THE TRAIL AT DAWN
Frances stopped at the high wire fence along the river bank. It was
dark there between the shrubs of the garden on one hand and the tall
willows on the other, but nothing moved in them but her own leaping
heart. She called Mrs. Chadron, running along the fence as she cried
her name.
Mrs. Chadron answered from the barn. Frances found her saddling a
horse, while Maggie's husband, an old Mexican with a stiff leg,
muttered prayers in his native tongue as he tightened the girths on
another.
Mrs. Chadron was for riding in pursuit of Nola's abductors, although
she had not mounted a horse in fifteen years. There was no man about
the place except crippled old Alvino, and wounded Dalton lying in the
men's quarters near at hand. Neither of them was serviceable in such
an emergency, and Banjo, willing as he would be, seemed too badly hurt
to be of any use.
Frances pressed her to dismiss this intention. Even if they knew which
way to ride, it would be a hopeless pursuit.
"There's only one way to go--towards the rustlers' settlement," Mrs.
Chadron grimly returned.
She was over her hysterical passion now, and steadied down into a
state of desperate determination to set out after the thieves and
bring Nola back. She did not know how it was to be accomplished, but
she felt her strength equal to any demand in the pressure of her
despair. She was lifting her foot to the stirrup, thinly dressed as
she was, her head bare, the rifle in her hand, when Frances took her
by the arm.
"You can't go alone with Alvino, Mrs. Chadron."
"I've got to go, I tell you--let loose of me!"
She shook off Frances' restraining hand and turned to her horse again.
With her hand on the pommel of the saddle she stopped, and turned to
Alvino.
"Go and fetch me Chance's guns out of the bunkhouse," she ordered.
Alvino hitched away, swinging his stiff leg, with laborious, slow
gait.
"You couldn't do anything against a crowd of desperate men--they might
kill you!" Frances said.
"Let 'em kill me, then!" She lifted her hand, as if taking an oath.
"They'll pay for this trick--every man, woman, and child of them'll
bleed for what they've done to me tonight!"
"Let Alvino go to the camp up the river where Mr. Chadron left the
men, and tell them; they can do more than you."
"You couldn't drive him alone out of sight of the lights in the house
with fire. He'd come back with some kind of a lie before he'd went a
mile. I'll go to 'em myself, honey--I didn't think of them."
"I'll go with you."
"Wait till Alvino comes with them guns--I can use 'em better than I
can a rifle. Oh, why don't the man hurry!"
"I'll run down and see what--"
But Alvino came around the corral at that moment. He had stopped to
light a lantern, in his peculiar Mexican mode of estimating the
importance of time and occasion, and came flashing it in short,
violent arcs as he swayed to swing his jointless leg.
Frances led out the other horse and was waiting to mount when Alvino
came panting up, the belt with its two revolvers over his arm. Mrs.
Chadron jerked it from him with something hard and sharp on her tongue
like a curse. Banjo Gibson came into the circle of light, a bandage on
his head.
"I didn't even see 'em. They knocked me down, and when I come to she
was gone!"
Banjo's voice was full of self-censure, and his feet were weak upon
the ground. He began to talk the moment the light struck him, and when
he had finished his little explanation he was standing beside Mrs.
Chadron's saddle.
"Go to the house and lie down, Banjo," Mrs. Chadron said; "I ain't
time to fool with you!"
"Are you two aimin' to go to the post after help?" Banjo steadied
himself on his legs by clinging to the horse's mane as he spoke.
"We're goin' up the river after the men," Mrs. Chadron told him.
"No, I'll go after the men; that's a man's job," Banjo insisted. "I
know right where they're camped at, you couldn't find 'em between now
and morning."
There was no arguing Banjo out of it, no brushing the little man
aside. He was as firm as a man three times his weight, and he took
Mrs. Chadron by the arm, like a son, and led her away from the horse
with a manner at once so firm and yet considerate that it softened her
stern heart and plunged her into tears.
"If you bring Nola back to me I'll give her to you, Banjo! I'll give
her to you!" she sobbed, as she belted him with Chance Dalton's guns.
"If any reward in this world could drive me through hell fire to lay
my hands on it, you've named it," he said.
Frances saw that Mrs. Chadron could be reasoned with now, and she was
grateful to Banjo for his opportune arrival. For the night was vast
and unfriendly over that empty land, and filled with a thousand
shudderful dangers. She was afraid of it, afraid to leave the lights
of the house behind her and ride out into it, no matter for all the
peril that poor little Nola might be facing in that cruel hour.
Banjo rode away. They stood clinging to each other in the dim circle
of Alvino's lantern-light, listening to his horse until the distance
muffled its feet on the road.
Frances was chilled with the horror of that brigandish act. Every
movement of the wind in the bushes made her skin crinkle and creep;
every sound of animals in barn and corral was magnified into some new
danger. Mrs. Chadron was in far worse state, with reason, certainly,
for being so. Now that the stimulation of her first wild outburst had
been exhausted, she stood wilted and weak, shivering with her hands
over her eyes, moaning and moaning in piteous low wail.
Frances took the lantern from old Alvino's shaking hand.
"Let's go and look for their tracks," she suggested, forcing a note of
eagerness into her words, "so we can tell the men, when they come back
to pick up the trail, how many there were and which way they went."
"Oh, if Chance was only able to go after them, if he was only able!"
Mrs. Chadron wailed, following Frances as she hurried along the wire
fence that cut the garden from the river.
"It was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron said,
"for that gate down there back of the house is open. That's the way
they come and went--somebody that knowed the lay of the land."
Frances felt her heart die within her as the recollection of another
night in that garden flashed like red fire in her mind. There was a
picture, as she stopped with closed eyes, struck cold and shuddering
by a fear she dared not own, of one flying, bent into the shadows,
along the garden path toward that gate. Someone who knew the "lay of
the land!"
"Did you hear something?" Mrs. Chadron whispered, leaning close to her
where she had stopped, stock-still, as if she had struck a wall.
"I thought I--I--saw something," Frances answered, in faint, sick
voice.
The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the
soft ground beyond it they found tracks.
"Only one man!" said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.
"There's only one track," said Frances, her breath so feeble, her
heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.
Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for
that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the
farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he
led them to the willows where the ravisher's horse had been
concealed.
"One shoe was lost," said he, pointing, "left one, hind foot."
Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone
with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.
"Oh, if I'd 'a' come down here place of saddlin' that horse!" she
lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.
"He'd have been gone, even then--I was past here and didn't hear him,"
Frances said.
Still the vision persisted in her disturbed imagination of that other
night, of one leaning low in the saddle, his fleet horse stretching
its neck in desperation for the distant refuge; the dash of pursuing
hoofs; the sound of shots up the river; the prayer that she sent to
heaven in his behalf.
"Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land," Mrs. Chadron
was repeating, with accusing conviction.
They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was
doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her
capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason
for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as
a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola
herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the
thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful
thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must
leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs,
binding her as if her feet were set in lava.
Somebody that knew the "lay of the land." Great God! could he fight
that way, was it in Alan Macdonald to make a hawk's dash like that? It
was hard to admit the thought, to give standing to the doubtful
accusation. But those whom they called "rustlers" must have borne Nola
away. Beyond the homesteaders up the river were the mountains and the
wild country where no man made his home; except them and the cattlemen
and the cowboys attending the herds, that country was unpeopled. There
was nobody to whom the deed could be charged but the enemies that
Chadron had made in his persecution of the homesteaders.
Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the
cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and
skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that
common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words,
and his association with them, seemed to convict him there in the
silence of that black-walled court of night.
It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his associates
by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel
that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a
sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his
blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree
the blame, even passive knowledge of the intent, of that base
offense.
At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together,
she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the
deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was
preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses.
They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own
immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify
them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.
She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own
mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she
should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.
The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road
up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that
might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an
infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then
she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she
imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the
road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate
by and by on Frances' arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow
of her life.
Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming
day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would
ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen
girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every
side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and
Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic
night.
Frances was in the saddle at daybreak. She had left Mrs. Chadron in an
uneasy sleep, watched over by Maggie. Banjo had not returned; no word
had reached them from any source. Alvino let Frances out through the
gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the
abductor's trail as far as possible without being led into strange
country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pass that
way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there.
The tracks of the raider's horse were deep in the soft soil. She
followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road,
angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a
trampling in the lose earth--testimony of the fight that Nola had made
to get away--Frances started at the sight of something caught on a
clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object
cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning.
Presently assured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with
it in her hand.
Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were
so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther.
But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was
heading for the homesteaders' settlement, and that he had taken the
road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence
picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and
place.
She felt again that surge of indignation that had fired her heart
early in the sad night past. The man who had lurked in the garden
waiting his chance to snatch Nola away, was certain of the protection
to which he fled. It was the daring execution of one man, but the
planning of many, and at the head of them one with fire in his wild
soul, quick passion in his eyes, and mastery over his far-riding band.
It could be no other way.
When she came to the branching of the roads she pulled up her horse
and sat considering her course a little while. Presently she rode
forward again, but not on the road that led to the army post.
She had proceeded a mile, perhaps, along the road branching to the
homesteaders' settlement, upon which she knew Macdonald's claim to lie
somewhere up the river, when she rounded an elbow screened by
tall-growing greasewood and came face to face with a small cavalcade
of dusty men. At the head of them Alan Macdonald rode, beside an old
man whose neck was guttered like a wasted candle and his branching
great mustache gray as the dust on his bony shoulders.
She halted when she saw them, and they jerked up their horses also,
with startled suddenness, like men riding in the expectation of danger
and surprise. Macdonald came forward in a moment, with respectful
salute, a look amounting almost to frightened questioning in his face.
For the sun was not up yet, although its flame was on the heavens, and
it was a strange, wild place to meet a woman of Frances Landcraft's
caste unattended, and with the shadow of a trouble in her face that
made it old, like misery.
But there was no question of the unfriendliness of that face for Alan
Macdonald and the men who came riding at his back. It was as cold as
the gray earth beneath her horse's hoofs, and its severity was
reflected in the very pose of her body, even in the grip of her
slender thighs as they clasped her saddle, sitting there like a
dragoon outrider who had appeared to bar their way.
Frances was wearing the brown corduroy riding-habit that she had worn
on the day when she first spoke to him. Her brown hair had fallen down
until it hid her ears, for she had ridden hard, and a strand of it
blew from beneath her cowboy hat in unheeded caress across her cheek.
Macdonald saw her stiffen in the saddle and lift herself a little from
her seat as he drew near, his companions stopping a little distance
back. Her eyes were stern and reproachful; a little frown troubled her
white forehead.
"I was starting out to find you, Mr. Macdonald," she said, severely.
"If there is any service, Miss Landcraft--"
"Don't talk emptiness, and don't pretend!" she said, a flash of anger
in her face. "It isn't a man's way to fight, it's a coward's! Bring
her back home!"
"I don't know what you mean." There was such an astonished helplessness
in his manner that it would have convinced any unprejudiced mind of
his innocence in itself.
"Oh!"--impatiently--"I can't hurt you, I'm alone. You'd just as well
tell me how much money you're going to demand, so I can set their
minds at rest."
Macdonald's face was hot; his eyes felt as if they swam in fire. He
put out his hand in a gesture almost a command, his heavy eyebrows
gathered in a frown, an expression of sternness in his homely face
that made it almost majestic.
"If you'll be good enough to tell me what your veiled accusations
point to, Miss Landcraft, then I can answer you by either yes or no."
She unbent so far as to relate briefly what she believed they knew
better than herself already. But behind her high air as she talked
there was a secret warm feeling for the strength of this man. It was a
quality of fine steel in the human mind and body such as she never had
seen so beautifully blended before. In her own father there was
something of it, but only a reflection on water compared to this. It
seemed the temper of the desert, she thought, like that oriental
spirit which spread Islam's dark creed over half the world.
When she had finished the relation of Nola's ravishment, he sat with
head drooped in dusty silence a moment. Then he looked her in the eyes
with such a steady blaze of indignation that she felt her own rage
kindle to meet it. His clear, steady gaze was an arraignment, an
accusation on the ugly charge of perversion of the truth as she knew
it to be in the bottom of her conscience when she had laid the crime
at the homesteaders' hands. If he saw her at all, she thought, it was
as some small despicable thing, for his eyes were so unflinching, as
they poured their steady fire into her own, that he seemed to be
summing up the final consequences which lay behind her, along the
dusty highway to the ranchhouse by the river.
"In the first place," said he, speaking slowly, "there are no cattle
thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss
Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some
of them, and judge for yourself."
He beckoned to Tom Lassiter and the three with him, and they joined
him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the
news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it.
"These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this
deed, but there's not one among us that wouldn't put down his life to
keep that young woman from harm and give her back to her home. We have
our grievances against Saul Chadron, God knows! and they are grave
enough. But we don't fight that way, Miss Landcraft."
"If you're innocent, then prove it by forcing the men that carried her
off, or the man, if there was only one, to bring her back home. Then
I'll believe you. Maybe others will, too. What are you riding the road
so early for, all armed and suspicious, if you're such honest men?"
"We're goin' to the agency after ammunition to defend our homes, and
our wives and children--such of us as Saul Chadron and his hired
hounds has left children to, colonel's daughter," Tom Lassiter
answered, reproof in his kind old eyes.
Frances had unrolled the bit of evidence that she had picked up from
the bushes, and was holding it on the horn of her saddle now, quite
unconscious of what her hands were doing, for she had forgotten the
importance of her find in the heat of that meeting. Macdonald spurred
forward, pointing to the thing in her hand.
"Where did you get that?" he asked, a sharp note of concern in his
voice that made her start.
She told him. He took it from her and turned to his comrades.
"It's Mark Thorn's cap!" he said, holding it up, his fingers in the
crown.
Tom Lassiter nodded his slow head as the others leaned to look.
"Saul Chadron's chickens has come home to roost," he said.
Frances understood nothing of the excitement that sprung out of the
mention of the outlaw's name, for Mark Thorn and his bloody history
were alike unknown to her. Her resentment mounted at being an outsider
to their important or pretended secret.
"Well, if you know whose cap it is, it ought to be easy for you to
find the owner," she said, unable to smother the sneer in her words.
"He isn't one of us," said a homesteader, with grim shortness.
"Oh!" said she, tossing her lofty head.
There was a pallor in Macdonald's weathered face, as if somebody near
and dear to himself was in extreme peril.
"She may never see home again," he said. Then quickly: "Which way did
he go, do you know?"
She told him what she knew, not omitting the lost horseshoe. Tom
Lassiter bent in his saddle with eagerness as she mentioned that
particular, and ran his eyes over the road like one reading the pages
of a book.
"There!" he said, pointing, "I've been seein' it all the way down,
Alan. He was headin' for the hills."
Frances could not see the print of the shoeless hoof, nor any
peculiarity among the scores of tracks that would tell her of Nola's
abductor having ridden that far along the road. She flushed as the
thought came to her that this was a trick to throw her attention from
themselves and the blame upon some fictitious person, when they knew
whose hands were guilty all the time. The men were leaning in their
saddles, riding slowly back on their trail, talking in low voices and
sharp exclamations among themselves. She spurred hotly after them.
"Mr. Chadron hasn't come home yet," she said, addressing Macdonald,
who sat straight in his saddle to hear, "but they expect him any hour.
If you'll say how much you're going to demand, and where you want it
paid, I'll carry the word to him. It might hurry matters, and save her
mother's life."
"I'm sorry you repeated that," said Macdonald, touching his hat in
what he plainly meant a farewell salute. He turned from her and drew
Tom Lassiter aside. In a moment he was riding back again the way that
he had come.
Frances looked at the unaccountable proceeding with the eyes of doubt
and suspicion. She did not believe any of them, and had no faith in
their mysterious trackings and whisperings aside, and mad gallopings
off to hidden ends. As for Tom Lassiter and his companions, they
ranged themselves preparatory to continuing their journey.
"If you're goin' our way, colonel's daughter," said Tom, gathering up
his bridle-reins, "we'll be proud to ride along with you."
Frances was looking at the dust-cloud that rose behind Macdonald. He
was no longer in sight.
"Where has he gone?" she inquired, her suspicion growing every
moment.
"He's gone to find that cowman's child, young lady, and take her home
to her mother," Tom replied, with dignity. He rode on. She followed,
presently gaining his side.
"Is there such a man as Mark Thorn?" she asked after a little, looking
across at Lassiter with sly innuendo.
"No, there ain't no man by that name, but there's a devil in the shape
of a human man called that," he answered.
"Is he--what does he do?" She reined a little nearer to Lassiter,
feeling that there was little harm in him apart from the directing
hand.
"He hires out to kill off folks that's in the way of the cattlemen at
so much a head, miss; like some hires out to kill off wolves. The
Drovers' Association hires him, and sees that he gits out of jail if
anybody ever puts him in, and fixes it up so he walks safe with the
blood of no knowin' how many innocent people on his hands. That's what
Mark Thorn does, ma'am. Chadron brought him in here a couple of weeks
ago to do some killin' off amongst us homesteaders so the rest 'd take
a scare and move out. He give that old devil a list of twenty men he
wanted shot, and Alan Macdonald's got that paper. His own name's at
the top of it, too."
"Oh!" said she, catching her breath sharply, as if in pain. Her face
was white and cold. "Did he--did he--kill anybody here?"
"He killed my little boy; he shot him down before his mother's eyes!"
Tom Lassiter's guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw
knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road
ahead of him.
"Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!"
"He was a little tow-headed feller, and he had his mother's eyes, as
blue as robins' eggs," said Tom, his reminiscent sorrow so poignant
that tears sprung to her eyes in sympathy and plashed down unheeded
and unchecked. "He'd 'a' been fifteen in November. Talkin' about
fightin', ma'am, that's the way some people fights."
"I'm sorry I said that, Mr. Lassiter," she confessed, hanging her head
like a corrected child.
"He can't hear you now," said Tom.
They rode on a little way. Tom told her of the other outrages for
which Thorn was accountable in that settlement. She was amazed as
deeply as she was shocked to hear of this, for if any word of it had
come to the post, it had been kept from her. Neither was it ever
mentioned in Chadron's home.
"No," said Tom, when she mentioned that, "it ain't the kind of news
the cattlemen spreads around. But if we shoot one of them in defendin'
our own, the news runs like a pe-rairie fire. They call us rustlers,
and come ridin' up to swipe us out. Well, they's goin' to be a
change."
"But if Chadron brought that terrible man in here, why should the
horrible creature turn against him?" she asked, doubt and suspicion
grasping the seeming fault in Lassiter's tale.
"Chadron refused to make settlement with him for the killin' he done
because he didn't git Macdonald. Thorn told Alan that with his own
bloody tongue."
Lassiter retailed to her eager ears the story of Macdonald's capture
of Thorn, and his fight with Chadron's men when they came to set the
old slayer free, as Lassiter supposed.
"They turned him loose," said he, "and you know now what I meant when
I said Chadron's chickens has come home to roost."
"Yes, I know now." She turned, and looked back. Remorse was heavy on
her for the injustice she had done Macdonald that day, and shame for
her sharp words bowed her head as she rode at old Tom Lassiter's
hand.
"He'll run the old devil down ag'in," Tom spoke confidently, as of a
thing that admitted no dispute, "and take that young woman home if he
finds her livin'. Many thanks he'll git for it from them and her. Like
as not she'll bite the hand that saves her, for she's a cub of the old
bear. Well, let me tell you, colonel's daughter, if she was to live a
thousand years, and pray all her life, she wouldn't no more than be
worthy at the end to wash that man's feet with her tears and dry 'em
on her hair, like that poor soul you've read about in the Book."
Frances slowed her horse as if overcome by a sudden indecision, and
turned in her saddle to look back again. Again she had let him go away
from her misunderstood, his high pride hurt, his independent heart too
lofty to bend down to the mean adjustment to be reached through
argument or explanation. One must accept Alan Macdonald for what his
face proclaimed him to be. She knew that now. He was not of the
mean-spirited who walk among men making apology for their lives.
"He's gone on," said Lassiter, slowing his horse to her pace.
"I'm afraid I was hasty and unjust," she confessed, struggling to hold
back her tears.
"Yes, you was," said Lassiter, frankly, "but everybody on the outside
is unjust to all of us up here. We're kind of outcasts because we
fence the land and plow it. But I want to tell you, Macdonald's a man
amongst men, ma'am. He's fed the poor and lifted up the afflicted, and
he's watched with us beside our sick and prayed with us over our dead.
We know him, no matter what folks on the outside say. Well, we'll have
to spur up a little, ma'am, for we're in a hurry to git back."
They approached the point where the road to the post branched.
"There's goin' to be fightin' over here if Chadron tries to drive us
out," Tom said, "and we know he's sent for men to come in and help him
try it. We don't want to fight, but men that won't fight for their
homes ain't the kind you'd like to ride along the road with, ma'am."
"Maybe the trouble can be settled some other way," she suggested,
thinking again of the hope that she had brought with her to the ranch
the day before.
"When we bring the law in here, and elect officers to see it put in
force for every man alike, then this trouble it'll come to an end.
Well, if you ever feel like we deserve a good word, colonel's
daughter, we'd be proud to have you say it, for the feller that stands
up for the law and the Lord and his home agin the cattlemen in this
land, ma'am, he's got a hard row to hoe. Yes, we'll count any good
words you might say for us as so much gold. 'And the Levite, thou
shalt not forsake him, for he hath no part nor inheritance with
thee.'"
Tom's voice was slow and solemn when he quoted that Mosaic injunction.
The appeal of the disinherited was in it, and the pain of lost years.
It touched her like a sorrow of her own. Tears were on her cheeks
again as she parted from him, giving him her hand in token of trust
and faith, and rode on toward the ranchhouse by the river.