The trio was the only sign of life visible in the snow-steeped gulch, and the crunch of their booted feet crushing through the frozen surface of the three-foot drift was the only sound breaking the virgin stillness of the mountains.

  In the lead, Pat felt a tremor of uneasiness as he plodded along and the canyon walls kept closing in sharply with no sign whatever of the presence of the hooded murderers.

  Yet, his sense of logic told him that the bandit hideout must lie ahead between those jagged, frowning walls, or there would have to be another trail leading out by which they had escaped after causing the snowslide.

  Pat dreaded to consider what the alternative would mean to his companions if there should be another trail. And to himself, too. He felt fagged already, hungry for food and weary for sleep. It might be miles and miles through the frozen fastness of the high country before they could reach human habitation, and without horses he doubted their ability to continue on up the canyon.

  They had no choice except to continue and trust they would surprise some of the outlaws at their hideout … with horses which they could commandeer to ride back to the Sutton cabin.

  That was all Pat Stevens prayed for as he made slow progress ahead. A chance to come to grips with the hooded bandits who had taken all the pots in the game thus far.

  He tried not to think about Sally and young Dock … about Sally’s worry for his safety and Dock’s need of a father. Sally was all wool and a yard wide, he thought, and she would understand that he had been forced to go after the thieves and murderers.

  Dock would not suffer much at his age, he thought facetiously, for he would be too busy boasting of his father’s bold daring, just as Pat had boasted of his own father’s fighting Irish spirit.

  But Sally was so feminine, so clinging, and yet so brave. She would understand, but there would be little woman’s happiness for her if anything happened to him. She would carry on at the Lazy Mare ranch, but her bright laughter would be gone. She would evolve into another woman fighting for the West; she would become masculine and domineering through necessity, running the ranch with the competence of a man.

  He felt a strange contraction somewhere beneath the wool shirt next to his skin, but he tightened his mouth and his gray eyes stared straight ahead. A determination to come to grips with the bandits who had terrorized Dusty Canyon caused him to increase his speed by a superhuman effort.

  Pat was grateful for the relieving questions which came to his mind. Thinking back and pondering over the identity of the person who had saved him and Sam and Ezra from certain death in the abandoned mine by throwing the map down the airshaft, he was spared the agony of thinking of Sally and Dock.

  Someone knew, quite obviously, that they had been caught by the slide. But why had he acted in such a mysterious manner … not identifying himself by a word written on the map or yelling down through the shaft?

  There were a lot of mysterious angles to the whole situation, starting with the fantastic ease of his rescue the preceding night … the untied rope behind his chair … the sudden departure of the guards, the saddled black waiting to be ridden away outside the cabin.

  Was it the Stevens luck still holding?

  Pat’s half-frozen face ached as it crinkled up with laughter. He knew that the Stevens luck was only an expression, the outgrowth of his successful man-hunts when Sam and Ezra stuck to him through thick and thin. There was no luck connected with it. Their fights and man-hunts had been the natural outcome of law-abiding citizens against blackguards from which the trio had emerged victors because they were in the right.

  The more he pondered over the curious train of circumstances in the present crisis, the more certain he became that some one person was responsible for the breaks he had got. Someone who was lurking in the background and acting as a guardian angel without showing his identity for some secret reason of his own.

  A member of the gang, he thought, whose conscience had turned him against his murderous, thieving companions. Perhaps one who couldn’t endure witnessing the cruelty the gang imposed upon honest citizens.

  That was his most feasible conjecture, though it still left a lot of questions unanswered … questions that would have to wait until the hooded men were rounded up and could do no more harm.

  As Pat rounded the first turn in a hair-pin curve, a sudden shrill shriek of agony and of terror brought him to a dead stop. He jerked his thoughts back from their far-wandering reverie and listened tensely for a repetition of the wild cry.

  Another shriek came, re-echoing in the narrow gorge, the eerie cry of a human being in torment; a frightful, piercing scream that was both human and inhuman. Blood-curdling and ominous in the desolate heart of the mountains which appeared to be uninhabited by living creatures.

  “God’lmighty,” Ezra yelled, stumbling forward and hurtling against Pat. “What was that?”

  “A howlin’ hyena, sounds like,” Sam ventured, crowding up to join Pat and Sam. He made the suggestion in a pessimistic voice, as if he had little hope his companions would agree.

  They didn’t. Pat shook his head while Ezra grunted with disdain for Sam’s opinion. “That ain’t no animal cry. You know as well as me that …”

  Another blood-curdling cry stopped his words. In the narrow confines of the gulch it was impossible to tell from which direction it came. The sound was all around them, lingering, filling the air with piteous entreaty, maniacal and inhuman in its piercing shrillness.

  “A banshee, then,” Sam suggested as the echoes died away.

  “Sound’s like a woman to me,” Ezra opined. He did not look at Pat. “Come from right ahead of us,” he stated flatly. “Three, four hunnerd yards up the canyon, mebbe.”

  Pat Stevens sprang forward without a word, leaning low at the waist and running swiftly, both hands darting to swinging holsters and sinewy fingers straining around the butts of his six-guns.

  Ezra followed at a slow, long-legged trot and Sam panted behind him. “You reckon … it kin be Sally? Hey! Ezra! Is that what you’re thinkin’?”

  Ezra put on a spurt of his best speed and Sam worked his short legs desperately to keep pace, but Pat’s flying feet drew him swiftly ahead of his older companions. He spun around a bend and disappeared from their sight.

  He did not slacken speed when the secluded mesa of the bandits’ hideout spread out in front of him. He was goaded on by that shrill cry of distress from a woman’s throat … from Sally’s throat … his own wife … being tortured by a band of fiends from hell.

  His straining eyes took in the corrals and sheds, the quartet of saddled horses hitched in front of the larger log building. A black plume of smoke drifted up from the chimney.

  His heart pounded a loud tattoo against his ribs, and each cold breath sucked in through his set teeth was like a knife stabbing his tortured lungs, but he ran on.

  The door of the log house swung open while Pat was still fifty yards away in a clearing and in plain sight.

  A figure appeared in the doorway, and at that distance Pat heard a grunt of surprise when he was sighted.

  A gun flashed in the man’s hand.

  Pat drew and fired from the hip as he ran.

  The figure in the doorway toppled forward as other men came rushing out of the open door.

  A slug through his hip slowed Pat’s speed and slewed him sideways. He was twenty feet from the building when he dropped to one knee and leveled both guns.

  The milling figures in the doorway dissolved back inside the log walls … all but two who remained outside in the snow and who would never move again.

  Pat lay on his side with his back to the building. He wriggled to a position where he could reach his cartridge belts and began reloading his guns.

  A rifle cracked viciously behind him and a steel-jacketed bullet plowed into the snow under his right elbow.

  He glimpsed movement at the edge of the aspen grove to the rear, caught sight of Sam’s swarthy face peering out while he sized up the situation.

  Pat cautiously waggled his fingers to signal that he wasn’t out of the fight yet, but couldn’t tell whether Sam saw and understood or not.

  The face drew back and Pat watched tensely. Presently he saw the bare gray limbs of the aspens shaking in two widely separated spots, and knew that his companions were skulking around to encircle the bandit hideout.

  Another rifle bullet spanged into the ground, this time uncomfortably close to Pat’s ear; so close that the tip of the lobe was seared.

  He sternly held himself against making any revealing move to indicate to the men inside the cabin that he was still alive while he carefully tested his wounded thigh to see if it was still in working order.

  It appeared to be only a flesh wound, and as he mentally debated whether to continue to play dead in the hope of decoying the killers into the open, or to risk everything on an attempted rush, his mind was made up for him by a reiteration of the agonized scream which had brought him rushing in search of the sound.

  In his tense state of mind it seemed to Pat that he could distinguish the timbre of Sally’s voice in the long-drawn wail, and the sound galvanized him into a surging movement.

  Whipping his body over he staggered to his feet. Two bullets thudded softly into the snow-covered ground he had just quit. He darted sideways, then forward, desperately searching for a sight of the rifle barrel that was firing at him.

  A puff of smoke and another whiplike report indicated the muzzle protruding from a hole in the chinked wall.

  Pat stopped short and blasted away with both guns at the small target, then drove his body forward toward the doorway. A black-robed figure opened the door and filled it as Pat leaped over one of the stiff prostrate bodies outside.

  The two men fired in unison, point-blank, and then fell together in a writhing heap of wounded flesh over the threshold.

  Pat’s left arm was without strength, but he gripped his gun with his right and desperately fought to disentangle it from the threshing weight on top of him.

  He dimly sensed movement inside the cabin, saw the butt of a rifle being driven at his head.

  He wrenched aside enough to take the sickening force of the blow on his shoulder, but was half-dazed by the blow and felt himself going supine.

  Closing his eyes, he lay quietly, fighting grimly to hold onto the remnants of consciousness, goaded to desperation by the thought of Sally being inside … so close to him and yet so completely beyond him.

  Rough hands grabbed him and dragged him out from under the sodden weight of the dying bandit.

  Pat’s lax fingers would not grip the butt of his gun any longer. A nauseating sense of defeat racked him as his body was dragged over the rough pine boards of the floor.

  Forcing one eyelid open a crack, his reeling senses refused for a moment to believe the reality of what he saw.

  In the center of a large bare room the pitiably beaten body of an aged man was suspended to the rafters by an ingenious arrangement of ropes looped about his thumbs and under his scrawny neck, holding him a few inches off the floor where he writhed and twisted in an effort to keep his bare feet above a pan of glowing coals set directly beneath him.

  As Pat stared in horrified disbelief, old man Sutton’s strength betrayed him again and one of his feet went low enough to contact the searing coals.

  The unearthly shriek that broke from the old man’s lips sent the red blood surging through Pat’s veins again, and he knew that was the sound he had heard outside.

  Mingled with the agonized scream was the acrid odor of burning flesh, and a loud guffaw of pleasure from the human fiend bending over Pat attested to his enjoyment of the proceedings.

  A rush of feet at the front and back brought the man to an erect posture. Two six-guns blasted in unison from somewhere near by. The human fiend slumped down with blood pouring from his bullet-riddled belly.

  Then, Sam and Ezra were jerking him aside, and Pat was muttering feebly:

  “I’m all right. Cut that old man down. For God’s sake, let me alone and tend to him. If he yells again I’ll go screechin’ mad.”

  It was only an instant before his companions had the old miner cut down from his horrible and torturing position, and Sam found a bucket of water which he sloshed over Pat’s face.

  Pat sat up, sputtering and spitting. The old man was the only one of the five men originally occupying the cabin who was alive, and he was so near death from the torture he had endured through the night that it was at least half an hour before they were able to bring him to a realization that he had been saved.

  Finally, when he mumbled his first coherent words, they sent a chill through the trio:

  “Get after … the boss. He’s goin’ to … to …”

  “The boss?” Pat bent over the old man, shaking him gently. “Are you sure he isn’t here? They’re all dead, you know.”

  “Not all … there’s … more. The boss … left … half a hour … ago. The gals … he’s gonna …”

  “The girls?” Pat cried desperately again. “Sally and Martha?”

  “Yeh. He knows … they’re … what they’re plannin’. He’s … goin’ to stop …”

  “What does he look like? Who is he? You’ve got to tell me.” Pat shook him gently once more and poured cold water on his face. “You’ve got to tell me!”

  “Bibe … Bibe …” The old man’s last vestige of strength deserted him. His head lolled back laxly and his shrunken eyes were tightly closed.

  Pat straightened up and turned slowly to Sam and Ezra. “I’ve got to get to Tola in a hurry. The girls … have some plan and the boss knows about it. They’re in danger. You bring Mr. Sutton along.”

  “You gonna stay here,” Sam put in strongly. “All shot up. What kin you do? I’ll ride to Tola.”

  Pat shook his head and his eyes gleamed angrily. “I’ve still got one good shootin’ arm. That’s all I need to go skunk-huntin’.”

  He limped out of the cabin to the hitchrack where he selected the best of the horses tethered there, and swung into the saddle with difficulty.

  The hidden trail leading into the head of the blind canyon showed clearly from this end, and Pat leaned forward in the saddle and spurred the horse up the steep ascent, gritting his teeth against the pain in his arm and leg, holding himself stiffly while his right hand gripped the saddlehorn.

  FOURTEEN

  When Sally was returning from the Dawson cabin she heard one of the horses nickering and remembered that they were still hitched to the buggy. Martha unbolted the door and Sally stepped into a brightly lit living room where a big fire was roaring up the chimney. Martha had already begun sewing ruffles on the blue dress.

  “I’ll light a lantern and unhitch the horses,” Sally said, “and feed them.”

  Laying her sewing aside, Martha said, “I’ll help you.”

  “No. You keep sewing.” Sally went to the kitchen and lighted a lantern and left by the back door for the corral.

  When she came back, she picked up the red dress, sat at the other end of the table, and reported, “Mr. Dawson is going to round up a posse tonight and they’re starting early in the morning. He thinks maybe the black-hoods captured Pat and Sam and Ezra and then caused the slide so people would think they were buried under it.”

  Martha’s eyes glowed with the dry brightness which comes after tears, and her soft young mouth drooped in sorrow. “What do you really think … about everything?” she asked.

  “I don’t think they captured Pat and Sam and Ezra alive,” Sally replied, “but let’s not talk about it. Let’s try not to think about it. All we can do is keep working until we finish the dresses and just … hope for the best.”

  Before starting her sewing, Sally took her pistol from her handbag and laid it on the table. Martha looked at it and asked, “Do you think they … might come back tonight?”

  “If your father is forced to tell where the gold is, I’m sure they will.”

  Martha shook her head slowly. “He’ll never tell them.”

  “It’s not a bad idea to keep the pistol handy,” Sally returned, and bent her head over her work.

  The clock on the mantel clanged off the hours as their needles flew. Just after the stroke of twelve, Sally stood up and shook the red dress out and laid it over a chair.

  “While you’re finishing up, I’ll pack the carpetbags. Then I can help you pack. We can’t take very much baggage, so maybe you’d better put all your things in mine. They’re practically empty.”

  “I’m almost finished,” Martha said. “You can just put in a couple of my dresses and some of the underclothes out of the drawer.”

  “We ought to get a little rest before starting,” Sally said sensibly. “I know we won’t sleep.”

  “Right now I don’t feel as if I could ever sleep or eat again,” Martha replied, her lips trembling.

  “We never know how much we can stand until we’re put to the test,” Sally told her young companion stoutly.

  By one o’clock the packing was finished and the new dresses, sagging under the weight of gold dust, were laid across the backs of chairs. The underskirts with the stout hoops were spread out on the big chest. Leaving the fire burning brightly with two fresh logs, they blew out the lamps, left the connecting door open, and went to bed.

  Sally stopped Martha when she wanted to talk. With her pistol under her pillow, the older girl lay quietly listening to Martha’s muffled sobs, and straining to hear any sound from without. Some time after the clock struck two, she could hear the girl’s even breathing and knew she was asleep.

  Going into the living room, Sally placed two more logs on the fire and went back to bed, intending to get up at four to start the kitchen fire going.

  She was startled to awake and see the bright sun streaming through the cracks around the one window in the bedroom. She flung the covers back and sprang from bed after rousing Martha from a sound sleep.

  “Get dressed in a hurry … just slip on anything until we’ve had breakfast and hitched up the team,” Sally said, swiftly getting into her own clothes and a rough jacket. She rekindled the living room fire from the coals and started one in the kitchen stove. Calling to Sally as she went out the rear, she said, “Whip up something for breakfast while I hitch the team.”