"Merry it is in the good Greenwood!"
"Merry it is in the good Greenwood!"
"Merry it is in the good Greenwood!"
"Merry it is in the good Greenwood!"
They ate and rested and the sun warmed them. Fora full two hours they scarcely stirred. Then they drank again; Lynette bathed her hands and face and arms; she set her hair in order, refashioning the two thick braids. She shut one eye and then the other, striving to make certain that there was not a black smudge somewhere upon her nose. They were starting on when Deveril said soberly:
"Shall I save the rabbit skin?"
"Why?" she asked innocently.
A twinkle came into his eyes.
"A few more days of this sort of life, and My Lady Linnet is going to require a new gown! Perhaps rabbit furs, if hunting is good, will do it!"
She laughed at him, and her eyes were daring as she sang, improvising as to melody:
"And for vest of pall, thy fingers small,That wont on harp to stray,A cloak must sheer from the slaughtered deer,To keep the cold away!"
"And for vest of pall, thy fingers small,That wont on harp to stray,A cloak must sheer from the slaughtered deer,To keep the cold away!"
"And for vest of pall, thy fingers small,That wont on harp to stray,A cloak must sheer from the slaughtered deer,To keep the cold away!"
"And for vest of pall, thy fingers small,
That wont on harp to stray,
A cloak must sheer from the slaughtered deer,
To keep the cold away!"
"Lynette!"
A flash from her gay mood had set his eyes on fire. He sprang up and came toward her, his two hands out. But as a black cloud can run over the face of the young moon, so did a sudden change of mood wipe the tempting look out of her eyes and darken them. Her spirit had peeped forth at him, merry-making; as quick as bird-flight it was gone, and she stepped back and looked at him steadily, cool now and aloof and dampening to a man's ardent nonsense.
"You have a way of saying something, Babe Deveril," she told him coolly, "which appeals to me. In your own upstanding words: 'Let's go!'"
He laughed back at her lightly, hiding under a light cloak his own chagrin. At that moment he had wanted her in his arms; had wanted that as he wanted neitherMexicali Joe's gold nor any other coldly glittering thing. Now he felt himself growing angry with her....
"Right. You've said it. Let's go."
He made short work of catching up the few articles they were to carry with them and of stamping into dead coals the few remaining glowing embers of their fire. Then, striding ahead, he led the way. And for a matter of a mile or more she was hard beset to keep up with him.
The day was filled with happenings to divert their thoughts from any one channel. They startled, in a tiny meadow, three deer, which shot away through a tangle of brush, leaping, plunging, shooting forward and down a slope like great, gleaming, graceful arrows. "A man could live like a king here, with a rifle," said Deveril longingly. They saw a tall, thin wisp of smoke an hour before noon; it stood against the sky to the southwest of them, at a distance of perhaps two miles. "Taggart's noonday camp," they decided, deciding further that Taggart must have insisted on an early start, and therefore had found his stomach demanding lunch well before midday. Later, some two or three hours after twelve, they heard the long, reverberating crack and rumble and echo of a rifle-shot. "Taggart's crowd, killing a deer or bear or rabbit," they imagined. And all along they were contented, making what time they could through the open spaces, over the ridges, down through tiny green valleys and up long, dreary slopes, resting frequently, never hastening beyond their powers, secure in knowing that the Taggart trail and the Lynette-Deveril trail, though paralleling, would have no common point of contact before both trails ran into the country in the vicinity of the Big Bear Creek, the rim of the Timber-Wolf country.
"The whole thing," exulted Babe Deveril, "lies in the fact that we know where they are and they haven't the least idea where we are! We know where they are going, and they haven't a guess which way we are steering...."
"Do you know," said Lynette thoughtfully, "I don't believe that Mexicali Joe intends for a minute to lead them to his gold!"
Deveril looked at her in astonishment.
"You don't! Why, couldn't you see that Taggart put the fear of the Lord into him? That Gallup, slick as wet soap, tricked him? That...."
She broke in impatiently, saying:
"Yet Joe.... He seemed to me to give in to them in something too much of a hurry ... as though he had his own wits about him, his own last card in the hole, as dad used to say. I wonder...."
He stared at her, puzzled.
"When youfeelthings," he muttered, none too pleasantly, "you get me guessing. I don't know yet how you came to know that the Taggart bunch was at our heels yesterday. But you did know; and you were right. As to this other hunch of yours...."
"You'll see," said Lynette serenely. "Joe isn't the biggest fool in that crowd of four. You wait and see."
"You'll give me the creeps yet," said Deveril.
They both laughed and went on—through brushy tangles; over rocky ridges; through spacious forests; across soft, springy meadows; up slope, down slope; on and on and endlessly on. Once they frightened a young bear that was tearing away as if its life depended upon it upon an old stump; the bear snorted and went lumbering away, as Deveril said, like a young freight-train gone mad; Lynette, as she admitted afterward, wastwice as frightened, but did not run, herself, because the bear ran first and because she couldn't get the hang of her feet as quickly as he could! They came upon several bands of mountain-quail, which shot away, buzzing like overgrown bees; Deveril hurled stones and curses at many a scampering rabbit; once she and once he caught a glimpse of that dark gleam, come and gone in a flash, which might have been coyote or timber-wolf.... They did not speak of Bruce Standing. But they wondered, both of them....
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon they heard for the second time the crack of a rifle-shot. Farther to the south of them this time; a hint farther eastward; fainter than when first heard. Taggart, they held in full confidence, was following the trail which they had mapped for him; he was going on steadily; he was forging ahead of them. And yet they were content that this was so. They rested more often; they relaxed more and more.
And before the brief reverberations of a distant rifle-shot had done echoing through the gorges, they came to a full stop and determined to make camp. Not for a second, all day long, had Deveril swerved from his determination to "dig in in comfort for the night." They were, as both were willing to admit, "done in."
Deveril employed his pocket-knife, long ago dulled, and now whetted after a fashion upon a rough stone, to whack off small pine and willow and the more leafy of sage branches. He made of them a goodly heap. Then he gathered dead limbs, fallen from the parent trees, making his second pile. All the while Lynette kept a small dry-wood and pine-cone fire going hotly; little smoke, little swirl of sparks to rise above the grove in which they were encamping; plenty of heat for body warmth and for cooking. She was preoccupied, movingabout listlessly. So this was Bruce Standing's country? She looked about her with an ever-deepening interest; this was a fitting land for such a man. Bigness and dominance and a certain vital freshness struck altogether the key-note here—and suggested Timber-Wolf. If he were not dead after all—— Well, then, he would be somewhere near now for like a wounded animal, he would have returned to his solitudes.
Deveril found near by a level space under the pines. Here he sought out a scraggly tree which expressed an earth-loving soul in low-drooped branches. Against a low arm which ran out horizontally from the trunk he began placing his longer dead limbs, the butts in the ground, sloping, the effect soon that of a tent. Against these a high-piled wall of leafy branches. He stood back, judging from which direction the wind would come. He piled more branches. Into his nostrils, filled with the resinous incense of broken pine twigs, floated the tempting aromas which spread out in all directions from Lynette's cooking. He cocked his eye at the slanting sun; it was still early. He yielded to the insistent invitation, and came down into the little cup of a meadow to her, and she watched him coming: a picturesque figure in the forest land, his black hair rumpled, his slender figure swinging on, his sleeves rolled back, his eyes full of the flicker of his lively spirit.
When Deveril was hard pressed along the trail, worn out and on the alert for oncoming danger from any quarter, he was impersonal; a mere ally on whom she could depend. At moments like this one, when he was rested and relaxed, and grasped in his eager hands a bit of the swift life flowing by, he became different. A man now—a young man—one with quick lights in his eyes and a lilting eagerness in his voice.
"It would be great sport," he said, "all life long ...to come home to you and find you waiting ... with a smile and a wee cup o' tea! And...."
He was half serious, half laughing; she made a hasty light rejoinder, and invited him to a hot supper waiting him.
They made a merry, frivolously light meal of it. There was plenty to eat; water near by; there was coffee; above them the infinity of blue, darkening skies, about them the peace and silence of the solitudes. And within their souls security, if only for the swiftly passing moment. They chose to be gay; they laughed often; Deveril asked her where she had learned to quote Scott and she asked him, in obvious retort, if he thought that she had never been to school! He sang for her, low-voiced and musically, a Spanish love-song; she made high pretense at missing the significance of the impassioned southern words. He, having finished eating and having nearly finished his cigarette, lying back upon the thick-padded pine-needles, jerked himself up, of a mood for free translation; she, being quick of intuition, forestalled him, crying out: "While I clean up our can dishes, if you will finish making camp...."
He laughed at her, but got up and went back, whistling his love-song refrain to his house-building. She, busied over her own labors, found time more than once to glance at him through the trees ... wondering about him, trying to probe her own instinctive distrust of one who had all along befriended her.
When she joined him a few minutes later, coming up the slope slowly, she looked tired, he thought, and listless. She sat down and watched him finishing his labors; all of her spontaneous gaiety had fled; she was silent and did not smile and appeared preoccupied. She sighed two or three times, unconsciously, but her sighs did not escape him. Always he had held her sex to bean utterly baffling, though none the less an equally fascinating one. Now he would have given more than a little for a clew to her thoughts ... or dreamings ... or vague preoccupation....
"My lady's bower!" he said lightly. "And what does my lady have to say of it?"
A truly bowery little shelter it was, on leaning poles in an inverted V, with leafy boughs making thick walls, through which only slender sun-rays slipped in a golden dust; within a high-heaped pile of fragrant boughs, with a heap of smaller green twigs and resinous pine-tips for her couch.
"You are so good to me, Babe Deveril," was her grave answer.
And not altogether did her answer please him, for a quick hint of frown touched his eyes, though he banished it almost before she was sure of it. Those words of hers, though they thanked him, most of all reminded him of his goodness and gentleness with her, and thus went farther and assured him that she still counted upon his goodness and gentleness.
"I am afraid, Babe Deveril," she added quickly, though still her eyes were grave and her lips unsmiling, "that I am pretty well tired out ... all sort of let-down like, as an old miner I once knew used to say! It's going to be sundown in a few minutes; can't we treat ourselves to the luxury of a good blazing camp-fire, and sit by it, and get good and warm and rested?"
Had she spoken her true thought she would have cried out instead:
"What troubles me, Babe Deveril, is that I am half afraid of you. And, all of a sudden, of the wilderness. And of life and of all the mysteries of the unknown! I am as near screaming from sheer nervousness at this instant as I ever was in my life."
But Deveril, who could glean of her emotions only what she allowed to lie among her spoken words, cried heartily:
"You just bet your sweet life we'll have a crackling, roaring fire. Taggart and his crowd are half a dozen miles away right now and still going; our fire down in that hollow will never cast a gleam over the big ridge yonder and the other ridges which lie in between him and us. Come ahead, my dear; here's for a real bonfire."
That "my dear" escaped him; but she did not appear to have noted it. She rose and followed him back to their dying fire. He began piling on dead branches; they caught and crackled and shot showering sparks aloft. He brought more fuel, laying it close by. Already the blaze had driven her back; she sat down by a pine, her knees in her hands, her head tipped forward so that her face was shadowed, her two curly braids over her shoulders.
Deveril lay near her, his hand palming his chin.
"Tell me, pretty maiden," he said lightly, "how far to the nearest barber shop?"
"And tell me," she returned, looking at her fingers, "if in that same shop they have a manicurist?"
Having glanced at her hands, she sighed, and then began working with her hair; there was one thing which must not be utterly neglected. She knew that if once it became snarled, she had small hope of saving it; no comb, no brush, no scissors to snip off a troublesome lock; only the inevitable result of such an utter snarl that she, too, in a week of this sort of thing, must needs seek a barber who understood bobbing a maid's hair. And with hair such as Lynette's, glorious, bronzy, with all the brighter glowing colors of the sunlight snared in it, any true girl should shudder at the barber's scissors.
All without warning a great booming voice crashed into their ears, shattering the silence, as Bruce Standing bore down upon them from the ridge, shouting:
"So, now I've got you! Got both of you! Got you where I want you, by the living God!"
The one first thought, bursting into full form and expression in Lynette's brain, with the suddenness, and the shock of an explosion, was: "He is alive!" And in Babe Deveril's mind the thought: "Bruce Standing at last!... And drunk with rage!"
And Bruce Standing's one thought, as both understood somewhat as they leaped to their feet:
"Into my hands, of all my enemies are those two whom I hate most delivered!" For it had been almost like a religion with him, his certainty that he would come up with them—the girl who had laughed and shot him; the man who had stolen her away, cheating his vengeance.
Babe Deveril, on the alert in the first flash of comprehension, stooped, groping among the shadows for his club, his only weapon. He saw the sun glinting upon Bruce Standing's rifle barrel. That club of his ... where was it? Dropped somewhere; perhaps while he was building a leafy bower for a pretty lady; forgotten in a gush of other thoughts ... he couldn't find it. He stood straight again; his hands, clinched and lifted, imitated clubs. The first weapons of the first men....
Lynette heard them shouting at each other, two men who hated each other, two men seeing red as they looked through the spectacles which always heady hatred wears. Men, both of them; masculinity asserting itself triumphantly, belligerently; manhood rampant and, on the spur of the moment, as warlike as two young bulls contending for a herd.... She heard them cursing each other; heard such plain-spoken Anglo-Saxon epithetshurled back and forth as at any other time would have set her ears burning. Just now the epithets meant less than nothing to her; they were but windy words, and a word was less, far less, than a stout club in a man's hand or a stone to hurl. She was of a mind to run while yet she could; but that was only the first natural reaction, lost and forgotten instantly. She stood without moving, watching them. An odd thing, she thought afterward, wondering, that that which at the moment made the strongest, longest-lasting impression upon her was the picture which Timber-Wolf, himself, created as, with the low sun at his back, he came rushing down upon them. Just now the mountain slope had constituted but a quiet landscape in softening tones, like a painting in pastels, with only the sun dropping down into the pine fringe to constitute a brighter focal point; and now, all of a sudden, it was as though the master artist, with impulsive inspiration, had slung with sweeping brush this new element into the picture—that of a great blond giant of a man, young and vigorous, and at this critical hour consumed with hatred and anger and triumphant glee. He was always one to punish his own enemies, was Bruce Standing. And now one felt that he carried vengeance in both big, hard, relentless hands.
On he came, almost at a run, so eager was he. Came so close before he stopped that Lynette saw the flash of his blue eyes—eyes which, when she had seen them first in Big Pine had been laughing andinnocent—which now were the eyes of a blue-eyed devil. He was laughing; it was a devil's laugh, she thought. For he jeered at her and her companion. His mockery made her blood tingle; his eyes said evil things of her. Her cheeks went hot-red under that one flashing look.
But he was not just now concerned with her! Hemeant to ignore her until he had given his mind to other matters! He was still shouting in that wonderful, golden voice of his; to every name in a calendar not of saints he laid his tongue as he read Babe Deveril's title clear for him. And, name to name, Babe Deveril checked off with him, hurling back anathema and epithet as good as came his way.... Lynette understood that both men had forgotten her. To them, passion-gripped as they were, it was as though she did not exist and had never existed. And yet it was largely because of her that they were gathering themselves to fly at each other! Man inconsistent and therefore man. Otherwise something either higher or lower; either of a devil-order or a god-order. But as it is ... better as it is ... something of god and devil and altogether—man.
And children of a sort, in their hearts. For, before a blow was struck, they called names! So fast did the words fly, so hot and furious were they, that she had the curious sense that their battle would end as it began, in insults and mutterings. But when Timber-Wolf had shouted: "Sneak and cur and coward ... a man to rifle another man's pockets, after that other had played square and been generous with you...." And when Deveril, his hands still lifted, while in his heart he could have wept for a club lost, shouted back: "Cur and coward yourself ... with a rifle against a man who has nothing ..." then she saw that the last word had been spoken and that blows were inevitable. She drew back swiftly, as any onlooker must give room to two big wild-wood beasts.
"Coward? Bruce Standing a coward? Why, damn your dirty soul...."
Bruce Standing caught his rifle by the end of the barrel; at first Lynette, and Deveril also, thought that hemeant to use it as a club. But instead he flourished it about his head but the once, and hurled it so far from him that it went, flashing in the sunlight, above a pine top and fell far away somewhere down the slope. Never in all his life had Bruce Standing had any man even think of naming him coward. As well name sunlight darkness. For all men who knew Bruce Standing, and all men who for the first and only time looked him square in the eyes, knew of him that he was fearless.
Thus with a gesture ... he abandoned wordy outpourings of wrath and hurled himself into flesh-and-blood combat. He did not turn to right or left for the dwindling camp-fire; he came straight through it, his two long arms outstretched, seeking Deveril. And Babe Deveril, the moment he saw how the rifle sped through the air and understood his kinsman's challenge, leaped forward eagerly to the meeting with him. Their four boots began scattering firebrands....
Lynette, with all her fast-beating heart, wanted to come to Babe Deveril's aid. The one thing which mattered was that, at her hour of need, he had stood up for her; her soul was tumultuously crying out for the opportunity to demonstrate beyond lip-service the meaning of gratitude. She caught up a stone, and throughout the fight held it gripped so hard that before the end her fingers were bleeding. But never an opportunity did she have to hurl it as long as those two contended.
Once it entered her thought that she must have dreamed of Bruce Standing, shot and bleeding and senseless on the floor at the Gallup House. For now, so few hours after, he gave no slightest hint of being a man recently badly wounded. There was more of common sense in a man's dying of such a wound as his than in his striking such great, hammer-hard blows with both arms. He created within her from that moment anodd sensation which grew with her later; the man was not of the common mould. Something beyond and above mere flesh and blood and the routine of human qualifications inspired him. There was somethinginevitableabout Bruce Standing....
Babe Deveril fought like a young, lissome tiger.... He fought with all of the might that lay within him, muscle and mind and controlling spirit. When he struck a blow he put into it, with a little coughing grunt, every last ounce of hostility which was at his command; with every blow he longed to kill. And, as though the two were blood-brothers, Bruce Standing fought as did Babe Deveril. Straight, hard, merciless blow to answer blow as straight and hard and merciless....
Timber-Wolf was a man to laugh at his own mine muckers when they could not thrust a boulder aside, and to stoop and set his hands and arms and back to the labor and pluck the thing up and hurl it above their bewildered heads. He smote as though he carried a war-club in each hand; he received a crashing blow full in the face, and, though the blood came, he did not feel it; he struck back, and his great iron fist beat through Deveril's guarding arms. No man, or at least no man whom Bruce Standing in his wild life had ever met, could have stood up against that blow. Babe Deveril, with the life almost jarred out of his body, went down. And Bruce Standing, growling like an angry bear, caught him up and lifted him high in air and flung him far away from him, as lightly as though he flung but a fifty-pound weight. And where Babe Deveril fell he lay still.... Lynette ran to him and knelt and put her hands at his shoulders, thinking him dead.
A short fight it had been, but already had the swift end come. So hard had that blow been, so tremendous had been the crash against rock and earth when theflung body struck, there appeared to be but a pale flame of life, flickering wanly, in Deveril's body. Timber-Wolf came and stood over him and over Lynette, gloating, mumbling; muttering while his great chest heaved: "Little rat that he is! A man to take advantage when he found me down; a man to cheat me of the she-cat that shot me. I could crush him into the dirt with my boot heel...."
"You great big brute!..."
It was then that she sprang to her feet and, almost inarticulate with her own warring emotions, grief and fear and anger and hatred, flung the jagged stone full into his face. He was unprepared; the stone struck him full upon the forehead; he staggered backward, stumbling, almost falling; his hands flew to his face. He was near-stunned; blinded. Deveril was on his elbow....
"Come!" she screamed wildly. "Quick! You and I...."
"Treacherous devil-cat!" There was his thunderous voice shouting so that she, so near him, was almost deafened.
Bruce Standing, wiping the blood from his eyes, his two arms out before him, came back to the attack. Deveril, on his knees, surged to his feet; Standing struck and Deveril went down like a poorly balanced timber falling. Lynette was groping for another stone. Suddenly she felt upon her wrist a grip like a circlet of cutting steel. She was whisked about; Timber-Wolf held her, drawn close, staring face into face. His other hand was lifted slowly; suddenly she felt it caught in her loose hair....
And then, inexplicable to her now and ever after, there was in her ear the sound of Bruce Standing's laughter. The hand at her hair fell away. It went up to his eyes, wiping them clear. And then she saw in the eyes what she had read in the voice ... laughter.
"Well, Deveril, what now?"
Again Deveril was on his feet. He swayed; his face was dead-white; it was easy to see how fiercely he bent every energy at his command to remain upright. There was a queer look in the eyes he turned upon Timber-Wolf.
"I never saw a man ... like you."
He spoke with effort; he was like a man far gone in some devastating lung trouble; his voice was windy and vibrant and weak.
"Baby Devil!" jeered Standing. "Oh, Baby Devil! And, when it comes to dealing with a real man.... Why, then, less devil than baby! Ho!..."
"I am going to kill you...."
"God aids the righteous!" Standing told him sternly. "You go. To hell with you and your kind."
God aids the righteous!This from the lips of Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf!... Lynette, her nerves like wires smitten in an electric storm, could have burst into wild laughter.... She wrenched at her wrist; Standing's big hand neither tightened nor relaxed, giving her the feeling of despair which a thick steel chain would have given had she been locked and deserted in a dungeon.
Deveril was looking over his shoulder. In his glance ... the sun was near setting among the pines, and they saw his face as his head jerked about ... any one might read his thought: down there, somewhere among the bushes, lay a rifle!
Standing laughed at him. And Standing, dragging Lynette along with him as easily as he might have drawn a child of six, went down the slope first. And first he came to the fallen rifle and caught it up and brought it back to the trampled camp-fire.
"You're sneak enough for that, Baby Devil!" hetaunted. "For that or any other coward act. And so is this woman of yours. So I spike the artillery. God! If the earth were only populated by men!... Now I've got this word for your crafty ear: listen well." Instantly his voice became as hard as flint and carried assurance that every word he was going to say would be a word meant with all his heart and soul. And all the while he gripped Lynette by the wrist and seemed unconscious of that fact or that she struggled to be free. "I've given you a fair fight, you who don't fight fair. And I've knocked the daylights out of you. And now I'm sick of you. You can go. You can sneak off through the timber and be out of sight inside of two minutes. Yet I'll give you five. And at the end of that time, if you're in sight, I am going to shoot you dead!"
Deveril glared at him, his glance laid upon Standing's as one rapier may clash across another.
"Do your dirty killing and be damned to you!" said Deveril briefly.
Timber-Wolf looked at him in surprise; he began to cast about him for a fresh and clearer comprehension of a man whom he despised. He strove with all his power of clean vision to see to the bottom of Deveril's most hidden thought.
"Now," said Standing slowly, "I am almost sorry for what I said. It strikes into me, Kid, that you are not afraid!"
Deveril, breathless, panting, holding himself erect only through a great call upon his will, made no spoken answer, but again laid the blade of his glance shiningly across that of Timber-Wolf.
"You die just the same," said Standing coldly. "It's only because I gave my word; that you can take in man-to-man style from me, Kid; for once I am not ashamedto be related to you. Either you travel or, in five minutes, you are a dead man."
Slowly Deveril's haggard eyes roved to Lynette's face ... Lynette chained to Bruce Standing in that crushing grip....
"I am going," he said. And both knew he said it in fearlessness but also in understanding of the power which lay in a rifle bullet and the weakness of the barricade offered to it by a human skull. And both understood, further, that it was to Lynette that he spoke. "I am coming back!"
"For God's sake!" she screamed. "Go! Hurry!"
"Hurry!" Bruce Standing, with his own word of honor in the balance against the weight of the life of a man whom he began to respect, was all anxiety to have his kinsman gone.
Deveril's last word, with his last look, was for Lynette.
"A man who doesn't know when he's beat is a fool.... But you can be sure of this: I'll be back!"
He went, walking crookedly at first among the knee-high bushes; then growing straighter as he passed into the demesne of the tall, straight pines. Not swiftly, since there was no possibility of any swift play of muscles left within him; but steadily.
"A man!" grunted Timber-Wolf. Whether in admiration or disgust, Lynette could not guess from his tone.
He had his watch in the palm of his hand; her gaze was riveted on it. It seemed so tiny a thing in that great valley of his hand; a bauble. Yet its even more insignificant minute-hand was assuming the office of arbiter of human life; she knew that the moment the fifth minute was ticked off Bruce Standing, true to his sworn word, would relinquish her wrist just long enoughto whip his rifle to his shoulder and fire ... in case the uncertain form of Babe Deveril, going up over the ridge, were still in sight. And she knew within her soul that just so sure as gun butt struck shoulder and finger found trigger, so sure would Babe Deveril toss his arms up and fall dead....
"Hurry, Kid ... you damn' fool ...hurry...."
All the while Timber-Wolf was muttering and glaring at his watch and clinching her wrist; all the while forgetting that he held her. And, this also she knew, regretting that he had the job set before him of shooting down another man.
Lynette, her whole body atingle, every sense keyed up to its highest stressing, knew as soon as did Bruce Standing when he was going to drop her wrist and jerk his gun up. The five minutes were passing; still, though at a distance far up on the ridge, seen only by glimpses now and then under the setting sun, Babe Deveril was driving on, a man half bereft of his sober senses, his brain reeling from savage blows and on fire with rage and mortification; they saw him among the pines; they lost him; they saw him again. Never once had he turned to look back. Yet it did not seem that he hastened....
Timber-Wolf, growling deep down in his throat, lifted his rifle. But Lynette, before the act,knew! She flung herself with sudden fury upon his uplifted arm; she caught it, and with the weight of her body dragged it down. He sought to fling her off; she wrapped both of her arms about his right arm; she jerked at it so that he could have no slightest hope of a steady aim....
He turned and looked down into her eyes; deep ... deep. For what seemed to her a long, long time he stood looking down into her eyes.
Then, with sudden anger, he thrust her aside.Without looking to see if she had fallen or stumbled and run, he raised his rifle again.
But just in time Babe Deveril was gone, over the ridge....
"And now that you're half scared to death, you'd like to make a man believe that you are not afraid of the devil himself!"
She flashed a burning look at him; chokingly she cried:
"At least, thank God, I am not afraid of you, Bruce Standing!... Big brute and bully and ... Yes!... Coward!"
And yet, as never before in her life, her heart was beating wildly, leaping against her side like an imprisoned thing struggling to break through the walls which shut it in. His fingers were still locked about her wrist; his grip tightened; he drew her closer in order to look the more clearly into her eyes. Then his slow, mocking laughter smote across her nerves like a rude hand brushing across harp-strings, making clashing discords.
"You begin well!" he jeered at her. "We are going to see how you end."
"Let me go!" She jerked back; she twisted and dragged at her wrist, trying wildly to break free. His mockery stung her into desperation. With her one free hand she struck him across the face.
She struck hard, with all her might, with trebled strength through her fury. And, maddening her, he gave no sign that she had hurt him. Still jeering at her, all that he did was drop his rifle, so that with his other hand he could take captive the hand which had struck him. And then it was so easy a thing for him to take both her wrists into the grip of his one, right hand; held thus, no matter how she fought, hers was the sensationof utter powerlessness which is a child's when an elder person, teasing, catches its two hands in one and lets it cry and kick.... Suddenly she grew quiet....
"Well?" she demanded, panting, forcing her eyes to a steady meeting with his. "What do you intend to do with me, now you've got me? There doesn't appear to be any one near to keep you from woman-beating!"
"What am I going to do with you? If I knew, I'd tell you! When I do know, I'll show you.... If I could catch you by the hair and drag you through hell after me.... I pay all of my debts, girl! I have followed you; I have found you; I have taken you, prying you loose from your running mate.... You thought it fun to laugh at me once, did you? Before I have done with you, you would give your soul for the power and the will to laugh...."
"It is because I laughed at you?" she asked wonderingly.
"For what else?" he said sternly.
"And not because of a pistol shot?"
"Less for that than for the other. I allow it any man's privilege to shoot at me if he doesn't like me; but no man's nor woman's privilege to laugh."
"How do you know it was I who shot you?... Did you see?"
"Had I seen, I should not have held it against you; for that would have meant that you struck in the open, any man's or woman's right! But to shoot a man in the back.... Here; help me!"
She was perplexed to know what he meant. He dragged her after him, a dozen paces from the fire; still holding her two hands caught in his one, he sat down upon a big stone. Suddenly it struck her that all this time, since he had dropped his rifle, his left arm had been hanging limply at his side.
"When I let go of you," he said, very stern, "if you try to run for it I'll catch you and drag you back. And I'm in no mood for gentleness!" At that he let her go. He put his right hand to his shirt collar and began unbuttoning it.
"My wound has broken open," he said, with a grunt of disgust. "That Baby Devil of yours didn't care where he hit a man!... Here; there's a bandage that has slipped. And I'm losing blood again. See what you can do."
"Why should I?" she demanded coolly. "What is it to me whether or not you bleed to death?"
Fury filled his eyes and he shouted at her:
"You, by God, drilled the cowardly hole; and you doctor it!"
"And if I won't?"
"Then, as I live, I'll make you! One way or another, girl, I'll make you. That's Bruce Standing's word for you. Now hurry!"
She cast a quick glance over her shoulder; she was on the verge of breaking into wild, headlong flight.... But certain knowledge restrained her; she knew that he would overtake her, that he would drag her back and ... that he was in no mood for gentleness. Therefore, while her whole soul rebelled, she came closer, as he commanded.
... She had never dreamed that any man born could have a chest like that; nor such shoulders, massive and yet beautiful as the pure-lined expression of power; nor such skin, soft and smooth and white as a girl's, the outward sign of another beauty, that of clean health. Clean, hard, triumphant physical manhood.... It struck her at the time, so that she marvelled at herself and wondered dully if she were taking leave of her sober senses, that there was truer, finer beauty in the body ofsuch a man than in any girl's; that here was a true artist's true triumph.... Physically he was splendid, superb.... In his own image did God make man....
With his right hand he was working with the bandage where it was taped about the bulge of his left breast; on the white cloth were fresh gouts of blood. Impatiently he tore at his shirt collar; on the bandage, where it passed about his left shoulder-blade, were red stains.
"Wait a minute," he commanded. "In my pocket I've got some sort of salve; some idiotic mess that Billy Winch cooked up; the Lord knows what it is or what he made it of; iodine and soap and flaxseed and cobwebs, most likely! But it will chink up the leak ... and it feels good and hasn't poisoned me so far! Here, smear it on."
... She felt as though she were dreaming all this! That wild, uncontrollable laughter of hers which swept over her at times of taut nerves and absurd situations, threatened to master her. She fought it down. She touched his back. She, Lynette, administering to Timber-Wolf ... it would be better for her, far better for her, if his wound were poisoned and he died!... Yet, as she touched his back, it was with wondrously gentle fingers. There was a wound there; the ugly wound made by a bullet, half healed, broken open anew under heavy blows. A little shiver, a strange, new sort of shiver, ran through her; here she was down to elementals, she, who with just cause and leaping instinct hated this man, ministering to him....
"Smear the stuff on, I tell you. Over the wound. Enough of it to shut out any infernal infection.... What in the devil's name is holding you? Waiting for the sun to go down and come up again?"
She bit her lips; he looked suddenly into her face, andcould have no clew to her thought or emotion; he could not guess whether she bit her lip to keep from laughing or crying!... She spread over the gaping wound a thin film of Billy Winch's pungent salve. As she touched the wound she looked for a muscular contraction, for the flinching from pain. He did not move; there was not so much as the involuntary quiver of a muscle. She wondered if the man felt as other human beings did?
... "Now a fresh piece of tape. That idiot Winch packed me off with my pockets loaded like a drug-store shelf! That's all for this time; we'll make a new dressing and bathe the wound in the morning. Now.... Here! Let me look at you!"
He crimsoned her face with that way of his. She whipped back from him and her eyes brightened with defiance. He sat looking at her a long time, while with slow fingers he buttoned his collar; his face showed not so much as a flicker of expression; his eyes were keen, but gave no clew to his thought.
The sun was already down beyond the ridge; shadows here in the little hollow had gathered swiftly; dark was on the way. He rose and went to the fire, for an instant turning his back upon her as he piled on the dead-wood which Deveril had gathered. But over his shoulder he called to her coolly:
"I've warned you not to try to run for it!"
And from his tone she knew that he had easily guessed her thought; for the impulse to attempt flight had been strong upon her the moment that he turned. She remained where she stood; if only it were pitch-dark, if only he went on a few paces farther away from her, if only the fringe of trees offering refuge were a few paces nearer.... She was quick to see the folly of making a premature dash; the wisdom in allowing him to think that she could be looked to for obedience! Thus, later,when her chance came and his watchfulness nodded, she'd be up and away like a shot....
The fire caught the fresh fuel and crackled and blazed, sparks showering about her where she stood. Now Standing, his face looking ruddy in the glow, turned toward her, saying curtly:
"Come here. I want a good look at you ... in the full light."
"Brute and bully!" she cried, struggling with herself for an outward semblance of calm. "You hold the high card. But the game isn't played out between you and me yet, Bruce Standing." While speaking she came closer, so that she too stood in the red fire glow. She held her head up; she returned his unswerving gaze unswervingly.
"You've got the vocabulary of a gambler's daughter," he said. "That's what you are, eh? A gambler's girl and, in your own penny-ante way, a gambler yourself!"
"I am the daughter of Dick Brooke!" she told him proudly. "Dick Brooke was a man and a miner and after that, if you like, a gambler."
"Dick Brooke? Dick Brooke's daughter? Why, then ... the daughter also of a dancing-girl!"
Her face went white with anger.
"Oh ... I hate you! Oh, I hate you! You ... you are contemptible!"
"Aha! So that hurts!" he jeered at her.
"It is a cruel lie. Olymphe Labelle was not a dancing-girl.... She was an artist! And a woman among ten thousand...."
The firelight cast its warm glow over her face. She lifted her chin defiantly. Her hair fell in loose, rippling strands of bronze and over her shoulders. She was very beautiful thus; no woman on whom Bruce Standing had ever looked was half so beautiful. And haughty, like aprincess ... like a high-bred lady made captive, yet scorning to show sign of fear....
"You are Lynette Brooke," he muttered; "you are the girl who laughed at me, shaming me; you are the girl who shot me in the back! Those are the things to remember. A treacherous cat of a woman; a gun woman! One to go sneaking around with a revolver at hand to shoot a man in the back with...."
"Any woman, dealing with men like you, has need of a gun!"
"I'll tell you this," he muttered. "I'm a fair judge of men, if not of women. And when it's a case of a man ... why just show me a man who carries a pocket-gun and I'll show you a cheap ragamuffin, a tin horn, or an overgrown kid ... or a dirty coward. A man's weapon is a rifle carried in the open; give me a good pair of boots and I'll stamp the white livers out of a whole crowd of your little gunmen.... As for women, gun-toting women...." He broke off with a heavy shrug. "Now, girl, I'm hungry. The smell of your coffee has been in my nostrils a long time. See what you can give me to eat."
"So I am to wait on you ... to be your servant...."
"To be my slave!" he shouted at her. "Proud, are you? So much the better. I swore to make you pay, and you begin paying now. Yes, as my slave as long as I like!"
"And you call yourself a man!"
"I call myself the best man that ever came into this wilderness country," he told her impudently. "If you are in doubt, bring on any other man of your choice and ask him, with your pretty smiles, if he cares to stand up against me! Yes, a man who goes rough-shod over everything and anything and anybody who stands in his way...."
"Boaster!" she named him scornfully.
He laughed loudly at that.
"I am no boaster and in your heart you know it!... There's another damn-fool convention for you, that business of great modesty! A man who is sure of himself doesn't have to walk easy and talk easy, but can tell other men what he is, and then, by glory, show 'em!"
Still she was scornful of him ... though she could not keep out of her thought that picture which he had made when, axe in hand, he had laid an armed jailer in the dust, and single-handed had made a jail delivery which hundreds of other men wanted to make and held back from ... through lack of that unrestricted confidence which was Bruce Standing's.
He was staring at her.
"You, too ... for a woman ... have courage," he muttered. And then, with a sudden arm flung out: "I'm hungry, I tell you."
"I'd rather die...."
"It's easy to die ... for any one who is not a coward. And I just told you that you had courage." He came suddenly close to her. "But there are other things that are not so easy! What if I put my two arms about you? If I hold you tight ... and set my lips to yours ... and...."
"You beast...."
"But my dinner?" he jeered at her.
She went hot and cold; she cast a quick glance toward the forest land where the night was thickening; she cast another glance at his rifle where it lay, a few feet from the fire. Then, her lower lip caught between her teeth, she went to the tin can in which she and Babe Deveril had made coffee.
"A funny thing," said Bruce Standing, watching her; "you skipped out, hot-foot, from Big Pine, thinking youhad killed me! And your little friend, meaning Baby Devil, skipped along, thinking he had done Jim Taggart in! And, after all, nobody much hurt!... Glad to hear that Taggart did not die?"
"I knew it already," she said, just to cheat him of any satisfaction in telling her.
"Mexicali Joe skipped this way, too," he went on swiftly, so swiftly that he succeeded in tricking her into saying:
"I knew that, too!"
Then he laughed at her, informing her:
"Now there remains little for you to tell me. You knew Taggart was still on his feet and you knew Joe was travelling this way, and you've come up from the general direction of Joe's dugout! Which tells me one thing: where you and Baby Devil got the coffee and this tinned stuff. Now let's hear details!"
"Oh ... I hate you!"
"You've told me that before. And...." He burst into booming laughter. And then, still laughter-choked, he cried: "Like a good old-time two-handled sword is the man Bruce Standing! And yet his wit, like a Spanish dagger, is good match for a girl's!"
She made no reply, though her blood tingled, and though her hand, with a will of its own, must be held back from striking him across the face again. She brought him his coffee and thereafter food which he called for from among the tins.
"What do you think has happened to your gentleman friend?" he mocked her. And when she refused to reply, he told her: "He's gone on ... where? After Taggart? To get a rifle and come back? Planning to hide behind a tree and pop me off while I'm not looking? That would make a hit with you, wouldn't it? Like your own best game of shooting a man in the back!Or has he forgotten a pair of bright eyes and warm arms and red lips? And is he content to trail Mexicali, spying on him, trying to get in on the new gold diggings? Which, girl?"
"He hates you!... with cause. And he is no coward; he is as good a man, if less brute, as you, Bruce Standing!..."
When he spoke finally it was to say:
"We're going to be short on provisions for a day or so, girl. Hungry?"
Here was her first, altogether too vague clew to his intentions. Quickly she asked:
"Where are we going?"
"I to keep an engagement; you to accompany me."
He supposed that he had told her nothing. And yet she, quick-witted, having never let slip from her mind a certain suspicion when Mexicali Joe had too readily succumbed to Taggart, cried out:
"To a meeting with Mexicali Joe!"
"What makes you think that?" he asked sharply.
She pretended to laugh at him. He ate in silence; drank his coffee; thereafter, stuffing a pipe full of crude black tobacco, smoked thoughtfully. All the while the fire burned lower and the darkness, ringing them around, drew closer in. She had been on the alert, while looking to be hopelessly bowed where she sat. Suddenly he was at her side, his grip like a steel bracelet about her wrist.
"About ready to jump and run for it?" he taunted her. "Not to-night, my girl; and not to-morrow night nor yet for many a day to come. I've got my own plans for you."
"Are you going to take me back to Big Pine? To hand me over to the law, with a charge of attempted murder against me?"
"I am going to take you with me on into the wilderness. Into a country which is absolutely the kingdom of Bruce Standing. Haven't I told you that I have my own plans for you? I can hand you over to the cheap degradation of a trial and conviction and jail sentence whenever I am ready for it...."
"You can't keep me from killing myself...."
"But I can! I am master here, understand? And you.... By heaven, you are nothing but my slave so long as I tolerate you!... Look here, what I brought for you!... For I knew I'd find you!"
He began unwinding from his big body a thin steel chain, a chain which he had brought with him from his ranch headquarters, where it had served as leash for a wolf-hound. With a quick movement he snapped the end of it about her waist; there was a steel padlock scarcely bigger than a silver half-dollar; she heard the click as he locked it. Then he stood back from her, the other end of the slight chain in his hand ... and laughed at her!
"The sign of your servitude!... Proud? One way to make you pay! Will you laugh again, girl? Will you, do you think, ever have the second chance to shoot me in the back?... Come; we must be on our way before daylight."
He caught up his rifle; that, together with the end of her chain, he held in his hand. He began putting out the fire, stamping on the living coals. Making her follow him, he went to the creek several times for water, which he carried in his big hat, which held so much more than any tin can in camp. When the fire was out, he turned with her toward the bowery shelter which Babe Deveril, working and singing, had made for her. With his shuffling boots he kicked the culled branches into two heaps. He wrapped the end of her chainabout his wrist; she heard the snap as he fastened it. He thrust his rifle under him.
"I am going to sleep," he told her bluntly and cast himself down. "You with your payment just begun, may lie awake all night ... wondering...."
... But it was a long, long while, a weary time of darkness sprinkled with stars before he went to sleep. She sat up on her couch of boughs, the chain about her waist galling her....
It may appear a strange thing that Lynette Brooke slept at all that night. But a fatigued body, healthy and young, demanded its right, and she did sleep and sleep well. A far stranger thing was that, after she had sat in the dark a long time, there had at last come a queer little smile upon her lips and into her eyes, and she had gone to sleep smiling!
For in the deep black silence her quick mind had been busy, never so busy; out of tiny scraps it had constructed a mental patchwork. Nor were all dark-hued threads weaving in and out of it; here and there the sombre pattern had bright-hued spots. Her courage was high, her hopes always at surging high tide; her senses keen. And, after all, Bruce Standing was a blunt, forthright man, in no degree subtle....
He had given her the impression an hour ago of being entirely brute beast. That was true. Further, she told herself with growing conviction, that it had been his great intent to make her regard him as brute and beast; she had angered him, she had drawn upon herself his vengeful wrath; he meant to make her pay; and his first step had been to make her afraid of him.... She went on to other thoughts; Bruce Standing was the man to defy Gallup in his own lair; the man to defy the sheriff; to hurl an axe at an armed deputy ... and yet the only man in Big Pine to lift an angry hand against the unfair play of shutting little Mexicali Joe up in jail! He, alone, had not sought to steal Joe's secret; he alone was ready, against all odds, to throwthe door back and let Joe go. Not altogether that the part of the brute and beast!
Another thing: Bruce Standing did not lie. Sheknewthat. And he was not a coward; he did not do petty, cowardly things.... He meant her to believe that there was nothing too cruel and merciless for him to inflict upon her. Yet she had struck him in the face with a stone; she had struck him with her hands, and he had not so much as bruised the skin of her wrists with his big hard hands!... Eager he had been to humiliate her, calling her his slave; eagerly, as soon as he had read her pride, he grasped at the first means of torturing it. Why that great eagerness ... unless he, despite his threat, was casting about in rather blind fashion for means to make her pay?... He wanted her to be afraid of him ... and it came to her in the dark, so that she smiled, that this was because there was little for her to fear!
"In his rage," she told herself, and, fettered as she was, a first gleam of triumph visited her, "he came roaring after me. And, now he has me, he doesn't know what to do with me! To make me his unwilling slave ...unwilling!... that is all that he can think of now."
And again there was comfort in the thought:
"If he meant to harm me, why should he have let me go to-night? An angry man, bent upon real brute vengeance, would have struck at the first opportunity. The opportunity was when he sent Babe Deveril away and had me to do what he pleased with. And he only played the perfectly silly game of making me his slave ...unwilling...."
It was the thoughts which rose with the word that put the little smile into her eyes and brought the first softening of her troubled lips.... Several times sheheard him stirring restlessly; once he awakened her with his muttering, and she knew that he was asleep, but that either his wound pained him or his sleep was disturbed by unwelcome dreams—perhaps both.
Bruce Standing woke and sat up in the early chill dawn. He looked swiftly to where Lynette lay. She appeared to be plunged in deep, restful sleep. She lay comfortably snuggled in among the boughs; the curve of one arm was up about her face, so that he could not see her eyes. Naturally he believed them shut; her breathing was low and quiet, exactly as it should have been were she really fast asleep.... She looked pretty and tiny and tired out, but resting. Suddenly he frowned savagely. But he sat for a long time without stirring.
Lynette put up her arms and stretched and yawned sleepily, and then, like a little girl of six, put her knuckles into her eyes. Then she, too, sat up quickly.
"Oh," she said brightly. "Are you awake already? And making not a bit of noise, so as to let me have my sleep out? Good morning, Mr. Timber-Wolf!"
She was smiling at him! Smiling with soft red lips and gay eyes!
He frowned and with a sudden lurch was on his feet.
"Come," he said harshly. "I want to make an early start."
She sprang to her feet as though all eagerness, exclaiming brightly:
"If you'll get the fire started, I'll have breakfast in a minute! There isn't much in the larder, but you'll see what a nice breakfast I can make of it. Then I'll dress your wound and we'll be on our way."
"Look here," muttered Standing, swinging about to stare at her, "what the devil are you up to?"
"What do you mean?" she asked innocently.
"I mean this cheap play-acting stuff ... as though you were as happy as a bird!"
"Why, I always believe in making the best of a bad mess, don't you?" she retorted. "And, after all, how do you know that I'm not as happy as a bird? I nearly always am."
His eyes were blazing, his face flushed; she saw that she was lashing him into rage. She began to fear that she had gone too far; for the present she would go no farther. But meanwhile she gave him no hint of any trepidation, but kept the clear, unconcerned look in her eyes.
He strode away from her, toward the charred remains of last night's fire. He held her chain in his hand; she hurried along after him, so that not once could the links tighten; so that not once could he feel that he was dragging an unwilling captive behind him. Her heart was beating like mad; she was aquiver with excitement over the working out of her scheme, yet she gave him no inkling of any kind of nervousness.
"I don't know what you are up to and I don't care," he said abruptly. "You are to do what you are told, girl."
"Of course!" she said quickly. "I understand that. I am ready...."
"I am going to take the chain off you now, simply because I don't need it during daylight. But you're not to run away; if you try it I'll run you down and drag you back. Do you understand? And after that I'll keep you chained up."
"I understand," she nodded again. And, when he had removed the chain from her waist, all the time not looking at her while she, all the time, stood smiling, she said a quiet "Thank you."
"While I get some wood," he went on, "you can takesome cans and go down to the creek for water. I'll trust you that far ... and don't you trust too much to the screen of willows to give you a chance for a getaway! I tell you, I'd overhaul you as sure as there is a God in heaven!"
She caught up two cans and went down the slope toward the creek. To keep him from guessing how, all of a sudden, her heart was fluttering again, she sang a little song as she went. He stared after her, puzzled and wondering. Then with a short, savage grunt, he began gathering wood.
Was now her time? This her chance? She sang more loudly, clearly and cheerily. She wanted to look back to see if he was watching her every step; yet she beat down the temptation, knowing that if he did watch and did see her turn he would know that she was overeager for flight. She came to the creek; she passed carelessly about a little clump of willows. Now she looked back, peering through the branches. He was stooping, gathering wood; his back was to her!
"Now!" her impulses cried within her. "Now!"
She looked about her hurriedly, in all directions. There was so much open country here; big pines, wide-spaced. If she ran down the slope he must surely see her when she had gone fifty or a hundred yards. And then he'd be after her! If she turned to right or left, the case was almost the same. If it were only dark! But the sun was rising....
She began singing again, so that he might hear. A sudden anger blazed up within her. With all his blunt ways, the man was not without his own sort of shrewdness; he had known that she had no chance here to escape him; no chance for such a head start as to give her an even break in a race with him.
... After ten minutes she came back to him; shecarried a dripping can in each hand; she had bathed hands and arms and face and throat; she had combed her hair out through her fingers, making new thick braids, with loosely curling ends. She had taken time to twist those soft ends about her fingers. He was standing over his newly built fire; his rifle, with the chain tossed across it, lay against a rock; he gave no sign of noting her approach.... Yet, while they ate a hurriedly warmed breakfast, she caught him several times looking at her curiously....
Her heart began again to beat happily; never was hope long departed from the breast of Lynette Brooke. She kept telling herself, over and over, that he was not going to be brute and beast to her. Soon or late she would find her chance for escape from him; she would let him think her that weakling which it was his way to regard women in general; there would come the time when, once more free, she could laugh at him.... And she, when he did not observe, looked curiously at him many a time.
When they had eaten and he had gathered up the few scraps of food and had very carefully extinguished the last ember of their fire, he wound the chain about his middle again, caught up the rifle and said briefly and still without looking at her:
"Come."
She followed him, neither hesitating nor questioning; thus she was gleefully sure she angered him.... She wondered what the day held in store for her; she wondered what of good and bad lay ahead; and yet she was now less filled with terror than with the burning zest for life itself. Bruce Standing had told her that he was going to keep an appointment; he had been the man to release Mexicali Joe; Mexicali Joe had whispered something and Standing had laughed; Mexicali Joe was nowahead of them, pretending to lead Taggart and Gallup and Cliff Shipton to his gold! Her thoughts were busy enough and she, like her silent companion, had small need for talk.
She wondered about Babe Deveril; how badly hurt he had been after Bruce Standing's mauling; what he was doing now; where he was? A hundred times that morning, hearing bird or squirrel and once a leaping buck, she looked to see Babe Deveril bursting back upon them.... Had he not gone far, last night? Had he remained near their camp and was he following them to-day?...
They passed over a ridge and turned into a little cup of a green valley; Standing, stalking ahead of her, went to a thicket and drew from it a saddle and bridle and saddle blankets and a small canvas pack. Then, standing with his hands on his hips, staring off in all directions, he whistled shrilly. Whistled, and waited listening, and whistled again. Lynette heard, from far off, the quick, gladwhickerof a horse. And here came the horse galloping; kicking up its heels; shaking its head with flying mane; circling, snorting, with lowered head; at standstill for a moment, a golden sorrel with snow-white mane and tail; a mount for even Timber-Wolf, lover of horses, to be proud to own and ride and whistle to through the forest land.... Lynette looked swiftly at Standing's face; he was smiling; his eyes were bright.
He went forward and stroked his horse's satiny nose and wreathed a hand in the mane and led the animal to the saddle, calling him softly, "Good old Daylight." The horse nosed him; Standing laughed out loud and smote the great shoulder with open palm.... Lynette saw with clear vision that there was a great love between man and animal; and she thought of another horse, Sunlight, slaughtered at Young Gallup's orders,and of Standing's lisping rage and of her own nervous, uncontrollable laughter....
There came a deep, ugly growling—a throaty, wolfish menace, almost at her heels. She whirled about and cried out in sudden startled fright.
"Lie down Thor!" Standing shouted sternly. "Down, sir!"
Lynette had never seen a dog like this one, big and lean and forbidding; as tall as a calf in her suddenly frightened eyes, wolfish looking, with stiff bristles rising along powerful neck and back, and eyes red-rimmed, and sharp-toothed mouth slavering. At Standing's command the great dog, which had come upon her on such noiseless pads, dropped to the ground as though a bullet instead of a commanding voice had drilled its heart. But still the steady eyes filled with suspicion and menace were fixed on her.
"He'd tear your throat out if I gave the word," said Standing. "Now you do what I tell you; go to him and set your hand on his head!"
"I won't!" she cried out sharply, drawing back. The deep, throaty growl came again; the dog's lips trembled and withdrew from the long, wolfish teeth; the whole gaunt form was aquiver....
"But you will! Otherwise.... He'll not hurt you when once I tell him not to. Go to him; put your hand on his head.... Afraid?" he jeered.
She was afraid. Sick-afraid. And yet she gave her taunter one withering glance and stepped swiftly, though her flesh quivered, to the dog.
"Steady, Thor!" cried Standing sternly. "You dog, steady, sir!"
The dog growled and the teeth were like evil, poisonous fangs. Yet Lynette came another step toward him; she stooped; she put forward her hand....
"Thor!" Standing's voice rang out, filled with warning. Thor began whining.
Lynette put her hand upon the big head. Thor trembled. Suddenly he lay flat, belly down; the head between the outstretched fore paws. He whined again. Standing laughed and began bridling and saddling his horse. Thor jumped up and frisked about his master; Standing fondled him, as he had fondled Daylight, by striking him resoundingly.
"To play safe," he flung over his shoulder at Lynette, "better come here."
When she had drawn close Standing stooped and patted the dog's head. Then, while Thor, snarling, looked on, he put out his hand and placed it for a fleeting instant upon Lynette's shoulder.
"Good dog," he said quietly.
Then he caught up her hand and placed it on Thor's head, cupped under his own.
"Good dog," he said again. And then he told Lynette to call the dog. She did so, saying in an uncertain voice:
"Here, Thor!... Come here, Thor!"
"Thor!" cried Standing commandingly. "Good dog!"
Thor trembled, but he went to her. He allowed her to pat him. Then, with a suddenness which startled her, he shot out a red tongue to lick her hand. Standing burst into sudden pleased laughter.
"Your friend ... so long as I don't set him on you!" he cried out.
"You are a beast ... who herd with beasts!" she said, shuddering.
He laughed again and finished drawing tight cinch and strapping latigo. He tied his small pack at the strings behind the saddle and said briefly:
"Since we're in a hurry, suppose you ride while I walk alongside? We'll make better time that way."