THE LAND OF FROZEN SUNS

A Novel

BY

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

Author of “Raw Gold,” Etc.

Copyright 1909, BY

STREET & SMITH.

Copyright, 1910, BY

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY.

The Land of Frozen Suns.

Made in U. S. A.

Contents

[CHAPTER I—THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE]

Who was it, I wonder, made that sagacious remark about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? He might have added an amendment to the effect that there’s always a plentiful supply of material for that much travelled highway. We all contribute, more or less. I know I have done so. And so did my people before me. My father’s intentions were good, but he didn’t live long enough to carry them out. If he hadn’t fallen a victim to an inborn streak of recklessness, a habit of taking chances,—well, I can’t say just how things would have panned out. I’m not fatalist enough to believe that we crawl or run or soar through our allotted span of years according to some prearranged scheme which we are powerless to modify. Oh, no! It’s highly probable, however, that if my father and mother had lived I should have gone into some commercial pursuit or taken up one of the professions. Either way, I should likely have pegged along in an uneventful sort of way to the end of the chapter—lots of men do. Not that I would have taken with enthusiasm to chasing the nimble dollar for the pure love of catching it, but because I was slated for something of the sort, and as the twig is bent so is the tree inclined; a man can’t sit down and twiddle his thumbs and refuse to perform any useful act, because there is no glory in it. The heroic age has gone a-glimmering down the corridors of time.

As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of circumstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always have felt, though, that I’d missed something, for I was ushered into this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South. Sumner here hadn’t developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and ’dobe buildings, of long-horned cattle, of wild, shaggy-maned horses, and of wilder men who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fashion. For landscape there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and stretches of greasewood—as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking over its quicksands—except in time of storm; then it raged.

So that when my father bundled mother and myself off to a place called St. Louis, where great squadrons of houses stood in geometrical arrangement over a vast area, I had already begun to look upon things with the eyes of cattleland. I recollect that when we were settled in a roomy, old-fashioned house I cried because my mother would not let me go out to the corral and play.

“There are no corrals in a city, dear,” she explained—and I cried the harder. I could conceive of no joy in a place where I could not go out to the corrals and have some brown-faced cowpuncher hoist me up on a gentle horse and let me hold the reins while the pony moved sedately about.

Left to himself, I think my father would have made a cowman of me, but mother had known the range when it was a place to try the nerves of strong men, and she hated it. I didn’t know till I was nearly grown that she had made dad promise when I was born that if the cattle made money for us, I should never know the plains. She came of an old Southern family, and her life had been a sheltered one till she met and married Jack Sumner. And she would have had me walk in pleasant places, as the men of her family had done—doctors, lawyers, planters, and such. The life was too hard, too much of an elemental struggle, she said—and I was to be saved some of the knocks that my dad had taken in the struggling years. Poor mother mine—her son was the son of his father, I’m afraid. But Sumner pere made good on his promise when the Sumner herds fattened his bank account sufficiently; and I gyrated through school, with college and a yet-to-be-determined career looming on the horizon.

So my childish memories of the great open, that lies naked to the sun-glare and the chilling breath of the northers year on year, grew fainter and more like something of which I had dreamed. Dad would come home occasionally, stay a day or two, perhaps a week, sometimes even a month; but my mother never went west of the Mississippi—nor did I. I often plagued them to let me go to the ranch during vacation, but they evidently considered it best to keep me away from the round-ups and horse-breaking and such, till I was old enough to see that there was another side to the life besides the sunshiny, carefree one that makes an irresistible appeal to a youngster.

And then, just a week after my twentieth birthday, my dad, slow-voiced, easy-going old Jack Sumner rode his horse into the smiling Red and drowned under the eyes of twenty men.

I was sitting on our front steps grouching about the heat when the messenger brushed by me with the telegram in his hand. Mother signed for it, and he ran down the steps whistling, and went about his business. There was no sound within. I had no hint of trouble, till a maid screamed. Then, I rushed in. Mother was drooping over the arm of a Morris chair, and the bit of yellow paper lay on the rug where it had fluttered from her hand. I carried her to a couch, and called a doctor. But he could do nothing. Her heart was weak, he said, and might have stopped any time; the shock had merely hastened her end.

I’m going to pass lightly over the week that followed. I was just a kid, remember, and I took it pretty hard. It was my first speaking acquaintance with death. A few of my mother’s people came, and when it was over with I went to Virginia with an uncle, a kindly, absent-minded, middle-aged bachelor. But I couldn’t settle down. For a week or ten days I fidgeted about the sleepy Southern village, and then I bade my uncle an abrupt good-bye and started for St. Louis. Little as I knew of business and legal matters I was aware that now the Sumner herds and ranches were mine, and I had a hankering to know where I stood. Except that there was a ranch and cattle in Texas I knew nothing of my father’s business. It didn’t even occur to me, at first, that I was a minor and consequently devoid of power to transact any business of importance. I knew that certain property was rightfully mine, and that was all.

Once in St. Louis, however, I began to get the proper focus on my material interests. It occurred to me that Sumner pere had done more or less business with a certain bank, a private concern engineered by two ultra-conservative citizens named Bolton and Kerr. I hunted them up, thinking that they would likely be able to tell me just what I needed to know. And it happened that by luck I came in the nick of time. A clerk took in my card, and returned immediately for me. I found the senior member, wrapping the bit of pasteboard around his forefinger when I was ushered in. We shook hands, and he motioned to a chair. I asked for information, and I got it, straight from the shoulder. Bolton was very economical in the use of words.

“Yes, I knew your father well. There is a sum of money to his account in the bank. He died intestate,” he told me bluntly. “In view of a communication I have just received, you will have little to do with any property until you are of age. The estate is now in the hands of an administrator—appointed by a Texas court. The court will probably order that you be allowed a certain monthly sum until your majority.”

“I see,” said I thoughtfully; I hadn’t considered that phase of it, although in a hazy way I knew something of the regular procedure. “Will our place here be managed by this administrator?”

“Very likely,” Bolton returned. “He has served us with a court order for the estate funds now in our hands. But you are legally entitled to the use and occupancy of the family residence until such time as the estate is appraised and the inventory returned. After that the administrator has discretionary power; he can make any disposition of the property, meanwhile making provision for your support.”

“It seems to me,” I hazarded, “that some relative should have been appointed.”

“Exactly,” Bolton nodded. “They made no move, though. And this Texas person acted at once: I dare say it’s all right. However, you’re a minor. Better have some responsible person appointed your guardian. Then if there’s any mismanagement, you can take court action to have it remedied. Frankly, I don’t like the look of this haste to administer. May be all right; may be all wrong.”

“See here,” I burst out impulsively, for I had taken a sudden liking to this short-spoken individual who talked to me with one foot on a desk and a half-smoked cigar tucked in the corner of his mouth, “what’s the matter with you becoming my guardian? None of my people seem to have thought of it. I’m sure we’d get along all right. It would be a mere matter of form, anyway.”

He smiled. My naive way of saddling myself upon him, along with a lot of possible responsibilities was doubtless amusing to a hard-headed financier like Bolton. I saw nothing out of the way in such an arrangement at the time. It struck me as a splendid idea, in fact. But he made allowance for my juvenile point of view. Shifting his cigar to the other corner of his mouth he surveyed me critically for a few seconds, crinkling his black brows thoughtfully.

“I’ll do it,” he finally assented. “The position ought to be a sinecure. Run in to-morrow morning at ten-thirty, and we’ll step around to the courthouse and have the thing legally executed. You’re staying at the old place, I suppose?”

“I’m going to,” I replied. “I haven’t been at the house; I came straight here from the train.”

“Well, run along, son,” he said good-naturedly. “I’d take you home to my family, only I don’t happen to possess one. I live at the club—the Arion—mostly.”

“Oh, by the way,” he called to me as I neared the door. “How are you off for funds?”

“To tell the truth,” I owned, rather shamefacedly, “I’m getting in pretty low water. I think I’ve some change at home, but I’m not sure. Dad never gave me a regular allowance; he’d just send me a check now and then, and let it go at that. I’m afraid I’m a pretty good spender.”

“You’ll have to reform, young man,” he warned, mock-seriously. “Here”—he dug a fifty dollar bill out of his pocket-book—“that’ll keep you going for a while. I’ll keep you in pocket money till this administrator allows you a monthly sum for maintenance. Don’t forget the time, now. Ten-thirty, sharp. Ta ta.” And he hustled me out of the office in the midst of my thanks. I was thankful, too, for I’d put it mildly when I told him that I was getting near the rocks. I was on them. I’d paid my last cent for a meal on the train that morning. And while I did feel tolerably sure of finding some loose silver in the pockets of my clothing at home, I knew it would not amount to more than four or five dollars. Oh, I was an improvident youth, all right. The necessity for being careful with money never struck me as being a matter of importance; I’d never had to do stunts in economy, that was the trouble.

From the bank I went straight home. We hadn’t kept a very pretentious establishment, even though Sumner pere had gone on increasing his pile all through the years since we’d moved to the city. A cook and a house-maid, a colored coachman and a gardener—the four of them had been with us for years, and old Adam was waiting by the steps for me when I came up the walk, his shiny black face beaming welcome. I had to go to the stable and look over the horses, and tell Adam that everything was fine, before the old duffer would rest.

In the house everything was as I’d left it. All that evening I moped around the big, low-ceiled living-room. There was little comfort in the place; it was too lonely. The hours dragged by on leaden feet. I couldn’t get over expecting to see mother come trailing quietly down the wide stairway, or dad walk in the front door packing a battered old grip and greeting me with his slow smile. I know it was silly, but the feeling drove me out of the house and down town, where there was a crush of humans, and the glitter of street lights and the noise of traffic. There I met a chum or two, and subsequent proceedings tore a jagged hole in Bolton’s fifty dollar bill before I landed home in the little hours. Even then I couldn’t sleep in that still, old house.

The long night came to an end, as nights have a habit of doing, and breakfast time brought with it the postman. The mail was mostly papers and other uninteresting junk, but one missive, postmarked Amarillo, Texas, and addressed to myself I opened eagerly. It was from the administrator, as I had surmised.

Most of the communication was taken up with an explanation of how he came to jump into the breach so quickly. He had been, it seemed, a close friend of my father’s. He knew that Jack Sumner had a son who was not yet of age, and who, even if he were, knew little or nothing about stock. Things needed looking after, he said; my father’s sudden death had left the business without a responsible head, and the ranch foreman and the range boss were bucking each other. Things were going to the devil generally, so he felt called upon to step into the breach, seeing that none of the Sumner family showed up to protect their interests. I wouldn’t be under any obligation to him, he frankly explained, for as administrator he would be paid for what he was doing. He also stated that if I felt that my affairs would be more capably managed in the hands of someone whom I knew better he would cheerfully turn over control of the estate without any tiresome litigation. And he concluded his letter with an urgent invitation to come down to headquarters and see the wheels go round for myself. He signed himself in a big heavy hand, Jake Howey, and the signature gave me an impression of a bluff, hard-riding cowman—picturesque and thoroughly Western. If I had been born a girl I expect my disposition would have been termed romantic. Anyway, Mr. Jake Howey’s letter made a hit with me.

When I went to keep my appointment with Bolton later in the forenoon I took the letter with me. He glanced over it, and tucked it back in the envelope.

“I don’t much believe in long distance judgment of men,” he declared, “but I’d be willing to take a chance on this Texas person. I should say you can expect a square deal from him—if this missive represents his true personality.”

“That’s the way it struck me, too,” I confessed. “I think I’d like to go down there for a while.”

“Yes? What about school?” he put in.

“Well, I suppose it’s necessary for me to go through college,” I admitted. “Dad intended me to. I was to begin this coming school year—September, isn’t it? But that’s nearly three months away. I would like to see that Red River ranch. I was born there, you know.”

“You’ll have to cut your eye-teeth in the business sometime,” he mused. “You’ll be less likely to get into mischief there than you will in town. Yes, I daresay you might as well take the trip. But no funking school this fall, mind. I’ve known youngsters to go to the cattle country and stick there. Your father did.”

“I won’t,” I promised, “even if I want to stay, I’ll be ready to dig in when September comes.”

“You’d better.” He laughed at my earnestness. “Or I’ll be down there after you. When do you propose to start?”

“As soon as I can.” Having paved the way to go, I wanted, boy-fashion, to be on the way at once.

“Any idea how to get there?” he queried; as if he had his doubts about the development of my bump of location.

But I had him there.

“Oh, yes. Dad used to take the train through Little Rock to Fort Worth, and on up into the Panhandle from there. Sometimes he took a steamer from here to Memphis. I think I’d like the river trip best.”

“All right,” he decided. “You shall go, my boy, just as soon as you can get ready. Now we’ll see about this guardianship matter.”

We saw about it in such wise that two days later I was the happy possessor of a ticket to Amarillo and a well-lined pocket-book. I had dinner with Bolton, and bade him good-bye quite cheerfully, for I felt a good deal as Columbus must have done when he turned the prow of his caravel away from Spanish shores. After leaving Bolton I went home after a grip I’d forgotten. The river boat on which I’d taken passage was due to leave at midnight.

And that midnight departure was what started one Bob Sumner up the Trouble Trail. It isn’t known by that name; it doesn’t show on any map that ever I saw; but the man who doesn’t have to travel it some time in his career—well, he’s in luck. Or perhaps one should reason by the reverse process. I daresay it all depends on the point of view.

[CHAPTER II—BY WAY OF THE “NEW MOON”]

Lights by the thousand speckled the night-enshrouded water-front when I reached the slip where my boat lay. On the huge roofed-in wharf freight-handlers swarmed like bees. The rumble of hand trucks and the tramp of feet rose to the great beams overhead and echoed back in a steady drone. Lamps fluttered on vibrating walls. Men moved in haste, throwing long shadows ahead and behind them. Boxes, bales, barrels, sacked stuff vanished swiftly down three separate inclines to the lower deck of the Memphis Girl, and from the depths of this freight-swallowing monster came the raucous gabble, freely garnished with profanity, of the toiling stevedores.

Out from under that vast sounding board of a roof the noise at once diminished in volume, and I passed through the heart of the dust and babel and gained the cabin deck of the Memphis. A steward looked over my ticket and guided me to the berth I had reserved. It was then half past nine; still two hours and a half to the time of departure. I took a look around the upper deck. Quite a number of passengers were already aboard. Some were gone to bed; others were grouped in the aft saloon. One or two poker games had started, and little groups were looking on. But of them all I knew not a soul. Youth hungers for companionship, and I was no exception to my kind. It may be a truism to say that nowhere can one be so completely alone as in a crowd; but the singularity of it never came home to me until that night. But we are always learning the old things and esteeming them new. I roamed about the Memphis, wishing I had stayed up town till the last minute. It had been my plan to go down and turn in; the ceremony of casting off was not one that interested me greatly. But now the whim was gone; a spirit of unrest, an impatience to be off, drove sleep from my mind. If you have ever known the dreary monotony of waiting for train or steamer to start when your whole being craves the restfulness of motion you will not wonder that I made one more round of the deck and saloons and then left the Memphis to roam aimlessly past the serried wharves that faced the stream.

I don’t recollect just how far I wandered. If the place had been strange to me I should likely have been more circumspect in my prowling. As it was, my only concern was to be at the S.S. Company’s wharf by midnight, and midnight was yet afar. So I poked along, stopping now and then to hang over a railing and peer across the dark sweep of the Mississippi toward the Illinois shore. Between, the lights of divers craft twinkled like fireflies, and tootings of major and minor keys with varying volume of sound went wailing through the night.

A big passenger packet, hailing from up-river, swept into view. Ablaze from her bow to the churning stern wheel she bore down like a floating villa strung with yellow gems. A band blared “Dixie” from somewhere amidships. I was young enough to have some degree of enthusiasm for such spectacles, and I turned onto a long half-lighted wharf and walked to its outermost tip to get a better view of the puffing river monster with its thousand gleaming eyes.

Until she came abreast and passed, I stood there watching. In a careless way I became aware of two men strolling out on the wharf; in fact, I had passed them near the entrance gate. I remember that the swell from the big packet was beginning to slap against the wharf wall when one of them edged over and asked me the time.

Like a simpleton I hauled out my watch to tell him. It did not occur to me that there might be any purpose behind the question. The river-front in St. Louis was not a place where one could safely exhibit signs of affluence in the way of cash or jewelry—and I knew it. I hadn’t grown up in a city without knowing some of its ways. No doubt it looked like an easy game, out there on the end of a deserted wharf.

My watch was a plain hunting-case affair, with a fob. Without an inkling of what was to come I turned toward the dim light as I sprung the case open. In that instant the fellow struck the watch out of my grasp with one hand, and smashed me full on the jaw with the other—a vicious, pugilistic punch. I went down. Curiously, I didn’t lose consciousness; and the blow gave little pain. But it paralyzed my motor nerves for a few seconds, gave me a queer, helpless feeling in my legs and arms, such as one has in a nightmare. It passed though, and the pair of them were just going through my pockets with a celerity that bespoke much practice when I recovered sufficiently to jab my fist into a face that was bent close to mine—at the same time driving both heels against the shins of the other fellow with what force I could muster.

This instinctive outbreak rather surprised them, I think. Anyway, they gave ground. Only for a moment, however. I made one valiant effort to gain my feet, and they were on me like twin wolves. Kicking, striking, struggling like primal beasts we three lurched this way and that on the brink of the wharf. A hundred yards away people were hurrying by, and if I’d had sense enough to realize that a shout was my best weapon I could easily have routed the thugs. But I was too frightened to think.

And in a very short time sheer weight of numbers decided the issue. One of them got a strangle hold about my neck. The other clasped me fervently around the waist. Thus they dragged me down. For one brief instant I rested on the hard planking, my head in a whirl, their weight like a mountain on my heaving chest. Then, with a quick shove they thrust me over the edge of the wharf.

Undertaken voluntarily, a twenty-foot dive is no great matter, but it is a horse of quite another color to be chucked into space and fall that distance like a bag of meal. I struck the water feet first, as it happened, and came to the top spluttering, half-strangled, but otherwise none the worse. Right quickly I found that I’d merely exchanged one antagonist for another. The current set strongly out from the wharf, and it cost me many a stroke to get back to it, and then I saw that I was no better off. Contrary to the usual thing the piles offered no avenue of escape, for they were planked up, a smooth wooden wall that I could not possibly climb. I felt my way toward shore, but the out-sweeping current was too strong. So I hooked my fingers in a tiny crack and proceeded to shed what clothing still burdened me. Of my coat only a fragmentary portion remained. It had been ripped up the back in the fracas above, and the side containing my ticket and most of my money had been torn clear off me. There was little left save the sleeves. My shoes and shirt and trousers I cast upon the waters with little thought of their return; and then, clad in a suit of thin underclothes I struck out for the next pier below, thanking my stars that I was a fair swimmer.

But I could not make it. The channel of the Mississippi threw the full head of a powerful current against the St. Louis side at that particular point; it struck the wharf-lined bank and swerved out again with the strength of an ocean tide, and I was in the out-going curve of it. The next wharf was not for me nor yet its fellow beyond. Steadily I was carried into mid-stream. Shouting for help across the black space that lay between me and the wharves soon exhausted what wind and strength I did not use up in a footless attempt to swim against the current. I stopped yelling then; it seemed to be sink or swim, and I began to conserve my energies a bit. Slipping along in plain view of myriad lights, hearing the fiendish screaming of steamer whistles, seeing the moving bulk of them dimly in the night, I felt in no immediate danger—not half as much alarm disturbed the soul of me as when the fingers of those night-hawks were clawing at my throat. I knew I could keep afloat an indefinite length of time, and some craft or other, I reasoned, would pick me up if I failed to make shore.

By and by I rapped my hand smartly against some hard object as I cleft the water, and gripping it I found myself the richer by a four-foot stick of cordwood on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This served to bear me up without any exertion on my part, and gave me that much better chance to buck the current. I was now well out from the wharves, and straining my eyes for passing boats.

Far down the river the piercing shriek of a siren split a momentary silence that had fallen on the stream. A drumming noise was borne up to me on a fitful night breeze. From behind the black loom of a jutting wharf a steamer appeared, and came throbbing upstream. Now she was almost on me, the heart-like pulse of her engines and the thresh of her great sternwheel deadening all the other sounds which that vast river surface caught up and bandied back and forth.

Remorselessly the current bore me into her path. At first I had strained every nerve to get in her way, but as the black hull with funnels belching smoke and deck-lights riding high drew near I remembered that if I missed a hold on her side I stood a fair chance of being sucked into the flailing paddles. When that filtered into my cranium I backed water in hot haste; but I had gone too far, and her speed was too great. In another minute I was pawing at the slippery bulge of her water-line, and striving to lift my voice above the chug of the engines as she slid by.

The wash from her swung me away and drew me back again, and just as the nearing thresh of her broad-paddled wheel struck a chill of fear into my quaking heart my hands fouled in a trailing line and I laid hold of it more tightly than ever drowning man clutched the proverbial straw.

It was a small line, and the strain of towing me was great, but it held. In the tiers of cabins above my head lights flicked out one by one. Again and again I called, bellowing upward with the regularity of a fog signal. No answer; no inquiring face peered over the rail. The docks slid by. God only knows how long I dangled at the end of that bit of twisted fiber. The glow-worm lamps of St. Louis twinkled distantly on the left, rapidly falling astern. The thin line wrapped about my wrist numbed it to the elbow; I changed hands from time to time, in peril of being cast adrift. Fervently I wished for my bit of driftwood. The on-rushing demon to which I clung offered less hope of succor.

In a little while longer I should have cast loose from sheer inability to hold on. The strain on my arms was exhausting, and the least shift soused me under water, such was the speed. How I should have fared then, I do not know. But in the nick of time an answering hail came from above and when I had established the fact that a human being was clinging alongside, a cluster of heads and a lantern or two appeared at the rail and a rope ladder came wriggling down.

Cramped and sore and weary as I was I climbed thankfully aboard. A knot of passengers surrounded an officer whom I took to be the mate. A deckhand or two stood by, eyeing me curiously as I heaved myself on deck. The mate held up his lantern and took a good look at me.

“You look some the worse for wear, bucko,” he volunteered indifferently. “How long you been hangin’ onto us?”

I began to explain, but I daresay my appearance hardly lent an air of truth to my words; he cut me short with an incredulous shrug of his shoulders.

“Tell that t’ the captain or the purser,” he interrupted sharply. “Bilk, you steer him t’ the pilot house. I’ll be there in a minute.”

He turned on his heel, and Bilk motioned me to follow. As we passed forward I wondered on what sort of craft I had landed, whither bound, and how good my chance was of getting back to St. Louis and making a fresh start. The first of these queries I voiced to Bilk.

“She’s the New Moon,” he growled. “Through freight t’ Bismark, Cow Island, and Fort Benton. Stop? Naw, she don’t stop fer nothin’ only wood.”

[CHAPTER III—WHICH SHOWS THAT THE WORM DOES NOT ALWAYS TURN]

The door of the pilot-house swung open and the captain himself stepped out as Bilk reached for the knob. The eyes of this river autocrat fell inquiringly on me. I daresay I was not a prepossessing figure in the dull glimmer of a deck lamp.

“What the devil’s this?” he demanded.

“Feller picked up alongside us, hangin’ on by an unstowed line, sir.” Bilk explained.

“Huh!” the captain grunted.

“See here, sir,” I began. “I’m much obliged for being picked up. And I’ll be much more obliged if you’ll put me in the way of getting into some clothes and landing as soon as possible. I was to have taken the Memphis Girl down-river to-night. Mr. Bolton, of the Bolton and Kerr bank will make it all right with you.”

The captain guffawed coarsely in my face. “God bless me, that’s all right. Hey, Tupper,”—to the mate, who came up while I was speaking—“here’s a lad with a black eye, a skinned nose, and no clothes on, who wants us to put about—and his banker will make it all right. Ha—ha—ha!” And he laughed till my cheeks burned.

“I don’t ask anything of you only to get ashore, first stopping-place,” I spluttered, trembling with anger; his patent disbelief of my statement was hard to swallow. “I’m not to blame for getting robbed and tumbled into the river, and I don’t want my people to think I’ve been drowned.”

“There’s the shore,” he jerked his thumb backward significantly. “Swim for it, if the deck o’ the Moon don’t suit you.”

That silenced me for the time. I knew I could never make shore, weary as I was. The inhospitable atmosphere was better than the unquiet bosom of the Mississippi. I had no stomach for further natatory stunts that night. And I knew that it depended on the good-will of this grouchy individual as to when and where I should set foot on land. He squinted calculatingly at me for a second or two, then addressed the mate.

“Take ’im below, Tupper,” he said. “Dig ’im up some jeans an’ a pair o’ shoes, an’ let ’im roost somewhere forrad. We can use ’im, I reckon.”

“Look here,” I remonstrated anxiously; he was overlooking my voice in the matter in a way that didn’t suit me at all. “I want to know when I’m going to get a chance to go back to St. Louis? You don’t seem to understand the fix I’m in.”

“Got passage-money about you?” he asked coolly.

“Why, of course not,” I replied. “A fellow doesn’t usually carry money in his underclothes.”

“He don’t, hey?” He stepped nearer to me and suddenly thrust a hairy fist under my nose. “Who the hell are you, t’ howl about gettin’ ashore? You look t’ me like a man that’s broke jail or somethin’ o’ the kind. As tough a lookin’ citizen as you are ought t’ be damn thankful for a chance t’ climb aboard. You’ll earn your keep while you’re on the Moon—an’ no questions asked. See? Take him along, Tupper. Kick his ribs in, if he makes a roar. Get forrad, there.”

That was all the satisfaction I got out of Captain Speer; and truth to tell I followed the mate with proper meekness. I knew enough of the river-boat way to avoid open clashing with sternwheel folk. Deep-water men paint lurid pictures of hell-ships, but I have my doubts, from what I’ve seen and heard, of any wind-jammer that ever sailed the seven seas being worse that some of the flat-bottomed craft that bucked the Missouri and Mississippi in the year of our Lord eighteen eighty-one.

The mate, a sullen, red-whiskered brute, hustled me down ’tween decks, rummaged in a locker and brought forth a frayed suit of cotton overalls, and a pair of brogans two sizes too large for my feet—and they are not small by any means.

“Get into them, if you feel the need o’ clothes,” he growled. “You camp on that pile o’ sacks an’ stay there till you’re wanted.”

Much as I resented his overbearing speech and manner I didn’t think it good policy to row with him just then. My face ached from the punching it had already received; physical weariness, bruises, the strangeness and palpable belligerence that confronted me on the Moon, all served to cow me, that had never been a fighting-man, nor thrown among the breed. My knowledge of the genus river-rat was sufficient to tell me that the mate would rather enjoy carrying out the captain’s order in regard to my ribs. I wanted none of his game at that time and place. So I donned the overalls and kept my mouth closed.

He wasted no more time on me, and when he was gone I settled myself philosophically on the sack-pile, wondering how long it would be till the Moon would make a landing. The wisest plan seemed to consist of dodging trouble while aboard, and stepping ashore at the first tie-up. Otherwise, I judged myself slated to enact the role of roustabout at the pleasure of the rude gentleman in command.

The night was warm; my wet underclothing not uncomfortable. Curled in an easy posture on the folded sacks I fell asleep, undisturbed by the monotonous beat of the Moon’s mechanical heart. The blast of her whistle, long-drawn, a demoniac, ear-splitting cross between a scream and a bellow, wakened me; and while I sat up, rubbing my sleepy eyes and wondering how long I’d slept, the boorish mate yelled from a gangway.

“Here you. Come along—an’ be quick about it.”

When I sensed the fact that he was directing his remarks at me, my first impulse was to lay hold of something and heave it at his bewhiskered face. But upon second thought I refrained, and ascended resentfully to the upper deck, grinding my teeth at the broad back of him as I went. A half dozen other men, roustabouts I judged from their general unkemptness, were gathered amidships by the rail. Off in the east day was just breaking; from which I gathered that I had slept seven hours or more. The speed of the Moon slackened perceptibly. Out of the grayness ahead a slip loomed ghostly in the dawn, tier on tier of cordwood stacked on the rude wharf; upreared on rows of piling, it seems to my juvenile fancy like a monster centipede creeping out to us over the smooth water.

Somewhere in the depths of the Moon a bell tinkled. Immediately the great paddle reversed, churning the river surface into dirty foam, and we began to sidle against the pier-end. Fore and aft, lines were run out and made fast by a dim figure that flitted from behind the woodricks. The mate growled an order, and a gangplank joined the Moon’s deck to the wharf. Down this we filed, his Sorrel Whiskers glanced over one shoulder at me.

At once my grimy companions, Bilk among the number, fell upon the pile of wood. For a moment I stood undecided—then made to walk boldly past the mate. Back of the wharf I saw the land, a sloping rise dotted with farmhouses, take form in the growing light; and I was for St. Louis whether or no. But Tupper forestalled me. I did not get past him. He seemed to be paying little attention, yet when I came abreast of him, heart somewhat a-flutter he lurched and struck out—with marvellous quickness for a stodgy-built man. There was no escaping the swing of his fist. I was knocked down before I knew it, for the second time in twelve hours. Satisfaction gleamed in his small, blue eyes. He stepped back, and when I got to my feet, something dazed and almost desperate, he was facing me with a goodly billet in one hand.

“Dig in there, blast yuh!” he roared. “Grab a stick an’ down below with it, or I’ll fix yuh good an’ plenty, yuh——”

The fierceness of him, the futility of pitting myself against a club, much less his ponderous fists, quelled me once more. I hoisted a length of cordwood upon my shoulder and passed aboard. Another trip I made, and some of the murderous rage that seethed inside me must have shown upon my countenance; for Bilk lagged, and, edging near as we trod the gangway together, muttered a word of advice.

“Fergit it, kid,” he warned. “Don’t go agin’ him. He’s a killer—he’s got more’n one man’s scalp a’ready. An’ it’s the calaboose for you if yuh do lay him out. See?”

Bilk was right. I was aware that while falling short of mutiny on the high seas, a good smash at Mr. Tupper would land me in jail right speedily—providing the captain and the other mate left enough of me to lock up—and seeing that St. Louis and my friends were already far astern, I might find myself in a worse pickle than aboard the Moon. This, coupled with a keen sense of shame for blows received and not yet returned, was galling. But cowardly or not, just as you choose, I could not cope with sluggers of that heavy calibre, and I knew it. So, temporarily, I subsided, and sullenly became a satellite of the New Moon.

The empty space behind the boilers, and a good share of the lower deck space was duly filled with wood; the Moon got under way again, and then I had a breathing spell, which I spent turning over in my mind certain plans that suggested a way out of the difficulty. Going to Montana, when my destination was Texas, was not to my liking, and the manner of my going I liked least of all. While I pondered Bilk drew near.

“First trip on a sternwheeler, huh?” he asked, in a not unfriendly tone.

“Yes—like this,” I answered, and he grinned understandingly.

“I should have jumped and made a swim for it,” I mourned. That had not occurred to me while we were tied up at the wood-wharf; in fact, my thinking was none too coherent about that time—Tupper’s fist had jarred me from head to heel.

“He’d likely ’a’ plugged yuh quick’s yuh hit the water,” Bilk observed indifferently. “He’s noway backward about usin’ a pistol, if he takes a notion.”

“Do you mean to say they’d dare shoot a man for quitting the steamer?” I uttered incredulously.

“Sure.” Bilk’s positive answer was distressingly matter of fact.

With exceeding bitterness I aired my opinion of such a state of affairs. Bilk merely shrugged his shoulders.

“They’re short-handed, that’s why they froze t’ you,” he explained. “She’ll lose time every wood-loadin’ if there ain’t men enough to pack it aboard. Then the freight’s slow, the passengers kick, an’ the owners pry up hell with the captain. Lord, was yuh never rung in like this before? It’s nothin’ t’ bein’ shanghaied onto a wind-jammer that’s due round the Horn—months of it yuh get then, an’ it’s tough farin’, too. You ain’t got no call t’roar on this. We’ll be in Benton in ten days or so. What’s that amount to?”

“It amounts to quite a lot with me,” I responded. “I’m not going to Benton if I can help it. I’ll fool that red-whiskered bully yet.”

“Don’t let him catch yuh at it, kid,” Bilk observed. “He’ll give yuh worse’n ten days’ steam-boatin’ if yuh mix with him.”

But I did go to Benton, in spite of my intention to the contrary. The Moon, as Bilk had told me, was a through freight, a fast boat, passengers and cargo billed direct to the head of navigation, and carrying mail for but one or two places between. Towns along the Missouri were few and far apart those days, once north of Sioux City, and for none did the Moon slow up. Wood-slips were her only landing; since food for the hungry monster that droned in the bowels of the ship was a prime necessity. For the next three days Tupper, and Bailey, the second mate, gave me no chance to quit my involuntary servitude. Their fists I avoided by submission. When we had progressed that far up-river I ceased to look for opportunity to take French leave, reasoning that I would have more trouble retracing my steps through that thinly settled land than if I stuck to the Moon and made the round trip; besides this, my anger at the dirty treatment had settled to cold malevolence. I wanted to stay with the Moon, to be forced to stay with her—for I had promised to make the captain and the mate dance to sad music once we tied to a St. Louis dock and I could get the ear of my guardian. That prospect was my only joy for many dolorous days.

Meantime I unwillingly carried wood, slushed decks, and performed such other tasks as were gruffly allotted me; always under a protest which I dared not voice. I suppose one would eventually become accustomed to being cursed every time one turned around, but it never failed to set me plotting reprisals; I can easily understand the psychology of a mutineer, I think. Once or twice I had it in mind to make some sort of appeal to one of the passengers—a prosperous-looking individual who, Bilk informed me, was a St. Louis fur merchant, and whom I thought might possibly know my father. But the sleek one transfixed me with such a palpably contemptuous air when I was in the act of approaching him that I hadn’t the heart to face a rebuff. A sternwheel deckhand is not an attractive person, as a rule, and I suppose I looked the part, aggravated considerably by my discolored optic and bruised face. My failure to get speech with one of the elect, and being scowled at as if I were a mangy dog into the bargain, didn’t tend to make me feel kindly toward the well-fed, well-clothed mortals who lounged on the after deck smoking Havana cigars. Of the hide man I took particular note, hoping to meet him some time in the future, when I’d settled with Tupper, Speer et al, and tell him what a damned snob he was. There was a woman or two aboard, but they stuck to their cabins and concerned me not—until a day when I was fool enough to show a trace of the soreness that always bubbled within.

I do not know why I tackled the captain. I did not want wages, for Bilk had made it clear to me that if I signed the steamer’s roll I thereby precluded the possibility of hauling the Moon’s commander over the coals for refusing to set me ashore and keeping me in practical peonage, and I would not have missed making it warm for that coarse ruffian for half the cattle my dad had left me. I dare say it was a flickering up of the smoldering fires of hostility. Neither Tupper nor Speer ever came close to me that I did not have to fight down an impulse to club them with whatever was nearest my hand. And this day I unthinkingly baited Captain Speer, much as I feared the weight of his ready fists. I was coiling a rope just aft of the wheel-house, when the captain paced along the deck, and turned a cold eye upon me. I dropped the rope.

“Say,” I asked bluntly, and perhaps more belligerently than was wise, “do I get paid wages for the work I’m doing?”

“Hey? Get paid?” he growled. Then he lifted up his voice and swore: “By God, you pay for the grub you eat and the clothes you got on an’ we’ll talk about wages. You—you double-dyed, gilt-edged, son-of-a-feather-duster!”

This is not a literal transcription of Captain Speer’s expletives, but it will have to serve. His rendering was of the sort frowned upon in polite literature, being altogether unprintable. Never did the captain sacrifice force to elegancy of expression. I have heard it said, and the statement is indubitably true, that he could swear louder and faster and longer than any two men between Benton and New Orleans. With the full tide of his reviling upon me, he lurched forward, his big-knuckled fingers reaching for my throat. I turned to dart around the wheel-house; Tupper, grinning maliciously, showed up from that quarter. And when I swung about to go the other way I tripped and Speer nailed me before I could dodge again. Like a cat pawing a helpless mouse, he slammed me against a deck-house wall, and I should doubtless have had my head well worked over but for a timely interruption.

Aft from the wheel-house a promenade deck ran over the cabin roofs, whereon the passengers lounged when they cared to sun themselves. The captain, the mate, and myself were on the narrow deck below. From just over our heads came the voice of feminine disapproval; at which Captain Speer let go my throat, and Tupper paused with his foot drawn back to kick me.

“You’re a pretty pair of brutes, indeed you are!”

The girl, a small serious-faced thing, her brown hair standing out in wind-blown wisps from under a peaked cap, leaned over the rail and flung down the words hotly, stamping one small foot to lend emphasis to her observation.

“You may be typical ship’s officers,” she went on scornfully, “but you are certainly not men.”

The two of them stood abashed, like pickpockets taken in the act, and a man by the girl’s side put in a word.

“Miss Montell,” he drawled. “You shouldn’t interfere with the pastimes of our worthy skipper and mate. Let the good work go on.”

“Shame on you, Mr. Barreau!” she flashed, drawing away from him.

The man paid no heed to her quick retort, but himself leaned a bit forward and spoke directly to the captain.

“Go to it, Captain Speer,” he said indifferently—that is, his manner of speech was well simulated indifference; but I, staring up at him, saw the storm-clouds gathering in his dark eyes. “Go ahead. Beat the boy’s face to a jelly. Kick in a few ribs for good measure. Make a thorough job of it. You see, I know something of the river-boat way. But when you are done with that, Messrs. Speer and Tupper, you shall have some little entertainment at my expense, I promise you.”

There was a menace in the inflection.

“By the Lord, sir, I’m master on this vessel,” Captain Speer at length found his tongue. “If you don’t like this, come down and take a hand.”

“Now speaks the doughty mariner,” Barreau laughed mockingly. “I shall take a hand without troubling to come down, believe me. Colonel Colt shall arbitrate for us. If that is to your liking I am at your service, Captain Speer.”

“Another cowardly blow,” cried the girl, her dainty face flushing, “and my father shall see that you captain no more boats for the Benton and St. Louis Company—you barbarian. I promise you that for penalty, whatever Mr. Barreau sees fit to do.”

Whether the threat against his position carried weight, or if he simply had no hankering for an encountering with the cool individual on the upper deck, I do not know; but, at any rate, Captain Speer saw fit to sheath his claws at this juncture.

“Git t’ hell out o’ here, you,” he grunted, under his breath. And I made haste to “git.”

Looking back, I saw Tupper and Speer striding aft. Above, the girl stood by the rail, tucking in the flying locks with graceful movements of her hands. Barreau was staring after the retreating pair, smiling sardonically over a cigarette.

Later, I learned from Bilk that Miss Montell was the fur-merchant’s daughter, and straightway I forgave the portly one any grievance I held against him. But from none of the crew could I learn aught of Barreau. Nor did I see him again, except at ship-length. Like the girl, he kept close to his cabin and the passengers’ saloon—terra incognita to such lowly ones as I. I was grateful, even at a distance, for between them they had saved me a thumping—a thumping which I had reason to believe was merely postponed.

The Moon was now well into Dakota. Steadily she forged up the turbid river, thrumming past Pierre, and, farther on, Standing Rock reservation. At Bismark we made a brief stop. Then we turned The Great Bend and plunged into the Bad Lands. Through this gashed and distorted country the Moon plowed along an ever-narrowing channel. From her deck I had my first glimpse of the buffalo, already doomed to extinction. Wild cattle and deer scuttled back up the fearful slopes at our approach, or vanished into the yawning canyons. Unaccustomed to that altitude, I marveled at the clarity of the atmosphere, the wonderful stillness of the land. The high banks that shut us in slanted away like paint-daubed walls, what of the vari-colored strata. The ridges back of them were twisted and notched by ancient geologic contortions, washed by countless rains and bleached by unnumbered centuries of sun—a strange jumble of earth and rocks and stunted trees; a place to breed superstitious fears, and warp the soul of a man with loneliness.

In time the Moon left this monstrosity of landscape behind, emerging upon a more wholesome land. Grassy bottoms spread on either side the river, and the upper levels ran back in a vast unbroken sweep, the true prairie. And presently we swept around a bend into view of a cluster of houses lining the north shore, and the Moon’s whistle outdid all previous efforts in the way of ungodly sound. Twenty minutes later she was rubbing softly against a low wharf, her passengers were disembarked, and the back-breaking task of unloading cargo began.

[CHAPTER IV—A FORTHRIGHT FIGHTING-MAN]

In due time the foodstuffs and other goods were unloaded, and the Moon began to take on her return cargo of buffalo hides and sundry bundles of furs, the harvest of the past winter’s hunting and the spring trade. Had it been left to our loud-mouthed captain there would have been no cessation of labor until the last pelt was stowed; he would have worked us twenty-four hours to the day. But Benton was not St. Louis, and the men who loaded ship were of a different calibre from the stevedores at the River City. A certain number of hours would they work, and no longer, though the Moon rotted at her slip. So we of the regular crew had a breathing spell as sundown approached. And the first spare time at my command I used to write a letter to Bolton, detailing my misadventures. This I posted, so that in case anything kept me from returning on the Moon, he would at least know whither I had gone and how I had fared.

It took two days to unload. The evening of the third day Bilk and I stole away from the boat and went uptown. There was not much of it, to be sure, but what little there was lacked nothing in the way of life and color. One could see any sort of costume, from sober broadcloth and fine linen to the rainbow garb of a blanket Indian. Even the long-haired frontiersman sacred to fiction was represented by a specimen or two. Altogether it was a motley, high-spirited crowd that we mixed with that night. Of the quieter residential portion of Benton I saw nothing, that time. My way, guided thereto by Bilk, was down the main street, where lights shone and glasses clinked merrily; into divers places where ancient pianos tinkled dance music. Drink and dance and gamble, that was the night life of the town. Wherever we went, wherever any man went, up and down the length of that one garish street, he could get a run for his money, if he had money to spend. In every saloon and dance hall the knights of farobank and draw poker held tourney on the field of green cloth. It was all very new and strange and fascinating to me.

Bilk stood treat in one of the saloons, and after we had emptied our glasses we stepped across the room to where a knot of men were watching an unkempt individual buck a roulette wheel with twenty-dollar gold pieces in lieu of chips. He had a dirty felt hat on the table before him, the crown of it half full of gold and silver, and he was scattering the double eagles two and three on a number. It was heavy play, I thought, but the dealer spun the little white ball and called the number and color in a bored sort of manner. The buffalo-runner lost half a dozen bets, and then all at once he caught the double O with three twenty-dollar coins resting on it. I gasped. Twenty-one hundred dollars in fifteen seconds! When the dealer passed over the stacks of gold, the unkempt one opened his mouth for the first time.

“How much’ll yuh turn for?” he asked.

The dealer jerked his thumb upward. “We’ll take the roof off,” he answered carelessly, “if yuh want to play ’em that high.”

The buffalo-runner grinned and deliberately set about placing handfuls of coin here and there on the board. And while I stood there wholly engrossed, eagerly watching the ivory ball in its circular race, some one grabbed me by the shoulders and hurled me unceremoniously out the door. Once outside and free of that powerful grip, I turned and beheld Tupper the red-whiskered, very drunk and very angry, flourishing a pistol and shouting vile epithets at me.

“Git back t’ the Moon, yuh —— son of a sea-cook! I’ll jerk an arm off yuh an’ beat yuh t’ death with the bloody end of it, if yuh show up here again. Scoot!”

Naturally, I “scooted,” Mr. Tupper meanwhile emphasizing his threats by sending a bullet or two skyward. I wondered, at the time, why no peace officer appeared to put a quietus on this manifestation of exuberance, but later in the game I learned that in frontier towns the popping of a pistol was regarded as one of the accessories of a properly joyful mood, men handled their guns to make a noise, a la the small boy with a bunch of holiday firecrackers. One could burn powder with impunity, so long as he had due care for innocent bystanders.

Of Bilk I saw no more, for a while. Thinking that since Tupper’s hostility had been directed at me, Bilk might have concluded to keep out of it, and see Benton by himself, I went on to the boat and curled up on a bale of buffalo hides, to sit a while in the moonlight and the pleasant night air before bedding down in the vile hole where we of the roustabout fraternity were permitted to rest o’ nights. An hour or so I sat there, and about the time I began to think of turning in, a figure came slouching up the wharf and aboard. The glare of a deck light showed me that it was Bilk. I called to him, and when he came a little nearer I saw further that he, too, had met with rough usage; for his face was bruised and his lips cut and swollen.

“Aw, that dam’ mate!” he said, in answer to my questioning. “He gits on a razoo like this every once in a while. Yuh was lucky he just throwed yuh out. The son of a gun nailed me after that an’ like t’ beat m’ head off. He’s tearin’ drunk an’ plumb on the fight. Chances is he’ll come down here before mornin’ an’ want t’ lick the captain, the cook, an’ the whole blame crew.”

“Somebody ought to take an axe to him,” I suggested bitterly.

“Yuh betche. That’s what he needs,” Bilk agreed. “I’ve heard tell about him gettin’ on these fightin’ drunks, but this here’s the first time he ever got t’ me. Yuh wait. I’ll git him some uh these times for this.” And Bilk went below, muttering dark threats.

I followed shortly, and rolled in. There was no disturbance during the night, and when we stood by for the loading after breakfast Tupper was on hand, a trifle surlier than usual, more or less red about the eyes, but otherwise showing no signs of his carouse. All that day we labored. Again at eventide part of the crew sallied uptown. Before ten o’clock all of them were back, one or two badly damaged about the face, and one and all filled with tales of the mate’s pugnacious mood.

“He sez, by the great horn spoon, he’ll bust the head of ary hide-slingin’ wharf-rat that sticks his nose up the main street. He wants the whole town t’ himself, the blamed hog!” one indignantly declared; and from what I’d seen of Tupper I could very well believe that he would have it to himself so far as the crew of the Moon was concerned.

The next morning found Mr. Tupper still on deck. Evidently a steady diet of strong whisky and rough-and-tumble fighting agreed with his peculiar constitution. That night we were all but done; two hours’ work in the morning would put the Moon in shape for the down-river journey. And when evening fell I took a notion to walk up and down the streets of Benton once more. It may have been that the prospect of getting to St. Louis in the near future made me desire to flaunt my independence in the face of the mate. Anyway, without stopping to make a critical analysis of motives, I slipped away from the Moon when dark closed in. The engineer came aboard a minute before I left, and I heard him call to his assistant that Tupper was a sheet and a half in the wind, and still wearing his fighting-clothes. But I took no thought of turning back.

Right up the main street I marched, venturing into one saloon after another without mishap. I felt quite elated, like a small boy playing “hookey” from school. And when, in the course of my prowling about, I ran into a half dozen hilarious cowpunchers I clean forgot Mr. Tupper and the unkind things he had promised to do to me.

The camp of these cattlemen, I gathered from their talk, was on the divide that loomed to the north of Benton, and after the manner of their kind they were “taking in the town” for the first time in many weeks. Wherefore, they were thirsty and noisy, and insistent that everybody should drink and be joyful. To one of them, a youngster near my own age, slim, sinewy, picturesque in his hair-faced chaps and high-heeled boots, I talked a little, but it was a hit-and-miss conversation, by reason of the general uproar, and the rapidity with which drinks came. I was all for information, and in his free-and-easy way he shed beams of light upon my black ignorance of range affairs. But alas! a discordant element burst rudely in upon our talk-fiesta. Tupper stalked in from the street, and chance decreed that his roving, belligerent eye should single me out of the crowd. I was leaning against a disreputable billiard table, at the time, and straight for me he came, not saying a word, but squinting up his little, pig eyes in a manner that boded ill.

I didn’t move. Though my heart flopped like a new-landed trout, I couldn’t quite bring myself to slink away. Beaten and bluffed and cowed as I had been for the past two weeks, I hadn’t quite lost the power to resent, and though I shrank from the weight of Tupper’s ungodly fists I shrank more from absolute flight. Something of the atmosphere of the ranges had crept into me that evening. I did not know what I was about to do, except that I was not going to run away from any red-whiskered brute from St. Louis or any other section of the globe.

He came up close to me, stopped, and regarded me a moment, as if amazed to see me standing there and making no move to go. And then with a quick hunch of his shoulders he swung a dirty fist for my jaw. But that time I fooled Mr. Tupper by sidestepping; I was watching him, and he was a bit oversure. Again he struck out, first with one hand and then the other. This time one of the blows landed, glancingly. His red, ugly countenance lurching toward me, his whisky-sodden breath in my face was more than I could stand; and when that vicious swing grazed my chin as I backed away, I ducked under his arm and smashed him on his reviling mouth.

It almost paid me for all the abuse I’d taken off him, that one good blow. The backward roll of his head, the quick spurt of blood where my knuckles split his lip, sent a quiver of joy over me. Had he been of the bigness of a house and equipped with two pair of fists I would gladly have fought him after that one punch. It showed me that I could hurt him. It gave me a hungry craving for more. I wanted to beat his ugly little eyes, his squat, round-nostriled nose, and his whisky-guzzling mouth into indistinguishable pulp.

But it was new business to me, and so instead of keeping at him hammer and tongs till he was down and out, I waited for him to rush me again. Wherein I made a sad mistake. If I had battered him down then and there—if—if! At any rate, he did come with a rush, and he came fortified with a wide knowledge of fist tactics to protect him from another such blow as I had dealt him. He fought me halfway across the room, and had me bleeding like a stuck pig before I connected with him again. But eventually one of my wild swings slipped through his guard, and jolted his head backward; the little bloodshot eyes of him blinked with the jar of it. And again I made a mistake. Instead of standing off and hammering him with clean straight punches, I rushed to close quarters. Half crazed with pain and anger I stepped in, swinging short right and left blows for his wabbling head, and so came within the sweep of his great arms.

He clinched, and in his grip I was next thing to helpless. One thing only could I do, and that was to butt him in the face with my head—which kindly office I performed to the best of my ability, until he jammed me hard against the billiard table and bent me backward till I felt my bones crack. And then with his thumb he deliberately set about gouging out one of my eyes.

I can feel it yet, the fierce pain and the horrible fear that overtook me when he jabbed at my eye-ball. I don’t know how I broke his hold. I only recollect that, half-blinded, hot searing pangs shooting along my optic nerve, I found myself free of him. And as I backed away from his outstretched paws my hand, sweeping along the billiard table, met and closed upon a hard, round object. With all the strength that was in me I flung it straight at his head. He went to the floor with a neat, circular depression in his forehead, just over the left eye.

There was a hush in the saloon. One of the cattlemen stooped over him.

“Sangre de Cristo!” he laughed. “A billiard ball sure beats a six-shooter for quick action. I’ll bet he was dead when he hit the floor.”

[CHAPTER V—THE RELATIVE MERITS OF THE FRYING-PAN AND THE FIRE]

They crowded close, a little ring of curious faces, about me and the dead man on the floor, and as a babel of talk uprose a tall, lean man pushed his way into the circle, Captain Speer of the Moon at his heels.

“I guess I’ll have to take you in just for luck,” the stranger said to me. “I’m town marshal. This killin’ business has got t’ stop.”

He took me by the arm, and as he did so the cowpuncher who had looked down at Tupper stepped in between us, breaking the marshal’s hold.

“Not this time, Bax,” he said softly. “Play fair or keep out uh the game. Yuh stay mighty close in your hole when a gun-fighter hits the town, and I’ll be damned if you build up your reputation by arrestin’ a kid. This red-muzzler came in huntin’ trouble, and he found it. It was on the square, and yuh ain’t goin’ to put nobody in your stinkin’ calaboose—not to-night. You and me don’t hitch on that proposition.”

For a second or two it seemed as if there might be another clash. Behind the two a space cleared at the first words, and I noticed more than one cowpuncher hitch his gun-belt forward. For myself, I was too dazed to realize the exact turn of affairs, and I cared less. Tupper, at least, would trouble me no more, and for that I was truly glad. But there was no mix-up, nor even a harsh word. The marshal weakened. If he had intended to take me he changed his mind after a brief glance at the faces of the men who were watching him with silent intentness.

“If that’s the way yuh feel about it, all right,” he said—with an indifference that his flushed face belied. He turned on his heel and walked out, Captain Speer following.

“Yuh bet it’s all right,” the cowpuncher flung after him derisively.

Then to me: “Throw a jolt uh Bourbon into yuh, kid, and you’ll feel better. Yuh made a good fight. But let me tell yuh somethin’. Go heeled. And when one uh these rough-necked fist-fighters jumps yuh, ventilate him. Show your claws a time or two, and these would-be bad actors’ll leave yuh strictly alone. Say, Mr. Bar-slave let’s have one pronto.”

Three or four of them picked up the carcass of the Moon’s mate and lugged it unceremoniously out to a rear room, and then the crowd lined up at the bar, the play at the wheel went on, the men at the faro-table who had turned on their stools to watch the fight again began to place their bets. Life ran too full and strong there to be long disturbed by the passing of any man.

My self-appointed champion—who, I now discovered, was just drunk enough to welcome disturbance in any form whatsoever—and the young fellow with whom I had been speaking before the row, wiped the blood off my face and doctored the eye that Tupper had come near gouging from its socket. And while they were thus ministering to me another stockhand clanked in from the street.

“Say, Matt, yuh sure stirred up somethin’,” he announced. “This the kid that got action on the St. Louis jasper? Well, there’s goin’ to be a healthy ruction round here over that, let me tell yuh. Bax is red-eyed over yuh runnin’ a whizzer on him, and he’s collectin’ a posse to take both of yuh in. Don’t yuh reckon we better drift for camp, Matt?”

Matt smiled and beckoned to some of the others. “Not by a long shot!” he drawled. “Whenever old Ed Bax runs me out uh town, it’ll be in the good-by wagon. I’m goin’ to see that this kid gets a square deal. If Bax or anybody else wants me let ’em come and get me. Will the rest uh you fellows stand pat?”

In varying stages of hilarity they crowded about him and profanely assured him that they would turn Benton inside out and shake the pockets if he but said the word. In the midst of their chatter the man who had brought news of the marshal’s action drew closer and lowered his voice.

“Look here, Matt,” he argued, “you’re runnin’ the outfit and you’re a friend of mine and all that sort of thing, and yuh know that all of us’ll back any sort of play yuh make. But it looks to me like we can do better’n to pull off a big fight. I ain’t plumb chicken-hearted, but Bax is goin’ to come down on us with a bunch uh tin-horn gamblers to help him out, and if this kid’s in sight he’s goin’ to try and take him. Yuh sabe? He’s got to make some kind of a bluff at it, or every pilgrim that comes along’ll run over him. So it’s a cinch that there’ll be more or less gun-play, and the Circle’ll be shy a man or two when it’s over.”

“They ain’t got the nerve, Dick,” Matt declared confidently.

“It don’t take much nerve to start anything like that,” Dick replied. “Somebody’ll reach for his gun, and it’ll be off. Now, Bax ain’t goin’ to jump you—he’s afraid to. If the kid’s with yuh he’s got to. I move we stake this kid to a hoss, and let him drift. That lets him out. And if Bax wants to have it out with yuh on general principles, why, we’ll see it through.”

“Dick’s right,” one of them put in. “The kid’s got to hit the trail, anyhow, and he might as well do it right away quick. That’s the main thing, ain’t it. We started in to help him out, and if we can do it peaceful, we’ll live longer. Bax won’t tackle us unless he just has to.”

“Yuh got me on the run,” Matt frowned. “I’d just as soon dehorn this Bax party to-night as any other time. But I see where the kid better move out, all right. You pilot him, Wall, and catch up one uh them extra hosses, and stake him to that saddle Musky left—I’ll fix it with old Musk when he comes back. He can ride my hoss to camp.”

It was all arranged offhand in less time than I have taken to tell of it, and I was hustled out to where a row of cow-ponies patiently awaited the pleasure of their hard-riding masters. For aught these sons of the plains knew I was a purely worthless bit of human driftwood. But I don’t think they gave a thought to the matter. There was only one thing to be done, in their estimation, and they proceeded to do it without consulting me or doing very much talking about it themselves. So very shortly I found myself straddle of the Circle foreman’s horse and jogging out of Benton. Beside me, young Wall rode silently until we reached the top of the long hill that slopes to the town. Then he shook his horse into a lope, and broke into cheerful whistling.

I, however, was far short of the whistling mood. The thing I should have done I was afraid to do. Ordinarily, my instinct would have been to face the music. I was unrepentant for the part I had played in the extinction of Tupper. Nor would I, if I had calmly weighed the chances for and against, have felt any fear of consequences before the law. But my experience with the law, in those days, was a void. That which we do not understand we usually fear, and that night I was stricken with a swift fear of the law. I had killed, and there was a penalty. My spirit revolted at the thought of a jail. Likewise, the quick action of those Circle cowpunchers made a deep impression on me. If incarceration was so to be avoided that they were willing to back their deeds with gunpowder, I wanted no phase of incarceration in my experience. Better the open, an unknown country, and whatever might befall therein, than to lie in Benton “calaboose”—which, to my disturbed mind, was a synonym for a place of vague horrors.

I thought of standing my ground, of taking chances on Bax the marshal and the Benton jail, until the Moon could reach St. Louis and apprise Bolton of my need—and then I shuddered at the thought that the thing might be settled beyond interference before he could make the long river journey. I had heard and read more or less of hasty trials in the West; I had killed a man in what seemed to me a barbarous fashion; I did not know what the authorities, self-constituted or otherwise, might do to me—and I hadn’t the nerve to stay and find out. If they should hang me, thought I, I shall be a long time dead. Flight, under these circumstances, made the strongest appeal to my excited imagination.

Such was the chaotic state of my ideas when Wall pulled up his horse, and I saw the white glimmer of tents close at hand.

“Night-hawk’s got the bunch over here, I think,” said he. “Seems like I hear the bells. Anyhow, you stay here and I’ll get yuh a caballo that can drift.”

He trotted off, leaving me standing by the clear-cut outline of a wagon. Away off in the semi-dark—for the moon was now risen—I heard a sudden scurry of hoofs, an accentuated jangling of two or three small bells. Presently Wall came loping back leading a blaze-faced sorrel horse.

From under the forward end of the wagon he dragged a saddle, a bridle and a saddle-blanket.

“There,” he said, “there’s a good rig, barrin’ spurs—which yuh won’t need much. And a good hoss to put it on. Go to it.”

The stock saddle, with its high horn and deep seat, was not so different from what I’d been used to—except as to weight. The double-cinch apparatus bothered me a little, but when Wall explained the uses of the latigo and the manner of its tying, I got my horse saddled properly—the small imps of uneasy haste spurring me on. Then I swung up to try the stirrups, and found that I had a restive brute under me. He plunged once or twice, but I kept his head in the air, and finally straightened him out. Wall nodded approval.

“I wasn’t dead sure yuh could ride him,” he owned. “But I see you’ve got him in your sack, and you’ll find him there when it comes to gettin’ over the ground.”

“I’m all ready now, I think,” said I.

“Wait a minute,” Wall laughed. “Don’t rush off. Bax wouldn’t come into the Circle camp after yuh to-night for two farms in Iowa. Chances are he’s busy right now figuring a way to get a dead safe whack at Matt Dunn. Come on over to the cook-tent and get some grub to tie on your saddle. You’ll need it.”

By the light of a candle he ransacked the grub boxes on the tail end of the cook-wagon. A loaf of bread, some fresh-made biscuits, and a big piece of boiled beef, together with a trifle of pepper and salt this light-hearted, capable youngster wrapped in a bit of burlap and tied behind the cantle of my saddle. And while he munched a piece of beef himself, he gave me explicit directions as to my course.

“Once yuh get over into the MacLeod country,” he concluded, “you’ll be all right. Nobody’ll care a cuss who yuh are nor where yuh come from, so long as yuh behave yourself. This red hoss hasn’t got the Circle brand, though he belongs to the outfit, so they won’t ask no fool questions about him. Yuh ought to pick up a job with some uh them Canadian layouts pretty easy.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” he exclaimed, when I was again about to mount, and he ran over to an outspread canvas-covered bed. He fumbled among the tumbled quilts a moment and came back to me carrying a broad cartridge-belt, on which a bone-handled Colt swung in its leathern scabbard.

“I pretty near forgot this,” he chuckled. “Yuh ain’t heeled, and Lord knows yuh need to be at this stage uh the game. Say, how are yuh off for coin?”

“Man alive!” I cried—and I meant it, “you’ve done more for me now than I can repay in a thousand years. I don’t need money.”

“Oh, yes, yuh do,” he returned, unruffled. “A dollar or two’ll come mighty handy when yuh hit MacLeod, or wherever yuh land. I ain’t goin’ to make yuh rich. Here, and good luck to yuh.”

He pressed a ten-dollar gold piece upon me. Then we shook hands as brothers at parting, and I rode out of the Circle camp on a high-stepping horse, with the Big Dipper and the North Star to guide me to the Canada line.

[CHAPTER VI—SLOWFOOT GEORGE]

I retain some vivid impressions of that night ride. A mile or two from the Circle tents I crossed the Teton River, then just receding from the June rise, and near swimming deep. After that I came out upon a great spread of bench-land, dotted with silent prairie-dog towns. Here and there a lone butte rose pinnacle-like out of the flatness. In all my short life I had never known what it was to be beyond sound of a human voice, to be utterly alone. That night was my first taste of it, and to my unaccustomed ears the patter of my horse’s hoofs seemed to be echoing up from a sounding-board, and the jingle of the bit chains rang like a bell, so profound was the quiet. I know of nothing that compares with the plains for pure loneliness, unless it be the deserted streets of a city at four in the morning—or the hushed, ghostly woods of the North, which I was yet to know. Each hollow into which I dipped reeked of mysterious possibilities. Every moon-bathed rise of land gave me a vague feeling that something sinister, some incomprehensible evil, lay in wait upon the farther side. Whatever of superstition lay dormant in my make-up was all agog that night; my environment was having its will of me. I know now that my nerves were all a-jangle. But what would you? The dark brings its subtle, threatening atmosphere to bear on braver men than I. For aught I knew there might be a price on my head. Certainly I was a fugitive, and flight breeds groundless, unreasoning fears.

Bearing a little west of the North Star, I kept the red horse at a steady jog, and when the night was far spent and my bones aching from the ride I came to another river—the Marias—which Wall had told me I must cross. Following his directions, a half-hour’s journey upstream brought me upon a trail; a few wagon-tracks that I near overlooked. This led to a ford, or what may once have been a ford. It no longer merited the term, for I got well soaked in the deep, swift stream. Red carried me through, however, and when I gained the farther bank of the Marias Valley a faint reddish glow was creeping up in the east. In a little while it was broad day.

Then I halted for the first time. My mettlesome steed I picketed carefully, ate a little of the biscuits and boiled beef, and lay down to sleep in a grassy hollow, too tired to care whether Bax was hard on my trail or not. The sunlight had given me a fresh access of courage, I think—that and the heady air of those crisp morning hours. My difficulties began to take on some of the aspects of an adventure. Once in the Territories, with none to hound me, I could apprise Bolton and he would forward money to get me home. That was all I needed. And if I could not manage to eke out a living in the meantime I was not the son of my father. I fell asleep with a wistful eye on three blue spires that broke the smooth sweep of the skyline to the northward—the Sweet Grass Hills, touching on the Canadian boundary, if I remembered rightly what Wall had said.

The hot noon sun beating on my unprotected face roused me at last. It was near midday. I had no liking for further moonlight travel, so I saddled up and rode on, thinking to get somewhere near the Hills by dusk, and camp there for the night. I was now over my first fear of being followed; but, oh, my hearers, I was stiff and sore! A forty or fifty mile jaunt is not much to a seasoned rider—but I lacked seasoning; however, I was due to get it.

A little before sundown I rode into the long shadow of West Butte, in rare good humor with myself despite the ache in my legs, for by grace of my good red horse I had covered a wonderful stretch that afternoon, and my nag was yet stepping out lightly. On either hand loomed the rugged pyramids of the Sweet Grass—which in truth are not hills at all, but three boulder-strewn, pine-clad mountains rising abruptly out of a rolling plain. The breaks of Milk River, in its over-the-border curve, showed plainly in the distance. I was nearing the City of Refuge.

There in that shadow-darkened notch between the lofty pinnacles I came to a new fork in the Trouble Trail. I did not know it then, but later I could not gainsay the fact. And the mile-post that directed my uncertain steps was merely a strain of the devil in the blaze-faced sorrel I bestrode. Had he been of a less turbulent spirit I doubt much if I should ever have fallen in with Slowfoot George.

It happened very simply. Ambling along with eyes for little but the wild land that surrounded, with reins held carelessly in lax fingers, I was an easy victim. As before remarked, I can put forward no better explanation than a streak of “cussedness” in my red mount. Suffice it to relate, that all at once I found my steed performing a series of diabolic evolutions, and in some mysterious manner he and I parted company in a final burst of rapid-fire contortions. I have since heard and read much of the Western horse and his unique method of unseating a rider, but never yet have I seen justice done the subject. Nor shall I descant long on such an unpleasant theme. Let me simply record the fact that I came to earth ungracefully, with a jarring shock, much as an importunate suitor might be presumed to descend the front steps of his inamorata’s home, when assisted therefrom by the paternal toe. And when I sat up, a freshly-bruised and crestfallen youth, it was to behold Red clattering over a little hillock, head up, stirrups swinging wide. He seemed in hot haste. Like a fool I had knotted the reins together for easier holding; with them looped upon his neck he felt as much at liberty as though stripped clean of riding-gear.

It looked like a dubious prospect. Upon second thought I decided that it could easily have been worse. A broken leg, say, would have been a choice complication. My bones, however, remained intact. So I sought about in the grass for the pistol that had been jolted from its place during the upheaval, and when I found it betook myself upon the way my erratic nag had gone.

It was no difficult matter for me to arrive at the conclusion that I was in a fair way to go into the Northwest afoot—should I be lucky enough to arrive at all. Red seemed to have gone into hiding. At least, he remained unseen, though I ascended divers little eminences and stared my hardest, realizing something of the hopelessness of my quest even while I stared. That Sweet Grass country is monstrously deceptive to the unsophisticated. Overlooking it from a little height one thinks he sees immense areas of gently undulating plain; and he sees truly. But when he comes to traverse this smooth sea of land that ripples away to a far skyline, it is a horse of another color, I assure you. He has not taken thought of what tricks the clear air and the great spaces have played with his perspective. The difference between looking over fifty miles of grassland and crossing the same is the difference between viewing a stretch of salt water from a convenient point ashore and being out in a two-oared skiff bucking the sway-backed rollers that heave up from the sea.

So with the plains: that portion of which I speak. Distance smoothed its native ruggedness, glossed over its facial wrinkles, so to say. The illusion became at once apparent when one moved toward any given point. The negligible creases developed into deep coulees, the gentle undulations proved long sharp-pitched divides. Creeks, flood-worn serpentine water-courses, surprised one in unexpected places.

I had not noticed these things particularly while I rode. Now, as I tramped across country, persuading myself that over each succeeding hill I should find my light-footed sorrel horse meekly awaiting me, it seemed that I was always either climbing up or sliding down. I found myself deep in an abstract problem as I plodded—trying to strike a balance between the illusory level effect and stern topographical realities. Presently I gave that up, and came back to concrete facts. Whereupon, being very tired and stiff from a longer ride than I had ever taken before, and correspondingly ill-tempered, I damned the red horse for bucking me off and myself for permitting any beast of the field to serve me so, and then sat down upon the peak of a low hill to reflect where and how I should come by my supper.

A smart breeze frolicked up from that quarter where the disappearing sun cast a bloodshot haze over a few tumbled clouds. This, I daresay, muffled sounds behind me to some extent. At any rate, I was startled out of my cogitations by a voice close by—a drawly utterance which evoked a sudden vision of a girl with wind-raveled hair, and a lean, dark-faced man leaning over a deck railing on the Moon.

“Magnificent outlook, isn’t it?”

Notwithstanding the surprise of finding him at my elbow in such unexpected fashion, I faced about with tolerable calmness. That intuitive flash had been no false harbinger, for it was Barreau sure enough. The angular visage of him was not to be confounded with that of any casual stranger, even though his habiliments were no longer broadcloth and its concomitants of linen and polished shoes. Instead, a gray Stetson topped his head, and he was gloved and booted like a cowboy. Lest it be thought that his plight was twin to my own, I will say that he looked down upon me from the back of a horse as black as midnight, a long-geared brute with a curved neck and a rolling eye. Best of all, at the end of a lariat Barreau held my own red horse.

“That,” said I, “depends on how you look at it. I’ll admit that the outlook is fine—since you have brought me back my runaway horse.”

“I meant that,” he nodded to the glowing horizon. “But I daresay a man gets little pleasure out of a red sky when he is set afoot in a horseless land. It will pay you, my friend, to keep your horse between your legs hereafter.”

“He threw me,” I confessed. “Where did you catch him? And how did you find me?”

“I thought he had slipped his pack, by the tied-up reins,” said Barreau. “As for catching him and finding you, that was an easy matter. He ran fairly into me, and I had only to look about for a man walking.”

“Well,” I returned, taking my sorrel by the rope, “I’m properly grateful for your help. And I have another matter to thank you for, if I am not badly mistaken.”

He made a slight gesture of deprecation. “Never mind that,” said he. His attitude was no encouragement to profuse thanks, if I had contemplated such.

I turned then to inspect my saddle, and found fresh cause for perplexity. By some means my supply of bread and beef had been shaken from its fastening. The bit of sack hung slack in the strings, but the food was gone. He looked down inquiringly, at my exclamation.

“More of my luck,” said I, and explained.

“Might I ask,” said he, after a moment of thoughtful scrutiny, “where you are bound for?”

“It’s no secret,” I replied. “I’m for the MacLeod country; over the line.”

“Then you may as well ride with me this evening,” he invited. “It is only a few miles to the Sanders ranch; you will be that much farther on your way. I can vouch for their hospitality.”

I hesitated, for obvious reasons. He smiled, as if he read my mind. And all in a breath I yielded to some subtle confidence-compelling quality of the man, and blurted out my story; the killing of Tupper, that is, and how the Circle men had aided me.

“I guessed at something of the sort,” he remarked. “You are new at the game, and you bear the ear-marks of a man on the dodge. We are a rowdy lot out here sometimes, and we can’t always settle our disputes by word of mouth; so that I think you will find most of us inclined to look lightly on what seems to you a serious affair indeed. Tupper had it in store for him; Speer too, for all of that, and many another brute on those river craft. You haven’t much to worry about. Very likely Benton has forgotten the thing by now—unless Bax and Matt Dunn’s men locked horns over it. Of course there is the chance that the Benton and St. Louis Company may hound you for killing one of their officers. But there’s no fear of their coming to Sanders’ after you—not to-night; and to-morrow, and all the other to-morrows, you can take things as they come. That’s the best philosophy for the plains.”

He swung a half-mile to the east, and picked up a pack-horse he had left when he took after my mount. Thereafter we loped north in the falling dusk, Barreau riding mute after his long speech, and I, perforce, following his example. At length we drew up at the ranch, a vague huddle of low buildings set in the bend of a creek. Barreau appeared to be quite familiar with the place. Even in the gloom he went straight to the bars of a small, round corral. In this we tied our horses, throwing them hay from a new-made stack close by. Then he led the way to a lighted cabin.

Barreau pushed open the door and walked in without ceremony. Two men were in the room; one lying upon a bunk, the other sitting with his spurred heels on the corner of a table. Each of them looked up at my companion, and both in one breath declared:

“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Slowfoot!”

After that there was more or less desultory talk, mostly impersonal—no questions pertinent to myself troubled the tongues of either man. One built a fire and cooked us a hot supper. The other made down a bed in one corner of the cabin, and upon this, at the close of the meal Barreau and I lay down to rest.

A jolt in the ribs and the flash of a light in my eyes brought me to a sitting posture later in the night. Sleep-heavy, what of the strenuous events that had gone before, it took me a full half-minute to get my bearings. And then I saw that three men in scarlet jackets held the two Sanders under their guns, while Barreau stood backed against the cabin wall with his hands held above his head. Even so it seemed to me that he was regarding the whole proceeding with a distinct curl to his lip.

“Come alive now, old chap, and don’t cut up rusty—it won’t do a bit o’ good,” one of these oddly dressed strangers was admonishing; and it dawned upon me that I, too, was included in the threatening sweep of their firearms. “Get into your clothes, old chap.”

It is astonishing—afterward—how much and how quickly one can reflect in a few fleeting seconds. A multitude of ideas swarmed in my brain. Plans to resist, to escape, half formed and were as instantaneously discarded. Among the jumble it occurred to me that I could scarcely be wanted for that Benton affair—my capture could scarcely be the cause of such a display. No, thought I, there must be more to it than that. Otherwise, Barreau and the two Sanders would not have been meddled with. Of course, I did not come to this conclusion of deliberate thought; it was more of an impression, perhaps I should say intuition, and yet I seemed to have viewed the odd circumstance from every angle in the brief time it took me to lay hold of my clothes. The queer sardonic expression lingered about Barreau’s lips all the while I dressed.

Presently I was clothed. Then the red-coated men mustered the four of us outside, by the light of a lantern. And two of them stood by the doorway and snapped a pair of handcuffs about the wrists of each of us as we passed out.

“Now,” said one of them, “you Sanders chaps know what horses you’d care to ride, and what stock Slowfoot George has here. So one of you can come to the stable wi’ me and saddle up.”

He took the youngest man, and went trailing him up in the uncertain light till both of them were utterly gone. After something of a wait they appeared, leading Barreau’s horse and mine and two others. In the interim I had had time to count noses. There was a man apiece for the four of us, and one off behind the cabin holding the raiders’ saddlestock. We stood there like so many pieces of uncouth statuary, no one seeming to have any inclination for talk, until the saddled horses came up. Then both the Sanders found their tongues in behalf of me.

“Look a-here, sergeant,” said the one, “yuh ain’t got any business over here, and yuh know it. Even if yuh did, this kid don’t belong in the crowd. You’re after us and yuh got us, but you’ve no call to meddle with him.”

“That’s right,” his brother put in. “I don’t know him from Adam. He just drifted in and camped overnight at the ranch.”

“I say y’know, that’s a bit strong,” the sergeant returned. “‘Birds of a feather,’ y’know. I shan’t take any chances. You’re too hard a lot, Sanders; you and your friend Slowfoot George.”

Thus he left no room for argument; and in a few minutes the four of us were in the saddle and on the move, a Mounted Policeman jogging at the elbow of each man.

At the end of half an hour’s progress, as we crossed a fairly level stretch of plain, we came to a little cairn of rocks; and when we had passed it the sergeant pulled up his horse and faced about. The moon was up, and the earth and the cairn and even our features stood out clear in the silvery glow.

“John Sanders, Walter Sanders, George Brown alias Slowfoot George, and one John Doe, in the Queen’s name I arrest you,” he addressed us perfunctorily.

A trooper snickered, and Barreau laughed out loud.

“Routine—routine and red tape, even in this rotten deal,” I heard Slowfoot murmur, when his laugh hushed. And on the other side of me Walt Sanders raised in his stirrups and cried hotly:

“You dirty dogs! Some day I’ll make yuh damned sorry yuh didn’t keep your own side of the line to-night.”

Of this the sergeant took no notice. He shook his horse into a trot, and prisoners and guard elbow to elbow, we moved on.

[CHAPTER VII—THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL]

“Destiny lurks in obscure places and emerges therefrom to seize upon us unawares.”

Barreau launched this epigrammatic sentence in the profound quiet of a cell in the MacLeod guardhouse. For that is the pass we came to: a six by eight housing of stout planks for the pair of us, food of indifferent quality in none too generous rations, and the keen eye of an armed guard in the background. For two days we had brooded in this cage, like any common felons.

Of the intervening time there is nothing worthy of chronicling. During the time it took Sergeant Hubbel and his troopers to bring us in we rode, ate, slept, and rode again, and little else befell. If Barreau and the two Sanders worried over the outcome, if they indulged any thought of escape, or laid plans to that end, they kept these things to themselves. I perforce, did likewise. Altogether, we were a company of few words. And one evening, when dusk was closing in, the journey ended, and we lay down to sleep with barred doors and windows between us and other men.

Little as we spoke I gathered stray odds and ends of the affair, and pieced them as best I could. Most of it came from the troopers. After all, the thing was simple enough. At that time the sale of liquor was strictly prohibited in the Canadian Territories, and naturally whisky was at a premium. Thus the Sanders ranch, lying just across the American line, furnished an ideal base of operations for men inclined to gather in the shekels of the thirsty. Proof of the traffic in contraband whisky lay ready for use, at least so the Policemen had it—but they could never catch the wily Sanders brothers on the right side of the boundary. So with a fine disregard for all but the object to be gained, they violated an international technicality. The result justified the raid; that is, from the Mounted Police point of view. My arrest followed logically, from the company I was in. Barreau’s connection, however, was a little beyond me. “Slowfoot George,” as they called him, came in for cautious handling. Not once were his wrists free of the steel bands till the guardhouse door closed upon him. From this, and certain pointed remarks that I failed to catch in their entirety, I conceived the idea that he was wanted for worse than whisky-running. But like the other two, Barreau neither denied nor affirmed. Once the sergeant tried to draw him out and the curl of his lip and a caustic word or two cut short the Policeman’s effort.

Our “apartment” was singularly free from furniture. A wide plank ranged on either side, and a few not overclean quilts served for a bed. There was no room for more in that vile box. I had managed to get paper and a pen from the guard, and was curled up on my plank setting forth in a letter to Bolton all the unbelievable things that had occurred, when Barreau uttered his observation anent the workings of Destiny. Something in the way he spoke caused me to look up, and I saw that he was looking fixedly out into the guard-room through the grated opening in our cell door. There was none too much light, but with what there was I made out a paleness of face and a compression of his lips that were strangely at odds with his general bearing.

“What now?” I asked, wondering at the sudden change in him.

“Something I had hoped to be spared,” he said under his breath; more to himself than to me. Then he turned his eyes from the little window, drew up his knees till his fingers locked before them, and so sat hunched against the wall. Wholly absorbed in my letter-writing I had heard nothing out of the common. Now I distinguished voices, the deep tones of a man and following that the clear treble of a woman. During a brief interval of quiet she laughed, and after that I heard footsteps coming toward the row, out of which our cell faced.

Presently the shadow of them darkened the little window in our door. The red coat of the guard passed. Barreau shifted uneasily. I, too, leaned forward listening to the light footfall drawing near, for I had a vivid recollection of that voice—or one that was its twin. It did not seem strange that she should be there; Benton is not so far from MacLeod in that land of great distances. And my recollection was not at fault. An instant later her small, elfish face bent to the opening and she peered in on us—as one who views caged beasts of the jungle.

But there was none of the human fear of wild things in her attitude.

“So,” she said coolly, tucking a lock of hair under the same ridiculous little cap she had worn on the Moon, “this is how the Northwest would have you, is it, Mr. Bar—Mr. Brown. Alas! ‘To what base uses we do return.’ I cannot say you have my sympathy.”

“If that is the least cruel thing you can say,” Barreau flung back at her, putting his feet on the floor and resting his hands on the edge of his seat, “I thank you. But my trail is my own, and I have never yet asked you to follow in my stumbling footsteps.”

She colored at that, and from where I sat I could see the Police guard lift his eyebrows inquiringly. But she had other shafts at hand.

“I grant you that,” she replied quickly. “But it is a shock, when one conceives a man to be something of a gentleman; to have some remnant of the code honorable—then, pah! to find his name a by-word on the frontier. A murderer! Even descended to common theft and dealings in contraband whisky. You have a savory record in these parts, I find. How nicely this chamber fits you, Mr.—ah—what is the euphonious title? Slowfoot George. Ah, yes. Why the Slowfoot? By the tale of your successful elusion of the law I should imagine you exceeding fleet of foot.”

It seemed to me unwomanly and uncalled for, that bitter, scornful speech; even granting the truth of it, which had not been established in my mind. But it had a tonic effect on Barreau. The hurt look faded from his face. His lips parted in the odd, half-scornful, half-amused smile that was always lurking about his mouth. He did not at once reply. When he did it was only a crisp sentence or two.

“Let us be done with this,” he said. “There is neither pleasure nor profit in exchanging insults.”

“Indeed,” she thrust back, “there can be no exchange of insults between us. Could aught you say insult any honest man or woman? But so be it. I came merely to convince my eyes that my ears heard truly. It may tickle your depraved vanity to know that MacLeod is buzzing with your exploits and capture.”

“That concerns me little,” Barreau returned indifferently.

“Ditto,” she averred, “except that I am right glad to find you stripped of your sheep’s clothing, little as I expected such a revelation concerning one who passed for a gentleman. And to think that I might never have found you out, if my father had permitted me to return from Benton.”

“Permitted?” Barreau laid inquiring inflection on the word.

“What is it to——” she cut in sharply.

“Your father,” he interrupted deliberately, “is a despicable scoundrel; a liar and a cheat of the first water.”

“Oh—oh!” she gasped. “This—from you.”

“I said, ‘let us be done with this,’ a moment ago,” he reminded her.

She drew back as if he had struck at her, flushing, her under lip quivering—more from anger than any other emotion, I think. Almost at once she leaned forward again, glaring straight at Barreau.

“It would be of a piece with your past deeds,” she cried, “if you should break this flimsy jail and butcher my father and myself while we slept. Oh, one could expect anything from such as you!” And then she was gone, the guard striding heavy-footed after her. A puzzled expression crept over Barreau’s face, blotting out the ironic smile.

“It was a dirty trick of me to speak so,” he muttered, after a little. “But my God, a man can’t always play the Stoic under the lash. However—I daresay——” He went off into a profound study, resting his chin in the palms of his hands. I kept my peace, making aimless marks with my pen. It was an odd turn of affairs.

“Bob, what did I say about Destiny awhile ago?” he raised his head and addressed me suddenly. “I will take it back. I am going to take Destiny by the nape of the neck. Being grilled on the seat of the scornful is little to my liking. It was a bit of ill-luck that you fell in with me. I seem to be in a bad boat.”

“Ill-luck for which of us?” I asked. It was the first time he had sounded the personal note—aside from the evening we were landed in MacLeod, when he comforted me with the assurance that at the worst I would spend no more than a few days in the guardhouse.

“For you, of course,” he replied seriously. “My sins are upon my own head. But it was unfortunate that I should have led you to Sanders’ place the very night picked for a raid. They can have nothing against you, though; and they’ll let you out fast enough when it comes to a hearing. Nor, for that matter, are they likely to hang me, notwithstanding the ugly things folk say. However, I have work to do which I cannot do lying here. Hence I perceive that I must get out of here. And I may need your help.”

“How are you going to manage that?” I inquired, gazing with some astonishment at this man who spoke so coolly and confidently of getting out of prison. “These walls seem pretty solid, and you can hardly dig through them with a lone pen-nib. That’s the only implement I see at hand. And I expect the guard will be after that before I get my letter done.”

“I don’t know how the thing will be done,” he declared, “but I am surely going to get out of here pretty pronto, as the cowmen have it.”

He settled back and took to staring at the ceiling. I, presently, became immersed in my letter to Bolton. When it was done I thrust a hand through the bars of my cell and wig-wagged the Policeman—they were good-natured souls for the most part, tolerant of their prisoners, and it broke the grinding monotony to exchange a few words with one under almost any pretext. Barreau was chary of speech, and the Sanders brothers were penned beyond my sight. Sheer monotonous silence, I imagine, would drive even peace-loving men to revolt and commit desperate deeds when they are cooped within four walls with nothing but their thoughts for company.

When he came I observed that the guard had been changed since Miss Montell’s visit. The new man was a lean, sour-faced trooper. To my surprise he took my letter and then stood peeping in past me to where Barreau lay on his bunk. After a few seconds he walked away, smiling queerly. In a minute or so he was back again, taking another squint. This time Barreau turned over facing the door, and when the trooper continued his promenade past our cell he got up and stood before the barred window, completely shutting off my outlook. I could not see, but I could hear. And by the sound of his booted feet the guard passed and repassed several times.

After a little he tired of this, it seemed, for I heard him stalking away to the front of the guardhouse, and immediately thereafter the creak of a chair as he sat down. Then Barreau sat down on his bunk again.

“Try this, kid,” he said, and tossed a package of tobacco and cigarette papers to me. I fell upon the forbidden luxury like a starving man upon food. He rolled himself one out of material in his hand, and in the midst of my puffing changed to my side of the cell—it was but a scant three feet to move—and sat down between me and the door.

“Fate smiles at last,” he whispered. “Blackie passed me in a little tobacco. And—see, here in my hand.”

I glanced down at what he was snuggling down out of sight between us, a heavy-bladed knife, a tiny saw, not more than six inches in length, and a piece of notepaper marked with what my reason told me must be a ground plan of the very place we were in.

“The tools of my deliverance,” said Barreau in an undertone. “I am for the blue sky and the sun and the clean, wide prairies once more.”

[CHAPTER VIII—BY WAYS THAT WERE DARK]

Looking back I marvel at the ridiculous ease with which the thing was accomplished. Still more do I marvel at my own part in it. Brought up as I had been, shielded from the ill winds of existence, taught the perfunctory, conventional standards of behavior that suffice for those whose lives are lived according to a little-varying plan, I should have shrunk from further infraction of the law. Indeed it is no more than could have been expected had I refused absolutely to lend myself to Barreau’s desperate plan. Conscious that I had done no wrong I might have been moved to veto an enterprise that imperiled me, to protest against his drawing me further into his own troublous coil. But I did nothing of the sort. It did not occur to me. My point of view was no longer that of the son of a St. Louis gentleman. And the transition was so complete, so radical, and withal, so much the growth of the past three weeks, that I was unaware of the change.

I know of no clearer illustration of the power of environment. Indubitably I should have looked askance at a man who tacitly admitted himself more or less of a criminal, making no defense, no denial. The traditions of my class should have kept me aloof, conscious of my own clean hands. This, I repeat, was what might have been expected of me: Put to me as an abstract proposition, I would have been very positive of where I should stand.

But without being conscious of any deviation from my previous concepts of right and wrong, I found myself all agog to help Slowfoot George escape. For myself, there was no question of flight. That, we agreed upon, at the outset. I could gain nothing by putting myself at odds with Canadian law, for the law itself would free me in its meteing out of justice. But with him it was different; he admitted the fact. And even so I found myself making nothing of the admission. He conformed to none of my vague ideas of the criminal type. In aiding him to be free I seemed to be freeing myself by proxy, as it were; and how badly I desired to be quit of the strange tangle that enmeshed me, none but myself can quite appreciate.