CHAPTER XI.
A RESCUE
Helen Messiter was left alone until darkness fell, when the Cheyenne squaw brought in a kerosene lamp and shortly afterward her supper. The woman either could not or would not speak English, and her only answer to her captive’s advances was by sullen grunts. At the expiration of half an hour she returned for the dishes, locking the door after her when she left.
The room itself was comfortable enough. It was evidently Bannister’s own, judging from its contents. Two or three rifles hung in racks. On top of the bookcase was a half-filled tobacco pouch and several pipes, all of them lying carelessly on a pile of music which ran from Verdi to ragtime. In his books she found the same shallow catholicity. Side by side with Montaigne’s “Essays,” a well-worn Villon in thé original, Stevenson’s “Letters” and “Anna Karenina,” dozens of paper-covered novels, mostly the veriest trash, held their disreputable own. Some of them were French, others detective stories, still others melodramatic tales of love. The piano was an expensive one, but not in the best of tune. Everything in the room contributed to the effect of capacity untempered by discipline and discrimination. Plainly he was a man of taste who had outraged and deadened his power of differentiation by abuse.
For Helen the silent night was alive with alarms. The moaning of the wind, the slightest rustle outside, the creaking of a board, were enough to set her heart wildly beating. She did not undress, but by the light of her dim, ragged wick sought for composure from the pages of Montaigne and Stevenson. When the first gray day streaks came she was still reading, but with their coming she blew out her light and lay down. She fell asleep at once, and it was five hours later that the knock of her attendant awakened her from heavy slumber.
With the bright sunlit day she was again mistress of her nerves, prepared to meet resolutely whatever danger might confront her. But the morning passed quietly enough, and after lunch the Indian woman led her into the little valley promenade in front of the buildings and sat down on a rock while her captive enjoyed the sunshine.
The course of Helen’s saunterings took her toward the rock slide that made the gateway of the valley. She was wondering if it could have been left unguarded, when a rough voice warned her back. Looking round, she caught sight of a man seated cross-legged on a great boulder. It took only a second glance to certify that the man was her former foreman, Judd Morgan.
She had never seen anything more malevolent than his triumph.
“Better stay in the valley, Miss Messiter. Y’u might right easily get lost outside,” he jeered.
Without reply she turned her back on him and began to retrace her way to the house. Stung by her contempt, he sprang up and strode after her.
“So y’u won’t speak to me, eh? Think yourself too good to speak to a common everyday God damned white man, do y’u?”
Apparently she did not know he was on the map. In a fury he caught at her shoulder and whirled her round.
“Now, by God, do y’u see me? I’m Judd Morgan, the man y’u kicked off the Lazy D. I told y’u then y’u were going to be sorry long as y’u lived.”
“Don’t you dare touch me, you hound!” Her blazing eyes menaced him so fiercely that he hesitated.
There was the sound of a quick, light step running toward them. Morgan half turned, was caught in a grip of steel and hurled headlong among a pile of broken rocks.
“Y’u would dare, would y’u?” panted his assailant, passionately, ready to obliterate the offender if he showed fight.
Morgan got up slowly, his head bleeding from contact with the sharp rocks. There was murder in his bloodshot eye, but he knew his master, and after trying vainly to face him down he swung away with an oath.
“I’ll have to apologize for that coyote, Miss Messiter. These fellows need a hint occasionally as to how to behave,” said Bannister.
“Your hints are rather forceful, are they not?”
“I ain’t running a Sunday school,” he admitted.
“So I have gathered. I wonder where he learned to bully women,” she mused aloud.
“Putting it another way, you think there ought to be some one to apologize for his master.”
He was smiling at her without the least rancor, and it came on her with a woman’s swift instinct that safety lay in humoring his volatile moods and diverting him from those that were dangerous.
“Since I’m a prisoner of war I wouldn’t dare think that—not aloud, at least. You might starve me,” she told him, saucily.
“Still, down in your heart y’u think—”
“That there is a great deal of difference between master and man. One is a gentleman in his best moments; the other is always a ruffian.”
She had touched his vanity. As he walked beside her she could almost see his complacency purr.
“I’m a miscreant, I reckon, but I was a gentleman first.”
Fortunately he did not see the flash of veiled scorn she shot at him under her long lashes.
With her breakfast next morning the Cheyenne woman brought a note signed “Shepherd-of-the-Desert.” In it Bannister asked permission to pay his respects. The girl divined that he was in his better mood, and penciled on his note the favor she could scarce refuse.
But she was scarcely prepared for the impudent air of jocund spring he brought into her prison, the gay assumption of camaraderie so inconsistent with the facts. Yet since safety lay in an avoidance of the tragic, she set herself to match his mood.
At sight of the open Tennyson on the table he laughed and quoted:
She only said, “The day is dreary.”
“He cometh not,” she said.
“But, you see, he comes,” he added. “What say, Mariana of the Robbers’ Roost, to making a picnic day of it? We’ll climb the Crags and lunch on the summit.”
“The Crags?”
“That Matterhorn-shaped peak that begins at our back door. Are you for it?”
While this mood was uppermost in him she felt reasonably safe. It was a phase of him she certainly did not mean to discourage. Besides, she had a youthful confidence in her powers that she was loath to give up without an effort to find the accessible side of his ruthless heart.
“I’ll try it; but you must help me when we come to the bad places,” she said.
“Sure thing! It’s a deal. You’re a right good mountaineer, I’ll bet.”
“Thank you ; but you had better save your compliments till I make good,” she told him, with the most piquant air of gayety in the world.
They started on horseback, following a mountain trail that zigzagged across the foothills toward the Crags. He had unearthed somewhere a boy’s saddle that suited her very well, and the pony she rode was one of the easiest she had ever mounted. At the end of an hour’s ride they left the horses and began the ascent on foot. It was a stiff climb, growing steeper as they ascended, but Helen Messiter had not tramped over golf links for nothing. She might grow leg weary,’ but she would not cry “Enough!” And he, on his part, showed the tactful consideration for the resources of her strength he had already taught her to expect from that other day’s experience on the plains. It was a very rare hand of assistance that he offered her, but often he stopped to admire the beautiful view that stretched for many miles below them, in order that she might get a minute’s breathing space.
Once he pointed out, far away on the horizon, a bright gleam that caught the sunlight like a heliograph.
“That’s the big rock slide back of the Lazy, D,” he explained.
She drew a long breath, and flashed a stealthy look at him.
“It’s a long way from here, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t find it so far last time I took the trip—not the last half of the journey, anyhow,” he answered.
“You’re very complimentary. I was only wondering whether I could find it if I should manage to escape.”
He stroked his black mustache and smiled gallantly at her. “I reckon I won’t let so pretty a prisoner escape.”
“Do you expect me to burden your hospitality forever and a day? Wouldn’t that be a little too much of Mariana of the Robbers’ Roost?” she asked, lightly.
“I’m willing to risk it.”
He looked with half-shut smoldering eyes at her slender exquisiteness, so instinct with the vital charm of sex. There was veiled passion in his eyes, but there was in them, too, a desire to stand well with her. He meant to win her, but if possible he would win with her own reluctant consent. She must bring him with hesitant feet a heart surrendered in spite of her pride and flinty puritanism. The vanity of the man craved a victory that should be of the spirit as well as of the flesh.
Deftly she guided the conversation back to less dangerous channels. In this the increasing difficulty of the climb assisted her, for after they reached the last ascent sustained talk became impossible.
“See that trough above us near the summit?. Y’u’ll have to hang on by your eyelashes, pardner.” He always burlesqued the word of comradeship a little to soften its familiarity.
“Dear me! Is it that bad?”
“It is so bad that at the top y’u have to jump for a grip and draw yourself up by your arms.”
“I’ll never be able to do it.”
“I’m here to help.”
“But if one should miss?”
He shrugged. “Ah! That’s a theological question. If the sky pilots guess right, for y’u heaven and for me hell.”
They negotiated the trough successfully to its uptilted end. She had a bad moment when he leaped for the rock rim above from the narrow ledge on which they stood. But he caught it, drew himself up without the least trouble and turned to assist her. He sat down on the rock edge facing the abyss beneath them, and told her to lock her hands together above his left foot. Then slowly, inch by inch, he drew her up till with one of his hands he could catch her wrist. A moment later she was standing on his rigid toes, from which position she warily edged to safety above.
“Well done, little pardner. You’re the first woman ever climbed the Crags.” He offered a hand to celebrate the achievement.
“If I am it is all due to you, big pardner. I could never have made that last bit alone.”
They ate lunch merrily in the pleasant sunlight, and both of them seemed as free from care as a schoolboy on a holiday.
“It’s good to be alive, isn’t it?” he asked her after they had eaten, as he lay on the warm ground at her feet. “And what a life it is here! To be riding free, with your knees pressing a saddle, in the wind and the sun. There’s something in a man to which the wide spaces call. I’d rather lie here in the sunbeat with you beside me than be a king. You remember the ‘Last Ride’ that fellow Browning tells about? I reckon he’s dead right. If a man could only capture his best moments and hold them forever it would be heaven to the nth degree.”
She studied her sublimated villain with that fascination his vagaries always excited in her. Was ever a more impossible combination put together than this sentimental scamp with the long record of evil?
“Say it,” he laughed.” Whang it out I ask, anything you like, pardner.”
Pluckily daring, she took him at his word. “I was only wondering at the different men I find in you. Before I have known you a dozen hours I discover in you the poet and the man of action, the schoolboy and the philosopher, the sentimentalist and the cynic, and—may I say it?—the gentleman and the blackguard. One feels a sense of loss. You should have specialized. You would have made such a good soldier, for instance. Pity you didn’t go to West Point.”
“Think so?” He was immensely flattered at her interest in him.
“Yes. You surely missed your calling. You were born for a soldier; cavalry, I should say. What an ornament to society you would have been if your energies had found the right vent! But they didn’t find it—and you craved excitement, I suppose. Perhaps you had to go the way you did.”
“Therefore I am what I am? Please particularize.”
“I can’t, because I don’t understand you. But I think this much is true, that you have set yourself against all laws of God and man. Yet you are not consistent, since you are better than your creed. You tell yourself there shall be no law for you but your own will, and you find there is, something in you stronger than desire that makes you shrink at many things. You can kill in fair fight, but you can’t knife a man in the back, can you?”
“I never have.”
“You have a dreadfully perverted set of rules, but you play by them. That’s why I know I’m safe with you, even when you are at your worst.”
She announced this boldly, just as if she had no doubts.
“Oh, you know you’re safe, do you?”
“Of course I do. You were once a gentleman and you can’t forget it entirely. That’s the weakness in your philosophy of total depravity.” “You speak with an assurance you don’t always feel, I reckon. And I expect I wouldn’t bank too much on those divinations of yours, if I were you.” He rolled over so that he could face her more directly. “You’ve been mighty frank, Miss Messiter, and I take off my hat to your sand. Now I’m going to be frank awhile. You interest me. I never met a woman that interested me so much. But you do a heap more than interest me. No, you sit right there and listen. Your cheeky pluck and that insolent, indifferent beauty of yours made a hit with me the first minute I saw you that night. I swore I’d tame you, and that’s why I brought you to the ranch. Your eye flashed a heap too haughty for me to give you the go-by. Mind you, I meant to be master. I meant to make you mine as much as that dog that licked my hand before we started. What I meant then I still mean, but in a different way.
“That’s as far as it went with me then, but before we reached here next day I knew the thing cut deeper with me. I ain’t saying that I love you, because I’m a sweep and it’s just likely I don’t know passion from love. But I’ll tell you this—there hasn’t been a waking moment since then I haven’t been on fire to be with you. That’s why I stayed away until I knew I wasn’t so likely to slop over. But here, I’m doing it right this minute. I care more for you than I do for anything else on this earth. But that makes it worse for you. I never cared for anybody without bringing ruin on them. I broke my mother’s heart and spoiled the life of a girl I was going to marry. That’s the kind of scoundrel I am. Even if I can make you care for me—and I reckon I can if y’u are like other women—I’ll likely drag you through hell after me.”
The simulation of despair in his beautiful eyes spoke more impressively than his self-scorning words. She was touched in spite of herself, despite, too, his colossal egotism. For there is an appeal about the engaging sinner that drums in a woman’s head and calls to her heart. All good women are missionaries in the last analysis, and Miss Messiter was not an exception to her sex. Even though she knew he was half a fraud and that his emotion was theatric, she could not let the moment pass.
She leaned forward, a sweet, shy dignity in her manner. “Is it too late to change? Why not begin now? There is still a to-morrcw, and it need not be the slave of yesterday. Life for all of us is full of milestones.”
“And how shall I begin my new career of saintliness?” he asked, with a swift return to blithe irony.
“The nearest duty. Take me back to my ranch. Begin a life of rigid honesty.”
“Give you up now that I have found you? That is just the last thing I would do,” he cried, with glancing eyes. “No—no. The clock can’t be turned back. I have sowed and I must reap.”
He leaped to his feet. “Come! We must be going.”
She rose sadly, for she knew the mood of sentimental regret for his wasted life had passed, and she had failed.
They descended the trough and reached the boulder field that had marked the terminal of the glacier. At the farther edge of it the outlaw turned to point out to the girl a great bank of snow on a mountainside fifteen miles away.
He changed his weight as he turned, when a rock slipped under his foot and he came down hard. He was up again in an instant, but Helen Messiter caught the sharp intake of his breath when he set foot to the ground.
“You’ve sprained your ankle!” she cried.
“Afraid so. It’s my own rotten carelessness.” He broke into a storm of curses and limped forward a dozen steps, but he had to set his teeth to stand the pain.
“Lean on me,” she said, gently. “I reckon I’ll have to,” he grimly answered.
They covered a quarter of a mile, with many stops to rest the swollen ankle. Only by the irregularity of his breathing and the damp moisture on his forehead could she tell the agony he was enduring.
“It must be dreadful,” she told him once.
“I’ve got to stand for it, I reckon.”
Again she said, when they had reached a wooded grove where pines grew splendid on a carpet of grass: “Only two hundred yards more. I think I can bring your pony as far as the big cottonwood.”
She noticed that he leaned heavier and heavier on her. However, when they reached the cottonwood he leaned no more, but pitched forward in a faint. The water bottle was empty, but she ran down to where the ponies had been left, and presently came back with his canteen. She had been away perhaps twenty minutes, and when she came back he waved a hand airily at her.
“First time in my life that ever happened,” he apologized, gayly. “But why didn’t y’u get on Jim and cut loose for the Lazy D while you had the chance?”
“I didn’t think of it. Perhaps I shall next time.”
“I shouldn’t. Y’u see, I’d follow you and bring you back. And if I didn’t find you there would be a lamb lost again in these hills.”
“The sporting thing would be to take a chance.”
“And leave me here alone? Well, I’m going to give you a show to take it.” He handed her his revolver. “Y’u may need this if you’re going traveling.”
“Are you telling me to go?” she asked, amazed.
“I’m telling you to do as you think best. Y’u may take a hike or y’u may bring back Two-step to me. Suit yourself.”
“I tell you plainly, I sha’n’t come back.”
“And I’m sure y’u will.”
“But I won’t. The thing’s absurd. Would you?”
“No, I shouldn’t. But y’u will.”
“I won’t. Good-bye.” She held out her hand.
He shook his head, looking steadily at her. “What’s the use? You’ll be back in half an hour.”
“Not I. Did you say I must keep the Antelope Peaks in a line to reach the Lazy D.
“Yes, a little to the left. Don’t be long, little pardner.”
“I hate to leave you here. Perhaps I’ll send a sheriff to take care of you.”
“Better bring Two-step up to the south of that bunch of cottonwoods. It’s not so steep that way.”
“I’ll mention it to the sheriff. I’m not coming myself.”
She left him apparently obstinate in the conviction that she would return. In reality he was taking a gambler’s chance, but it was of a part with the reckless spirit of the man that the risk appealed to him. It was plain he could not drag himself farther. Since he must let her go for the horse alone, he chose that she should go with her eyes open to his knowledge of the opportunity of escape.
But Helen Messiter had not the slightest intention of returning. She had found her chance, and she meant to make the most of it. As rapidly ias her unaccustomed fingers would permit she saddled and cinched her pony. She had not ridden a hundred yards before Two-step came crashing through the young cottonwood grove after her. Objecting to being left alone, he had broken the rein that tied him. The girl tried to recapture the horse in order that the outlaw might not be left entirely without means of reaching camp, but her efforts were unsuccessful. She had to give it up and resume her journey.
Of course the men at his ranch would miss their chief and search for him. There could be no doubt but that they would find him. She bolstered up her assurance of this as she rode toward the Antelope Peaks, but her hope lacked buoyancy, because she doubted if they had any idea of where he had been going to spend the day.
She rode slower and slower, and finally came to a long halt for consideration. Vividly there rose before her a picture of the miscreant waiting grimly for death or rescue. Well, she was not to blame. If she deserted him it was to save herself. But to leave him helpless——
No, she could not leave a crippled man to die alone, even though he were her enemy. That was the goal to which her circling thoughts came always home, and with a sob she turned her horse’s head. It was a piece of soft-headed folly, she confessed, but she could not help it.
So back she went and found him lying just where she had left him. His derisive smile offered
her no thanks. She doubted, indeed, whether he felt any sense of gratitude.
“Y’u didn’t break your neck hurrying,” he said.
She made her confession with a palpable chagrin. “I meant to ride away. I rode a mile or two. But I had to come back. I couldn’t leave you here alone.”
His eyes sparkled triumphantly. She saw that he had misunderstood the reason of her return, that he was pluming himself on a conquest of his fascinated victim.
“One couldn’t leave even a broken-legged dog without help,” she added, quietly.
“So how could we expect a woman to leave the man she’s getting ready to love?”
She let her contemptuous eyes rest on him in silence.
“That’s right. Look at me as if I were dirt under your feet. Hate me, if it makes y’u feel better. But y’u’ll have to come to loving me just the same.”
“Can you get on without help?” she asked, ranging the pony alongside him.
“Yes.” He dragged himself to the saddle and smiled down at her. “So y’u better make up your mind to that soon as convenient.”
Disdaining answer, she walked in front of the pony down the trail. She was tired, but her elastic tread would not admit it to him. For she was dramatizing unconsciously, with firmly clenched fingers that bit into her palms, the march of the unconquerable.
Evening had fallen before they reached the ranch. It was beautifully still, except for the call of the quails. The hazy violet outline of the mountains came to silhouette against the skyline with a fine edge.
As they passed the pony corral he spoke again. “I’ll never forget to-day. I’ve got it fenced from all the yesterdays and to-morrows. I have surely enjoyed our little picnic.”
“Nor will I forget it,” she flung back quickly, as she followed him into the house. “For I never before met a man wholly incapable of gratitude and entirely lacking in all the elements that go to distinguish a human being from a wolf.”
He turned to speak to her, and as he did so a quiet voice cautioned him:
“Don’t move, seh, except to throw up your hands.”
At the sound of that pleasant drawl Helen’s heart jumped to her throat. Jim McWilliams, half seated on the edge of the table, was looking intently at Bannister, and there was a revolver in his hand. On the other side of the room sat Morgan and the Cheyenne woman, apparently in charge of the young giant Denver.
Bannister’s hands went up, even as he whirled with a snarl toward the man Morgan.
“I told y’u to watch out, y’u muttonhead!”
“But y’u clean forgot to remember to watch out your own self,” spoke up McWilliams, unbuckling the belt from the waist of his new captive.
“Oh, Mac, you blessed boy!” cried Helen, with an hysterical laugh that was half a sob.
“How did you ever find me?”
“Followed the track of the gas wagon to where it ran out of juice. We lost your trail after that, but Denver and me had the good luck to pick it up again where y’u’d camped that night. We mislaid it again up in the hills, and Denver he knew about this place. We dropped in just casual for information, but when we set our peepers on Judd we allowed we would stay awhile, him being so anxious to have us.”
“You dear boys! I’m so glad! You don’t know,” she sobbed, dropping weakly into thes nearest chair.
“We can guess, ma’am,” her foreman answered grimly, his eyes on Bannister.” And if either of these scoundrels have treated y’u so they need their light put out all y’u have got to do is to say so.”
“No, no, Mac. Let us go away from here and leave them. Can’t we go now—this very minute?”
The foreman’s eyes found those of Denver and the latter nodded. Neither of them had had a bite to eat since the previous evening, and they were naturally ravenous.
“All right. We’ll go right now, ma’am. Denver, I’ll take care of these beauties while y’u step into the pantry with Mrs. Lo-the-poor-Indian and put up a lunch. Y’u don’t want to forget we’re hungry enough to eat the wool off a pair of chaps.”
“I ain’t likely to forget it, am I?” grinned Denver, as he rose.
“You poor boys! I know you are starved. I’ll see about the lunch if one of you will get the I horses round,” Helen broke in. “Only let us hurry and get away from here.”
Ten minutes later they were in the saddle. For the sake of precaution Mac walked two of his captives with them for about a mile before releasing them. Bannister, unable to travel, they left behind.
“We’ll get down out of the hills and then cut acrost to the Meeker ranch,” said McWilliams, after they had ridden forward a few miles. “I’ll telephone from there to Slauson’s and have the old man send a boy over to the Lazy D with the good word. We’ll get an early start from Meeker’s and make it home in the afternoon.”
“How did you leave Mr. Bannister?” asked Helen, in a carefully careless voice.
She had held back this question for nearly an hour till Denver, who was guiding the party, had passed out of earshot.
“Left him with two of the boys holding him down. He was plumb anxious to commit suicide by joining the hunt for y’u, but I had other thoughts,” grinned Mac.
She felt herself flushing in the darkness. “We’ve made a great mistake about him, Mac, It’s his cousin of the same name that is the desperado—the man we just left.”
“Yes, that’s what Judd let out before y’u and the King arrived. It made me plumb glad to my gizzard to hear it.”
“I was pleased, too.”
“Somehow I suspicioned that,” he made answer, with banter in his dry tones.
“Of course I would be glad to know that he is not a villain,” she defended.
“Sure!”
“Well, one doesn’t like to think that a friend——”
“He’s your friend, is he?” chuckled Mac.
“Why shouldn’t he be?”
“I’m offering no objections, ma’am.”
“You act as if——”
“Sho! Don’t pay any attention to me. Sometimes I get these spells of laughing in to myself. They just come. Doctors never could find a reason.”
“Oh, well!”
“He was your enemy and now he’s your friend. Course since I’m your foreman I got to keep posted on how we stand with our neighbors. If your feelings change to him again y’u’ll let me know, I expect.”
“Why should they change?” she asked in a cold voice that her rising color belied.
“Search me! I just thought mebbe——”
“You think too much,” she cut in, shortly.
“Yes, ma’am,” admitted the youth, meekly, but from time to time as they rode she could hear, faint sounds of mirth from his direction.
McWilliams telephoned from the Meeker ranch to Slauson’s, and inside of two hours the Lazy D knew that its owner had been found. As one puncher after another reported there on jaded ponies to get the latest word they heard that all was well. Each one at once unsaddled, ate and turned in for the first night’s sleep he had had since his mistress had been missing. Next morning they rode in a body to meet her.
She saw them galloping toward her in a cloud of dust, and presently she was the centre of a circle of her happy family. They were like boys—exuberant in their joy at her deliverance and eager to set out at once to avenge her wrongs.
Ned Bannister, from his window, saw them coming. When the group separated at the corral and she rode from among them with McWilliams toward the house the sheepman could sit still no longer. He limped to the front door and waved the American flag which he had unearthed for the occasion.