FRANCES PULLED BACK ON MOLLY’S BRIDLE REINS. Frontispiece (Page 125).

FRANCES OF THE
RANGES

OR

THE OLD RANCHMAN’S
TREASURE

BY

AMY BELL MARLOWE

AUTHOR OF
THE OLDEST OF FOUR, THE GIRLS OF HILLCREST
FARM, WYN’S CAMPING DAYS, ETC.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1915, by

GROSSET & DUNLAP

Frances of the Ranges

FRANCES OF THE RANGES

CHAPTER I
THE ADVENTURE IN THE COULIE

The report of a bird gun made the single rider in sight upon the short-grassed plain pull in her pinto and gaze westerly toward the setting sun, now going down in a field of golden glory.

The pinto stood like a statue, and its rider seemed a part of the steed, so well did she sit in her saddle. She gazed steadily under her hand–gazed and listened.

Finally, she murmured: “That’s the snarl of a lion–sure. Get up, Molly!”

The pinto sprang forward. There was a deep coulie ahead, with a low range of grass-covered hills beyond. Through those hills the lions often came down onto the grazing plains. It was behind these hills that the sun was going down, for the hour was early.

As she rode, the girl loosened the gun she carried in the holster slung at her hip. On her saddle horn was coiled a hair rope.

She was dressed in olive green–her blouse, open at the throat, divided skirts, leggings, and broad-brimmed hat of one hue. Two thick plaits of sunburned brown hair hung over her shoulders, and to her waist. Her grey eyes were keen and rather solemn. Although the girl on the pinto could not have been far from sixteen, her face seemed to express a serious mind.

The scream of that bane of the cattlemen–the mountain lion–rang out from the coulie again. The girl clapped her tiny spurs against the pinto’s flanks, and that little animal doubled her pace. In a minute they were at the head of the slope and the girl could see down into the coulie, where low mesquite shrubs masked the bottom and the little spring that bubbled there.

Something was going on down in the coulie. The bushes waved; something rose and fell in their midst like a flail. There was a voice other than that of the raucous tones of the lion, and which squalled almost as loudly!

A little to one side of the shrubs stood a quivering grey pony, its ears pointed toward the rumpus in the shrubs, blowing and snorting. The rider of that empty saddle was plainly in trouble with the snarling lion.

The cattlemen of the Panhandle looked upon the lion as they did upon the coyote–save that the former did more damage to the herds. Roping the lion, or shooting it with the pistol, was a general sport. But caught in a corner, the beast–unlike the coyote–would fight desperately. Whoever had attacked this one had taken on a larger contract than he could handle. That was plain.

Urged by the girl the pinto went down the slope of the hollow on a keen run. At the bottom she snorted and swerved from the mesquite clump. The smell of the lion was strong in Molly’s nostrils.

“Stand still, Molly!” commanded the girl, and was out of the saddle with an ease that seemed phenomenal. She ran straight toward the thrashing bushes, pistol in hand.

The lion leaped, and the person who had been beating it off with the shotgun was borne down under the attack. Once those sabre-sharp claws got to work, the victim of the lion’s charge would be viciously torn.

The girl saw the gun fly out of his hands. The lion was too close upon its prey for her to use the pistol. She slipped the weapon back into its holster and picked up the shotgun. Plunging through the bushes she swung the gun and knocked the beast aside from its prey. The blow showed the power in her young arms and shoulders. The lion rolled over and over, half stunned.

“Quick!” she advised the victim of the lion’s attack. “He’ll be back at us.”

Indeed, scarcely had she spoken when the brute scrambled to its feet. The girl shouldered the gun and pulled the other trigger as the beast leaped.

There was no report. Either there was no shell in that barrel, or something had fouled the trigger. The lion, all four paws spread, and each claw displayed, sailed through the air like a bat, or a flying squirrel. Its jaws were wide open, its teeth bared, and the screech it emitted was, in truth, a terrifying sound.

The girl realized that the original victim of the lion’s attack was scrambling to his feet. She dropped to her knee and kept the muzzle of the gun pointed directly for the beast’s breast. The empty gun was her only defense in that perilous moment.

“Grab my gun! Here in the holster!” she panted.

The lion struck against the muzzle of the shotgun, and the girl–in spite of the braced position she had taken–was thrown backward to the ground. As she fell the pistol was drawn from its holster.

The empty shotgun had saved her from coming into the embrace of the angry lion, for while she fell one way, the animal went another. Then came three shots in rapid succession.

She scrambled to her feet, half laughing, and dusting the palms of her gantlets. The lion was lying a dozen yards away, while the victim of its attack stood near, the blue smoke curling from the revolver.

“My goodness!”

After the excitement was all over that exclamation from the girl seemed unnecessary. But the fact that startled her was, that it was not a man at all to whose aid she had come. He was a youth little older than herself.

“I say!” this young man exclaimed. “That was plucky of you, Miss–awfully plucky, don’t you know! That creature would have torn me badly in another minute.”

The girl nodded, but seemed suddenly dumb. She was watching the youth keenly from under the longest, silkiest lashes, it seemed to Pratt Sanderson, he had ever seen.

“I hope you’re not hurt?” he said, shyly, extending the pistol toward the girl. She stood with her hands upon her hips, panting a little, and with plenty of color in her brown cheeks.

“How about you?” she asked, shortly.

It was true the young man appeared much the worse for the encounter. In the first place, he stood upon one foot, a good deal like a crane, for his left ankle had twisted when he fell. His left arm, too, was wrenched, and he felt a tingling sensation all through the member, from the shoulder to the tips of his fingers.

Beside, his sleeve was ripped its entire length, and the lion’s claws had cut deep into his arm. The breast of his shirt was in strips.

“I say! I’m hurt, worse than I thought, eh?” he said, a little uncertainly. He wavered a moment on his sound foot, and then sank slowly to the grass.

“Wait! Don’t let yourself go!” exclaimed the girl, getting into quick action. “It isn’t so bad.”

She ran for the leather water-bottle that hung from her saddle. Molly had stood through the trouble without moving. Now the girl filled the bottle at the spring.

Pratt Sanderson was lying back on his elbows, and the white lids were lowered over his black eyes.

The treatment the range girl gave him was rather rough, but extremely efficacious. She dashed half the contents of the bottle into his face, and he sat up, gasping and choking. She tore away his tattered shirt in a most matter-of-fact manner and began to bathe the scratches on his chest with her kerchief (quickly unknotted from around her throat), which she had saturated with water. Fortunately, the wounds were not very deep, after all.

“You–you must think me a silly sort of chap,” he gasped. “Foolish to keel over like this—”

“You haven’t been used to seeing blood,” the girl observed. “That makes a difference. I’ve been binding up the boys’ cuts and bruises all my life. Never was such a place as the old Bar-T for folks getting hurt.”

“Bar-T?” ejaculated the young man, with sudden interest. “Then you must be Miss Rugley, Captain Dan Rugley’s daughter?”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, quietly. “Captain Rugley is my father.”

“And you’re going to put on that very clever spectacle at the Jackleg schoolhouse next month? I’ve heard all about it–and what you have done toward making it what Bill Edwards calls a howling success. I’m stopping with Bill. Mrs. Edwards is my mother’s friend, and I’m the advance guard of a lot of Amarillo people who are coming out to the Edwardses just to see your ‘Pageant of the Panhandle.’ Bill and his wife are no end enthusiastic about it.”

The deeper color had gradually faded out of the girl’s cheeks. She was cool enough now; but she kept her eyes lowered, just the same. He would have liked to see their expression once more. There had been a startled look in their grey depths when first she glanced at him.

“I am afraid they make too much of my part in the affair,” said she, quietly. “I am only one of the committee—”

“But they say you wrote it all,” the young fellow interposed, eagerly.

“Oh–that! It happened to be easy for me to do so. I have always been deeply interested in the Panhandle–‘The Great American Desert’ as the old geographies used to call all this great Middle West, of Kansas, Nebraska, the Indian Territory, and Upper Texas.

“My father crossed it among the first white men from the Eastern States. He came back here to settle–long before I was born, of course–when a plow had never been sunk in these range lands. He belongs to the old cattle régime. He wouldn’t hear until lately of putting wheat into any of the Bar-T acres.”

“Ah, well, by all accounts he is one of the few men who still know how to make money out of cows,” laughed Pratt Sanderson. “Thank you, Miss Rugley. I can’t let you do anything more for me—”

“You are a long way from the Edwards’ place,” she said. “You’d better ride to the Bar-T for the night. We will send a boy over there with a message, if you think Mrs. Edwards will be worried.”

“I suppose I’d better do as you say,” he said, rather ruefully. “Mrs. Edwards will be worried about my absence over supper time. She says I’m such a tenderfoot.”

For a moment a twinkle came into the veiled grey eyes; the new expression illumined the girl’s face like a flash of sunlight across the shadowed field.

“You rather back up her opinion when you tackle a lion with nothing but birdshot–and one barrel of your gun fouled in the bargain,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

“But I killed it with a revolver!” exclaimed the young fellow, struggling to his feet again.

“That pistol throws a good-sized bullet,” said the ranchman’s daughter, smiling. “But I’d never think of picking a quarrel with a lion unless I had a good rope, or something that threw heavier lead than birdshot.”

He looked at her, standing there in the after-glow of the sunset, with honest admiration in his eyes.

“I am a tenderfoot, I guess,” he admitted. “And you were not scared for a single moment!”

“Oh, yes, I was,” and Frances Rugley’s laugh was low and musical. “But it was all over so quickly that the scare didn’t have a chance to show. Come on! I’ll catch your pony, and we’ll make the Bar-T before supper time.”

CHAPTER II
“FRANCES OF THE RANGES”

The grey was a well-trained cow-pony, for the Edwards’ ranch was one of the latest in that section of the Panhandle to change from cattle to wheat raising. A part of its range had not as yet been plowed, and Bill Edwards still had a corral full of good riding stock.

Pratt Sanderson got into his saddle without much trouble and the girl whistled for Molly.

“I’ll throw that lion over my saddle,” she said. “Molly won’t mind it much–especially if you hold her bridle with her head up-wind.”

“All right, Miss Rugley,” the young man returned. “My name is Pratt Sanderson–I don’t know that you know it.”

“Very well, Mr. Sanderson,” she repeated.

“They don’t call me that much,” the young fellow blurted out. “I answer easier to my first name, you know–Pratt.”

“Very well, Pratt,” said the girl, frankly. “I am Frances Rugley–Frances Durham Rugley.”

She lifted the heavy lion easily, flung it across Molly, and lashed it to the saddle; then she mounted in a hurry and the ponies started for the ranch trail which Frances had been following before she heard the report of the shotgun.

The youth watched her narrowly as they rode along through the dropping darkness. She was a well-matured girl for her age, not too tall, her limbs rounded, but without an ounce of superfluous flesh. Perhaps she knew of his scrutiny; but her face remained calm and she did not return his gaze. They talked of inconsequential things as they rode along.

Pratt Sanderson thought: “What a girl she is! Mrs. Edwards is right–she’s the finest specimen of girlhood on the range, bar none! And she is more than a little intelligent–quite literary, don’t you know, if what they say is true of her. Where did she learn to plan pageants? Not in one of these schoolhouses on the ranges, I bet an apple! And she’s a cowgirl, too. Rides like a female Centaur; shoots, of course, and throws a rope. Bet she knows the whole trade of cattle herding.

“Yet there isn’t a girl who went to school with me at the Amarillo High who looks so well-bred, or who is so sure of herself and so easy to converse with.”

For her part, Frances was thinking: “And he doesn’t remember a thing about me! Of course, he was a senior when I was in the junior class. He has already forgotten most of his schoolmates, I suppose.

“But that night of Cora Grimshaw’s party he danced with me six times. He was in the bank then, and had forgotten all ‘us kids,’ I suppose. Funny how suddenly a boy grows up when he gets out of school and into business. But me—

“Well! I should have known him if we hadn’t met for twenty years. Perhaps that’s because he is the first boy I ever danced with–in town, I mean. The boys on the ranch don’t count.”

Her tranquil face and manner had not betrayed–nor did they betray now–any of her thoughts about this young fellow whom she remembered so clearly, but who plainly had not taxed his memory with her.

That was the way of Frances Durham Rugley. A great deal went on in her mind of which nobody–not even Captain Dan Rugley, her father–dreamed.

Left motherless at an early age, the ranchman’s daughter had grown to her sixteenth year different from most girls. Even different from most other girls of the plains and ranges.

For ten years there was not a woman’s face–white, black, or red–on the Bar-T acres. The Captain had married late in life, and had loved Frances’ mother devotedly. When she died suddenly the man could not bear to hear or see another woman on the place.

Then Frances grew into his heart and life, and although the old wound opened as the ranchman saw his daughter expand, her love and companionship was like a healing balm poured into his sore heart.

The man’s strong, fierce nature suddenly went out to his child and she became all and all to him–just as her mother had been during the few years she had been spared to him.

So the girl’s schooling was cut short–and Frances loved books and the training she had received at the Amarillo schools. She would have loved to go on–to pass her examinations for college preparation, and finally get her diploma and an A. B., at least, from some college.

That, however, was not to be. Old Captain Rugley lavished money on her like rain, when she would let him. She used some of the money to buy books and a piano and pay for a teacher for the latter to come to the ranch, while she spent much midnight oil studying the books by herself.

Captain Rugley’s health was not all it should have been. Frances could not now leave him for long.

Until recently the old ranchman had borne lightly his seventy years. But rheumatism had taken hold upon him and he did not stand as straight as of old, nor ride so well.

He was far from an invalid; but Frances realized–more than he did, perhaps–that he had finished his scriptural span of life, and that his present years were borrowed from that hardest of taskmasters, Father Time.

Often it was Frances who rode the ranges, instead of Captain Rugley, viewing the different herds, receiving the reports of underforemen and wranglers, settling disputes between the punchers themselves, looking over chuck outfits, buying hay, overseeing brandings, and helping cut out fat steers for the market trail.

There was nothing Frances of the ranges did not know about the cattle-raising business. And she was giving some attention to the new grain-raising ideas that had come into the Panhandle with the return of the first-beaten farming horde.

For the Texas Panhandle has had its two farming booms. The first advance of the farmers into the ranges twenty-five years or more before had been a rank failure.

“They came here and plowed up little spots in our parsters that air eyesores now,” one old cowman said, “and then beat it back East when they found it didn’t rain ’cordin’ ter schedule. This land ain’t good for nothin’ ’cept cows.”

But this had been in the days of the old unfenced ranges, and before dry-farming had become a science. Now the few remaining cattlemen kept their pastures fenced, and began to think of raising other feed than river-bottom hay.

The cohorts of agriculturists were advancing; the cattlemen were falling back. The ancient staked plains of the Spanish conquestadors were likely to become waving wheat fields and smiling orchards.

The young girl and her companion could not travel fast to the Bar-T ranch-house for two reasons: Pratt Sanderson was sore all over, and the mountain lion slung across Frances’ pony caused some trouble. The pinto objected to carrying double–especially when an occasional draft of evening air brought the smell of the lion to her nostrils.

The young fellow admired the way in which the girl handled her mount. He had seen many half-wild horsemen at the Amarillo street fairs, and the like; since coming to Bill Edwards’ place he had occasionally observed a good rider handling a mean cayuse. But this man-handling of a half-wild pony was nothing like the graceful control Frances of the ranges had over Molly. The pinto danced and whirled and snorted, and once almost got her quivering nose down between her knees–the first position of the bucking horse.

At every point Frances met her mount with a stern word, or a firm rein, or a touch of the spur or quirt, which quickly took the pinto’s mind off her intention of “acting up.”

“You are wonderful!” exclaimed the youth, excitedly. “I wish I could ride half as good as you do, Miss Frances.”

Frances smiled. “You did not begin young enough,” she said. “My father took me in his arms when I was a week old and rode a half-wild mustang twenty miles across the ranges to exhibit me to the man who was our next-door neighbor in those days. You see, my tuition began early.”

It was not yet fully dark, although the ranch-house lamps were lit, when they came to the home corral and the big fenced yard in front of the Bar-T.

Two boys ran out to take the ponies. One of these Frances instructed to saddle a fresh pony and ride to the Edwards place with word that Pratt Sanderson would remain all night at the Bar-T.

The other boy was instructed to give the mountain lion to one of the men, that the pelt might be removed and properly stretched for curing.

“Come right in, Pratt,” said the girl, with frank cordiality. “You’ll have a chance for a wash and a brush before supper. And dad will find you some clean clothes.

“There’s dad on the porch, though he’s forbidden the night air unless he puts a coat on. Oh, he’s a very, very bad patient, indeed!”

CHAPTER III
THE OLD SPANISH CHEST

Pratt saw a tall, lean man–a man of massive frame, indeed, with a heavy mustache that had once been yellow but had now turned grey, teetering on the rear legs of a hard-bottomed chair, with his shoulders against the wall of the house.

There were plenty of inviting-looking chairs scattered about the veranda. There were rugs, and potted plants, and a lounge-swing, with a big lamp suspended from the ceiling, giving light enough over all.

But the master of the Bar-T had selected a straight-backed, hard-bottomed chair, of a kind that he had been used to for half a century and more. He brought the front legs down with a bang as the girl and youth approached.

“What’s kept you, Frances?” he asked, mellowly. “Evening, sir! I take it your health’s well?”

He put out a hairy hand into which Pratt confided his own and, the next moment, vowed secretly he would never risk it there again! His left hand tingled badly enough since the attentions of the mountain lion. Now his right felt as though it had been in an ore-crusher.

“This is Pratt Sanderson, from Amarillo,” the daughter of the ranchman said first of all. “He’s a friend of Mrs. Bill Edwards. He was having trouble with a lion over in Brother’s Coulie, when I came along. We got the lion; but Pratt got some scratches. Can’t Ming find him a flannel shirt, Dad?”

“Of course,” agreed Captain Rugley, his eyes twinkling just as Frances’ had a little while before. “You tell him as you go in. Come on, Pratt Sanderson. I’ll take a look at your scratches myself.”

A shuffle-footed Chinaman brought the shirt to the room Pratt Sanderson had been ushered to by the cordial old ranchman. The Chinaman assisted the youth to get into the garment, too, for Captain Rugley had already swathed the scratches on Pratt’s chest and arm with linen, after treating the wounds with a pungent-smelling but soothing salve.

“San Soo, him alle same have dlinner ready sloon,” said Ming, sprinkling ‘l’s’ indiscriminately in his information. “Clapen an’ Misse Flank wait on pleaza.”

The young fellow, when he was presentable, started back for the “pleaza.”

Everything he saw–every appointment of the house–showed wealth, and good taste in the use of it. The old ranchman furnished the former, of course; but nobody but Frances, Pratt thought, could have arranged the furnishings and adornments of the house.

The room he was to occupy as a guest was large, square, grey-walled, was hung with bright pictures, a few handsome Navajo blankets, and had heavy soft rugs on the floor. There was a gay drapery in one corner, behind which was a canvas curtain masking a shower bath with nickel fittings.

The water ran off from the shallow marble basin through an open drain under the wall. The bed was of brass and looked comfortable. There was a big steamer chair drawn invitingly near the window which opened into the court, or garden, around which the house was built.

The style of the building was Spanish, or Mexican. A fountain played in the court and there were trees growing there, among the branches of which a few lanterns were lit, like huge fireflies.

In passing back to the front porch of the ranch-house (farther south it would have been called hacienda) Pratt noted Spanish and Aztec armor hanging on the walls; high-backed, carven chairs of black oak, mahogany, and other heavy woods; weapons of both modern and ancient Indian manufacture, and those of the style used by Cortez and his cohorts when they marched on the capital city of the great Montezuma.

In a glass-fronted case, too, hung a brilliant cloak of parakeet feathers such as were worn by the Aztec nobles. Lights had been lit in the hall since he had arrived and the treasures were now revealed for the first time to the startled eye of the visitor.

The sight of these things partially prepared him for the change in Frances’ appearance. Her smooth brown skin and her veiled eyes were the same. She still wore her hair in girlish plaits. She was quite the simple, unaffected girl of sixteen. But her dress was white, of some soft and filmy material which looked to the young fellow like spider’s web in the moonlight. It was cut a little low at the throat; her arms were bared to the elbow. She wore a heavy, glittering belt of alternate red-gold links and green stones, and on one arm a massive, wrought-gold bracelet–a serpent with turquoise eyes.

“Frances is out in her warpaint,” chuckled Captain Rugley’s mellow voice from the shadow, where he was tipped back in his chair again.

“You gave me these things out of your treasure chest, Daddy, to wear when we had company,” said the girl, quite calmly.

She wore the barbarous ornaments with an air of dignity. They seemed to suit her, young as she was. And Pratt knew that the girdle and bracelet must be enormously valuable as well as enormously old.

The expression “treasure chest” was so odd that it stuck in the young man’s mind. He was very curious as to what it meant, and determined, when he knew Frances better, to ask about it.

A little silence had fallen after the girl’s speech. Then Captain Rugley started forward suddenly and the forelegs of his chair came sharply to the planks.

“Hello!” he said, into the darkness outside the radiance of the porch light. “Who’s there?”

Frances fluttered out of her chair. Pratt noted that she slipped into the shadow. Neither she nor the Captain had been sitting in the full radiance of the lamp.

The visitor had heard nothing; but he knew that the old ranchman was leaning forward listening intently.

“Who’s there?” the captain demanded again.

“Don’t shoot, neighbor!” said a hoarse voice out of the darkness. “I’m jest a-paddin’ of it Amarillo way. Can I get a flop-down and a bite here?”

“Only a tramp, Dad,” breathed Frances, with a sigh.

“How did you get into this compound?” demanded Captain Rugley, none the less suspiciously and sternly.

“I come through an open gate. It’s so ’tarnal dark, neighbor—”

“You see those lights down yonder?” snapped the Captain. “They are at the bunk-house. Cook’ll give you some chuck and a chance to spread your blanket. But don’t you let me catch you around here too long after breakfast to-morrow morning. We don’t encourage hobos, and we already have all the men hired for the season we want.”

“All right, neighbor,” said the voice in the darkness, cheerfully–too cheerfully, in fact, Pratt Sanderson thought. An ordinary man–even one with the best intentions in the world–would have been offended by the Captain’s brusk words.

A stumbling foot went down the yard. Captain Rugley grunted, and might have said something explanatory, but just then Ming came softly to the door, whining:

“Dlinner, Misse.”

“Guess Pratt’s hungry, too,” grunted the Captain, rising. “Let’s go in and see what the neighbors have flung over the back fence.”

But sad as the joke was, all that Captain Rugley said seemed so open-hearted and kindly–save only when he was talking to the unknown tramp–that the guest could not consider him vulgar.

The dining-room was long, massively furnished, well lit, and the sideboard exposed some rare pieces of old-fashioned silver. Two heavy candelabra–the loot of some old cathedral, and of Spanish manufacture–were set upon either end of the great serving table.

All these treasures, found in the ranch-house of a cowman of the Panhandle, astounded the youth from Amarillo. Nothing Mrs. Bill Edwards had said of Frances of the ranges and her father had prepared him for this display.

Captain Rugley saw his eyes wandering from one thing to the other as Ming served a perfect soup.

“Just pick-ups over the Border,” the old man explained, with a comprehensive wave of his hand toward the candelabra and other articles of value. “I and a partner of mine, when we were in the Rangers years and years ago, raided over into Mexico and brought back the bulk of these things.

“We cached them down in Arizona till after I was married and built this ranch-house. Poor Lon! Never have heard what became of him. I’ve got his share of the treasure out of old Don Milo Morales’ hacienda right here. When he comes for it we’ll divide. But I haven’t heard from Lon since long before Frances, here, was born.”

This was just explanation enough to whet the curiosity of Pratt. Talk of the Texas Rangers, and raiding over the Border, and looting a Mexican hacienda, was bound to set the young man’s imagination to work.

But the dinner, as it was served in courses, took up Pratt’s present attention almost entirely. Never–not even when he took dinner at the home of the president of the bank in Amarillo–had he eaten so well-cooked and well-served a meal.

Despite his commonplace speech, Captain Rugley displayed a familiarity with the niceties of table etiquette that surprised the guest. Frances’ mother had come from the East and from a family that had been used to the best for generations. And the old ranchman, in middle age, had set himself the task of learning the niceties of table manners to please her.

He had never fallen back into the old, careless ways after Frances’ mother died. He ate to-night in black clothes and a soft, white shirt in the bosom of which was a big diamond. Although he had sat on the veranda without a coat–contrary to his doctor’s orders–he had slipped one on when he came to the table and, with his neatly combed hair, freshly shaven face, and well-brushed mustache, looked well groomed indeed.

He would have been a bizarre figure at a city table; nevertheless, he presided at his own board with dignity, and was a splendid foil for the charming figure of Frances opposite.

In the midst of the repast the Captain said, suddenly, to the soft-footed Chinaman:

“Ming! telephone down to Sam at the bunk-house and see if a hobo has just struck there, on his way to Amarillo. I told him he could get chuck and a sleep. Savvy?”

“Jes so, Clapen,” said Ming, softly, and shuffled out.

It was evident that the tramp was on the Captain’s mind. Pratt believed there must be some special reason for the old ranchman’s worrying over marauders about the Bar-T.

There was nothing to mar the friendliness of the dinner, however; not even when Ming slipped back and said in a low voice to the Captain:

“Him Slilent Slam say no hobo come to blunk-house.”

They finished the meal leisurely; but on rising from the table Captain Rugley removed a heavy belt and holster from its hook behind the sideboard and slung it about his hips.

Withdrawing the revolver, he spun the cylinder, made sure that it was filled, and slipped it back in the holster. All this was done quite as a matter of course. Frances made no comment, nor did she seem surprised.

The three went back to the porch for a little while, although the night air was growing chill. Frances insisted that her father wear his coat, and they both sat out of the brighter radiance of the hanging lamp.

She and her guest were talking about the forthcoming pageant at the Jackleg schoolhouse. Pratt had begun to feel enthusiastic over it as he learned more of the particulars.

“People scarcely realize,” said Frances, “that this Panhandle of ours has a history as ancient as St. Augustine, Florida. And that, you know, is called the oldest white settlement in these United States.

“Long, long ago the Spanish explorers, with Indian guides whom they had enslaved, made a path through the swarming buffaloes up this way and called the country Llano Estacada, the staked plain. Our geographers misapplied the name ‘Desert’ to this vast country; but Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma threw off that designation because it was proven that the rains fell more often than was reported.”

“What has built up those states,” said Pratt, with a smile, “is farming, not cattle.”

The Captain grunted, for he had been listening to the conversation.

“You ought to have seen those first hayseeds that tried to turn the ranges into posy beds and wheat fields,” he chuckled. “They got all that was coming to them–believe me!”

Frances laughed. “Daddy is still unconverted. He does not believe that the Panhandle is fit for anything but cattle. But he’s going to let me have two hundred acres to plow and sow to wheat–he’s promised.”

The Captain grunted again.

“And last year we grew a hundred acres of milo maize and feterita. Helped on the winter feed–didn’t it, Daddy?” and she laughed.

“Got me there, Frances–got me there,” admitted the old ranchman. “But I don’t hope to live long enough to see the Bar-T raising more wheat than steers.”

“No. It’s stock-raising we want to follow, I believe,” said the girl, calmly. “We must raise feed for our steers, fatten them in fenced pastures, and ship them more quickly.”

“My goodness!” exclaimed Pratt, admiringly, “you talk as though you understood all about it, Miss Frances.”

“I think I do know something about the new conditions that face us ranchers of the Panhandle,” the girl said, quietly. “And why shouldn’t I? I have been hearing it talked about, and thinking of it myself, ever since I can remember.”

Secretly Pratt thought she must have given her attention to something beside the ranch work and cattle-raising. Of this he was assured when they went inside later, and Frances sat down to the piano. The instrument was in a big room with a bare, polished floor. It was evidently used for dancing. There was a talking machine as well as a piano. The girl played the latter very nicely indeed. There were a few scratches on the floor of the room, and she saw Pratt looking at them.

“I told Ratty M’Gill he shouldn’t come in here with the rest of the boys to dance if he didn’t take his spurs off,” she said. “We have an old-time hoe-down for the boys pretty nearly every week, when we’re not too rushed on the ranch. It keeps ’em better contented and away from the towns on pay-days.”

“Are the cowpunchers just the same as they used to be?” asked Pratt. “Do they go to town and blow it wide open on pay-nights?”

“Not much. We have a good sheriff. But it wasn’t so long ago that your fancy little city of Amarillo was nothing but a cattleman’s town. I’m going to have a representation of old Amarillo in our pageant–you’ll see. It will be true to life, too, for some of the very people who take part in our play lived in Amarillo at the time when the sight of a high hat would draw a fusillade of bullets from the door of every saloon and dance-hall.”

“Don’t!” gasped Pratt. “Was Amarillo ever like that?”

“And not twenty years ago,” laughed Frances. “It had a few hundred inhabitants–and most of them ruffians. Now it claims ten thousand, has bricked streets that used to be cow trails, electric lights, a street-car service, and all the comforts and culture of an ‘effete East.’”

Pratt laughed, too. “It’s a mighty comfortable place to live in–beside Bill Edwards’ ranch, for instance. But I notice here at the Bar-T you have a great many of the despised Eastern luxuries.”

“‘Do-funnies’ daddy calls them,” said Frances, smiling. “Ah! here he is.”

The old ranchman came in, the holstered pistol still slung at his hip.

“All secure for the night, Daddy?” she asked, looking at him tenderly.

“Locked, barred, and bolted,” returned her father. “I tell you, Pratt, we’re something of a fort here when we go to bed. The court’s free to you; but don’t try to get out till Ming opens up in the morning. You see, we’re some distance from the bunk-house, and nobody but the two Chinks are here with us now.”

“I see, sir,” said Pratt.

But he did not see; he wondered. And he wondered more when, after separating from Frances for the night, he found his way through the hall to the door of the room that had been assigned to him for his use.

On the other side of the hall was another door, open more than a crack, with a light shining behind it. Pratt’s curiosity got the better of him and he peeped.

Captain Dan Rugley was standing in the middle of the almost bare room, before an old dark, Spanish chest. He had a bunch of keys in one hand and in the other dangled the ancient girdle and the bracelet Frances had worn.

“That must be the ‘treasure chest’ she spoke of,” thought the youth. “And it looks it! Old, old, wrought-iron work trimmings of Spanish design. What a huge old lock! My! it would take a stick of dynamite to blow that thing open if one hadn’t the key.”

The Captain moved quickly, turning toward the door. Pratt dodged back–then crept silently away, down the hall. He did not know that the eye of the old ranchman watched him keenly through the crack of the door.

CHAPTER IV
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT

Frances looked through her barred window, out over the fenced yard, and down to the few twinkling watch-lights at the men’s quarters. All the second-story windows of the ranch-house, overlooking the porch roof, were barred with iron rods set in the cement, like those on the first floor. The Bar-T ranch-house was a veritable fort.

There was a reason for this that the girl did not entirely understand, although her father often hinted at it. His stories of his adventures as a Texas Ranger, and over the Border into Mexico, amused her; but they had not impressed her much. Perhaps, because the Captain always skimmed over the particulars of those desperate adventures which had so spiced his early years–those years before the gentle influence of Frances’ mother came into his life.

He had mentioned his partner, “Lon,” on this evening. But he seldom particularized about him.

Frances could not remember when her father had gone into Arizona and returned from thence with a wagon-train loaded with many of the most beautiful of their household possessions. It was when she was a very little girl.

With the other things, Captain Rugley had brought back the old Spanish chest which he guarded so anxiously. She did not know what was in the chest–not all its treasures. It was the one secret her father kept from her.

Out of it he brought certain barbarous ornaments that he allowed her to wear now and then. She was as much enamored of jewelry and beautiful adornments as other girls, was Frances of the ranges.

There was perfect trust between her father and herself; but not perfect confidence. No more than Pratt Sanderson, for instance, did she know just how the old ranchman had become possessed of the great store of Indian and Spanish ornaments, or of the old Spanish chest.

Certain she was that he could not have obtained them in a manner to wrong anybody else. He spoke of them as “the loot of old Don Milo Morales’ hacienda”; but Frances knew well enough that her good father, Captain Dan Rugley, had been no land pirate, no so-called Border ruffian, who had robbed some peaceful Spanish ranch-owner across the Rio Grande of his possessions.

Frances was a bit worried to-night. There were two topics of thought that disturbed her.

Motherless, and with few female friends even, she had been shut away with her own girlish thoughts and fears and wonderings more than most girls of her age. Life was a mystery to her. She lived in books and in romances and in imagination’s pictures more than she did in the workaday world about her.

There seems to be little romance attached to the everyday lives we live, no matter how we are situated. The most dreary and uncolored existence, in all probability, there is in the world to-day is the daily life of a real prince or princess. We look longingly over the fence of our desires and consider all sorts and conditions of people outside as happier and far better off than we.

That was the way it was with Frances. Especially on this particular night.

Her unexpected meeting with Pratt Sanderson had brought to her heart and mind more strongly than for months her experiences in Amarillo. She remembered her school days, her school fellows, and the difference between their lives and that which she lived at present.

Probably half the girls she had known at school would be delighted (or thought they would) to change places with Frances of the ranges, right then. But the ranch girl thought how much better off she would be if she were continuing her education under the care of people who could place her in a more cultivated life.

Not that she was disloyal, even in thought, to her father. She loved him intensely–passionately! But the life of the ranges, after her taste of school and association with cultivated people, could not be entirely satisfactory.

So she sat, huddled in a white wool wrapper, by the barred, open window, looking out across the plain. Only for the few lights at the corrals and bunk-house, it seemed a great, horizonless sea of darkness–for there was no moon and a haze had enveloped the high stars since twilight.

No sound came to her ears at first. There is nothing so soundless as night on the plains–unless there be beasts near, either tamed or wild.

No coyote slunk about the ranch-house. The horses were still in the corrals. The cattle were all too far distant to be heard. Not even the song of a sleepy puncher, as he wheeled around the herd, drifted to the barred window of Frances’ room.

Her second topic for thought was her father’s evident expectation that the ranch-house might be attacked. Every stranger was an object of suspicion to him.

This did not abate one jot his natural Western hospitality. As mark his open-handed reception of Pratt Sanderson on this evening. They kept open house at the Bar-T ranch. But after dark–or, after bedtime at least–the place was barred like a fort in the Indian country!

Captain Rugley never went to his bed save after making the rounds, armed as he had been to-night, with Ming to bolt the doors. The only way a marauder could get into the inner court was by climbing the walls and getting over the roof, and as the latter extended four feet beyond the second-story walls, such a feat was well-nigh impossible.

The cement walls themselves were so thick that they seemed impregnable even to cannon. The roof was of slates. And, as has been pointed out already, all the outer first-floor windows, and all those reached from the porch roof, were barred.

Frances knew that her father had been seriously troubled to-night by the appearance of the strange and unseen tramp in the yard, and the fact that the arrival of that same individual had not been reported from the men’s quarters.

Captain Rugley telephoned and learned from his foreman, Silent Sam Harding, that nobody had come to the bunk-house that night asking for lodging and food.

Frances was about to seek her bed. She yawned, curled her bare toes up closer in the robe, and shivered luxuriously as the night air breathed in upon her. In another moment she would pop in between the blankets and cuddle down—

Something snapped! It was outside, not in!

Frances was wide awake on the instant. Her eyelids that had been so drowsy were propped apart–not by fear, but by excitement.

She had lived a life which had sharpened her physical perceptions to a fine point. She had no trouble in locating the sound that had so startled her. Somebody was climbing the vine at the corner of the veranda roof, not twenty feet from her window. She crouched back, well sheltered in the shadow, but able to see anything that appeared silhouetted between her window and the dark curtain of the night.

There was no light in the room behind her; indeed every lamp in the ranch-house had been extinguished some time before. It was evident that this marauder–whoever he was–had waited for the quietude of sleep to fall upon the place.

Back in the room at the head of Frances’ bed hung her belt with the holster pistol she wore when riding about the ranges. In these days it was considered perfectly safe for a girl to ride alone, save that coyotes sometimes came within range, or such a savage creature as had been the introduction of Pratt Sanderson and herself so recently. It was the duty of everybody on the ranges to shoot and kill these “varmints,” if they could.

Frances did not even think of this weapon now. She did not fear the unknown; only that the mystery of the night, and of his secret pursuit, surrounded him. Who could he be? What was he after? Should she run to awaken her father, or wait to observe his appearance above the edge of the veranda roof?

A dried stick of the vine snapped again. There was a squirming figure on the very edge of the roof. Frances knew that the unknown lay there, panting, after his exertions.

CHAPTER V
THE SHADOW IN THE COURT

A dozen things she might have done afterward appealed to Frances Rugley. But as she crouched by her chamber window watching the squirming human figure on the edge of the roof, she was interested in only one thing:

Who was he?

This question so filled her thought that she was neither fearful nor anxious. Curiosity controlled her actions entirely for the few next minutes. And so she observed the marauder rise up, carefully balance himself on the slates of the veranda roof, and tiptoe away to the corner of the house. He did not come near her window; nor could she see his face. His outlines were barely visible as he drifted into the shadow at the corner–soundless of step now. Only the cracking of the dry branch, as he climbed up, had betrayed him.

“I wish he had come this way,” thought Frances. “I might have seen what he looked like. Surely, we have no man on the ranch who would do such a thing. Can it be that father is right? Did the fellow who hailed us to-night come here to the Bar-T for some bad purpose?”

She waited several minutes by her window. Then she bethought her that there was a window at the end of a cross-hall on the side of the house where the man had disappeared, out of which she might catch another glimpse of him.

So she thrust her bare feet into slippers, tied the robe more firmly about her, and hurried out of the room. Nor did she think now of the charged weapon hanging at the head of her bed.

She believed nobody would be astir in the great house. The Chinamen slept at the extreme rear over the kitchen. Their guest, Pratt Sanderson, was on the lower floor and at the opposite side, with his windows opening upon the court around which the hacienda was built.

Captain Rugley’s rooms were below, too. Frances knew herself to be alone in this part of the house.

Nothing had ever happened to Frances Rugley to really terrify her. Why should she be afraid now? She walked swiftly, her robe trailing behind, her slippered feet twinkling in and out under the nightgown she wore. In the cross-hall she almost ran. There, at the end, was the open window. Indeed, there were no sashes in these hall windows at this time of year; only the bars.

The night air breathed in upon her. Was that a rustling just outside the bars? There was no light behind her and she did not fear being seen from without.

Tiptoeing, she came to the sill. Her ears were quick to distinguish sounds of any character. There was a strange, faint creaking not far from that wide-open casement. She could not thrust her head between the bars now (she remembered vividly the last time she had done that and got stuck, and had to shriek for Daddy to come and help her out), but she could press her face close against them and stare into the blackness of the outer world.

There! something stirred. Her eyes, growing more accustomed to the darkness, caught the shadow of something writhing in the air.

What could it be? Was it alive? A man, or—

Then the bulk of it passed higher, and the strange creaking sound was renewed. Frances almost cried aloud!

It was the man she had before seen. He was mounting directly into the air. The over-thrust of the ranch-house roof made the shadow very thick against the house-wall. The man was swinging in the air just beyond this deeper shadow.

“What can he be doing?” Frances thought.

She had almost spoken the question aloud. But she did not want to startle him–not yet.

First, she must learn what he was about. Then she would run and tell her father. This night raider was dangerous–there was no doubt of that.

“Oh!” quavered Frances, suddenly, and under her breath. The uncertain bulk of the man hanging in the air had disappeared!

For a minute she could not understand. He had disappeared like magic. His very corporeal body–and she noted that it had been bulky when she first saw him roll over the edge of the veranda roof and sit up–had melted into thin air.

And then she saw something swinging, pendulum-like, before her. She thrust an arm between the bars and seized the thing. It was a rope ladder.

The whole matter, then, was as plain as daylight. The man had climbed to the porch roof, with the rope ladder wound around his body. That was what had made him seem so bulky.

Selecting this spot as a favorable one, he had flung the grappling-hook over the eaves. There must be some break in the slates which held the hook. Once fastened there, the man had quickly worked his way up to the roof, and Frances had arrived just in time to see him squirm out of sight.

There were a dozen questions in Frances’ mind. How did he get here? Who was he? What did he want? Was he the man Captain Rugley had seemed to be expecting to try to make a raid upon the ranch-house? Was he alone? How did he know he could make the hook of his ladder fast at this point? Was there a traitor about who had broken a slate in the roof? Or was the broken place the result of an accident, and the marauder had noted it by daylight from the ground?

Question after question flashed through her mind. But there was one query far more important than all the others:

Where was the man going over the roof?

Frances let the ladder swing away from her clutch again. If she held it the fellow above might become alarmed.

She turned from the window and darted back along the hall. At the end was a door leading out onto the balcony which surrounded the inner court of the house at the level of the second story. The roof sloped out from the main wall of the building at this inner side, just as it did in front–indeed, the eaves were even longer. But the pillars of the balcony met the overhang at its verge, making it very easy indeed for an active person to swarm down from the roof.

Once on the balcony, the interior of the house was open to a marauder by a dozen doors, while there were likewise two flights of stairs descending directly into the court.

There were no lamps in the court now. It was a well, filled with grey shadows. Frances leaned over the balustrade and heard no sound. She looked up. The edge of the roof was a sharply defined line against the lighter background of the sky. But there was no moving figure silhouetted against that background.

Where had the man gone who had climbed the rope ladder? He could not so quickly have descended into the court; Frances was positive of that.

She shivered a little. There was something quite disturbing about this mysterious marauder. She wished now she had aroused her father immediately on first descrying the man.

She started around the gallery. Her father’s room lay upon the other side of the house. She could reach his windows by descending the outside stairway there. Her slippered feet made no sound; the wool robe did not rustle. Had she been seen by anybody she might have been taken for a ghost. But the black shadow of the roof of the gallery swathed Frances about, and it would have taken keen eyes indeed to distinguish her form.

Down the stair she sped. She was almost at its foot when something held her motionless again. She halted with a gasp, while before her, from the direction of the softly playing fountain, a figure drifted in.

Frances held her breath. Was this the man who had come over the roof of the house? Or was it another?

She crouched silently behind the railing. The figure passed her, going toward her father’s windows. She dared not whisper, for she did not think it bulky enough for her father’s huge frame.

On the trail of the figure she started, her heart palpitating with excitement, yet never for a moment considering her own peril.

There were other bedrooms beside that of Captain Rugley in this direction. And there was that small apartment in which the old Spanish chest was so carefully locked.

Captain Rugley never allowed the key of this door or the key of the chest to go out of his possession. He had always intimated that if a thief ever tried to break into the Bar-T ranch-house, he would first of all try to get at the treasure chest.

There were plenty of valuable things scattered about the house, but they were bulky–hard for a thief to remove. Although Frances did not know just what her father’s treasure consisted of, she believed it must be of such a nature that it could be removed by a thief.

Frances, her eyes now well used to the gloom, hurried along in the wake of the drifting shadow, without sound. She came to the first window opening into her father’s sleeping apartment. Like a wraith she glided in, believing at last that her duty was to awaken her father.

But when she reached his bed she found it undisturbed. It seemed his pillow had not been lain upon that night. She felt swiftly over the smooth bed, and with growing alarm–not for herself, but alarm for the missing man.

Where could he have gone? What had happened here since the lights went out and that mysterious marauder had come in over the ranch-house roof?

CHAPTER VI
A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

Frances knew her way about her father’s room in the dark as well as she did about her own. She knew where every piece of furniture stood. She knew where the chair was on which he carelessly threw his outer clothing at night.

Like most men who for years have slept in the open, Captain Rugley did not remove all his clothing when he went to bed. He usually lay between blankets on the outside of his bed, with his boots and trousers ready to jump into at a moment’s notice. Of some of the practices of his life on the plains, with the dome of heaven for a roof-tree, he could not be broken.

She fumbled for the chair, and found it empty. She reached for the belt and holster which he usually hung on a hook at the head of the bed. They, too, were gone, and Frances felt relieved.

She did not withdraw from the room through either of the long windows. Instead, she crept through her father’s office and out of the door of that room into the great, main hall.

Along this a little way was the door of the room to which Pratt Sanderson had been assigned, and that of the treasure room as well.

Frances scarcely gave Pratt a thought. She presumed him far in the land of dreams. She did not take into consideration the fact that about now the scratches of the mountain lion would become painful, and Pratt correspondingly restless. Frances was mainly troubled by her father’s absence from his room. Had he, too, seen the mysterious shadow in the court? Was he on the watch for a possible marauder?

By feeling rather than eyesight she knew the door to the treasure room was closed. Was her father there?

She doubled her fist and raised it to knock upon the panel. Then she hesitated. The slightest sound would ring through the silent house like an alarm of fire.

Inclining her ear to the door, she listened. But the oak planking was thick and there was no crevice, now the portal was closed, through which any slight sound could penetrate. She could not have even distinguished the heavy breathing of a sleeping man behind the door.

Uncertain, wondering, yet quite mistress of herself again, Frances went on along the corridor. Here was an open door before her into the court. Had that shadow she had seen come this way? she wondered.

The hiss of a voice, almost in her ear, did startle her:

“My goodness! is it you, Miss Frances?”

A clammy hand clutched her wrist. She knew that Pratt Sanderson must have been horribly wrought up and nervous, for he was trembling.

“What is the matter? Why are you out of your bed, Pratt?” she asked, quite calmly.

“I couldn’t sleep. Fever in those scratches, I s’pose,” said the young man. “I got up and went outside to get a drink at the fountain–and to bathe my face and wrists. Isn’t it hot?”

“You are feverish,” whispered Frances, cautiously. “Have you seen daddy?”

“The Captain?” returned Pratt, wonderingly. “Oh, no. He isn’t up, is he?”

“He’s not in his room—”

“And you’re not in yours,” said Pratt, with a nervous laugh. “We all seem to be out of our beds at the hour when graveyards yawn, eh?”

Frances had a reassuring laugh ready.

“I think you would better go to bed again, Pratt,” she said. “You–you saw nothing in the court?”

“No. But I thought I heard a big bird overhead when I was splashing the water about out there. Imagination, of course,” he added. “There are no big night-flying birds out here on the plains?”

“Not that I know of,” returned she.

“I made some noise. I didn’t know what it was I scared up. Seemed to be on the roof of the house.”

Frances thought of the mysterious man and his rope ladder. But she did not mention them to Pratt.

“Put some more of father’s salve on those scratches,” she advised. “It’s an Indian salve and very healing. He was taught by an old Indian medicine man to make it.”

“All right. Good-night, Miss Frances,” said Pratt, and withdrew into his room, from which he had appeared so suddenly to accost her.

Pratt’s mention of “the bird on the roof” disturbed Frances a good deal. She turned to run back upstairs and learn if the ladder was still hanging from the eaves. But as she started to do so she realized that the door of the treasure room had been silently opened.

“Frances!”

“Oh, Dad!”

“What are you running about the house for at this time o’ night?” he demanded.

She laughed rather hysterically. “Why are you out of your bed, sir–with your rheumatism?” she retorted.

“Good reason. Thought I heard something,” growled the Captain.

“Good reason. Thought I saw something,” mocked Frances, seizing his arm.

She stepped inside the room with him. He flashed an electric torch for a moment about the place. She saw he had a cot arranged at one side, and had evidently gone to bed here, beside the treasure chest.

“Why is this, sir?” she demanded, with pretty seriousness.

“Reckon the old man’s getting nervous,” said Captain Rugley. “Can’t sleep in my reg’lar bed when there are strangers in the house.”

Frances started. “What do you mean?” she cried.

“Well, there’s that young man.”

“Why, Pratt is all right,” declared Frances, confidently.

“I don’t know anything for him–and do know one thing against him,” growled the old ranchman. “He’s been up and about all night, so far. Weren’t you just talking to him?”

“Oh, yes, Dad! But Pratt is all right.”

“That’s as may be. What was he doing wandering around that court?”

“Oh, Dad! Don’t worry about him. His arm and chest hurt him—”

“Humph! didn’t hurt him when he went to bed, did they? Yet he was sneaking along this hall and looking into this very room when the door was slightly ajar. I saw him,” said the old ranchman, bitterly.

Frances was amazed by this statement; but she realized that her father was oversuspicious regarding the interest of strangers in the old Spanish chest and its contents.

“Never mind Pratt,” she said. “I came downstairs to find you, Daddy, because there really is a stranger about the house.”

“What do you mean, Frances?” was the sharp retort.

The girl told him briefly about the man she had observed climbing up to the veranda roof, and later to the roof of the house by aid of the rope ladder.

“And Pratt tells me he heard some sound up there. He thought it was a big bird,” she concluded.

“Come on!” said her father, hastily. “Let’s see that ladder.”

He locked the door of the treasure room and strode up the main stairway. Frances kept close behind him and warned him to step softly–rather an unnecessary bit of advice to an old Indian trailer like Captain Rugley!

But when they came to the window through which Frances had seen the dangling ladder it was gone. The old ranchman shot a ray of his electric torch through the opening; but the light revealed nothing.

“Gone!” he announced, briefly.

“Do–do you think so, Dad?”

“Sure. Been scared off.”

“But what could he possibly want–climbing up over our roof, and all that?”

Captain Rugley stood still and stroked his chin reflectively. “I reckon I know what they’re after—

“They? But, Daddy, there was only one man.”

“One that was coming over the roof,” said her father. “But he had pals–sure he did! If one of them wasn’t in the house—”

“Why, Dad!” exclaimed Frances, in wonder.

“You can’t always tell,” said the old ranchman, slowly. “There’s a heap of valuables in that chest. Of course, they don’t all belong to me,” he added, hastily. “My partner, Lon, has equal rights in ’em–don’t ever forget that, Frances, if something should happen to me.”

“Why, Dad! how you talk!” she exclaimed.

“We can never tell,” sighed her father. “Treasure is tempting. And it looks to me as though this fellow who climbed over the roof expected to find somebody inside to help him. That’s the way it looks to me,” he repeated, shaking his head obstinately.

“Dear Dad! you don’t mean that you think Pratt Sanderson would do such a thing?” said Frances, in a horrified tone.

“We don’t know him.”

“But his coming here to the Bar-T was unexpected. I urged him to come. That lion really scratched him—”

“Yes. It doesn’t look reasonable, I allow,” admitted her father; but she could see he was not convinced of the honesty of Pratt Sanderson.

There was a difference of opinion between Frances and Captain Rugley.

CHAPTER VII
THE STAMPEDE

The remainder of the night passed in quietness. That there really had been a marauder about the Bar-T ranch-house could not be doubted; for a slate was found upon the ground in the morning, and the place in the roof where it had been broken out was plainly visible.

Captain Rugley sent one of the men up with a ladder and new slates to repair the damage. He reported that the marks of the grappling-hook in the roof sheathing were unmistakable, too.

Although her father had expressed himself as doubtful of the good intentions of Pratt Sanderson, Frances was glad to see at breakfast that he treated the young man no differently than before. Pratt slept late and the meal was held back for him.

“The attentions of that old mountain lion bothered me so that I did not sleep much the fore part of the night,” Pratt explained.

“How about that bird you heard on the roof?” the Captain asked, calmly.

“I don’t know what it was. It sounded like big wings flapping,” the young fellow explained. “But I really didn’t see anything.”

Captain Rugley grunted, and said no more. He grunted a good deal this morning, in fact, for every movement gave him pain.

“The rheumatism has got its fangs set in me right, this time,” he told Frances.

“That’s for being out of your warm bed and chasing all over the house without a coat on in the night,” she said, admonishingly.

“Goodness!” said her father. “Must I be that particular? If so, I am getting old, I reckon.”

She made him promise to keep out of draughts when she mounted Molly to ride away on an errand to a distant part of the ranch. She rode off with Pratt Sanderson, for he was traveling in the same direction, toward Mr. Bill Edwards’ place.

Frances of the ranges was more silent than she had been when they rode together the night before. Pratt found it hard to get into conversation with her on any but the most ephemeral subjects.

For instance, when he hinted about Captain Rugley’s adventures on the Border:

“Your father is a very interesting talker. He has seen and done so much.”

“Yes,” said Frances.

“And how adventurous his life must have been! I’d love to get him in a story-telling mood some day.”

“He doesn’t talk much about old times.”

“But, of course, you know all about his adventures as a Ranger, and his trips into Mexico?”

“No,” said Frances.

“Why! he spoke last night as though he often talked about it. About the looting of— Who was the old Spanish grandee he mentioned?”

“I know very little about it, Pratt,” fluttered Frances. “That’s just dad’s talk.”

“But that gorgeous girdle and bracelet you wore!”

Frances secretly determined not to wear jewelry from the treasure chest again. She had never thought before about its causing comment and conjecture in the minds of people who did not know her father as well as she did.

Suppose people believed that Captain Dan Rugley had actually stolen those things in some raid into Mexico? Such a thought had never troubled her before. But she could see, now, that strangers might misjudge her father. He talked so recklessly about his old life on the Border that he might easily cause those who did not know him to believe that not alone the contents of that mysterious treasure chest but his other wealth was gained by questionable means.

Fortunately, a herd of steers, crossing from one of the extreme southern ranges of the Bar-T to the north where juicier grass grew, attracted the attention of the guest from Amarillo.

“Are those all yours, Frances?” he asked, when he saw the mass of dark bodies and tossing horns that appeared through rifts in the dust cloud that accompanies a driven herd even over sod-land.

“My father’s,” she corrected, smiling. “And only a small herd. Not more than two thousand head in that bunch.”

“I’d call two thousand cows a whole lot,” Pratt sighed.

“Not for us. Remember, the Bar-T has been in the past one of the great cattle ranches of the West. Daddy is getting old now and cannot attend to so much work.”

“But you seem to know all about it,” said Pratt, with enthusiasm. “Don’t you really do all the overseeing for him?”

“Oh, no!” laughed Frances. “Not at all. Silent Sam is the ranch manager. I just do what either dad or Sam tell me. I’m just errand girl for the whole ranch.”

But Pratt knew better than that. He saw now that she was watching the oncoming mass of steers with a frown of annoyance. Something was going wrong and Frances was troubled.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, curiously.

“I thought that was Ratty M’Gill with that bunch,” Frances answered, more as though thinking aloud than consciously answering Pratt’s question. “The rascal! He’d run all the fat off a bunch of cows between pastures.”

She pulled Molly around and headed the pinto for the herd. It was not in his way, but Pratt followed her example and rode his grey hard after the cowgirl.

Not a herdsman was in sight. The steers were coming on through the dust, sweating and steaming, evidently having been driven very hard since daybreak. Occasionally one bawled an angry protest; but those in front were being forced on by the rear ranks, which in turn were being harassed by the punchers in charge.

Suddenly, a bald-faced steer shot out of the ruck of the herd, darting at right angles to the course. For a little way a steer can run as fast as a race-horse. That’s why the creatures are so very hard to manage on occasion.

To Pratt, who was watching sharply, it was a question which got into action first–Frances or her wise little pinto. He did not see the girl speak to Molly; but the pony turned like a shot and whirled away after the careering steer. At the same moment, it seemed, Frances had her hair rope in her hand.

The coils began to whirl around her head. The pinto was running like the wind. The bald-faced, ugly-looking brute of a steer was soon running neck and neck with the well-mounted girl.

Pratt followed. He was more interested in the outcome of the chase than he was in where his grey was putting his feet.

There was an eerie yell behind them. Pratt saw a wild-looking, hatless cowboy racing a black pony toward them. The whole herd seemed to have been turned in some miraculous way, and was thundering after Old Baldface and the girl.

Pratt began to wonder if there was not danger. He had heard of a stampede, and it looked to him as though the bunch of steers was quite out of hand. Had he been alone, he would have pulled out and let the herd go by.

But either Frances did not see them coming, or she did not care. She was after that bald-faced steer, and in a moment she had him.

The whirling noose dropped and in some wonderful way settled over a horn and one of the steer’s forefeet. When Molly stopped and braced herself, the steer pitched forward, turned a complete somersault, and lay on the prairie at the mercy of his captor.

“Hurray!” yelled Pratt, swinging his hat.

He was riding recklessly himself. He had seen a half-tamed steer roped and tied at an Amarillo street fair; but that was nothing like this. It had all been so easy, so matter-of-fact! No display at all about the girl’s work; but just as though she could do it again, and yet again, as often as the emergency arose.

Frances cast a glowing smile over her shoulder at him, as she lay back in the saddle and let Molly hold Old Baldface in durance. But suddenly her face changed–a flash of amazed comprehension chased the triumphant smile away. She opened her lips to shout something to Pratt–some warning. And at that instant the grey put his foot into a ground-dog hole, and the young man from Amarillo left the saddle!

He described a perfect parabola and landed on his head and shoulders on the ground. The grey scrambled up and shot away at a tangent, out of the course of the herd of thundering steers. He was not really hurt.

But his rider lay still for a moment on the prairie. Pratt Sanderson was certainly “playing in hard luck” during his vacation on the ranges.

The mere losing of his mount was not so bad; but the steers had really stampeded, and he lay, half-stunned, directly in the path of the herd.

Old Baldface struggled to rise and seized upon the girl’s attention. She used the rope in a most expert fashion, catching his other foreleg in a loop, and then catching one of his hind legs, too. He was secured as safely as a fly in a spider-web.

Frances was out of her saddle the next moment, and ran back to where Pratt lay. She knew Molly would remain fixed in the place she was left, and sagging back on the rope.

The girl seized the young man under his armpits and started to drag him toward the fallen steer. The bulk of Old Baldface would prove a protection for them. The herd would break and swerve to either side of the big steer.

But one thing went wrong in Frances’ calculations. Her rope slipped at the saddle. For some reason it was not fastened securely.

The straining Molly went over backward, kicking and squealing as the rope gave way, and the big steer began to struggle to his feet.

CHAPTER VIII
IN PERIL AND OUT

Pratt Sanderson had begun to realize the situation. As Frances’ pony fell and squealed, he scrambled to his knees.

“Save yourself, Frances!” he cried. “I am all right.”

She left him; but not because she believed his statement. The girl saw the bald-faced steer staggering to its feet, and she knew their salvation depended upon the holding of the bad-tempered brute.

The stampeded herd was fast coming down upon them; afoot, she nor Pratt could scarcely escape the hoofs and horns of the cattle.

She saw Ratty M’Gill on the black pony flying ahead of the steers; but what could one man do to turn two thousand head of wild cattle? Frances of the ranges had appreciated the peril which threatened to the full and at first glance.

The prostrate carcase of the huge steer would serve to break the wave of cattle due to pass over this spot within a very few moments. If Baldface got up, shook off the entangling rope and ran, Frances and Pratt would be utterly helpless.

Once under the hoofs of the herd, they would be pounded into the prairie like powder, before the tail of the stampede had passed.

Frances, seeing the attempts of the big steer to climb to its feet, ran forward and seized the rope that had slipped through the ring of her saddle. She drew in the slack at once; but her strength was not sufficient to drag the steer back to earth.

Snorting and bellowing, the huge beast was all but on his feet when Pratt Sanderson reached the girl’s side.

Pratt was staggering, for the shock of his fall had been severe. He understood her, however, when she cried:

“Jump on it, Pratt! Jump on it!”

The young man leaped, landing with both feet on the taut rope. Frances, at the same instant, threw herself backward, digging her heels into the sod.

The shock of the tightening of the rope, therefore, fell upon the steer. Down he went bellowing angrily, for he had not cast off the noose that entangled him.

“Don’t let him get loose, Pratt! Stand on the rope!” commanded Frances.

With the slack of the lariat she ran forward, caught a kicking hind foot, then entangled one of the beast’s forefeet, and drew both together with all her strength. The bellowing steer was now doubly entangled; but he was not secure, and well did Frances know it.

She ran in closer, although Pratt cried out in warning, and looped the rope over the brute’s other horn. Slipping the end of her rope through the loop that held his feet together, Frances got a purchase by which she could pull the great head of the beast aside and downward, thus holding him helpless. It was impossible for him to get up after he was thus secured.

“Got him! Quick, Pratt, this way!” Frances panted.

She beckoned to the Amarillo young man, and the latter instantly joined her. She had conquered the steer in a few seconds; the herd was now thundering down upon them. M’Gill, on the black pony, dashed by.

“Bully for you, Miss Frances,” he yelled.

“You wait, Ratty!” Frances said; but, of course, only Pratt heard. “Father and Sam will jack you up for this, and no mistake!”

Then she whipped out her revolver and fired it into the air–emptying all the chambers as the herd came on.

The steers broke and passed on either side of their fallen brother. The tossing horns, fiery eyes and red, expanded nostrils made them look–to Pratt’s mind–fully as savage as had the mountain lion the evening before.

Then he looked again at his comrade. She was only breathing quickly now; she gave no sign of fear. It was all in the day’s work. Such adventures as this had been occasional occurrences with Frances of the ranges since childhood.

Pratt could scarcely connect this alert, vigorous young girl with her who had sat at the piano in the ranch-house the previous evening!

“You’re a wonder!” murmured Pratt Sanderson, to himself. And then suddenly he broke out laughing.

“What’s tickling you, Pratt?” asked Frances, in her most matter-of-fact tone.

“I was just wondering,” the Amarillo young man replied, “what Sue Latrop will think of you when she comes out here.”

“Who’s she?” asked Frances, a little puzzled frown marring her smooth forehead. She was trying to remember any girl of that name with whom she had gone to school at the Amarillo High.

“Sue Latrop’s a distant cousin of Mrs. Bill Edwards, and she’s from Boston. She’s Eastern to the tips of her fingers–and talk about ‘culchaw’! She has it to burn,” chuckled Pratt. “Bill Edwards says she is just ‘putting on dog’ to show us natives how awfully crude we are. But I guess she doesn’t know any better.”

The steers had swept by, and Pratt was just a little hysterical. He laughed too easily and his hand shook as he wiped the perspiration and dust from his face.

“I shouldn’t think she would be a nice girl at all,” Frances said, bluntly.

“Oh, she’s not at all bad. Rather pretty and–my word–some dresser! No end of clothes she’s brought with her. She’s coming out to the Edwards ranch before long, and you’ll probably see her.”

Frances bit her lip and said nothing for a moment. The big steer struggled again and groaned. The girl and Pratt were afoot and the stampede of cattle had swept their mounts away. Even Molly, the pinto, was out of call.

The half dozen punchers who followed the maddened steers had no time for Frances and her companion. A great cloud of dust hung over the departing herd and that was the last the castaways on the prairie would see of either cattle or punchers that day.

“We’ve got to walk, I reckon,” Frances said, slowly.

“How about this steer?” asked the young man, curiously.

“I think he’s tamed enough for the time,” said the girl, with a smile. “Anyway I want my rope. It’s a good one.”

She began to untangle the bald-faced steer. He struggled and grunted and tossed his wide, wicked horns free. To tell the truth Pratt was more than a little afraid of him. But he saw that Frances had reloaded the revolver she carried, and he merely stepped aside and waited. The girl knew so much better what to do that he could be of no assistance.

“Now, Pratt,” she said, at last, “stand from under! Hoop-la!”

She swung the looped lariat and brought it down smartly upon the beast’s back as it struggled to its shaking legs. The steer bellowed, shook himself like a dog coming out of the water, or a mule out of the harness, and trotted away briskly.

“He’ll follow the herd, I reckon,” Frances said, smiling again. “If he doesn’t they’ll pick him out at the next round-up. His brand is too plain to miss.”

“And now we’re afoot,” said Pratt. “It’s a long walk for you back to the house, Frances.”

“And longer for you to the Edwards ranch,” she laughed. “But perhaps you will fall in with some of Mr. Bill’s herders. They’ll have an extra mount or two. I’ll maybe catch Molly. She’s a good pinto.”

“But oughtn’t I to go back with you?” questioned Pratt, doubtfully. “You see–you’re alone–and afoot—”

“Why! it isn’t the first time, Pratt,” laughed the girl. “Don’t fret about me. This range to me is just like your backyard to you.”

“I suppose it sounds silly,” admitted Pratt. “But I haven’t been used to seeing girls quite as independent as you are, Frances Rugley.”

“No? The girls you know don’t live the sort of life I do,” said the range girl, rather wistfully.

“I don’t know that they have anything on you,” put in Pratt, stoutly. “I think you’re just wonderful!”

“Because I am doing something different from what you are used to seeing girls do,” she said, with gravity. “That is no compliment, Pratt.”

“Well! I meant it as such,” he said, earnestly. He offered his hand, knowing better than to urge his company upon her. “And I hope you know how much obliged to you I am. I feel as though you had saved my life twice. I would not have known what to do in the face of that stampede.”

“Every man to his trade,” quoted Frances, carelessly. “Good-bye, Pratt. Come over again to see us,” and she gave his hand a quick clasp and turned away briskly.

He stood and watched her for some moments; then, fearing she might look back and see him, he faced around himself and set forth on his long tramp to the Edwards ranch.

It was true Frances did not turn around; but she knew well enough Pratt gazed after her. He would have been amazed had he known her reason for showing no further interest in him–for not even turning to wave her hand at him in good-bye. There were tears on her cheeks, and she was afraid he would see them.

“I am foolish–wicked!” she told herself. “Of course he knows other–and nicer–girls than me. And it isn’t just that, either,” she added, rather enigmatically. “But to remember all those girls I knew in Amarillo! How different their lives are from mine!

“How different they must look and behave. Why, I’m a perfect tomboy. Pratt said I was wonderful–just as though I were a trick pony, or an educated goose!

“I do things he never saw a girl do before, and he thinks it strange and odd. But if that Sue Latrop should see me and say that I was not nice, he’d begin to see, too, that it is a fact.

“Riding with the boys here on the ranch, and officiating at the branding-pen, riding herd, cutting out beeves and playing the cowboy generally, has not added to my ‘culchaw,’ that is sure. I don’t know that I’d be able to ‘act up’ in decent society again.

“Pratt looked at me big-eyed last evening when I dressed for dinner. But he was only astonished and amused, I suppose. He didn’t expect me to look like that after seeing me in this old riding dress.

“Oh, dear!” sighed Frances of the ranges. “I wouldn’t leave daddy, or do anything to displease him, poor dear! But I wish he could be content to live nearer to civilization.

“We’ve got enough money. I don’t want any more, I’m sure. We could sell the cattle and turn our ranges into wheat and milo fields. Then we could live in town part of the year–in Amarillo, perhaps!”

The thought was a daring one. Indeed, she was not wholly confident that it was not a wicked thought.

Just then she reached the summit of a slight ridge from which she could behold the home corrals of the hacienda itself, still a long distance ahead, and glowing like jewels in the morning sunshine.

Such a beautiful place! After all, Frances Rugley loved it. It was home, and every tender tie of her life bound her to it and to the old man who she knew was sitting somewhere on the veranda, with his pipe and his memories.

There never was such another beautiful place as the old Bar-T! Frances was sure of that. She longed for Amarillo and what the old Captain called “the frills of society”; but could she give up the ranch for them?

“I reckon I want to keep my cake and eat it, too,” she sighed. “And that, daddy would say, ‘is plumb impossible!’”

CHAPTER IX
SURPRISING NEWS

Frances arrived at home about noon. The last few miles she bestrode Molly, for that intelligent creature had allowed herself to be caught. It was too late to go on the errand to Cottonwood Bottom before luncheon.

Silent Sam Harding met her at the corral gate. He was a lanky, saturnine man, with never a laugh in his whole make-up. But he was liked by the men, and Frances knew him to be faithful to the Bar-T interests.

“What happened to Ratty’s bunch?” he asked, in his sober way.

“Did you see them?” cried Frances, leaping down from the saddle.

“Saw their dust,” said Sam.

“They stampeded,” Frances said, warmly. “And Mr. Sanderson and I lost our ponies–pretty nearly had a bad accident, Sam,” and she went on to give the foreman of the ranch the particulars. “I thought something was wrong. I got that little grey hawse of Bill Edwards’. He just come in,” said Sam.

“Ratty M’Gill was running those steers,” Frances told him. “I must report him to daddy. He’s been warned before. I think Ratty’s got some whiskey.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. There was a bootlegger through here yesterday.”

“The man who tried to get over our roof!” exclaimed Frances.

“Mebbe.”

“Do you suppose he’s known to Ratty?” questioned the girl, anxiously.

“Dunno. But Ratty’s about worn out his welcome on the Bar-T. If the Cap says the word, I’ll can him.”

“Well,” said Frances, “he shouldn’t have driven that herd so hard. I’ll have to speak to daddy about it, Sam, though I hate to bother him just now. He’s all worked up over that business of last night.”

“Don’t understand it,” said the foreman, shaking his head.

“Could it have been the bootlegger?” queried Frances, referring to the illicit whiskey seller of whom she suspected the irresponsible Ratty M’Gill had purchased liquor. The “bootleggers” were supposed to carry pint flasks of bad whiskey in the legs of their topboots, to sell at a fancy price to thirsty punchers on the ranges.

“Dunno how that slate come broken on the roof,” grumbled Sam. “The feller knowed just where to go to hitch his rope ladder. Goin’ to have one of the boys ride herd on the hacienda at night for a while.” This was a long speech for Silent Sam.

Frances thanked him and went up to the house. She did not find an opportunity of speaking to Captain Rugley about Ratty M’Gill at once, however, for she found him in a state of great excitement.

“Listen to this, Frances!” he ejaculated, when she appeared, waving a sheet of paper in his hand, and trying to get up from the hard chair in which he was sitting.

A spasm of pain balked him; his bronzed face wrinkled as the rheumatic twinge gripped him; but his hawklike eyes gleamed.

“My! my!” he grunted. “This pain is something fierce.”

Frances fluttered to his side. “Do take an easier chair, Daddy,” she begged. “It will be so much more comfortable.”

“Hold on! this does very well. Your old dad’s never been used to cushions and do-funnies. But see here! I want you to read this.” He waved the paper again.

“What is it, Daddy?” Frances asked, without much curiosity.

“Heard from old Lon at last–yes, ma’am! What do you know about that? From good old Lon, who was my partner for twenty years. I’ve got a letter here that one of the boys brought from the station just now, from a minister, back in Mississippi. Poor old Lon’s in a soldier’s home, and he’s just got track of me.

“My soul and body, Frances! Think of it,” added the excited Captain. “He’s been living almost like a beggar for years in a Confederate soldiers’ home–good place, like enough, of its kind, but here am I rolling in wealth, and that treasure chest right here under my eye, and Lon suffering, perhaps—”

The Captain almost broke down, for with the pain he was enduring and all, the incident quite unstrung him. Frances had her arms about him and kissed his tear-streaked cheek.

“Foolish, am I?” he demanded, looking up at her, “But it’s broken me up–hearing from my old partner this way. Read the letter, Frances, won’t you?”

She did so. It was from the chaplain of the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home, of Bylittle, Mississippi.

“Captain Daniel Rugley,
“Bar-T Ranch,
“Texas Panhandle.

“Dear Sir:

“I am writing in behalf of an old soldier in this institution, one Jonas P. Lonergan, who was at one time a member of Company K, Texas Rangers, and who before that time served honorably in Company P, Fifth Regiment, Mississippi Volunteers, during the War between the States.

“Mr. Lonergan is a sadly broken man, having passed through much evil after his experiences on the Border and in Mexico in your company. Indeed, his whole life has been one of privation and hardship. Now, bent with years, he has been obliged to seek refuge with some of his ancient comrades at Bylittle.

“In several private talks with me, Captain Rugley, he has mentioned the incidents relating to the looting and destruction of Señor Morales’ hacienda, over the Border in Mexico, while you and he were on detail in that vicinity as Rangers.

“Perhaps the old man is rambling; but he always talks of a treasure chest which he claims you and he rescued from the bandits and removed into Arizona, hiding the same in a certain valley at the mouth of a cañon which he calls Dry Bone Cañon.

“Mr. Lonergan always speaks of you as ‘the whitest man who ever lived.’ ‘If my old partner, Captain Dan, knew how I was fixed or where I was, he’d have me rollin’ in luxury in no time,’ he has said to me; ‘providing he’s this same Captain Dan Rugley that’s owner of the Bar-T Ranch in the Panhandle.’

“You know (if you know him at all) that Mr. Lonergan had no educational advantages. Such men have difficulty in keeping up communication with their friends.

“He claims to have lost track of you twenty-odd years ago. That when you separated you both swore to divide equally the contents of Señor Morales’ treasure chest, the hiding place of which at that time was in a hostile country, Geronimo and his braves being on the warpath.

“If you are Jonas P. Lonergan’s old-time partner you will remember the particulars more clearly than I can state them.

“If this be the case, I am sure I need only state the above and certify to the identity of Mr. Lonergan, to bring from you an expression of your remembrance and the statement whether or no any property to which Mr. Lonergan might make a claim is in your possession.

“Mr. L. speaks much of the treasure chest and tells marvelous stories of its contents. He does not seem to desire wealth for himself, however, for he well knows that he has but a few months to live, nor does he seem ever to have cared greatly for money.

“His anxiety is for the condition of a sister of his who was left a widow some years ago, and for her son. Mr. L. fears that the nephew has not the chance of getting on in life that he would like the boy to have. In his old age Mr. L. feels keenly the fact that he was never able to do anything for his family, and the fate of his widowed sister and her son is much on his mind.

“A prompt reply, Captain Rugley, if you are the old-time partner of my ancient friend, will be gratefully received by the undersigned, and joyfully by Mr. Lonergan.

Respectfully,

(Rev.) Decimus Tooley.

“Why! what do you think of that?” gasped Frances, when she had read the letter to the very last word.

Her father’s face was shining and there were tears in his eyes. His joy at hearing from his old companion-in-arms was unmistakable.

This turning up of Jonas Lonergan meant the parting with a portion of the mysterious wealth that the old ranchman kept hidden in the Spanish chest–wealth that he might easily keep if he would.

Frances was proud of him. Never for an instant did he seem to worry about parting with the treasure to Lonergan. His fears for it had never been the fears of a miser who worshiped wealth–no, indeed!

Now it was plain that the thought of seeing his old partner alive again, and putting into his hands the part of the treasure rightfully belonging to him, delighted Captain Dan Rugley in every fibre of his being.

“The poor old codger!” exclaimed the ranchman, affectionately. “And to think of Lon being in need, and living poor–maybe actually suffering–when I’ve been doing so well here, and have had this old chest right under my thumb all these years.

“You see, Frances,” said the Captain, making more of an explanation than ever before, “Lon and I got possession of that chest in a funny way.

“We’d been sent after as mean a man as ever infested the Border–and there were some mighty mean men along the Rio Grande in those days. He had slipped across the Border to escape us; but in those times we didn’t pay much attention to the line between the States and Mexico.

“We went after him just the same. He was with a crowd of regular bandits, we found out. And they were aiming to clean up Señor Milo Morales’ hacienda.

“We got onto their plans, and we rode hard to the hacienda to head them off. We knew the old Spaniard–as fine a Castilian gentleman as ever stepped in shoe-leather.

“We stopped with him a while, beat off the bandits, and captured our man. After everything quieted down (as we thought) we started for the Border with the prisoner. Señor Morales was an old man, without chick or child, and not a relative in the world to leave his wealth to. His was one of the few Castilian families that had run out. Neither in Mexico nor in Spain did he have a blood tie.

“His vast estates he had already willed to the Church. Such faithful servants as he had (and they were few, for the peon is not noted for gratitude) he had already taken care of.

“Lon and I had saved his life as well as his personal property, he was good enough to say, and he showed us this treasure chest and what was in it. When he passed on, he said, it should be ours if we were fixed so we could get it before the Mexican authorities stepped in and grabbed it all, or before bandits cleaned out the hacienda. It was a toss-up in those days between the two, which was the most voracious!

“Well, Frances, that’s how it stood when we rode away with Simon Hawkins lashed to a pony between us. Before we reached the river we heard of a big band of outlaws that had come down from the Sierras and were trailing over toward Morales’.

“We hurried back, leaving Simon staked down in a hide-out we knew of. But Lon and I were too late,” said the old Captain, shaking his head sadly. “Those scoundrels had got there ahead of us, led by the men we had first beaten off, and they had done their worst.

“The good old Señor–as harmless and lovely a soul as ever lived–had been brutally murdered. One or two of his servants had been killed, too–for appearance’s sake, I suppose. The others, especially the vaqueros, had joined the outlaws, and the hacienda was being looted.

“But Lon and I took a chance, stole in by night, found the treasure chest, and slipped away with it. I went back alone before dawn, found a six-mule team already loaded with household stuff and drove off with it, thus stealing from the thieves.

“A good many of these fine old things we have here were on that wagon. I decided that they belonged to me as much as to anybody. Get them once over the boundary into God’s country and the thieving Mexican Government–only one degree removed at that time from the outlaws themselves–would not dare lay claim to them.

“We did this,” concluded Captain Dan, with a sigh of reminiscence, and with his eyes shining, “and we got Simon into the jail at Elberad, too.

“Lon and I kept on up into Arizona, into Dry Bone Cañon, and there we cached the stuff. Air and sand are so dry there that nothing ever decays, and so all these rugs and hangings and featherwork were uninjured when I brought them away to this ranch soon after you were born.

“That’s the story, my dear. I never talk much about it, for it isn’t altogether my secret. You see, my old partner, Lon, was in on it. And now he’s going to come for his share—”

“Come for his share, Daddy?” asked Frances, in surprise.

“Yes–sir-ree–sir!” chuckled the old ranchman. “Think I’m going to let old Lon stay in that soldiers’ home? Not much!”

“But will he be able to travel here to the Panhandle?”

“Of course! What the matter is with Lon, he’s been shut indoors. I know what it is. Why! he’s younger than I am by a year or two.”

“But if he can’t travel alone—”

“I’ll go after him! I’ll hire a private car! My goodness! I’ll hire a whole train if it’s necessary to get him out of that Bylittle place! That’s what I’ll do!

“And he shall live here with us–so he shall! He and I will divide this treasure just as I’ve been aching to do for years. You shall have jewels then, my girl!”

“But, dear!” gasped Frances, “you are not well enough to go so far.”

“Now, don’t bother, Frances. Your old dad isn’t dead yet–not by any means! I’ll be all right in a day or two.”

But Captain Rugley was not all right in so short a time. He actually grew worse. Frances sent a messenger for the doctor the very next morning. Whether it was from the exposure of the night the stranger tried to climb over the hacienda roof or not, Captain Rugley took to his bed. The physician pronounced it rheumatic fever, and a very serious case indeed.

CHAPTER X
THE MAN FROM BYLITTLE

Responsibility weighed heavily upon the young shoulders of Frances of the ranges in these circumstances.

Old Captain Rugley insisted upon being out of doors, ill as he was, and they made him as comfortable as possible on a couch in the court where the fountain played. Ming was in attendance upon him all day long, for Frances had many duties to call her away from the ranch-house at this time. But at night she slept almost within touch of the sick man’s bed.

He did not get better. The physician declared that he was not in immediate danger, although the fever would have to run its course. The pain that racked his body was hard to bear; and although he was a stoic in such matters, Frances would see his jaws clench and the muscles knot in his cheeks; and she often wiped the drops of agony from his forehead while striving to hide the tears that came into her own eyes.

He demanded to know how long he was “going to be laid by the heels”; and when he learned that the doctor could not promise him a swift return to health, Captain Rugley began to worry.

It was of his old partner he thought most. That the affairs of the ranch would go on all right in the hands of his young daughter and Silent Sam, he seemed to have no doubt. But the letter from the chaplain of the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home was forever troubling him. Between his spells of agony, or when his mind was really clear, he talked to Frances of little but Jonas Lonergan and the treasure chest.

“He is troubling his mind about something, and it is not good for him,” the doctor, who came every third day (and had a two hundred-mile jaunt by train and buckboard), told Frances. “Can’t you calm his mind, Miss Frances?”

She told the medical man as much about her father’s ancient friend as she thought was wise. “He desires to have him brought here,” she explained, “so that they can go over, face to face and eye to eye, their old battles and adventures.”

“Good! Bring the man–have him brought,” said the physician.

“But he is an old soldier,” said Frances. She read aloud that part of the Reverend Decimus Tooley’s letter relating to the state of Mr. Lonergan’s health.

“Don’t know what we can do about it, then,” said the doctor, who was a native of the Southwest himself. “Your father and the old fellow seem to be ‘honing’ for each other. Too bad they can’t meet. It would do your father good. I don’t like his mind’s being troubled.”

That night Frances was really frightened. Her father began muttering in his sleep. Then he talked aloud, and sat up in bed excitedly, his face flushed, and his tongue becoming clearer, although his speech was not lucid.

He was going over in his distraught mind the adventures he had had with Lon when they two had foiled the bandits and recovered possession of the Señor’s treasure chest.

Frances begged him to desist, but he did not know her. He babbled of the long journey with the mule team into the mouth of Dry Bone Cañon, and the caching of the treasure. For an hour he talked steadily and then, growing weaker, gradually sank back on his pillows and became silent.

But the effort was very weakening. Frances telephoned from the nearest station for the doctor. Something had to be done, for the exertion and excitement of the night had left Captain Rugley in a state that troubled the girl much.

She had no friend of her own sex. Mrs. Bill Edwards was a city woman whom, after all, she scarcely knew, for the lady had not been married to Mr. Edwards more than a year.

There were other good women scattered over the ranges–some “nesters,” some small cattle-raisers’ wives, and some of the new order of Panhandle farmers; but Frances had never been in close touch with them.

The social gatherings at the church and schoolhouse at Jackleg had been attended by Frances and Captain Rugley; but the Bar-T folk really had no near neighbors.

The girl’s interest in the forthcoming pageant had called the attention of other people to her more than ever before; but to tell the truth the young folk were rather awe-stricken by Frances’ abilities as displayed in the preparation for the entertainment, while the older people did not know just how to treat the wealthy ranchman’s daughter–whether as a person of mature years, or as a child.

Riding back from the railroad station, where one of the boys with the buckboard three hours later would meet the physician, she thought of these facts. Somehow, she had never felt so lonely–so cut off from other people as she did right now.

The railroad crossed one corner of the Bar-T’s vast fenced ranges; but there were twenty long miles between the house and the station. She had ridden Molly hard coming over to speak to the doctor on the telephone; but she took it easy going back.

Somewhere along the trail she would meet the buckboard and ponies going over to meet the doctor. And as she walked her pony down the slope of the trail into Cottonwood Bottom, she thought she heard the rattle of the buckboard wheels ahead.

A clump of trees hid the trail for a bit; when she rounded it the way was empty. Whoever she had heard had turned off the trail into the cottonwoods.

“Maybe he didn’t water the ponies before he started,” thought Frances, “and has gone down to the ford. That’s a bit of carelessness that I do not like. Whom could Sam have sent with the bronchos for the doctor?”

She turned Molly off the trail beyond the bridge. The wood was not a jungle, but she could not see far ahead, nor be seen. By and by she smelled tobacco smoke–the everlasting cigarette of the cattle puncher. Then she heard the sound of voices.

Why this latter fact should have made Frances suspicious, she could not have told. It was her womanly intuition, perhaps.

Slipping out of the saddle, she tied Molly with her head up-wind. She was afraid the pinto would smell her fellows from the ranch, and signal them, as horses will.

Once away from her mount, she passed between the trees and around the brush clumps until she saw the ford of the river sparkling below her. There were the hard-driven ponies, their heads drooping, their flanks heaving, standing knee-deep in the stream–this fact in itself an offense that she could not overlook.

The animals had been overdriven, and now the employee of the ranch who had them in charge was allowing them to cool off too quickly–and in the cold stream, too!

But who was he? For a moment Frances could not conceive.

The figure of the driver was humped over on the seat in a slouching attitude, sitting sideways, and with his back toward the direction from which the range girl was approaching. He faced a man on a shabby horse, whose mount likewise stood in the stream and who had been fording the river from the opposite direction.

This horseman was a stranger to Frances. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat, no chaps, no cartridge belt or gun in sight, and a white shirt and a vest under his coat, while shoes instead of boots were on his feet. He was neither puncher nor farmer in appearance. And his face was bad.

There could be no doubt of that latter fact. He wore a stubble of beard that did not disguise the sneering mouth, or the wickedly leering expression of his eyes.

“Well, I done my part, old fellow,” drawled the man in the seat of the buckboard, just as Frances came within earshot. “’Tain’t my fault you bungled it.”

Frances stopped instead of going on. It was Ratty M’Gill!

She could not understand why he was not on the range, or why Sam had sent the ne’er-do-well to meet the doctor. It puzzled her before the puncher’s continued speech began to arouse her curiosity.

“You’ll sure find yourself in a skillet of hot water, old fellow,” pursued Ratty, inhaling his cigarette smoke and letting it forth through his nostrils in little puffs as he talked. “The old Cap’s built his house like a fort, anyway. And he’s some man with a gun–believe me!”

“You say he’s sick,” said the other man, and he, too, drawled. Frances found herself wondering where she had heard that voice before.

“He ain’t so sick that he can’t guard that chest you was talkin’ about. He’s had his bed made up right in the room with it. That’s whatever,” said Ratty.

“Once let me get in there,” said the other, slowly.

“Sam’s set some of the boys to ride herd on the house,” chuckled Ratty.

“That’s the way, then!” exclaimed the other, raising his clenched fist and shaking it. “You get put on that detail, Ratty.”

“I’ll see you blessed first,” declared the puncher, laughing. “I don’t see nothing in it but trouble for me.”

“No trouble for you at all. They didn’t get you before.”

“No,” said the puncher. “More by good luck than good management. I don’t like going things blind, Pete. And you’re always so blamed secretive.”

“I have to be,” growled the other. “You’re as leaky as a sieve yourself, Ratty. I never could trust you.”

“Nor nobody else,” laughed the reckless puncher. “Sam’s about got my number now. If he ain’t the gal has—”

“You mean that daughter of the old man’s?”

“Yep. She’s an able-minded gal–believe me! And she’s just about boss of the ranch, specially now the old Cap is laid by the heels for a while.”

The other was silent for some moments. Ratty gathered up the reins from the backs of the tired ponies.

“I gotter step along, Pete,” he said. “Gal’s gone to telephone for the medical sharp, who’ll show up on Number 20 when she goes through Jackleg. I’m to meet him. Or,” and he began to chuckle again, “José Reposa was, and I took his place so’s to meet you here as I promised.”

“And lots of good your meeting me seems to do me,” growled the man called Pete.

“Well, old fellow! is that my fault?” demanded the puncher.

“I don’t know. I gotter git inside that hacienda.”

“Walk in. The door’s open.”

“You think you are smart, don’t you?” snarled Pete, in anger. “You tell me where the chest is located; but it couldn’t be brought out by day. But at night— My soul, man! I had the team all ready and waiting the other night, and I could have got the thing if I’d had luck.”

“You didn’t have luck,” chuckled Ratty M’Gill. “And I don’t believe you’d ’a’ had much more luck if you’d got away with the old Cap’s chest.”

“I tell you there’s a fortune in it!”

“You don’t know—”

“And I suppose you do?” snarled Pete.

“I know no sane man ain’t going to keep a whole mess of jewels and such, what you talk about, right in his house. He’d take ’em to a bank at Amarillo, or somewhere.”

“Not that old codger. He’d keep ’em under his own eye. He wouldn’t trust a bank like he would himself. Humph! I know his kind.

“Why,” continued Pete, excitedly, “that old feller at Bylittle is another one just like him. These old-timers dug gold, and made their piles half a dozen times, and never trusted banks–there warn’t no banks!”

“Not in them days,” admitted Ratty. “But there’s a plenty now.”

“You say yourself he’s got the chest.”

“Sure! I seen it once or twice. Old Spanish carving and all that. But I bet there ain’t much in it, Pete.”

“You’d ought to have heard that doddering old idiot, Lonergan, talk about it,” sniffed Pete. “Then your mouth would have watered. I tell you that’s about all he’s been talkin’ about the last few months, there at Bylittle. And I was orderly on his side of the barracks and heard it all.

“I know that the parson, Mr. Tooley, was goin’ to write to this Cap Rugley. Has, before now, it’s likely. Then something will be done about the treasure—”

“Waugh!” shouted Ratty. “Treasure! You sound like a silly boy with a dime story book.”

The puncher evidently did not believe his friend knew what he was talking about. Pete glowered at him, too angry to speak for a minute or two.

Frances began to worm her way back through the brush. She put the biggest trees between her and the ford of the river. When she knew the two men could not see or hear her, she ran.

She had heard enough. Her mind was in a turmoil just then. Her first thought was to get away, and get Molly away. Then she would think this startling affair out.

CHAPTER XI
FRANCES ACTS

She got away from the Bottom without disturbing Ratty and the man from Bylittle. Once Molly was loping over the plain again, Frances began to question her impressions of the dialogue she had overheard.

In the first place, she was sure she had heard the voice of the man, Pete, before. It was the same drawling voice that had come out of the darkness asking for food and a bed the evening Pratt Sanderson stopped at the Bar-T Ranch.

The voice had been cheerful then; it was snarling now; but the tones were identical. Then, going a step farther, Frances realized, from the talk she had just heard, that this Pete was the man who had tried to get over the roof of the ranch-house. One and the same man–tramp and robber.

Ratty had shown Pete the way. Ratty was a traitor. He might easily have seen the broken slate on the roof and pointed it out to the mysterious Pete.

The latter had been an orderly in the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home, and had heard the story of the Spanish treasure chest, when old Mr. Lonergan was rambling about it to the chaplain.

The fellow’s greed had started him upon the quest of the treasure so long in Captain Rugley’s care. Perhaps he had known Ratty M’Gill before; it seemed so. And yet, Ratty did not seem entirely in the confidence of the robber.

Nevertheless, Ratty must leave the ranch. Frances was determined upon this.

She could not tell her father about him; and she shrank from revealing the puncher’s villainy to Silent Sam Harding. Indeed, she was afraid of what Sam and the other boys on the ranch might do to punish Ratty M’Gill. The Bar-T punchers might be rather rough with a fellow like Ratty.

Frances believed the boys on the Bar-T were loyal to her father and herself. Ratty’s defection hurt her as much as it surprised her. She had never thought him more than reckless; but it seemed he had developed more despicable characteristics.

These and similar thoughts disturbed Frances’ mind as she made her way back to the ranch-house. She found her father very weak, but once more quite lucid. Ming glided away at her approach and Frances sat down to hold the old ranchman’s hand and tell him inconsequential things regarding the work on the ranges, and the gossip of the bunk-house.

All the time the girl’s heart hungered to nurse him herself, day and night, instead of depending upon the aid of a shuffle-footed Chinaman. The mothering instinct was just as strong in her nature as in most girls of her age. But she knew her duty lay elsewhere.

Before this time Captain Rugley had never entirely given over the reins of government into the hands of Silent Sam. He had kept in touch with ranch affairs, delegating some duties to Frances, others to Sam or to the underforeman. Now the girl had to be much more than the intermediary between the old ranchman and his employees.

The doctor had impressed her with the rule that his patient was not to be worried by business matters. Many things she had to do “off her own bat,” as Sam Harding expressed it. The matter of Ratty M’Gill’s discharge must be one of these things, Frances saw plainly.

She waited now for the doctor’s appearance with much anxiety of mind. The Captain was quiet when the physician came; but the effect of his delirium of the night before was plain to the medical eye.

“Something must be done to ease his mind of this anxiety about his old chum, Frances,” said the doctor, taking her aside. “That, I take it, was the burden of his trouble when he rambled last night in his speech?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Try to get the fellow brought here, then,” said the doctor, with decision.

“That Mr. Lonergan?”

“The old soldier–yes. Can’t it be done?”

“I–I don’t know,” said the troubled girl. “The chaplain writes that he is a sick man—”

“And so is your father. I warn you. A very sick man. And he cannot be moved, while this Lonergan can probably travel if his fare is paid.”

“Oh, Doctor! If it is only a matter of money, father, I know, would hire a private car–a whole train, he said!–to get his old partner here,” Frances declared.

“Good! I advise you to go ahead and send for the man,” said the physician. “It’s the best prescription for Captain Rugley that I can give you. He has his mind set upon seeing his old friend, and these delirious spells will be repeated unless his longing is satisfied. And such attacks are weakening.”

“Oh, I see that, Doctor!” agreed Frances.

She sat down that very hour and wrote to the Reverend Decimus Tooley, explaining why she, instead of Captain Rugley, wrote, and requesting that Jonas Lonergan be made ready for the trip from Bylittle to Jackleg, in the Panhandle, where a carriage from the Bar-T Ranch would meet him.

She told the chaplain of the soldiers’ home that a private car would be supplied for Captain Rugley’s old partner to travel in, if it were necessary. She would make all arrangements for transportation immediately upon receiving word from Mr. Tooley that the old man could travel.

Haste was important, as she explained. Likewise she asked the following question–giving no reason for her curiosity:

“Did there recently leave the Bylittle Home an employee–an orderly–whose first name is Peter? And if so, what is his reputation, his full name, and why did he leave the Home?”

“Maybe that will puzzle the Reverend Mr. Tooley some,” thought Frances of the ranges. “But I am indeed curious about this friend of Ratty M’Gill’s. And now I’ll tell Silent Sam that there is a man lurking about the Bar-T who must be watched.”

She said nothing to Captain Rugley about sending for Lonergan until she had written. The doctor said it would be just as well not to discuss the matter much until it was accomplished. He also left soothing medicine to be given to the patient if he again became delirious.

Frances was so much occupied with her father all that day that she could do nothing about Ratty M’Gill. She had noticed, however, that the Mexican boy, José Reposa, had driven the doctor to the ranch and that he took him back to the train again.

The reckless cowpuncher had somehow bribed the Mexican boy to let him take his place on the buckboard that forenoon.

“Ratty is like a rotten apple in the middle of the barrel,” thought Frances. “If I let him remain on the ranch he will contaminate the other boys. No, he’s got to go!

“But if I tell him why he is discharged it will warn him–and that Pete–that we suspect, or know, an attempt is being made to rob father’s old chest. Now, what shall I do about this?”

The conversation between Ratty and Pete at the ford which she had overheard gave Frances an idea. She saw that the contents of the treasure chest ought really to be put into a safety deposit vault in Amarillo. But the old ranchman considered it his bounden duty to keep the treasure in his own hands until his partner came to divide it; and he would be stubborn about any change in this plan.

Lonergan could not get to the Bar-T for three weeks, or more. In the meantime suppose Pete made another attempt to steal the contents of the Spanish chest?

Frances Rugley felt that she could depend upon nobody in this emergency for advice; and upon few for assistance in carrying out any plan she might make to thwart those bent upon robbing the hacienda. To see the sheriff would advertise the matter to the public at large. And that, she well knew, would make Captain Dan Rugley very angry.

Whatever she did in this matter, as well as in the affair of Ratty M’Gill, must be done without advice.

Her mind slanted toward Pratt Sanderson at this time. Had her father not seemed to suspect the young fellow from Amarillo, Frances would surely have taken Pratt into her confidence.

Now that Captain Rugley had given a clear explanation of how he had come possessed of a part of the loot of Señor Milo Morales’ hacienda, Frances was not afraid to take a friend into her confidence.

There was no friend, however, that she cared to confide in save Pratt. And it would anger her father if she spoke to the young fellow about the treasure.

She knew this to be a fact, for when Pratt Sanderson had ridden over from the Edwards Ranch to inquire after Captain Rugley’s health, the old ranchman had sent out a courteously worded refusal to see Pratt.

“I’m not so awfully fond of that young chap,” the Captain said, reflectively, at the time. “And seems to me, Frances, he’s mighty curious about my health.”

“But, Daddy!” Frances cried, “he was only asking out of good feeling.”

“I don’t know that,” growled the old ranchman. “I haven’t forgotten that he was here in the house the night that other fellow tried to break in. Looks curious to me, Frances–sure does!”

She might have told him right then about Ratty M’Gill and the man Pete; but Frances was not an impulsive girl. She studied about things, as the colloquialism has it. And she knew very well that the mere fact that Ratty and the stranger were friends would not disprove Pratt’s connection with the midnight marauder. Pete might have had an aid inside, as well as outside, the hacienda.

So Frances said nothing more to the old ranchman, and nothing at all to Pratt about that which troubled her. They spoke of inconsequential things on the veranda, where Ming served cool drinks; and then the Amarillo young man rode away.

“Sue Latrop and that crowd will be out to-morrow, I expect,” he said, as he departed. “Don’t know when I can get over again, Frances. I’ll have to beau them around a bit.”

“Good-bye, Pratt,” said Frances, without comment.

“By the way,” called Pratt, from his saddle and holding in his pony, “your father being so ill isn’t going to make you give up your part in the pageant, Frances?”

“Plenty of time for that,” she returned, but without smiling. “I hope father will be well before the date set for the show.”

Pratt’s departure left Frances with a sinking heart; but she did not betray her feelings. To be all alone with her father and the two Chinamen at the ranch-house seemed hard indeed; and with the responsibility of the treasure chest on her heart, too!

Her father, it was true, had insisted on having his couch placed at night in the room with the Spanish chest. He seemed to consider that, ill as he was, he could guard the treasure better than anybody else.

Frances had to devise a plan without either her father’s advice or that of anybody else. She prepared for the adventure by begging the Captain to have burlap wrapped about the chest and securely roped on.

“Then it won’t be so noticeable,” she told him, “when people come in to call on you.” For some of the other cattlemen of the Panhandle rode many miles to call at the Bar-T Ranch; and, of course, they insisted upon seeing Captain Rugley.

Ming and San Soo (the latter was very tall and enormously strong for a coolie) corded the Spanish chest as directed, and under the Captain’s eye. Then Frances threw a Navajo blanket over it and it looked like a couch or divan.

To Silent Sam she said; “I want a four-mule wagon to go to Amarillo for supplies. When can I have it?”

“Can’t you have the goods come by rail to Jackleg?” asked the foreman, somewhat surprised by the request.

Now, Jackleg was not on the same railroad as Amarillo. Frances shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Sam. There’s something particular I must get at Amarillo.”

“You going with the wagon, Miss Frances?”

“Yes. I want a good man to drive–Bender, or Mack Hinkman. None of the Mexicans will do. We’ll stop at Peckham’s Ranch and at the hotel in Calas on the way.”

“Whatever ye say,” said Sam. “When do ye want to go?”

“Day after to-morrow,” responded Frances, briskly. “It will be all right then?”

“Sure,” agreed Silent Sam. “I’ll fix ye up.”

Frances had several important things to do before the time stated. And, too, before that time, something quite unexpected happened.

CHAPTER XII
MOLLY

Frances’ secret plans did not interfere with her usual tasks. She started in the morning to make her rounds. Molly had been resting and would now be in fine fettle, and the girl expected to call her to the gate when she came down to the corral in which the spare riding stock was usually kept.

Instead of seeing only José Reposa or one of the other Mexicans hanging about, here was a row of punchers roosting along the top rail of the corral fence, and evidently so much interested in what was going on in the enclosure that they did not notice the approach of Captain Rugley’s daughter.

“Better keep off’n the leetle hawse, Ratty!” one fellow was advising the unseen individual who was partly, at least, furnishing the entertainment for the loiterers.

“She looks meek,” put in another, “but believe me! when she was broke, it was the best day’s work Joe Magowan ever done on this here ranch. Ain’t that so, boys?”

“Ratty warn’t here then,” said the first speaker. “He don’t know that leetle Molly hawse and what capers she done cut up—”

“Molly!” ejaculated Frances, under her breath, and ran forward.

At that instant there was a sudden hullabaloo in the corral. Some of the men cheered; others laughed; and one fell off the fence.

“Go it!”

“Hold tight, boy!”

“Tie a knot in your laigs underneath her, Ratty! She’s a-gwine to try to throw ye clean ter Texarkana!”

“What’s he doing with my pony?”

The cry startled the string of punchers. They turned–most of them looking sheepish enough–and gaped, wordlessly, at Frances, who came running to the fence.

Molly was her pet, her own especial property. Nobody else had ridden the pinto since she was broken by the head wrangler, Joe Magowan. Nor was Molly really broken, in the ordinary acceptation of the term.

Frances could ride her–could do almost anything with her. She was the best cutting-out pony on the ranch. She was gentle with Frances, but she had never shown fondness for anybody else, and would look wall-eyed on the near approach of anybody but the girl herself. None but Joe and Frances had ever bridled her or cinched the saddle on Molly.

Ratty M’Gill was the culprit, of course; nor did he hear Frances’ cry as she arrived at the corral. He had bestridden the nervous pinto and Molly was “acting up.”

Ratty had his rope around her neck and a loop around her lower jaw, as Indians guide their half-wild steeds. At every bound the puncher jerked the pony’s jaw downward and raked her flanks with his cruel spurs. These latter were leaving welts and gashes along the pinto’s heaving sides.

“You cruel fellow!” shrieked Frances. “Get off my pony at once!”

“Say! she’s trying to buck, Miss Frances,” one of the men warned her. “She’ll be sp’il’t if he lets her beat him now. You won’t never be able to ride her, once let her git the upper hand.”

“Mind you own concerns, Jim Bender!” exclaimed the girl, both wrathful and hurt. “I can manage that pony if she’s let alone.” Then she raised her voice again and cried to Ratty:

“M’Gill! you get off that horse! At once, I tell you!”

“The Missus is sure some peeved,” muttered Bender to one of his mates.

“And why shouldn’t she be? We’d never ought to let Ratty try to ride that critter.”

“Molly!” shouted Frances, climbing the fence herself as quickly as any boy.

She dropped over into the corral where the other ponies were running about in great excitement.

“Molly, come here!” She whistled for the pinto and Molly’s head came up and her eyes rolled in the direction of her mistress. She knew she was being abused; and she remembered that Frances was always kind to her.

Whether Ratty agreed or not, the pinto galloped across the corral.

“Get down off that pony, you brute!” exclaimed Frances, her eyes flashing at the half-serious, half-grinning cowboy.

“She’s some little pinto when she gits in a tantrum,” remarked the unabashed Ratty.

Frances had brought her bridle. Although Molly stood shaking and quivering, the girl slipped the bit between her jaws and buckled the straps in a moment. She held the pony, but did not attempt to lead her toward the saddling shed.

“M’Gill,” Frances said, sharply, “you go to Silent Sam and get your time and come to the house this noon for your pay. You’ll never bestride another pony on this ranch. Do you hear me?”

“What’s that?” demanded the cowpuncher, his face flaming instantly, and his black eyes sparkling.

She had reproved him before his mates, and the young man was angry on the instant. But Frances was angry first. And, moreover, she had good reason for distrusting Ratty. The incident was one lent by Fortune as an excuse for his discharge.

“You are not fit to handle stock,” said Frances, bitingly. “Look what you did to that bunch of cattle the other day! And I’ve watched you more than once misusing your mount. Get your pay, and get off the Bar-T. We’ve no use for the like of you.”

“Say!” drawled the puncher, with an ugly leer. “Who’s bossing things here now, I’d like to know?”

“I am!” exclaimed the girl, advancing a step and clutching the quirt, which swung from her wrist, with an intensity that turned her knuckles white. “You see Sam as I told you, and be at the house for your pay when I come back.”

The other punchers had slipped away, going about their work or to the bunk-house. Ratty M’Gill stood with flaming face and glittering eyes, watching the girl depart, leading the trembling Molly toward the exit of the corral.

“You’re a sure short-tempered gal this A. M.,” he growled to himself. “And ye sure have got it in for me. I wonder why? I wonder why?”

Frances did not vouchsafe him another look. She stood in the shadow of the shed and petted Molly, fed her a couple of lumps of sugar from her pocket, and finally made her forget Ratty’s abuse. But Molly’s flanks would be tender for some time and her temper had not improved by the treatment she had received.

“Perfectly scandalous!” exclaimed Frances, to herself, almost crying now. “Just to show off before the other boys. Oh! he was mean to you, Molly dear! A fellow like Ratty M’Gill will stand watching, sure enough.”

Finally, she got the saddle cinched upon the nervous pinto and rode her out of the corral and away to the ranges for her usual round of the various camps. She had not been as far as the West Run for several days.

CHAPTER XIII
THE GIRL FROM BOSTON

Cow-ponies are never trained to trot. They walk if they are tired; sometimes they gallop; but usually they set off on a long, swinging lope from the word “Go!” and keep it up until the riders pull them down.

The moment Frances of the ranges had swung herself into Molly’s saddle, the badly treated pinto leaped forward and dashed away from the corrals and bunk-house. Frances let her have her head, for when Molly was a bit tired she would forget the sting and smart of Ratty M’Gill’s spurs and quirt.

Frances had not seen Silent Sam that morning; but was not surprised to observe the curling smoke of a fresh fire down by the branding pen. She knew that a bunch of calves and yearlings had been rounded up a few days before, and the foreman of the Bar-T would take no chance of having them escape to the general herds on the ranges, and so have the trouble of cutting them out again at the grand round-up.

It was impossible, even on such a large ranch as the Bar-T, to keep cattle of other brands from running with the Bar-T herds. A breach made in a fence in one night by some active young bull would allow a Bar-T herd and some of Bill Edwards’ cattle, for instance, to become associated.

To try to separate the cattle every time such a thing happened would give the punchers more than they could do. The cattle thus associated were allowed to run together until the round-up. Then the unbranded calves would always follow their mothers, and the herdsmen could easily separate the young stock, as well as that already branded, from those belonging on other ranches.

Although it was a bit out of her direct course, Frances pulled Molly’s head in the direction of the branding fire. Before she came in sight of the bawling herd and the bunch of excited punchers, a cavalcade of riders crossed the trail, riding in the same direction.

No cowpunchers these, but a party of horsemen and horsewomen who might have just ridden out of the Central Park bridle-path at Fifty-ninth Street or out of the Fens in Boston’s Back Bay section.

At a distance they disclosed to Frances’ vision–unused to such sights–a most remarkable jumble of colors and fashions. In the West khaki, brown, or olive grey is much worn for riding togs by the women, while the men, if not in overalls, or chaps, clothe themselves in plain colors.

But here was actually more than one red coat! A red coat with never a fox nearer than half a thousand miles!

“Is it a circus parade?” thought Frances, setting spurs to her pinto.

And no wonder she asked. There were three girls, or young women, riding abreast, each in a natty red coat with tails to it, hard hats on their heads, and skirts. They rode side-saddle. Luckily the horses they rode were city bred.

There were two or three other girls who were dressed more like Frances herself, and bestrode their ponies in sensible style. The males of the party were in the Western mode; Frances recognized one of them instantly; it was Pratt Sanderson.

He was not a bad rider. She saw that he accompanied one of the girls who wore a red coat, riding close upon her far side. The cavalcade was ambling along toward the branding pen, which was in the bottom of a coulie.

As Frances rode up behind the party, Molly’s little feet making so little sound that her presence was unnoticed, the Western girl heard a rather shrill voice ask:

“And what are they doing it for, Pratt? I re’lly don’t just understand, you know. Why burn the mark upon the hides of those–er–embryo cows?”

“I’m telling you,” Pratt’s voice replied, and Frances saw that it was the girl next to him who had asked the question. “I’m telling you that all the calves and young stock have to be branded.”

“Branded?”

“Yes. They belong to the Bar-T, you see; therefore, the Bar-T mark has to be burned on them.”

“Just fancy!” exclaimed the girl in the red coat. “Who would think that these rude cattle people would have so much sentiment. This Frances Rugley you tell about owns all these cows? And does she have her monogram burned on all of them?”

Frances drew in her mount. She wanted to laugh (she heard some of the party chuckling among themselves), and then she wondered if Pratt Sanderson was not, after all, making as much fun of her as he was of the girl in the red coat?

Pratt suddenly turned and saw the ranchman’s daughter riding behind them. He flushed, but smiled, too; and his eyes were dancing.

“Oh, Sue!” he exclaimed. “Here is Frances now.”

So this was Sue Latrop–the girl from Boston. Frances looked at her keenly as she turned to look at the Western girl.

“My dear! Fancy! So glad to know you,” she said, handling her horse remarkably well with one hand and putting out her right to Frances.

The latter urged Molly nearer. But the pinto was not on her good behavior this morning. She had been too badly treated at the corral.

Molly shook her head, danced sideways, wheeled, and finally collided with Pratt’s grey pony. The latter squealed and kicked. Instantly, Molly’s little heels beat a tattoo on the grey’s ribs.

“Hello!” exclaimed Pratt, recovering his seat and pulling in the grey. “What’s the matter with that horse, Frances?”

Molly was off like a rocket. Frances fairly stood in the stirrups to pull the pinto down–and she was not sparing of the quirt. It angered her that Molly should “show off” just now. She had heard Sue Latrop’s shrill laugh.

When she rode back Frances did not offer to shake hands with the Boston girl. And, as it chanced, she never did shake hands with her.

“You ride such perfectly ungovernable horses out here,” drawled the Boston girl. “Is it just for show?”

“Our ponies are not usually family pets,” laughed Frances. Yet she flushed, and from that moment she was always expecting Sue to say cutting things.

“They tell me it is so interesting to see the calves–er–monogrammed; do you call it?” said Sue, with a little cough.

“Branded!” exclaimed Pratt, hurriedly.

“Oh, yes! So interesting, I suppose?”

“We do not consider it a show,” said Frances, bluntly. “It is a necessary evil. I never fancied the smell of scorched hair and hide myself; and the poor creatures bawl so. But branding and slitting their ears are the only ways we have of marking the cattle.”

“Re’lly?” repeated Sue, staring at her as though Frances were more curious than the bawling cattle.

The irons were already in the fire when the party rode down to the scene of the branding. Silent Sam was in charge of the gang. They had rounded up nearly two hundred calves and yearlings. Some of the cows had followed their off-spring out of the herd, and were lowing at the corral fence.

Afoot and on horseback the men drove the half-wild calves into the branding pen runway. As they came through they were roped and thrown, and Sam and an assistant clapped the irons to their bony hips. The smell of singed hair was rather unpleasant, and the bawling of the excited cattle drowned all conversation.

When a calf or a yearling was let loose, he ran as hard as he could for a while, with the smoking “monogram,” as Sue Latrop called it, the object of his tenderest attention. But the smart of it did not last for long, and the branded stock soon went to graze contentedly outside the corral fence, forgetting the experience.

Frances had a chance to speak to Sam for a moment.

“Ratty will come to you for his time. I’m going to pay him off this noon. I’ve got good reason for letting him go.”

“I bet ye,” agreed Sam, for whatever Frances said or did was right with him.

Pratt insisted upon Frances meeting all these people from Amarillo. There was Mrs. Bill Edwards, whom she already knew, as chaperon. Most of the others were young people, although nearer Pratt’s age than that of the ranchman’s daughter.

Sue Latrop was the only one from the East. She had been to Amarillo before, and she evidently had much influence over her girl friends from that Panhandle city, if over nobody else. Two of the girls had copied her riding habit exactly; and if imitation is the sincerest flattery, then Sue was flattered indeed.

The Boston girl undoubtedly rode well. She had had schooling in the art of sticking to a side-saddle like a fly on a wall!

Her horse curvetted, arched his neck, played pretty tricks at command, and was long-legged enough to carry her swiftly over the ground if she so desired. He made the scrubby, nervous little cow-ponies–including Molly–look very shabby indeed.

Sue Latrop apparently believed she was ever so much better mounted than the other girls, for she was the only one who had brought her own horse. The others, including Pratt, were mounted on Bill Edwards’ ponies.

While they were standing in a group and talking, there came a yell from the branding pen. A section of rail fence went down with a crash. Through the fence came a little black steer that had escaped several “branding soirées.”

Blackwater, as the Bar-T boys called him, was a notorious rebel. He was originally a maverick–a stray from some passing herd–and had joined the Bar-T cattle unasked. That was more than two years before. He had remained on the Bar-T ranges, but was evidently determined in his dogged mind not to submit to the humiliation of the branding-iron.

He had been rounded up with a bunch of yearlings and calves a dozen times; but on each occasion had escaped before they got him into the corral. It was better to let the black rebel go than to lose a dozen or more of the others while chasing him.

This time, however, Silent Sam had insisted upon riding the rebel down and hauling him, bawling, into the corral.

But the rope broke, and before the searing-iron could touch the black steer’s rump he went through the fence like a battering-ram.

“Look out for that ornery critter, Miss Frances!” yelled the foreman of the Bar-T Ranch.

Frances saw him coming, headed for the group of visitors. She touched Molly with the spur, and the intelligent cow-pony jumped aside into the clear-way. Frances seized the rope hanging at her saddle.

Pratt had shouted a warning, too. The visitors scattered. But for once Sue Latrop did not manage her mount to the best advantage.

“Look out, Sue!”

“Quick! He’ll have you!”

These and other warnings were shouted. With lowered front the black steer was charging the horse the girl from Boston rode.

Unlike the trained cow-ponies from Bill Edwards’ corral, this gangling creature did not know, of himself, what to do in the emergency. The other mounts had taken their riders immediately out of the way. Sue’s horse tossed his head, snorted, and pawed the earth, remaining with his flank to the charging steer.

“Get out o’ that!” yelled Pratt, and laid his quirt across the stubborn horse’s quarters.

But to no avail. Sue could neither manage him nor get out of the saddle to escape Blackwater. The maverick was fortunately charging the strange horse from the off side, and he was coming like a shot from a cannon.

The cowpunchers at the pen were mounting their ponies and racing after the black steer, but they were too far away to stop him. In another moment he would head into the body of Sue’s mount with an awful impact!

CHAPTER XIV
THE CONTRAST

“Frances!”

Pratt Sanderson fairly shrieked the ranch girl’s name. He could do nothing to save Sue Latrop himself, nor could the other visitors from Amarillo. Silent Sam and his men were too far away.

If with anybody, it lay with Frances Rugley to save the Boston girl. Frances already had her rope circling her head and Molly was coming on the jump!

The wicked little black steer was almost upon the gangling Eastern horse ere Frances stretched forward and let the loop go.

Then she pulled back on Molly’s bridle reins. The cow-pony began to slide, haunches down and forelegs stiffened. The loop dropped over the head of the black steer.

Had Blackwater been a heavier animal, he would have overborne Frances and her mount at the moment the rope became taut. For it was not a good job at all–that particular roping Frances was afterward ashamed of.

To catch a big steer in full flight around the neck only is to court almost certain disaster; but Blackwater did not weigh more than nine hundred pounds.

Nor was Molly directly behind him when Frances threw the lariat. The rope tautened from the side–and at the very instant the mad steer collided with Sue Latrop’s mount.

The wicked head of the steer banged against the horse’s body, which gave forth a hollow sound; the horse himself squealed, stumbled, and went over with a crash.

Fortunately Sue had known enough to loosen her foot from the stirrup. As Frances lay back in her own saddle, and she and Molly held the black steer on his knees, Pratt drove his mount past the stumbling horse, and seized the Boston girl as she fell.

She cleared her rolling mount with Pratt’s help. Otherwise she would have fallen under the heavy carcase of the horse and been seriously hurt.

Blackwater had crashed to the ground so hard that he could not immediately recover his footing. He kicked with a hind foot, and Frances caught the foot expertly in a loop, and so got the better of him right then and there. She held the brute helpless until Sam and his assistants reached the spot.

It was Pratt who had really done the spectacular thing. It looked as though Sue Latrop owed her salvation to the young man.

“Hurrah for Pratt!” yelled one of the other young fellows from the city, and most of the guests–both male and female–took up the cry. Pratt had tumbled off his own grey pony with Sue in his arms.

“You’re re’lly a hero, Pratt! What a fine thing to do,” the girl from Boston gasped. “Fancy my being under that poor horse.”

The horse in question was struggling to his feet, practically unhurt, but undoubtedly in a chastened spirit. One of the boys from the branding pen caught his bridle.

Pratt objected to the praise being showered upon him. “Why, folks, I didn’t do much,” he cried. “It was Frances. She stopped the steer!”

“You saved my life, Pratt Sanderson,” declared Sue Latrop. “Don’t deny it.”

“Lots of good I could have done if that black beast had been able to keep right on after your horse, Sue,” laughed Pratt. “You ask Mr. Sam Harding–or any of them.”

Sue’s pretty face was marred by a frown, and she tossed her head. “I don’t need to ask them. Didn’t you catch me as I fell?”

“Oh, but, Sue—”

“Of course,” said the Boston girl, in a tone quite loud enough for Frances to hear, “those cowmen would back up their employer. They’d say she helped me. But I know whom to thank. You are too modest, Pratt.”

Pratt was silenced. He saw that it was useless to try to convince Sue that she was wrong. It was plain that the girl from Boston did not wish to feel beholden to Frances Rugley.

So the young man dropped the subject. He ran after his own pony, and then brought Sue’s stubborn mount to her hand. Sue was being congratulated and made much of by her friends. None of them spoke to Frances.

Pratt came over to the latter before she could ride away after the bawling steer. Blackwater was going to be branded this time if it took the whole force of the Bar-T to accomplish it!

“Thank you, Frances, for what you did,” the young man said, grasping her hand. “And Bill will thank you, too. He’ll know that it was your work that saved her; Mrs. Edwards isn’t used to cattle and isn’t to be blamed. I feel foolish to have them put it on me.”

Frances laughed. She would not show Pratt that this whole series of incidents had hurt her deeply.

“Don’t make a mountain out of a mole-hill, Pratt,” she said. “And you did do a brave thing. That girl would have been hurt if you had not caught her.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he grumbled.

“I reckon she thinks so, anyway,” said Frances, her eyes twinkling. “How does it feel to be a hero, Pratt?”

Pratt blushed and turned away. “I don’t want to wear any laurels that are not honestly my own,” he muttered.

“But you don’t object to Miss Boston’s expression of gratitude, Pratt?” teased Frances.

He made a little face at her as he went back to the ranchman’s wife and her guests; without another word Frances spurred Molly in the other direction, and before Mrs. Bill Edwards could speak to her the girl of the ranges was far away.

She headed for the West Run, where a large herd of the Bar-T cattle grazed. Nor did she look back again to see what became of the group of riders who were with Mrs. Edwards and Pratt.

Frances had no heart for such company just then. Sue Latrop’s manner had really hurt the Western girl. Perhaps Frances was easily wounded; but Sue had plainly revealed her opinion of the ranchman’s daughter.

The contrast between them cut Frances to the quick. She keenly realized how she, herself, must appear in the company of the pretty Eastern girl.

“Of course, Pratt, and Mrs. Edwards, and all of them, must see how superior she is to me,” Frances thought, as Molly galloped away with her. “But just the same, I don’t like that Sue Latrop a bit!”

CHAPTER XV
IN THE FACE OF DANGER

Frances was going by the way of Cottonwood Bottom because the trail was better and there were fewer gates to open.

The Bar-T kept a gang riding fence all the time; but even so, it was impossible always to keep up the wires. Frances seldom if ever rode from home without wire cutters and staples in a pocket of her saddle.

She stopped several times on this morning to mend breaks and to tighten slack wires, so it was late when she found the herd at West Run. Here were chuck-wagon, horse corral and camp–a regular “cowboy’s home,” in fact.

The boss of the outfit was Asa Bird, and Tom Phipps was the wrangler, while a Mexican, named Miguel, was cooking for the outfit.

“Ya-as, Miss Frances,” drawled Asa, “I reckon we need a right smart of things. Mike says he’s most out o’ provisions; but for the love of home don’t send us no more beans. We’ve jest about been beaned to death! No wonder them Greasers are fighting among themselves all the endurin’ time. It’s the frijoles they eat makes ’em so fractious–sure is!”

Frances wrote out a list of the goods needed, for the next supply wagon that passed this way to drop at the camp, and looked over the outfit in general in order to report fully to Sam and her father regarding the conditions at the West Run.

It was high noon before she got in sight of the cottonwoods on her homeward trail. She was hurrying Molly, for she did not want to keep Ratty M’Gill waiting for his money. As she had told him, she wanted the reckless cowboy off the Bar-T ranges before nightfall.

She had struck the plain above the river ford when she sighted a single rider far ahead, and going in her own direction. It was plain that the man–whoever he was–was heading for the ford instead of the bridge where the new trail crossed.

Something about this fact–or about the slouching rider himself–made Frances suspicious. She was reminded of the last time she had come this way and of the dialogue she had overheard between Ratty M’Gill and the man named Pete.

“If he turns to look back, he will see me,” thought the excited girl.

Instantly she was off Molly’s back. There might be no time to ride out of sight over the ridge. Here was an old buffalo wallow, and she took advantage of it.

In the old days when the bison roamed the plains of the Panhandle the beasts made wallows in which they ground off the grass, and the grassroots as well, leaving a barren hollow from two to four feet in depth. These dust baths were used frequently by the heavily-coated buffalo in hot weather.

Holding Molly by the head the girl commanded her to lie down. The cow-pony, perfectly amenable to her young mistress now, obeyed the order, grunting as she dropped to her knees, the saddle squeaking.

“Be dead!” ordered Frances, sternly. The pinto rolled on her side, stretched out her neck, and blinked up at the girl. She was entirely hidden from any chance glance thrown back by the stranger on the trail; and when Frances dropped down, too, both of them were well out of sight of any one riding the range.

The range girl waited until she was quite sure the stranger had ridden beyond the first line of cottonwoods. Perhaps he merely wished to water his steed at the ford, but Frances had her doubts of him.

When she finally stood up to scrutinize the plain ahead, there was no moving object in sight. Yet she did not mount and ride Molly when she had got the pinto on its legs.

Instead, she led the pony, and kept off the wellworn trail, too. The pounding of hoofs on a hard trail can be distinguished for a long distance by a man who will take the trouble to put his ear to the ground. The sound travels almost as far as the jar of a coming railroad train on the steel rails.

It was more than two miles to the beginning of the cottonwood grove, and one cannot walk very fast and lead a horse, too. But with a hand on Molly’s neck, and speaking an urgent word to the pinto now and then, Frances was able to accomplish the journey within a reasonable time.

Meantime she saw no sign of the man on horseback, nor of anybody else. He had ridden down to the ford, she was sure, and was still down there.

Once among the trees, Frances tied the pinto securely and crept through the thickets toward the shallow part of the stream. She heard no voices this time; but she did smell smoke.

“Not tobacco,” thought Frances Rugley, with decision. “He’s built a campfire. He is going to stay here for a time. What for, I wonder? Is he expecting to meet somebody?”

This Cottonwood Bottom, as it was called, was on the Bar-T range. Nobody really had business here save the ranch employees. The trail to the hacienda was not a general road to any other ranch or settlement. It was curious that this lone man should come here and make camp.

She came in sight of him ere long. He had kindled a small fire, over which already was a battered tin pot in which coffee beans were stewing. The rank flavor was wafted through the grove.

His scrubby pony was grazing, hobbled. The man’s flapping hat brim hid his face; but Frances knew him.

It was Pete, the man who had been orderly at the Soldiers’ Home, at Bylittle, Mississippi, and who had frankly owned to coming to the Panhandle for the purpose of robbing Captain Dan Rugley.

The girl of the ranges was much puzzled what to do in this emergency. Should she creep away, ride Molly hard back to the ranch-house, arouse Sam and some of the faithful punchers, and with them capture this ne’er-do-well and run him off the ranges?

That seemed, on its face, the more sensible if the less romantic thing to do. Yet the very publicity attending such a move was against it.

The suspicion that Captain Rugley had a treasure hidden away in the old Spanish chest was not a general one. It might have been lazily discussed now and then over some outfit’s fire when other subjects of gossip had “petered out,” to use the punchers’ own expression.

But it was doubtful if even Ratty M’Gill believed the story. Frances had heard him scoff at the man, Pete, for holding such a belief.

If she attempted to capture this tramp by the fire, making the affair one of importance, the story of the Spanish treasure chest would spread over half the Panhandle.

“What the boys didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them!” Frances told herself, and she would not ask for help. She had already laid her plans and she would stick to them.

And while she hesitated, discussing these things in her mind, a figure afoot came down the slope toward the ford and the campfire. It was Ratty M’Gill, walking as though already footsore, and with his saddle and accoutrements on his shoulder.

The high-heeled boots worn by cowpunchers are not easy footwear to walk in. And a real cattleman’s saddle weighs a good bit! Ratty flung down the leather with a grunt, and dropped on the ground beside the fire.

“What’s the matter with you?” growled the man, Pete. “Been pulling leather?”

“There ain’t no hawse bawn can make me git off if I don’t want,” returned Ratty M’Gill, sharply. “I got canned.”

“Fired?”

“Yep. And by that snip of a gal,” and he said it viciously.

“Ain’t you man enough to have a pony of your own?”

“Sam wouldn’t sell me one–the hound! Nor I didn’t have no money to spare for a mount, anyway. I’d rustle one out of the herd if the wranglers hadn’t drove ’em all up the other way las’ night. And I said I’d come over here to see you again.”

“What else?” demanded Pete, suspiciously. He seemed to know that Ratty had not come here to the ford for love of him.

“Wal, old man! I tried to go to headquarters. Went in to see the Cap. Nothing doing. If the gal had canned me, that was enough. So he said, and so Sam Harding said. I’m through at the Bar-T.”

“That’s a nice thing,” snarled Pete. “And just as I got up a scheme to use you there!”

“Mebbe you can use me now,” grunted Ratty.

“I–don’t–know.”

“Oh, I seen something that you’d like to know about.”

“What is that?” asked Pete, quickly.

“The old Cap has taken a tumble to himself. Guess he was put wise by what happened the other night–you know. He’s going to send the chest to the Amarillo bank.”

“What?”

“That’s so,” said Ratty, with his slow drawl, and evidently enjoying the other’s discomfiture.

“How do you know?” snapped Pete.

“Seed it. Standing all corded up and with a tag on it, right in the hall. Knowed Sam was going to get ready a four-mule team for Amarillo to-morrow morning. The gal’s going with it, and Mack Hinkman to drive. Good-night! if there’s treasure in that chest, you’ll have to break into the Merchants’ and Drovers’ Bank of Amarillo to get at it–take that from me!”

Pete leaned toward him and his hairy hand clutched Ratty’s knee. What he said to the discharged employee of the Bar-T Ranch Frances did not hear. She had, however, heard enough. She was worried by what Ratty had said about his interview with Captain Rugley. Her father should not have been disturbed by ranch business just then.

The girl crept back through the grove, found Molly where she had left her, and soon was a couple of miles away from the ford and making for the ranch-house at Molly’s very best pace.

She found her father not so much excited as she had feared. Ratty had forced his way into the stricken cattleman’s room and done some talking; but the Captain was chuckling now over the incident.

“That’s the kind of a spirit I like to see you show, Frances,” he declared, patting her hand. “If those punchers don’t do what you tell ’em, bounce ’em! They’ve got to learn what you say goes–just as though I spoke myself. And Ratty M’Gill never was worth the powder to blow him to Halifax,” concluded the ranchman, vigorously.

Frances was glad her father approved of her action. But she did not believe they were well rid of Ratty just because he had started for Jackleg Station.

She had constantly in mind Ratty and the man, Pete, with their heads together beside the campfire; and she wondered what villainy they were plotting. Nevertheless, in the face of possible danger, she went ahead with her scheme of starting for Amarillo in the morning. And, as Ratty had said, the chest, burlapped, corded, and tagged, stood in the main hall of the ranch-house, ready for removal.

CHAPTER XVI
A FRIEND INSISTENT

It was a long way to the Peckham ranch-house, at which Frances meant to make her first night stop. The greater part of the journey would then be over.

The second night she proposed to stay at the hotel in Calas, a suburb of Amarillo. Her errands in the big town would occupy but a few hours, and she expected to be back at Peckham’s on the third evening, and at home again by the end of the fourth day.

She was troubled by the thought of being so long away from her father’s side; but he was on the mend again and the doctor had promised to see him at least once while she was away from the ranch.

Her reason she gave for going to Amarillo was business connected with the forthcoming pageant, “The Panhandle: Past and Present.” This explanation satisfied her father, too–and it was true to a degree.

She heard from the chaplain of the Bylittle Soldiers’ Home the day before she was to start on her brief journey, and she sent José Reposa with a long prepaid telegraph message to the station, arranging for a private car in which Jonas P. Lonergan was to travel from Mississippi to the Panhandle. She hoped the chaplain would come with him. About the ex-orderly of the home the letter said nothing. Perhaps Mr. Tooley had overlooked that part of her message.

Captain Rugley was delighted that his old partner was coming West; the announcement seemed to have quieted his mind. But he lay on his bed, watching the corded chest, with his gun hanging close at hand.

That is, he watched one of the corded and burlapped chests. The secret of the second chest was known only to Frances herself and the two Chinamen. Anybody who entered the great hall of the hacienda saw that one, as Ratty had, standing ready for removal. The one in Captain Rugley’s room was covered by the blanket and looked like an ordinary divan.

Frances believed San Soo and Ming were to be trusted. But to Silent Sam she left the guarding of the ranch-house during her absence.

Day was just beginning to announce itself by faint streaks of pink and salmon color along the eastern horizon, when the four-mule wagon and Frances’ pony arrived at the gate of the compound. The two Chinamen, Sam himself, and Mack Hinkman, the driver, had all they could do to carry the chest out to the wagon.

Frances came out, pulling on her gantlets. She had kissed her father good-bye the evening before, and he was sleeping peacefully at this hour.

“Have a good journey, Miss Frances,” said Sam, yawning. “Look out for that off mule, Mack. Adios.”

The Chinamen had scuttled back to the house. Frances was mounted on Molly, and the heavy wagon lurched forward, the mules straining in the collars under the admonition of Mack’s voice and the snap of his bullwhip.

The wagon had a top, and the flap at the back was laced down. No casual passer-by could see what was in the vehicle.

Frances rode ahead, for Molly was fresh and was anxious to gallop. She allowed the pinto to have her head for the first few miles, as she rode straight away into the path of the sun that rose, red and jovial-looking, above the edge of the plain.

A lone coyote, hungry after a fruitless night of wandering, sat upon its haunches not far from the trail, and yelped at her as she passed. The morning air was as invigorating as new wine, and her cares and troubles seemed to be lightened already.

She rode some distance ahead of the wagon; but at the line of the Bar-T she picketed Molly and built a little fire. She carried at her saddle the means and material for breakfast. When the slower moving mule team came up with her there was an appetizing odor of coffee and bacon in the air.

“That sure does smell good, Ma’am!” declared Mack. “And it’s on-expected. I only got a cold bite yere.”

“We’ll have that at noon,” said Frances, brightly. “But the morning air is bound to make one hungry for a hot drink and a rasher of bacon.”

In twenty minutes they were on the trail again. Frances now kept close to the wagon. Once off the Bar-T ranges she felt less like being out of sight of Mack, who was one of the most trustworthy men in her father’s employ.

He was not much of a talker, it was true, so Frances had little company but her own thoughts; but they were company enough at present.

As she rode along she thought much about the pageant that was to be held at Jackleg; many of the brightest points in that entertainment were evolved by Frances of the ranges on this long ride to the Peckham ranch.

There were several breaks in the monotony of the journey. One was when another covered wagon came into view, taking the trail far ahead of them. It came from the direction of Cottonwood Bottom, and was drawn by two very good horses. It was so far ahead, however, that neither Frances nor Mack could distinguish the outfit or recognize the driver.

“Dunno who that kin be,” said Mack, “’nless it’s Bob Ellis makin’ for Peckham’s, too. I learned he was going to town this week.”

Bob Ellis was a small rancher farther south. Frances was doubtful.

“Would Ellis come by that trail?” she queried. “And why doesn’t he stop to pass the time of day with us?”

“That’s so!” agreed Mack. “It couldn’t be Bob, for he’d know these mules, and he ain’t been to the Bar-T for quite a spell. I dunno who that kin be, then, Miss Frances.”

Frances had had her light fowling-piece put in the wagon, and before noon she sighted a flock of the scarce prairie chickens. Away she scampered on Molly after the wary birds, and succeeded, in half an hour, in getting a brace of them.

Mack picked and cleaned the chickens on the wagon-seat. “They’ll help out with supper to-night, if Miz’ Peckham ain’t expectin’ company,” he remarked.

But they were not destined to arrive at the Peckham ranch without an incident of more importance than these.

It was past mid-afternoon. They had had their cold bite, rested the mules and Molly, and the latter was plodding along in the shade of the wagon-top all but asleep, and her rider was in a like somnolent condition. Mack was frankly snoring on the wagon-seat, for the mules had naught to do but keep to the trail.

Suddenly Molly lifted her head and pricked her ears. Frances came to herself with a slight shock, too. She listened. The pinto nickered faintly.

Frances immediately distinguished the patter of hoofs. A single pony was coming.

The girl jerked Molly’s head around and they dropped back behind the wagon which kept on lumberingly, with Mack still asleep on the seat. From the south–from the direction of the distant river–a rider came galloping up the trail.

“Why!” murmured Frances. “It’s Ratty M’Gill!”

The ex-cowboy of the Bar-T swung around upon the trail, as though headed east, and grinned at the ranchman’s daughter. His face was very red and his eyes were blurred, and Frances feared he had been drinking.

“Hi, lady!” he drawled. “Are ye mad with me?”

“I don’t like you, M’Gill,” the girl said, frankly. “You don’t expect me to, do you?”

“Aw, why be fussy?” asked the cowboy, gaily. “It’s too pretty a world to hold grudges. Let’s be friends, Frances.”

Frances grew restive under his leering smile and forced gaiety. She searched M’Gill sharply with her look.

“You didn’t gallop out of your way to tell me this,” she said. “What do you want of me?”

“Oh, just to say how-de-do!” declared the fellow, still with his leering smile. “And to wish you a good journey.”

“What do you know about my journey?” asked Frances, quickly.

But Ratty M’Gill was not so much intoxicated that he could be easily coaxed to divulge any secret. He shook his head, still grinning.

“Heard ’em say you were going to Amarillo, before I went to Jackleg,” he drawled. “Mighty lonesome journey for a gal to take.”

“Mack is with me,” said Frances, shortly. “I am not lonely.”

“Whew! I bet that hurt me,” chuckled Ratty M’Gill. “My room’s better than my comp’ny, eh?”

“It certainly is,” said the girl, frankly.

“Now, you wouldn’t say that if you knowed something that I know,” declared the fellow, grinning slily.

“I don’t know that anything you may say would interest me,” the girl replied, sharply, and turned Molly’s head.

“Aw, hold on!” cried Ratty. “Don’t be so abrupt. What I gotter say to you may help a lot.”

But Frances did not look back. She pushed Molly for the now distant wagon. In a moment she knew that Ratty was thundering after her. What did he mean by such conduct? To tell the truth, the ranchman’s daughter was troubled.

Surely, the reckless fellow did not propose to attack Mack and herself on the open trail and in broad daylight? She opened her lips to shout for the sleeping wagon-driver, when a cloud of dust ahead of the mules came into her view.

She heard the clatter of many hoofs. Quite a cavalcade was coming along the trail from the east. Out of the dust appeared a figure that Frances had learned to know well; and to tell the truth she was not sorry in her heart to see the smiling countenance of Pratt Sanderson.

“Hold on, Frances! Ye better listen to me a minute!” shouted the ex-cowboy behind her.

She gave him no attention. Molly sprang ahead and she met Pratt not far from the wagon. He stopped abruptly, as did the girl of the ranges. Ratty M’Gill brought his own mount to a sudden halt within a few yards.

“Hello!” exclaimed Pratt. “What’s the matter, Frances?”

“Why, Pratt! How came you and your friends to be riding this way?” returned the range girl.

She saw the red coat of the girl from Boston in the party passing the slowly moving wagon, and she was not at all sure that she was glad to see Pratt, after all!

But the young man had seen something suspicious in the manner in which Ratty M’Gill had been following Frances. The fellow now sat easily in his saddle at a little distance and rolled a cigarette, leering in the meantime at the ranch girl and her friend.

“What does that fellow want?” demanded Pratt again.

“Oh, don’t mind him,” said Frances, hurriedly. “He has been discharged from the Bar-T—”

“That’s the fellow you said made the steers stampede?” Pratt interrupted.

“Yes.”

“Don’t like his looks,” the Amarillo young man said, frankly. “Glad we came up as we did.”

“But you must go on with your friends, Pratt,” said Frances, faintly.

“Goodness! there are enough of them, and the other fellows can get ’em all back to Mr. Bill Edwards’ in time for supper,” laughed Pratt. “I believe I’ll go on with you. Where are you bound?”

“To Peckham’s ranch,” said Frances, faintly. “We shall stop there to-night.”

The rest of the party passed, and Frances bowed to them. Sue Latrop looked at the ranch girl, curiously, but scarcely inclined her head. Frances felt that if she allowed Pratt to escort her she would make the Boston girl more of an enemy than she already felt her to be.

“We–we don’t really need you, Pratt,” said Frances. “Mack is all right—”

“That fellow asleep on the wagon-seat? Lots of good he is as an escort,” laughed Pratt.

“But I don’t really need you,” said the girl, weakly.

“Oh! don’t be so offish!” cried the young man, more seriously. “Don’t you suppose I’d be glad of the chance to ride with you for a way?”

“But your friends—”

“You’re a friend of mine,” said Pratt, seriously. “I don’t like the look of that Ratty M’Gill. I’m going to Peckham’s with you.”

What could Frances say? Ratty leered at her from his saddle. She knew he must be partly intoxicated, for he was very careless with his matches. He allowed a flaming splinter to fall to the trail, after he lit his cigarette, and, drunk or sober, a cattleman is seldom careless with fire on the plains.

It was mid-pasturage season and the ranges were already dry. A spark might at any time start a serious fire.

“We-ell,” gasped Frances, at last. “I can’t stop you from coming!”

“Of course not!” laughed Pratt, and quickly turned his grey pony to ride beside the pinto.

The wagon was now a long way ahead. They set off on a gallop to overtake it. But when Frances looked over her shoulder after a minute, Ratty M’Gill still remained on the trail, as though undecided whether to follow or not.

CHAPTER XVII
AN ACCIDENT

It was not until later that Frances was disturbed by the thought that Pratt was suspected by her father of having a strong curiosity regarding the Spanish treasure chest.

“And here he has forced his company upon me,” thought the girl. “What would father say, if he knew about it?”

But fortunately Captain Rugley was not at hand with his suspicions. Frances wished to believe the young man from Amarillo truly her friend; and on this ride toward Peckham’s they became better acquainted than before.

That is, the girl of the ranges learned to know Pratt better. The young fellow talked more freely of himself, his mother, his circumstances.

“Just because I’m in a bank–the Merchants’ and Drovers’–in Amarillo doesn’t mean that I’m wealthy,” laughed Pratt Sanderson. “They don’t give me any great salary, and I couldn’t afford this vacation if it wasn’t for the extra work I did through the cattle-shipping season and the kindness of our president.

“Mother and I are all alone; and we haven’t much money,” pursued the young man, frankly. “Mother has a relative somewhere whom she suspects may be rich. He was a gold miner once. But I tell her there’s no use thinking about rich relatives. They never seem to remember their poor kin. And I’m sure one can’t blame them much.

“We have no reason to expect her half-brother to do anything for me. Guess I’ll live and die a poor bank clerk. For, you know, if you haven’t money to invest in bank stock yourself, or influential friends in the bank, one doesn’t get very high in the clerical department of such an institution.”

Frances listened to him with deeper interest than she was willing to show in her countenance. They rode along pleasantly together, and nothing marred the journey for a time.

Ratty had not followed them–as she was quite sure he would have done had not Pratt elected to become her escort. And as for the strange teamster who had turned into the trail ahead of them, his outfit had long since disappeared.

Once when Frances rode to the front of the covered wagon to speak to Mack, she saw that Pratt Sanderson lifted a corner of the canvas at the back and took a swift glance at what was within.

Why this curiosity? There was nothing to be seen in the wagon but the corded chest.

Frances sighed. She could credit Pratt with natural curiosity; but if her father had seen that act he would have been quite convinced that the young man from Amarillo was concerned in the attempt to get the treasure.

It was shortly thereafter that the trail grew rough. Some heavy wagon-train must have gone this way lately. The wheels had cut deep ruts and left holes in places into which the wheels of the Bar-T wagon slumped, rocking and wrenching the vehicle like a light boat caught in a cross-sea.

The wagon being nearly empty, however, Mack drove his mules at a reckless pace. He was desirous of reaching the Peckham ranch in good season for supper, and, to tell the truth, Frances, herself, was growing very anxious to get the day’s ride over.