RED BILL SUMMERS
A keen chill, sharp as if an icy wind had swept her, embraced Peggy.
It was succeeded by a mad beating of her heart. Roy said nothing
but clutched his rifle. He jerked it to his shoulder as, out of the
shadows, a figure emerged sharp and black against the moonlight. As
if she were in a trance Peggy saw Roy's hand slide under the barrel
of the little repeater and then came the sharp click of the
repeating mechanism, followed by the snap of the hammer as it fell
forward.
But no report followed.
"Jammed!" exclaimed the boy desperately.
At the same moment the figure approaching them, which for an instant
had vanished behind a shoulder of rock, emerged boldly, the
moonlight playing on a revolver barrel pointed menacingly at the
brother and sister.
"No foolin' thar, youngsters," came a harsh voice; "we've got you
where we want you."
Coincidently from all about them the rocks seemed to spawn figures,
till half a dozen men in rough plainsman's garb stood in the
moonlight. Resistance was useless; worse, it might have resulted in
a calamity more dire than the one that had overtaken them.
But curiously enough the very hopelessness of their situation
inspired in Peggy a far different feeling to the terror that had
clutched at her heart a moment before. She was conscious of a swift
tide of anger. In one of the figures she had recognized the
renegade guide.
"Juan--you!" she exclaimed in tones in which scorn struggled with
indignation.
The guide turned away. Even his effrontery wilted before the young
girl's frank contempt. It was all clear enough to Peggy now.
Evidently, Juan had been bribed by these men to stay with the party
till he had learned their plans, which he was then to betray to the
band. For, in the moonlight Peggy had had no difficulty in
recognizing the men whose conversation she had overheard at the
National House.
There was the red-headed man, with his coarse, bristling crop of
hair, and the mustache like the stumpy bristles of an old tooth
brush, the tall, dark young fellow with the red sash and the silver
spurs, poor Peggy's "romantic brigand," and the hawk-nosed man with
the drooping mustache, who had formed the red-headed one's companion
on the train.
"Hearn of Red Bill Summers, I op-ine," shot out the man with the red
hair in a voice that rasped like a file on rusty iron.
"I think so," rejoined Roy quietly, and Peggy rejoiced to hear her
brother's calm, steady tones.
"Wall, I'm him. You treat me right and don't make no fuss an' we'll
git along all right. If not--"
He paused significantly.
"Whar's Buck Bellew?"
The red-headed one gazed about him. From the shadows stepped
Peggy's "romantic brigand."
"Buck, you put a couple of half hitches about them kids."
"The gal, too?" hesitated the silver-spurred one addressed as
"Buck."
"Sure. Didn't I tell yer to."
"Wa-al, I won't. That's flat. I ain't never persecuted women folks
an' I ain't goin' ter start now."
Red Bill Summers paused and then grumbled out:
"All right, then. She kin ride the greaser's horse. Juan, you
yellow-skinned bronco, go git ther ponies."
Juan flitted off and presently reappeared, leading half a dozen wiry
little ponies. In the meantime the remainder of the band had
gathered about Roy and Peggy, regarding them with frank curiosity.
Except that their weapons were taken away from them no harm was
offered them however, and Roy had not, so far, even been tied up.
"This isn't a bit like the story-book hold-ups", thought Peggy. "If
it wasn't for their rough clothes and fierce looks these men
wouldn't be so very different from anyone else."
"Now, miss, I'll help you to mount. Sorry we ain't got a side
saddle, but we don't hev much use fer such contraptions with our
outfit."
It was the red-sashed man speaking. He held out a stirrup for
Peggy, and the girl, perforce, mounted the pony. She caught herself
wondering as she did so what her friends at home in the East would
have thought if they could have seen her at the moment. It was
Roy's turn next. Brother and sister were permitted to ride side by
side. Juan, to Peggy's secret satisfaction, was compelled to give
up his burro to one of the outlaws while he tramped along.
"Serves him right," thought the girl.
The man whose pony Roy bestrode leaped nimbly into the saddle behind
Buck Bellew.
Hardly a word was spoken, but their captors closed in silently about
the boy and the girl prisoners.
"Death Valley," ordered Red Bill briefly, swinging himself into the
saddle. Peggy guessed that the sinisterly named place must be their
destination.
Amid the maze of pinnacles, minarets and spires of the desert range
the horsemen forged slowly forward. From the fact that they
traveled toward the newly risen moon Peggy surmised that their
course lay to the eastward . But presently it shifted and they began
moving north.
"Where can we be going?" Peggy found an opportunity to exchange a
word or two with Roy. Owing to the rough nature of the ground their
rear guard had, of necessity, fallen back a bit.
"No idea, sis. One thing seems certain, however, they don't mean to
harm us, at least not yet."
The rear guard closed up again, necessitating silence once more.
All night they traveled, ambling at the plainsman's "trotecito" when
opportunity offered, and then again slacking to a crawling walk
where the baked ground grew uneven and criss-crossed with gullies
and arroyos.
At last, when Peggy's head was beginning to sway with exhaustion,
the eastern sky began to grow gray. The coming day lit up the
desert wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising
of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once
more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over
undulating country overgrown with rough brush. It was a sad, drab
color, and smelled pungently where the ponies' hooves trampled it.
But presently they broke into a different country. It was flatter
than that which they had already traversed and, if possible, more
desolate, sun-bleached and parched. The ponies stumbled over loose
shale, raising clouds of suffocating dust that tingled in the
nostrils. Down they rode into its basin-like formation. All about
the depression arose the craggy, stripped hills. Their jagged peaks
seemed to shut out the rest of the world and compress the universe
into this baked, burning basin in the desert.
Across the bottom of it the alkali swept in little vagrant puffs,
proceeding from the gaps of the hills. It piled in little gray
heaps like ashes. The air hung steady and still as a plumb line
dropped from the sky.
"We've got ter git across hyar muy pronto, (very quickly)," grunted
the red-headed man, whose perspiring, fat face was coated gray with
dust and alkali. "What a hole fer white men ter be in."
"It's like a busted heat-blister on a big piecrust," commented Buck
Bellew, whose jauntiness had wilted. His red sash was of a piece
now with the rest of his garments-a dirty, dull gray.
After a while a hot wind sprang up. It felt like the heated blast
from an opened oven door. It tore in mad witch-dances about the
dismal basin, sending whirling dust-devils dancing over that dreary
place.
They spread, gyrated, swelled to giant mushroom shape, and died down
in a monstrous ballet. Peggy felt her senses slipping under the
strain. But she kept a tight rein on herself.
"I must brace up for Roy's sake," she thought.
She stole a glance at her brother. Roy, despite his plight and the
dust which enveloped him, was tight-lipped and defiant. No sign of
a breakdown appeared on his features, for which Peggy breathed a
prayer of thanks.
"After all, God is near us even in this dreadful place," she
thought, and the reflection comforted her strangely.
Across the bottom of the bowl men and animals crawled like flies
round the base of a pudding basin. From time to time the water kegs
on the back of Juan's burro were sparingly tapped. At such times
Buck Bellew never failed to be at Peggy's side with a tin cup of the
warm, unpalatable stuff. But at least it was liquid, and Peggy
thanked the man with as cheerful an air as she could assume.
But, unending as the progress across the red hot depression seemed
to be, it came to an end at last, and the ponies began to climb the
steep walls on the further side. At the summit, a surprise was in
store for them--for Peggy and Roy that is. To the others the place
was evidently familiar. Some rough huts, half of canvas and half of
brush, showed that it had long been used as a rendezvous by the
band.
The spot was a perfect little amphitheatre in the barren hills.
Green grass, actual green grass, covered its floor and wild oats
grew on the hillsides in fair plentitude. From the further end of
the enclosed oasis arose clouds of steam which they afterwards
learned came from boiling hot springs. But the waters of the hot
springs soon lost their heat, and in the course of years had watered
this little spot till it literally--in comparison with its
surroundings--blossomed like the rose.
Red Bill Summers threw himself from his pony and, lying full length
beside the creek that trickled through the valley from the springs
above, he reveled in the water. When he had drunk his fill he
stood erect.
"Wa-al," he drawled, running his hand through his stubbly red crop,
"I reckon we're home again."