eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his
right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly
full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could
not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the
same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a
_détour_ to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and
concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was
confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing
themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first,
invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, passed him at
speed.
After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it
was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a
water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was
patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that
the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which
might have discomforting consequences.
For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches
and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man
from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and
altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a
breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the
puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort
was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.
IV
THE HIGHBINDERS
When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand
and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to
wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it
simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one
of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and
flinging his body into the near-by canyon.
The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the
thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding
peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he
was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden
sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the
camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself
confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a
sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had
been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed
and the surprise had been complete; but the grotesquery remained.
Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only
surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he
remembered the three invisible horsemen who had passed him on the broad
mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his
thoughts went back to the little episode on the hotel porch. The passing
glance he had given to the three men with whom the fourth man, Hathaway,
had been talking did not enable him to identify them with the three who
were sourly discussing his fate at the near-by fire; none the less, the
conclusion was fairly obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or
too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous of the
expedients was apparently about to be adopted, he decided that it was
high time to try to find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he
called across to the group at the fire.
"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements you gentlemen are
making, I shall be obliged if you will tell me why you think you have
found it necessary to murder me."
"You know mighty good and well why there's one too many of you on Lost
River, jest at this stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman
who had held the Winchester while his two accomplices were doing the
unhorsing and the binding.
"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly. "So far as I know, there
is only one of me--on Lost River or anywhere else."
"That'll do for you; it ain't your put-in, nohow," was the gruff
decision of the court; but Blount was too good a lawyer to be silenced
thus easily.
"Perhaps you might not especially regret killing the wrong man, but in
the present case I am very sure I should," he went on. And then: "Are
you quite sure you've got the right man?"
"The boss knows who you are--that's enough for us."
"The boss?" questioned Blount.
"Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!"
Blount caught at the word. In a flash the talk with Gantry on the
veranda of the Winnebasset Club flicked into his mind.
"There is only one boss in this State," he countered coolly. "And I am
very sure he hasn't given you orders to kill me."
"What's that?" demanded the spokesman.
Blount repeated his assertion, adding jocularly: "Perhaps you'd better
call up headquarters and ask your boss if he wants you to kill the son
of his boss."
At this the gun-holder came around the fire to stand before his
prisoner.
"Say, pal--this ain't my night for kiddin', and it hadn't ort to be
your'n," he remarked grimly. "The boss didn't say you was to be rubbed
out--they never do. But I reckon it would save a heap o' trouble if you
_was_ rubbed out."
"On the contrary, I'm inclined to think it would make a heap of
trouble--for you and your friends, and quite probably for the man or
men who sent you to waylay me. But, apart from all that, you've got hold
of the wrong man, as I told you a moment ago."
"No, by grapples! I hain't. I saw you in daylight. If there's been any
fumblin' done, I hain't done it. So you see it ain't any o' my funeral."
"Think not?" said Blount.
"I know it ain't. Orders is orders, and you don't git over into them
woods on Upper Lost Creek with no papers to serve on nobody: see?"
It was just here that the light of complete understanding dawned upon
Blount; and with it came the disconcerting chill of a conviction
overthrown. As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that a
corporation, which is a creature of the law, could afford to be an open
law-breaker. But here was a very striking refutation of the charitable
assumption. His smoking-room companion of the Pullman car was doubtless
one of the timber-pillagers who had been cutting on the public domain.
To such a man an agent of the National Forest Service was an enemy to be
hoodwinked, if possible, or, in the last resort, to be disposed of as
expeditiously as might be, and Blount saw that he had only himself to
blame for his present predicament, since he had allowed the man to
believe that he was a Government emissary. Having this clew to the
mystery, his course was a little easier to steer.
"I have no papers of the kind you think I have, as you can readily
determine by searching me," he said. "My name is Blount, and I am the
son of ex-Senator David Blount, of this State. Now what are you going to
do with me?"
"What's that you say?" grated the outlaw.
"You heard what I said. Go ahead and heave me into the canyon if you are
willing to stand for it afterward."
The hard-faced man turned without replying and went back to the other
two at the fire. Blount caught only a word now and again of the
low-toned, wrangling argument that followed. But from the overheard word
or two he gathered that there were still some leanings toward the sound
old maxim which declares that "dead men tell no tales." When the
decision was finally reached, he was left to guess its purport. Without
any explanation the thongs were taken from his wrists and ankles, and he
was helped upon his horse. After his captors were mounted, the new
status was defined by the spokesman in curt phrase.
"You go along quiet with us, and you don't make no bad breaks, see? I
more'n half believe you been lyin' to me, but I'm goin' to give you a
chance to prove up. If you don't prove up, you pass out--that's all. Now
git in line and hike out; and if you're countin' on makin' a break, jest
ricollect that a chunk o' lead out of a Winchester kin travel a heap
faster thern your cayuse."
If Blount had not already lost all sense of familiarity with his
surroundings, the devious mountain trail taken by his captors would soon
have convinced him that the boyhood memories were no longer to be
trusted. Up and down, the trail zigzagged and climbed, always
penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains. At times
Blount lost even the sense of direction; lost it so completely that the
high-riding moon seemed to be in the wrong quarter of the heavens.
For the first few miles the trail was so difficult that speed was out of
the question; but later, in crossing a high-lying valley, the horses
were pushed. Beyond the valley there were more mountains, and half-way
through this second range the trail plunged into a deep, cleft-like
canyon with a brawling torrent for its pathfinder. Once more Blount lost
the sense of direction, and when the canyon trail came out upon broad
uplands and became a country road with bordering ranches watered by
irrigation canals, into which the mountain torrent was diverted, there
were no recognizable landmarks to tell him whither his captors were
leading him.
As he was able to determine by holding his watch, face up, to the
moonlight, it was nearly midnight when the silent cavalcade of four
turned aside from the main road into an avenue of spreading cottonwood
trees. At its head the avenue became a circular driveway; and fronting
the driveway a stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and
colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the white gravel of the
carriage approach.
There were lights in one wing of the house, and another appeared behind
the fan-light in the entrance-hall when the leader of the three
highbinders had tramped up the steps and touched the bell-push. Blount
had a fleeting glimpse of a black head with a fringe of snowy wool when
the door was opened, but he did not hear what was said. After the negro
serving-man disappeared there was a little wait. At the end of the
interval the door was opened wide, and Blount had a gruff order to
dismount.
What he saw when he stood on the door-mat beside his captor merely added
mystery to mystery. Just within the luxuriously furnished hall, where
the light of the softly shaded hall lantern served to heighten the
artistic effect of her red house-gown, stood a woman--a lady, and
evidently the mistress of the Georgian mansion. She was small and dark,
with brown eyes that were almost childlike in their winsomeness; a woman
who might be twenty, or thirty, or any age between. Beautiful she was
not, Blount decided, comparing her instantly, as he did all women, with
Patricia Anners; but--He was not given time to add the qualifying phrase
or to prepare himself for what was coming.
"What is it, Barto?" the little lady asked, turning to the man with the
gun.
The reply was direct and straight to the purpose.
"Excuse _me_; but I jest wanted to ask if you know this here young
feller. He's been allowin' to me th't he is--"
"Of course," she said quickly, and stepping forward she gave her hand
and a welcome to the dazed one. "Please come in; we have been expecting
you." Then again to the man with the Winchester: "Thank you so much,
Barto, for showing the gentleman the way to Wartrace Hall."
It was all done so quietly that Blount was still unconsciously holding
the hand of welcoming while his late captors were riding away down the
cottonwood-shaded avenue. When he realized what he was doing he was as
nearly embarrassed as a self-contained young lawyer could well be. But
his impromptu hostess quickly set him at ease.
"You needn't make any explanations," she hastened to say, smiling up at
him and gently disengaging the hand which he was only now remembering
that he had forgotten to relinquish. "Naturally, I inferred that you
were in trouble, and that your safety depended in some sense upon my
answer. Were you in trouble?"
Blount perceived immediately how utterly impossible it would be to make
her, or any one else, understand the boyish impulse which had prompted
him to leave his train, or the curious difficulty into which the impulse
had precipitated him. So his explanation scarcely explained.
"I was on my way to a ranch--that is, to the capital--when these men
held me up," he stammered. "They--they mistook me for some one else, I
think, and for reasons best known to themselves they brought me here. If
you could direct me to some place where I can get a night's lodging--"
"There is nothing like a tavern within twenty miles of here," she broke
in; "nor is there any house within that radius which would refuse you a
night's shelter, Mr.--"
Blount made a quick dive for his card-case, found it, and hastened to
introduce himself by name. She took the bit of pasteboard, and, since
she scarcely glanced at the engraved line on it, he found himself wholly
unable to interpret her smile.
"The card is hardly necessary," she said; and then, to his complete
bewilderment: "You are very much like your father, Mr. Blount."
"You know my father?" he exclaimed.
She laughed softly. "Every one knows the senator," she returned, "and I
can assure you that his son is heartily welcome under this roof. Uncle
Barnabas"--to the ancient serving-man who was still hovering in the
background--"have Mr. Blount's horse put up and the blue room made
ready."
Blount followed his still unnamed hostess obediently when she led the
way to the lighted library in the wing of the great house.
"Uncle Barnabas will come for you in a little while," she told him,
playing the part of the gracious lady to the line and letter. "In the
meantime you must let me make you a cup of tea. I am sure you must be
needing it after having ridden so far. Take the easy-chair, and we can
talk comfortably while the kettle is boiling. Are you new to the West,
Mr. Blount, or is this only a return to your own? The senator is always
talking about you, you know; but he is so inordinately proud of you that
he forgets to tell us all the really interesting things that we want to
know."
The serving-man took his own time about coming back; so long a time that
Blount forgot that it was past midnight, that he was a guest in a
strange house, and that he still had not learned the name of his
entertainer. For all this forgetfulness the little lady with the
dark-brown eyes was directly responsible. Almost before he realized it,
Blount found himself chatting with her as if he had always known her,
making rapid strides on the way to confidence and finding her alertly
responsive in whatever field the talk happened to fall. Apparently she
knew the world--his world--better than he knew it himself: she had
summered on the North Shore and wintered in Washington. She knew Paris,
and when the conversation touched upon the Italian art-galleries he was
led to wonder if he had gone through Italy with his eyes shut. At the
next turn of the talk he was forced to admit that not even Patricia
herself could speak more intelligently of the English social problem;
and when it came to the vital questions of the American moment he gasped
again and wondered if he were awake--if it could be possible that this
out-of-place Georgian mansion and its charming mistress could be part
and parcel of the West which had so far outgrown the boyhood memories.
Since all things mundane must have an end, the old butler with the
white-fringed head came at last to show him the way to his luxurious
lodgings on the second floor of the mansion. With a touch of hospitality
which carried Blount back to his one winter in the South, the hostess
went with him as far as the stair-foot, and her "Good-night" was still
ringing musically in his ears when the old negro lighted the candles in
the guest-room, put another stick of wood on the small fire that was
crackling and snapping cheerfully on the hearth, and bobbed and bowed
his way to the door. Blount saw his last chance for better information
vanishing for the night, and once more broke with the traditions.
"Uncle Barnabas, before you go, suppose you tell me where I am," he
suggested. "Whose house is this?"
The old man stopped on the threshold, chuckling gleefully. "A-ain't you
know dat, sah?--a-ain't de mistis done tell you dat? You's at Wa'trace
Hall--Mahsteh Majah's new country-house; yes, sah; dat's whah you
is--kee-hee!"
"And who is 'Master Major'?" pressed Blount, whose bewilderment grew
with every fresh attempt to dispel it.
"A-ain't she tell you dat?--kee-hee! Ev'body knows Mahsteh Majah; yes,
sah. If de mistis ain't tell you, ol' Barnabas ain't gwine to--no, sah.
Ah'll bring yo'-all's coffee in de mawnin'; yes, sah--good-night,
sah--kee-hee!" And the door closed silently upon the wrinkled old face
and the bobbing head.
Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed, but sleep came
reluctantly. Life is said to be full of paper walls thinly dividing the
commonplace from the amazing; and he decided that he had surely burst
through one of them when he had given place to the vagrant impulse
prompting him to go horseback-riding when he should have gone
comfortably to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.
Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall,"
and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked
as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at
her tongue's end--who had held him so nearly spellbound over the teacups
that he had entirely lost sight of everything but his hospitable
welcome?
These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the
door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off
into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a
motor-car aroused him. There was a window at his bed's head, and he
reached over and drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue of
cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach. A touring-car, with its
powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up
at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to
heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.
"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he mused sleepily. "That's
why the little lady was sitting up so late--she was waiting for him."
Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake:
"Scat!--go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!"
V
AT WARTRACE HALL
In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a
home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.
When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular
adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a
cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little
heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and
kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.
"Father!"--and "Evan, boy!" were the simple words of greeting; but the
mighty hand-grip which went with them was for the younger man a
confirmation of the filial hope and a heart-warming promise for the
future. Following instantly, there came a rush of mingled emotions: of
astoundment that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the midnight
faring through the hills or on the approach to the home of his
childhood; of something akin to keen regret that the old had given place
so thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling bordering on
chagrin that he had been surprised into accepting the hospitable
advances of a woman whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom he
had hitherto cherished--and meant to cherish--a settled aversion.
But at the hand-gripping moment there was no time for a nice weighing of
emotions. He was in his father's house; the home-coming, some phases of
which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished, and the new
life--the life which must be lived without Patricia--was fairly begun.
Also, there were many arrears to be brought up.
"Intuition, on the manward side of it at least, doesn't go," he was
saying with half-boyish candor. "I was awake last night when you drove
home in the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw you as you
came up the steps. According to the psychics, there ought to have been
some inward stirrings of recognition, but there weren't--not a single
thrill. Did the little--er--did Mrs. Blount tell you that I was here?"
"She did so; but she couldn't tell me much more. Say, son, how on top of
earth did you happen to blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your
herd leader?"
"It's a fairy tale, and you won't believe it--of a Blount," was the
laughing reply. "I left Boston Monday, and should have reached the
capital last night. But my train was laid out by a yard wreck at Twin
Buttes just before dark, and I left it and took to the hills--horseback.
Don't ask me why I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the
smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I simply had to do it."
The old cattle-king was standing with his feet planted wide apart and
his hands deep in his pockets. "You hired a horse!" he chuckled, with
the humorous wrinkles coming and going at the corners of the kindly
eyes. "Did you have the nerve to think you were going to climb down from
a three-legged stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the fifty
miles from Twin Buttes to the capital the next?"
"Oh, no; I wasn't altogether daft. But knowing where I was, I did think
I could ride out to Debbleby's. So I hired the bronco and set out--and
that reminds me: the horse will have to be sent back to the liveryman in
Twin Buttes, some way."
"Never mind the cayuse. Shackford would have made you a present of it
outright if you had told him who you were. Go on with your story. It
listens like a novel."
"I took the general direction all right on leaving Twin Buttes, and kept
it until I got among the Lost River hogbacks. But after that I was
pretty successfully lost. I'm ashamed to tell it, but about half of the
time the moon didn't seem to be in the right place."
"Lost, were you? And Jack Barto found you?" queried the father.
"Barto hadn't lost me to any appreciable extent," was the half-humorous
emendation. And then: "Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around
playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel the next?"
"He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway, the head pusher of
the Twin Buttes Lumber Company. He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser
and log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn't work very hard at his trade.
Down in the lower wards of New York they'd call him a boss heeler,
maybe. But you say 'hold-up'; you don't mean to tell me that Jack Barto
robbed you, son!"
"Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his helpers pulled me off the
bronco and hog-tied me, and then fell to discussing with the other two
the advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping me into Lost
River Canyon--that's all. Of course, I knew they had stumbled upon the
wrong man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto accept that
hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently to bring me here for
identification. Since he wouldn't talk, and I didn't recognize the trail
or the place, I hadn't the slightest notion of my whereabouts--not the
least in the world; didn't know where he was taking me or where I had
landed when we stopped here."
The big man was leaning against the foot-rail of the bed and frowning
thoughtfully. "Talked about dropping you into Lost River, did they? H'm.
I reckon we'll have to look into that a little. Who set them on, son?
Got any idea of that?"
"I have a very clear idea: it was this man Hathaway you speak of--a big
ranchman named Griggs told me his name. He came across in the Pullman
with me from Omaha; middle-aged, tall, and slim, with a hatchet face and
owlish eyes. Before I learned his name we had talked a bit--killing time
in the smoking-room. He said he was interested in mines and timber.
Along toward the last he got the notion into his head that I was a
special agent of some kind, on a mission for the Bureau of Forestry, and
I was foolish enough to let him escape with the impression uncorrected."
"That was Pete Hathaway, all right," was the senator's comment. "His
company has been cutting timber in the Lost River watershed reserves,
and he probably thought you were aiming to get him. You say he sent
Barto after you?"