When Major King delivered Frances—his punctilious military observance made her home-coming nothing less—to Colonel Landcraft, they found that grizzled warrior in an electrical state of excitement. He was moving in quick little charges, but with a certain grim system in all of them, between desk and bookcases, letter files, cabinets, and back to his desk again. He drew a document here, tucked one away there, slipped an elastic about others assembled on his desk, and clapped a sheaf of them in his pocket.

Major King saluted within the door.

“I have the honor to report the safe return of the detachment dispatched to Alamito Ranch for the convoy of Miss Landcraft,” he said.

Colonel Landcraft returned the salute, and stood stiffly while his officer spoke.

“Very well, sir,” said he. Then flinging away his official stiffness, he met Frances half-way as she ran to meet him, and enfolded her to his breast, just as if his dry old heart knew that she had come to him through perils.

King interposed to tell him that Chadron was not at the ranch, and begged the colonel to delegate to him the office of avenger of this insult and hazard that Frances had suffered at the hands of his men. For a moment Colonel Landcraft held the young officer’s eye with thankful expression of admiration, then he drew himself up as if in censure for wasted time, saluted, took a paper from his desk, and said with grave dignity:

“It must fall to you, Major King, to demand the reparation for this outrage that I shall not be here to enforce. I am ordered to Washington, sir, to make my appearance before the retiring board. The department has vested the command of this post in you, sir—here is the order. My soldiering days are at an end.”

He handed the paper to Major King, with a salute. With a salute the young officer took it from his hand, an eager light in his eyes, a flush springing to his pale face. Frances clung to her father’s arm, a little trembling moan on her lips as if she had received a mortal hurt.

“I’ll never soldier any more,” he said, “the politicians have got me. They’ve been after me a long time, and they’ve got me. But there is one easement in my disgrace—”

“Don’t speak of it on those terms, sir!” implored Major King, more a man than a soldier as he laid a consoling hand on the old man’s arm.

“No, no!” said Frances, clinging to her father’s hand.

Colonel Landcraft smiled, looking from one to the other of them, and a softness came into his face. He took Major King’s hand and carried it to join Frances’, and she, in her softness for her father, allowed it to remain in the young soldier’s grasp.

“There is one gleam of joy in the sundown of my life,” the colonel said, “and that is in seeing my daughter pledged to a soldier. I must live in the reflection of your achievements, if I live beyond this disgrace, sir.”

“I will try to make them worthy of my mentor, sir,” Major King returned.

Frances stood with bowed head, the major still holding her hand in his ardent grasp.

“My poor wife is bowed under it,” the colonel spoke as he marched back and forth. “She has hoped with me for some fitting reward for the years of service I have unselfishly given to my country, sir, for the surrender of my better self to the army. I’ll never outlive it, I feel that I’ll never outlive it!”

Colonel Landcraft had no thought apart from what he felt to be his hovering disgrace. He had forgotten his rage against Chadron, forgotten that his daughter had lived through a day as hazardous as any that he had experienced in the Apache campaigns, or in his bleak watches against the Sioux. He turned to her now, where she stood weeping softly with bowed head, the grime of the dugout on her habit, her hair, its bonds broken, straying over her face.

“I had counted pleasurably on seeing you two married,” he said, “but something tells me I shall never come back from this journey, never resume command of this post.” He turned back to his marching, stopped three or four paces along, turned sharply, a new light in his face. “Why shouldn’t it be before I leave—tonight, within the hour?”

“Oh, father!” said Frances, in terrified voice, lifting her face in its tear-wet loveliness.

“I have been ready at any time for two years,” Major King replied, in trembling eagerness.

Frances was thrown into such a mental turmoil by the sudden proposal that she could not, at that moment, speak a further protest. She stood with white face, her heart seeming to shrivel, and fall away to laboring faintness. Colonel Landcraft was not considering her. He was thinking that he must have three hours’ sleep in the hotel at Meander before the train left for Omaha.

“Then we shall have the wedding at once, just as you stand!” he declared. “We’ll have the chaplain in and—go and tell your mother, child, and—oh, well, throw on another dress if you like.”

Frances found her tongue as her danger of being married off in that hot and hasty manner grew imminent.

“I’m not going to marry Major King, father, now or at any future time,” said she, speaking slowly, her words coming with coldness from her lips.

“Silence! you have nothing to say, nothing to do but obey!” Colonel Landcraft blazed up in sudden explosion, after his manner, and set his heel down hard on the floor, making his sword clank in its scabbard on his thigh.

“Hold your tongue, miss! I command you—hold your tongue!”

“It’s the farthest thing from my heart to give you pain, or disappoint you in your calculations of me, father,” she told him, her voice gathering power, her words speed, for she was a warrior like himself, only that her balance was not so easily overthrown; “but I am not going to marry Major King.”

“Heaven and hell!” said Colonel Landcraft, stamping up and down.

“Heaven or hell,” said she, “and not hell—if I can escape it.”

“I’ll not permit this insubordination in a member of my family!” roared the colonel, his face fiery, his rumpled eyebrows knitted in a scowl. “I’ll have obedience, with good grace, and at once, or damn my soul, you’ll leave my house!”

“Major King, if you are a gentleman, sir, you will relieve me of this unwelcome pressure to force me against my inclination. It is quite useless, sir, I tell you most earnestly. I would rather die than marry you—I would rather die!”

“Sir, I have no wish to coerce the lady”—Major King’s voice shook, his words were low—“as she seems to have no preference for me, sir. Miss Landcraft perhaps has placed her heart somewhere else.”

“Spare me the humiliation of informing you,” begged Major King, with averted face, with sorrow in his voice.

“Oh, you slanderous coward!” Frances assailed him with scorn of word and look. Colonel Landcraft was shaking a trembling finger at her, his face thrust within a foot of her own.

“I’ll not have it! you’ll not—who is the fellow, who?”

“There is nothing to conceal, there is no humiliation on my part in speaking his name, but pride—the highest pride of my heart!”

She stood back from them a little, her lofty head thrown back, her face full of color now, the strength of defense of the man she loved in her brave brown eyes.

“Some low poltroon, some sneaking civilian—”

“He is a man, father—you have granted that. His name is—”

“Stop!” thundered the colonel. “Heaven and hell! Will you disgrace me by making public confession of your shame? Leave this room, before you drive me to send you from it with a curse!”

Her mother had gone to him to share the last moments of his presence there, and to intercede for her. Now Frances listened, her hot cheek in her hand, her eyes burning, her heart surging in fevered stroke. There was a good deal of coming and going before the house; men came up and dismounted, others rode away. Watching, her face against the cool pane, she did not see her father leave. Yet he had not come to her, and the time for his going was past.

Her heart was sore and troubled at the thought that perhaps he had gone without the word of pacification between them. It was almost terrifying to her to think of that. She ran down the stairs and stood listening at his closed door.

That was not his voice, that heavy growl, that animal note. Saul Chadron’s; no other. Her mother came in through the front door, weeping, and clasped Frances in her arms as she stood there, shadowy in the light of the dim hall lamp.

“He is gone!” she said.

Frances did not speak. But for the first time in her life a feeling of bitterness against her father for his hardness of heart and unbending way of injustice lifted itself in her breast. She led her mother to her own room, giving her such comfort as she could put into words.

“He said he never marched out to sure defeat before,” Mrs. Landcraft told her. “I’ve seen him go many a time, Frances, but never with such a pain in my heart as tonight!”

And Saul Chadron was the man who had caused his going, Frances knew, a new illumination having come over the situation since hearing his voice in the colonel’s office a few minutes past. Chadron had been at Meander, telegraphing to the cattlemen’s servants in Washington all the time. He had demanded the colonel’s recall, and the substitution of Major King, because he wanted a man in authority at the post whom he could use.

This favoritism of Chadron made her distrustful at once of Major King. There must be some scheming and plotting afoot. She went down and stood in the hall again, not even above bending to listen at the keyhole. Chadron was talking again. She felt that he must have been talking all the time that she had been away. It must be an unworthy cause that needed so much pleading, she thought.

“Well, he’ll not shoot, I tell you, King; he’s too smart for that. He’ll have to be trapped into it. If you’ve got to have an excuse to fire on them—and I can’t see where it comes in, King, damn my neck if I can—we’ve got to set a trap.”

“Leave that to me,” returned Major King, coldly.

“How much force are you authorized to use?”

“The order leaves that detail to me. ‘Sufficient force to restore order,’ it says.”

“I think you ort to take a troop, at the least, King, and a cannon—maybe two.”

“I don’t think artillery will be necessary, sir.”

“Well, I’ll leave it to you, King, but I’d hate like hell to take you up there and have that feller lick you. You don’t know him like I do. I tell you he’d lay on his back and fight like a catamount as long as he had a breath left in him.”

“Can you locate them in the night?”

“I think we’d have to wait up there somewheres for daybreak. I’m not just sure which cañon they are in.”

There was silence. Frances peeped through the keyhole, but could see nothing except thick smoke over bookcases and files.

“Well, we’ll not want to dislodge them before daylight, anyway,” said King.

“If Macdonald can back off without a fight, he’ll do it,” Chadron declared, “for he knows as well as you and I what it’d mean to fire on the troops. And I want you to git him, King, and make sure you’ve got him.”

“It depends largely on whether the fellow can be provoked into firing on us, Chadron. You think he can be; so do I. But in case he doesn’t, the best we can do will be to arrest him.”

There was the sound of somebody walking about, in quick, nervous strides. Frances knew that Major King had got up from his usurped place at the desk—place unworthily filled, this low intrigue with Chadron aside, she knew—and was strutting in the shadow of his promised glory.

“Leave it to me, Chadron; I’ve got my own account to square with that wolf of the range!”

A sharp little silence, in which Frances could picture Chadron looking at King in his covert, man-weighing way. Then Chadron went on:

“King, I’ve noticed now and then that you seemed to have a soft spot in your gizzard for that little girl of mine. Well, I’ll throw her in to boot if you put this thing through right. Is it a go?”

“I’d hesitate to bargain for the young lady without her being a party to the business,” King replied, whether from wisdom born of his recent experience, or through lack of interest in the proposal Frances could not read in his even, well-pitched voice.

“Oh, she’d jump at you like a bullfrog at red flannel,” Chadron assured him. “I could put your uniform on a wooden man and marry him off to the best girl in seven states. They never think of lookin’ under a soldier’s vest.”

Chadron got up so quickly he overturned his chair.

“By God, sir! do you mean to intimate you wouldn’t have her after what she’s gone through? Well, I’ll put a bullet through any man that says—”

“Oh, hold yourself in, Chadron; there’s no call for this.”

King’s cold contempt would have been like a lash to a man of finer sensibilities than Saul Chadron. As it was, Frances could hear the heavy cattleman breathing like a mad bull.

“When you talk about my little girl, King, go as easy as if you was carryin’ quicksilver in a dish. You told me she was all right a little while ago, and I tell you I don’t like—”

“Miss Chadron was as bright as a redbird when I saw her this afternoon,” King assured him, calmly. “She has suffered no harm at the hands of Macdonald and his outlaws.”

“He’ll dance in hell for that trick before the sun goes down on another day!”

“His big play for sympathy fell flat,” said King, with a contemptuous laugh. “There wasn’t much of a crowd on hand when he arrived at the ranch.”

Silence. A little shifting of feet, a growl from Chadron, and a curse.

“But as for your proposal involving Miss Chadron, I am honored by it,” said King.

“Any man would be!” Chadron declared.

“And we will just let it stand, waiting the lady’s sanction.”

That brightened Chadron up. He moved about, and there was a sound as if he had slapped the young officer on the back in pure comradeship and open admiration.

“What’s your scheme for drawin’ that feller into firin’ on your men?” he asked.

“We’ll talk it over as we go,” said King.

A bugle lifted its sharp, electrifying note in the barracks.

“Boots and saddles!” Chadron said.

“Yes; we march at nine o’clock.”

“You done right to come to the mission after me, for I’d ride to the gatepost of hell to turn a trick agin Saul Chadron!”

Banjo’s voice had a quaver of earnestness in it that needed no daylight to enforce. The pitchy night made a bobbing blur of him as he rode his quick-stepping little horse at Frances Landcraft’s side.

“Yes, you owe him one,” Frances admitted.

“And I’ll pay him before mornin’ or it won’t be no fault of mine. That there little ten-cent-size major he’d ’a’ stopped you if he’d ’a’ known you was goin’, don’t you suppose?”

“I’m sure he would have, Mr. Gibson.”

“Which?” said Banjo.

“Banjo,” she corrected.

“Now, that sounds more comfortabler,” he told her. “I didn’t know for a minute who you meant, that name’s gittin’ to be a stranger to me.”

“Well, we don’t want a stranger along tonight,” said she, seriously.

“You’re right, we don’t. That there horse you’re ridin’ he’s a good one, as good as any in the cavalry, even if he ain’t as tall. He was an outlaw till Missus Mathews tamed him down.”

“How did she do it—not break him like a bronco-buster?”

“No, she done it like she tames Injuns and other folks, by gentle words and gentler hands. Some they’ll tell you she’s sunk down to the ways of Injuns, clean out of a white man’s sight in the dirt and doin’s of them dead-horse eatin’ ’Rapahoes. But I know she ain’t. She lets herself down on a level to reach ’em, and git her hands under ’em so she can lift ’em up, the same as she puts herself on my level when she wants to reach me, or your level, or anybody’s level, mom.”

“Her eyes and her soft ways tell you that, Banjo, as plain as any words.”

“She’s done ten times as much as that big-backed buffalo of a preacher she’s married to ever done for his own people, or ever will. He’s clim above ’em with his educated ways; the Injun’s ironed out of that man. You can’t reach down and help anybody up, mom, if you go along through this here world on stilts.”

“Not very well, Banjo.”

“You need both of your hands to hold your stilts, mom; you ain’t got even a finger to spare for a low-down feller like me.”

“You’re not a low-down fellow, Banjo. Don’t be calling yourself names.”

“A man named Lassiter told me about it.”

They rode along in silence a long time after that. Then Banjo—

“Well, I hope we don’t bust out onto them cavalry fellers too sudden and meet a flock of bullets. I’d never forgive the man that put a bullet through my fiddle.”

“We’ll go slowly, and keep listening; I can tell cavalry from cowboys as far as I can hear.”

“I bet a purty you can, brought up with ’em like you was.”

“They’ll not be able to do anything before daylight, and when we overtake them we’ll ride around and get ahead while they’re waiting for morning. I don’t know where the homesteaders are, but they’ll be sending out scouts to locate them, and we can watch.”

They were following the road that the cavalry had taken an hour in advance of them. Listening now, they rode on without words. Now and then a bush at the roadside flipped a stirrup, now and again Banjo’s little horse snorted in short impatience, as if expressing its disapproval of this journey through the dark. Night was assertive in its heaviness, but communicative of its mysteries in its wild scents—the silent music of its hour.

But Frances Landcraft was not afraid of the night as she rode silently through it with Banjo Gibson at her side. There was no shudder in it for her as there had been on the night that Nola was stolen; it could not have raised up a terror grim enough to turn her back upon the road.

Her one thought was that she must reach Macdonald before Chadron and King could find him, and tell him that the troops were coming, and that he was to be trapped into firing upon them. She knew that many lives depended upon her endurance, courage, and strategy; many lives, but most of all Alan Macdonald’s life. He must be warned, at the cost of her own safety, her own life, if necessary.

To that end the troops must be followed, and a desperate dash at daylight must be made into Macdonald’s camp. Perhaps it would be a race with the cavalry at the last moment.

Banjo said it was beginning to feel like morning. An hour past they had crossed the river at the ford near Macdonald’s place, and the foothills stood rough and black against the starry horizon. They were near them now, so near that the deeper darkness of their timbered sides fell over them like a cold shadow.

Suddenly she checked Banjo with a sharp word.

“I heard them!” she whispered.

Banjo’s little horse, eager for the fellowship of its kind as his master was for his own in his way, threw up its head and whinnied. Banjo churned it with his heels, slapped it on the side of the head, and shut off the shrill call in a grunt, but the signal had gone abroad. From the blackness ahead it was answered, and the slow wind prowling down from the hills ahead of dawn carried the scent of cigarettes to them as they waited breathlessly for results.

“They’re dismounted, and waiting for daylight,” she said. “We must ride around them.”

They were leaving the road, the low brush rasping harshly on their stirrups—as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances—when a dash of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate. Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to know what they should do.

“Keep that little fool horse still!” she said.

Now the patrol, which had stopped to hail, was coming on again. Banjo’s horse was not to be sequestered, nor his craving for companionship in that lonesome night suppressed. He lifted his shrill nicker again, and a shot from the outriders of cavalry was the answer.

“Answer them, tell them who you are Banjo—they all know you—and I’ll slip away. Good-bye, and thank you for your brave help!”

“I’ll go with you, they’ll hear one as much as they’ll hear two.”

“No, no, you can help me much better by doing as I tell you. Tell them that a led horse got away from you, and that’s the noise of it running away.”

She waited for no more words, for the patrol was very near, and now and then one of them fired as he rode. Banjo yelled to them.

“Say, you fellers! Stop that fool shootin’ around here, I tell you!”

“Who are you?” came the answer.

“Banjo, you darned fool! And I tell you right now, pardner, the first man that busts my fiddle with a bullet’ll have to mix with me!”

The soldiers came up laughing, and heard Banjo’s explanation of the horse, still dimly heard, galloping off. Frances stopped to listen. Presently she heard them coming on again, evidently not entirely satisfied with Banjo’s story. But the parley with him had delayed them; she had a good lead now.

In a little swale, where the greasewood reached above her head, she stopped again to listen. She heard the troopers beating the bushes away off to one side, and knew that they soon would give it up. When they passed out of her hearing, she rode on, slowly, and with caution.

She had rounded the cavalry troop and left it far behind; the silence which immersed the sleeping land told her this. No hoof but her own mount’s beat the earth within sound, no foot but hers strained saddle-leather within reach of her now, she believed.

There was only one thing to do; ride slowly in the direction that she had been holding with Banjo, and keep eyes, ears, and nose all on the watch. The ways of the range were early; if there was anybody within a mile of her to windward she would smell the smoke of his fire when he lit it, and see the wink of it, too, unless he built it low.

But it was neither the scent of fire nor the red eye of it winking on the hill that at length gave her despairing heart a fresh handful of hope—nothing less indeed than the aroma of boiling coffee. It had such a feeling of comfort and welcome, of domesticity and peace in it that she felt as if she approached a door with a friend standing ready to take her horse.

Her horse was not insensible to the cheer that somebody was brewing for himself in that wild place. She felt him quicken under her, and put up his head eagerly, and go forward as if he was nearing home. She wondered how far the smell of coffee would carry, and subsequent experience was a revelation on that point.

She had entered the hills, tracking back that wavering scent of coffee, which rose fresh and sudden now, and trailed away the next moment to the mere color of a smell. Now she had it, now she lost it, as she wound over rugged ridges and through groves of quaking-asp and balm of Gilead trees, always mounting among the hills, her eager horse taking the way without guidance, as keen on the scent as she.

It must have taken her an hour to run down that coffee pot. Morning was coming among the fading stars when she mounted a long ridge, the quick striding of her horse indicating that there was something ahead at last, and came upon the camp fire, the coffee, and the cook, all beside a splintered gray rock that rose as high as a house out of the barrenness of the hill.

The coffee-maker was a woman, and her pot was of several gallons’ capacity. She was standing with the cover of the boiler in one hand, a great spoon in the other, her back half bent over her beverage, in the position that the sound of Frances’ coming had struck her. She did not move out of that alert pose of suspicion until Frances drew rein within a few feet of her and gave her good-morning. When the poor harried creature saw that the visitor was a woman, her fright gave place to wonder.

Frances introduced herself without parley, and made inquiry for Macdonald.

“How long have they been gone?”

“Why, not so very long. I reckon you must ’a’ missed meetin’ ’em by a hair.”

“I’ve got to catch up with them, right away! Is there anybody here that can guide me?”

“My son can, and he’ll be glad. He’s just went to sleep back there in the tent after guardin’ them fellers all night. I’ll roust him out.”

The pioneer woman came back almost at once, and pressed a cup of her coffee upon Frances. Frances took the tin vessel eagerly, for she was chilled from her long ride. Then she dismounted to rest her horse while her guide was getting ready, and warm her numb feet at the fire. She told the woman how the scent of her coffee had led her out of her groping like a beacon light on the hill.

“It’s about three miles from here down to the valley,” the woman said. “Coffee will carry on the mornin’ air that way.”

“Do you think your son—?”

“He’s a-comin’,” the woman replied.

The boy came around the rock, leading a horse. He was wide awake and alert, bare-footed, bareheaded, and without a coat. He leaped nimbly onto his bare-backed beast, and Frances got into her saddle as fast as her numb limbs would lift her.

As she road away after the recklessly riding youth, she felt the hope that she had warmed in her bosom all night paling to a shadow. It seemed that, circumstances were ranging after a chart marked out for them, and that her own earnest effort to interfere could not turn aside the tragedy set for the gray valley below her.

Morning was broadening now; she could see her guide distinctly even when he rode many rods ahead. Dawn was the hour for treacherous men and deeds of stealth; Chadron would be on the way again before now, with the strength of the United States behind him to uphold his outlawed hand.

When they came down into the valley there was a low-spreading mist over the gray sage, which lent a warmth to the raw morning wind. There was a sense of indistinctness through the mist which was an ally to Chadron. Ten rods away, even in the growing morning, it would have been impossible to tell a cowboy from a cavalryman.

Over and over again as they rode that sad picture was repeated. Destruction had swept the country, war had visited it. Side by side upon the adjoining lines many of the homesteaders had built their little houses, for the comfort of being near their kind. In the corner of each quarter section on either side of the road along the fertile valley, a little home had stood three days ago. Now all were gone, marked only by little heaps of embers which twinkled a dying glow in the breath of the morning wind.

Day was spreading now. From the little swells in the land as she mounted them Frances could see the deeper mist hovering in the low places, the tops of tall shrubs and slender quaking-asp showing above it as if they stood in snow. The band of sunrise was broadening across the east; far down near the horizon a little slip of lemon-rind moon was faltering out of sight.

But there was no sight, no sound, of anybody in the road ahead. She spurred up beside her guide and asked him if there was any other way that they might have taken. No, he said; they would have to go that way, for there was only one fordable place in the river for many miles. He pointed to the road, fresh-turned by many hoofs, and clamped his lean thighs to his bare horse, galloping on.

The ache of the most intense anxiety that she ever had borne was upon Frances; hope was only a shred in her hand. She believed now that all her desperate riding must come to nothing in the end.

She never had been that long in the saddle before in her life. Her body was numb with cold and fatigue; she felt the motion of her horse, heard its pounding feet in regular beat as it held to its long, swinging gallop, but with the detached sense of being no party to it. All that was sharp in her was the pain of her lost struggle. For she expected every moment to hear firing, and to come upon confusion and death at the next lift of the hill.

In their short cut across the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger. Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale.

“You’d better go back—there’s goin’ to be a fight!” he said, a look of shocked concern in his big wild eyes.

“Do you see them? Where—”

“There they are!”—he clutched her arm, leaning and pointing—“and there’s a bunch of fellers comin’ to meet ’em that they don’t see! I tell you there’s goin’ to be a fight!”

The last dash of that long ride was only a whirlwind of emotions to Frances. It was a red streak. She did not know what became of the boy; she left him there as she lashed her horse past him on the last desperate stretch.

The two forces were not more than half a mile apart, the cavalry just mounting at the ruins of a homestead where she knew they had stopped for breakfast at the well. A little band of outriders was setting off, a scouting party under the lead of Chadron, she believed. Macdonald’s men, their prisoners under guard between two long-strung lines of horsemen, were proceeding at a trot. Between the two forces the road made a long curve. Here it was bordered by brushwood that would hide a man on horseback.

When Frances broke through this screen which had hidden the cavalry from Macdonald, she found the cavalcade halted, for Macdonald had seen her coming down the hill. She told him in few words what her errand to him was, Tom Lassiter and those who rode with him at the head of the column pressing around.

“I was looking for Chadron to come with help and attempt a rescue, and I was moving to forestall him, but we were late getting under way. They”—waving his hand toward the prisoners—“held out until an hour ago.”

“You must think, and think fast!” she said. “They’re almost here!”

“Yes. I’m going ahead to meet them, and offer to turn these prisoners over to Major King. They’ll have no excuse for firing on us then.”

“No, no! some other way—think of some other way!”

He looked gravely into her anxious, pleading eyes. “Why, no matter, Frances. If they’ve come here to do that, they’ll do it, but this way they’ll have to do it in the open, not by a trick.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

“I think perhaps—”

“I’ll go!”

Macdonald turned to Lassiter in a few hurried words. She pressed to his side as the two rode away alone to meet the troops, repeating as if she had been denied:

“I’ll go!”

There was a dash of hoofs behind them, and a man who rode like a sack of bran came bouncing up, excitement over his large face.

“What’s up, Macdonald—where’re you off to?” he inquired.

Macdonald told him in a word, riding forward as he spoke. He introduced the stranger as a newspaper correspondent from Chicago, who had arrived at the homesteaders’ camp the evening past.

“So they got troops, did they?” the newspaper man said, riding forward keenly. “Yes, they told me down in Cheyenne they’d put that trick through. Here they come!”

Macdonald spurred ahead, holding up his right hand in the Indian sign of peace. Major King was riding with Chadron at the head of the vanguard. They drew rein suddenly at sight of what appeared to be such a formidable force at Macdonald’s back, for at that distance, and with the dimness of the scattering mist, it appeared as if several hundred horsemen were approaching.

Major King greeted Frances as he rode up, scowling in high dignity. Chadron could not cover his surprise so well as Major King at seeing her there, her horse in a sweat, her habit torn where the brambles had snatched at her in her hard ride to get ahead of the troops. He gave her a cold good-morning, and sat in the attitude of a man pricking up his ears as he leaned a little to peer into the ranks of the force ahead.

The homesteaders had come to a halt a hundred yards behind Macdonald; about the same distance behind Major King and his officers the cavalry had drawn up across the road. Major King sat in brief silence, as if waiting for Macdonald to begin. He looked the homesteader captain over with severe eyes.

“Well, sir?” said he.

“We were starting for Meander, Major King, to deliver to the sheriff fifty men whom we have taken in the commission of murder and arson,” Macdonald replied, with dignity. “Up to a few minutes ago we had no information that martial law had superseded the civil in this troubled country, but since that is the case, we will gladly turn our prisoners over to you, with the earnest request that they be held, collectively and individually, to answer for the crimes they have committed here.”

“Them’s my men, King—they’ve got ’em there!” said Chadron, boiling over the brim.

“This expedition has come to the relief of certain men, attacked and surrounded in the discharge of their duty by a band of cattle thieves of which you are the acknowledged head,” replied Major King.

“Then you have come on a mistaken errand, sir,” Macdonald told him.

“I have come into this lawless country to restore order and insure the lives and safety of property of the people to whom it belongs.”

“The evidence of these hired raiders’ crimes lies all around you, Major King,” Macdonald said. “These men swept in here in the employ of the cattle interests, burned these poor homes, and murdered such of the inhabitants as were unable to fly to safety in the hills ahead of them. We are appealing to the law; the cattlemen never have done that.”

“Say, Mr. Soldier, let me tell you something”—the newspaper correspondent, to whom one man’s dignity was as much as another’s, kicked his horse forward—“these raiders that bloody-handed Chadron sent in here have murdered children and women, do you know that?”

“Who in the hell are you?” Chadron demanded, bristling with rage, whirling his horse to face him.

“This is Chadron,” Macdonald said, a little flash of humor in his eyes over Chadron’s hearing the truth about himself from an unexpected source.

“You’d just as well keep your questions for another day—you’ll send nothing out of here!” said Major King, sharply.

Neel looked across his nose at King with triumphant leer.

“I’ve sent out something, Mr. Soldier-man,” said he; “it was on the wire by midnight last night, rushed to Meander by courier, and it’s all over the country this morning. It’s a story that’ll give the other side of this situation up here to the war department, and it’ll make this whole nation climb up on its hind legs and howl. Murder? Huh, murder’s no name for it!”

Chadron was growling something below his breath into King’s ear.

“Forty-three men and boys—look at them, there they are—rounded up fifty of the cutthroats the Drovers’ Association rushed up here from Cheyenne on a special train to wipe the homesteaders out,” Neel continued, rising to considerable heat in the partisanship of his new light. “Five dollars a day was the hire of that gang, and five dollars bonus for every man, woman, or baby that they killed! Yes, I’ve got signed statements from them, Chadron, and I’d like to know what you’ve got to say, if anything?”

“Disarm that rabble,” said Major King, speaking to a subordinate officer, “and take charge of the men they have been holding.”

“Sir, I protest—” Macdonald began.

“I have no words to waste on you!” Major King cut him off shortly.

“I’d play a slow hand on that line, King, and a careful one, if I were you,” advised Neel. “If you take these men’s guns away from them they’ll be at the mercy of Chadron’s brigands. I tell you, man, I know the situation in this country!”

“Thank you,” said King, in cold hauteur.

Chadron’s eyes were lighting with the glitter of revenge. He sat grinding his bridle-reins in his gloved hand, as if he had the bones of the nesters in his palm at last.

“You will proceed, with the rescued party under guard, to Meander,” continued Major King to his officer, speaking as if he had plans for his own employment aside from the expedition. “There, Mr. Chadron will furnish transportation to return them whence they came.”

“I’ll furnish—” began Chadron, in amazement at this unexpected turn.

“Transportation, sir,” completed Major King, in his cold way.

“These men should be held to the civil authorities for trial in this county, and not set free,” Macdonald protested, indignant over the order.

Major King ignored him. He was still looking at Chadron, who was almost choking on his rage.

“Certainly not, sir!” snapped King.

“My orders to you—” Chadron flared.

“It happens that I am not marching under your orders at—”

“The hell you ain’t!” Chadron exploded.

“It’s an outrage on humanity to turn those scoundrels loose, Major King!” Neel said. “Why, I’ve got signed statements, I tell you—”

“Remove this man to the rear!” Major King addressed a lieutenant, who communicated the order to the next lowest in rank immediately at hand, who passed it on to two troopers, who came forward briskly and rode the protesting correspondent off between them.

Other troopers were collecting the arms of the homesteaders, a proceeding which Macdonald witnessed with a sick heart. Frances, sitting her horse in silence through all that had passed, gave him what comfort and hope she could express with her eyes.

“Detail a patrol of twenty men,” Major King continued his instructions to his officer, “to keep the roads and disarm all individuals and bands encountered.”

“That don’t apply to my men!” declared Chadron, positively. In his face there was a dark threat of disaster for Major King’s future hopes of advancement.

Chadron was gaping in amazement. That feeling in him seemed to smother every other, even his hot rage against King for this sudden shifting of their plans and complete overthrow of the cattlemen’s expectations of the troops. The one little comfort that he was to get out of the expedition was that of seeing his raiders taken out of Macdonald’s hands and marched off to be set free.

Macdonald felt that he understood the change in King. The major had come there full of the intention of doing Chadron’s will; he had not a doubt of that. But murder, even with the faint color of excuse that they would have contrived to give it, could not be done in the eyes of such a witness as Frances Landcraft. Subserviency, a bending of dignity even, could not be stooped to before one who had been schooled to hold a soldier’s honor his most precious endowment.

Major King had shown a hand of half-fairness in treating both sides alike. That much was to his credit, at the worst. But he had not done it because he was a high-souled and honorable man. His eyes betrayed him in that, no matter how stern he tried to make them. The coming of that fair outrider in the night had turned aside a great tragedy, and saved Major King partly to himself, at least, and perhaps wholly to his career.

“You’ve double-crossed me, King,” Chadron accused, in the flat voice of a man throwing down his hand. “I brought you up here to throw these nesters off of our land.”

“The civil courts must decide the ownership of that,” returned King, sourly. “Disarm that man!” He indicated Macdonald, and turned his horse as if to ride back and join his command.

The lieutenant appeared to feel that it would be no lowering of his dignity to touch the weapons of a man such as Macdonald’s bearing that morning had shown him to be. He approached with a smile half apologetic. Chadron was sitting by on his horse watching the proceeding keenly.

“Pardon me,” said the officer, reaching out to receive Macdonald’s guns.

A swift change swept over Macdonald’s face, a flush dyeing it to his ears. He sat motionless a little while, as if debating the question, the young officer’s hand still outstretched. Macdonald dropped his hand, quickly, as if moved to shorten the humiliation, to the buckle of his belt, and opened it with deft jerk. At that moment Chadron, ten feet away, slung a revolver from his side and fired.

Macdonald rocked in his saddle as Frances leaped to the ground and ran to his side. He wilted forward, his hat falling, and crumpled into her arms. The lieutenant relieved her of her bloody burden, and eased Macdonald to the ground.

Major King came riding back. At his sharp command troopers surrounded Chadron, who sat with his weapon still poised, like one gazing at the mark at which he had fired, the smoke of his shot around him.

“In a second he’d ’a’ got me! but I beat him to it, by God! I beat him to it!” he said.

Macdonald’s belt had slipped free of his body. With its burden of cartridges and its two long pistols it lay at Frances’ feet. She stooped, a little sound in her throat between a sob and a cry, jerked one of the guns out, wheeled upon Chadron and fired. The lieutenant struck up her arm in time to save the cattleman’s life. The blow sent the pistol whirling out of her hand.

“They will go off that way, sometimes,” said the young officer, with apology in his soft voice.

The soldiers closed around Chadron and hurried him away. A moment Major King sat looking at Macdonald, whose blood was wasting in the roadside dust from a wound in his chest. Then he flashed a look into Frances’ face that had a sneer of triumph in it, wheeled his horse and galloped away.

In a moment the lieutenant was summoned, leaving Frances alone between the two forces with Macdonald. She did not know whether he was dead. She dropped to her knees in the dust and began to tear frantically at his shirt to come to the wound. Tom Lassiter came hurrying up with others, denouncing the treacherous shot, swearing vengeance on the cowardly head that had conceived so murderous a thing.

Lassiter said that he was not dead, and set to work to stem the blood. It seemed to Frances that the world had fallen away from her, leaving her alone. She stood aside a little, her chin up in her old imperious way, her eyes on the far hills where the tender sunlight was just striking among the white-limbed aspen trees. But her heart was bent down to the darkness of despair.

She asked no questions of the men who were working so earnestly after their crude way to check that precious stream; she stood in the activity of passing troopers and escorted raiders insensible of any movement or sound in all the world around her. Only when Tom Lassiter stood from his ministrations and looked at her with understanding in his old weary eyes she turned her face back again, slowly resolute, to see if he had died.

Her throat was dry. It took an effort to bring a sound from it, and then it was strained and wavering.

“Is he—dead?”

“No, miss, he ain’t dead,” Tom answered. But there was such a shadow of sorrow and pain in his eyes that tears gushed into her own.

“Will—will—”

Tom shook his head. “The Lord that give him alone can answer that,” he said, a feeling sadness in his voice.

“Miss Landcraft, I am ordered to convey you to Alamito Ranch—under guard,” said he.

Banjo Gibson, held to be harmless and insignificant by Major King, had been set free. Now he came up, leading his horse, shocked to the deepest fibers of his sensitive soul by the cowardly deed that Saul Chadron had done.

“It went clean through him!” he said, rising from his inspection of Macdonald’s wound. And then, moved by the pain in Frances’ tearless eyes, he enlarged upon the advantages of that from a surgical view. “The beauty of a hole in a man’s chest like that is that it lets the pizen dreen off,” he told her. “It wouldn’t surprise me none to see Mac up and around inside of a couple of weeks, for he’s as hard as old hick’ry.”

“Well, I’m not going to Alamito Ranch and leave him out here to die of neglect, orders or no orders!” said she to the lieutenant.

The young officer’s face colored; he plucked at his new mustache in embarrassment. Perhaps the prospect of carrying a handsome and dignified young lady in his arms for a matter of twenty-odd miles was not as alluring to him as it might have been to another, for he was a slight young man, only a little while out of West Point. But orders were orders, and he gave Frances to understand that in diplomatic and polite phrasing.

She scorned him and his veneration for orders, and turned from him coldly.

“Is there no doctor with your detachment?” she asked.

“He has gone on with the main body, Miss Landcraft. They have several wounded.”

“Wounded murderers and burners of homes! Well, I’m not going to Alamito Ranch with you, sir, unless you can contrive an ambulance of some sort and take this gentleman too.”

The officer brightened. He believed it could be arranged. Inside of an hour he had Tom Lassiter around with a team and spring wagon, in which the homesteaders laid Macdonald tenderly upon a bed of hay.

Banjo waited until they were ready to begin their slow march to the ranch, when he led his little horse forward.

“I’ll go on to the agency after the doctor and send him over to Alamito as quick as he can go,” he said. “And I’ll see if Mother Mathews can go over, too. She’s worth four doctors when it comes to keep the pizen from spreadin’ in a wound.”

Frances gave him her benediction with her eyes, and farewell with a warm handclasp, and Banjo’s beribboned horse frisked off on its long trip, quite refreshed from the labors of the past night.

Frances rode in the wagon with Macdonald, a canteen of water slung over her shoulders. Now and then she moistened his lips with a little of it, and bathed his eyes, closed in pathetic weariness. He was unconscious still from the blow of Saul Chadron’s big bullet. As she ministered to him she felt that he would open his eyes on this world’s pains and cruel injustices nevermore.

And why had Major King ordered her, virtually under arrest, to Alamito Ranch, instead of sending her in disgrace to the post? Was it because he feared that she would communicate with her father from the post, and discover to him the treacherous compact between Chadron and King, or merely to take a mean revenge upon her by humiliating her in Nola Chadron’s eyes?

Major King had seen his promised reward withdrawn through her intervention, and had made a play of being fair to both sides in the controversy, except that he kept one hand on Chadron’s shoulder, so to speak, in making martyrs of those bloody men whom he had sent there to burn and kill. They were to be shipped safely back to their place, where they would disperse, and walk free of all prosecution afterwards. For that one service to the cattlemen Major King could scarcely hope to win his coveted reward.

She believed that Alan Macdonald would die. It seemed that the fever which would consume his feeble hope of life was already kindling on his lips. But she had no tears to pour out over him now. Only a great hardness in her heart against Saul Chadron, and a wild desire to lift her hand and strike him low.

Whether Major King would make her attempt against Chadron’s life, or her interference with his military expedition his excuse for placing her under guard, remained for the future to develop. She turned these things in her mind as they proceeded along the white river road toward the ranch.

It came noontime, and decline of sun; the shadow of the mountains reached down into the valley, the mist came purple again over the foothills, the fire of sunset upon the clouds. Alan Macdonald still lived, his strong harsh face turned to the fading skies, his tired eyelids closed upon his dreams.