THE MASKED RIDER
Venters looked quickly from the fallen rustlers to the cañon where the
others had disappeared. He calculated on the time needed for running
horses to return to the open, if their riders heard shots. He waited
breathlessly. But the estimated time dragged by and no riders appeared.
Venters began presently to believe that the rifle reports had not
penetrated into the recesses of the cañon, and felt safe for the
immediate present.
He hurried to the spot where the first rustler had been dragged by his
horse. The man lay in deep grass, dead, jaw fallen, eyes protruding—a
sight that sickened Venters. The first man at whom he had ever aimed a
weapon he had shot through the heart. With the clammy sweat oozing from
every pore Venters dragged the rustler in among some boulders and
covered him with slabs of rock. Then he smoothed out the crushed trail
in grass and sage. The rustler’s horse had stopped a quarter of a mile
off and was grazing.
When Venters rapidly strode toward the Masked Rider not even the cold
nausea that gripped him could wholly banish curiosity. For he had shot
Oldring’s infamous lieutenant, whose face had never been seen. Venters
experienced a grim pride in the feat. What would Tull say to this
achievement of the outcast who rode too often to Deception Pass?
Venters’s curious eagerness and expectation had not prepared him for
the shock he received when he stood over a slight, dark figure. The
rustler wore the black mask that had given him his name, but he had no
weapons. Venters glanced at the drooping horse, there were no
gun-sheaths on the saddle.
“A rustler who didn’t pack guns!” muttered Venters. “He wears no belt.
He couldn’t pack guns in that rig.... Strange!”
A low, gasping intake of breath and a sudden twitching of body told
Venters the rider still lived.
“He’s alive!... I’ve got to stand here and watch him die. And I shot an
unarmed man.”
Shrinkingly Venters removed the rider’s wide sombrero and the black
cloth mask. This action disclosed bright chestnut hair, inclined to
curl, and a white, youthful face. Along the lower line of cheek and jaw
was a clear demarcation, where the brown of tanned skin met the white
that had been hidden from the sun.
“Oh, he’s only a boy!... What! Can he be Oldring’s Masked Rider?”
[Illustration: “Oh, he’s only a boy!... What! Can he be Oldring’s
Masked Rider?”]
The boy showed signs of returning consciousness. He stirred; his lips
moved; a small brown hand clenched in his blouse.
Venters knelt with a gathering horror of his deed. His bullet had
entered the rider’s right breast, high up to the shoulder. With hands
that shook, Venters untied a black scarf and ripped open the blood-wet
blouse.
First he saw a gaping hole, dark red against a whiteness of skin, from
which welled a slender red stream. Then the graceful, beautiful swell
of a woman’s breast!
“A woman!” he cried. “A girl!... I’ve killed a girl!”
She suddenly opened eyes that transfixed Venters. They were fathomless
blue. Consciousness of death was there, a blended terror and pain, but
no consciousness of sight. She did not see Venters. She stared into the
unknown.
Then came a spasm of vitality. She writhed in a torture of reviving
strength, and in her convulsions she almost tore from Ventner’s grasp.
Slowly she relaxed and sank partly back. The ungloved hand sought the
wound, and pressed so hard that her wrist half buried itself in her
bosom. Blood trickled between her spread fingers. And she looked at
Venters with eyes that saw him.
He cursed himself and the unerring aim of which he had been so proud.
He had seen that look in the eyes of a crippled antelope which he was
about to finish with his knife. But in her it had infinitely more—a
revelation of mortal spirit. The instinctive bringing to life was
there, and the divining helplessness and the terrible accusation of the
stricken.
“Forgive me! I didn’t know!” burst out Venters.
“You shot me—you’ve killed me!” she whispered, in panting gasps. Upon
her lips appeared a fluttering, bloody froth. By that Venters knew the
air in her lungs was mixing with blood. “Oh, I knew—it would—come—some
day!... Oh, the burn!... Hold me—I’m sinking—it’s all dark.... Ah,
God!... Mercy—”
Her rigidity loosened in one long quiver and she lay back limp, still,
white as snow, with closed eyes.
Venters thought then that she died. But the faint pulsation of her
breast assured him that life yet lingered. Death seemed only a matter
of moments, for the bullet had gone clear through her. Nevertheless, he
tore sageleaves from a bush, and, pressing them tightly over her
wounds, he bound the black scarf round her shoulder, tying it securely
under her arm. Then he closed the blouse, hiding from his sight that
blood-stained, accusing breast.
“What—now?” he questioned, with flying mind. “I must get out of here.
She’s dying—but I can’t leave her.”
He rapidly surveyed the sage to the north and made out no animate
object. Then he picked up the girl’s sombrero and the mask. This time
the mask gave him as great a shock as when he first removed it from her
face. For in the woman he had forgotten the rustler, and this black
strip of felt-cloth established the identity of Oldring’s Masked Rider.
Venters had solved the mystery. He slipped his rifle under her, and,
lifting her carefully upon it, he began to retrace his steps. The dog
trailed in his shadow. And the horse, that had stood drooping by,
followed without a call. Venters chose the deepest tufts of grass and
clumps of sage on his return. From time to time he glanced over his
shoulder. He did not rest. His concern was to avoid jarring the girl
and to hide his trail. Gaining the narrow cañon, he turned and held
close to the wall till he reached his hiding-place. When he entered the
dense thicket of oaks he was hard put to it to force a way through. But
he held his burden almost upright, and by slipping side wise and
bending the saplings he got in. Through sage and grass he hurried to
the grove of silver spruces.
He laid the girl down, almost fearing to look at her. Though marble
pale and cold, she was living. Venters then appreciated the tax that
long carry had been to his strength. He sat down to rest. Whitie
sniffed at the pale girl and whined and crept to Venters’s feet. Ring
lapped the water in the runway of the spring.
Presently Venters went out to the opening, caught the horse and,
leading him through the thicket, unsaddled him and tied him with a long
halter. Wrangle left his browsing long enough to whinny and toss his
head. Venters felt that he could not rest easily till he had secured
the other rustler’s horse; so, taking his rifle and calling for Ring,
he set out. Swiftly yet watchfully he made his way through the cañon to
the oval and out to the cattle trail. What few tracks might have
betrayed him he obliterated, so only an expert tracker could have
trailed him. Then, with many a wary backward glance across the sage, he
started to round up the rustler’s horse. This was unexpectedly easy. He
led the horse to lower ground, out of sight from the opposite side of
the oval along the shadowy western wall, and so on into his cañon and
secluded camp.
The girl’s eyes were open; a feverish spot burned in her cheeks she
moaned something unintelligible to Venters, but he took the movement of
her lips to mean that she wanted water. Lifting her head, he tipped the
canteen to her lips. After that she again lapsed into unconsciousness
or a weakness which was its counterpart. Venters noted, however, that
the burning flush had faded into the former pallor.
The sun set behind the high cañon rim, and a cool shade darkened the
walls. Venters fed the dogs and put a halter on the dead rustlers
horse. He allowed Wrangle to browse free. This done, he cut spruce
boughs and made a lean-to for the girl. Then, gently lifting her upon a
blanket, he folded the sides over her. The other blanket he wrapped
about his shoulders and found a comfortable seat against a spruce-tree
that upheld the little shack. Ring and Whitie lay near at hand, one
asleep, the other watchful.
Venters dreaded the night’s vigil. At night his mind was active, and
this time he had to watch and think and feel beside a dying girl whom
he had all but murdered. A thousand excuses he invented for himself,
yet not one made any difference in his act or his self-reproach.
It seemed to him that when night fell black he could see her white face
so much more plainly.
“She’ll go, presently,” he said, “and be out of agony—thank God!”
Every little while certainty of her death came to him with a shock; and
then he would bend over and lay his ear on her breast. Her heart still
beat.
The early night blackness cleared to the cold starlight. The horses
were not moving, and no sound disturbed the deathly silence of the
cañon.
“I’ll bury her here,” thought Venters, “and let her grave be as much a
mystery as her life was.”
For the girl’s few words, the look of her eyes, the prayer, had
strangely touched Venters.
“She was only a girl,” he soliloquized. “What was she to Oldring?
Rustlers don’t have wives nor sisters nor daughters. She was bad—that’s
all. But somehow... well, she may not have willingly become the
companion of rustlers. That prayer of hers to God for mercy!... Life is
strange and cruel. I wonder if other members of Oldring’s gang are
women? Likely enough. But what was his game? Oldring’s Masked Rider! A
name to make villagers hide and lock their doors. A name credited with
a dozen murders, a hundred forays, and a thousand stealings of cattle.
What part did the girl have in this? It may have served Oldring to
create mystery.”
Hours passed. The white stars moved across the narrow strip of
dark-blue sky above. The silence awoke to the low hum of insects.
Venters watched the immovable white face, and as he watched, hour by
hour waiting for death, the infamy of her passed from his mind. He
thought only of the sadness, the truth of the moment. Whoever she
was—whatever she had done—she was young and she was dying.
The after-part of the night wore on interminably. The starlight failed
and the gloom blackened to the darkest hour. “She’ll die at the gray of
dawn,” muttered Venters, remembering some old woman’s fancy. The
blackness paled to gray, and the gray lightened and day peeped over the
eastern rim. Venters listened at the breast of the girl. She still
lived. Did he only imagine that her heart beat stronger, ever so
slightly, but stronger? He pressed his ear closer to her breast. And he
rose with his own pulse quickening.
“If she doesn’t die soon—she’s got a chance—the barest chance to live,”
he said.
He wondered if the internal bleeding had ceased. There was no more film
of blood upon her lips. But no corpse could have been whiter. Opening
her blouse, he untied the scarf, and carefully picked away the sage
leaves from the wound in her shoulder. It had closed. Lifting her
lightly, he ascertained that the same was true of the hole where the
bullet had come out. He reflected on the fact that clean wounds closed
quickly in the healing upland air. He recalled instances of riders who
had been cut and shot apparently to fatal issues; yet the blood had
clotted, the wounds closed, and they had recovered. He had no way to
tell if internal hemorrhage still went on, but he believed that it had
stopped. Otherwise she would surely not have lived so long. He marked
the entrance of the bullet, and concluded that it had just touched the
upper lobe of her lung. Perhaps the wound in the lung had also closed.
As he began to wash the blood stains from her breast and carefully
rebandage the wound, he was vaguely conscious of a strange, grave
happiness in the thought that she might live.
Broad daylight and a hint of sunshine high on the cliff-rim to the west
brought him to consideration of what he had better do. And while busy
with his few camp tasks he revolved the thing in his mind. It would not
be wise for him to remain long in his present hiding-place. And if he
intended to follow the cattle trail and try to find the rustlers he had
better make a move at once. For he knew that rustlers, being riders,
would not make much of a day’s or night’s absence from camp for one or
two of their number; but when the missing ones failed to show up in
reasonable time there would be a search. And Venters was afraid of
that.
“A good tracker could trail me,” he muttered. “And I’d be cornered
here. Let’s see. Rustlers are a lazy set when they’re not on the ride.
I’ll risk it. Then I’ll change my hiding-place.”
He carefully cleaned and reloaded his guns. When he rose to go he bent
a long glance down upon the unconscious girl. Then ordering Whitie and
Ring to keep guard, he left the camp.
The safest cover lay close under the wall of the cañon, and here
through the dense thickets Venters made his slow, listening advance
toward the oval. Upon gaining the wide opening he decided to cross it
and follow the left wall till he came to the cattle trail. He scanned
the oval as keenly as if hunting for antelope. Then, stooping, he stole
from one cover to another, taking advantage of rocks and bunches of
sage, until he had reached the thickets under the opposite wall. Once
there, he exercised extreme caution in his surveys of the ground ahead,
but increased his speed when moving. Dodging from bush to bush, he
passed the mouths of two cañons, and in the entrance of a third cañon
he crossed a wash of swift clear water, to come abruptly upon the
cattle trail.
It followed the low bank of the wash, and, keeping it in sight, Venters
hugged the line of sage and thicket. Like the curves of a serpent the
cañon wound for a mile or more and then opened into a valley. Patches
of red showed clear against the purple of sage, and farther out on the
level dotted strings of red led away to the wall of rock.
“Ha, the red herd!” exclaimed Venters.
Then dots of white and black told him there were cattle of other colors
in this inclosed valley. Oldring, the rustler, was also a rancher.
Venters’s calculating eye took count of stock that outnumbered the red
herd.
“What a range!” went on Venters. “Water and grass enough for fifty
thousand head, and no riders needed!”
After his first burst of surprise and rapid calculation Venters lost no
time there, but slunk again into the sage on his back trail. With the
discovery of Oldring’s hidden cattle-range had come enlightenment on
several problems. Here the rustler kept his stock, here was Jane
Withersteen’s red herd; here were the few cattle that had disappeared
from the Cottonwoods slopes during the last two years. Until Oldring
had driven the red herd his thefts of cattle for that time had not been
more than enough to supply meat for his men. Of late no drives had been
reported from Sterling or the villages north. And Venters knew that the
riders had wondered at Oldring’s inactivity in that particular field.
He and his band had been active enough in their visits to Glaze and
Cottonwoods; they always had gold; but of late the amount gambled away
and drunk and thrown away in the villages had given rise to much
conjecture. Oldring’s more frequent visits had resulted in new saloons,
and where there had formerly been one raid or shooting fray in the
little hamlets there were now many. Perhaps Oldring had another range
farther on up the pass, and from there drove the cattle to distant Utah
towns where he was little known. But Venters came finally to doubt
this. And, from what he had learned in the last few days, a belief
began to form in Venters’s mind that Oldring’s intimidations of the
villages and the mystery of the Masked Rider, with his alleged evil
deeds, and the fierce resistance offered any trailing riders, and the
rustling of cattle—these things were only the craft of the
rustler-chief to conceal his real life and purpose and work in
Deception Pass.
And like a scouting Indian Venters crawled through the sage of the oval
valley, crossed trail after trail on the north side, and at last
entered the cañon out of which headed the cattle trail, and into which
he had watched the rustlers disappear.
If he had used caution before, now he strained every nerve to force
himself to creeping stealth and to sensitiveness of ear. He crawled
along so hidden that he could not use his eyes except to aid himself in
the toilsome progress through the brakes and ruins of cliff-wall. Yet
from time to time, as he rested, he saw the massive red walls growing
higher and wilder, more looming and broken. He made note of the fact
that he was turning and climbing. The sage and thickets of oak and
brakes of alder gave place to piñon pine growing out of rocky soil.
Suddenly a low, dull murmur assailed his ears. At first he thought it
was thunder, then the slipping of a weathered slope of rock. But it was
incessant, and as he progressed it filled out deeper and from a murmur
changed into a soft roar.
“Falling water,” he said. “There’s volume to that. I wonder if it’s the
stream I lost.”
The roar bothered him, for he could hear nothing else. Likewise,
however, no rustlers could hear him. Emboldened by this and sure that
nothing but a bird could see him, he arose from his hands and knees to
hurry on. An opening in the piñons warned him that he was nearing the
height of slope.
He gained it, and dropped low with a burst of astonishment. Before him
stretched a short cañon with rounded stone floor bare of grass or sage
or tree, and with curved, shelving walls. A broad rippling stream
flowed toward him, and at the back of the cañon waterfall burst from a
wide rent in the cliff, and, bounding down in two green steps, spread
into a long white sheet.
If Venters had not been indubitably certain that he had entered the
right cañon his astonishment would not have been so great. There had
been no breaks in the walls, no side cañons entering this one where the
rustlers’ tracks and the cattle trail had guided him, and, therefore,
he could not be wrong. But here the cañon ended, and presumably the
trails also.
“That cattle trail headed out of here,” Venters kept saying to himself.
“It headed out. Now what I want to know is how on earth did cattle ever
get in here?”
If he could be sure of anything it was of the careful scrutiny he had
given that cattle track, every hoofmark of which headed straight west.
He was now looking east at an immense round boxed corner of cañon down
which tumbled a thin, white veil of water, scarcely twenty yards wide.
Somehow, somewhere, his calculations had gone wrong. For the first time
in years he found himself doubting his rider’s skill in finding tracks,
and his memory of what he had actually seen. In his anxiety to keep
under cover he must have lost himself in this offshoot of Deception
Pass, and thereby in some unaccountable manner, missed the cañon with
the trails. There was nothing else for him to think. Rustlers could not
fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices. He was only proving
what the sage-riders had long said of this labyrinthine system of
deceitful cañons and valleys—trails led down into Deception Pass, but
no rider had ever followed them.
On a sudden he heard above the soft roar of the waterfall an unusual
sound that he could not define. He dropped flat behind a stone and
listened. From the direction he had come swelled something that
resembled a strange muffled pounding and splashing and ringing. Despite
his nerve the chill sweat began to dampen his forehead. What might not
be possible in this stonewalled maze of mystery? The unnatural sound
passed beyond him as he lay gripping his rifle and fighting for
coolness. Then from the open came the sound, now distinct and
different. Venters recognized a hobble-bell of a horse, and the
cracking of iron on submerged stones, and the hollow splash of hoofs in
water.
Relief surged over him. His mind caught again at realities, and
curiosity prompted him to peep from behind the rock.
In the middle of the stream waded a long string of packed burros driven
by three superbly mounted men. Had Venters met these dark-clothed,
dark-visaged, heavily armed men anywhere in Utah, let alone in this
robbers’ retreat, he would have recognized them as rustlers. The
discerning eye of a rider saw the signs of a long, arduous trip. These
men were packing in supplies from one of the northern villages. They
were tired, and their horses were almost played out, and the burros
plodded on, after the manner of their kind when exhausted, faithful and
patient, but as if every weary, splashing, slipping step would be their
last.
All this Venters noted in one glance. After that he watched with a
thrilling eagerness. Straight at the waterfall the rustlers drove the
burros, and straight through the middle, where the water spread into a
fleecy, thin film like dissolving smoke. Following closely, the
rustlers rode into this white mist, showing in bold black relief for an
instant, and then they vanished.
Venters drew a full breath that rushed out in brief and sudden
utterance.
“Good Heaven! Of all the holes for a rustler!... There’s a cavern under
that waterfall, and a passageway leading out to a cañon beyond. Oldring
hides in there. He needs only to guard a trail leading down from the
sage-flat above. Little danger of this outlet to the pass being
discovered. I stumbled on it by luck, after I had given up. And now I
know the truth of what puzzled me most—why that cattle trail was wet!”
He wheeled and ran down the slope, and out to the level of the
sage-brush. Returning, he had no time to spare, only now and then,
between dashes, a moment when he stopped to cast sharp eyes ahead. The
abundant grass left no trace of his trail. Short work he made of the
distance to the circle of cañons. He doubted that he would ever see it
again; he knew he never wanted to; yet he looked at the red corners and
towers with the eyes of a rider picturing landmarks never to be
forgotten.
Here he spent a panting moment in a slow-circling gaze of the sage-oval
and the gaps between the bluffs. Nothing stirred except the gentle wave
of the tips of the brush. Then he pressed on past the mouths of several
cañons and over ground new to him, now close under the eastern wall.
This latter part proved to be easy traveling, well screened from
possible observation from the north and west, and he soon covered it
and felt safer in the deepening shade of his own cañon. Then the huge,
notched bulge of red rim loomed over him, a mark by which he knew again
the deep cove where his camp lay hidden. As he penetrated the thicket,
safe again for the present, his thoughts reverted to the girl he had
left there. The afternoon had far advanced. How would he find her? He
ran into camp, frightening the dogs.
The girl lay with wide-open, dark eyes, and they dilated when he knelt
beside her. The flush of fever shone in her cheeks. He lifted her and
held water to her dry lips, and felt an inexplicable sense of lightness
as he saw her swallow in a slow, choking gulp. Gently he laid her back.
“Who—are—you?” she whispered, haltingly.
“I’m the man who shot you,” he replied.
“You’ll—not—kill me—now?”
“No, no.”
“What—will—you—do—with me?”
“When you get better—strong enough—I’ll take you back to the cañon
where the rustlers ride through the waterfall.”
As with a faint shadow from a flitting wing overhead, the marble
whiteness of her face seemed to change.
“Don’t—take—me—back—there!”