CHAPTER XXV STILL A-ROLLIN'

Arnold finished his breakfast and, telling Margaret that he was going to Gunsight to see Johnny and Dave, the hiring of another puncher being uppermost in his mind, went to the corral and soon was riding along the trail, gratified by the entire absence of pain in his leg and with the stimulation which came from the easy motion, the sun, and the crisp morning air. When Margaret turned back into the house her brother had slipped out of the front door and had gone, eager to shirk his few duties and play scout. Since he had found an old, broken rifle in the deserted and disused bunkhouse it formed the foundation upon which he based his play. As she called to him, vexation in her voice, he was wriggling through a clump of brush not far away, this part of his scouting being earnest and real. Wiping dishes was woman's work, as he firmly believed, and he detested and scorned it. His pony had been saddled and picketed in a draw south of the house before breakfast, and when the opportunity offered he intended to get to it and ride off over the ranch until hunger forced him to return. Lying quietly in his cover he kept a keen watch until, the beds made, his sister should begin the kitchen work and give him a chance to cross the open space between him and the pony. He was growing more and more impatient when he caught sight of a horse[346]man riding down the slope of a hill north of the house, and his anger and curiosity flared up when he saw that it was Big Tom.

The Bar H foreman rode leisurely past the corral, noting the absence of Arnold's horse and the pony, and stopped before the door. Swinging from the saddle he sauntered up to the kitchen door and knocked. Margaret wondered who it could be, a sudden thought of injury to her father coming to her, and she hastened to answer it. When she saw who the visitor was she stopped and recoiled a little.

"How-do-you-do?" she said coldly.

"Glad to see you. Ma'am," came the answer. "I rode over to see yore father about some mavericks of his that are eatin' up my grass."

"You have just missed him," replied Margaret. "If you return by the way of Gunsight you can see him there."

"Now, ain't that just my luck?" regretted the foreman, stepping inside. "Might I have a drink of water, Ma'am? I wasn't aimin' to ride back that way. Of course there ain't no chance at all of his comin' back soon?"

"Why, no," answered Margaret, handing him the dipper. "He may not return until evening. But you can leave a message for him with me."

"It's somethin' we has to talk over," Big Tom replied, giving her the empty dipper. As her hand touched it he grabbed her to him, her screams muffled by his hand. Struggle as she would she was helpless against his bearlike strength and soon was limp with[347] exhaustion and partially suffocated. Holding her with one arm and hand he took a clothesline from a peg on the wall and quickly trussed her with it until she was powerless to move. Gagging her with a towel he carried her to the corral, caught her horse, and threw her on it and cinched up the saddle which lay at the gate. Hurrying back to the house he collected provisions and ran out again, and in another minute he rode rapidly for the brush and rough ground west of the house, leading her horse. Bound, gagged, and tied to the saddle she could do nothing, every beat of the horses' hoofs increasing her terror.

Back at the house Charley wriggled around the corner, his curiosity overcoming caution, and he stared in amazement as he saw them crossing the open, his sister bound with rope. Suddenly cursing the useless rifle in a burst of rage, he dashed for his horse, mounted and rode for town to tell his father, keeping to the low levels until the hills and brush formed a screen behind him. The little pony ran at top speed, shrewdly guided over the rough trail, and the nine miles did not take long. Dashing up to Dave's, Charley shouted at the top of his lungs and pulled up at the door.

"Peggy's kidnapped! Dad! Peggy's kidnapped!"

A chair crashed in Dave's and three men jammed in the doorway, Johnny forcing his two companions back as he fought his way past them. "What's that?" he demanded.

"Big Tom's stole Peggy, d—n him!" shrilled the boy, tears of helpless rage in his eyes.

Johnny needed no further proof than the words and[348] Charley's earnestness. "Where was it? Which way did he go?" he snapped, leaping to the black horse standing at the tie rail.

"At th' ranch—they went west. Oh, Peggy!" he sobbed. "Oh, Peggy!"

"Come a-runnin'!" shouted Johnny over his shoulder, wheeling his horse. He spoke to the black thoroughbred and she struck into a gait she could hold for hours, and one which was deceptive in its smoothness. As he rocked down the trail three Double X punchers rode in from the south.

"Keep a-goin'!" Dave yelled to them, apoplectic with his emotions. "Foller him! Big Tom's run off with th' Arnold gal!"

Slim's brief remark is better left unrecorded. Three sets of hoofs rolled out of the town and sent the dust swirling high along the trail. The punchers overtook and passed Arnold, who cursed the slowness of his mount, shouted profane reassurance at him and left him their dust. Dailey led Fanning around the corner of the saloon and aroused surprised resentment in his horse, which heretofore had regarded him as a sane being. Fanning's gray felt a touch of its youthful spirits return; if it had to race, all right; it wasn't much for speed, but it expected to be better than last at the finish.

Big Tom, having passed the boundaries of the ranch, pulled up long enough to remove the gag. "If you behave yoreself I'll untie you," he said. "You can't get away—if you try it you'll learn what a rope feels like."

[349]

Margaret managed to nod and the rope came off of her.

"'Twon't do no good to yell," he told her, "nor to hold back. You won't be missed till supper time, an' then nobody will do much worryin' till dark. They'll search th' range first—an' by th' time they finish that we'll be so far away that they'll never find us. Yo're thinkin' they'll trail us? Huh! Let 'em, then. Once we get into my country they can trail an' be d—d! You might as well make th' best of it. I got th' herd money in my pockets, an' we can have a nice little ranch an' live like th' story books say—happy ever after. Yo're goin' to live there with me. If yo're sensible you can do it as my wife. I'm going to give you that chance. But, yo're goin' to live there with me, just the same."

"You are even more of a beast than I thought," she retorted. "You'll never reach that ranch; and if you do, I'll kill you while you sleep."

"I'm chancin' th' last," he retorted. "Yo're thinkin' of that Nelson, huh?" he grinned. "When Big Tom does play his cards it takes more'n a fool like him to win th' pot. An' I'm sayin' I stacked this deck. I've been stackin' it for a long time, figgerin' everythin'. He's cold-decked, Ma'am; beat clean when he'd reckoned he'd won. Thinkin' they'll trail us, an' get us because we're not pushin' hard?" He laughed ironically. "Didn't I say I've been plannin' this a long time? There ain't no use of wearin' horses out when it ain't needed. With twenty hours, or more, start, ours will be fresh when we need speed—which we won't. You'd do better to begin practicin' callin' yoreself Missus Huff[350]—it'll come easy before you know it. I'm givin' you that chance, an' I'll not bother you till a parson is handy. Then it will be yore move. You've got three days." Receiving no reply he looked around the range and thenceforth ignored her.

A black thoroughbred swept across the little SV valley, passed the corral, and rocked westward along a plain trail. The rider, his sombrero jammed tightly down on his head to baffle the pull of the whistling wind, cold with a rage which had turned him into the personification of vengeance, felt an exultant thrill as the double trail sped past him, for his quarry had but eighteen miles start, and he felt sure that it had been cut down by the speed at which half of it had been covered. There was nothing on hoofs on all that range that could keep an even lead against Pepper. She flashed past mesquite, around chaparrals, her great heart beating with a gameness which excelled even her love for the race; her trim legs swinging rhythmically, the reaching of her free, beautiful stride eating up the range and sending it past like the speeding surface of some great rapids. A Gila monster moved from her course barely in time, and a rattler coiled and struck too late. Off in the brush a startled coyote changed its mind about crossing the open and slunk back into cover, following the black with suspicious gaze. The great muscles writhed and bunched, rippled and bulged under the satiny skin, the barrel-like chest rising and falling with a rhythm and smoothness which graphically told that it was a perfect part of a perfect running machine. Down the slopes at top speed, up them at a[351] lope, the undulating range slipped swiftly past. Brush and scattered mesquite, chaparrals and lone, sentinel cacti; hollows, coulees, draws, and arroyos went behind in swift procession. Still the double trail lay ahead, now lost as it crossed hard ground, now plain with small, shallow basins where the sand had slid back and hidden the outlines of the roofs, and then clear and sharp and fresh in soils possessing claylike cohesion.

The rider gave no thought to ambush. There was a time for everything, but hesitation or caution would not claim its turn until the ride was done. If an ambush lay ahead, what mattered it? Others were coming along that trail, and only one need survive. The picture which he carried in his brain was not one from which counselings of safety could arise. Its message was to ride, ride, ride; and kill, kill, kill; and it turned the thin-lipped, narrow-lidded rider into an agent of Death, merciless and untiring. The ages rolled back from around his soul and stripped it of the last, pulsating film of civilization's veneer. No gray wolf ever ran a trail, no wolverine hunted in its northern fastness that was more coldly savage or cruel than this man whose grim confidence gave no thought of failure. Mile after mile he rode, motionless in the saddle save for the rhythmic rise and swing of a saddle poise superb. Neither to right nor left he looked, nor back where the billowing dust swirled suddenly high to roll spreading over the drab earth, slowly settling. Straight ahead he set his gaze, to the fartherest new-made mark on the winding, twisting trail, a trail which twisted and wound as though vainly seeking a place to hide until that flying[352] Death were past. A high ridge of limestone poured into view and the swinging black was pulled to a walk, for a breathing spell wise in its length, and canny in its shortness. Then up slowly and off again on her far-reaching stride, the noonday sun blazing down unheeded.

To the west the ribbon-like trail was widening. Behind Johnny it was bigger by one more strand; behind Slim, a furnace of rage, was another strand; Tom Wilkes, grimly determined, made another; half a mile behind him rocked Cimarron, vengeful and silent, and added the sixth. Certain memories, returning to the segundo, caused him to ride off and make a trail of his own, confident that it would be a chord in a great arc and lead him past his two ranch mates. There was a certain pass far to the northeast which he vaguely coupled to the Bar H foreman, and with three men ahead of him to follow the certainty of the tell-tale trail, he could afford to gamble. Two hours later Slim became indignant and wondered if Cimarron's black-and-white had grown wings, for his segundo's dust did not suit his mouth and eyes.

"He can do it with me," muttered Slim, "but that Pepper hoss won't be seen by any of us till she stops. I hope Nelson ain't killin' her."

The Pepper horse was neither stopping nor being killed. She skimmed along with no faltering in her stride as though she remembered a day in a quicksand. There was a debt to be paid, and if heart held out and the heaving sides did not prove false to her thoroughbred courage, the lengthening shadows would see it[353] canceled before they became lost in the day's deepening twilight. Down a narrow valley she sped, the hills rolling the tattoo of her drumming hoofs as though they liked the sound and were reluctant to let it die. Taking a brook at a bound and scorning her rising thirst, she swirled around a sharp bend, and twitched her ears suddenly forward, the quick pressure of her rider's knees telling her that he had seen.

Johnny slipped his Sharp's from its long sheath and, holding it at the ready, stood up in his stirrups, his horse somewhere finding a reserve power that fairly hurled her forward, the trim black legs whirring under her like flashing spokes of jet. The rider's lids narrowed to thin slits and the tight-pressed lips pressed tighter. Yard after yard he gained, second after second. The half mile became a quarter, steadily lessened and then, Pepper pounding over a stretch of rocky ground where the hammering of her hoofs rang out loudly, there was a quick turning in the saddles ahead, and a roar from the saddle behind, a ragged cloud of acrid smoke tearing itself to filmy bits and blending with the suddenly tenuous dust cloud in the rear.

Big Tom cursed in sudden rage and whirled his horse behind Margaret's, his rifle spitting past her shoulder. His shelter bolted from in front of him as a Sharp's Special stung the SV horse, its rider barely able to keep her seat during the convulsive lunge. Big Tom leaped down behind his mount and rested the gun across the saddle. Before he could pull the trigger another Special passed through the animal's abdomen and, its force spent, struck his belt and doubled him up, gasping for[354] breath as the agonized animal leaped forward. The cantle of the saddle, striking the barrel of the Winchester, tore the weapon from its owner's hands and left him, slowly straightening up, with a Colt for his only defense.

Coming at him like a skimming swallow sped Pepper, her rider, having slipped the rifle back into its long sheath, standing erect in the stirrups, each hand holding a Colt. For a moment they were held aloft and then as the Bar H foreman drew his six-gun they chopped down and poured jets of flame and puffs of smoke over Pepper's head. The foreman twisted, fired aimlessly, lurched, fired again, and plunged forward, face down on the sand. Johnny slid his guns back into their holsters and raced for Margaret, who was fighting a pain-crazed horse.

Slim and Cimarron, neck and neck now, jumped the brook, sped along the little valley, keyed to fighting pitch by the sound of distant shots, and flashed around the bend, where they pulled up sharply and looked across the level pasture.

"H—l!" growled Cimarron. "I thought we was ridin' to a lynchin'! This here looks more like a weddin'. Get back, around that bend, you fool!"

"It shore does," said Slim, grinning. "A weddin', huh? Well, then, I says he's still a-rollin'."

The End