CHAPTER VI
THE HIDDEN MARKSMAN
Adrian Conrad withdrew his feet from the table and consulted his watch. Benny, his cook, a large fair-haired Norwegian, pushed through from the kitchen with an armful of dishes and gravely arranged them on the oilcloth-covered table in preparation for tomorrow's breakfast. Then, with a cough—his nightly farewell—he disappeared.
Conrad, still examining his watch, heard him depart by the back door, drawing it carefully behind him, and tramp in his heavy dragging way round the shack to the path leading down to the camp. Alone, the foreman rose and pulled out a drawer, frowning critically into it.
The task of selecting his evening tie was interrupted by a subdued grunt from the doorway. The ruddy face of Benny, the silent, was poking through, alive with excitement.
At the same instant Conrad became aware of the source of the Norwegian's agitation. From the camp below broke the distant clamour of altercation, the full-mouthed curses of excited foreigners building up a structure of more strenuous argument. In four strides the foreman was at the door.
Conrad's shack was strategically situated. Half-way up the sloping path between camp and trestle, it overlooked the former unobtrusively. From his door he had his men under his eye, with all the advantages of a not too distant isolation.
The scene of the commotion was apparent enough, a small excited group of men, probably the participators in one of the games of chance always in progress in the evenings in the open space between the camp and the water. Far more industriously the bohunk gambled his pay away in the evening than he earned it by day. And always overhung the contractors this peril of a camp quarrel.
Almost before Conrad had seized the spirit of the incident, it was swelled by the accession of other disputants. Five seconds' thoughtful scrutiny warned him that to attempt to quell it without assistance was taking an unjustifiable risk. Small groups were rising angrily everywhere about the river bottom, and crowding to the fringes of the altercation. Alone, he might fail, and it were better then not to have tried. By the time he could reach the scene half the camp would probably be involved.
For he saw at a glance that this was no personal squabble but one of the infrequent but always impending race feuds.
He jerked his head about to see if Torrance knew. But the shack door up at the trestle was empty; Torrance and Tressa would be in the kitchen cleaning up. Thereupon Conrad set off at a run up the sloping path, watching intermittently the angry scene below.
A hundred yards from the grade he put his fingers to his lips and whistled. Torrance came instantly to the door. He saw the fight, saw Conrad's beckoning hand, and, without hat or coat, dashed out to the grade. But even as he leaped the rails his mood altered: pulling up, he strolled leisurely on down the path.
Conrad was intent on the waxing conflict. Group by group it was extending. He realised the wisdom of the instinct that had sent him for help—if the affray had not already passed control. There were only the two of them to count on. Koppy, whose duty it was to forestall such conflicts, was nowhere in sight; and anyway Conrad had learned not to trust the Pole. Casting hasty eyes upward toward the underforeman's shack topping the promontory overlooking the camp, he fancied a dim movement in the darkness of the interior. Unless his eyes deceived him, Koppy was out of the reckoning in case of need. Irritated, Conrad swung about impatiently. Torrance was sauntering downward, filling his pipe.
"Here," the foreman called sharply, "we must stop that, and quick."
"It's only a fight," drawled Torrance.
Conrad's face darkened with disgust. "Don't cut your own throat. You don't seem to have heard of where these fights sometimes lead—Swanson's, for instance, and Tillman's, to mention only last year's. You'd be in a fine mess with one of those on your hands in late July, wouldn't you?"
"Let it go for a couple of minutes longer, Adrian," pleaded Torrance.
"They're just getting into it. I see a knife out."
"And that's what we must forestall. Or it'll end only when the Italians and the Hungarians have cleaned out the Swedes and the Poles, or vice versa. There's not a second to waste."
He had hold of Torrance's arm and was forcing him to run.
"I know you're right, Adrian," panted Torrance, "but I don't want to."
As they neared the camp, running now at top speed, Conrad saw Koppy emerge fussily from his shack above the camp and come leaping down—too late, of course, to be of much service.
The fight had grown to alarming proportions. Originating in a mere normal act of cheating at cards, naturally resented by a huge Swede who had been losing steadily to a one-eyed Italian, it had passed swiftly into the realms of the smouldering feud between the races. And the first blow had excited the onlookers to take vociferous sides; the first weapon had roused their lingering instincts of antagonism; and the first drop of blood had driven a dozen of them headlong into the mêlée. Before Conrad and Torrance arrived, knives and knife-ended knuckle-dusters and clubs were swinging.
The most disgusting feature of the shrieking, struggling mass was the presence on its outskirts of sneaking villains intent only on their personal enemies.
One of these had just plunged his knife into an unsuspecting arm when Torrance caught sight of him. It fired his blood to a blind fury. With a lunge he planted his heavy boot on the brute's forehead, and the fellow crumpled up and lay record to an honest man's anger. Thereafter Torrance knew only that he was enjoying himself, as fist and boot struck snarling face or struggling body. Followed a few minutes of more careful fighting, as the roused bohunks began to retaliate; and then a sense of personal danger not to be countered by any amount of exertion.
As he threw himself into the fight he glowed with the satisfaction of knowing that every face before him belonged to an enemy. Normally slinking cowards before authority, the bohunks were now inflamed beyond anything but brute force. Curses too deep and furious to express more than their tone—the cries of the wounded—the panting of laboured breathing—Torrance roared into it, striking right and left.
At the last moment Conrad turned aside. He had an idea that the impression on the warring elements would be increased by separate attacks. From another angle, therefore, silently and recklessly he fought his way into the mob. He had no thought of defence—merely slugged, trusting to the surprise and speed of his attack to protect him.
Five convulsed faces had fallen before the fury of Torrance's assault before there was resistance. The first threatening arm he seized in relentless clutch, flinging back over his head the knife it held. Then a Hungarian, saved from a swinging club by Torrance's quick blow, recognised only another foe and lunged with a knife. The contractor kicked him out of the fray and went on.
In the meantime Conrad was realising his mistake in dividing forces. The mob was quieting a little, it was true, but it was the comparative calm only of discovering new foes. Torrance, ten yards away, was battling like a madman, but now advance was hopelessly blocked by weight of numbers and concentrated resistance. Two dozen bohunks, lost now to any ordinary sense of peril, were bent on paying off old scores. Conrad began seriously to fight his way over to Torrance.
Across the crowd he could see Koppy making headway at last, and he vaguely wondered why. A face loomed before him, and he struck into it viciously. It dropped away, but a shooting pain across his scalp warned him that he was cut; a moving spot of warm moisture on the back of his neck located a small stream of blood.
The maddest fury of the fight seemed to have waned, yet Conrad knew that the danger to him and Torrance had increased. Italian and Hungarian, Pole and Swede, had forgotten their race feud in the greater hatred of their bosses. The noise, so hideous and snarling when they arrived, was stilled in unity of purpose.
Many had retired, some to nurse their wounds, others not yet blind enough to custom to ignore authority. Those who remained knew what they were doing. Murder was in their eyes.
Through a temporary opening in his own group Conrad caught Torrance's eye, anxious and a little uncertain. The foreman made a peremptory movement of his head urging retreat—for Torrance. If one of them could get away for a rifle! At that instant he ducked to avoid a side attack, and Torrance saw the blood on his neck. With a bellow the contractor charged through.
"Back to back!" he shouted, and lashed out sideways with one foot at a fresh onset against the tiring foreman. Conrad smiled. He was feeling the strain—had been for minutes—but Torrance's arrival lent him fresh strength. Back to back they continued the losing struggle.
A gleam of light darted on Conrad's right, and he knew he could not avoid it. But suddenly the knife dropped, and the one who had wielded it grabbed his wrist with the other hand. The foreman dare not look to see what had happened, but he was aware of a sudden thinning in the crowd of spectators.
A lumbering Pole, his club knocked away by an unexpected blow from Torrance, leaped furiously on the contractor. The latter turned his back to receive the shock, at the same time ducking forward. The Pole's legs shot into the air before Conrad's eyes—a shriek—and a sudden stain of blood on the pant leg. Yet no one had touched the place where the blood gushed.
The scene was changing curiously. A score of men still fought to reach their prey, blind and deaf to everything but their own passions; but the great crowd that had made the threat of disaster so ominous had disappeared. One of the mad group about them, teeth bared, was creeping closer to Torrance, a long stiletto held aloft. But as it jerked back to strike, the hand that held it opened nervelessly, and a spurt of blood covered the fingers.
Many pairs of eyes had been on that stiletto, and when it dropped, bloody and useless, a sudden silence fell. In the midst of it a rifle snapped from the trees behind the camp. An Italian, into whose bloodshot eyes a sudden sense of fear was crowding, grabbed his ear and howled. A thin stream of blood trickled down his wrist.
Not another blow was struck. It was not the casualties, not alone the sound of the rifle, but rather the uncanny mystery of the hidden marksman and his aim. Almost before the two hard-pressed men dare look about them, the river bottom was empty of life, save for themselves and Koppy, and two or three delayed by the nature of their wounds.
"Right again, Adrian," puffed Torrance, picking at the torn sleeve of his shirt and feeling himself over gingerly. "I thought they'd got you when I saw that scratch. Here, let's look at it."
But even as he reached to Conrad's shoulder his interest faded before the marvel of their succour, and he turned to run his eye in a puzzled way along the thin trees of the slope behind the camp.
"By hickory! The horse-thief again! There ain't two can shoot like that." He noticed Koppy staring angrily in the same direction. "It sure ain't one of your gang, Koppy. That would be one too many."
"No bohunk—no bohunk!" assented the Pole, and there was that in his voice boded ill for proof to the contrary. "No bohunk . . . maybe. . . . I don't think."
Tressa came running round the nearest shack, rifle in one hand and a small automatic in the other. She saw the blood on Adrian's collar and made straight for him. For a moment her father frowned jealously.
"A man brings a daughter into the world," he sulked, "frets and stews and labours over her until she's old enough—to fall in love with some young fellow who never had a moment's worry about her."
"And so it has been since ribs ceased to become women," grinned Conrad. "It's only another beauty mark, Tressa. It's stopped bleeding already." He turned angrily on Koppy. "You saw this fight from the first—"
"I come as soon as I see," protested the Pole indignantly.
"You lie! You wanted to see it get beyond us. You thought they'd do for us, didn't you?"
"Why do I fight, then?" enquired Koppy, with lifted eyebrows.
"Heaven only knows," muttered Conrad. "But you saw we had 'em licked."
"Don't be an ass," chided Torrance, his eyes still on the trees. "We can lick four hundred and ninety-five of them, but it was that fellow in there did for the extra five. Find him for me, Koppy, and I'll put him in your place and kick you to hell."
"If Koppy find him, you no need," replied the Pole, the expression of his face clearing away the ambiguity of his words. "I find him."
As if in challenge, the unseen rifle replied. Koppy leaped aside, stooping to examine a long slit in the side of his high boots.
"I find him," he hissed, shaking his fist at the trees.
Torrance chuckled delightedly. "A dandy eye for beauty, that chap has. He seems to like us; I'd hate to have him shooting the boots off me like that."
He started for home, but bethought himself.
"Get the wounded rounded up, Koppy. Nobody dead. Just as well. Funerals are a nuisance. Can't see why a bohunk can't sneak off into the bush and die without any bother. If there's more than one speeder load to lug that seventy-five miles to the hospital, there'll be the devil to pay. You and the cooks have your hands full bandaging the rest of the evening, I guess. Come up in an hour and report."
As they toiled up the slope to the trestle Torrance broke a long silence.
"In your prayers to-night, Tressa, you might put in a word for a mysterious stranger with an eye like an eagle. I think we're going to need him a lot before this job's finished."
CHAPTER VII
CONRAD FLASHES A GUN
A whistle sounded down the line, a short nervous blast twice repeated. An instant shrieking of handbrakes, and the rumbling train of loaded flat-cars slowed down toward the trestle.
Torrance lumbered up from the supper table to watch. He was hoping that by some slip of the levers up in Murphy's cab the rock-laden cars would glide out over the trestle and give it a real test. The trains that crossed carrying supplies to construction further west were comparatively light, because of just such tender spots on the line; and they never stopped until they reached the other side. And always they sent back the taunting whistle of engineers breathing again after the perils of the "softest" place on the line.
Murphy, the engineer of his ballast train, persistently refused to expose one little car to "the crazy conthraption ye have the nerve to call a threstle. Sure I'd as lave tie down me gauge and sit on the biler as put a foot on that skinny doodle." And Murphy never made a mistake with his levers.
As Torrance watched, the end car slowly glided back toward the trestle and, to the sharply extended arms of an overalled brakesman, came to a standstill with a few inches of the truck overhanging the gossamer structure.
Far up the track the engine puffed and panted. Presently a bewhiskered little old Irishman climbed from it and came ploughing down beside the grade.
"Late to-night, Murphy," said Torrance severely. "What's the row?"
"Row, d'ye ask? Listen to that now," he demanded of the grinning brakesman. "Huh!" He bent to examine his sand-filled boots. "I'll be later still some o' these nights, that I will, ye big bully, if ye don't take the throuble to lay a footpath down that gr-rade for dacent citizens to use. Me legs are only that long, and I wasn't born on the seashore. Some day I'll stay up with me cab, I will, and then who'll brighten up yeer dull and unintheresting lives? How'd ye kape in touch with civilisation then, I'd ask ye?"
As the extent of Murphy's connection with civilisation was never more than fifteen miles down the line, Torrance and Tressa could laugh without offending his choleric feelings.
Murphy became aware of the few inches of flatcar that overhung the trestle.
"Ye mooney-face!" he roared at the brakesman who, his day's work done, was lolling on the grass. "Don't ye know that straw-pile's apt to blow over if ye disturb the air about it. Ye just saved yeer skin by about four inches. If ye'd let me run out on that toy I'd have t'rown ye over it, that I would."
The brakesman continued to grin.
"Ye can slit yeer face all up and think ye're laughing, ye can, but be the time ye'd struck a few t'ousand o' these bean-poles and clothes-line props that Torrance here calls a threstle, ye'd be looking like a pin-cushion dress-making day. It's dangerous, I call it, to lave splinters like thim with their ends up. Some day a thoughtless brakesman like yeerself will take a careless breath in the vicinity—and there ain't an undertaker this side o' Saskatoon."
Torrance, half nettled, laughed carelessly.
"If you'd sharpen up your wits more, Murphy, hustling along here in reasonable hours, instead of insulting a work you're not big enough to understand, you'd get away sooner to a softer job."
"Softer, is it? Sure I nade something softer soon or I'll get as tough as a railway contractor. I suppose ye'd call it a soft job running a train where a herd of—no, ye didn't hear what I called them, Miss Tressa—where a filthy, low-down gang of craters dressed up like men and walking on their hind legs, is running loose. Lifted about four miles of rail, they did. This locomotive engineer's been doing railway building for half a day; and if ye could do my job as well as I can do yours, Torrance, there'd be no nade o' the two of us. If I had a rowdy, dyed-in-the-wool mob like them under me I'd shoot the lot and have a better stand in with St. Peter than I'm going to have as an engineer. I'd die happy if I could catch one of thim in the act and he wasn't too big for the fire-door."
Torrance looked grave. "Another? That's the second this week. If this—"
"Indade, it was another. Ye didn't think it was the same rail I've been putting down every day for six years or so. When I fix a rail it stays, it does."
"Leave the train there till morning," urged Torrance; "we'll unload it first thing."
"Lave thim, is it?" shouted Murphy. "Lave thim on the main line! Not likely! When I lave this man-trap, they go too."
"Murphy, you're a bad-tempered little stickler to rules that don't mean a cuss. There isn't another train within a hundred miles or so, except west; there won't be one this way for days."
"I didn't know ye'd done so well as a bridge builder they'd made ye train-despatcher too," sneered Murphy. "Build a siding and I'll take a chance, though it ain't fair to Molly. Ye'll nade one anyway. Trains ought to have a chance to pull up where it's safe and say their prayers before tempting Providence on those straws. Why don't ye set up a saloon where the passengers can get drunk first—"
"Look here, man, the whole camp's at supper. They wouldn't work an extra hour for the devil."
"Why don't ye let somebody else ask thim thin? Of course if they've got ye scared—"
Torrance knew the danger of demanding overtime even when necessitated by their own devilish destruction. He knew the added risk since the recent camp fight. But the suggestion of danger threw precaution to the winds. Taking a nickel whistle from his pocket he stepped on the trestle and blew a long blast.
The camp lay quiet and clear in the late afternoon sun, a long line of sluggish smoke marking the cook-houses. A few minutes more and the lazy evening life would filter out over the river bottom. At the moment five hundred mouths were working as if their lives depended on it, five hundred pairs of eyes were looking for the next plate to devour.
First to appear in answer to the summons was Adrian Conrad, the one to whom it was directed. He took in the situation at a glance, even without Torrance's pointing arm, and made straightway for the cook-houses. From the open door of one of them Koppy's head appeared, and disappeared as quickly. He, too, understood.
As Conrad approached the nearest cook-house, Koppy emerged hastily on his way to the next. Conrad changed his intentions and strolled on after the underforeman. The two men met face to face as Koppy was coming out. The foreman, inches shorter, laid a hand on the Pole's shoulder. "I want you back here, Koppy." Without excitement, without apparent annoyance, he thrust the Pole ahead into the building.
A hundred and fifty evil countenances glared at them from about the long tables, some openly defiant, some only uncomfortable; all sullen and prepared to resist under the influence of what Koppy had just hurled at them in impassioned words.
"I'm afraid you've made it hard for yourself, Koppy," said the foreman.
"How long will it take them to finish?"
"Supper is their time," returned the underforeman stiffly. He was temporising; he scarcely knew how far it was wise to resist. "After supper?" He shrugged his shoulders in simulated indifference.
Conrad ran undisturbed eye over the tables, noting the pie before each diner.
"After supper is my time to-night," he corrected quietly. "In ten minutes they're wanted on the grade. There's a train to unload."
A rumble of protest cut him short. Koppy, the firm lines of the foreman's face close to his shoulder, hesitated.
"Why for train not here in time?" he demanded. "We work ten hours.
Train don't come. Why?"
Conrad lifted his shoulders and let them drop. "Ask the boss that—after. Now—the train has to be unloaded!"
The underforeman still hesitated. He had a curious respect for this quiet little fellow who never argued, never swore, never retreated from a stand once taken; and he was not quite certain how far he could trust his men in open conflict with authority. But they were waiting for his lead; his future with them was at stake.
"Perhaps they not work. Perhaps they say they work enough to-day." He caught the hardening gleam in Conrad's eye. "Can I make them?"
"If you can't," said Conrad, "I can. Only there'll be sore heads, and an empty bunk or two before I'm through. And yours will be one of them. I've given the orders; are you going to make them obey or am I—in your absence?"
A few of the men were on their feet now, mumbling, waving their soiled fists. Certain mysterious movements were significant to Conrad. Like a flash he had Koppy round the waist and was pressing a small automatic into his stomach.
"I want them to sit down, Koppy," ordered the foreman, "every one of them. You have till I count five. If I see a knife in the meantime, time's up. One—two—"
The Pole swallowed—shouted something in a foreign tongue, and every hand fell into the open, weaponless, every man sat down.
"You're a wise guy sometimes, Koppy," smiled Conrad. "Now you and I remain here for five minutes, then fifty of them come with us—I won't need more. Tell them that in the lingo. I'm already holding the watch. . . . And, Koppy, hereafter you'll save yourself embarrassment by remembering I'm foreman; these men take orders from me—through you. I don't make a habit of showing a gun, but I prefer it to argument with you. . . . All ready, march. You and I'll go last, Koppy."
But outside, Adrian Conrad passed carelessly along the line of sullen men and led up the bank and through the woods to the standing train. And not a knife showed.
Torrance and Murphy and the train crew watched the line file from the cook-house and up the path.
"'Blimey!' as me friend, 'Uggins, o' Whitechapel, would say," exclaimed
Murphy. "And then some!"
Torrance only rubbed his hands.
"Did I bring enough?" enquired Conrad.
"They'll do."
"So'll ye, me lad," said Murphy behind his hand to Tressa. "Faith, but ye've a way wid ye. Here I was hoping for a bang-up spree, wid me houlding the watch till me blood got riled; and all that rat of a kid does is to dr-rop a few hundred husky bohunks into his pocket and lug 'em up the bank to overtime on a foine night like this. It's dishear-rtening. A chap can't get up a recent foight out here. I'm going back to civilisation where they still bang each other about a bit in a friendly way, thank God! Where'd yeer father pick him up, Tressa?"
"He didn't 'pick him up'," replied Tressa indignantly.
The merry eyes of the engineer came round to her in a slow circle.
"I'm always making mistakes like that. I never can tell when a couple's married—not unless he's showing the mar-rks of it about the pate, or flir-rting wid another gir-rl. What I meant to ask was how did yeer benevolent paterfamilias contrive to induce him to direct his seductive manners to the uncongenial atmosphere o' construction." He peered more closely into the laughing eyes of the girl. "And good taste he has, too, bad cess to him! If I was younger now— These whiskers hide me age; they've always been me fatal lure. The girls take to thim like ants to sugar. Me first wife took to thim so liberally I had to cut thim off in self-protection. I used to wear thim par-rted in the middle. Ah, a gay dog was I. That was before I saw 'Lord Dundreary.' Sure I changed thim so quick then the gir-rls didn't know they weren't flirting wid the same fellow. Next to being taken for an Englishman, an Irishman would prefer old Nick himself. So I let thim grow solid, the luxuriant and becoming gr-rowth ye're admiring this very minute. . . . Look at that now!"
He indicated the work of unloading. Each car was being emptied at the edge of the trestle on the other side of the grade, where a long shoot had been scooped from the bank and walled off to direct the falling rocks from the framework of the trestle.
"Ye'd think some o' thim beggars liked wor-rk. Koppy, there, him o' the leering eye and forked tongue—that's Indian, ye know—he thinks he's showing off."
Koppowski was standing on a car, legs far apart, heaving over great rocks with his bare hands. Two bohunks, unsuccessfully tussling with a huge piece, he unceremoniously pushed aside, to grip it with his callous hands. Slowly it tilted, balanced a moment, and bounded away to the valley with great thuds.
"Ye mayn't be aware of it, gir-rl, but ye're expected to clap. Koppy's showing off. I know the symptoms—but I grew whiskers then." He combed long, toil-stained fingers through the beard.
Car after car the train moved back, the empty ones passing out over the trestle, which Murphy pretended to study with anxiety. The engine panted up to the end of its task.
"Well, there's Molly." The firemen thrust tousled head from the engineer's side of the cab to catch the signals. "Billy 'Uggins may be only an Englishman from Whitechapel, or wherever they raise the lowest brand, but he and Molly are getting too friendly. If I weren't frightened o' that crazy conthraption o' yeer father's I wouldn't let him touch a lever; but till that beanpole toy is safe for a cat I'm not going to risk the head end of any train. And here's for supper, and a long sleep!"
He sprang into the cab with a roar at 'Uggins, tossed a kiss to Tressa, pulled the whistle cord, and drew away with increasing speed from the trestle and down the line to the official siding, three miles away, at the deserted end-of-steel village.
The work was completed for the night, yet the men lingered, self-consciously kicking over fragments of rock. Torrance and Conrad, without seeming to notice, were aware that something was in brew; and, wishing to meet it in the open, they did not enter the shack.
Presently Koppy and one of his bosom friends, Carl Heppel, detached themselves from the loitering group and approached the boss.
"What you pay overtime, my men ask?"
"Overtime!" Torrance's roar rolled out over the valley. "What in h— d'ye mean? When I want men they got to work. I don't care what hour it is—" The depth of his fury choked him. "Get your damned bunch out of my sight, and quick, or I'll kick you to perdition. They tore up the rail that forced the overtime—"
Conrad had come to his side; he spoke quietly now:
"These men may be innocent. They've worked beyond the ten hours.
Time-and-a-quarter would be fair."
Torrance gaped; the world seemed to be falling from beneath his feet.
"I would add this proviso," continued the calm voice of the foreman, "that when damage occurs again, the extra work it entails will not be paid for. You may take that as a warning, Koppy. Tell them"—his eyes were flashing, though his voice had not risen—"that extra work caused by damage to the line will always be done overtime—and—they're going—to do it—without pay. Understand? Now clear out."
CHAPTER VIII
A TRAGEDY OF CONSTRUCTION
Stretched on the dry grass beside the trestle, hanging perilously over the edge of the dizzy drop to the river bottom, Tressa watched the unceasing struggle with the hungry quicksands.
A hive of industry was below her—men and horses, huge tree trunks and masses of rock, network trestle and piled poles. Men swarmed everywhere, appearing from her height mere dots of movement, ridiculously unfit to cope with the force that was making her father so irritable these days.
Two distinct gangs were at work. Over beyond the water the filling in of the trestle was almost complete, the material being hauled by a train working from cuttings to the west. A great hundred-and-fifty foot bank of loose earth had swallowed the "crazy conthraption" to the very edge of the water, sloping steeply upward at its near side from the bridge that spanned the permanent course of the river. Everything hung now waiting only for the choking of the quicksand to commence the filling of the near side.
From bank to bank of the river a heavy boom of logs caught the trees felled in the forest above and floated down for the great maw that had already swallowed so much. These trees, trimmed of all but their larger branches, were being drawn to the shore by the surer footed men and several teams of horses; the river bottom down there was a tangle of trunks ready to feed to the quicksands.
Closer in beneath the bank over which she looked men were piling rocks on the spongy area, as they had been for weeks—as they were a year ago under O'Connor—as they might be forever, unless luck favoured her father.
To the inexperienced eye the scene was ceaseless activity, but Tressa had long since learned the skill with which the bohunk conceals his laziness. A dozen civilised workmen would accomplish as much as three times their number of foreigners. But this was a bohunk's job; civilised workmen treated it as a plague.
The swift figure of Adrian Conrad moved from group to group, leaving a wake of energy. By sheer personality and grit he gained his ends, though railway construction was as foreign to his life's plans, past and future, as suicide.
She smiled as she thought of the reason of his presence, and blew a kiss over the edge to his unsuspecting head. This, the great task of her father's career, would mark the end of Conrad's apprenticeship. These days of a mass attack on the bottomless pit might be the beginning of the end. When the mass of logs and trees and rocks was dumped in, surely she could lay her plans for a new life! Conrad would return to the city, to the partnership he had dropped only temporarily to be near her; and her father would have enough for the rest of his days.
A week or two to test the success of their latest effort, another to build the permanent foundations and strengthen the trestle in its final shape, and then a few weeks at most for the fill-in. Already the wave in the trestle beneath the supply trains was scarcely noticeable. The end was in sight.
Her father she could pick out easily enough—that still, large figure standing by itself, or joined now and then by Adrian. Once it jerked forward, and half a dozen men catapulted themselves at some part of the work that did not please him.
Presently Adrian and two others gathered before the contractor, where they seemed to confer a long time. One, Tressa knew, would be Koppowski; the other must be one of his friends, Werner probably, or Morani, or Heppel. They alone of the five hundred possessed intelligence enough to justify consultation. The rest merely obeyed orders, like the horses, and crammed their stomachs till the dishes were empty. Yes, and made strange music of evenings. She never understood that.
Then Adrian and her father were alone.
The men swarming through the lower lacework of the trestle were keying up with sledge and rope and wrench, adding a pole here and there. These they lifted by means of rope and pulley attached to convenient parts of the existing structure. Her father was pointing upward. A bohunk climbed clumsily to the point indicated and tied a pulley there. Passing a rope through the pulley, he tossed the end down. Several men seized it. To the other end a log was attached.
Down below, Torrance watched the carrying out of his orders with keenest interest. He had been at this for months, and his trained eye could pick out the weak spots with unerring instinct. To his eye he was forced to trust for the support of those twin bands of steel high above his head, since the uncertain and uneven sinking of the trestle, green timber, and ignorant and careless workmen, with the incidence of accident far above the average, made construction at the best patchy and haphazard.
He was surprised and a little chagrinned by the weakness he had discovered; he could not understand how it had escaped him before. The pull, the brace of the trestle poles just there did not seem unsound, yet instinct warned him that something was amiss in the sag of adjacent supports. His orders to Conrad, accordingly, were hurried and abrupt.
The men in the trestle went about the work in their usual clumsy way, but at last a score of men had hold of the rope and the fresh log rose on its end in slow jerks. Then it was clear of the ground, rolling in a leisurely way against the lower supports of the trestle in response to the uncurling of the rope. Up above, men were holding it away from the trestle; a dozen more waiting to fasten it in place.
It had risen twenty feet when a cry of warning burst from Torrance's lips. He scarcely knew why. His wandering eyes had fancied a sag in the support that held the pulley; his quick ear had caught a new note in the creaking timbers.
From above came the sound of snapping ropes—a chorus of panic-stricken cries—a succession of crashes as the two logs dashed earthward.
The swarthy man half way up, who had been directing the rising log, a task for which he was chosen on account of his great strength and cool judgment, turned a lightning backward somersault without pausing to look where he might land. As he turned over he twisted in the air, caught a support, and swung himself easily to safety. For a moment he contemplated the tragedy below, then like a cat sprang upward through the trestle. The others merely closed their eyes and hung on.
Of the two freed logs the upper bounced from support to support, finally resting in the trestle itself. But the one that had been on its way to remedy the weakness turned slightly sideways and glanced off into the group of frozen bohunks below. The trestle trembled from end to end.
Torrance did not follow the course of the falling logs. All that mattered at such a moment was the fate of his great work. He saw the quiver run through it—felt it in his own body—heard the creaking of ropes and blots, and there flashed through him a horror that he had not provided for a strain like that. When the trestle held its place, a great surge of pride and joy swept over him, but his knees were trembling.
When his eyes returned to earth, the bohunks were in flight, almost to a man, though danger was past. Only Conrad, Koppy, and Lefty Werner were straining at the log that held down their crushed comrades. Torrance sprang forward and bent his great back to the weight. Two fewer bohunks were on construction in Canada.
Some one dropped from the trestle close to Torrance, and a hand thrust itself before the contractor's eyes. In the hand was the end of a rope. Torrance looked from it to the dusky Indian face above it.
"Cut!" jerked the halfbreed. "Thar's more up thar."
Torrance reached out slowly and took the rope, incredulous.
"'Twan't bolted," said the halfbreed. "An' then that."
A wave of crimson deepened the tan on Torrance's face. Whirling on the group beside him, he struck viciously, and Koppy hurtled over the log and lay as still as his dead companions. Instantly Conrad was on the Pole, running his hands swiftly over the unconscious body. With a satisfied smile he drew a knife from a leather sheath fastened inside the trouser-band, and thrust it into his own belt.
"You did well to strike quickly," he muttered to Torrance. "A bullet would be the proper thing, but we've no direct proof; the Police would ask questions. He'll be round in a minute."
Torrance was examining the severed rope.
"Where did you find this, Mavy?"
The halfbreed pointed aloft. "Lower end o' the support the pulley was fastened to. Thar's more."
Torrance was restraining himself for lack of victims on whom to vent his wrath; Werner had retired to a discreet distance. Koppy was sitting weakly on the log, wondering what had happened. The contractor reached out one big hand and jerked him to his feet.
"Now, you—! I'll give you twenty minutes to round up them cusses of yours and get them up in that trestle. The Indian here'll show you what you got to do. And you'll stand right under all the time—and you'll stand there every time we work on the trestle. I'm going to make it worth your skin to stop this thing. And if after to-day I find a rope cut or a bolt missing I'll smash you to pulp. And Big Jim Torrance don't go back on his word. . . . What's more, you and the other dogs won't be paid for the time it takes to fix things up."
He closed his powerful fist on the Pole's shoulder so tightly that the man's face twisted.
"You think you're going to bust this job up, you and your gang. I'm telling you that before you succeed you'll wish you'd stayed in jail in your own country. I don't know what you got against the trestle, but I do know you're a hellish cuss I'm going to break to the halter. If you count to bust things up here, I'll see that the busting falls on your own head. Scat!"
CHAPTER IX
TORRANCE EVOLVES A PLAN
"Were they—real dead, daddy? Couldn't we—can't we do anything?"
Horror stared from Tressa's eyes; she was trembling from head to foot.
"I thought you or—or Adrian were under it, and I almost fell over.
I'd have fainted if I hadn't thought you might need me."
The big man laid his arm across the shaking shoulders and drew her to him.
"I guess it was Adrian before your old dad."
"No—I don't think so." She continued naively: "Adrian's so quick; I don't think he'd be caught like that. It was you I thought of—too."
He smiled a little wistfully. "That's right, little girl, be honest. We all had it—once. When your mother was alive there was no one counted but 'Jim.' God, if I could hear her say it now! . . . 'Jim.'" He lingered over the word, repeating it in reverent whisper. "It was 'Jim' kept me straight them days. . . . Just the little word 'Jim.' I've always thought if I could die with that in my ears, perhaps there might—might open up a bit of a chance for the big rough fellow who hasn't had much chance to get away from things that make men rougher. . . . 'Jim.' Now I'll have to kick out without it."
The girl in his arms was frightened of him when he talked that way; and it was happening more frequently in these days of worry. She had scarcely known her mother, except through the lips of her daddy, but the woman who touched only the fringes of her memory was to her, as to him, a being not quite of this earth.
"'Jim,'" she whispered, scarce knowing she said it.
His arms closed convulsively, and she could feel his beating heart.
"Say it to me—sometimes—won't you, little girl?" he whispered.
But she was suddenly conscious of treading sacred ground.
"I don't think I can, daddy. It's mother's, mother's own. You're my daddy, and there's nothing as good as that to me."
He smiled lovingly down on her, tossing aside his depression.
"And a daddy couldn't have anything better—no, not if he searched this whole wide Canada through from terminal to terminal. I'm just about the luckiest dog this side Heaven.
'Just one girl,
There is just one girl;
There may be others, I know,
But they're not my pearl.
Sun or rain,
She is just the same;
I'll be happy forever with
Just one girl.'"
The song was coarse and toneless, but he knew no other way of voicing it, and she noted nothing of its crudeness.
"Daddy, you're a base deceiver."
She was wagging an accusing finger before his eyes, and he blinked in exaggerated concern.
"O' course," he admitted, "I don't say I've had much chance with more than one. This job of mine is death to gallivanting. I wouldn't know how to look at a woman now—not in a way that would mean she was more to me than one of the same sex as the best little girl in the world."
But the silently accusing finger continued to wag.
"Honest, I don't know what you mean."
"What about the cow-girl last year that you bought the horses from?"
He chuckled deep in his throat.
"Shucks! I know a pretty girl when I see one, that's all. I knew how to appreciate that skin of hers, and her riding, and the way she lifted her feet when she walked, and how she wore her clothes—though they weren't much, were they? And I bet they don't half prize her where she comes from. A chap like me who's known the two best women in the world can spot a real pippin any time; and he sort of owes it to the world to pass the message along. Shucks, girl! You didn't think—say, you didn't think I was sidling up to her, or anything like that? All I did was to touch her arm. I wanted to see if they were all alike, like yours. And look what she gave me!"
He made a grimace and drew a finger along a dim line cutting down his cheek.
"She couldn't have been the nice girl I thought," he reflected, "or she wouldn't have got on her high-and-mighty just for a little thing like that."
"Anyway," sighed the girl, snuggling deeper in his arms, "I was real proud of you when she brought that quirt across your face, and your cheek all bleeding, and it looked as if your eye was gone. You just laughed and borrowed my handkerchief."
He laughed again now. "You didn't think I'd slam at her with one of these big fists, did you? I believe I kind of enjoyed wiping away the blood."
"And you paid her every cent without a word."
"O' course! That hadn't anything to do with our little tiff. Didn't I owe the money? I got them horses cheap enough, goodness knows! I'd take a thousand of them any day in the week she trotted 'em along. Easiest way to make a fortune I know."
Tressa eased herself away to look gravely in his face. "Did you ever think those horses might be stolen ones?"
"Not more'n I could help," he grinned. "It wasn't any of my business; she offered them at a reasonable price—"
"You set the price."
"The buyer always does, my dear—when he can. Ten dollars was only a starter; I'd have given five times as much. They've been the best horses I've had." He stopped with a sudden inspiration. "Say, come to think of it, they're the very ones we've been losing lately. Looks as if some one else is a good judge of horseflesh."
"I hope they don't touch Doll and Prince. Surely nobody would come right up here to our own stable!"
"Not while Big Jim Torrance and booze don't get mixing company too free. You didn't used to think so much of Doll—but that was before she was broke. You're getting your riding legs pretty quick, I say. We'll sell them before we pull out. They're real prairie horses; they wouldn't be happy down East. Just the same," he murmured, after a long pause, "I'd give a week's pay to know who got them horses. Perhaps the camps out west needed brightening up their horse-power, and they've done it at my expense. If we could have got on the trail of the last lot that nearly went over the rapids—but there's nobody can trail in this camp." He smote his knee with a loud smack. "By hickory! Why didn't I think of the Indian before?"
"Peter Maverick?"
"Sure. The only Indian we got. He did me a good turn to-day on that trestle. Never saw an Indian couldn't follow a trail, if there was whisky or a horse at the end of it . . . and I never saw a likelier one than Mavy. Might be worth my while to get in ahead of the Mounted Police. They had to be told, you know."
"Did you tell them how you got the horses, daddy?"
The big man looked grieved. "Do you think your dad has lost all his senses? But this smashing of things was getting too common, and they'd have found out about the horses and wondered why I hadn't called them in. I don't think they'd favour buying strange horses at ten dollars a head and trying to look innocent about it. It isn't any use arguing with them—but you got common sense. You wouldn't suspect your old dad of receiving stolen property—at ten per; but them Mounted Police will ask for a birth certificate for every blessed one. I haven't time to look into the pedigree of every horse I buy. I'm busy. The Police are so unreasonable when it comes to law."
"That's why," he went on, after a thoughtful silence, "I'd like to steer them off the horse question. There's lots else for them to do. . . . Why didn't I think of Mavy before?"
He went to the edge of the bank and whistled. Ten minutes later Conrad was with them.
"Koppy got them repairs done yet?"
"Pretty nearly," replied the foreman.
"When the Indian can get away, send him up . . . or maybe we'd better wait till after hours—if he wouldn't ask overtime."
"You'll never find him after hours; he doesn't sleep in the camp. Wanders off somewhere in the bush. He has about as much use for white trash as you have."
"Send him right away then."
CHAPTER X
MAVY TAKES A RISK
Mavy, known on the camp books as Peter Maverick, received the summons to the boss's shack with his customary silence. For a moment after Conrad delivered the message he hesitated, then, nodding shortly, he swung into the trestle and began to clamber up by way of the hundred and fifty feet of network supports, scorning the path that led up the bank before the foreman's shack. With a puzzled shake of his head Conrad watched the strange figure growing smaller.
"A hundred of him," he muttered, "and they could take the whole bunch of bohunks. If he's a specimen of the wild Indian, Lord only knows what right we had to clean them out of the land. Mr. Torrance would say it was because they never build railways."
To the bohunks, mildly staring after the vanishing halfbreed, his method of reaching the top was merely foolishly exhausting; but several weeks of acquaintance had taught them to accept his silent peculiarities with nothing more than casual wonder, though they disliked him for his unsociability, for the cold contempt that twisted his lips, and for the stifled volcano that smouldered within his squinting eyes. They hated him more than ever now, with a hatred that could be liquidated only in blood. Their own criminal schemes that had taken the lives of two of their companions they did not consider, but the man who had exposed the cause of the deaths, and had made them sweat unrequited hours for exercising the only weapon they knew in their relentless fight against their bosses, must answer to them for his temerity and treason. Hereafter the halfbreed was just prey; sooner or later he would fall before the slumbering fires that knew no law but the knife, no restraint but fear.
Torrance looked up at the shadow in the doorway.
"Hey? Where did you come from?"
"Yuh sent fer me, didn't yuh?"
"I thought you were down bossing the Koppy job."
"Sartin. We jest was through when he tol' me."
"But Conrad only got down there; I saw him." Torrance squinted sternly at the halfbreed.
Mavy nodded. "I come by the trestle."
"The h—you did!"
The halfbreed shrugged his shoulders. The contractor examined him with renewed interest.
"How'd you like to be an underforeman?"
Again the wide, sloping shoulders shrugged.
"Say, you don't mean you'd turn down an extra dollar a day?"
"Koppy's underforeman, ain't he?" The halfbreed spat with disgust, and
Torrance chuckled sympathetically.
"If I did that every time I felt like it about Koppy, I'd be as dry as a camp-meeting in three days. You're not afraid of him, are you?"
Mavy grinned.
"Because Koppy's going to be some busy for the next few weeks hanging out under that trestle, and we'll need another underforeman perhaps."
The squinting eyes took on a sudden gleam, even a keen anticipation that could not escape the contractor's attention.
"An' wud I be bossin' 'em about, them bohunks? Wud yuh let me do as I liked?"
"Well," smiled Torrance, "not quite what you liked; you'd be under the foreman and me, you know."
The halfbreed sighed. "That's allus the way. Suthin's allus foolin' me. 'Cause ef yuh'd gi' me a free hand thar'd be a dozen er so less bohunks the fus' night fer supper. I jes' natcherl hate hidin' my feelin's." He repeated the sigh more hopelessly. "Yuh'd never git the work did; thar ain't bohunks enough in the world."
Torrance clutched his hand; here in an unexpected quarter was a man to his liking.
"If I could," he whispered, "I'd make you foreman this instant, and round up all the bohunks out of jail. But that ain't what I want you for. Are you a real Indian?"
"Naw," drawled Mavy. "I'm a Chinee, with a bit o' Pole thrown in."
Torrance showed he could appreciate humour like that. "I mean, can you follow a trail?"
The halfbreed's eyes danced. "Take a run in the bush," he said proudly, "an' to-morrow I'll take yuh over it agin t' the foot. Kin I foller a trail! Gor-swizzle! It's wot I done most o' my born days."
The contractor ruminated. Much as he dreaded the interference of the Police in the matter of the stolen horses, he hesitated about entrusting their recovery to this strange Indian; and a tardy thought came to him that the Police might question it. He cast the die in favour of his first plan.
"You know them horses we been losing?"
Mavy kept his eyes fixed on the contractor's face, but he knew the location of door and window with the unerring sense of the trapped wild thing.
"If you can find the thief—or who he is—there's under-foreman's pay for you. A dollar a day more—if money's any use to you. Will you take it on?"
"No."
The reply was prompt and uncompromising. Torrance, flaming as usual before unexpected opposition, was about to fire him on the spot, when the noise of metal against metal drew Tressa to the door.
"It's Constable Williams and a new Policeman—a Sergeant. Father's here, Mr. Williams. He was sending for you. There's been a dreadful accident. A piece of the trestle fell and killed two of the men."
As Tressa stepped back to let the Policeman enter, the halfbreed slid unobtrusively to the other side of the room and stood in the semi-obscurity facing the doorway, his back tight against the wall.
"Yes," stormed Torrance, "and if it had killed a dozen of them it would have served them right. They'd taken out the bolts and cut a rope."
Constable Williams, blinking at the sudden darkness of the sitting room, stepped aside and made way for a straight, bronzed figure wearing the stripes of a Sergeant, who was already acknowledging with a winning smile Tressa's unspoken welcome.
"Torrance, shake hands with Sergeant Mahon. He's been sent up to clear—"
The halfbreed, his squinting eyes staring as at a ghost, seemed to make only a single movement. Then the entire window crashed out, and a pair of heavy boots disappeared over the sill.
For one brief moment the contractor and his daughter were stupefied. Not so Sergeant Mahon. With the crash he was at the door, tugging at his belt. But Tressa was in the way, and by the time he reached the open only a tiny cloud of dust rising above the edge of the steep drop to the river bottom told the way the halfbreed had gone.
The Sergeant rushed to the bank and looked down the hundred-and-fifty foot wall with a gasp. No need for a revolver there. With a shudder he drew back.
Torrance stormed up beside him, rifle in hand.
"Where is he? Why don't you shoot? Let me—"
The Sergeant, with a deft twist, secured the rifle.
"What's he been doing?"
"Doing?" yelled the contractor. "Didn't you see that whole window—didn't you—"
"We don't shoot men for that."
Tressa came to the rescue:
"He's an Indian, one of the bohunks. I didn't know he'd done anything. We were talking to him when you came. Daddy wanted to make him underforeman, but he refused. And now"—she peered in awe over the edge—"he's killed."
"Guilty conscience, I guess," commented the Sergeant. "Lots of them are taken that way when they see the uniform—though I don't recall quite such a sudden and successful attempt at suicide."
"Suicide!" snorted Torrance, who was lying down where he could see the scene below. "Suicide nothing! That chap's a human cat—or he ain't human at all. He came up by the trestle; this is just another way to get down. Look at that dust! He's not falling, not him! He's just kicking up a dust so we can't see, and all the time he's breaking his up record. He's not dropping fast enough to hurt himself . . . but, by hickory! where he finds toe-holds on that cliff beats me."
They were all craning over. Down below, the bohunks were scattering like frightened sheep, while those further out gaped. The dust-cloud struck the bottom and spread, and out of it emerged a running figure, limping a little but covering the ground with surprising speed. Tag ends of clothing hung to him, and from head to foot he was the colour of earth.
Torrance cheered. "Hurrah! I'm surer than ever I made no mistake offering him the job . . . and I'll pay for the window myself, by hickory!"
Mahon was watching him with a faint smile.
"It's a lively reception to give a stranger. Is there more to the programme?"
"If there is," replied Torrance, "I'm only one of the innocent audience. That guy's beaten the limit three times inside as many hours. He's a continuous performance. He did a few careless flips and tumbles down there to get out of the way of that pole, then he swings up by way of the trestle while you'd say 'Jack Robinson.' He's gone down again," he added, measuring with his eye the dizzy height, "by way of Providence. Wouldn't you say he'd got the wrong job out here, even if he is an Indian?"
"Was it Mavy?" asked Constable Williams.
"We call him Mavy, but he's a blooming sparrow, or a toy balloon."
"An Indian who's been working on construction," Williams explained to his superior, "a strange, silent fellow. Always seemed a bit above the job. Peter Maverick was his name."
Mahon started violently. His heart had made a bound that almost suffocated him. Before his eyes swept a picture of a court of so-called justice, with a big half breed giving evidence for the Police in a rustling case. The Judge, ignorantly persisting in his demand for a name for a child of nature who had all his life been content with "Blue Pete," had swallowed an invention of the moment, though every rancher in the room laughed at the ludicrously unfit term they knew so well. "Peter Maverick," the halfbreed had replied without a smile.
The Sergeant closed his eyes with a weary shake of the head. The picture had faded before another—the halfbreed wounded to death by a bullet he had drawn to his own chest to save the Police friend for whom it was intended.
"Know him?" enquired the Constable curiously.
Mahon passed a hand across his moist brow. "I knew a cowboy once—best friend I ever had—best a man could have. He gave that name once because he had no other to give. . . . He, too, was part Indian. Peter's a common Indian name. . . . He's dead now. He gave his life for me."
"That was Blue Pete, wasn't it?" asked Williams. "We got some of the story up here. He was working with us down there at Medicine Hat, wasn't he?"
The Sergeant moved toward the shack. "That drop makes me dizzy."
Within the shack Tressa laid a sympathetic hand on his.
"You'd better tell us about it, hadn't you? You're thinking a lot."
He smiled sadly into her tender eyes. "There's not much to tell," he began, "at least, not in quantity. Blue Pete was the whitest man that ever lived, the whitest of any colour. Yet he died a rustler—giving his life gladly for one who had done nothing more for him than call him friend. He was no rustler at heart. For years he had stolen horses and cattle in the Badlands of Montana, because, as he said, every one rustled there, more or less; he was brought up to it. Perhaps he did a bit more than the others, but that was because he knew more tricks. I came on him just north of the border. He'd come across before the rifles of two cowboys who hated him so badly they'd quite forgotten that he could have picked them off with ease any time he wished. Though he was the best shot in the Badlands, he never used his rifle till he had to; and for days he'd been running before them."
He looked about the room, feeling the silence. To him it was as a tribute to his dead friend.
"I took him in to the Inspector. He became a detective for us. You see, the rustlers were getting a bit the better of us because they knew the Cypress Hills and we never had force enough to take time to study them. Blue Pete didn't need to. He could pick up a trail anywhere and follow it like a blood-hound. . . . I learned a little from him; that's why I'm up here. With his assistance we ran down some of the rustlers. It was he proved to us that our own ranchers were among the rustlers—proved it to his own destruction. It was at the trial of one of them that he received the blow that sent him wild again. For a week he'd been on the trail of that fellow, a man we'd long suspected, half rancher, half hotel-keeper, and his nerves were a bit raw from lack of sleep and being forced into the open. You see, it meant giving up all the cow-punching he loved, for no rancher would employ him then."
A flash of anger lit the Sergeant's face.
"The Judge questioned his evidence—doubted it—even censured the Police for using such an acknowledged rustler. . . . Pete left the courtroom straight for the old game . . . and I, his old friend—I was put on his track. It was my duty. In the meantime some of his old companions from the Badlands crossed the border. I don't know whether Blue Pete joined up with them or not. If he did there are so many things can't be explained. We caught a few of them—including a white girl who—who also had gone wild. She was—a friend of mine, too, once. When we caught her brothers, who owned one of the best ranches in the district, the 3-bar-Y, and they—killed themselves, she just broke away. She and Blue Pete worked together. I think they loved each other. It was a crazy venture of hers that put her in our hands. She got six months. . . .
"It was spring when she came out, early spring this year. A gang of Badland rustlers got into the Hills. We surrounded them, and I went in with one companion on a trail of blood from a lucky shot we'd got at them when they tried to break through for the border. The wounded man ambushed me . . . but Blue Pete—he'd been creeping along beside me all the time—took the bullet instead of me. He managed to tell me the rustlers' rendezvous, and then something struck me on the head and I dropped. My companion came to my assistance then. I guess I was half-crazy from the blow, and from the awful wound I'd seen in Pete's chest, because when we closed in on the rendezvous that night I took fool chances. I jumped in alone. Dutch Henry had my life in his hands when Blue Pete fired from the shadows. . . . Somehow he'd dragged himself there to be on hand. He saved my life again. . . . He died for it."
Constable Williams cleared his throat. Torrance was silent. Tressa leaned forward and touched Mahon's sleeve.
"You didn't bury him in a cemetery? He'd hate it."
"We never found his body. Mira Stanton, the girl I told you of, buried him where we never could find. She wrote us . . . and she hated us. There's a rough stone to his memory down there on the edge of the Cypress Hills. It reminds the few of us who see it of my friend, simple, plain, rugged, lasting. There's no name on it, just 'Greater Love.'"
"You didn't find him? What was he like?" Tressa's face was flushed.
"A big, slouching sort of figure, but with a world of muscle you'd never suspect. The face of an Indian, but lighter; it's bluish tint gave him his name. A smile that made you forget anything but that he was your friend; a square jaw, squinting eyes—"
"Was his face very thin, almost haggard, with hollows under the eyes, and one shoulder lower than the other?"
Mahon smiled at her excitement. "No, his face lurked a little heavily, waiting only for that wonderful smile, but it wasn't haggard. And his shoulders were twin towers of strength."
"Oh," she sighed, "then it isn't him."
"I can assure you, Miss Torrance, that there's not a grain of hope to raise. Whom does my friend resemble?"
"Why, Peter Maverick—just some ways."
For a moment he seemed startled, almost frightened, then he smiled indulgently.
"It only means they're both of Indian strain, have crooked eyes (a not uncommon combination), and happened to toy with the same invented name that is taken from the herds. Nothing more. . . . If I thought Blue Pete would throw himself through a window and down a bank like that at sight of me—"
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "He wouldn't, of course. But wouldn't it have been a story?"
"The sort of story that never happens even in books," he sighed.