Part 11 (2/2)

Five days had pa.s.sed without a tragedy, and the homesteaders were beginning to draw breath in the open again, in the belief that Macdonald must have driven the slayer out of the country. Nothing had been seen or heard of Macdonald since the evening that he parted company with Tom La.s.siter, father of the murdered boy.

Macdonald, in the interval, was hard on the old villain's trail. He had picked it up on the first day of his lone-handed hunt, and once he had caught a glimpse of Thorn as he dodged among the red willows on the river, but the sight had been too transitory to put in a shot. It was evident now that Thorn knew that he was being hunted by a single pursuer. More than that, there were indications written in the loose earth where he pa.s.sed, and in the tangled brushwood where he skulked, that he had stopped running away and had turned to hunt the hunter.

For two days they had been circling in a constantly tightening ring, first one leading the hunt, then the other. Trained and accustomed as he was to life under those conditions, Thorn had not yet been able to take even a chance shot at his clinging pursuer.

Macdonald was awake to the fact that this balance in his favor could not be maintained long. As it was, he ascribed it more to luck than skill on his part. This wild beast in human semblance must possess all the wild beast's cunning; there would be a rift left open in this straining game of hide and seek which his keen eyes would be sure to see at no distant hour.

The afternoon of that day was worn down to the hock. Macdonald had been creeping and stooping, running, panting, and lying concealed from the first gleam of dawn. Whether by design on the part of Thorn, or merely the blind leading of the hunt, Macdonald could not tell, the contest of wits had brought them within sight of Alamito ranchhouse.

Resting a little while with his back against a ledge which insured him from surprise, Macdonald looked out from the hills over the wide-spanning valley, the farther sh.o.r.e of which was laved in a purple mist as rich as the dye of some oriental weaving. He felt a surge of indignant protest against the greedy injustice of that manorial estate, the fair house glistening in the late sun among the white-limbed cottonwoods. There Saul Chadron sat, like some distended monster, his hands spread upon more than he could honestly use, or his progeny after him for a thousand years, growling and snapping at all whose steps lagged in pa.s.sing, or whose weary eyes turned longingly toward those gra.s.sy vales.

There had been frost for many nights past; the green of the summerland had merged into a yellow-brown, now gold beneath the slanting sunbeams. A place of friendly beauty and sequestered peace, where a man might come to take up his young dreams, or stagger under the oppression of his years to put them down, and rest. It seemed so, in the light of that failing afternoon.

But the man who sat with his back against the ledge, his ears strained to find the slightest hostile sound, his roaming eyes always coming back with unconscious alertness and frowning investigation to the nearer objects in the broken foreground, had tasted beneath the illusive crust of that land, and the savor was bitter upon his lips.

He questioned what good there was to be got out of it, for him or those for whom he had taken up the burden, for many a weary year to come.

The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft: ”There must be millions behind the cattlemen.” He felt that he never had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never to overturn.

There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a lion for the bounty upon his head. And in the event that a lucky shot should rid the earth of that foul thing, how much would it strengthen his safety, and his neighbors', and fasten their weak hold upon the land?

Little, indeed. Others could be hired out of those uncounted millions of the cattlemen's resources to finish what Mark Thorn had begun. The night raids upon their fields would continue, the slanders against them would spread and grow. Colonel Landcraft believed him to be what malicious report had named him; there was not a doubt of that. And what Frances thought of him since that misadventure of the glove, it was not hard to guess.

But that was not closed between them, he told himself, as he had told himself before, times unnumbered. There was a final word to be said, at the right time and place. The world would turn many times between then and the Christmas holidays, when Frances was to become the bride of another, according to the colonel's plans.

Macdonald was weary from his night vigils and stealthy prowlings by day, and hungry for a hot meal. Since he had taken the trail of Mark Thorn alone he had not kindled a fire. Now the food that he had carried with him was done; he must turn back home for a fresh supply, and a night's rest.

It did not matter much, anyway, he said, feeling the uselessness of his life and strife in that place. It was a big and unfriendly land, a hard and hopeless place for a man who tried to live in defiance of the established order there. Why not leave it, with its despair and heart-emptiness? The world was full enough of injustices elsewhere if he cared to set his hand to right them.

But a true man did not run away under fire, nor a brave one block out a task and then shudder and slink away, when he stood off and saw the immensity of the thing that he had undertaken. Besides all these considerations, which in themselves formed insuperable reasons against retreat, there had been some big talk into the ear of Frances Landcraft. There was no putting down what he had begun. His dream had taken root there; it would be cruel cowardice to wrench it up.

He got up, the sun striking him on the face, from which the west wind pressed back his hat brim as if to let the daylight see it. The dust of his travels was on it, and the roughness of his new beard, and it was harsh in some of its lines, and severe as an ashlar from the craftsman's tool. But it was a man's face, with honor in it; the sun found no weakness there, no shame concealed under the sophistries and wiles by which men beguile the world.

Macdonald looked away across the valley, past the white ranchhouse, beyond the slow river which came down from the northwest in toilsome curves, whose gray sh.o.r.es and bars were yellow in that sunlight as the sands of famed Pactolus. His breast heaved with the long inspiration which flared his thin nostrils like an Arab's scenting rain; he revived with a new vigor as the freedom of the plains met his eyes and made them glad. That was his place, his land; its troubles were his to bear, its peace his to glean when it should ripen. It was his inheritance; it was his place of rest. The lure of that country had a deep seat in his heart; he loved it for its perils and its pains. It was like a sweetheart to bind and call him back. A man makes his own Fortunate Isles, as that s.h.a.ggy old gray poet knew so well.

For a moment Mark Thorn was forgotten as Macdonald repeated, in low voice above his breath:

Lo! These are the isles of the watery miles That G.o.d let down from the firmament.

Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man's trust; Your forehead to G.o.d and your feet in the dust--

Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining soul. Its fight was his fight, and there was gladness in the thought.

His alertness as he went down the slope, and the grim purpose of his presence in that forbidden place, did not prevent the pleading of a softer cause, and a sweeter. That rare smile woke in his eyes and unbent for a moment the harshness of his lips as he thought of brown hair sweeping back from a white forehead, and a chin lifted imperiously, as became one born to countenance only the exalted in this life. There was something that made him breathe quicker in the memory of her warm body held a transitory moment in his arms; the recollection of the rose-softness of her lips. All these were waiting in the world that he must win, claimed by another, true. But that was immaterial, he told his heart, which leaped and exulted in the memory of that garden path as if there was no tomorrow, and no such shadow in man's life as doubt.

Of course, there remained the matter of the glove. A man might have been expected to die before yielding it to another, as she had said, speaking out of a hot heart, he knew. There was a more comfortable thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of living to win the hand that it had covered.

Chadron's ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him, although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light. He cut his course to bring himself into the public highway--a government road, it was--that ran northward up the river, the road along which Chadron's men had pursued him the night of the ball. He meant to strike it some miles to the north of Chadron's homestead, for he was not looking for any more trouble than he was carrying that day.

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