The cook had ridden on ahead. Now he was waiting for them, looking back.

Parsons shrugged his shoulders.

"How do we split?" asked Hahn.

"Three ways," said Plimsoll. "We'll take her to the cabin. The rest'll be at the other end. We'll keep Cookie with us--for the present. No need for the boys to know about it. We can manage that all right. Three ways, and I handle the girl."

Butch Parson grinned at him.

"I thought you'd lost all your nerve, Jim, but I guess I was wrong. All right, it goes as it lays. You handle the lady. You ought to know how.

Now then, how'll we bring it off?"

Plimsoll talked glibly, convincingly. Butch Parsons had no extra share of brains, those he had had never been developed beyond the ordinary.

Hahn was a good faro dealer. There his intelligence specialized and ended. Plimsoll was the master-mind of his crowd; they appreciated and acknowledged his capacity for details. That he had been unsuccessful of late they set down to his lack of nerve, dissipated in his encounter with Sandy. Their present lack of cash, the doubtfulness of being able to sell and deliver the horses, made ransom a glittering possibility.

Hahn had some objections, but Plimsoll overruled them plausibly enough.

"I don't see the sense of letting the kid go," questioned Hahn. "He's good for a big split as well as the girl."

"You're a fool when it comes to looking ahead, Hahn. You always were,"

answered Plimsoll. What with the chance of revenge in sight over which he had brooded until it became a part of his consciousness, and the liquor still stirring potently within him, he felt that his ascendancy had become reestablished, "Keith--the old man--is too big a fish to monkey with. Got too many pulls and connections. He'd have the whole country out and the trick played up big in every d.i.n.ky newspaper. That's part of his business--publicity. We've got one fish--or will have--no sense straining the net. We don't want the kid. Let him string along back best way he can. We'll get all the start we need. What else would you do with him?"

"Stow him away somewhere and send a tip where they can find him in a day or two."

Plimsoll shot a look of contempt at Butch, making the proposal.

"You and Hahn make a good team," he said. "No. One's enough. He may get lost--we'll take his horse--and that won't be our fault. He may make Three Star late this afternoon. I wish I could be with him when he tells what he knows. Time they locate the Hideout, we'll be miles away through the south end and they'll have one h.e.l.l of a time trailing us over the rocks. The boys weren't over-keen about staying with the herd and they can vamose. We'll tell them it's best to scatter for a bit and name a meeting-place. The horses can stay in the park. If we put this deal over right we don't need to bother about horse-trading. We can get clean out of the country with a big stake, go down to South America and start up a place. There are live times and good plays down there, boys. All right, Cookie, we're coming. I'm going to take another look. It's ten to one they're making for Beaver Dam Lake--on a picnic."

He laughed and the two laughed with him as he went for his survey and returned, announcing that the girl and her escort were entering the ravine at the other end. They rode through the trees toward them. Molly and Donald came on so leisurely that Plimsoll feared they might have turned back and, with Butch, he risked a look down the trail, sighting them.

"They didn't recognize us," he said. "We've got to take Cookie into this. You and Butch ride on through the trees a ways, Hahn, till you get back of them. Then we'll get 'em between us. I'll wise Cookie up to what we are doing."

It was more than doubtful whether the three ever intended for a second to allow Cookie to share in the ransom money, but Plimsoll easily persuaded him that he would be a partner, adding that it would be foolish to let all the riders into the pot.

"She's Molly Casey of the Casey Mine," he told him. "Sandy Bourke's her guardian. We'll make him come through with twenty or thirty thousand, sabe? But there ain't enough to go all round and make a showing."

Cookie was a willing rascal and a natural adept at the double-cross. He raised no objections and the trap was set and sprung.

"You go ahead, Cookie, and open up the gate," said Plimsoll. Hahn and Butch were speeding Donald Keith on his way with close-flung bullets.

"I'm going to have a little private talk with this lady. Go to the cabin and get some grub ready. There's plenty there. Spread yourself. We'll be along in a little while. That was a nice job of roping you did. I won't forget it."

"Allus c'ud la.s.s' fair to middlin'," grinned the man through yellow, stumpy teeth. "That's why I tote a rope. An' I sure had a purty target."

Plimsoll scowled at him and he rode off. Molly, the lariat twisted about her upper body from shoulders to waist, constricting her arms, fastened where she could not reach it by a hitch, sat on Blaze, looking with steady contempt at Plimsoll, who held her bridle rein. He regarded her with sleek complacency and then his eyes slowly traveled over her rounded figure, accented by her riding toggery.

"Grown to be quite a beauty, quite a woman, Molly, my dear," he said.

"Never should have suspected you'd turn out such a wonder. Clothes make the woman, but it takes a proper figure to set them off. And you've got all of that."

"What are you going to do with me?" she asked.

"I'm not going to tell you--yet. It depends upon circ.u.mstances, my dear.

We'll all have a little chat after lunch. I'd take that rope off if I wasn't afraid I might lose you. You are quite precious."

She looked through him as if he had been a sheet of gla.s.s. From her first sight of him, back in childhood, she had known instinctively the man was evil. But she was not afraid. The blood that ran in her veins was pure and bore in its crimson flood the st.u.r.dy heritage of pioneers who had outfaced dangers of death and torture and shame. She was all westerner. The blood was fighting blood. She felt it urged in her pulses while her brain bade her bide her time. Rage mounted as she faced the possible issues of this capture, the flaunting dismissal of young Keith.

Plimsoll must be either very sure of his ground or desperate, she fancied. Both, perhaps. Molly had come into contact with life in the raw long before she went east. Education had not made a prude of her nor tainted her clean purity. She faced the fact and, for the time, she ignored the man. She had even time to think of young Donald turned tenderfooted into the mountains, to wonder whether he would be able to find his way back or get lost in the ranges. She heard the laughter that followed the rifle-shots and surmised that they were having their idea of a joke with the lad.

If he got back--then Sandy would come after her. She was very sure of Sandy and that he would find her. Until he did she must use her wits.

And Grit, gallant Grit, wounded and lying in the chaparral!

Though she still gazed through Plimsoll rather than at him, the scorn showed in her eyes and bit through his a.s.sumption of ease as acid bites through skin, eating its way on. He burned to wipe out his own trickeries, his cowardice, his failures, to wreak a vile satisfaction on this girl who sat so disdainfully, with her chin lifted, her lips firm, oblivious of him. She baffled him. A mind like Plimsoll's never had the clarity of prevision to see the strength of character that had been in the prospector's child, even as he had never suspected her unfolding to beauty. It roused the vandal in him--he longed to break her, mar her.

The return of Butch and Hahn brought him back to the fact that he was not playing this deal alone. While they might allow him some personal license, to them the girl represented so much money. Plimsoll's reprisals were only partly theirs, they would not permit him to balk them of their share. There is Berserker madness latent in every one that breaks out sometimes in the child that torments a kitten and ends by torturing it, maiming--killing. There had been nothing in what stood for Plimsoll's manhood to change such instinct, to restrain it where he held the will and power. But here he had to go carefully.

He cut short Butch's boast of the way they had scared young Keith. Both Hahn and Parsons felt a coil of embarra.s.sment at the silence, almost the serenity, of their captive. They had expected her to act far differently, to rage, threaten, cry out. She almost abashed them.

"See if you can round up that d.a.m.ned dog, Butch," said Plimsoll. "I plugged him but we want to be sure he don't get away. He might help Keith's kid, for one thing. And he clamped my arm."

Parsons rode into the chaparral until he was barred by its thickness, trying to stir out the dog, without success.

"Dead, I reckon," he reported. "Crawled in somewheres. You hit him hard, Plim. Plenty blood on the leaves."

Molly bit her lips and paled a little, but turned away her head so that they could not see. She winked back the tears that came to her thought of Grit helpless, panting, bleeding.

They rode on up the rocky ravine that gradually closed in on either side with the rock walls set with cactus here and there, carved into great ma.s.ses superimposed upon one another for a hundred feet. Presently they turned aside from the stony trail that left no record of hooves, and, Plimsoll in the lead, Molly next, walked their horses over a precarious ledge that zigzagged back and forth up to where a notch in the cliff had been nearly filled by a t.i.tanic boulder. To one side appeared a narrow opening, unseen from below by the curve of the great rock, just wide enough to admit horse and rider. A few feet in, they halted, and Plimsoll turned in his saddle while the other three men dismounted and carefully adjusted several rock fragments in the opening, piling them with a swift care that showed familiarity with their task, so placing them that they appeared as if a part of the wall. Butch clambered to the top of the great boulder and viewed the job from the outside.

"First-cla.s.s," he announced. "That's sure a great scheme, Plim."

"Go on up to the tree and take a look," said Plimsoll. "Hahn, hand him my gla.s.ses."

Parson took them and climbed up to where a dead tree stood like a skeleton in a crotch of the rocks. It screened him from observation perfectly by outer approach.

"I can see Keith's kid," he said with a chuckle when he came down. "He's through the creek and he don't know which way to start. Looks as if he meant to follow down the creek."

"He'll not go far that way," commented Plimsoll. "Mount up. Cookie's getting grub and I'm getting hungry. He'll have to cook for the boys after we're through. They'll be showing up after a bit."

Below them, Molly saw the hidden park that lay so snugly back of the barrier walls. It was an irregular oval that appeared to curve at the far end. Gulches reached back, occasionally thick with timber that grew in clumps among the rocks and on the ledges, dotting the green gra.s.s of the floor. She caught the sparkle of a little cascade, the gleam of a streamlet. The cliffs were terraced and battlemented in red and white and gray. Their facades showed fantasies of weather sculpture that looked like ruined castles and cathedrals with cave mouths for entrances. Here and there a monolith of stone stood up out from the main cliff, spiring for a hundred feet or more. The gra.s.s was starred with flowers. Some horses were grazing a little distance away and stood at gaze, to break and wheel and gallop away with flying manes and tails.

There was a good deal of underbush covering the talus.

The trail down was plainly marked. It forked after they reached the general level and the branch they took led into a side gulch where a log cabin stood, smoke coming from its chimney. Plimsoll took the rein of Blaze again and they broke into a canter. At the cabin Plimsoll took Molly from the saddle and carried her into the rude interior. There he set her on a chair. Cookie was busy at a stove frying ham and eggs, with coffee simmering.

"You'd better sit up and eat nicely, my dear," said Plimsoll as he unbound her. "You'll have to sooner or later, you know. No sense in being stubborn."

She said nothing but he saw a gleam in her eyes as she glanced toward the table where Hahn was setting out plates and cutlery.

"You'll eat with a fork, Molly," said Plimsoll. "Those steel knives are too handy for you. There's a nasty look in those blue eyes of yours that will have to be tamed--have to be tamed," he repeated as he took a demijohn from a corner and poured out a liquor that sent the reek of its raw strength sickeningly through the cabin. "Here's to your health, Molly--Molly Mine!"

The others laughed and drank their share before they ate the food that Cookie placed before them, talking louder, growing flushed with the crude whisky, while Molly sat facing the door, striving to catch something that might help, might give some clue. But the talk was all of the brawl at the Waterline with contemptuous mention of Wyatt and the rest. They seemed by common consent to ignore her once she had refused the food.