She saw the quick change of light in his eyes and in the instant knew that if Buck Thornton hated Henry Pollard he was hated no less in return. Further, she saw that back of the hatred there was a sort of silent laughter as though the thing she had said had pleased this man as no other thing could have pleased him, that in some way which she could not understand, this information had moved him as he had not been moved by news of his heavy loss. And she wondered.

"You are ready to swear to that?" he asked sharply, his eyes searching and steady and eager upon hers. "You will swear that it was Thornton who robbed you?"

"Yes," she cried hotly as she remembered the insult of a kiss and in the memory forgot the robbery itself.

"I'll get him now," he muttered. "Both ways; going and coming! Tell me all about it, Winifred."

She began, speaking swiftly, telling him of her meeting with Thornton at the bank, of her suspicion that he had overheard her talk with the banker. Then of her second meeting with the man after she had seen him on the trail behind her, the encounter at the Harte cabin.... A sudden banging of the kitchen door, and he had stopped her abruptly, putting his hand warningly upon her arm.

"Later. It can wait. That is Mrs. Riddell. She will show you to your room. And it will be better, my dear, if you say nothing to her. Or to any one else just yet."

She got to her feet and went to the door. Turning there, to smile back at her uncle, she saw that his pillows had slipped a little and that under them lay a heavy revolver. And she surprised upon the man's face a look which was gone so quickly that she wondered if she had seen right in the darkened room, a look so filled with malicious triumph. Instead of being profoundly disturbed by the tidings of her adventure, the man appeared positively to gloat.... Now, more than ever, did she regret that she had come to the town of Dead Man's Alley.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RANCH ON BIG LITTLE RIVER

Buck Thornton had returned to the Poison Hole ranch. But first he had ridden from the Smith place down the trail to Harte's, where he made swift, careful search for some sign to tell him who was the man who had lamed his horse maliciously and seemingly with no purpose to be gained.

Further, he had sought for tracks to tell him from where this man had come, where he had gone. When he had found nothing he went, he hardly knew why, to the cabin, pushed the door open and entered. And instead of learning anything definitely now he was merely the more perplexed. By the fireplace lay a chair, overturned. There had been some sort of hurried movement here, perhaps a struggle. The table had been pushed to one side, one leg catching in the rag rug and rumpling it. He struck a match, lighted the lamp and sought for some explanation. When had this struggle, if struggle there had been, occurred? It must have been after he and Miss Waverly had set out on the trail to Smith's, he told himself positively. Then there had been two people here in the meantime, for it takes two people to make a tussel. And they had gone. Who could it be?

Was he after all to find a clue to the man who had maimed his horse?

Looking about him curiously it chanced that he found something that drove a puzzled frown into his eyes. It had caught in the frayed edge of the rug, and to have been so caught and so left meant that it had been done during the struggle he had already pictured. He took it up into his hand, trying to understand. For it was the rowel of a spur, a tiny, sharp, shining rowel that had come loose from a spur he remembered very well. And he remembered, too, that Winifred Waverly had had her spurs on when she came out to him at the barn!

"It happened while I was out after the horses!" He sat down, the shining spiked wheel lying in the palm of his hand, his brows drawn heavily.

"While I was out there ... it happened. Some jasper came in here, there was some sort of a tussle ... and she didn't say a d.a.m.ned word about it!"

Yes, he was certain now that something had happened during the brief time between his going out for the horses and the girl's coming to him at the barn. Something that had changed her, that had killed her friendliness toward him, that had made her cold and cruelly different.

"The same man who slipped his knife across my horse's foot came in here and saw her while I was out for the horses," he said slowly. "The same man. It must have been. And she could tell me who it was and she didn't. Why? After they had struggled here, too! Why?"

He could see no reason in it all, no reason for her silence, no reason for a man's malicious cruelty to a horse. Nor were these the only things which he could not understand. Groping for the truth, he began carefully to run over the things which had seemed strange to him and which now struck him as being connected in some plan darkly hidden.

The girl was Henry Pollard's niece. He began with that fact. She was on her way to Pollard's and on an errand which the banker Templeton had called mad and dangerous. Some man had followed her, a man whom she had twice seen on the trail and whose outfit resembled Thornton's, resembled it too closely to be the result of chance! The same headstall with the red ta.s.sel, the same grey neck-handkerchief, a sorrel horse....

"By G.o.d!" whispered the cowboy, a sudden light in his eyes, "he lamed my horse so it would limp the same as his! So she'd be sure she had seen me on the trail behind her! And when she came out and saw my horse limping she knew I had lied to her!"

But why? Why? What lay back of all this?

In the end he put out the light, slipped the spur rowel into his vest pocket, and went out to his horse. Then when an hour's search brought him no nearer to the hidden truth for which he was groping, he gave up trying to pick up this other man's trail in the rocky soil about Harte's place and turned back toward the south-east and his own ranch.

"I'm going to have a talk with you, Miss Grey Eyes," he said softly.

"I've got to give you back your spur, and I'm going to ask you some questions."

He rode late into the night, stopped for a few hours under the stars with saddle blanket for bed, and in the dawn pushed on again.

For the few days which followed he had, in the stress of range work, little time for thought of the riddle which had been set for him to solve, and when he had time after the day's work he was tired and ready for sleep. He was working short handed now for the very simple and not uncommon reason that he was spending no dollar which he did not have to spend. The payments he had already made to Pollard had been heavy for him, and there was yet another five thousand dollars to be forthcoming in six months. The contract was clear upon the point, and he knew that if he failed to meet his obligation Henry Pollard would be vastly pleased, being in a position to keep the fifteen thousand which had been paid to him and to get his range back to boot.

Perhaps because Henry Pollard had never lived upon the ranch during the twenty years he had owned it improvements were few and poor. There was the barn, too small now, which must come down in another year; there was the old corral which was little used since Thornton had had the newer, bigger one builded. Then, for ranch house, there was a single room cabin, its walls of heavy logs from the hills at the head of the Big Little River, its door of great thick planks rough and nail studded, its roof of shakes. A hundred yards from it, at the foot of the knoll upon which the ranch house stood, was a similar cabin, a dozen feet longer, serving as the men's bunk house.

Big Little River wound about the foot of the knoll, separating Thornton's cabin from the bunk house, three or four feet deep here and spanned by a crude footbridge. In its windings it made a sort of horseshoe about the knoll so that looking out from the door of the cattle man's cabin one saw the sluggish water to east, west and north.

Upon the third morning after his return to the range Thornton rose early, scowled sleepily at the little alarm clock whose strident clamour had startled him out of his sleep at four o'clock, kicked off his pajamas and with towel in hand started down to the river for his morning plunge. Subconsciously he noted a sc.r.a.p of white paper lying upon the hewn log which served as doorstep, but he paid no heed to it. He had his dip, diving from the big rock from which most mornings of the year he dived into the deepest part of the stream; and in a little came back through the brightening daylight rosy and tingling and with the last webs of sleep washed out of his brain. Again he noted the paper; this time he stooped and caught it up. For now he saw that it was folded, carefully placed where he must see it, pinned down with a sharp pointed horseshoe nail.

"Now who's sending me letters this way?" he demanded of himself.

And he flushed a little and called himself a fool because he knew that he half expected to find that it was a note from a certain girl with unforgettable grey eyes. But before he had read the few words, as soon in fact as his eyes had fallen upon the uneven, laboriously constructed letters of the lead-pencilled scrawl, he knew that this did not come from her hand. The signature puzzled him; it consisted of two letters, initials evidently, a very large j, not capitalized, followed by a very small capital C.

"Now, who's J.C.?" he muttered. "I can call to mind no J.C. who would be writing me letters!"

As he read the note a look of astonishment came into his eyes. It ran:

"Deer buck, I am shure up against hard luck. Dont know n.o.body but you can give me a hand remember that time down in El paso I was yore freind.

Come to old shack by Poison hole tonight & dont tell n.o.body & bring sum grub Buck remember El paso.

"j.c.

"p.s. I was yore freind buck."

Thornton remembered. He went slowly about his dressing, turning again and again to look at the note he had placed upon his little pine table.

That had been five years ago. He was riding between Juarez and El Paso, having just sold a herd of steers from the range he had owned in Texas then. He had been detained in the Mexican town until after dark, and before its lights had ceased winking behind him he had known that though his precaution of taking a check instead of gold had saved his money to him it had not saved him from coming very close to death. There were still three scars, two in the shoulder, one in the right side, to show where the bullets had bitten deep into him, from behind. He had been searched swiftly, roughly, his clothing torn by the hurried fingers of the man who had shot him.

It had been close to midnight when his consciousness came back to him. A little man, hard featured but gentle fingered, was working over him. It was Jimmie Clayton. And Clayton had found the crumpled check in the darkness, had gotten the wounded man on his own horse, had taken him to El Paso, and finally had saved his life, nursing him, working over him day and night for the two weeks in which his life was in danger.

Since then Thornton had seen little of Clayton. He had known even at the time of the shooting that the man was as hard a character as his close-set, little eyes and weasel face bespoke him; he had come to know him as an insatiate gambler, the pitiful sort of gambler who is too much of a drunkard to be more than his opponent's dupe at cards. He had found him to be a brawler and very much of a ruffian. But though he did not close his eyes to these things they did not matter to him. For grat.i.tude and a sense of loyalty were two of the strong silver threads that went to make up the mesh of Buck Thornton's nature, and it was enough to him that little Jimmie Clayton had played the part of friend in a town where friends were scarce and at a time when but for a friend he would have died.

It was not alone the fact of Clayton's turning up here and now that surprised the cattle man; it was the fact of his turning up anywhere.

For he had thought that Clayton, weak natured and so very often the other man's tool, was serving time in the Texas penitentiary. For, three years ago, rumour had brought to him word of a sheriff's clean-up, and the names of three men who had been working a crude confidence game, bold rather than shrewd, and Jimmie Clayton's name was one of the three.

He had heard only after the men had been convicted and sentenced for five years apiece, and had at the time regretted that he could not have known sooner so that in some way he might have returned the favour he had never forgotten.

At last having dressed, he shoved the letter into his pocket, and went down to the bunk house for breakfast. To the cook and to the three men already at the table he had little to say, so full were his thoughts of Jimmie Clayton. He was wondering what "hard luck" the little fellow had run up against, why he was hiding out at a place like the Poison Hole shack, how he had gotten the letter to the range cabin, and, if he had brought it himself, why he had not made himself known last night.

He gave his few, succinct orders for the day, made his hurried meal, and went to the corral for his horse. And all that day he rode hard out in the broken country where the eastern end of the range ran up and back into the gorges of the mountains, shifting herd, collecting stragglers, bringing them down into the meadow lands where the feed was abundant now that he had sold the cattle he had had ranging there in order that he might raise the money to make up the five thousand dollars for Henry Pollard.

As he rode he spoke seldom to the horse running under him or to the boys with whom he worked, his thoughts flying now to another horse, lamed from a knife cut, now to a girl whose spur rowel he carried in his vest pocket, now to a man whose appealing letter he carried in another pocket. And he was glad when the day was done and the boys raced away through the dusk to their supper.

Not infrequently did he ride on after he had told the others to "knock off," working himself harder than he could ask them to work, riding late to look at the water holes or find a new pasture in some of the little mountain valleys or to bring in a fresh string of saddle horses for the morrow's riding. So now, as darkness gathered, he watched the boys scamper away to their food and smoke and bunks, and rode on slowly toward the north.

He chose this time, the thickening darkness before moonrise, for he had caught the insistent plea for secrecy running through the lines of the letter. And so, though he was not a little impatient and curious, he let his tired horse choose its own loitering gait, willing that the night draw down blacker about him.

He crossed the Big Flat, rich gra.s.sy land watered by the Big Little River, and struck off into the hills that closed in about it, following the river trail. It was very still, with no sound save the swish of the water against the willows drooping downward from its banks, no light save the dim glimmer of the early stars. For two miles he followed the stream, then left it for a short cut over the ridge, to pick it up again upon the farther side. Now he was in a tiny valley with the mountains close to the spot which gave its name to the range.

Big Little River writhed in from the east, twisted out to the south. And in the shut-in valley it made and left behind it to all but cover the entire floor of the valley a lakelet of very clear water not over a quarter of a mile from edge to edge, but very deep. Upon the far side, a little back and close under the overhanging cliffs, there was a great, jagged-mouthed, yawning hole, of a type not uncommon in this part of the western country, from which heavy, noxious gases drifted sometimes when the wind caught them up, gases which for the most part thickened and made deadly the dark interior. There were skeletons to be seen dimly by daylight down there, ten feet below the surface of the uneven ground, the vaguely phosph.o.r.escent bones of jack rabbits that had fallen into this natural trap, of coyotes, even of a young cow that had been overpowered before it could struggle upward along the steep sides. And the odour clinging to the mouth of the hole was indescribably foul and sickening.

Not a pretty place, and yet some man many years ago had builded him a habitation here that was half dugout, half log lean-to. The door of the place faced Poison Hole, and was not two hundred yards from it. The hovel had been in disuse long before Buck Thornton came to the range save as a shelter to some of the wild things of the mountains.