THE DASTARDLY PLOT
The two girls waited to make sure there was no one else in the cave
besides Joe, listened until the sounds made by his captor crashing
through the underbrush had died away.
Then Dorothy ran to him, sank to her knees beside him, laughed and cried
over him as she lifted his head and held it tight against her.
“Joe, Joe! why did you run away? We’ve been nearly crazy, dear! No, no,
don’t cry, Joe darling! It’s all right. Your Dorothy is here. Nothing,
nothing will ever hurt you again.”
Her arms tightened about him fiercely and the boy sobbed, great, tearing
sobs that he was ashamed of but could not control.
The storm lasted only a minute, and then he said gruffly, big-boy
fashion, to hide his weakness:
“I—you oughtn’t to come near me, Dot. I—I’ve done an awful thing and got
myself into a heap of trouble!”
“Never mind about that now, dear,” cried Dorothy, suddenly recalled to
the peril of their situation. “We’ve got to get you away before that
dreadful man comes back.”
“He went off to fetch the others,” said Joe, growing suddenly eager and
hopeful now that rescue seemed near. “They are going to do something
awful to me because I wouldn’t——”
“Yes, yes, Joe, I know. But now be quiet,” cried Dorothy, as she propped
him up against the wall and began to work feverishly at the knots of the
heavy cord that bound his feet and hands. “Some one might hear you
and—oh, we must get away from here before they come back!”
“Here, I have something better than that,” cried Tavia, who had been
watching Dorothy’s clumsy efforts to unloose Joe’s bonds.
She fished frantically in the pockets of her jacket and brought forth a
rather grimy ball of cord and a penknife. This she held up triumphantly.
“A good sight better than your fingers!”
“Oh, give it to me, quickly,” cried Dorothy, reaching for the knife in
an agony of apprehension. “Oh, it won’t open! Yes, I have it!”
With the sharp blade she sawed feverishly at the cords.
They gave way one after another and she flung them on to the floor of
the cave.
Joe tried to get to his feet, but stumbled and fell.
“Feel funny and numb, kind of,” he muttered. “Been tied up too long, I
guess.”
“But, Joe, you must stand up—you must!” cried Dorothy frantically.
“Come, try again. I’ll hold you. You must try, Joe. They will be back in
a minute! Never mind how much it hurts, stand up!”
With Dorothy’s aid Joe got to his feet again slowly and painfully and
stood there, swaying, an arm about his sister’s shoulders, the other
hand clenched tight against the damp, rocky wall of the cave.
The pain was so intense as the blood flowed back into his tortured feet
that his face went white and he clenched his teeth to keep from crying
out.
“Do you think you can walk at all, dear?” asked Dorothy, her own face
white with the reflection of his misery. “If you could manage to walk a
little way! We have horses in the woods and it would be harder for them
to find us there. Try, Joe dear! Try!”
“I guess I can make it now, Sis,” said Joe from between his clenched
teeth. “If Tavia will help a little too—on the other side.”
“I guess so!” cried Tavia with alacrity, as she put Joe’s other arm
about her shoulders and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Now
something tells me that the sooner we leave this place behind the
healthier it will be for all of us.”
“Hush! What’s that?” cried Dorothy, and they stood motionless for a
moment, listening.
“I didn’t hear anything, Doro,” whispered Tavia. “It was just nerves, I
guess.”
They took a step toward the entrance of the cave, Joe still leaning
heavily upon the two girls.
A horse whinnied sharply and as they paused again, startled, a sinister
shadow fell across the narrow entrance to the cave. They shrank back as
substance followed shadow and a man wedged his way into the cave.
He straightened up and winked his eyes at the unexpected sight that met
them.
Dorothy stifled a startled exclamation as she recognized him. It was the
small, black-eyed man, Gibbons, known to Desert City as George Lightly,
who stood blinking at them.
Suddenly he laughed, a short, sharp laugh, and turned back toward the
mouth of the cave.
“Come on in, fellows!” he called cautiously. “Just see what I found!”
Joe’s face, through the grime and dirt that covered it, had grown fiery
red and he struggled to get free of Dorothy and Tavia.
“Just you let me get my hands on him!” he muttered. “I’ll show him!
I’ll——”
“You keep out of this, Joe,” Dorothy whispered fiercely. “Let me do the
talking.”
Three other men squeezed through the narrow opening and stood blinking
in the semi-darkness of the cave.
One of them Dorothy recognized as Joe’s former captor, a big, burly man
with shifty eyes and a loose-lipped mouth, another was Philo Marsh, more
smug and self-sufficient than she remembered him, and the third was Cal
Stiffbold, her handsome cavalier of the train ride, who had called
himself Stanley Blake.
It took the girls, crouched against the wall of the cave, only a moment
to see all this, and the men were no slower in reading the meaning of
the situation.
Stiffbold’s face was suffused with fury as he recognized Dorothy and
Tavia, and he took a threatening step forward. Philo Marsh reached out a
hand and drew him back, saying in mild tones:
“Easy there, Stiffbold. Don’t do anything you are likely to regret.”
“So, ladies to the rescue, eh?” sneered Lightly, thrusting his hands
into his pockets and regarding the girls with an insulting leer.
“Regular little heroines and all, ain’t you? Well, now, I’ll be blowed!”
“Young ladies, this isn’t the place for you, you know.” Philo Marsh took
a step forward, reaching out his hand toward Joe. “You’re interfering,
you know, and you’re likely to get yourselves in a heap o’ trouble. But
if you’ll go away and stay away and keep your mouths closed——”
“And leave my brother here with you scoundrels, I suppose?” suggested
Dorothy.
The hypocritical expression upon the face of Philo Marsh changed
suddenly to fury at her short, scornful laugh.
“Scoundrels, is it?” he sneered. “Well, my young lady, maybe you’ll know
better than to call honest people names before you leave this place.”
“Honest people! You?” cried Dorothy, no longer able to contain her
furious indignation. “That sounds startling coming from you, Philo
Marsh, and your—honest friends!
“Do you call it honest,” she took a step forward and the men retreated
momentarily, abashed before her fury, “to take a poor boy away from his
people, to hide him here in a place like this, to torture him physically
and mentally, to attempt to make him false to all his standards of
right——”
“See here, this won’t do!” Lightly blustered, but Dorothy turned upon
him like a tigress.
“You will listen to me till I have said what I am going to say,” she
flung at him. “You do all this—you honest men,” she turned to the
others, searing them with her scorn. “And why? So that you can force
Garry Knapp, who has the best farmlands anywhere around here—and who
will make more than good some day, in spite of you, yes, in spite of
you, I say—to turn over his lands to you for a song, an amount of money
that would hardly pay him for the loss of one little corner of it——”
“Say, are we goin’ to stand here and take this?”
“Yes, you are—Stanley Blake!” Dorothy flamed at him, and the man
retreated before her fury. “And then, when this boy defies you, what do
you do? Act like honest men? Of course you do! You threaten to ‘put the
screws on’ until he is too weak to defy you, a boy against
four—honest—men! If that is honesty, if that is bravery, then I would
rather be like that slimy toad out in the woods who knows nothing of
such things!”
“Hold on there, you!” George Lightly started forward, his hand uplifted
threateningly. “You call us any more of those pretty names and I’ll——”
“What will you do?” Dorothy defied him gloriously, her eyes blazing.
“You dare to lay a hand upon me or my friend or my brother,”
instinctively her arm tightened about Joe, “and Garry Knapp will hound
you to the ends of the earth. Hark! What’s that?” She paused, head
uplifted, listening.
They all listened in a breathless silence while the distant clatter of
horses’ hoofs breaking a way through the woodland came closer—ever
closer!
“Garry!” Dorothy lifted her head and sent her cry ringing through the
woodland. “We are over this way, Garry, over this way! Come qui——”
[Illustration:
A HORSEMAN BROKE THROUGH THE UNDERBRUSH. IT WAS GARRY.
“Dorothy Dale to the Rescue.” Page 237
]