DUDLEY STONE
The victim of the accident made no sound. No scream rose from the depths
after he disappeared. The buckskin pony rolled over, scrambled to its
feet, and cantered off across the plateau.
Helen Morrell had swerved her own mount farther to the south and came to
the edge of the caved-in bit of bank with a rush of hoofs that ended in a
wild scramble as she bore down upon the Rose pony's bit.
She was out of her saddle, and had flung the reins over Rose's head, on
the instant. The well-trained pony stood like a rock.
The girl, her heart beating tumultuously, crept on hands and knees to the
crumbling edge of the bluff.
She knew its scarred face well. There were outcropping boulders, gravel
pits, ledges of shale, brush clumps and a few ragged trees clinging
tenaciously to the water-worn gullies.
She expected to see the man crushed and bleeding on some rock below.
Perhaps he had rolled clear to the bottom.
But as her swift gaze searched the face of the bluff, there was no rock,
splotched with red, in her line of vision. Then she saw something in the
top of one of the trees, far down.
It was the yellow handkerchief which the stranger had worn. It fluttered
in the evening breeze like a flag of distress.
"E-e-e-_yow!_" cried Helen, making a horn of her hands as she leaned over
the edge of the precipice, and uttering the puncher's signal call.
"E-e-e-_yow!_" came up a faint reply.
She saw the green top of the tree stir. Then a face--scratched and
streaked with blood--appeared.
"For the love of heaven!" called a thin voice. "Get somebody with a rope.
I've got to have some help."
"I have a rope right here. Pass it under your arms, and I'll swing you out
of that tree-top," replied Helen, promptly.
She jumped up and went to the pony. Her rope--she would no more think of
traveling without it than would one of the Sunset punchers--was coiled at
the saddlebow.
Running back to the verge of the bluff she planted her feet on a firm
boulder and dropped the coil into the depths. In a moment it was in the
hands of the man below.
"Over your head and shoulders!" she cried.
"You can never hold me!" he called back, faintly.
"You do as you're told!" she returned, in a severe tone. "I'll hold
you--don't you fear."
She had already looped her end of the rope over the limb of a tree that
stood rooted upon the brink of the bluff. With such a purchase she would
be able to hold all the rope itself would hold.
"Ready!" she called down to him.
"All right! Here I swing!" was the reply.
Leaning over the brink, rather breathless, it must be confessed, the girl
from Sunset Ranch saw him swing out of the top of the tree.
The tree-top was all of seventy feet from its roots. If he slipped now he
would suffer a fall that surely would kill him.
But he was able to help himself. Although he crashed once against the side
of the bluff and set a bushel of gravel rattling down, in a moment he
gained foothold on a ledge. There he stood, wavering until she paid off a
little of the line. Then he dropped down to get his breath.
"Are you safe?" she shouted down to him.
"Sure! I can sit here all night."
"You don't want to, I suppose?" she asked.
"Not so's you'd notice it. I guess I can get down after a fashion."
"Hurt bad?"
"It's my foot, mostly--right foot. I believe it's sprained, or broken.
It's sort of in the way when I move about."
"Your face looks as if that tree had combed it some," commented Helen.
"Never mind," replied the youth. "Beauty's only skin deep, at best. And
I'm not proud."
She could not see him very well, for the sun had dropped so low that down
where he lay the face of the bluff was in shadow.
"Well, what are you going to do? Climb up, or down?"
"I believe getting down would be easier--'specially if you let me use your
rope."
"Sure!"
"But then, there'd be my pony. I couldn't get him with this foot----"
"I'll catch him. My Rose can run down anything on four legs in these
parts," declared the girl, briskly.
"And can you get down here to the foot of this cliff where I'm bound to
land?"
"Yes. I know the way in the dark. Got matches?"
"Yes."
"Then you build some kind of a smudge when you reach the bottom. That'll
show me where you are. Now I'm going to drop the rope to you. Look out it
doesn't get tangled."
"All right! Let 'er come!"
"I'll have to leave you if I'm to catch that buckskin before it gets dark,
stranger. You'll get along all right?" she added.
"Surest thing you know!"
She dropped the rope. He gathered it in quickly and then uttered a
cheerful shout.
"All clear?" asked Helen.
"Don't worry about me. I'm all right," he assured her.
Helen leaped back to her waiting pony. Already the golden light was dying
out of the sky. Up here in the foothills the "evening died hard" as the
saying is; but the buckskin pony had romped clear across the plateau. He
was now, indeed, out of sight.
She whirled Rose about and set off at a gallop after the runaway. It was
not until then that she remembered she had no rope. That buckskin would
have to be fairly run down. There would be no roping him.
"But if you can't do it, no other horsie can," she said, aloud, patting
the Rose pony on her arching neck. "Go it, girl! Let's see if we can't
beat any miserable little buckskin that ever came into this country. A
strawberry roan forever!"
Her "E-e-e-yow! yow!" awoke the pony to desperate endeavor. She seemed to
merely skim the dry grass of the open plateau, and in ten minutes Helen
saw a riderless mount plunging up the side of a _coulee_ far ahead.
"There he goes!" cried the girl. "After him, Rosie! Make your pretty hoofs
fly!"
The excitement of the chase roused in Helen that feeling of freedom and
confidence that is a part of life on the plains. Those who live much in
the open air, and especially in the saddle, seldom think of failure.
She knew she was going to catch the runaway pony. Such an idea as
non-success never entered her mind. This was the first hard riding she had
done since Mr. Morrell died; and now her thoughts expanded and she shook
off the hopeless feeling which had clouded her young heart and mind since
they had buried her father.
While she rode on, and rode hard, after the fleeing buckskin her revived
thought kept time with the pony's hoofbeats.
No longer did the old tune run in her head: "If I only _could_ clear dad's
name!" Instead the drum of confidence beat a charge to arms: "I know I
_can_ clear his name!
"To think of poor dad living out here all these years, with suspicion
resting on his reputation back there in New York. And he wasn't guilty! It
was that partner of his, or that bookkeeper, who was guilty. That is the
secret of it," Helen told herself.
"I'll go back East and find out all about it," determined the girl, as her
pony carried her swiftly over the ground. "Up, Rose! There he is! Don't
let him get away from us!"
Her interest in the chase of the buckskin pony and in the mystery of her
father's trouble ran side by side.
"On, on!" she urged Rose. "Why shouldn't I go East? Big Hen can run the
ranch well enough. And there are my cousins--and auntie. If Aunt Eunice
resembles mother----
"Go it, Rose! There's our quarry!"
She stooped forward in the saddle, and as the Rose pony, running like the
wind, passed the now staggering buckskin, Helen snatched the dragging
rein, and pulled the runaway around to follow in her own wake.
"Hush, now! Easy!" she commanded her mount, who obeyed her voice quite as
well as though she had tugged at the reins. "Now we'll go back quietly and
trail this useless one along with us.
"Come up, Buck! Easy, Rose!" So she urged them into the same gait,
returning in a wide circle toward the path up which she had climbed before
the sun went down--the trail to Sunset Ranch.
"Yes! I can do it!" she cried, thinking aloud. "I can and will go to New
York. I'll find out all about that old trouble. Uncle Starkweather can
tell me, probably.
"And then it will please father." She spoke as though Mr. Morrell was sure
to know her decision. "He will like it if I go to live with them a spell.
He said it is what I need--the refining influence of a nice home.
"And I _would_ love to be with nice girls again--and to hear good
music--and put on something beside a riding skirt when I go out of the
house."
She sighed. "One cannot have a cow ranch and all the fripperies of
civilization, too. Not very well. I--I guess I am longing for the
flesh-pots of Egypt. Perhaps poor dad did, too. Well, I'll give them a
whirl. I'll go East----
"Why, where's that fellow's fire?"
She was descending the trail into the pall of dusk that had now spread
over the valley. Far away she caught a glimmer of light--a lantern on the
porch at the ranch-house. But right below here where she wished to see a
light, there was not a spark.
"I hope nothing's happened to him," she mused. "I don't believe he is one
of us; if he had been he wouldn't have raced a pony so close to the edge
of the bluff."
She began to "co-ee! co-ee!" as the ponies clattered down the remainder of
the pathway. And finally there came an answering shout. Then a little
glimmer of light flashed up--again and yet again.
"Matches!" grumbled Helen. "Can't he find anything dry to burn down there
and so make a steady light?"
She shouted again.
"This way, Miss!" she heard the stranger cry.
The ponies picked their way carefully over the loose shale that had fallen
to the foot of the bluff. There were trees, too, to make the way darker.
"Hi!" cried Helen. "Why didn't you light a fire?"
"Why, to tell you the truth, I had some difficulty in getting down here,
and I--I had to rest."
The words were followed by a groan that the young man evidently could not
suppress.
"Why, you're more badly hurt than you said!" cried the girl. "I'd better
get help; hadn't I?"
"A doctor is out of the question, I guess. I believe that foot's broken."
"Huh! You're from the East!" she said, suddenly.
"How so?"
"You say 'guess' in that funny way. And that explains it."
"Explains what?"
"Your riding so recklessly."
"My goodness!" exclaimed the other, with a short laugh. "I thought the
whole West was noted for reckless riding."
"Oh, no. It only _looks_ reckless," she returned, quietly. "Our boys
wouldn't ride a pony close to the edge of a steep descent like that up
yonder."
"All right. I'm in the wrong," admitted the stranger. "But you needn't rub
it in."
"I didn't mean to," said Helen, quickly. "I have a bad habit of talking
out loud."
He laughed at that. "You're frank, you mean? I like that. Be frank enough
to tell me how I am to get back to Badger's--even on ponyback--to-night?"
"Impossible," declared Helen.
"Then, perhaps I _had_ better make an effort to make camp."
"Why, no! It's only a few miles to the ranch-house. I'll hoist you up on
your pony. The trail's easy."
"Whose ranch is it?" he asked, with another suppressed groan.
"Mine--Sunset Ranch."
"Sunset Ranch! Why, I've heard of that. One of the last big ranches
remaining in Montana; Isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Almost as big as 101?"
"That's right," said Helen, briefly.
"But I didn't know a girl owned it," said the other, curiously.
"She didn't--until lately. My father, Prince Morrell, has just died."
"Oh!" exclaimed the other, in a softened tone. "And you are Miss
Morrell?"
"I am. And who are you? Easterner, of course?"
"You guessed right--though, I suppose, you 'reckon' instead of 'guess.'
I'm from New York."
"Is that so?" queried Helen. "That's a place I want to see before long."
"Well, you'll be disappointed," remarked the other. "My name is Dudley
Stone, and I was born and brought up in New York and have lived there all
my life until I got away for this trip West. But, believe me, if I didn't
have to I would never go back!"
"Why do you have to go back?" asked Helen, simply.
"Business. Necessity of earning one's living. I'm in the way of being a
lawyer--when my days of studying, and all, are over. And then, I've got a
sister who might not fit into the mosaic of this freer country, either."
"Well, Dudley Stone," quoth the girl from Sunset Ranch, "we'd better not
stay talking here. It's getting darker every minute. And I reckon your
foot needs attention."
"I hate to move it," confessed the young Easterner.
"You can't stay here, you know," insisted Helen. "Where's my rope?"
"I'm sorry. I had to hitch one end of it up above and let myself down by
it."
"Well, it might have come in handy to lash you on the pony. I don't mind
about the rope otherwise. One of the boys will bring it in for me
to-morrow. Now, let's see what we can do towards hoisting you into your
saddle."