Short Stories (US)/Sage Brush Vengeance

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

SAGE BRUSH VENGEANCE

By Robert Welles Ritchie
Author of “King Solomon's Shoe,” “Too Much Spotlight,” etc.

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“ME, I RIDES ALONE TO MAKE MY VENGEANCE,” SAID YOUNG JERE CUTTLES—
EVEN WHEN THEY TOLD HIM THAT THE MAN WHO HAD KILLED HIS PARTNER
WAS THE TOUGHEST ROAD AGENT AND GAMBLER ON THE OVERLAND TRAIL

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A HORSEMAN drooped in his saddle as his tired beast plodded up the zig-zags of the road over Cougar Mountain. White dust of the desert behind lay in a sweated crust on the animal, powdered the rider so that he looked like a miller fresh from the grinding. Bitter dust, tasting of death and the agonies of thirst in a bleak land where slow moving emigrant trains left their toll of oxen's bones and rude little crosses over heaps of stones.

Even as they climbed, the desert was reluctant to release its clutch upon the lone rider and his jaded beast. Black scum of sage still flowed away from the trail's narrow ribbon even when the first stunted pines came down from the heights to be heralds of a sweeter land above. Bit by bit the burnt cake of the desert yielded to the softness of a needle carpet as the road mounted. Creeping manzanita and squaw carpet crowded the sage. At last the summit of the mountain—tremendous panorama of the Sierra's white peaks filling all the western horizon with cold beauty.

The desert rider reined in his horse under the breath-taking compulsion of the scene. Transition from the gray and thirsty monotony of the Carson Valley, whence he had come, to this sweet high country of pines and promises of many waters was startling enough to stir even the soul of a Lucky Bill Hazard, jaded player at life's gaming table.

He looked down to where the road led into a broad valley running parallel with the north-and-south trend of the range far as his eye could carry. Directly below him where a stream wandered through natural meadows certain dun and moving spots caught the eye of the rider. Prime beef cattle. The only herd anywhere round the diggin's here in this part of the new, raw country called California.

Reason for his two days in the saddle from his home over in Carson Valley centered about those moving mites against meadow green two thousand feet below. Lucky Bill Hazard knew a great deal more about cattle than he did about placer gold—and fancied 'em higher.

IT WAS late afternoon before the desert rider found himself on the valley's level floor and following the stream northward to the new boom mining town of Fiddler's Bar. Dog tired, wet and shivering from two fordings of the stream, the stranger pricked his ears thankfully at the sound of an ax coming from a deep willow copse which fringed the stream. Somebody to put him right about the trail——

Lucky Bill dismounted and pushed through the willows. Gambler though he was, player of hunches and trusting disciple of the genius who won him his name of Lucky, this minute when as a stranger he pushed through willows to the sound of an ax he did not feel the light touch of fate directing him to the most momentous encounter of his life. As with all of us, so with Lucky Bill; none may know what little turn in the trail of life will bring one face to face with the veiled shape of destiny.

A figure standing in a small clearing by the river bank and with felled willows heaped about him halted his ax in mid-swing at Lucky Bill's hail.

“Hey, stranger, which way to Lem Collins's hangout?”

The youth with the ax—for youth he was for all his gangling height—gave Lucky Bill a long, slow look from under the brim of his shapeless wool hat. His long, sallow face framed in a ridiculous straggle of first-crop whiskers corn colored and juvenile, registered neither surprise at the intrusion nor the least sign of having heard the question. Pale lids flickered over his eyes the color of the sky at morning. A sharply jutting jaw moved in slow sweeps against a hidden cud. Lucky Bill, taking in at a glance the dull and listless features, the single cowhide gallus which crossed one stooped shoulder to grapple the waistband of homespun trousers, the coarse cowhide boots, set the boy down for a blown-in-the-bottle Pike—Argonauts' scornful term for those half wild, fever shaken poor whites from Missouri who swarmed across the Overland Trail to overrun the California diggin's. He repeated his question.

“Cal'late ye mean Lem Collins the cowman?” drawled the youth.

Lucky Bill agreed.

“Don't hold no truck with him, I don't,” said the other dispassionately. “Got a right peart bad name in these parts, Lem Collins has. Still, iffen yo're wishful to take up with him——” He left the burden of responsibility resting on the newcomer the while he studied Lucky Bill with his sleepy glance.

A RATHER eye-filling figure was Lucky Bill. His two hundred pounds were so well distributed that there was no hint of grossness anywhere the length of his six-feet-two. Though he had spent his thirty years carelessly, youth still ruled the set of his shoulders and the trim girth of waist. His face was one made wholesome by much laughter, albeit laughter which never could quite smudge out the steel-coldness in his blue eyes. One to fascinate most women and some men was Lucky Bill Hazard.

“So you count Lem Collins a bad man round these parts?” He gave the Pike a disarming smile.

“Sence ye asks me—yes.” Gravely from the youth with the corn-tassel beard, and he looked down at his ax as a hint that conversation about folks in the Valley was not in his line,

“Hear he runs cattle for Frenchy Allaire,” Lucky Bill ventured.

“Mostly runs 'em off, like's not.” The other picked up his ax and started to turn his back on Lucky Bill.

“But you don't mind telling me where I can hook up with Collins?” the latter insinuated.

“Up to the forks yander—fust trail to yore left,” came the direction over-shoulder. Lucky Bill, amused by the youth's boorishness, dared him into further conversation.

“Cutting willows for charcoal?”

“Nope. Wing-dam.”

“Figuring on damming the river to work a claim under her?”

“Yep,” and the ax head came down fairly into the notch in a willow's trunk. Evidently the Pike cared to “have no truck” with strangers, either. Lucky Bill grinned and threaded his way through the thicket back to his horse. On the trail to Lem Collins's place he wiped his mind clean of the picture of a gawky youth with the mist of a dull mentality in his eyes. Such boors were not for him to bother about.

THE strange friendship between Allaire the Frenchman and Jereboam Cuttles—almost a relationship of father and son— had an abiding interest for all the Valley. It was one of those bonds so common in the days of gold when men without women braved the perils of two thousand miles through wilderness to face the anarchy and the turmoil of the gold diggings in a land just snatched from wilderness. Under the stress of this double hazard man groped for the comradeship of man with a yearning almost akin to love of women. Pardners cleaved one to the other with a constancy exceeding David and Jonathan's.

Quitting St. Louis in the spring, Pierre Allaire and his party of compatriots—all French of the old colonial stock—were pushing their wagon train through South Pass when under the southernmost spur of the Wind River range they came upon one of the tragic by-products of the great westward migration. A wagon abandoned by its train was being driven by a fifteen-year-old scarecrow whose eyes burned with the fires of cholera. Under its soiled hood lay the bodies of two dead—the father and mother. This wagon of death was lurching alone across the roof of the continent and with a mad boy swinging his goad over two starved oxen.

Then and there Pierre Allaire adopted Jereboam Cuttles, the waif; nursed him back to health; filled his starved life with a fervent Gallic affection. For was he not a fellow Missourian, this odd cabbage? What if he did come from the far western fringe of settlements where the Great River coiled down among red hills, and what if he did speak the language of the barbarous Kentuckians and shaggy rivermen? Did not this orphan need a father like a stray dog needs a master?

And the stray cur's affection was that which Jere Cuttles, the Pike, gave to this St. Louis Frenchman twenty years his senior. Before the last demons of the cholera were driven from his racked body his eyes had taken the task which his stumbling tongue found too great; that of yielding unqualified adoration to the gentle Pierre. Awkward and uncouth of body, primitive as to mind and with all the inhibitions of his ancestors—silent and furtive backwoodsmen for generations—Jere Cuttles gave his soul into the keeping of a laughing, song-singing Gaul.

THEY hit the diggin's at Hangtown and set up their flume and rocker. But the anti-foreign selfishness of the greedy Americans, the cry, “Out with the dam' foreigners!” which sometimes preceded actual bloodshed, became intolerable to Allaire. He quit his claim, took Jere with him over to the Valley on the eastern slopes of the Sierras through which the Lassen Trail invited emigrants to a short cut for Shasta, there bought a herd of graded beef cattle from the Mormons and set up as a cattleman.

Now five years after the time when Allaire had rescued him from the wilderness of South Pass and with the rush to the Valley following rich discoveries in the Susan River, Jere Cuttles, gawky Pike of twenty, was caught by a fever no less savage than that which had brought him near death on the Overland Trail. He had his claim on the river. He shook out gold from his rocker. But once a week or oftener he walked fifteen miles to the little log house in the midst of the grazing range to sit with his foster-father Allaire; to turn upon the Frenchman his pallid eyes which were filled with dog-like adoration.

“My poor infant is bitten by the gold bug,” Allaire would say to his friends in Fiddler's Bar. “He leaves me to trust to that sacre Collins and to that son of a wolf Despard to ride my range. But soon this unlovely Pike of mine will be coming back. He knows where home lies.”

You see now, perhaps, why Jere Cuttles gave less than his usual niggardliness of conversation to Lucky Bill Hazard when the latter came questioning the whereabouts of Lem Collins, cowpuncher for his idol Allaire. Perhaps his surliness was tinged by a tweak of conscience in that his temporary desertion of Allaire for the lure of gold had forced his foster-father to rely upon the questionable services of Collins and of a Basque vagabond calling himself Despard. Like as not in his dull way this gaunt sapling of frontier stock fell back upon his native suspicion when a stranger to the country came asking to be directed to Lem Collins. Why should anybody want to see that shifty-eyed polecat who'd sifted over the mountains from the gold camps with a tight mouth against all questions concerning the whys and wherefores of his coming?

A VAGUE shadow of uneasiness flickered behind Jere's dull eyes the rest of that day and the next. Up to his waist in snow water at his task of anchoring willow brush for his wing-dam, the youth was conscious of a formless dread for the interests of his idol Allaire. There was no reasoning the thing; it was one of those chimeras which make dogs bark at night. His impulse was to go over the trail to Allaire's cabin and assure himself that the coming of a stranger seeking the dubious Collins meant no harm to the Frenchman; but were he to leave his brush barrier unfinished even for a day the current would undo labor of weeks. He must wait until his dam was well anchored.

Three days after he'd talked to the big stranger Jere heard a single shot down-river. He thought little of it. Some hunter taking a crack at a buck.

The dam finished, Jere buckled the flap of his tent there in the willows and set out afoot for the Allaire ranch before daybreak. He came to his destination in mid-afternoon; a log house set in a little glade of the forest high on one shoulder of the valley's western wall and commanding blue distances. Allaire was not at home, “Prob'ly down to Fiddler's Bar to kotch hisself a armful of brandy,” mused the Pike, tolerant of his patron's one genteel vice.

Jere waited. He waited all night and half the next day. No Allaire.

Near noon he set off afoot over the rolling range lands to the shack which Collins and Despard, the cowmen, occupied. Near dark the former rode up. He scowled when the rangy youth stepped out of the shadows to greet him,

“Where-at's Allaire?” Jere put his question bluntly.

“My job's to ride herd on his stock, not on him,” grunted Collins,

“He hain't been to home overnight,” Jere insisted in his high whine. “An' that hain't like him, nohow.”

“Drunk most likely, down to the Bar.” The cowman was busy loosing the saddle girths and flung this carelessly over shoulder. Jere gave that squat figure a long, speculative glance.

“Did that-thar stranger come up with ye t'other day?” Lem whirled suddenly at the question,

“What stranger, Pike?”

“Big fella with fringes onto his huntin' shirt—blue eyes—way o' smilin' quick.”

“Say, what's eatin' you!” Lem put unnecessary heat in his challenge. “Ain't seen nothin' but beef critters and that Basco Despard going on a week. You clear outa here with your fool questions.”

“Yo're plumb sure?”

The cowman whisked a quirt off his saddle horn and took two quick strides toward the gaunt youth.

“Look-y heere, you long, pindlin' drink-o'-water, what're you trying to put up to me? If I was a violent man—which I'm not—I'd snake the hide off'n you for misdoubtin' my word. Now get your feet to goin' while you're all in one piece.”

Jere looked down at the menacing figure before him with a sleepy-slow insistence of the eyes. He turned to go.

“Iffen Allaire hain't to home by tomorrer,” he said simply, “I'll come ask ye some more questions, like's not.”

JERE walked all night to come to the sprawling town of Fiddler's Bar, an unlovely huddle of board and canvas shacks, every third one a bar. Here in graying dawn he made a tour of the saloons—still in their last flutter of the night's hectic life—and the two hotels, He awoke men to sleepy anger with his drawled questions. He scanned bloated faces below barroom tables.

Allaire was not in Fiddler's Bar.

Without sleep and almost without food, the Pike trudged wearily back to the Allaire cabin. As he approached he saw Lem Collins fill the open doorway. A musket lay in the crook of his left arm.

“Stop right where you are—you with your fool questions,” the cowman called to Jere. “I'm in charge here now; an' I give you just three minutes to take it down the hill on a run.”

II

HERE CUTTLES sweated in an agony of doubts and fears as he plodded back over the trail from Allaire's ranch to Fiddler's Bar. His simple mind, unaccustomed to grappling with anything more complex than day-by-day needs of life, launched itself futilely at the mystery of Pierre Allaire's disappearance—for mystery it appeared to Jere. Surely this partner of his would not have left the country without first telling him of the intention,

Only two hand-holds to the problem. First, that big stranger with the quick smile who'd asked him to be directed to Lem Collins; a fellow from the outside coming into the valley and wanting to find a man with a shady reputation. Then the queer carryings-on of Lem Collins himself. First off he'd denied having seen Allaire for a week and got his back hair roached up when Jere didn't seem to believe him. That same Lem standing in Allaire's doorway with a musket. “I'm in charge here now——”

“Them two's hooked up together somehow,” the youth muttered. Then, with a catch in his throat, “Sartin sure they've massacreed my podner!”'

Where to turn for help in solving this mystery? Whom could he enlist in the hunt for Allaire—if the good God still let him be in the land of the living? Or who would be on his side if Allaire's blood cried for vengeance? Jere knew nobody in the mushroom mining camp of Fiddler's Bar with its hundreds of boomers from over the Sierra crest. Only occasionally had he tramped in from his claim down river to exchange pokes of nuggets for cornmeal and sowbelly.

“But I jist gotta ease my troubles onto somebody——”

Night, and Fiddler's Bar was in full tilt. Lighted tents glowed like incandescent toadstools down the single street. Squeak of fiddles and moan of accordions spilled out through the doors of a dozen dance halls. Herds of men lurched from bar to bar; shaggy men with the bearded faces of baboons and the speech of the earth's far corners. In the Miners' Rest and the El Dorado where dance platforms crowded the bars men danced clumsily together like trained bears; those who wore a white patch of flour sack on the seat of their pants so designated themselves as coy partners to be sought with many bows and flourishes. Between dances the bartenders went into frenzies of activity; nothing served for less than an ounce of dust, and that bought a dozen drinks.

Aye, Fiddler's Bar; most remote of the California diggin's, told the silent white peaks circling it about that it was the ring-tailest camp north of Rich Bar—and to hell with all others.

INTO this welter of folly crept Jere Cuttles the Pike. Jere Cuttles, half starved, dazed from lack of sleep and tottering on his tired legs. Jere, looking for a sympathetic listener to whom he could pour out his burden of doubts and fears.

Chance united with a half formed resolution to direct him to the one man in Fiddler's Bar most likely to give him a kindly ear—Jacob Stupe, alcalde by popular choice and lawyer by his own determination. A big slow-spoken man was this Jacob Stupe; shrewd by inheritance of his Pennsylvania Dutch blood; a steady rock in all the roaring tides of the new camp. Jere knew that his partner Allaire was an acquaintance of “Judge” Stupe's; he'd often heard the volatile Frenchman make jests at the expense of the other's sober habit of mind.

He found Jacob Stupe nursing a long pipe and a mug of porter away from the monte tables in the camp's most respectable resort. In broken and halting bits Jere told his story of Allaire's disappearance. The other heard him through soberly.

“My young friend,” he said, “I see no reason for you to worry. If Allaire has gone away it is on proper business.”

Then the alcalde told Jere of a visit Allaire had made upon him the week before; Allaire accompanied by a big stranger—Stupe did not remember the latter's name—who was negotiating for the purchase of the Frenchman's beef herd. They wished Stupe to witness a bill of sale between them. Part payment for the herd passed from the stranger to Allaire in Stupe's presence—$3,000 if the judge recalled the figure correctly—and it seemed to be the understanding between them that Allaire was to accompany the purchaser to his home and there receive the remainder.

Jere followed the other's statement with troubled eyes. When he had done the youth launched a question. “Big fella, that-thar stranger, with fringes onto his huntin' shirt an' a sorta possum smile?”

Stupe nodded.

“An' whar from was he?”

“Somewhere over in Utah Territory along the Overland Trail, as best I can remember.”

JERE knotted his bony fingers together and gave Judge Stupe an agonized look. “Jedge, hit jist don' make sense, my podner sellin' out an' goin' away 'thought tellin' me ary thing about hit. An that-thar Lem Collins settin' in my podner's cabin a'claimin' of hisself in charge.

“Jedge Stupe”—suddenly Jere's head came up under the thrust of a smashing thought—“iffen that-thar stranger was wishful to meet up with Allaire—him comin' into strange country an' all—whyn't he ask me, when he meets up with me down to my claim, whar-at's Pierre Allaire, 'stead of wantin' to know whar he kin find that pole-cat Lem Collins?”

Jacob Stupe stroked his long beard without answer. Jere hurried on.

“An' whyfor should Allaire go all the way over the mountains to Utah Territory to kotch the rest of his money when all he's gotta do is set tight with his cow critters an' let the stranger fotch it to him?”

Stupe took a long pull at his mug and swabbed his beard with the back of his hand. “I don't see that we can do anything, my young friend, on such slight suspicion. It would be likely that Allaire would put his head cowman in charge of his properties if he were going over the mountains with this purchaser of his herd. I don't see anything out of the way in the stranger's asking for Collins. Likely he knows Collins and relied upon him to meet your partner.

“Go back to your claim, young fella,” Stupe finished with a paternal note, “and I promise you that if the Frenchman doesn't show up inside of a week I'll have this Lem Collins down here and put the screws on him.”

TWO days passed. Jere Cuttles, at work with his long handled shovel lifting the gravel from the bed of the diverted river into his rocker box, was not as intent upon his work as he should have been. Day and night a weight of anxiety pressed down on his brain like lead foil packed inside his skull. Over and over again until the rote became maddening he had reviewed the scant circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Allaire, weighing, surmising, driving futilely at a conclusion which always evaded him.

Suddenly he dropped. his shovel and started striding through the willows. That gunshot he'd heard down-river three days after the stranger had accosted him here on his claim, why hadn't he thought of that since?

The lanky youth took the trail following the windings of the river—the trail that crossed Cougar Mountain to carry down into the desert beyond. Here was open country unmarred by any settlement or miner's claim—Jere's own diggings were miles below the furor about Fiddler's Bar. The trail was but a meandering horse-track through wild oats and meadow grass well within sound of the river's voice.

Jere Cuttles could scarcely sense the subtle change that came over him once he was launched on this new business. As his grandfathers and their fathers before them had made themselves trail-wise in their pioneering over the passes of the Blue Ridge in their cheating of a skulking death ever ready to strike from forest shadows, so now he put into practice the craft that was in his blood. This narrow horse-track through virgin country began to tell him hidden secrets.

To back-track the trail of the stranger who'd come questioning Lem Collins was simple; where he'd tied his horse amid the willows on Jere's claim four hoofprints were plain in marshy ground—one of them made by a “skelped” hoof. But about two miles south of the Pike's claim, where foxgloves bordered a little crossing rivulet, other hoofprints bearing in from the range lands on the west side of the valley joined the trail and followed it on its south'ard course, The tracker dropped to his knees and studied these prints closely.

One was made by the horse with the skelped hoof—the stranger cutting back from Allaire's range onto the trail to Utah Territory.” There were two other horses in the party that had passed that way.

“Allowin's as how my podner mout be ridin' with that-thar big stranger, how-come a third?”

NOW the tracker was alert and tingling. The trail turned into a little flat where the old Indian campoodie stood. Jere looked for the landmark. He saw a circle of black smudge where the abandoned hut of grass and bark had been. Promptly he turned off the trail and strode to that circle.

Charred butt-ends of willow poles fringed the center pile of ashes. A few fragments of clay pots lay amid the crisp cinders. Jere's new-found impulse of a reader of blind signs prompted him to stir those cinders, to spread them out thin for his eyes to scan.

He picked from amid the ashes a scorched metal button—another. What appeared at first a calcined lump of willow butt proved to be a charred bootheel held together by steel pegs.

Jere sat back on his hunkers and pondered. The old campoodie would not have made a fire hot enough to consume a body even though it might destroy all but these relics of a man's clothing had been burned with the hut. No live man would set fire to an Indian campoodie to burn his clothes. But if they were a dead man's clothes——

The youth arose, trembling. He walked back to the trail and stood there slowly turning his eyes in widening sweeps across the little meadow. A white streak against the trunk of an alder tree screening the river caught his eye and he strode to investigate. There was a fresh wound in the bark where a horse's teeth had stripped off a piece—a tethered and restless horse. Beyond, the river widened in a dark pool.

Jere stood on a grassy bank a yard high over the green water and tried to peer into the depths. He could catch the dim outlines of great boulders ten feet below the surface, but there was frustrating shadows between.

He stripped off his clothes and plunged. The icy water drove knives into him and he was forced almost immediately to scramble up to the grassy slope. He beat himself furiously and dived again. Furiously he forced himself to explore the deepest crevices of the submerged rocks. Something white and grotesque came into his swimming vision. He put out a hand and touched it.

Jere Cuttles came to the surface and summoned his last atom of strength to drag himself up the bank. His eyes were bulging and his breath came in sharp whistles through the convulsions of chills.

“My podner! Oh my God—my podner!”

JUDGE STUPE and a dozen men from Fiddler's Bar with ropes and grapples made of hay hooks came next day under the guidance of a youth with the look of a destroying angel in his eyes. They brought to the sunlight the body of Pierre Allaire, naked and bound with rope about a weighting boulder.

A bullet hole had been drilled through the back of the dead man's skull.

III

PIERRE ALLAIRE'S body was buried in the flower flecked meadow by the side of the stream from whose watery cavern it had been recovered. Alcalde Stupe said a prayer over the bowed heads about the shallow grave. Jere Cuttles stood slope shouldered and moveless, his pale eyes following the falling clods.

When the others were moving toward their horses the lanky Pike still remained by the fresh mound.

“Podner,” he whispered, “I aims to take vengeance, an' that I do. By tooth and eye, by hair for hair I aims to take vengeance. God hear me!”

Then he took his horse with the others and rode with his chin on his chest.

By whispers and nods between man and man the burial party had become a company of vigilantes before ever the forks of the trail above Jere's claim had been reached. Such companies leap out of thin air when necessity arises—and there is no judge of necessity save themselves.

Jacob Stupe rode his horse alongside Jere and laid an arm over the boy's shoulder.

“My son, if you'd only come to me with your suspicions about Lem Collins the day after you did I'd been more ready to believe you.”

Jere, deep in grim thoughts, gave no sign. Stupe continued, “Our lodge”—he named a secret society potent in California life—“got a letter by Langton's express driver over from Quincy the day after you talked to me. Letter from Acacia Lodge, 'way down in Merced country, telling of the killing of our brother Jim Anstey by a man calling himself Edwards. That was three months ago. Description fits Lem Collins to a T. How long had he been working for Allaire?”

“Goin' on two months,” Jere said.

“Ever heard him say where he came from?”

“Wouldn't say, him; leastwise not when my pod—when Allaire tries to find out.”

“We'll hang him for two murders,” said the alcalde simply. “And the other fellow—the cattle buyer from over the mountains?”

“The Lord will deliver him inter my hands,” solemnly from the Missourian.

RED of blood was in the western sky and all the snow peaks were ensanguined when the men with law in their hands rode up the slope to the cabin of Allaire's ranch. They dismounted and approached, spread out and with revolvers at hip. The cabin door was open. No expected shot from a trapped murderer.

They entered. Confusion there, what with every foot of the dirt floor spaded over and heaped about in piles; what with even the stones of the fireplace dislodged. Evidence enough of frantic digging for hidden gold. Was it for the $3,000 Jacob Stupe had seen the stranger give to the murdered man in part payment for his stock? Pierre Allaire would not have thought of taking such a large sum with him if in truth he had agreed to accompany the purchaser to his home. Manifestly, the twain had killed him and then returned to the cabin to find what they believed to be hidden there.

And this had happened since the time Jere Cuttles came here seeking his foster-father. Could it have been—so Jere turned probabilities over in his mind—that on that morning following his interview with Lem when he returned to Allaire's cabin and was warned away by a musket in the cowman's hands that he had interrupted Collins in his work of searching for a dead man's treasure—in spading and prying after a hiding place?

“You know the way to the cowmen's camp,” Stupe said to Jere. “You lead and I reckon we can make it before dark.”

The vigilantes followed after the youth's horse over the miles of range along the slope of the western mountains. Shadows marched down from the purpling summits to flank them ere they came to destination. And none too soon. For as Jere and the leaders filed up out of a coulee north of the weather-beaten shack they saw a figure frantically saddling a horse in the corral beyond the house.

A dash—scattering shots and he who had attempted escape stood with hands high above his head. Despard the second cowman for Allaire's herd.

Riders formed a ring about the fellow. One dropped a noose over his head and tightened the slip-knot with a significant jerk.

“What's your hurry to get away?” Stupe asked the man. Answer came in a crackling Spanish oath.

“Where is Lem Collins?” the alcalde challenged.

“Not your dam' business,” in a snarl from the swarthy Basco. The head man of Fiddler's Bar bent a surprised glance at the fellow.

“Look-y here, Greaser, we mean business. We want Lem Collins for murder—and you, too, maybe. I give you another chance; where is your partner?”

“Go to hell!”

THE grave man on horseback slowly looked about in the clotting dark. His eyes fell on a white oak standing a little beyond the corral. A brief nod of his head thither and the horsemen closed about the Basco, driving him under the tree by the hustling of their horses' flanks. A man leaped down, fought briefly with the defiant cowman and had his arms triced behind him in no time. The loose end of the rope about his neck snaked up over a branch and was wrapped about a saddle horn.

“Where is Lem Collins?” Stupe thundered. The stubborn one's oath was strangled in his throat as his feet left the ground. A minute of horror as a body leaped and danced. Judge Stupe held up a hand and the rope was eased away. Despard crumpled choking on the ground.

Once again the wretch was made to look into the very eyes of death before his spirit was broken by the torture. He lay, at last, sobbing answers to questions put to him.

Collins had gone these two days since—gone a'horseback over the trail to Carson Valley over in the Utah desert. Yes, Collins had gone to join his friend Lucky Bill Hazard who lived at a place on the Overland Trail called Bitter Springs.

He, Despard, and Collins had planned to drive Allaire's cattle over to Hazard's ranch in the desert but Collins had become afraid over something and had ridden away in the night.

“What part did you have in the killing of Allaire?” Stupe drove into the strangled cowman's ear.

“Name of God, señor—nothing! I only guess the boss is killed by them when Collins begins digging the floor of the Frenchman's cabin. Before that I think he rides to Bitter Springs with that Hazard because he tells me watch well his cattle while he is gone.”

“How much of Allaire's buried gold did Collins give you to keep your mouth shut?” some one of the group put in.

“Not a penny,” whined the Basco. “I not even know Collins find that gold.”

There was a whispered consultation between the alcalde and some of the men. Despard, they decided, had a guilty knowledge of the Frenchman's slaying and should be taken to Fiddler's Bar to stand trial before a miners' court. The man was hoisted in a saddle before one of the riders and the trail for the settlement taken,

HERE CUTTLES had said no word during the test under the oak tree and now he rode a little apart from the others. Before the cavalcade had ridden far through the dark Judge Stupe pushed his horse alongside.

“Well, my son, what'd we best do about this proposition?” His voice held a kindly invitation to confidence. Jere was silent for a minute.

“Far's I'm consarned, they hain't no 'we' into it,” he said.

“You mean——”

“Judge, sir”—the boy turned to give the other a glance he would have seen to be full of flames had there been light—“back in the red oak kentry whar I was born an' whar my pappy was born, does somebody do yore family a hurt, yo' don't call in the hull county to make yore vengeance. Hit's the family's vengeance.

“Me, I rides alone to make my vengeance.”

“But, young friend, I've heard of this Lucky Bill Hazard,” the other expostulated. “Saw him myself, by jinks, when I came across three years ago. He's the toughest road agent and gambler on the Overland Trail and he's got a gang at his back—cutthroats and blacklegs. You can't fight the whole settlement of Bitter Springs. Now my lodge in Fiddler's Bar is interested in stringing up Collins for the murder he did down in the Merced country; Collins will be expecting us to trail him over there. If we could get a line on Collins and Hazard both—you feeling out the ground, for one man would be better than a crowd fer that—why——”

Long the worthy alcalde argued to beat down the Missouri youth's stiff necked devotion to the idea of a personal and single handed vengeance. Finally he won. In the star-strewn dark of the Sierra night the man and the boy came to agreement upon a plan, daring as the strategy of any fabled hero cast against overwhelming odds.

IV

THE tough frontier station of Bitter Springs, squatting like a congress of beetles in a valley of black sage, was the only eddy of life along five hundred miles of wheel tracks between the Mormon settlements at the head of Great Salt Lake and the first of the California gold camps on the Sierra's western slope. Great white wagons which threaded across the Overland Trail in the world's most spectacular caravan won through the blistering terrors of the Humboldt Sink to the north and east of Bitter Springs and came to the ugly town as to a promised Zion.

For there reprovisioning could be made in food stocks packed over the mountains from San Francisco and sold at almost their weight in gold. A few canny hay farmers—disappointed gold seekers turning back from El Dorado to squat on the valley's wild grasses—would open their meadows to starved trail cattle for a stiff price. The town's saloons and deadfalls offered sufficient excitement to men surfeited with months of monotony on the road out from Independence or Council Bluffs.

And Bitter Springs was Lucky Bill Hazard's personal domain. He had built it. He owned a major interest in all of the saloons and gambling tents. Largely he had populated it with blacklegs and shady characters fleeing the California diggings to find sanctuary from pursuing vigilantes; Sydney ducks driven out of San Francisco, discredited gamblers given ticket-of-leave from Sacramento, men with red hands. In the eyes of these refugees from the law Lucky Bill stood as a second Robin Hood. For the big fellow with the quick smile had a heart wide as outdoors for all crooks in trouble—and even for honest men in the same circumstance.

Lucky Bill was the Law—the only Law existing between Salt Lake and Sierra crest. At the time I introduce him to you there was no geographical area marked “Nevada.” Bitter Springs lay in the shadowy jurisdiction of the Territory of Utah and with the nearest peace officer nigh a month away in terms of travel.

THIS master of crooks and desperadoes had been back two weeks from his mission over the Sierras—and he counted the trip a failure for reasons which will appear—when a wagon train from the east straggled into Bitter Springs with a horror tale more grim than the average. The wagon company's draft cattle were tottering skeletons, its people nigh dead from thirst and the ravages of what was called mountain fever.

“They's a wagon broke down back yonder by the Sink,” a walking ghost under an alkali stained hat reported to Lucky Bill. “Ole man an' his daughter, both nigh dead with the fever, lyin' under the wagon. Best we could do for 'em was to leave a dram or so of water an' promise we'd get relief back when we hit this station.”

Not in the three years of his rule had a tale of hardship and want in the desert gone unheeded by Lucky Bill. He might rob emigrants over his card tables or charge them out of their boots at his store, but he never left them to die in the wilderness. So, with this news to spur him, he set out with four horses hitched to his light prairie wagon and water barrels under the hood. Beside him on the high driver's seat rode one Doc. Almy, drunkard and gambler who once in his cleaner days had been a surgeon in the Navy; Doc Almy with his almost forgotten black bag of pills.

It was mid-July and the heat dropped like drippings from a melting sky of tin Through the shimmering atmosphere mountains at a distance swelled and shrank like the sides of breathing monsters. Every stunted sagebush was a dead faggot charred by sun flames,

Not until near dark did the mercy wagon from Bitter Springs come upon the marooned prairie schooner canted over on one shattered wheel. One of two prone oxen hitched to the tongue lifted its head a few inches from the sand and tried to low.

Lucky Bill and Doc Almy found the abandoned sufferers on a pallet of blankets beneath the wagon box where the sun could not reach them. The man, who was in the middle age and with gray in his beard, lay in a stupor, eyes closed and scarcely breathing. Beside him a girl not many years beyond pinafores—Lucky Bill guessed she might be seventeen or eighteen—was stretched on her back, her wide eyes looking up at the dusty boards over her head. They slowly moved to fasten upon Lucky Bill's face when it bent over hers; but the action was automatic, there was no comprehension in the irises.

“Work on her first, Doc,” Lucky Bill whispered. “This little beauty can't afford to die.”

The master of Bitter Springs was not one to credit beauty in the opposite sex carelessly. Despite the burning flush spreading down from the double wave of chestnut hair over the brow, beauty lay on the girl's face like a caress. There was perfection in the curve of chin to throat and the full arch of lips; in all the features a certain spiritual quality which few of the sun-bonneted women of the wagon trains Lucky Bill was used to seeing could display. The flimsy calico which gowned her fell about lines of budding womanhood.

ALL this Lucky Bill took in with an avid glance. He thought himself a judge of pretty women—though in this almost womanless West he saw few enough. A woman's beauty thrilled him as no chance on the gaming table could.

While Doc Almy was busy with dripping rags for the brows of the fever sufferers and brandy sponges for their stiffened lips, Lucky Bill's broad humanity pushed him to the needs of the poor beasts under their ox bow. As tenderly as if he had been ministering to the girl under the wagon box, he bathed the protruding tongues and then brought water by the bucketful for the reviving oxen.

“The man won't live; the girl—maybe,” was Doc Almy's diagnosis when, long after sundown, he and Lucky Bill lifted the twain to a bed of blankets in the prairie wagon. Unconsciousness still held them. The apostate medico sat by the heads of the sufferers renewing the compresses on their brows while Lucky Bill drove through the dark on the homeward trail. The two oxen followed willingly enough, their noses lifted to the precious scent of water.

Some time during the dark hours when all was still but for the lisping of sand off the tires, the man in the wagon box called a woman's name in a high gasping voice, then breathed no more.

MARY, Pah-ute squaw, cook and housekeeper for the master of Bitter Springs, came loping down the single street of that frontier outpost on the back of a mule—all over the mule, it might be said, for Mary's physical specifications varied but slightly from those of a fair sized haystack. She sought out her boss where he was attacking a noonday steak in the town's single eating house.

“She wake-up,” was Mary's wheezed message. That was sufficient to send Lucky Bill out to his horse. He mounted, passed a message for Doc Almy to one of the loafers on the sidewalk, then put off at a gallop. The squaw followed as best she could on her slower moving mount.

Lucky Bill's hay ranch and the cabin he called home lay in a sparse meadow where an underground river came up to spread a narrow carpet of green three miles from the town—a tiny spot of softness in the gray immensity of the desert. No neighbors; only the circle of mountains with the gray heads of prophets to look down upon the devious comings and goings of Lucky Bill Hazard.

He strode into the house and then unconsciously went a'tiptoe as he approached the bedroom door. A flash of startled eyes met him as he stood in the doorway looking down at the girl on the bed. He saw a hand come up to pull close the opened throat of a shirt—one of his clean shirts. For a breath neither spoke.

“I am Bill Hazard,” he said, then, inwardly a little surprised at a feeling of diffidence.

“Then I am—this is——” The girl was finding difficulty in marshaling a rush of questions.

“My house,” he supplied. “And mighty welcome to it—er—Miss.”

“Then that Indian woman—” She found another question more pressing, “How long have I been here—and what place is this?”

“You've been here three days—mighty sick. And, ma'am, you're two-three miles from Bitter Springs on the Overland Trail. Twenty, or thereabout, from where we found you.”

On the ride out from town Lucky Bill had braced himself to meet one question he dreaded. Now it came. He answered it with no fumbling or silly evasion.

“Sorry to have to tell you, miss, your father died when Doc Almy and I were bringing the two of you in from the Sink.”

THE girl on the bed took the news without flinching. Just a quick flutter of a hand to lips and the closing of eyelids in sharp pain. Lucky Bill stood twirling his hat, wondering if he should leave her with her grief or say something to assuage it. Subconsciously he was feasting himself on her fragile beauty.

“You—have—cared for—him?”

“Yes—near here,” he answered. She turned her head to let her eyes travel through the window to the grave old men of the mountains. Then back to Lucky Bill.

“I am alone—then——”

To his confusion Lucky Bill found it difficult to put in the right word of reassurance here. He wanted to say, in his character of take—what-you-want, that—but shucks! That wouldn't go here.

“Not exactly alone, lady. Quite a lot of well-meaning folks in Bitter Springs”—Lucky Bill was lying brazenly—“who'll go far toward making you feel at home.”

“I haven't thanked you yet,” she suddenly cut in with a brave attempt at a smile. “I am not quite sure I have much to thank you for—saving my life, I mean; but when I feel stronger, maybe——”

Silence fell. For his part, Lucky Bill felt a little shame that his eyes should be traveling so hungrily from the round of her throat to the half-bared arm lying on the blankets. In his experience women were women, to be taken like a drink—when wanted. He thought he knew 'em. But this girl snatched from the desert; alone in a world she had not even seen, the tough world of Bitter Springs; weak and helpless as a new-born coyote—why, he just couldn't feel toward her like—like he thought he would.

“I am two thousand miles from home.” Her voice came hushed by sudden realization of the hopelessness of her situation. “Now—with dad gone—I can't go on to California; no place for a girl alone. And I couldn't face that dreadful desert again to go back to the States. I just couldn't, even if I could find some one good enough to let me go with their party.”

LUCKY BILL was on the point of saying it wouldn't be so bad for her to remain in Bitter Springs, but he compromised with, “When you get stronger will be time enough to figure on what's to be done.”

He filled another pause by a blunt query, “What's your name, miss?”

“Lucy,” she answered. “Lucy Brand.”

“Pretty name. Knew a Lucy once, but she wasn't like you—hardly!” Lucky Bill's accustomed habit of boldness pushed through the unwonted delicacy he had felt during the interview. He tossed his hat into a corner and sat down on the bed beside the girl—the flicker of shrinking in her eyes was not lost on him, either.

“Lucky Bill Hazard's an awfully easy fellow to get along with, you'll find, Lucy; will go farther than most for them he likes.”

Lucy Brand's eyes were fixed searchingly on the outlaw's bronzed features. She had not known many men. Her neighbors back in Wisconsin, the young fellows who came to take her to choir meeting or to candy pulls, were all farm boys—plodders of the soil. None of them possessed the hint of recklessness, the taunt to the devil lying in the alert eyes and quickly smiling mouth of this man. She feared him and yet——

“That Indian woman who was bending over me when I spoke up a little time ago,” Lucy questioned; “she is—I mean, maybe your wife has taken care of me and I didn't know it.”

Lucky Bill grinned. “Which is your way of asking if Big Mary is my wife. Well—hardly!”

“Oh!” A flush mounted Lucy's cheeks. “I didn't mean—that is——”

Now Lucky Bill's first mood of pity and curbing deference was whisked away completely by the habit of mastery that was his. He flashed a knowing smile at Lucy Brand.

“That's not saying I may not get me a wife sometime—when I find a girl I figure I want.”

Deep eyes bearing on him widened in an instant's startlement, then by an effort of will they composed themselves.

“Of course,” she said.

V

JERE CUTTLES came to Bitter Springs on his mission of blood vengeance a week after Lucy Brand made her first discovery in the character of her rescuer. Jere's arrival was nigh a month after the murder of Pierre Allaire. It had required all of Alcalde Stupe's powers of persuasion to hold the boy off that long. No hurry, the canny Dutchman had argued; let Hazard and Collins believe the killing of the Frenchman had not been discovered and that they need fear no pursuit. Moreover—also on Stupe's recommendation—Jere did not take the trail direct from Fiddler's Bar over the Sierras to the desert town, but bore far to the south on the California side of the mountains and turned east when he struck the Overland Trail at Hangtown.

A new outfit of clothes bought at that lively camp and the sacrifice of the corn-tassel beard materially changed Jere's aspect. All arms and legs he still was; but without the juvenile fringe of beard his face had a more mature look. Jere Cuttles who rode into tough Bitter Springs was much less the gawky Pike than the Jere the valley knew. Perhaps the events which prodded him to this serious adventure had in themselves served to lift him over the border line between youth and manhood.

He rode into Bitter Springs with a very definite plan of action in mind and in a character he had rehearsed many times over the long trail across the mountains. From this and that bit of gossip he had gleaned from emigrants going west over the trail Jere had learned a good deal about the type of men constituting the town's citizenry; who were the outstanding ruffians besides Lucky Bill and what to expect from them. So he was primed to the feather edge.

It was late afternoon of a day of intolerable heat when Jere's horse reached the straggling single street; a double row of tents and false front wooden shacks emblazoned by signs of refreshment and folly; alkali dust a foot deep in the road; emigrants' white-hooded wagons parked in a central corral or drawn up before a store while their tenants gave themselves a thrill of town life after weeks in the silences.

He drew rein before a rude hitching rack, bridle-tied his beast and creaked his way in new boots into the first saloon. A dozen or more idlers there, hanging by the crook of their elbows on the pine bar or watching a listless game of high-low. Jere noisily beat his hat against his knees to rid it of dust the while his eyes shrewdly skimmed the fringe of loafers. He hit upon the biggest one, a whiskered fellow with the mark of hard liquor on his face, and swaggered up to him.

“Yo're the lop-eared ki-yote I been yearnin' to meet up with,” Jere blustered and without more ado he shot his big hand into the other's face and gave his nose a terrific yank. The outraged owner of the assaulted nose staggered back and reached for his waistband. Jere was too quick for him. His left hand darted to the crook handle of a long dragoon revolver protruding above a belt, whisked the weapon out and sent it crashing against a fancy pyramid of glasses behind the bar.

“No ye don't!” Jere bellowed. “Kaintuck' rules. Eye gougin' an' bitin' free as ever—but no weepons!” A crash of his fist against the injured nose sent the other reeling back against a card table.

Instantly a ring of excited spectators formed about the twain. Others rushed in from the street. Tables and chairs were whisked into a corner. Here was something to watch; a lanky stranger all of a sudden tying into Yazoo Yancy, the town's most spectacular killer. 'Nother funeral out to Boot Hill!

YAZOO spread his arms and made a rush for Jere. Neatly side-stepping, one of Jere's new boots came up with a swoop and landed against a kneecap—this was all within “Kaintuck' rules,” remember. The big Yazoo's right leg crumpled under him and he sprawled. Jere leaped for his back. Landing on his doubled knees fairly between the other's shoulders, his hands went to Yazoo's hairy neck in a strangle hold.

But the Missouri youth might as well have tried to choke an elephant. Big Yazoo rose to one knee with a hoarse roar and pitched his lighter antagonist over his head. Then he plunged upon Jere before the latter had time to evade the avalanche of sinew and bone. Jere's rigid right arm popped the other's chin for an instant while his left thumb drove at the wolf-like eyes.

This was what men of the frontier, the trappers of the Rockies, the tough bargemen of the Mississippi, called “ground-scufflin'.” A deadly and bone-breaking business. Jere Cuttles had learned all its tricks back in the Red Hills country of his birth—eye-gouging, biting, throttling. But now he realized that his stunt of bravado, his singling out the biggest man to fight as a proper introduction to Bitter Springs' good graces, suddenly had plumped him into a life-and-death issue.

“Git him, Yazoo! Trim the young pup of his ears! Now, Yaz', y'got 'im whar y'want 'im!” The crowd was all with Yancy, hungered for an execution.

Jere must break that grip on his arms, must get to his feet where his superior shiftiness could weigh against overwhelming weight. He felt fingers groping for his eyes, a sharp slicing pain across the lids.

With a supreme effort he bowed his back—Yazoo's weight was a terrific load to lift—and swung his long right leg upward in a sweeping arc. The coppered toe of the boot thudded against the base of a hairy skull just where the backbone emerged—a numbing blow. Yazoo went limp. Like a cat Jere was out from under and striding the big chest. His grip was on the other's ears ready to give the shaggy head what was called “the bumps” in the technic of ground scuffing when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“You win, stranger. No use killing Yazoo just to settle a friendly argument.”

JERE looked through blood at the face between his fists. Eyes were closed; jaw sagged open. He turned his head up toward the sound of the voice. Vaguely he saw the grinning face of the man who had accosted him in the willows a month ago—Lucky Bill Hazard. His pounding heart skipped a full beat and the roused fighting blood in him prompted that then and there he attempt to blot out the life of one of Allaire's slayers. But he remembered the responsibility drummed into him by Judge Stupe; he had come to Bitter. Springs only as the agent of rough justice over the mountains, not as its principal.

Jere got stiffly to his feet. He found his hand grasped by Lucky Bill. The fickle crowd, eager to champion a victor, pushed about him to slap his back. The beaten Yazoo was dragged into a corner and forgotten. Men came solicitously with dripping towels to swab the blood from Jere's face. Lucky Bill ordered all hands to the bar to drink to the prowess of the stranger.

“What was your grudge against Yazoo Yancy?” Lucky Bill wanted to know when the first slug of burning liquor had scorched Jere's throat. Jere, emerging quickly from the daze of battle and finding himself exalted by Lucky Bill himself, dropped into the part he had planned for himself.

“Reckoned he was a polecat what did me outa a claim over in Californy three-four months ago. But when I gits to scuffin' him”—here Jere threw in a wide grin for good measure—“I see I'm wrong. Anyway, I craved to git a fight outa my system. Hain't had a good one goin' on a month.”

A roar of laughter greeted this sally. Once more Lucky Bill crooked a finger at the bartender.

“Headed for the States?” he asked,

Jere appeared to ponder his reply with the craft of a man who was unaccustomed to revealing his plans. “Maybe so,” he finally conceded. “I'm sorta on the loose.”

With a lordly gesture he ordered the barkeeper to refill the drained glasses and let Lucky Bill take the lead in conversation. The master of Bitter Springs was a connoisseur of men as some people in this softer age of ours are connoisseurs of porcelains and tapestries. He liked to have rare specimens of manhood about him. This long limbed stranger had just licked the town bully, wherefore he was a treasure to be added to Lucky Bill's precious collection.

Though strictly adhering to the West's rigorous code against prying into a man's past, Lucky Bill managed to draw from Jere vague hints about “trouble” he'd gotten into over the Sierras in the diggin's, “Trouble” in the Days of Gold had a peculiar significance; it covered everything from robbing sluice boxes to murder.

Jere allowed himself to be persuaded to stay a while in Bitter Springs.

Yazoo Yancy, brought around by copious sloshings of water, accepted Jere's apology for the results of a mistaken identity in an humble spirit. His crown had been snatched from him and perhaps he was glad to be rid of the responsibility.

So the avenger of Pierre Allaire established himself by a single daring stratagem in Lucky Bill's nest of murderers and hunted men. So in a few whirlwind minutes he learned the half of what he'd ridden many weary miles to know; the whereabouts of Hazard. Remained for him to discover if Lem Collins, the second man whose hands were wet with Allaire's blood, was also a fledgling in this infamous nest.

BEFORE he went to bed that night in the Emigrant's Rest, a two-storied scaffold with canvas stretched over it, Jere had sealed his place in the town's affections—and in Lucky Bill's—by sitting into a game of stud designed especially as a sort of second degree for neophytes and winning several stacks of Mexican dollars from the town's hardened gamblers. Here again, not luck so much as skill was with the Missourian. Jere could not read or write, but he'd studied poker—draw and stud—at his father's knee. He could read secrets in the twitch of an opponent's eyelash.

Not counting transient emigrants, there were not a hundred and fifty people in Bitter Springs and the surrounding he had been two days in town Jere saw them all. Lem Collins was not one of them. Jere checked this situation.

No doubting the confession made by Despard the Basco who told the truth when death faced him. Collins had quit the valley on sudden alarm to cross the mountains and join Lucky Bill in his desert retreat. Since he was not now in Bitter Springs, only two contingencies offered. Either, more timorous than Lucky Bill, he was hiding out somewhere in the surrounding mountains until all chance of pursuit should pass, or he had joined a wagon train of disheartened gold seekers headed east. In that case the cowman was ere now hopelessly beyond reach of the vigilantes' noose.

How to discover which of these two possibilities covered fact?

No safe way except through Lucky Bill himself, and that would require caution.

JERE set himself assiduously to cultivate the big fellow with the ready smile. Not openly, but in seeming casualness Jere put himself opposite Lucky Bill at friendly games of high-low, let himself be summoned by Lucky Bill to “whack in on a piece of bull meat” at the Rhinoceros Eating House. The Missourian's natural taciturnity commended him to the town's master rather than serving as a handicap; Lucky Bill did not favor men who told all they knew. The big fellow also found secret enjoyment in the few homely bits of folk wisdom that came in Jere's lazy drawl.

This lanky fellow with the deceptive air of a gawk was a slick customer in Lucky Bill's estimation. He'd make a good steerer for emigrants over the new toll road Lucky Bill was planning to cut through Beckwourth Pass.

Lucky Bill Hazard, connoisseur of men, open-hearted patron of fugitives on the wrong side of the law, took into his heart the youth whose business it was to see him properly hanged.

As supreme evidence of this favor, on Jere's fourth day in Bitter Springs Lucky Bill drew him aside and with many winks and sly smiles entrusted him with a delicate mission.

“Like's not you've heard of my girl—my new one,” he began. “She's out to my house on the hay ranch getting over a mountain fever which nigh killed her over in the Sink. She and Big Mary out there. I've been sleeping in town to make things look right and proper with her.

“Well, Jere, I reckon I've been crowding Lucy a li'l too hard with my—um—offer of affections. Yunno. And this morning she climbed out of bed, through the window and took it for the hills. Big Mary had to catch her and bring her back. You wouldn't think a likely young girl would act that way; now would you?”

Jere shook his head sagely. He had heard sly whispers about a girl Lucky Bill had rescued from the desert and had in his ranch-house over her convalescence.

“Well, sir, to sort of square myself with Lucy,” the other resumed, “I've bought a new silk gown off a busted emigrant's wife. Lucy hasn't got anything but calico, and you know how girls admire to have pretties. You ride out there with this silk gown, give it to Lucy with a few kind words, and maybe later I'll lope out there and find her in a forgiving mind.”

“But looky here, Lucky——”

“Oh, don't you be afraid of cutting me out!” A hearty slap on Jere's back. “Not with that map of yours!”

ONCE at the ranch, Jere had difficulty winning past Big Mary, jealous guardian of Lucy Brand. He finally persuaded her that he came as trusted messenger from Lucky Bill and the squaw grudgingly removed her bulk from the door. Jere halted, tongue tied, before the girl whose big eyes searched his questioningly. She sat swathed in a blanket and almost buried in the depths of an armchair fashioned from a large wine barrel. Two heavy braids of burnished chestnut framed her small features where they fell down to lie over her breast.

The Missouri youth's life since he was rescued from the wilderness of the Overland Trail had been almost without feminine contacts. Sure it is that the vision of pale beauty before him was not at all what he expected to see. Hard eyes, maybe; painted lips, but not——

“Lucky Bill sent you out this, ma-am.” Jere clumsily laid a paper wrapped bundle in Lucy's lap and half turned as if to make an escape.

“Please—don't go!” Quickly from the girl, in her desperation seizing the opportunity for speech with somebody who did not possess the bold, hungry eyes of Lucky Bill. Jere halted and fumbled his hat.

“What——” Her fingers lightly touched the bundle.

“He says it's a silk gown he bought off a emigrant woman,” Jere blurted. A line jumped between the girl's eyes and she let the gift slide to the floor. Again the small oval of her face was turned to Jere. Resolution fought with pressing fear there. Here, perhaps, was opportunity to find some way of escape from walls high as the desert sky.

“Are you a friend of Mr. Hazard's?” She put the question hesitantly. Even to Jere Cuttles an overtone of the gnawing anxiety behind Lucy's words carried unerringly.

“Well, ma-am, I hain't knowed him only four days. Lucky Bill 'pears to've taken a shine to me.”

“Oh then you aren't one of his men—I mean the Bitter Springs outlaws I heard about on the trail before—before I was brought here?”

A QUICK gust of sympathy, half comprehended, stirred Jere's heart. Recalling the whispers and the sly nods in the town's saloons; recalling, too, Lucky Bill's innuendo when commissioning him with the gift of the silk dress, Jere could not fit this wistful and fear ridden face into the ugly picture? Not in all his life had he seen in a woman's face what he saw in the one framed by oaken barrel staves there before him.

He told her truthfully he was not one of Lucky Bill's gang and was about to add a word of explanation when Lucy interposed.

“Why, then, did Hazard choose you to carry his—his hateful gift out to me?”

“I tell you, ma-am, he taken a shine to me and—-and”—Jere was bogging down in a situation but half guessed and wholly beyond his experience. He bull-headed through. “Iffen so be yo're in need of a friend, please, ma-am, figure on Jere Cuttles; that's me.”

“Oh!” Her hands fluttered out in quick appeal. “I do need a friend. Somebody to take me away from this dreadful place before-——”

Sound of a heavy tread on the boards of the lean-to kitchen beyond the cabin's main room. The Pah-ute squaw filled a doorway.

“You go now,” she grunted. Jere looked at her sullenly. The greasy copper face was placid.

“You go now. Stay long 'nough.” Big Mary gave the impression of a solid structure designed to remain in that doorway for all time. Reluctantly Jere turned to the front door, the Indian woman following. Over her mountainous shoulder the Missourian managed to send a message with his eyes; a message promising hope to Lucy Brand.

He mounted and was turning down the trail to town when a horseman cantered around a patch of willows beyond the door-yards. They passed within a yard of each other.

“Howdy!” The approaching rider gave Jere a searching look. The youth's heart gave a great bound and then seemed to stop. He lifted a hand in a wave of salutation—for he could not have spoken had he tried—and rode on.

Lem Collins!

VI

RECOVERING from the surprise of this encounter, Jere filled the short ride back to town with an attempt to analyze the situation which the past four days—and, particularly, recent minutes—had revealed. Consecutive thinking was a hard business for the Pike. He had to drive at it.

This much to the tally of the good: The two men he'd ridden so far to find were both right here in this narrow valley—Lucky Bill without fear in the midst of his gang; Lem Collins skulking in the back country. Like as not, he was depending upon Lucky Bill for grub, or why should he show himself at the latter's ranch in broad daylight?

How to bring the cowman down from the hills so that when the vigilantes from over the Sierras made their swoop the two murderers could both be caught? That was a knotty problem. Only Lucky Bill could fetch Lem into Bitter Springs; and not even a rope around his neck could force him to do that or to tell where the cowman's hideout was. Jere had sized up the big outlaw's character sufficiently to establish this deduction.

“Gosh a'mighty! How kin I work on thet-thar big fella to ease this cowardly ki-yote into town, or leastwise to tell me whar-at he is?”

A pretty problem for a one-gallus Pike to solve. .

Then there was another, tougher still: that girl with the big fear-ridden eyes he'd just left a prisoner under the eye of the fat squaw.

“Oh, I do need a friend!” So much in a note of desperate appeal before the big Indian woman had stopped the girl's lips. But those deep eyes had told him more—much more. Jere laboriously putting two and two together, found a strangely thrilling answer to the sum in his heart. Something stirred there which he never had felt before; a tremulous tenderness wholly outside his experience.

JERE filled in the background of the picture she had made there, blanket swathed in that rude armchair. Bits of gossip he'd heard in the saloons gave him the colors. A girl robbed, as he had been, of a protector by the savage spirit of the desert; alone and without a friend in all this raw wilderness; tossed into the hands of a smiling outlaw for his plaything. Every hour that passed with her still in the power of the smiling giant brought her nearer to a fate which stirred the youth's gorge.

Yet what could he do to snatch her from her peril? Contrive to outwit the big squaw jailer and ride off with the girl back to Fiddler's Bar? That would mean forsaking the mission of vengeance upon which he'd come, turning his back upon the call of Pierre Allaire's blood and the confidence Judge Stupe and those others of Fiddler's Bar had imposed upon him.

“Oh Lawd, I kain't do thet—jist kain't!”

Lucky Bill spied Jere riding down the town's single street and hailed him eagerly, “How's the weather look out at the ranch?”

“Yo' mout say chilly an' risin' signs of storm,” soberly from Jere. The big outlaw's face clouded momentarily, then his smile pushed through.

“Didn't my Lucy fancy the pretty gown?” He pitched his voice in a mimicking falsetto.

“Ask her yoreself,” Jere bluntly advised. Then he seized upon a bold inspiration.

“Seen a fella ridin' in to yore house jist as I was siftin' away.” Lucky Bill's eyes narrowed under the stab of primitive jealousy. Jere drawled on disinterestedly, “Mout've stopped an' passed the time of day iffen I'd been sure. Looked powerful like a fella I knowed once over in the Merced kentry yander of the mountings.”

“So? What's the specifications of this fella you saw?” Jere described him.

“Oh, that'd be Lem Collins.” Lucky Bill vented his relief in a brief laugh.

Jere caught him up with simulated interest. “Lem Collins—the same! Dawgone me, whyn't reckernize him for sure? What's Lem doin' this side of the range?”

“Living off me, mostly,” the other grumbled.

“Whar-at kin I locate ole Lem?” innocently from Jere. Lucky Bill shot a shrewd look at him.

“If you're from the Merced country I suspicion Collins won't be hankering to see you,” he said. “Got in a li'l trouble down there, Collins did; and a li'l more trouble somewhere else, more recent.”

“Don't tell me it was a killin',” said Jere solicitously.

“I won't,” was the other's cryptic answer and he swung his leg over the saddle. “That hungry wolf will hang round my place until I come out and stake him to some more grub. Right now I'm not craving to have any man hang round my house. I've got valuables there which I don't want stolen.”

He gave Jere a ponderous wink and set off at a brisk lope in the direction of the ranch.

JERE was left all bogged down. He had tried out Lucky Bill on a lead which might bring precious information and that wily outlaw had parried. To bring up the subject of Lem Collins again would arouse the other's quick suspicion. His single chance of learning the cowardly cowman's hiding place had failed.

To distract his mind from the wearisome treadmill it pursued Jere left his horse in a saloon corral and walked a few hundred yards off the single street to where a newly come emigrant train, westward bound, had halted in a straggling line of covered wagons. Half the town was there; gamblers with their little portable tables going after a monte business right on the ground; hay farmers looking for business; Bitter Springs merchants with cloth for the women and provision price lists for wagon captains and lieutenants to scan, News from the East was swapped for lies about the California diggings just over the mountains. Hubbub and hurly-burly of a circus day.

In talk with a young boomer from Cincinnnati Jere learned that this Illinois Company—for so this emigrant train styled itself—was bound for the Shasta diggings in the far northern part of California and was planning to turn off the Overland Trail here at Bitter Springs to follow the Beckwourth Road which led through Fiddler's Bar. He felt a prick of elation at the news. Here was a way to get a message to Judge Stupe. There wasn't a messenger in all Bitter Springs he could trust, so these pop-eyed emigrants were God-given.

But the train would rest here a week, Jere's new-found friend said, to allow the draft animals to rest and feed up before taking the harrowing road over the mountains.

A week! In that time he must learn the hiding place of Lem Collins and——

“Here you're fixin' up fer a wedding here in town,” the young emigrant said. Jere admitted ignorance of such an impending event.

“Big fella you call Lucky Bill—and we heard lots about him from the Mormons back yonder—was over here not an hour ago askin' if there's a parson in the train. We told him half our company got hung up at Mormon Meadows—our preacher with 'em—but they'll be rolling in, come three-four days.”

Jere Cuttles's heart went cold. Lucky Bill—a preacher Then that girl who had cried to him for rescue had only three or four days before——

A WILD thought came to him—these greenhorn emigrants; wouldn't they help? Suppose he stole Lucky Bill's girl and brought her to them for their protection.

Jere made a rapid appraisal. About thirty men here in the train; thirty against Lucky Bill's whole townful of roughnecks and bad men, even granted he could persuade them to risk all their dreams of gold to prevent an unknown girl's being properly married. What a chance!

“Good God—a li'l help!”

He quit the emigrants and walked back to the deserted street. Just in time to see Lucky Bill, evidently back from his flying trip to the ranch turn into the saloon which was his headquarters.

A crazy impulse seized Jere. He turned into the corral where his horse waited, mounted and cantered down the silent street out to where the wheel tracks of a nation's migration led toward the sunset sky. Unobserved, he rode until a small hill range lay between himself and the town, then he left the road and made a wide circle north in the direction of the ranch where Lucy Brand was held a prisoner.

“Don' know what's like to come of it,” Jere told the backward turning ears before him; “but I jist kain't set round doin' nothin'. I gotta find me some action.”

Jere Cuttles, the gawky Pike, was bursting from his chrysalis. Compulsion of circumstances, pressure of desperate need were forcing him to do a man's thinking.

VII

IN A green and gold dusk merging into the purple of night Jere came in sight of the squat log house with its outriggers of corral and shed—very desolate and alone under the black masses of the mountains. No lights in the two windows looking down the valley. Not a sign of anyone within. At a safe distance Jere sat his horse and studied the prospect. He finally dared to ride in a wide circle around the back of the cabin where he tied his horse to one of the posts of a hayrick. Then with an eye peeled for the Indian giantess he tiptoed to the door of the lean-to kitchen.

It was ajar. He slipped through the crack of the door and took a step in darkness. A board popped under his tread; the noise was like a pistol shot to the boy's taut nerves. No expected invasion of the kitchen by a ponderous squaw, Jere wondered if Lucky Bill had carried the girl away to another hiding place on this afternoon excursion.

He felt his way to the door giving onto the long main room—pushed it open and stood alert in the doorway. Though he saw nothing, heard nothing, yet some indefinable sense of a presence carried to him. His breath stopped as his ears strained to catch a sound. Finally:

“Lady,” he called, very low, “whar-at be ye?” Then in quick afterthought, “I'm Jere Cuttles, the fella who's aimin' to help ye outa this pickle.”

A long sigh of pent-up breath in the darkness, then a low call from somewhere at the room's far end:

“Here I am—tied.”

Jere stumbled in the direction of the voice. His spread hands touched the staves of the great barrel chair, slipped over its top and fell upon soft hair.

“Lord love us, ma-am! Howcome?” Already his clasp knife was haggling at tough strands wrapped round and round the chair to imprison the body of the girl.

“Oh, when I heard your step in the kitchen,” Lucy whispered with a catch of hysteria, “I didn't know who might be coming, what might happen to me; so I didn't dare speak. Mary, you see, wanted to ride to town and so to keep me from running away she tied me tight in this chair.”

“Injun-like,” Jere muttered as he cut loose the last bond about the girl's ankles. “Now we'll make a light.”

“No—no!” in instant alarm. “If Hazard should come and find you here——”

“Let him.” Jere was all recklessness under the presence he felt so close to him.

“But you're going to take me away with you, aren't you?” Hands fluttered through the dark to fall on the youth's head where he knelt, pulling severed ropes from Lucy's ankles. They pressed in desperate appeal.

“I—well ma-am-——” Suddenly Jere Cuttles forgot everything in the world except the warm near presence of a woman who filled every bit of his being.

“Yes, ma-am, iffen yo're wishful fer me to do that,” he said with a choke, and he stooped to lift her from the cavernous depths of the chair. The weakness of her convalescence added to numbness from the bonds Big Mary had imposed upon her made Lucy totter. Jere felt her weight sag, stooped suddenly and gathered her in his arms. Strands of her hair pressed against his cheek as he started to grope with a free hand toward the kitchen door. His blood leaped.

“Yo're trustin' me, ma-am?” he choked. “Yo're trustin' me true?”

“I am,” Lucy whispered.

THE aloof desert stars looked down upon this odd variant of a tale old as the world. A youth who had come on a mission of blood vengeance forgetting all for the sake of a girl; a maid reading a clean heart in the exchange of a dozen words with a stranger youth and giving herself into the keeping of that youth's strong hands.

She was on the saddle before him and Jere was guiding his horse through the scrub over the circuitous route he'd picked for his trip to the ranch. For the first few minutes there was silence between them; each was a little dumbfounded by this swift turn of events into which both of them had been swept almost without conscious thought. Finally from Jere:

“We got a sight o' figgerin' to do afore we get clean outa here, ma-am.” She gently corrected his form of address and he repeated after her, a little reverently, “Lucy.”

“Yes, but you have already done the hardest part of it—taking me away from that dreadful place,” she answered with a thrill of admiration in her voice. “And I thought, when you came to the house this morning bringing a gift from Hazard—I haven't even opened the hateful bundle; I thought you were just one of his bullies.”

“That's been my game—makin' Lucky Bill think that same,” simply from Jere. And then he told her why he was in Bitter Springs; of the murder of his foster father which had sent him, roundabout, into this nest of thugs and killers as scout for the vigilantes; how he was frustrated by the elusive Collins. He felt Lucy shudder in his arms.

“Oh!” she whispered. “Hazard a murderer; and he wanted—he said I was to marry him.” She told Jere something of her experience since the fog of fever had lifted and she had found herself the guest-prisoner of a masterful outlaw with laughing eyes. Lucky Bill had been scrupulously chivalrous in outward deportment, the girl admitted, but he had told her bluntly that she was his; just as soon as a preacher came along the trail they would be wedded.

“You see, Jere, from what you have saved me,” she finished in a tone which carried far behind her words. But the lanky youth who rode through the dark with a new and strange tumult in his heart was not so sure that he had saved Lucy Brand from the predatory hands of Lucky Bill. Now that he had snatched her from her cabin prison, where could he take her?

TWO days' hard riding over the Beckwourth Trail to Fiddler's Bar—but one horse—no blankets or grub. And the girl still weak from fever's ravages. Even granted he could hide her in the desert, slip into town in the night and steal another horse, no chance of getting food and blankets without arousing curiosity. That would mean suspicion and—when Lucky Bill discovered the kidnapping of his girl—pursuit and inevitable capture.

Yet there was no place in Bitter Springs where he might hide Lucy while he made more ordered preparation for flight. In that town of tough men were but three women—not Lucy's kind; neither they nor any of the Bitter Springs men would dare harbor the girl stolen from the town's master even if they could provide a hiding place.

Greatest peril of all; the hoofprints in the sand which each minute were lengthening out behind them to bind them to Lucky Bill's little feudal despotism in the desert. When the lord of Bitter Springs discovered his loss and trailed those tracks back to town——

“Lucy, they's jist a single slim chance.” Jere gravely spoke his thoughts aloud after many minutes of silence. “I'll circle the town and lose our tracks where the emigrants' horned cattle've been turned loose, then we'll sneak up on the train an' find some greenhorn woman who'll hide ye in a wagon fer a day till I kin ready up a trick fer liftin' us over the mountings. I dunno but what—Lawsy, what's that!”

A distant angry popping of shots. Over the top of a low hill lying between themselves and the town a rosy glow was fanning out against the night.

THE fight had started as so many of those affairs did—annals of the Argonauts are replete with instances—with a row between a drunken emigrant and a crooked gambler. Everywhere along the Overland Trail where nests of buzzards sprang up to pick the bones of California-bound boomers, red liquor and redder passions of men combined to produce savage combustion.

An Illinois corn-shucker from Quincy didn't like the way Diamond Joe flipped the cards around in a stud game at the Overland Rest. He said so and he emphasized his statement by a slam of his fist into Diamond Joe's face. Quicker than thought a derringer barked and the corn-shucker half arose, blood spouting from his neck, turned slowly on his heel, then pitched to the floor. Another Illinoisian, who was watching the game, swung a chair down on Diamond Joe's head.

Then uproar.

Five men of the Illinois wagon train, back to back, slowly retreated to the street in a shower of bottles and bullets, Bitter Springs's choicest thugs pressed them hard.

“Illinoy! Help, Illinoy!”

In answer to the battle cry valiants of the wagon train poured out of ten saloons all up and down the street and hurled themselves into the core of the fighting. Bitter Springs bravos, not unused to this sort of thing and schooled in a certain rough system of tactics, caught the wagon men on either flank as they pell-melled into the fray. Revolvers were not their common weapons; a club did better execution in the dark without drawing answering fire by a revealing streak of red.

Lucky Bill was in the thick of it. An emigrant's bullet through the flesh of a forearm roused him to a bull's fury. He was without weapon other than the thick oaken leg of a card table, but that swung on heads with terrific execution.

OUTNUMBERED, the Illinois men yielded ground until they had reached the circle of their wagons behind the shabby street. Thence a galling musket fire from the more sober stay-at-homes of the wagon company covered their retreat behind barriers of tongue and wheel. Now it was the turn of the Bitter Springs gang to give way; but not until some skulker had slipped around the circle of great prairie schooners under cover of darkness and hullabaloo and had set fire to a sheaf of hay projecting from the wagon bed of one of them.

A waving band of flame leaped at the sky. The townies, at a safe distance beyond musket balls, set up a great yell. Flustered emigrants ran with water pails, seized the tongue of the burning wagon and dragged it away from the inflammable circle of canvas hoods. Pickets with their Sharps rifles and their buffalo guns at the alert were thrown out in a wide cordon about the beleaguered train; but the Bitter Springs roughs had their bellies full of fighting and were content to retire to their street of canvas and wood shacks.

Five dead and a double score nursing wounds and bumps was the toll of this folly in Lucky Bill's robbers' roost. Just another episode in the life of the town whose infamy had spread away back to Council Bluffs and Independence.

Big Lucky Bill, his bullet drilled arm hung in a sling by the worthy Doc Almy and his temper sadly needing similar treatment, was mercifully spared added fury. He did not know at once that Big Mary, the Pah-ute squaw, was rapidly putting desert miles behind her on the back of one of Lucky Bill's mules. Big Mary was making for the wickiups of her people away over in the Cedar Range. Returning to Lucky Bill's ranch cabin from her stolen excursion into town and finding the cut loops of rope where her girl prisoner had been, Big Mary had decided it would be bad medicine to stay there longer.

IT WAS an hour after midnight when one of the sentries of the wagon train thought he saw a ghost rise out of the sage scrub. He promptly pulled down on the shadowy figure—“Halt there!”

“No harm, stranger—no harm!” Jere Cuttles sent his mollifying hail through the dark. “Call yore capting whiles I stay right here. I got somethin' mighty important to tell him.”

The sentry whistled sharply and soon was joined by another. They commanded Jere to approach and wanted to know his business. He insisted he must see the wagon train's leader. After some argument one of the guards disappeared to fetch him.

“Mister, I taken no part in tonight's rukus,” Jere began when he was faced by a bearded man in shirt and drawers. “I don't rightly b'long to Lucky Bill's gang o' wolves an' hold no truck with 'em a-tall.”

“Ye-ah?” dubiously from the captain. “What's your game, then?”

“Mister, I'm plumb desp'rit else I wouldn't be botherin' ye. But Lucky Bill, the roach-haired chief of this Bitter Springs gang, is aimin' to force a decent young gal to marry with him—keeps her tied up like a Injun's captive out to his ranch-house. So tonight I went out an' stole her offen' Lucky Bill. You gotta——”

“Stole her!” The captain gave a surprised whistle. “What're ye drivin' at, stranger? Stole Lucky Bill's gal for yourself, eh?”

“No, mister,” Jere answered truthfully enough. “I stole her to keep her from misery an' disgrace. Got her hid out in the scrub yander, waitin' to hear yore outfit'll take her in and care fer her tender-like.”

Then, before the other could interpose objections, Jere hurried his story of how Lucy Brand came to Bitter Springs a waif from the desert orphaned and near dead; how she returned to life to find herself in the grip of the outlaw leader and how her fate would be sealed with the imminent arrival of a preacher in the second division of the Illinois contingent.

“I'm only askin', Captin, fer yore women folks to hide Lucy in one've yore wagons till I kin' ready myself to take her over the mountings to Fiddler's Bar, whar I live. After tonight's rukus it hain't likely Lucky Bill nor no other Bitter Springer'll come prowlin' round here on her trail.

“An' Capting”—in a final gust of pleading—“thar hain't no t'other place to hide her in all Utah Territory.”

THE captain of the Illinois Company pondered this surprising request and the situation forcing it.

“But m'son, we're pulling out for Beckwourth Pass soon's we can round up our cattle tomorrow. After what happened tonight we can't stay here a minute longer than necessary.”

“Then, mister”—eagerly from Jere—“take Lucy 'long with yore party. I kain't ride 'long of ye 'cause—cause I got business here which Jedge Stupe, at Fiddler's Bar, will explain. Captin, sir, thar hain't no chance o' yore sayin' no to me!”

The captain retired a few paces with the two sentries and talked the matter over in low tones. He strode back to Jere.

“Bring the girl in,” he said. Jere faded into the scrub.

“Lucy, they'll take ye in—an' yo're leavin' fer Fiddler's Bar come mornin'!” Jere knelt by the side of the girl where she crouched under a covert of willows. The ecstatic clasp of her hands over one of his was joy to him.

“Oh, Jere! But you'll come, too?”

“No, Lucy, I stay here. I got work to do round here.”

“But Hazard, if he finds out you took me away from him——”

“He'll find out in the Lord's good time,” grimly from Jere. “But I'm countin' on yore help, Lucy. Somethin' mighty important. Three-four days'll see ye in Fiddler's Bar, what with a wagon train bein' slower than horseback. Once thar, go straight to Jedge Stupe an' tell him Jere Cuttles, in Bitter Springs, is ready fer him.”

“Yes, Jere, and God take care of you. And—and——” Lucy's voice quavered. She saw the shadowy sentries waiting ahead; the moment of separation had come.

“I'll leave word in Fiddler's Bar where the wagon train is going. Where they go I'll go, too. You——”

“I kin come an' find you—some day when I've finished my work here,” huskily from Jere. They had stopped.

“Jere, you won't—won't think wrong if I——” Suddenly her arms went up. She pulled his head down and kissed him.

Then Jere saw her join the three waiting shadows.

VIII

THE Illinois Company's wagon train moved out of Bitter Springs with the dawn, on the road to Beckwourth Pass and California beyond. The sullen town of rags and shanty boards gave no sign of farewell; only a still smoking mound representing the burned emigrant wagon remained a token of the night's madness.

Jere Cuttles, in his bed on the second floor of the hotel and with his eye to a rent in the canvas wall, followed the progress of the white covered wagons as they serpentined through the dim sea of sage. Somewhere under those caterpillar hoods of canvas was one who had opened a new world to this wilderness waif. He wondered if he ever would see her again; and if he did, what——

But an eminently practical consideration jerked the youth back from vague dawn dreams. With that wagon train went, too, his message to the alcalde of Fiddler's Bar which would bring the vigilantes coursing over the mountains to execute their justice here in this lawless desert town. The vigilantes would come and he, Jere, would have but one of the brace of murderers to turn over to them. But five or six days were left to him in which to locate the hideout of Lem Collins or contrive that the cowardly cowman should be in Bitter Springs when the surprise swoop of the avengers should be made.

Moodily Jere reflected that he'd sent that message by Lucy on impulse and because other trustworthy means of communication with Fiddler's Bar lacked. Now he must make good. Determination fired him anew. With the distraction of the girl and her plight removed, the deep crusader spirit of vengeance that had pushed him on his dangerous mission to Bitter Springs burned again.

Nor did the lanky Pike have long to wait before his revived resolution was put to supreme test.

Jere was sitting at a trestle in the Rhinoceros Eating House manfully attacking what passed for breakfast in that primitive establishment when Lucky Bill strode in. The big fellow stood for a minute at the head of the table letting his eye range down over the scattered line of food stokers. Jere gave him a casual look and nod. In that flick of the eye he read portent in the outlaw's face; it was drained of its usual healthy tan and the lips were a thin line of menace.

LUCKY BILL chose an empty place next to Jere and sat down without a word. With one arm in a sling he made hard going of his handling of knife and fork, particularly when the Chinaman who was cook, waiter and general roustabout put a steak before him. Lucky Bill essayed to anchor the piece of meat with a fork held in his tethered hand while he sawed at it with the dull table knife. Suddenly he turned to Jere.

“Let me have your clasp knife. I can't do anything with this tin blade.”

Something in the tone or the fox-like glance of the other's eyes gave a prompting of danger. Why he did it Jere could not have said; but instead of reaching into his trousers pocket for his heavy clasp knife his hand slid down into his boot and brought up his long bladed Bowie—in Jere's time as common an accouterment as a man's stick is today.

“This-here's cut tougher things 'n steak,” he said carelessly as he offered the hilt to Lucky Bill. The latter's eyes were narrowed in deadly suspicion.

“I said I wanted your clasp knife, not your man-carver.”

“Have to git one off'n somebody else, then. Never packed one o' them child's toys.” Jere went on with his eating, leaving the Bowie knife where Lucky Bill had flung it down by his plate. Meanwhile his left hand had made a lightning-quick pass over his thighs; no bump there marking the presence of his clasp knife in pockets.

The outlaw leader dropped his untethered hand into a coat pocket, then opened his fist before Jere's coffee cup. A big clasp knife with a wooden handle rolled once over on the oilcloth and came to rest with two intials burned into the wood staring up at Jere.

They were “J.C.”

“Your knife,” in a cold monotone from Lucky Bill. Jere gave him an indifferent look.

“This a present yo're makin' me?”

“Your knife, I say.” The other's voice was steel cold and the glitter of murder was in his eyes. Men up and down the table poised bundles of food midway to their mouths to stare. They knew the import of that tone.

“Iffen yo're pleased to make me a present of a boy's knife,” Jere drawled, “whyn't ye git the 'nitials right? I hain't long on readin' an' writin' an sich, but I'm fair well grounded on my own 'nitials.”

LUCKY BILL, taken aback, searched the homely face and found nothing but quizzical interest lightly touched by a dash of humor in the eyes.

“J.C. stands for Jere Cuttles,” he snapped.

“Which I hain't disputin',” Jere gave him back.

“Then you admit this is your knife.” Lucky Bill's free hand was toying with the hilt of Jere's wicked Bowie blade where it lay amid the clutter of dirty dishes. The Missourian suddenly wiped the humor from his eyes and stiffened in a hint of antagonism,

“Say, Lucky, is this a game or somethin'? What's into all this palaver 'bout a child's knife with 'nitials onto it?”

Now the whole table was tense. This newcomer, this fightin' wildcat who'd licked Yazoo Yancy, was getting his scalplock roached up against Lucky Bill. One or two pushed back from the table in an access of caution.

“You may give my game any fancy name you like.” The outlaw spaced his words in deadly deliberation. “I found this knife a short time ago in a place where it ain't healthy for men besides myself to be. You admit your initials are J.C. That same J.C. is branded onto this handle. I'm going to——”

“Lucky, I don't make a habit of callin' a man a liar—least-wise not a crippled man. But iffen yo're puttin' forth them letters for J.C. yo're a liar.”

Jere gave this defy in a maddeningly slow drawl, the while his eyes held the other's locked. He was looking for the split-second signal meaning a death stroke with the Bowie.

The master of Bitter Creek was toppled from his sureness by the very effrontery of this charge as well as by the unusual experience of having some one dare him to strike, Perforce he had to listen.

“I'd reckoned, Lucky, ye had more schoolin' 'n I got. But when ye say thet-thar's a J”—he pointed to the burnt letter on the knife handle “I know ye fer a pore ignorant man. A J has got its crook turned t'other way. Thet's a L—an' to hell with ye!”

Very slowly, very calmly Jere unbuckled his length and arose from the bench. He reached for the Bowie, stooped to slip it in his boot and walked out of the eating house. Lucky Bill sat staring at the brand on the knife handle.

“Lawsy, lawsy!” Jere whispered under his breath as he walked down to the feed lot to care for his horses. “Close squeak fer a young fella——”

LATER in the day, when Jere was walking down the frowsy street, he saw Lucky Bill approaching. Jere tensed himself for eventualities. The big outlaw advanced with his hand out.

“Son, I sure gotta do the handsome by you,” he said as he gripped Jere's hand. “You're one man in Bitter Springs not afraid to stand up against Lucky Bill—even if you're right. Come in here; I got somethin' to say to you.”

He led the way into a saloon and through the clutter of deserted card tables to a corner in the rear. When they were seated, Lucky Bill faced Jere with a serious countenance.

“Whether you're right or wrong about that being a L on this knife”—he flipped the damning evidence on the table before them—“and some of the boys in the Rhinoceros told me after you left that was the way they made a L, when you were willing to fight me about it I knew this knife wasn't yours. Now let me tell you why I was ready to slit your throat about it.”

Lucky Bill then proceeded to narrate his discovery of Lucy's flight; how he'd ridden out to the ranch cabin after the fight with the Illinois men to reassure her in case she'd heard the firing and found Big Mary and Lucy both gone—found the cut strands of rope and this clasp knife lying by the barrel chair.

“When I made a light and saw your initials—or what I took to be your initials—on this handle and when I figgered you were the only man in camp those initials fit, and figgered, too, that you'd had a chance to talk to the girl when you took that silk gown out to her, I was in a killing mind. But I waited until morning and then spotted horse tracks coming and going between the ranch and town. Says I, 'There's only two townies ever seen my Lucy—Doc Almy and Jere Cuttles—J.C. on the knife cinches it.”

Jere had been doing some quick and lofty thinking during the other's recital. A God-given stratagem popped into his head.

“Lucky,” he drawled, “'s'posin' this friend of yours who's hidin' out, this Lem Collins, makes a L the way I say she should be made”—Jere traced in the table dust a letter with a left hand turn—“what then?”

“Well s'posin' he does, allowing he can make any initials at all; what of it?”

“I met that Collins ridin' up to yore house yistiddy,” Jere mused.

“You mean——”

JERE jerked his thumb at the tell-tale knife. “His'n,' he said. Lucky Bill clenched a fist.

“But I sent him on some business for me over to a ranch in Washoe Valley,” the other objected.

“Did you see him go?” innocently from Jere. The outlaw shook his head.

“How long do ye figger it'd take Collins to make the trip an' back?”

“Maybe three-four days.”

“Then,” Jere persisted, “this Collins fella might reckon he could lift yore Lucy an' take her over into Californy, an' ye wouldn't suspicion him as the fella for three-four days. He didn't start to once on that trip to Washoe Valley, but come into town last night to spy our whar ye mout be; knowed ye'd be mixed up in the big rukus an' so traipsed out to yore ranch, give that big Injun squaw some Mex dollars to pull her stake-rope an' grabbed the gal.

“That,” Jere concluded casually, “is jist my way of figgerin' it all out. May be wrong; may be right.”

Suddenly Lucky Bill smashed his fist into a cupped hand. “Why, what'd be more natural than for the son-of-a-gun to join up with the emigrant train? I'll pick me a dozen good shots, catch up with those Illinoy clam diggers and snatch 'em both.”

JERE'S heart suddenly went cold and it required all his resources of nerve to keep a poker face. He covered a second of appalling fear by elaborately cutting a quid of tobacco with the disputed knife.

“Didn't ye tell me t'other day somethin' or other 'bout Collins gettin' into some sorta trouble over to Fiddler's Bar?” Jere knew the other had not specified Fiddler's Bar, but he took a long chance.

“Yes—a killin',” Lucky Bill answered.

“Hain't likely, then, yore man'd jine up with a outfit that's goin' through Fiddler's Bar; which one o' them Illinoysers told me they plan to do. What's more, ye don't reckon that wagon train'd welcome to its bosom anybody from Bitter Springs—much less a gal stealer.”

Jere, feeling his way, with his brain keyed to seize upon every advantage of a word, was fighting desperately; first to fix suspicion surely on Lem Collins and seize some fortuitous advantage which might insure Lucky Bill's holding Collins in Bitter Springs, then—in the turn of this last minute—to prevent the outlaw's pursuit of the wagon train,

“Hit's none o' my business, Lucky, an' I'm not one to shove my oar into another fella's pond; but this's the way I size it up. Maybe Lem Collins hain't the man yo're lookin' for a-tall. Maybe he's lopin' along, innercent enough, on yore business to Washoe Valley an' will be back in three-four days. Iffen he' hain't back then, why you'll know he's hid out yore gal somewhere or is taking her over to Californy on the Overland Trail. Easy enough then to follow him over the mountings an' land on him, Other than that, ye kin gallyvant all round Utah Territory to no purpose.”

A long speech for taciturn Jere Cuttles. His lack-lustre eyes betrayed no hint of the stress behind them. Lucky Bill suddenly arose.

“Thanks a lot, Jere, for helping me figger this thing. You got a lot of brains even if you don't show it.”

He strode out into the white sunlight.

Jere set back, surprised at himself. Surprised at the quickness and sureness of his brain's workings in the second by second development of crisis. No faltering. A dependable instrument, that brain of his.

IX

{{di|HETHER it was Jere's hastily improvised logic or the result of his own survey of the situation, Lucky Bill remained in Bitter Springs awaiting the problematical return of Lem Collins from the mission to Washoe Valley. So five days passed; days whose dragging hours Jere Cuttles counted as so many centuries. With the passing of the third day after the Illinois wagon train quit the desert town, he began to visualize events on the far side of the Sierras. Given any luck, the wagons would now be drawing very close to Fiddler's Bar. But a little while and Lucy Brand would be giving his message to Judge Stupe. Then——

Jere could see the scurrying and the saddling up all along the single street of the new mining town; men with guns slung over their shoulders hastening to be out on the road that would lead down into the desert and to a nest of murderers. Give them two days to make the hard ride, just two days, and then——

Late in the night of the fifth day Jere was sitting in a light game of casino at the Overland—Bitter Springs gamblers played what they called “a lady's game” with one another between spurts of serious business when an emigrant train was in town—when Lucky Bill strolled behind his chair and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Want to see you when you've finished this hand.”

Jere played through to the last card, cashed his chips and joined Lucky Bill at the bar. With a crook of his finger the latter drew Jere out to the street. Two horses were tethered there; Lucky Bill indicated that he mount.

“We're going out to the ranch—where we won't be disturbed,” he said shortly. They rode the three miles in silence, Jere wondering just what development lay at the end of the trail. His companion pushed ahead through the door of the cabin and lit a candle on the mantel. The first feeble flicker showed a dim figure sitting in the great barrel chair. As the flame waxed stronger Jere saw a familiar face emerge from shadow.

Lem Collins!

THAT instant of recognition came the screech of a rusty key turning in the door behind him.

Collins' wolf-like eyes under a shaggy mat of hair lanced white flames at Jere. His hands gripped the arms of the chair as if bracing him for a spring. As for the Missourian, whatever secret shock the encounter might have wrought on him, he didn't give a sign. Standing with his weight on one foot like a tired horse, he let his eyes travel slowly up and down the seated figure.

“Well,” purred a silken voice behind him, “you don't seem right glad to meet your old friend, Lem Collins—the man you knew in the Merced country over the Sierras.”

“No, Lucky, to tell truth, I hain't”—in Jere's tired drawl. “Nobody what's not a friend o' yours kin claim friendship with me.”

“You dam'd spy!” Collins leaped to his feet and ran at Jere. Lucky Bill held him off with a straight arm.

“Hold on there, Collins; get a good look first.” The outlaw chief brought the candle from the mantel and held the flame close to Jere's face. The ex-cowman launched his ugly head forward like a buzzard's and gave Jere a searching scrutiny.

“Put a fringe of kid's corn-tossed whiskers under them weak eyes an' round that big mouth o' hisn, an' he's the Frenchman's orphant,” the murderer said. “Like I told you, Lucky, he's here to spy on us fer Allaire's killin'.”

Jere, frozen at heart by this sudden turn, nevertheless kept his head high and his wits at wire tautness. He deliberately turned his back on Collins and addressed himself to Lucky Bill.

“Speakin' of killin's, Lucky, how about this fella's murder of Jim Anstey down in the Merced country? Think ye said something 'bout that yoreself jist t'other day.”

“Lemme at the lyin' whelp; I'll tear his heart out!” Collins made another lunge, but Lucky Jim's grip on the collar of his shirt was unbreakable.

“All in good time, Collins,” he soothed; then to Jere with a mocking smile of pseudo politeness, “If you'll sit, Mr. Cuttles, and join us in a li'l confab. But first, just so's there'll be no unfortunate mistakes——”

He swooped down and whisked Jere's Bowie knife from a bootleg, gave it a fling so that it stuck quivering in a far wall. Jere suffered this disarming without a change of countenance and took the stool indicated. In the guttering candle light he surveyed the faces of his two enemies with not so much as the flicker of an eyelash.

LUCKY BILL reached into a pocket with elaborate ceremony and tossed the wooden handled clasp knife with the initials onto the table under the candle.

“You see, Mr. Cuttles, conversation sorta swings back to this knife—where we left it t'other morning.” Then, turning to Collins, “Tell our friend Mr. Cuttles what you know 'bout this knife.”

“Allaire the Frenchman give it to him three-four months ago,” snarled Collins. “I see the Frenchy settin' in front of his fireplace one day a'heatin' of a ramrod to burn the letters in. I remember 'cause the ramrod slipped once an' burnt his hand—and he done some tall cussin' in French, which don't sound like proper cussin'.”

Lucky Jim turned on Jere, his cold eyes belying the smile on his lips.

“Do you think, Mr. Cuttles, a ignorant Frenchy would know which side to put the loop on a J?”

“I think this's a lot of Chinaman's palaver if yo're askin' me,” doughtily from Jere; “and I'll be siftin' along iffen ye hain't got sense to talk.”

“Oh, no you won't be siftin' yet a'while!” A quick flash of the outlaw's teeth. Then he turned to Collins.

“Ever see this long stalk of sparrergrass down in the Merced country where he claims to've known you?”

Collins denied with an oath,

“And you last saw him when—and where?”

“Few days after Allaire—I mean, he was prowlin' round the Frenchy's cabin when I was lookin' fer somethin' there. That's what made me figger on gettin' out of the country before I could drive the cattle——”

“Needn't tell all you know, you pore dam' fool!” Lucky Bill sharply reproved. Then he turned his glance on Jere.

“What've you got to say, my friend?” The silkiness of his tone masked deadly venom. Jere gave him back look for look.

“Sence yore mind's made up to take the word of a killer, what do ye want me to say?”

“Just this!” Lucky Bill had leaped from his stool and towered over Jere. All pretense at mock civility was gone now. The man's stained soul was in his eyes.

“Just this, you lying whippersnapper: What did you do with my girl?”

JERE kept his seat. Not a tremor did he show. He slowly nodded his head toward Collins.

“Asked him that question, Lucky?”

“Yes, and he's proved he knows nothing about her. I'm asking you now; and by the Lord——”

“I don't know where she is,” Jere answered in strict truth. The other's hands lifted as if to throttle the Missouri youth, but by a masterful effort of strong will Lucky Bill restrained himself. His face again went cold.

“Cuttles,” he said tensely, “nobody but a mighty brave man can face me down like you're doing. I could kill you where you sit for stealing from me what I wouldn't trade for all the gold over the Sierras. But that's a business between you and me.”

He took a quick turn about the room and came to a halt before Jere. “But there's something outside this personal business. You're a spy. You've come here to get hangin' stuff on Lem Collins—and maybe on me, for all I know. We have a way of hanging spies here in Bitter Springs. Come morning an' we'll take you down to town where everybody can see; an' there we'll hang you, Cuttles.”

He gave a nod toward Collins. Together they fell upon Jere. After a sharp struggle they had him bound and triced to a staple in the stones of the fireplace.

“You sleep on that pile of buffalo robes where you can watch this man,” Lucky Jim indicated to Collins. He turned at the door into the bedroom and gave Jere a steady look.

“Too bad to hang you, Cuttles. With your nerve you oughta go far.”

X

A CANDLE guttered and built itself a pile of grease on a corner of the mantel above Jere's head. By its feeble light he could see the suggested shape of Lem Collins on his heap of buffalo robes in a far corner of the room. The man was a thousand fathoms deep in slumber; his breathing was like a tiger's snarl. In the bedroom which had been Lucy Brand's his other jailer, Lucky Bill, was sleeping; though lightly as Jere judged by the sound of intermittent stirring.

Though the blood was all squeezed from his extremities by the hard knots binding them, there was no numbness in his brain, Instead, that new-found instrument was geared to highest functioning. Love of life was the force now dominating its activities; yes, and a bitter resolve to triumph over these two enemies even in this moment of direst extremity. Death did not terrify Jere Cuttles so much as the prospect of suffering death with his oath of personal vengeance still unsatisfied. That was unthinkable!

He knew that ere this his riders from Fiddler's Bar were on the road to Bitter Springs. There could be no doubt of the Illinois wagon train's having won through in the time he allotted in his calculations; no question of Judge Stupe and his vigilantes making top speed over the mountains. But when they arrived he, Jere, must be on the ground to intercept them and guide them to their quarry. They might even be due to arrive at journey's end this night!

Jere could not see the staple between fireplace stones through which the rope tricing his arms and legs had been passed. He felt it as a lump between his shoulders. Very cautiously he strained forward to bring strain upon the staple. Darting pains through his wrists were his sole reward. Then he resorted to patient manipulation.

By shifting his body slightly he got a purchase on the staple under one shoulder blade, tightened a muscle against the iron thing and commenced a slow up-and-down worrying of the unseen binding post. It hurt him with a nibbling pain through all his back muscles. He could not guess whether he was making progress or not, but every fiber of his being willed that progress it must be.

Minutes stretched into an hour—into two. Jere had no way of measuring the torture except by the tiger bellowings of the sleeping Collins.

At last his sore shoulder told him that the staple actually was loosened. He waited with caught breath until one of Collins' snores reached its crescendo, then suddenly leaned forward. He felt the staple pull from its fastening. A single sharp clink as it rang against the hearth stones.

Sound of feet dropping to the floor in the next room. Jere saw the door opening and quickly dropped his head onto his chest in simulated sleep. So for an age-long minute he endured the critical gaze of Lucky Bill in the doorway. When he finally dared open one eye the door was shut again. But he must needs wait interminable minutes for the light sound of breathing to tell him his restless warder was once again asleep.

Now the time of Jere's most desperate expedient, when every hope of life hung upon a most dubious factor. All the time of his labor to loosen the staple he had been conscious of faint heat from the fireplace to his right. Coals lay there somewhere in the heap of ashes; coals which now must be conjured to save him.

HE SLOWLY inched away from the stone side wall of the fireplace until his body was squarely before the black maw itself. Then his bound hands went backward into the ashes—live flesh groping for burning coals. He could not even twist his head to bring his eyes to the search; must needs trust only to the nerves in his finger tips. Inch by inch those groping fingers burrowed through ashes until lightning stabs of pain told of a treasure wound, then it was mumbled and shuffled with loving taps through the ashes to be added to a precious heap behind Jere's back. Slow burning greasewood and sage brands, resistant and long alight, were painfully garnered into a little pile forward of the ash heap.

Then the supreme moment.

Still unseeing, Jere pressed his bound hands down upon the heap so that the strands of rope pushed against red hearts of embers. Through the flesh of his fingers and wrists might not actually touch, yet was it so close to the source of heat that a slow parboiling was inevitable.

One blessed circumstance; the binding cord was old and dry. Had it been green, Jere's torture would have been to no end. Even as it was, from minute to minute he had to lift his hands away from the coals and bury them in the cooler ashes to dull the pain.

A smell of burning hemp came to his nostrils. He prayed that it would not penetrate beyond that closed door where Lucky Bill slept with one eye open—prayed, too, that the rope would not catch flame, in which case he would be done for.

Minutes of excruciating agony. Then suddenly his hands came free.

Jere sat for a minute dissolved in weakness. Then he gathered his resolution and set his blistered and swollen fingers to work upon the knots about his ankles. A tough business, but iron will drove him through with it.

Then he took stock of the situation. There he was with crippled hands, unarmed; how was he to capture two men, each armed with revolver and—presumably—a knife?

The flickering candle showed him but a half of the long room. His eyes had covered every inch of visible wall during the time he was bound and he'd seen neither gun nor revolver holster. His own Bowie knife was stuck in a wall of shadow somewhere where Lucky Bill had thrown it at the moment Jere walked into the trap. If he had that now—but daw-gone it! A Bowie was for killin' and he didn't want to kill either of these men unless it was to save his own life. His business was to save Lucky Bill and Lem Collins for hemp!

FIRST pale light of dawn was marking the squares of two windows when Jere struck a balance of the pros and cons of strategy. First, and very painfully, he removed his boots, using for that operation a heavy bootjack which stood on the hearth. Then with the bootjack grasped in his left hand for a weapon, he started a cautious stocking-foot stalking of the snoring Lem Collins. Every board he tested before putting his weight upon it. He was crouched like a cougar for the spring. So, noiselessly, he came to where the cowman lay, stooped and let his free right hand stray stealthily along the other's waistband.

The brass stock of a dragoon revolver fell under his gliding fingers. Gently—oh, so gently—Jere started to draw the precious weapon from under the sleeping weight which pinned it down.

Just as the long barreled weapon was coming free the cowman opened his eyes. One startled look—the beginnings of a yell—then Jere's bootjack clouted the bull-like head just once. The man groaned and sank back.

In two bounds Jere was back at the fireplace and had swept the candle to the floor. Then he leaped aside just on the instant that a spurt of flame came from the door to the bedroom. With all his might he hurled the heavy bootjack at the lozenge of lighter dark which represented the doorway whence Lucky Bill had fired.

He heard a thud—a screamed oath—clatter of a revolver as it was knocked spinning from an unseen antagonist's hand. Jere closed in, stooping almost double, his captured weapon held clubwise by its long barrel. Lucky Bill, caught a little above the knees, toppled and fell forward like a giant pine felled.

Then in the graying dark of the cabin the twain locked in a death battle. Lucky Bill handicapped by that ball through a forearm which the Illinois Company had given him for a souvenir of the street battle. Jere Cuttles with hands half baked by recent contact with live coals, Lucky Bill fighting to kill. Jere fighting to save this man and one other for the noose, Advantage lay with Jere insofar as he had Lem Collins' dragoon revolver; but he was determined not to use it to shoot except in final extremity.

“Damn you, you won't live long enough to hang!” Lucky Bill panted in Jere's ear in their first deadly grip.

“But you will, Lucky,” the youth gritted back at him, and he made a short swing with the revolver butt calculated to bring the brass knob of the butt down on the bandit chief's head. Instead it fell upon Lucky Bill's wounded arm thrown up as a cover. The man screamed in agony and broke his hold upon Jere. Before the latter could grapple him anew Lucky Bill had rolled over several times.

Jere heard his antagonist vent a triumphant cry, and almost instantly thereafter a streak of flame jetted at him. Lucky Bill had rolled onto the revolver which the hurtling boot jack had knocked from his hand. The bullet winged past Jere's cheek so close that he felt the wind of it.

WITH a quick shift of the body Jere managed to put the legs of the table between himself and the spot where that dangerous flame had spouted. Though a quick twist of his wrist had thrown the revolver butt into his hand and he bore steadily before him in the dark ready to shoot in defense of his life, he held his fire. Noiselessly he crab-legged himself backward,

“Come on and fight it out like a man,” he heard Lucky Bill's taunt through. the dark. “I know you've got Lem's gun. Looky here, I'll even give you a mark to shoot at.”

A match scratched. A feeble sulphur blue flame showed close to the floor perhaps eight feet away. Even if he'd dared run the risk of spoiling a hanging, Jere was too wise to fall into the trap Lucky Bill was baiting; he knew too well that the spit of his gun would send a bullet his way. Instead, he inched himself backward and to one side, hoping to induce his hidden foe to carry the battle to him. At close grips in the dark perhaps he need not shoot.

In his last shift his stockinged feet plumped against a head. A mumbling groan sounded sepulchrally from behind him—the forgotten Lem Collins!

“Lem!” Lucky Bill's clarion voice out of blackness. “Lem, get yourself together, you poor dam'd fool. It's Lucky Bill talking——”

“O-o-o-uh! Whazzat?”

JERE froze. Here was a second foe in the dark—one counted done for. He lifted himself quickly to one side and lay flat on the floor.

“Lem! Cuttles is loose. He's in this room. Get up and strike a light.” So, cold bloodedly, Lucky Bill invited a befuddled man to sacrifice himself; deliberately he was trapping his confederate into danger to save himself.

Jere lay moveless, his mind suddenly composed to meet this new danger and turn it to his own account. He heard the cattleman groan again and want to know what had happened.

“Get up, I tell you!” from out of the gloom somewhere beyond the table. “Find the candle and light it.”

The hulk on the buffalo robes stirred, raised itself to an elbow uncertainly—Jere not three feet away could just distinguish the shape in the little-less-than-dark filtering down from a nearby window.

“Somebody—um-m—must'a' hit me a wallop——” Lem Collins was on his feet, swaying. Jere, silent as a ghost, arose behind him. The man took a couple of wavering steps in the direction of the fireplace, his boots clumping heavily on the boards. Jere was his shadow.

“Wha' the hell, Lucky! No candle——”

Just then the shrill neigh of one of the horses in the corral behind the house. Jere thought he heard an answering whinny faint in the distance.

“Oh, here y'are. Stepped on it. Wait minute——”

Collins scratched a match. The flame waxed slowly and was brought unsteadily to the candle wick. Jere, crouching close behind the body of the swaying Collins, waited wire-taut. The yellow globule of flame at the candle tip waxed brighter—sent its puny invasion against the dark by little and little outward.

“Look out, Lem!”

But that instant Jere, too, had seen. He leveled his weapon under the cowman's uplifted arm at the shoulder of the big figure sprawled on the floor and fired.

“Don't stir, Collins,” Jere growled in Lem's ear. “There's another bullet here marked with your name.”

That instant a sharp rush of feet sounded outside the cabin and a splintering crash against the locked door.

“Once more, boys!” Another rending smash and the door caved in. Jere, dumbfounded, but still keeping his dragoon revolver pressed against Lem Collins's ribs, turned his head to where the flare of a torch showed a ring of guns in the light of new morning outside the portal. He saw the figure of Judge Stupe before the others and hailed him.

“Come on in, Alcalde. I got yore men.”

THEN the vigilantes from Fiddler's Bar trooped in.

“My boy—my boy! Providence sent us just in time, I'd say.” Judge Stupe was first to throw his arms about Jere after Lem Collins was ringed about by steel and others had squatted where Lucky Bill lay stretched on the floor. Others came up to slap him on the back and want to know what the shooting meant.

Somebody look after Lucky Bill there,” Jere broke the volley of felicitations, then added grimly, “I fired for the shoulder—to save him.”

“We come a'runnin, Jere,” Judge Stupe was saying. “The girl told us we'd like to find the Curly Wolf himself here in this shack and gave us directions. But we weren't counting on finding you just winding up the job this way.”

There was a great milling round. One of the vigilantes who professed a passing acquaintance with medicine dressed Lucky Bill's wound, It would be one slow to heal—ordinarily, said the amateur medico with a twisted grin. He added that he believed Lucky Bill need not worry himself about the healing business this time.

The dressing of Lucky Bill's wound completed, the king of Bitter Springs was lifted to the buffalo robes in the far corner of the room and the cursing Lem Collins was forced to lie down beside him. Leg irons clicked to join the precious pair. In a chance second when no bodies intervened Jere caught Lucky Bill's quizzical glance upon him; saw just the least backward nod of the outlaw's head summoning him. He walked over to where the twain lay shackled.

“Very neat, Jere—very neat,” with a flash of Lucky Bill's strong teeth. “I ought to've killed you a while ago before your gang got here, then I'd of had good company in hell.”

Jere looked down at him soberly as if weighing a question of policy. Then, “It mout comfort ye to know, Lucky, yore gal is in good hands. I sent her outa Bitter Springs with the Illinoy company.”

“And gave her the message which brought your gang?” This without rancor. Jere nodded affirmation. The big outlaw's lips parted in one of his devil-teasing smiles.

“You'll likely see Lucy before—before I do. Tell her for me Lucky Bill made his primest mistake with her. Say he didn't know how to make love soft an' gentlemanly like, he not being rightly trained to it.” He moved his head in what might have been a gesture of regret for lost opportunities. “But say this for me, too, Jere Cuttles. Say to Lucy I loved her true—if not tender.”

Judge Stupe drew Jere away. “We've got the two men we're after,” said he. “But there are ninety of us here and we figure to give Bitter Springs a housecleaning. After what we heard from the Illinois company the town needs it. We'll leave a dozen men here to guard these two until the trial, but you ride with us and post us as to where to locate the worst bullies in the town.”

THE taking of Bitter Springs was absurdly simple. Armed men in the white of dawn rode down the single street, distributing themselves before saloons, hotels and lodging houses. Even before alarm lights began to flash through tent walls twenty of the choicest birds in Lucky Bill's foul nest found themselves bound and under guard in the Overland Rest. A score and more of the lesser ruffians scurried out into the desert like scared rabbits. The remainder of the citizens were voluble in their protestations of rectitude.

The second division of the Illinois Company—that one which carried the preacher Lucky Bill had so anxiously awaited—rolled into a surprise around nine o'clock of the morning. A town under martial law. To the emigrants went Judge Stupe with explanation of the situation and a request for cooperation in the serious business impending.

The shed back of Lucky Bill's log cabin was the court of the vigilantes; just a roof of wattles supported by poles. The scene had been chosen because of its safe distance from town and comparative immunity from attack should the outlaw leader's scattered supporters risk a raid. As added guaranty against such interruption pickets were thrown down the trail toward town and twenty men with muskets filled the cabin to man loopholes cut through the log chinking.

Half the men of the emigrant train had ridden out to witness the trial. Prompted by that scrupulous sense of adherence to the spirit of the law which characterized the extra-legal trials of the Argonauts, the Fiddler's Bar men chose twelve jurors from among the Illinois contingent and called upon them to supply a lawyer for the defense. A Fiddler's Bar lawyer who was of the vigilantes body claimed the right of prosecution. Alcalde Stupe was elevated to the position of judge.

IT WAS after noon and when the Illinois lawyer had had ample time to confer with the accused, that Judge Stupe took his seat before an improvised justice bar of barrels and boxes. The jury sat in a wagon box to his left. The two prisoners were seated on saddles placed side by side on the ground by his right hand, guards behind them. Out beyond the shed the hard ground was closely packed with spectators—nigh a hundred standing moveless in the broiling sun.

Lucky Bill Hazard and Lem Collins were put on trial for their lives, for the murder of Pierre Allaire.

The Fiddler's Bar prosecutor first called three fellow townsmen to testify to the finding of Allaire's body, with a bullet through the head, in the deep river pool below Jere Cuttles's placer claim. They were excused without cross examination at the hands of the volunteer defense counsel from the wagon train. Then the prosecutor called, “Jereboam Cuttles to the bar.” Jere took his seat on the cracker box serving as a witness stand.

He told of his first encounter with Lucky Bill, coming to him on his claim to inquire the whereabouts of Lem Collins, then recited in detail his meetings with the cowman, first at the latter's camp and on the second occasion when Collins ordered him away from Allaire's cabin; told how on revisiting the cabin he'd found the dirt floor all turned over and the fireplace stones displaced where a thorough search for supposed hidden gold had been made.

In simple phrases the Missourian detailed his exploration of the meadow down-valley from his claim, the discovery of the burnt wickiup and of the horse tracks thereabouts. Then, lightly passing over his coming to Bitter Springs, Jere quoted the statement Lucky Bill had made to him: “If you're from the Merced country I suspicion Collins won't be hankering to see you. He got in a little trouble down there, and a little more trouble somewhere else, more recent.”

THE cowman stirred in his saddle seat at this juncture and darted a viperish look at his erstwhile leader, Lucky Bill. The latter's face was serene.

“You say that among the hoofprints of three horses about the burned wickiup and leading to the pool in the river you saw one that was marked—skelped, as you called it,” said the prosecutor. “Is that your statement?” Jere nodded. The Fiddler's Bar lawyer gave a sign to some men behind him and they pushed through the crowd.

Two came back, rolling a barrel of flour from Lucky Bill's kitchen. Three more returned from the corral, each leading one of three horses found there. While the spectators stretched their necks a thick layer of flour was laid on the dirt floor of the shed before the wagon where the jury sat. Then one by one the three horses were led through the white patch.

“I ask you, Mr. Witness, to examine the prints in that flour and see if you can find there a duplicate of that skelped hoof,” impressively from the prosecutor. Jere made a cursory examination and pointed to a mark where a part of the frog of a worn and unshod hoof had left its print.

“Did you notice the horse that made that mark; and, if so, can you say to whom it belongs?”

“Lucky Bill's horse,” said Jere.

“Take the witness.” The prosecutor turned with a formal bow to the stranger lawyer for the defense.

“Mr. Cuttles,' he began, “when you found those horse tracks by the burned wickiup you had no way of knowing whether or not they were made on the day the wickiup was burned—and the clothing of a man with it, we will say—or at a time prior to the destruction of the Indian hut?”

“No,” Jere declared.

“Then, Mr. Cuttles, if it should appear that Allaire rode with two men down that valley to show one of them the cattle he had for sale, or had sold; and if it should appear that after having inspected the cattle one of those men—call him William Hazard—rode on his way across the mountains to Bitter Springs while the other—say that this man was Lemuel Collins—rode back with Allaire to the latter's cabin; if all this should appear in evidence, Mr, Cuttles, would you still say that the tracks of horses you observed about that burned wickiup conclusively linked their riders with the murder of Allaire?”

THAT was a long question for Jere to digest. He went through it doggedly in his mind, then he gave a surprising answer:

“I'd agree to everythin' ye say, Mister, iffen it hadn't been thet one of them riders changed his boots right thar by the wickiup.”

Even Judge Stupe's judicial reserve slipped at this statement and he looked his surprise. A flash of apprehension shot across Lucky Bill's features, to be instantly wiped clean again.

“Please explain that statement,” severely from the Illinois lawyer. Jere reached inside his shirt and brought out a flaming silk handkerchief tied about something hard.. He undid the knot and exhibited on the heel of his hand a charred black cinder.

“That-thar's the heel off'n a cowman's boot—a built-up heel,” he said in his slowest drawl. “My podner Allaire never wore cowman's boots. When I last seen him alive he wore a new pair of boots with ord'nary heels which had been made fer him down to Sacramento—an' with his 'nitials worked on the hind pull-on strap.”

Jere paused and let his eyes turn to where Lucky Bill sat manacled to Collins.

“He's wearin' Allaire's boots right now—been wearin' em ever since he helped murder my podner thar by the river. Stole the boots off'n a dead man, Lucky did, an' burnt up his old ones in the fire which burnt my podner's clothes.”

The giant under the accusing finger leaped to his feet with an inarticulate cry and made a charging step; but the anchored weight of Collins on the leg-iron threw him to the dust. Instantly guards were upon him. They jerked off the boot from his free leg and passed it to Judge Stupe. The latter looked under the rear bootstrap, nodded his head and passed the boot to the jury.

Twelve men read the initials, “P.A.” done in red thread through the leather.

“The Court declares all necessary evidence to be now before it,” the judge decreed. He turned to the prisoners.

“Have you anything to say before your cases go to the jury?”

Lem Collins struggled to his feet, His face was blotched with purple laid on dead white.

“I'll turn state evidence,” he bawled. “I'll tell the whole story if you'll be easy on me. I didn't——”

“We don't barter with murderers!” the judge thundered.

Lucky Bill did not even rise from his saddle. He gave Stupe a cold smile.

“Reckon the jig's up, Judge. I will say, though, I was careless about that swap of boots.”

The jury found their verdict of guilty without leaving the wagon box.

Half an hour later a stunted alamo tree in the middle of Lucky Bill's green hay lot bore strange fruit.

BACK in Fiddler's Bar Jere Cuttles was restive under the various legal hurdles Judge Stupe kept putting in his way in the matter of settling the estate of Pierre Allaire. He was sole heir to the murdered Frenchman's cattle, his lands and homestead. The $3,000 in gold for which Lem Collins had dug so frantically was his, too. Jere had recovered it from Allaire's private bank in the bole of an old oak tree, known only to the two of them.

Finally Jere put his mark on the last document and was free.

“And now what, my son?” from kindly Judge Stupe. Jere blushed and drew a line in the dust with the toe of one of his shining new boots.

“Well, Jedge, reckon that-thar Illinoy wagon train'll be jist 'bout makin' into Shasta diggin's 'bout this time. I was figgerin' on ridin' up to Shasta an'—sorta projectin' round.”