. In the meantime she was done with inactivity and watching; doing nothing when there was much to be done irked her.
Withdrawn far enough to make her certain that nochance sound made by her would disturb his trout, she went on through the grove and across little grassy open spaces flooring the cañon, making her way further up-stream. When a hundred yards above him, she turned about a tangled thicket and came upon the creek where it flashed through shallows. All of her life she had lived in the mountains; as a little girl, many a day had she followed a stream like this, bickering away down the most tempting of wild places; and more than once, lying by a tiny clear pool, had she caught in her hands one of the quick fishes, just to set him in a little lakelet of her own construction, where she played with him before letting him go again. To-day ... if she could catch her fish first! While Deveril, man-like, taking all such responsibilities upon his own shoulders, cursed silently and achieved nothing beyond loss of bait and loss of temper!
Up-stream, always keeping close to the merrily musical water, she made her slow way until she found a likely spot. At the base of a tiny waterfall was a big smooth rock; the water from above, glassily smooth in its well-worn channel, struck upon the rock and was divided briefly into two streams. One of them, the lesser, poured down into a small, rock-rimmed pool; the other, deflected sharply, sped down another course, to rejoin its fellow a few feet below the pool.
It was to the pool itself, half shut off from the main current, that Lynette gave her quickened attention. She crept closer, noiseless, peeping over. A sudden dark gleam, the quick, nervous steering of a trout rewarded her. She stood still, making a profound study of what lay before her; in what the rock-edged pool aided and wherein it would present difficulties. Scarcely more than a trickle of water poured out at the lower side; she could hastily pile up a few stones there, and so construct awall insurmountable to the trout if minded to escape down-stream. Then she looked to the far side, where the water slipped in. She could lay a few broken limbs across the rock there and build up a rampart of stones and turf upon it, and so deflect nearly all of the incoming water. Both these things done, she could, if need be, bail the pool out, and so come with certainty upon whatever fish had blundered into it. She began to hope that she would find a dozen!
Twice, standing upon the glassy rocks, she slipped; once she got soaking wet to her knee; another time she saved herself from a thorough drenching in the ice-cold stream only at the cost of plunging one arm down into it, elbow-deep. She shivered but kept steadily on.
She heard a bird among the bushes and started, thinking that here came Deveril; she fancied him with a string of fish in his hand, laughing at her. Impulsively she called to him.
The close walls of the ravine shut in her voice; the thickets muffled it; the splash and gurgle of the tumbling water drowned it out. She stood very still, hushed; now suddenly the silence, the loneliness, the bigness of the wilderness closed in about her. She looked about fearfully, half expecting to see men spring out from behind every boulder or tree trunk. She longed suddenly to see Babe Deveril coming up along the creek to her. She was tempted to break into a run racing back to him.
She caught herself up short. All this was only a foolish flurry in her breast, conjured up by that sudden realization of loneliness when her quickened voice died away into the whispered hush of the still solitudes. For an instant that feeling of being alone had overpowered her, or threatened to do so; then her only thought had been of Babe Deveril; she could have rushed fairly intohis arms, so did her emotions drive her. Now she found time to puzzle over herself; it struck her now, for the first time, how she had fled unquestioningly into this wilderness with a man. A man whom she did not even know. That hasty headlong act of hers would seem to indicate a trust of a sort. But did she actually trust Babe Deveril, with those keen, cutting eyes of his and the way he had of looking at a girl, and the whole of his reckless and dare-devil personality? Lynette Brooke had not lived in a cave all of her brief span of life; nor had she grown into slim girlhood and the full bud of her glorious youth without more than one look into a mirror. Vapidly vain she was not; but clear-visioned she was, and she knew and was glad for the vital, vivid beauty which was hers and thanked God for it. And she glimpsed, if somewhat vaguely, that to a man like Babe Deveril, taking life lightly, there was no lure beyond that of red lips and sparkling eyes. How far could she be sure of him? She went back with slow steps to her trout; she was glad that Babe Deveril had not heard and come running to her just then. But when Deveril did come, carrying two gleaming trout, she masked her misgivings and lifted a laughing face toward his triumphant one.
"We eat, Lynette!" he announced gaily.
Suddenly his eyes warmed to the picture she made, paying swift tribute to the tousled, flushed beauty of her. His glance left her face and ran swiftly down her form; she felt suddenly as though her wet clothing were plastered tight to her.
"You can finish this," she told him swiftly, "if you want to take any more fish."
"But, look here! Where are you going? Breakfast...."
Her teeth were beginning to chatter.
"I'm going to try to get dry. You can start breakfast or...."
She fled, and called herself a fool for growing scarlet, as she knew that she did; as though two burning rays had been directed full upon her back, she could feel his look as she ran from him; she could not quickly enough vanish from his keen eyes, beyond the thicket. And how on earth she was going to get dry again until the sun stood high in the sky, she did not in the least know. She could wring out the free water; she could make flails of her arms and run up and down until she got warm.... If only she had a fire; but that would be foolhardy, the smoke arising to stand a signal for miles of their whereabouts....
And until this moment she had not thought of how they were to convert freshly caught fish into an edible breakfast! How, without fire? She began to shiver again, from head to foot now, and, confronted by her own problem, that of getting warm and dry, she was content to leave all other solutions to Deveril.
When half an hour later she returned to him, she found him smoking a cigarette and crouching over a bed of dying coals, whereon certain tempting morsels lay; Deveril was turning them this way and that; with the savory odor of the grilling fish there arose from the embers a whiff of the green sage-leaves which he had plucked at the slope of the cañon and laid first on his bed of coals. Crisp mountain-trout, garnished with sage! And plenty of clear, cold, sparkling water to drink thereafter! Truly a morning repast for king and queen.
"I hope they keep us on the run for a month!" Deveril greeted her. "I haven't had this much fun for a dozen years!"
"But your fire?" she asked anxiously. "Aren't you afraid? The smoke?"
"Where there's smoke, there's always fire," he told her lightly. "But when a man's on the dodge, as we are, he can have a fire that gives out almighty little smoke! It's all bone-dry wood, with only the handful of sage and a few crisscross willow sticks. Look up, and see how much smoke you can see!"
He had built his small blaze, ringed about by some rocks, in the heart of a small grove of trees which stood forty or fifty feet high; he had got his fire burning with strong, clean flames, from a handful of dry leaves and twigs; Lynette, looking up, could make out only the faintest bluish-gray wisp of smoke against the gray-green of the leaves. She understood; always it was inevitable that they must accept whatever chances the moment brought them, yet it was not at all likely that their faint plume of smoke, vanishing among the treetops, would ever draw the glance of any human eye other than their own.
"I'll tell you ..." began Deveril, and broke short off there, as she and he, alert and tense once more, reminded that they were fugitives, listened to a sudden sound disturbing their silence. A sound unmistakable—a man at no great distance from them, but, fortunately, upon the farther side of the stream, and thus beyond the double screen of willows, was breaking his way through the brush. Both Deveril and Lynette crouched low, peering through the bushes. They could only make out that the man was coming up-stream. Once they caught a vague, blurred glimpse of his legs, faded overalls and ragged boots. Then they lost him entirely. They knew when he stopped and both waited breathlessly to know if he had come upon some sign of their own trail. But once more he went on, but now in such silence, as he crossed a little open spot, that they could scarcely make out a sound. Had it not been for the willowsintervening, they could then have answered their own question, "Who is it?"—a question just now of supreme importance, of the importance of life and death. They lay lower; they strove as never before to catch some glimpse that would tell them what they wanted to know. The man stopped again; again went on. There was something guarded about his movements; they felt that he must have seen their tracks, that he was seeking in a roundabout way to come unexpectedly upon them. And then, because there was a narrow natural avenue through the brush, they were given one clear, though fleeting glimpse, of him ... of his face—a face as tense and watchful as their own had been ... the face of Mexicali Joe.
A glimpse, scarcely more it was, had been given them of Mexicali Joe's face. And at a considerable distance, at least for the reading of a man's look. But yet they marked how the face was haggard and drawn and furtive. Joe had no inkling of their presence. He had not seen their wisp of smoke; there was no wind setting toward him to carry him the smell of cooking trout. Plainly he had no desire for company other than his own. He, no less than they, fled from all pursuit. Again he was lost to them; he vanished, gone up-stream, beyond the thickets, no faintest sound of his footfalls coming back to them. From him they turned to each other, the same expression from the same flooding thought in their eyes.
"We're on the jump and we'll keep on the jump!" said Deveril softly. "And at the same time, Lynette Brooke, we'll stick as close as the Lord'll let us to Mexicali Joe's coat-tails! Don't you worry; he'll go back as sure as shooting to his gold-mine, if only to make certain that no one else has squatted on it. And where he drives a stake, we'll drive ours right alongside!"
"It's funny ... that he hasn't gotten any further ... that he should come this way, too...."
"No telling how long he had to lie still while the pack yelped about his hiding-place; that he came this way means only one thing. And that is that our luck is with us, and we're headed as straight as he is toward his prospect hole. Ready? Let's follow him!"
She jumped up. But before they started they gathered up, to the last small bit, what was left of their fish;Deveril made the small bundle, fish enwrapped in leaves, with a handkerchief about the whole.
"If he should hear us?" she whispered. "If he should lie in waiting and see us?"
He chuckled.
"In any case, we'll have it on him! He can't know that we're on the run, too; he got away too fast for that. And even if he should know, what would he do about it? He has no love for Taggart, anyway; and he has no wish to get himself into the hands of that mob that he has just ducked away from, like a rabbit dodging a pack of hounds. If he catches us ... why, then, we catch him at the same time! Come on."
Thus began the second lap of their journey; thus they, fleeing, followed like shadows upon the traces of one who fled. For Mexicali Joe would obviously keep to the bed of the cañon; if he forsook it in order to climb up either slope to a ridge above, he must of necessity pass through the more sparsely timbered spaces, where he would run constantly into danger of being seen. The only danger to their plans lay with the possibility that he might overhear sounds of their following and might draw a little to one side and hide in some dense copse, and so let them go by. But they had the advantage from the beginning; they knew he was ahead, and he did not know that they followed; so long as they, listening always, did not hear him ahead, there was little danger of him hearing them coming after him. With all the noise of the water, tumbling over falls and splashing along over rocks, singing cheerily to itself at every step, there was small likelihood of any one of the three cautious footfalls being heard....
There were the times, so intent were they following the Mexican, when they forgot what was after all the main issue; forgot that they, too, were followed. For thenewer phase of the game was more zestful just now than the other; they had neither glimpsed nor heard anything since the passing of the two riders last night to hint that any danger of discovery threatened them. They spoke seldom, only now and then, pausing briefly, in lowered voices, as the speculations which had been occupying both minds, demanded expression. Thus they were always confronted by some new problem; at first, and for a mile or more, they had full confidence that they had Joe straight ahead of them. But presently they approached a fork of the cañon; it became imperative to know if Joe had gone up the right or the left ravine. And here, where most they wanted a glimpse of him, they had scant hope of seeing him, so dense was the timber growth; he would keep close to the bed of the stream, at times walking in the water so that the network of branches from the brushy tangle on both banks would make for him a dim alleyway, like a tunnel. They could not hope to hear him; they could not count on finding his tracks, since none would be left upon the rocks and the rushing water held none.
But they were alert, ears critical of the slightest rustling, eyes never keener. And, their good fortune holding firm, when they came to the forking of the ways, that which they had not hoped for, a track upon a hard rock, set them right. For here Joe, but a few score yards ahead of them, had slipped, and had crawled up over a boulder, and there was still the wet trace of his passing, a sign to vanish, drying, while they looked on it. Joe had gone on into the deeper cañon, headed in the direction which last night they had elected for their own, driving on toward the heart of the wilderness country.
They were no less relieved at finding what was the man's likely general direction than at making sure that they were still almost at his heels. For they had cometo realize that, to explain Joe's presence here, there were two directly opposing possibilities to consider: It was imaginable that Joe would be making straight for his gold; and it was just as reasonable that his craft might have suggested to him to head in an opposite direction. Now that they might follow him and still be going direct upon their own business, they were for the moment content upon all points.
Deveril, for the most part, went ahead; now and then he paused a moment for the girl to come up with him. But never did he have to wait long. He began to wonder at her; they had covered many hard miles last night; more hard miles this morning. How long, he asked himself, as his eyes sought to read hers, could such a slender, altogether feminine, blush-pink girl stand up under such relentless hardship as this flight promised to give them? And always he went on again, reassured and admiring; her eyes remained clear, her regard straight and cool. A girl unafraid; the true daughter of dauntless, hot-blooded parents.
And she, watching his tall, always graceful form leading the way, found ample time to wonder about him. She had seen him last night burst in through a window and take the time coolly, though already the hue and cry was breaking at his contemptuous heels, to rifle a man's pockets. There was an indelible picture: the debonair Babe Deveril, who had stepped unquestioningly into her fight, going down on his knees before his fallen kinsman ... calmly bent upon robbery. For she had seen the bank-notes in his hand.
The sun rose high and crested all the ridges with glorious light, and poured its golden warmth down into the steep cañons. But, now that shadows began to shrink and the little open spaces lay revealed in detail, fresh labor was added in that they were steadily harderdriven to keep to cover; all day long, at intervals, they were to have glimpses of the Buck Valley road, high above upon the mountain flank, and at each view of the road they understood that a man up there might have caught a glimpse of them. Ten o'clock came and found them doggedly following along the way which they held the viewless Mexicali Joe must have taken before them. They paused and stooped to the invitation of the creek, and thereafter ate what was left them of their grilled trout. Having eaten, they drank again; and having drunk, they again took up the trail....
"If you can stand the pace?" queried Deveril over his shoulder. And she read in the gleam in his eyes that he was set on seeing this thing through; on sticking close to Mexicali Joe until he came, with Joe, upon his secret.
"Why, of course!" she told him lightly, though already her body ached.
It was not over an hour later when they set their feet in a trail which they were confident Mexicali Joe had followed; from the moment they stepped into the trail they watched for some trace of him, but the hard, rain-washed, rocky way which only a mountaineer could have recognized as a trail, was such as to hold scant sign, if the one who travelled it but exercised precaution. Babe Deveril, with his small knowledge of these mountains, held it the old short-cut trail from Timkin's Bar, long disused, since Timkin's Bar itself had a score of years ago died the death of short-lived mining towns. Brush grew over it, and again and again it vanished underfoot, and they were hard beset to grope forward to it again. Yet trail of a sort it was, and it set them to meditating: Timkin's Bar, in the late '80's, had created a gold furor, and then, after its short and hectic life, had been abandoned, as an orange, sucked dry bya child, is thrown aside. Was it possible that among the old diggings Mexicali Joe had stumbled upon a vein which the old-timers had overlooked?
At any rate, the trail lured them along, winding in their own general direction; and Mexicali Joe still fled ahead. Of this latter fact they had evidence when they came to the unmistakable sign ... to watchful eyes ... of his recent passing: here, on the steep, ill-defined trail he had slipped, and had caught at the branches of a wild cherry. They saw the furrow made by his boot-heel and the scattered leaves and broken twigs.
Gradually the trail led them up out of the cañon-bed, snaking along the flank of the mountain. And gradually they were entering the great forest land of yellow pines. If not already in Timber-Wolf's country, here was the border-line of his monster holdings: few men could draw the line exactly between the wide-reaching acres which were his and those contiguous acres which were a portion of the government reserve. Standing himself had quarrelled with the government upon the matter and what was more, after no end of litigation, had won a point or two.
Once they diverged from the trail to climb and slide to the bottom of the cañon for a long drink. But this and the sheer ascent took them in their hurry only a few minutes. Again they took up the trail. It was high noon and they were tired. But, alike disdainful of fatigue, driven and lured, they pressed on.
Suddenly she startled him by catching him by the arm and whispering warningly:
"Sh! Some one is following us!"
In another moment, drawing back from the trail, they were hidden among the wild cherries in a little side ravine.
"Where?" he demanded, his voice hushed like hers,as he peered back along the way they had come. "Who? How many of them?"
"I didn't see," she answered.
"What did you hear?"
"Nothing ... I just know ... Ifeltthat some one was trailing us just as we are trailing Mexicali Joe! I feel it now; I know!"
"But you had something—something that you saw or heard—to tell you?"
She shook her head. And he saw, wondering at her, that she was very deeply in earnest as she admitted:
"No. Nothing! But I know. I tell you, I know. Can't you feel that there is some one back there, following us, spying on us, hiding and yet dogging every step we take? Can't youfeelit?"
She saw him shaken with silent laughter. She understood that he, a man, was convulsed with laughter at the imaginings of her, a maid. And yet, also, since she was quick-minded, she noted how his laughter wassilent! He meant her to see that he put no credence in her suspicions; and yet, for all that, he was impressed, and he did take care that no one, whomightfollow them, should overhear him!
"One doesn't feel things like that," he told her, as though positive. But in the telling he kept his voice low, so that it was scarcely louder than her own whisper.
"One does," she retorted. "And you know it, Babe Deveril!"
"But," he challenged her, "were you right, and were there a man or several men back there tracking us, why all this caution on their parts? What would they be waiting for, being armed themselves and knowing us unarmed? What better place than this to take us in? Why give us a minute's chance to slip away in the brush?"
"I don't know." She shrugged, and again he marvelled at her; she looked like one who had little vital concern in what any others, pursuing, might or might not do.
Despite his cool determination to adhere to calm reason and to discount feminine impressionism, which he held to be fostered by a nervous condition brought about by overexertion, Babe Deveril began to feel, as she felt, that there was something more than imagination in her contention. How does a man sense things which no one of his five senses can explain to him? He could not see any reason in this abrupt change in both their moods; and yet, none the less, it seemed to him, all of a sudden, as though eyes were spying on him from behind every pine trunk, and from the screen of every thicket.
"Joe won't escape us in a hurry," he muttered. "Not in this cañon. And we'll see this thing through. Let's sit tight and watch."
And so, with that inexplicable sense that here in the wilderness they were not yet free from pursuit, they crouched in the bushes and bent every force of every sense to detect their fancied pursuers. But the forest land, sun-smitten, a playland of light and shadow and tremulous breeze, lay steeped in quiet about them, and they saw nothing moving save the gently stirring leaves and occasional birds; half a dozen sparrows briefly stayed their flight upon a shrub in flower with pale-pink blossoms; a bevy of quail, forty strong, marched away through the narrow roadways under the low, drooping branches, with crested topknots bobbing; the forest land murmured and whispered and sang softly, and seemed empty of any other human presence than their own. And yet they waited, and at the end of their waiting, grown nervous despite themselves, though they had hadno slightest evidence that pursuit was drawing close upon their heels, they were not able to shake from them thatfeelingthat danger, the danger from which they fled, was become a near-drawn menace. And all the more to be feared in that it approached so silently, covertly, hidden and ready to strike when their guard was down.
"Just the same," said Deveril, deep in his own musings, "it can't be Jim Taggart, for that's not Taggart's way, having the goods on a man, and, besides, I fancy I put him out of the running." Then he looked at her curiously, and added: "And it can't be Bruce Standing, since you put him down and out and...."
It was the first time that such a reference to the past had been made. Now she startled him by the quick vehemence of her denial, saying:
"I didn't shoot Bruce Standing! I tell you...."
He looked at her steadily, and she broke off, as she saw dawning in his eyes a look which was to be read as readily as were white stones to be glimpsed in the bottom of a clear pool. She had made her statement, and, whether true or false, he held it to be a lie.
"In case they should somehow lay us by the heels," he said dryly, "you would come a lot closer to clearing yourself by saying that you shot him in self-defense than in denying everything. But they haven't got their ropes over our running horns yet!... Do you still feel that we are followed?"
His look angered her; his words angered her still further. So to his question she made no reply. He looked at her again curiously. She refused to meet his eyes, coolly ignoring him. A little smile twitched at his lips.
"It's a poor time for good friends to fall out," he said lightly. "I don't care the snap of my fingers who shot him, or why. He ought to have been shot a dozen yearsago. And now I'll tell you what, I think, explains this business of some one being close behind us, if you are right in it. The big chance is that some one has been trailing Mexicali Joe all along; and dropped in behind us when we dropped in behind Joe. We've been doing a first-class job of sticking to cover; mind you, we haven't caught a second glimpse of Joe all this time, and therefore it is as likely as not that the gent whom youfeelto be trailing us hasn't caught a glimpse of us. If this is right, we've got a bully chance right now to prove it. We lie close where we are for ten minutes, and see if your hombre doesn't slip on by us, nosing along after Joe."
In silence she acquiesced. That sense of the nearness of another unseen human being was insistent upon her. For a long time, as still as the deep-rooted trees about them, they crouched, listening, watching. She heard the watch ticking in Babe Deveril's pocket. She heard her own breathing and his. She heard the brownie birds threshing among dead leaves. Then there was the eternal whispering of the pines and the faint murmurings from the stream far down in the cañon. At last it would have been a relief to straining nerves if a man, or two or three men, had stepped into sight in the trail from which she and Deveril had withdrawn. For more certain than ever was Lynette Brooke, though she could give neither rhyme nor reason for that certainty, that her instincts had not tricked her. Therefore, instead of being reassured at seeing or hearing no one, she was depressed and made anxious; the silence became sinister, filled with vague threat; that she saw no one was explicable to her by but the one ominous condition: that person or those persons were watching even now, and knew where she and Babe Deveril hid, and did not mean to stir until first their quarry stirred.Why all this caution? She could not explain that to herself; if some one followed, why should that some one hide? Why not step out with gun levelled, and put an end to this grim game of hide-and-seek.
"You see," whispered Deveril, "there is no one behind us."
They had not moved for a full twenty minutes, and by now he began to convict her of nervous imaginings, fancies of an overwrought girl. But she answered him, saying with unshaken certainty:
"I tell you, I know! Some one has been following us, and now is hiding and waiting for us to go on."
"Well, you are right or wrong, and in either case I don't fancy this job of sitting so tight I feel as though I were growing roots. If you should happen to be right, we'll know in time, I suppose. Let's go!"
To her, in her present mood, anything was better than inaction. They left their hiding-place, found a silent and hidden way a bit farther down the slope, went forward a hundred yards and stepped back into the faint trail. Their concern, each said inwardly, was to forge on and to follow Joe; thus they pretended within themselves to ignore that nebulous warning that they, like Joe, were followed.
And so the day wore on, a day made up of uncertainty and vague threat. How full the silent forest lands were of little sounds! For therein lies the greatest of all forest-land mysteries; that silence in the solitudes may be made audible. Uncertainty struck the key-note of their long day. They sought to follow Mexicali Joe; they did not see him, they did not hear him, they did not know where he was. Was he still ahead of them, hastening on? How far ahead? A mile by now, not having paused while they lost time? A hundred yards? Or had he turned aside? Or had he thrown himselfdown flat somewhere, watching them go by? Was he following them, or had he struck out east or west, while they went on north? And was there some one following them? One man? Two? More? Or none at all? Uncertainty. And as they grew tired and hungry, the great silence oppressed them, and most of all this uncertainty of all things began to bite in upon their nerves as acid eats into glass, etching its own sign.
"I'm getting jumpy," muttered Deveril, glaring at her, his eyes looking savage and stern. "This nonsense of yours...."
"It's not nonsense!"
"Anyway, it's getting on my nerves! There's no sense in this sort of thing. We're scaring ourselves like two kids in the dark. What's more, we are allowing a pace-setter to get us to going too hard and steady a clip; we'll be done in, the first thing we know. And we've got to begin figuring on where the next meal comes from. What I mean is, that we've got enough to do without wasting any more nerve force on what may or may not follow after us."
"Joe is still ahead of us," she reminded him; "or, at any rate, we think that he is. He left last night in as big a hurry as we did; and he, too, came away without gun and fishing-tackle, and didn't stop to get Young Gallup to put him up a lunch. Then, on top of all that, Joe knows this country better than we do."
"I get you!" he told her quickly. "Joe's as ready for food and lodging as we are, and Joe, unless we're wrong all along, is hiking ahead of us. Who knows but we'll invite ourselves to dine with Señor Joe before the day's done!... Is that it?"
"I don't know how it may work out.... I hadn't gotten that far yet.... But if Joe is headed toward his secret, and if he does have a provision cachesomewhere in the mountains ... a few items in tinned goods and, maybe, even coffee and sugar and canned milk...."
"Let's go!" broke in Deveril, half in laughter and half in eagerness. "You make my mouth water with your surmisings."
Here in these steep-walled narrow gorges the shadows lengthened swiftly after the sun had passed the zenith, and already, when now and then they looked searchingly at what lay ahead, it was difficult to distinguish the shadows from the substance. They must come close to Joe if they meant to see him, and, by the same token, if a man followed them, he was confronted by the same difficulty. So they hurried on, walking more freely, keeping in the trail, climbing at times along the ridge flank, frequently dipping down into the lower cañon. Babe Deveril cut himself a green cudgel from a scrub-oak, trimming off the twigs as he walked on. If it came to argument with Mexicali Joe, a club like that might bring persuasion. And he fully meant that the Mexican should show himself generous, even to the division of a last crust. Always buoyed up by optimism, he was counting strongly on Joe's provision cache.
When they dropped down into the cañon again, they saw the first star. Lynette looked up at it; it trembled in its field of deep blue. She was faint, almost dizzy; her muscles ached; fatigue bore hard upon her spirit; she was footsore. But, most of all, like Deveril before her, she was concerned with imaginings of supper. She pictured bacon and a tin of tomatoes and shoe-string potatoes sizzling in the bacon grease ... and coffee. Whether with milk or sugar, or without both, no longer mattered. Then she sighed wearily, and had no other physical nor mental occupation than that which had to do with the putting of one foot before the other, plodding on and on and on. And all the while the shadowsdeepened and thickened in the cañons, and the stars multiplied, and the little evening breeze sharpened; she began to shiver.
She could mark no trail underfoot; always Deveril, before her, was breaking through a tangle, always at his heels, she kept his form in sight; but she began to think that he had lost the way, and a new fear gripped her. Instead of dining with Joe, they were losing him, and now, with the utter dark already on the way, they would see no sign of him. And in the dark they would not be able to snare a trout or anything else that might be eaten. She got into the habit of breaking off twigs and chewing at them....
And all the while Deveril was rushing on, faster and faster. It was hard work keeping up with him.
"We've got him! Stay with it, Lynette; we've got him!"
It was Deveril's whisper, sharp and eager; there was Deveril himself just ahead of her, pausing briefly.
"Come on. As fast and as quiet as you can."
Her heart leaped up; her life fires burned bright and warm again; the pain went out of her. She began to run....
"Sh! Look! Off to the left in that little clearing."
On the mountain slope just ahead of them she marked the clearing and, since there, too, the shadows were darkening, she saw nothing else. She wondered what he saw or thought that he saw. He pointed, and she, with straining eyes, made out a shadow which moved; Joe, going up a steep, open trail. And just ahead of Joe a dark, square-cornered blot....
"A house ... a cabin...."
"A dirty dugout, most likely, and from the look of it. But, as sure as you're born, there's Mexicali Joe's mountain headquarters. A clump of bushes, willows,you can be sure, not ten feet from his door; that will be his spring. And inside his shack ... a box of grub, Lady Lynette! And if Joe doesn't have company for dinner, I'll eat your hat."
"I haven't any," said Lynette. "But we'd probably have to eat our own shoes. Come on; let's hurry.... What are you waiting for?"
"I want to whet my appetite by loitering a while.... Listen, Lynette; after all, there's no great hurry any longer. First thing, a hot supper is what is needed, and Joe can make as good a fire as we can. You can gamble that he won't waste any time, and that he'll cook a panful!"
"He might have only one panful ... and he might start in on it cold...."
"And if he has only that limited amount and it belongs to him and he wants it, you don't mean to say that you would seek to take it away from him? That's robbery...."
"We'll play square with him, Babe Deveril, and give him exactly one-third. And man may call it robbery, but God and nature won't. Come...."
"I'll come with you a few steps farther. And then we will possess our souls in patience and will sit down among the bushes and will wait until we smell coffee. And I'll tell you why."
She looked at him, wondering. And then suddenly she guessed somewhat of his thought, though not all of it. She had forgotten her own certainty that some one followed them; it surged back upon her now.
"Yes," he said, when she had spoken, "you're on the right track. We are going to wait a few minutes to make sure. If some one was following and wanted you and me, he could have had no object in hanging back, spying on us. But if that same gent were following Mexicali Joe, hewould want to hang back, trusting to Joe to lead him to something worth coming at. So, out of yourfeelingI've built my theory: That this gent thinks all the time he's trailing Joe, and doesn't know we are here at all; tracks in the rocky trail wouldn't show him whether one or a dozen had gone over it. And I get to this point: How did this gent pick up Joe's trail in the dark? And I answer it by saying that he could have known that Joe had a dugout up here, and so lay in wait for him. And, that being true, by now he would be sure that Joe was going straight to his camp, and so, at almost any moment, he would give up his sneak-thief style of travelling and would come hurrying along. And, if that's right, you and I can get a glimpse of this new hombre before he does of us. It may come in handy, you know," he concluded dryly, "to get the first swing at him if he's an ugly gent with a rifle. At short range, and in the dark, and stepping lively, this club of mine is way up. And, if we can take his rifle from him ... why, then into the wilderness we go, without fear of starving. Which is a long speech for the end of a perfect day, but I'm right!"