Algy still looked as fierce as one of his heathen idols.

"You t'ink velly smart," he said, still concealing his feelings.

"Lats!" and with that he went out to chop some wood.

"Batten me into the pantry!" said Napoleon. "I'll bet old Algy'd board the outlaw himself, fer you, Van, squall and all."

"That horse ain't human," Gettysburg exploded anew. "Van, you can't ride no such Fourth-of-July procession!"

"Shut up!" murmured Van, with a gesture towards the room where Beth and her maid were dining. He added aloud: "The chances are we'll find he's a cheap Sunday-school picnic. Napoleon, you and Cayuse go out and prepare his mind for work."

"Aye, aye," said Napoleon rising to go, "but I wish we had some soothin' syrup, skipper."

He and the Indian were heard to depart, by Beth, sitting back in her chair. She was greatly alarmed by all she had heard of vengeful convicts and the vicious horse, and could eat no more for nervous dread.

"That horse has killed his man, and you know it," said Gettysburg in a whisper that the girl distinctly overhead. "Boy, boy, let the Injun ride him first."

"There, there, ease off," Van answered quietly. "You keep the women entertained about the mill while Suvy and I are debating."

He gulped down a last drink of coffee, silenced the miner's further remonstrances, and departed by way of the kitchen door.

Beth arose hurriedly and hastened forth, intent upon immediate prevention, if possible, of any further ordeals undertaken in behalf of herself. She was thoroughly frightened. A prescience of something ominous impending seemed to grip her very heart. She glanced about, helplessly, unfamiliar with the place. Van was nowhere in sight. She started to run around the cabin when Gettysburg appeared in her path.

"Well, well," said he nervously, "now who'd a-thought you'd finished eatin'?"

"Oh please," she said, "please go tell Mr. Van I'd rather he wouldn't attempt to ride _any_ horse again to-day. Will you please go tell him that?"

"You bet your patent leathers!" said Gettysburg. "You just go over and globe-trot the quartz-mill while I'm gone, and we'll fix things right in a shake."

He strode off in haste. Beth watched him go. She made no move towards the quartz-mill, which Gettysburg had indicated, over on the slope.

She soon grew restive, awaiting his return. Elsa came out and sat down. The old miner failed to reappear.

At length, unable to endure any longer her feeling of alarm and suspense, Beth resolutely followed where Gettysburg had gone, and soon came in sight of the stable and high corral. Then her heart struck a blow of excitement in her breast, and her knees began to weaken beneath her.

CHAPTER VI

THE BATTLE

Too late to interfere in the struggle about to be enacted, the girl stood rigidly beside a great red pine tree, fixing her gaze upon Van, on whose heels, as he walked, jingled a glinting pair of spurs.

From the small corral he was leading forth as handsome an animal as Beth had ever seen, already saddled, bridled--and blindfolded. The horse was a chestnut, magnificently sculptured and muscled. He was of medium size, and as trim and hard as a nail. His coat fairly glistened in the sun.

Despite his beauty there was something about him that betokened menace.

It was not altogether that the men all stood away--all save Van--nor yet that the need for a blindfold argued danger in his composition.

There was something acutely disquieting in the backward folding of his ears, the quiver of his sinews, the reluctant manner of his stepping.

Beth did not and could not know that an "outlaw" is a horse so utterly abandoned to ways of broncho crime and equine deviltry that no man is able to break him--that having conquered man after man, perhaps even with fatal results to his riders, he has become absolutely depraved and impossible of submission. She only knew that her heart was beating rapidly, painfully, that her breath came in gasps, that her whole nervous system was involved in some manner of anguish. She saw the Chinese cook run past to witness the game, but all her faculties were focused on the man and horse--both sinister, tense, and grim.

Van had not turned in Beth's direction. He was wholly unaware of her presence. He halted when the horse was well out towards the center of the open, and the outlaw braced awkwardly, as if to receive an attack.

With the bridle reins held in his hand at the pommel of the saddle, Van stood for a moment by the chestnut's side, then, with incredible celerity of movement, suddenly placed his foot in the stirrup and was up and well seated before the blinded pony could have moved.

Nothing happened. No one made a sound. No one, apparently, save Beth, had expected anything to happen. She felt a rush of relief--that came prematurely.

Van now leaned forward, as the horse remained stiffly braced, and slipping the blindfold from the pony's eyes, sat back in the saddle alertly.

Even then the chestnut did not move. He had gone through this ordeal many times before. He had often been mounted--but not for long at a time. He had even been exhausted by a stubborn "broncho buster"--some hardy human burr who could ride a crazy comet--but always he had won in the end. In a word he had earned his sobriquet, which in broncho-land is never lightly bestowed.

Van was not in the least deceived. However, he was eager for the conflict to begin. He had no time to waste. He s.n.a.t.c.hed off his hat, let out a wild, shrill yell, dug with his spurs and struck the animal a resounding slap on the flank, that, like a fulminate, suddenly detonated the pent-up explosives in the beast.

He "lit into" bucking of astounding violence with the quickness of dynamite.

It was terrific. For a moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed with eccentric motion.

The horse shot up in the air like a loose, distorted piece of statuary, blown from its pedestal by some gigantic disturbance. He appeared to buckle in his mid-air leap like a bended thing of metal, then dropped to the earth, stiff-legged as an iron image, to bound up again with mad and furious gyrations that seemed to the girl to twist both horse and rider into one live ma.s.s of incongruity,

He struck like a ruin, falling from the sky, went up again with demon-like activity, once more descended--once more hurtled wildly aloft--and repeated this maneuver with a swiftness utterly bewildering.

Had some diabolical wind, together with a huge, volcanic force, taken insane possession of the animal, to fire him skyward, whirl him about, thrash him down viciously and fling him up again, time after time, he could not have churned with greater violence.

He never came down in the same place twice, but he always came down stiff-legged. The jolt was sickening. All about, in a narrow, earth-cut circle he bucked, beginning to grunt and warm to his work and hence to increase the deviltry and malice of his actions.

Van had yelled but that once. He saw nothing, knew nothing, save a dizzy world, abruptly gone crazy about him.

To Beth it seemed as if the horror would never have an end. One glimpse she had of Van's white face, but nothing could it tell of his strength or the lack thereof. She felt she must look and look till he was killed. There could be no other issue, she was sure. And for herself there could be no escape from the awful fascination of the merciless brute, inflicting this torture on the man.

It did end, however, rather unexpectedly--that particular phase of the conflict. The horse grew weary of the effort, made in vain, to dislodge the stubborn torment on his back. He changed the program with the deadliest of all a broncho's tricks.

Pausing for the briefest part of a second, while Van must certainly have been reeling with hideous motion and jolt, the chestnut quickly reared on high, to drop himself clean over backwards. It was thus that once he had crushed the life from a rider.

"Oh!" screamed Both, and she sank beside the tree.

The men all yelled. They were furious and afraid.

With hoofs wildly flaying the air, while he loomed tall and unreal in such an att.i.tude, the broncho hung for a moment in mid-poise, then dropped over sheer--as if to be shattered into fragments.

But a ma.s.s of the bronze-like group was detached, and fell to one side, on its thigh. It was Van. He had seen what was coming in time.

Instantly up, as the brute rolled quickly to arise, he leaped in the saddle, the horn of which had snapped, and he and the chestnut came erect together, as if miraculously the equestrian group had been restored.

"Yi! Yi!" he yelled, like the madman he was--mad with the heat of the fight--and he dug in his spurs with vicious might.

Back to it wildly, with fury increased, the broncho leaped responsively.

Here, there, all the field over, the demon thrashed, catapulting incredibly. He tried new tricks, invented new volcanics of motion, developed new whirlwinds of violence.