Part 28 (2/2)
Frances asked the question abruptly, like one throwing down some troublesome and heavy thing that he has labored gallantly to conceal.
It was the first word that she had spoken since they had taken refuge from their close-pressing pursuers in the dugout that some old-time homesteader had been driven away from by Chadron's cowboys.
Macdonald was keeping his horse back from the door with the barrel of his rifle, while he peered out cautiously again, perplexed to understand the reason why Dalton had not led his men against them in a charge.
”Not all the way, Frances. She rode behind me till she got so cold and sleepy I was afraid she'd fall off.”
”Yes, I'll bet she put on half of it!” she said, spitefully. ”She looked strong enough when you put her down there at the gate.”
This unexpected little outburst of jealousy was pleasant to his ears.
Above the trouble of that morning, and of the future which was charged with it to the blackness of complete obscuration, her warrant of affection was like a lifting sunbeam of hope.
”I can't figure out what Dalton and that gang mean by this,” said he, the present danger again pressing ahead of the present joy.
”I saw a man dodge behind that big rock across there a minute ago,”
she said.
”You keep back away from that door--don't lean over out of that corner!” he admonished, almost harshly. ”If you get where you can see, you can be seen. Don't forget that.”
He resumed his watch at the little hole that he had drilled beside the weight-bowed jamb of the door in the earth front of their refuge. She sat silent in her dark corner across from him, only now and then shaking her glove at the horses when one of them p.r.i.c.ked up his ears and shewed a desire to dodge out into the sunlight and pleasant grazing spread on the hillside.
It was cold and moldy in the dugout, and the timbers across the roof were bent under the weight of the earth. It looked unsafe, but there was only one place in it that a bullet could come through, and that was the open door. There was no way to shut that; the original battens of the homesteader lay under foot, broken apart and rotting.
”Well, it beats me!” said he, his eye to the peephole in the wall.
”If I'd keep one of the horses on this side it wouldn't crowd your corner so,” she suggested.
”It would be better, only they'll cut loose at anything that pa.s.ses the door. They'll show their hand before long.” He enlarged the hole to admit his rifle barrel. She watched him in silence. Which was just as well, for she had no words to express her admiration for his steadiness and courage under the trying pressure of that situation.
Her confidence in him was so entire that she had no fear; it did not admit a question of their safe deliverance. With him at her side, this dangerous, grave matter seemed but a pa.s.sing perplexity. She left it to him with the confidence and up-looking trust of a child.
While she understood the peril of their situation, fear, doubt, had no place in her mind. She was under the protection of Alan Macdonald, the infallible.
No matter what others may think of a man's infallibility, it is only a dangerous one who considers himself endowed with that more than human attribute. Macdonald did not share her case of mind as he stood with his eye to the squint-hole that he had bored beside the rotting jamb.
”How did you find her? where was she?” she asked, her thoughts more on the marvel of Nola's return than her own present danger.
”I lost Thorn's trail that first day,” he returned, ”and then things began to get so hot for us up the valley that I had to drop the search and get those people back to safety ahead of Chadron's raid. Yesterday afternoon we caught a man trying to get through our lines and down into the valley. He was a half-breed trapper who lives up in the foothills, carrying a note down to Chadron. I've got that curious piece of writing around me somewhere--you can read it when this blows by. Anyway, it was from Thorn, demanding ten thousand dollars in gold.
He wanted it sent back by the messenger, and he prescribed some picturesque penalties in case of failure on Chadron's part.”
”And then you found her?”
”I couldn't very well ask anybody else to go after her,” he admitted, with a modest reticence that amounted almost to being ashamed. ”After I made sure that we had Chadron's raiders cooped up where they couldn't get out, I went up and got her. Thorn wasn't there, n.o.body but the Indian woman, the 'breed's wife. She was the jailer--a regular wildcat of a woman.”
That was all there was to be told, it seemed, as far as Macdonald was concerned. He had the hole in the wall--at which he had worked as he talked--to his liking now, and was squinting through it like a telescope.
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