THE FUGITIVE
"You are no longer daughter of mine!" cried Martin Leland sternly in
the first heat of his anger. "You have turned against your own blood
like a traitress. You have forsaken your father to ally yourself with
a drunken brawler, a man so sunken in depravity that he has murdered
his own brother for mere money. You have shamed yourself and your
mother and me. You have bared your heart for the world to look at and
laugh at, that men may link your name and the name of a common fugitive
from justice. You would be held up to less shame had you merely
uncovered your body and gone out naked for men to jeer at!"
Wanda, lying white and lax upon the couch near the fireplace, suddenly
dropped her mother's hand and sprang to her feet, her body quivering
with a quick anger that leaped out to meet her father's.
"Papa!" Her head was thrown up in defiant pride, her vibrant voice,
her blazing eyes were as hard as his own. "I won't listen to such
things, not even from you. They are untrue. You say that Wayne ran
away because he is guilty and a coward. You know better than that! He
is not a fugitive from justice; he is forced by the things you have
done to become a fugitive from injustice and persecution. Oh, how can
you stand there and denounce him after you have set your hand against
him as you have? Or don't you think that I know how you and the rest
have sought to rob him and ruin him!"
"What!" stormed Leland. "Is the girl mad?"
"No, I am not mad," she flung back at him hotly, all facts and
considerations swept away before the rush of her furious indignation
except the one vital matter that she was fighting for a thing as dear
as her lover's life. "You can find no name too bad for him, just
because you hate him! You have always hated him just because he is his
father's son. You and his own cousin, two men whom he has trusted,
have tricked him and betrayed him. You have hidden from him all
knowledge of the mortgage you held upon the Bar L-M. Even now you are
trying to steal his ranch from him. Wayne has never done a thing so
vile as that in all his life. Oh! I am ashamed."
Her voice grew harsh in her throat; her face was no longer white, two
spots of anger burned in her cheeks. She broke off panting, her eyes
growing harder, brighter as they challenged his.
"Martin," cried Mrs. Leland, coming swiftly to the girl's side. "Be
careful."
"Careful!" shouted Leland, his face red with his fury. "When one of my
blood loses her last shred of decency, when she takes up with a low,
dissolute unprincipled Shandon? The worst of a bad lot. May God curse
him, may God curse her if she clings to him!"
"You have never spoken to me like this before," cried Wanda
passionately. "You will never do it again."
"Listen to me," thundered Leland, his heavier voice drowning the girl's
words. "If your father does a thing which your untrained, woman's
brain cannot rightly understand are you the one to judge and condemn
him? Because a lying Shandon has cast his cursed spell over your
romantic fancies are you to leap to these ridiculous conclusions? Am I
the man to do a dishonourable thing? Ask other men out in the world
where my dealings are an open book. Ask your mother. If, to you, who
have gone hungering for lies to a man amply competent to tell them to
you, it has seemed that I have done a mean thing for selfish purposes
is it your place to judge me? Listen, I tell you. I have known for a
year and a half that Wayne Shandon murdered his brother and robbed the
dead body. I have seen, although all men know this fact as well as I
do, that he has been trickster enough to cover his bloody tracks; that
it would be hard to convict him in court. I have seen that it lay
within my power, that it has become my duty, to punish him in another
way. Not a thing have I done that is not just, that the law courts
will not sanction. And yet, when I had wrested from him the thing his
red hands took with his brother's life, I should have punished him a
little as he deserves. Is a man like him deserving of any other
treatment?"
"How do you know all this?" she demanded, all that dormant fierceness
of the female heart Hashing from the depths to the surface. "Did you
see him kill Arthur?"
"Don't be a fool," he retorted.
"Or were you over ready to believe because you hated him, and because
the tool you would lay your hand to would not only punish him but
enrich you? And you call me traitress!"
For a moment Martin Leland, his face convulsed, his hands clenched, his
great body towering over her, looked as though he were going to strike
her down. Then, without a word, he left the room and returned swiftly
to the study where MacKelvey and Hume were waiting for him.
Wanda stood looking after him, her body stiff and erect, her face
lifted, her eyes unchanging. Her mother laid a quick hand upon the
girl's arm. Then, suddenly the tired body relaxed, the flaming spirit
softened, and Wanda, white and trembling, dropped sobbing upon the
couch.
"Wanda, Wanda," whispered her mother softly, kneeling and putting her
hands gently upon the shaking shoulders. "I am sorry. And yet, Wanda,
I am proud of what my daughter has done to-day."
The mother heart comforted. And even before the storm of sobs, shaken
from the girl by strained and jangling nerves, had ceased, Mrs. Leland
was trying to make excuses for her husband.
"He has just been blinded by hate," she said bravely. "Some day he
will see the light."
"Gee," commented Willie Dart, outside the door, resuming his pacing up
and down upon the front porch. "If Red turns that girl down I'll marry
her myself!"
Had Martin Leland's iron nature asked such a thing as sympathy it would
have received little satisfaction from the interview that night in his
study. MacKelvey's greeting to him was, "Martin, that girl of yours is
a wonder! There's not a man in the country would have tackled the
thing she did to-day."
"Pshaw," grunted Hume, his sneering manner having come back to him with
his growing displeasure. "It was simple enough for all of its
spectacular staging."
"Was it?" MacKelvey asked sharply. "I'll bet you five hundred dollars,
Mr. Hume, that you're not the man to do it!"
Hume lifted his shoulders for answer and kicked viciously at the
andirons on the hearth.
"So you let him get clean away?" demanded Martin, flinging himself into
his chair at the table and glowering at MacKelvey. "Why didn't you
follow him up?"
"Because I wasn't a fool. Wouldn't I cut a pretty picture slipping
around on a pair of sticks trying to catch up with the strongest ski
man in the county! He'd double up on me every mile. And with the
night coming on I'd stand a great chance finding him, wouldn't I?"
"What are you going to do about it then?"
MacKelvey spat thoughtfully at the fire.
"I'm going to nab him the first chance I get. And I'm not in the habit
of carrying a warrant around in my pocket until I wear it out, either."
"You are going out after him in the morning?"
MacKelvey again attacked the fire with more thoughtfulness, truer
precision than before.
"Nope. I'm going back to El Toyon while I can get out. There's about
ten feet more snow due in the next two weeks, Martin."
"So," cried Hume. "That's the way you serve a warrant, is it? You are
going to let the man get away if he wants to, and he has shown us
already how he feels about that! You are going to let him slip down to
Mexico or work up to the Canadian line."
"Easy, Mr. Hume," said MacKelvey slowly. "I've been sheriff in this
county for seventeen years. Name me the name of any man who's been
wanted and who hasn't been brought in. If I stuck here, running around
like a rabbit in the snow, Shandon would have the chance to get out, if
he wanted it. And I don't believe that he does want it. But if I'm
back in El Toyon to-morrow with the wires busy there won't be a hole in
the web for a blue bottle to buzz through. He can't eat snow, you
know. I'll put a man up here to see he don't slip back to the Bar L-M.
And I don't say I won't go myself or send Johnson and Crawford out in
the morning to try and pick up his tracks if it don't snow during the
night and cover them up."
But long before midnight it came on to snow again, so heavily that they
all knew that a fresh ski track would not have lasted an hour. Early
the next morning Leland, Garth Conway, Sledge Hume and MacKelvey with
his deputies went out of the valley upon skis or snow shoes. Helga
Strawn went with them, shrugging her shoulders at Leland's blunt
assurance that it would be a good ten miles of hard work before they
could expect to take to the horses waiting beyond the heavy snow line.
Mr. Dart did not go with them. He had settled that fact for himself
very positively before going to bed the night before.
"In the first place," he decided, "Red might need me to smuggle him
some grub or something and I got to be on hand. In the second place I
had enough trying to ride two slippery sticks yesterday. Split myself
in two for ten miles on a pair of devil's toboggans? Thanks awfully.
I'll stay here and split stovewood for Julia."
"Where's Dart?" demanded Leland when the men were pushing back their
chairs from the breakfast table.
Nobody knew. He had not been seen since last evening. Julia, hastily
returning from quest of him, brought back word that he was in bed and
that she was afraid that he was unwell. She had heard him groaning.
"The little fool is faking," cried Martin, ready this morning to fly
into a rage over trifles. "Does he think I'm going to have him
sticking around the place all winter?"
He flung himself from the table and went heavily up the stairs to
Dart's room in the attic.
"Come out of that," he said roughly, throwing the door open. "We are
going to start right away. You'd better get some breakfast in a hurry
if you want any."
"Breakfast?" moaned Dart weakly. "Good God, Mart. Don't say breakfast
to me or I'll die."
"What's the matter?" asked Martin roughly and suspiciously. "You
weren't sick last night."
He came closer to the huddled figure. Dart's hands were shaking, his
face was as white as a sheet.
"It came on sudden," he said faintly. "I--I've had it before. I--I
think I'm dying this time. Has Mamma Leland got a Bible?"
Suddenly, before Leland's astonished eyes, the little man began a
violent retching and vomiting. Leland went back down the stairs,
swearing, and sent Julia with word to Mrs. Leland that Dart was really
sick.
Dart got out of bed, his legs trembling under him, and crept to the
window, peering out cautiously. Only when he had seen the party leave
the house upon skis and webs did he go back to his bed, snatch a bit of
plug cut chewing tobacco out from under his pillow and hurl it
venemously into the snow.
"A man that will chew that stuff for fun," he groaned creeping back
into bed, "ain't safe to have around. Good God, I wonder if I am
dying? I might have took too much!"
* * * * * *
Thus it happened that almost at the very beginning of the hard winter
Wayne Shandon was a hunted man, forewarned that his hunters would spare
neither unsleeping vigilance nor expense to secure his arrest and
conviction. During the first night and the first day he never went far
from the Bar L-M range house. From behind a screen of timber less than
a quarter of a mile from his pursuers he had watched them turn back
towards the Echo Creek. The darkness was already dimming the landscape
but he could count the figures, five of them, with the horse Wanda had
insisted that MacKelvey bring out with them. As they went toward the
bridge he came down toward them, moving swiftly among the trees,
keeping well out of sight.
He knew he would be doing the thing upon which MacKelvey would not
count. Besides it was sheer madness to think of spending the night
without shelter of any kind and he did not dare go immediately to
Wanda's cave. Already he had come to think of that place, high above
the treetops and as safely hidden as if it were below the earth's
surface, as a place of refuge. If he went there now they would track
him to-morrow--unless it snowed. He must wait somewhere until the snow
came to wipe out the track he would leave behind him.
He entered the house by the back door, got his rifle and a belt of
cartridges, made into a compact pack such blankets, tobacco, coffee,
sugar, salt and condensed foods as he could carry. The cave was
already well stocked but he could not guess now how long he must lie
hidden there. He had no time to decide upon the course ahead of him
beyond the immediate future. He knew only that he must not let them
take him until he had done the work he would be unable to do from the
inside of a jail. He was preparing carefully for such needs as he
could foresee.
He slept that night in his own bed, waking at each little noise, ready
to spring up fully dressed and armed, prepared equally for defence or a
hasty retreat. Going to the window shortly after midnight he saw that
the snow was falling heavily. He made a hasty cold meal, then strapped
on his pack, took up his rifle and left the house. Now was the time to
go to the cave; the snow might cease by morning.
In the darkness he deemed it wiser to go down by the bridge than to
attempt the steeper passage beyond the head of the lake. They would
not be out in this sort of night watching for him; they would not know
where to expect him. And even if he came within twenty paces of a man
his swift, silent passage in the dark would be unnoticed.
To a man knowing the broken range country a whit less intimately than
Shandon knew it, the trip that night down to the bridge, across it,
across the Leland ranch and to the cliffs where the cave was would have
been a sheer impossibility. The storm, howling and snatching at him,
would have taken the heart out of a man less grimly determined than he
had grown to be. The snow, while it befriended him, covering his trail
in the rear, drove its shifting wall of opposition across his way in
front. The darkness tricked him and baffled him again and again. But
still, head down and dogged, he pushed on, certain always of his
general direction, confident of being under the cliffs in the first
faint glow of the new day.
It was an endless night, torturous with cold and uncertainty. But at
last, before the day broke, he made his heavy way up the great cedar,
climbing perilously with numbed hands. He knew that if his pursuers
came here now they would see where he had knocked the thick pads of
snow from the wide horizontal branches. But he knew, too, that before
they could arrive the steadily falling snow would have hidden the signs
he had left behind him. And at last, wearily, he threw himself down
before a crackling fire, and went to sleep.
For upwards of two weeks his life was like that of a rat in a cellar.
Silence, monotony, darkness, loneliness. Already the snowfall was as
great as that of most winters. He could guess that by this time the
fences about Wanda's home were hidden under a smooth covering that
thickened day by day, night after night. When he looked out from the
screen across his doorway he saw that the smaller trees were blotted
out and reckoned that upon the level floor of the valley the snow lay
ten feet deep. Now and again, when he went out in the early dawn or
the last glimmering light of dusk for wood or for a break in the
monotony that was horrible in itself to a man of his type, he saw how
the winter was piling higher and higher its white heaps along the
cliffs above. He spent hours on the cliffs, working his way slowly
upward along the seam in the rocks which he discovered led out above,
digging with his hands for dead branches to replenish his dwindling
stock of firewood. He must choose days for this when the snow so
thickened the air that a man within shouting distance could not have
seen him.
Two weeks, and Wanda did not come to him. Two weeks of inactivity, of
waiting, the hardest trial in the world for a man tingling with energy,
with his work calling to him through every moment of his waking hours.
He had planned that work, going over and over his plans, every step.
He knew just what he should do--when Wanda came.
He could not know why she did not come. He began to fear that she had
left the valley. Then, when he assured himself that she would not have
gone without a word he began to fear that she was ill; that the day
when she took the short cut had been too much for any woman's endurance.
But she was not ill, he was certain of that. During the two weeks
there were only two days when the air cleared enough for him to see the
Leland house. The first came when he had been in hiding three days;
the other two days later. Both times Wanda had come out upon the porch
where with the spy-glass in the cave he could see her plainly. She had
signalled him, using the first few signals of that code they had made
together so merrily. She lifted both hands up to her face and he knew
that her heart was repeating his words, "I love you, dear, with my
whole heart." She loitered on the porch in apparent carelessness, but
as eager as the man watching her, yearning for her, she had lifted her
hood lightly from her head, flashing the message across the miles: "Be
careful. We are being watched." She turned her back and stood for a
long time looking in at the open living room door: "Something has
happened to prevent our meeting to-day."
Several times during the two clear days she repeated her signals. But
for more than a week afterward he had no sight of her. He did not
know, he could only guess vaguely at the truth. One of MacKelvey's men
had come back to the Echo Creek, unexpected by Wanda and Mrs. Leland,
and while he was apparently concerned only in making frequent trips
toward the Bar L-M, Wanda had the uneasy feeling that she was never
long out of his sight.
But at length Wanda risked coming to him, choosing a time when the
danger was least. Johnson, the deputy sheriff, had said in the morning
that he was going to take a run over to the Bar L-M, to look things
over. It was by no means the first time he had said this, and the girl
felt that he had no particular reason to suspect her to-day. It was
still snowing, not too heavily for one to venture out, but steadily
enough to obliterate ski tracks entirely in less than an hour. Johnson
left the house, and a little later Wanda set forth, her preparations
swiftly made. Johnson was out of sight. She drove on swiftly to a
hilltop due east of the house from which she would be able to see him
before he came to the bridge.
She waited anxiously there until she saw him, pushing steadily onward.
One sharp glance at the way she had come showed her that unless Johnson
returned very much faster than he had gone out there would be no sign
to tell him where she had gone. And then, her eyes suddenly brighter
than they had been for many a day, she hastened on, still eastward, not
daring even now to turn directly toward the cliffs until she had passed
into the deeper forest.
It was like bringing new life to Wayne Shandon. He swept the girl up
hungrily into his arms, crying out softly as she came through the snow
blocked entrance to the cave. And she, when he brought a candle and
her eyes caught sight of his face, bearded and worn, must shut her lips
tight and fight hard to keep back the tears.
It was only a brief half hour allowed them, leaving them both happier
and sadder at the parting. But she had brought the few little things
she could smuggle out to him, had assured herself from a close
examination of his store that he was in no danger of freezing or
starving; and he had entrusted to her the carrying out of the work he
had hit upon.
"I have scribbled a letter in your little note book, dear. It is to
Brisbane, a lawyer in San Francisco. He is a friend of mine and I can
trust him. It tells him everything, about the mortgage and the
foreclosure, about the trouble I am in. He's the man to advise us now.
There's not a keener criminal lawyer in the State. I'm going to give
him my power of attorney. I'll take chances on slipping down to the
city, somehow, if it's necessary. Or I can get down into White Rock at
night, meet him there, and get back here before morning. The letter
tells him, too, that I am dead certain that Sledge Hume is the man the
law wants; it explains why, and authorises him to hire a detective
agency to run Hume down. Dear heart of mine, you are too brave to be
afraid for me now. You will get this letter out somehow? You will get
it to Brisbane for me? Once he is at work things are going to right
themselves. A man can't kill another and rob him of twenty-five
thousand dollars and not leave some sort of a trail behind him. Then
there is another message. I have not written it. Can you get word to
Big Bill to keep a close watch on Little Saxon? I'll ride him in the
spring."
"And you, Wayne? You can't stay here all winter!"
"I can, if there is anything to be gained by it. But we'll wait until
we hear from Brisbane. He'll find the evidence we want, dear. And
until then hadn't you rather think of me waiting here than lying in
jail?"
When she left him to take a devious way home the tears lay glistening
upon her cheek until the snow, beating in her face, washed them away.