As Blaze worked, he looked up from time to time, his glance sweeping the slowly narrowing circle of plainly visible ground nearby. Finally he left Joe and, mounting again, rode toward the timber. The position in which he had found Joe gave him no hint of where the bushwhacker had hidden. But before the light was completely gone, he intended to try and find the killer's sign, knowing that the rain would have obliterated it long before morning.

And now, as Blaze began what appeared to be his almost hopeless search, his earlier doubt was gone. The fact that Joe had been shot and left here, apparently dead, to be discovered by the first stray rider who happened along was proof that someone had a reason for not bringing Joe in himself. What that reason was, Blaze had no way of knowing. But there was a reason, and it might tie in with Ed Merrill's murder. That small possibility did more to bolster Blaze's belief in Joe's innocence than anything that had happened today.

Riding into the timber, Blaze began circling, knowing that the trees offered the best protection to a man wanting to shoot from cover. He crossed the creek and noted that the water had risen from its normal fetlock depth to his gelding's knees. Beyond the stream he angled back along an open stretch, skirting it. Farther on, he climbed along a low rising spur of ground. Beyond that, in a shallow draw, he came across horse sign.

The light was now so feeble that Blaze had to lean down in the saddle to get the details of that sign. The horse had worn light shoes and, from all appearances, had been a fairly big animal. Blaze turned toward the basin, following the sign. He found the spot where the horse had been tied and its rider gone on afoot. But out here, where the force of the rain wasn't broken by the trees, the sign was already badly washed. There was nothing but the badly melted outline of boot prints to go by. They might have been made by a man wearing a size seven boot or by one wearing a twelve.

The boot tracks led to a boulder. It was behind the boulder, under its back vertical face, that Blaze found the still clear print of a rifle's b.u.t.t plate. He knelt and examined it closely, even striking a match and cupping it in his hand against the rain, to see clearly every detail. The mark was coa.r.s.ely etched in cross lines, a Winchester. That was discouraging, for probably 100 men in Lodgepole alone owned Winchesters.

Then, almost when he was ready to drop his match, Blaze saw a raised line angling over the cross-hatching. It ran obliquely across the plate, from a point midway on it almost to the heel. It was obviously a scar put on the b.u.t.t plate made by rough handling; perhaps a deep branch scratch, or the mark left by the rifle's owner dropping the gun's stock carelessly onto a sharp edge of rock.

When he straightened and climbed onto his gelding again, Blaze knew that he would be able to recognize the killer by his rifle, if he could ever get a look at the gun. And from now on he'd inspect every Winchester he came across.

Back with Joe again, he faced a knotty problem. Where could he take the wounded man? Anchor was out, for Yace wasn't to be trusted; besides, the posse was making the ranch house its headquarters for tonight at least. Joe would need care, more care than Blaze himself could give him. A doctor's care would be best. Doc Nesbit was at Brush. But, reasoned Blaze, Nesbit would be as anxious as the next man to turn Joe in as a suspected murderer. So he couldn't go to Nesbit.

Ruth Merrill! The instant Blaze thought of her, he was sure he had found the right person to help him. The next, he wasn't. Hadn't Ruth kept stalling Joe five years ago when Joe openly admitted she was the girl of his choice? Why, Blaze asked himself, would Ruth now go out of her way to protect a man she didn't love? He had never liked Ruth much; her ways were too high and mighty to suit him, and her treatment of Joe had done little to increase his respect for her. In fact, Blaze still looked on Ruth Merrill as one of the primary causes of Joe's having sold out to Middle Arizona before he left home.

He thought of Jean Vanover and at once discarded her as a possibility. She, like the others, wouldn't hesitate to give away Joe's whereabouts to the law at her first opportunity. Also, to bring Jean up here would mean telling Vanover about Joe. And that would seal Joe's fate as surely as though the bushwhacker's bullet hadn't missed its mark.

As total darkness settled over the basin, Blaze knew that he would have to do this on his own. He tried to think of a place to take Joe, and abruptly knew where it would be. Two miles from here, up a narrow box caon, was a cave where he and Joe and Clark had once smoked out a mountain lion their dogs had cornered.

Blaze had a hard time lifting Joe and getting the gelding to stand while he roped his friend across the animal's withers. But in the end he managed, and left the creek, striking eastward. The rain came harder now, no longer a misty vapor, but a pelting downpour. Blaze began to worry about Joe's catching cold, even though he had bundled his friend tightly in the poncho. He wondered how long Joe would remain unconscious. He wondered what he could do about feeding him. He wondered, all at once, if Joe would die.

From then on Blaze hurried, as though his friend's life depended on how soon he could find the cave and get a fire going. He found the brush-choked mouth of the box caon and rode its narrow bed for better than half a mile before he was sure he had pa.s.sed the cave. He turned back, his impatience blending with his worry to set up a strong and futile anger in him. He went almost as far as the mouth of the caon without seeing the cave, and knew he had again missed it. Then, stubbornly, he got down and led the gelding, stumbling through the scrub oak along the east wall. He was ready to give up. He started thinking he had come up the wrong caon.

Then he saw the tall, jagged finger of a high rock outcrop, and suddenly knew where he was. Fifty yards up the caon he found the cave entrance. It was hidden by a tangle of a hack-berry thicket he hadn't remembered. Leaving the gelding, Blaze crawled into the low opening on hands and knees, lighting a match to inspect what lay beyond. The long low tunnel was some fifteen feet deep, broadening out and shoulder-high at its rear wall. It was dry and warm in here.

He sc.r.a.ped the floor clear of twigs and branches left by some small animal that had once made the cave its home, then went down for Joe. He fell once on his way back to the cave and had a moment's bad fright when Joe's limp body rolled off his shoulder and into the mud. Hardly had his panic subsided than he was in the cave and hearing Joe's breathing now as a throttled, choked gasping. That awful sound lasted even after he had stretched Joe out at full length on the blanket.

Helplessness and near desperation were strong in Blaze now. He sat alongside Joe with the conviction that his friend was dying, that the strangled breathing sounding so ominously out of the darkness was a prelude to the end. The pitch blackness made it seem as though this cave was a tomb. As though he had found a way of helping Joe, Blaze went out into the night again and stumbled around until he had gathered a big arm load of wood, mostly dead branches broken from windfalls and the bottoms of the stunted cedars higher up along the near wall. He found some pitch pine, too, with which to kindle the damp wood.

The fire helped. Now that he could see, Blaze made his first close inspection of Joe. It was with a start that he saw the bandanna around the unconscious man's neck knotted hard and drawn so tightly that the neck muscles bulged. He loosened the knot and pulled the bandanna free. And at once Joe's breathing became easier, quite normal. Somehow, in that fall Blaze had taken when he was lugging Joe up here, the bandanna had been drawn so tightly that it had constricted the unconscious man's breathing.

Blaze sat back on his heels, keen relief striking through him. He might have killed Joe back there. Tragedy had nearly struck Joe a second time, proof to Blaze now that he wasn't capable, alone, of looking after his friend. No matter how often he told himself that Joe's color was good, that his friend would presently regain consciousness, he couldn't put down the urgency of the belief that he should go for help. Supposing Joe should die because he didn't get that help? Supposing his death should be caused by some simple thing like that tightly drawn bandanna that another person could readily see and correct?

Blaze knew finally that he was going to get help. Once again he tried to think of a person he could trust. There wasn't one but Clark Dunne. And Clark would be little more help than he himself in a situation like this. In the end, Blaze settled on Jean Vanover as the likeliest possibility. He went out and gathered more firewood. As he wrapped his poncho around Joe, took a last look, and finally stepped out into the rainy night, he thought he knew a way to get Jean Vanover up here without anyone knowing where he had brought her.?

Night Ride.

At Diamond Ranch, headquarters for Middle Arizona, Fred Vanover and his daughter were sitting before the fire that blazed on the hearth of the big stone fireplace. Vanover had been restless and distracted since supper, and now he said abruptly: "I can't wait any longer, Jean. I have to know."

"What, Dad?" His daughter's head tilted up from the book she was reading. She was sitting on the couch, her legs curled under her.

"About Harper. Yace Bonnyman was right. It could have been Harper that looted the safe and killed Merrill."

"But, Dad, he isn't . . ."

"He's entirely capable of it," Vanover antic.i.p.ated what she was going to say. "Harper's been an enigma ever since they sent him down here to me. Last night, when I told him he and his men were through, it was as though I had remarked on the weather. He's the coolest proposition I've ever come across."

"But to rob the man he's been working for, to kill that way? I can't believe it."

"What has he had out of this beyond wages?" her father asked, reasoning aloud more than putting a question to be answered. "His kind are never in a thing for wages alone. It's an admitted policy of the company to reward their hired gunfighters with something besides pay. Take their Phillipsburg operation ten years ago. Dooley came out of it with a ranch of his own. He was nothing but a hired gun boss for the company when he went down there." Vanover rose from the chair and went out of the room, to reappear a few minutes later, pulling on a poncho. He had his Stetson. "Don't wait up for me," he said. "I'm going up to the camp."

"Be careful, Dad," Jean said, and walked with him to the door, kissing him before he went out. She knew that nothing she could do or say would keep her father from riding up to the chuck wagon tonight to see Harper and have it out with him. This was part of her father's job. The only rea.s.surances she had against the gun boss resorting to violence was that her father never carried a gun, and that several of the roundup crew had little use for Harper and would side with her father if it came to a showdown.

She stayed at the door until he rode from the yard, then went back to the couch and picked up her book again. But now she stared sightlessly at the page, her thoughts too insistent to be turned aside. The rain drummed gently on the roof, reminding her as it had this afternoon that the fifty men on the hunt for Joe Bonnyman must be having a miserable time of it.

As had happened several times since early morning, Jean's thoughts turned to the tall, pleasant man who had come to Ruth Merrill's hotel room in that dawn hour. She wondered again why she hadn't called out for someone to stop him after he had struck down Roy Keech. But now an answer came to her. She didn't really believe that Joe Bonnyman was guilty. She hadn't believed it this morning as she stood at the head of the hotel stairs and listened to his mocking words. It didn't do any good to reason that she had found him attractive and was giving in to a little wishful thinking. It went deeper than that, to an instinct she couldn't deny, one that seldom was wrong. That instinct told her that Joe Bonnyman wasn't capable of having committed the crime for which he was being hunted. The brutality of striking down an unarmed man with the b.u.t.t of a gun wasn't in his make-up, or she was no judge of a man.

She had told Ruth of Joe's visit, and Ruth had bitterly resented the fact that she hadn't been wakened. She hadn't even bothered to thank Jean for staying with her through the night. She'd had two opportunities, once before Jean left the hotel, another when Jean and her father had gone over to Brush to offer their help this afternoon on learning of John Merrill's collapse. Both times Ruth had a.s.sumed that proud cloak of cool aloofness so irritating to most people who didn't know her well. But instead of taking offense, Jean had felt sympathy for the girl. She wished now that she had wakened Ruth and let her talk with Joe for she saw even more clearly than she had last night, when Ruth so blandly admitted it, that the girl's feeling for Joe Bonnyman was sincere. So, in her generous way, Jean Vanover blamed herself rather than Ruth for the coolness of feeling that lay between them. She would have given anything to be able to relive those few minutes with Joe in the hotel's upper hallway, so as to make good what she now saw as a grave error.

She was thinking this when she heard a rider coming in across the yard toward the house. Her first thought was that it was her father returning, then she knew it couldn't be, for he hadn't been gone long. She had a disquieting moment of realizing she was practically alone, until she remembered that Harley, the cook, was close enough to be wakened if she called. His room was beyond the kitchen, which adjoined this main living room. So when the solid clump of boots crossed the porch and the knock sounded at the door, she answered it unhesitatingly.

It was the Anchor foreman who stood in the light of the lamp s.h.i.+ning through the door when she opened it, a sodden, drawn-faced, poncholess Blaze Coyle, who wrung from her a quick: "Blaze! You're soaking! Get over by the fire!"

"Thank you, ma'am," he drawled, and took off his hat as he came in, revealing his sorrel hair matted wetly to his head. He crossed the room and stood with his back to the fireplace, puddles forming quickly around his boots as he said: "Sorry to b.u.t.t in on you this time o' night." His glance roved the room and came back to the girl. "Your father around?"

"No. He had to ride up to see the crew."

Blaze's eyes went narrow-lidded a moment. "Then how'll he know where you've gone?" he asked.

"Am I going somewhere, Blaze?"

"It's up to you, ma'am. John Merrill's worse, a lot worse. Ruth ain't much help, and the doc sent a message over to our place that I was to send a man across to get you. I come myself to make sure."

"I'll leave Dad a note," Jean said, and at once turned toward the hallway that led to her bedroom.

In the following moments, Blaze's face a.s.sumed an unaccustomed gravity even though the fire's warmth was relieving the bone-deep chill of his two-hour ride. He liked Jean Vanover, and it hurt him to have to lie to her. But he forgot that in the face of the urgency that drove him. Thinking of Joe now, remembering his fright over that labored breathing, and the deep wound channeled in his friend's head, he doubted that he would ever again see him alive. A stark fear took hold of him, sent him across the room to call down the hallway into which Jean had gone: "I'll go out and saddle you a horse! We'll have to make some fast tracks!"

Blaze not only saddled a horse for Jean at the big corral, but roped a fresh mount for himself, choosing a big-headed animal that had the look of a stayer. He turned his Anchor-branded pony loose, knowing the animal would find its way home. Back at the house, Blaze entered the living room as Jean came out of the hallway. He saw that she wore waist overalls and a sweater and warm jacket under her ankle-length slicker.

She carried a spare poncho over her arm and gave it to him. "You'll need this. What happened to yours?"

"I'm a b.u.m judge of the weather, I reckon." Blaze grinned ruefully. "Hate to wear the darn' things. I thought it was through rainin' when I left our layout." He thought of something to take her attention from his lame explanation and added hastily: "I missed supper. Mind if I see what I can find in the kitchen?"

"I should have thought of that," Jean said contritely. "I'll wake Harley and have him get you something."

"No. Don't. A cup o' coffee'll do."

His relief was keen as Jean led him into the kitchen without approaching the door at the far side, which he knew to be that of the cook. There was coffee on the stove and a pan of tamale pie in the warming oven. Blaze sat down to a big plateful of ground beef and browned cornmeal mush, for the first time aware that he was ravenously hungry. But he grudged this waste of time; he had wanted to get into the kitchen alone, to get his hands on food he could take to the cave, but Jean's endeavor to be helpful had spoiled his chances of that.

As the girl got him bread and b.u.t.ter and a second cup of coffee, she questioned him about John Merrill. Blaze pretended ignorance of everything but the errand he had been sent upon. Jean wanted to know about the posse, if there was any word yet of their having taken Joe. No, the redhead said, no word yet. He was slightly puzzled by the girl's obvious relief at his answer.

As his hope of taking any food up to the cave left him, she said abruptly: "The note. I'd almost forgotten. Help yourself to anything more you want, Blaze. I'll be back in a minute." And she went out into the living room.

Blaze was up out of his chair the instant she was gone. He found half a sack of flour in the bin under the bread board, emptied it quickly, and started looking for things to put in the sack. In the storage cupboard he found canned tomatoes; he took three cans. Next came a coffee can full of flour, the big salt cellar on the stove, an unopened can of baking powder, one half full of coffee, a big slab of bacon from the ice box. He had run his belt through the handle of a small frying pan and was buckling the poncho over it when he heard Jean's steps crossing the room beyond. He fastened the last buckle barely in time to keep her from seeing what was underneath the poncho as she entered the room.

Blaze said-"All set."-and opened the outside door. Jean paused close to him before she went out, taking a last look at the kitchen. Then the darkness swallowed her and he was groping his way over toward the horses, pulling his Stetson low against the slanting rain, breathing a long sigh of relief at not having wakened the cook.

By the time they came to the yard gate, Blaze had tied the flour sack to the horn of his saddle, knowing it was too dark for Jean to see it.

"'You'd better follow me close!" he called, and spurred his horse into the lead. The animal seemed eager to go, and Blaze was relieved to think he'd made a wise choice.

The one danger, Blaze knew, lay in their getting lost, for the pitch blackness of the night was unrelieved. It was also necessary that, for a mile or two, he keep up the pretense of heading for Brush.

When he did swing off the trail, the girl called from close behind: "You're too far to the right, Blaze!"

His answer was inspired, coming to him quickly. "Short cut," was all he said.

For close to half an hour his explanation seemed to satisfy Jean, for she stayed close, even though he rode hard. But at the end of that interval, when he finally swung up into the timber that backed the mesa, she called out again: "Blaze! Let's stop. I think we're lost."

He reined in and let her come alongside, a ready answer again occurring to him. "I was supposed to sleep with the crew tonight. Thought I'd swing up Porcupine and tell 'em I couldn't be in until mornin'. It isn't much out of the way."

The girl was close enough so that he could distinguish faintly the outline of her face. He imagined that she was smiling. When she spoke, he knew it wasn't his imagination.

"Blaze," she said softly, "where are you really taking me?"

He was at first astonished, then angry as he realized that his ruse had failed. The girl was suspicious. He groped a moment for an explanation, and in the end knew there was none. Just as surely he knew that he couldn't carry out the idea that had sent him down to the Diamond. He couldn't lay a hand on this girl, force her to come with him; no matter how badly he needed her the innate sense of decency in him rebelled at that.

"There's a man bad hurt up in the hills," he told her simply. "I wanted someone to help me look after him. I reckon you can go back now."

"It's Joe Bonnyman, isn't it?" Jean said.

Blaze nodded wearily, not surprised that she should have guessed to whom he referred.

"You didn't think I'd have come if I'd known he was the one, did you?" Without waiting for his reply, the girl went on, her voice edged with gravity. "Is he badly hurt, Blaze? How did it happen?"

"Someone shot him and left him lyin' by the creek at the upper edge of the basin. Thought he was dead, I reckon. The slug hit him alongside the head, knocked him out. I've got him in a cave up there. His breathin' didn't sound any too good."

"Why didn't you tell me?" She was angry now. "We could have brought iodine and bandages. Now we'll have to get along with what we have. What's in that sack, Blaze?"

"Grub," he said sheepishly. So she had known all along of the sack tied to the horn of his saddle.

"We can at least be thankful for that." Jean paused a moment, then: "Well, we're wasting time. Show me the way."

"You mean you'll help?"

"Of course. I couldn't let a man die, could I?"

"And you won't give it away where he is?"

"Blaze, I'm terribly poor at telling directions. For all I know, we're on our way to Lodgepole."

As he touched his pony with spurs and went on, Blaze let his breath out in a long sigh of keen relief. You could never tell about women. Jean Vanover was no more lost than he was.

Homesteaders with Guns.

Mike Saygar drew rein at the edge of the timber, within 100 yards of the spot where Joe Bonnyman's horse had thrown his rider at dusk yesterday evening. He let the others come up with him before he said, his voice lifted against the roar of the swollen Troublesome: "You got it straight what you're to do?" Whitey and Pecos nodded, but Chuck Reibel's look was sullen as he said: "The devil with this sleepin' on the ground. It stiffens me up too much, Mike."

"You can travel any time you don't like the way you're treated, mister," came Saygar's smooth drawl. Ignoring Reibel, then, he lifted a hand, indicating the snow-patched reach of the basin baking under the hot early sun. "Run your lines each side of the creek. If you have trouble gettin' wire, forget your fences. Whitey, watch your temper in town. We don't want the law on us. Remember, you've come in here peaceable and all you want is to be let alone. Now go ahead and make it look right."

So saying, Saygar turned back into the trees. The others sat watching him go, until Pecos drawled: "Well, let's get goin'."

On the ride down out of the hills, they talked chiefly about the weather, and the way the sun had risen into a cloudless sky at dawn, two hours ago, to start the rapid melt that would see every creek on this side of the peaks over its banks by noon.

"There'll be h.e.l.l to pay for what we're doin' tonight," Pecos commented once.

"What you worryin' about?" was Reibel's acid retort. "It ain't you they'll skin for it."

They rode into Lodgepole shortly after ten, going straight to the Land Office. The clerk there was only mildly interested when they asked to look over the plat maps in his big file case. Busy with his work, he left them alone.

But in half an hour, when Reibel politely asked for three sets of homestead papers, the clerk's curiosity came alive. He got the papers from his desk, handed them to Reibel, and queried: "Settlin' down here, are you?"

Reibel gave him little satisfaction beyond a nod before he returned to the office's side counter, where Whitey and Pecos were closely inspecting one of the maps. For the next twenty minutes, while the three strangers filled in their papers, the clerk had to control his curiosity. But at the end of that interval all three came over to his desk and laid their papers on it. The clerk picked up the first, Reibel's, and glanced at it.

He suddenly straightened in his chair at something he saw on the printed form. Hastily picking up the other two, he examined them. His jaw sagged open a moment. Then he laughed.

"You're out of luck, boys," he said. "That's closed country."

Reibel's brows lifted. "Closed? How come? There's a notice over in the post office at Junction that that land is open to lease or homestead. We looked it over and like it. Were movin' in."

"But you can't." was the clerk's smug rejoinder. "You'd have half a dozen of the biggest outfits in the country ganged up on you inside of a day."

"It's legal, ain't it?" Whitey drawled.

"Legal? Sure. But that basin's summer range for the Mesa Grande outfits, Anchor, Brush, Yoke, and a few others."

"Never heard of them brands," Pecos offered.

The clerk's eyes widened. "You haven't? Well, brother, you'll hear plenty if you stay around here. Where you from?" "Colorado."

The clerk shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint you, gents. But it's no go.

"You mean we can't file on that creek up there?" queried Reibel.

"You can. But it won't do you any good. You'll be run out." "That's our worry, ain't it?" Reibel drawled. He nodded down to the papers. "Go ahead and register those. We're movin' in."