“I don’t believe you,” replied Gloriana, steadily.

  “Sweet on him yet, huh?”

  “No, I despise him. Any punishment, even hanging, would be too good for him,” retorted Gloriana, with passion.

  “See there, Molly. She’s comin’ round,” drawled Stone. “We’ll make a Westerner of her yet.”

  “Jed, was there a fight down below Yellow Jacket?” asked Molly, with agitation.

  “Shore was. Malloy said he seen two cowboys shot, one of which he accounted fer himself. But he didn’t know either. An’ so they couldn’t have been Jim or Slinger or Prentiss.”

  “Oh how’ll we find out?” cried Molly in honest agony. And the tone of her voice, the look of her, about finished Gloriana, who fell in a heap.

  “Wal, what difference does it make,” queried Stone, “to one of you, anyhow? One of you girls is shore goin’ with me, an’ cowboys won’t never be no more in your young life. Haw haw!”

  “I could stick this in you, Jed Stone,” cried Molly, brandishing the wicked butcher knife.

  The outlaw reached down and lifted Gloriana upright. Gloriana’s head rolled. “Brace up,” he said, and shook her. She found strength left to resist. Then he clasped her in his arms and hugged her tight. And while he did this he winked and grinned at Molly, who stood there aghast. “You need a regular desperado hug to stiffen your spine...There! Now you stand up an’ do your work.”

  She did keep her feet, too, when he released her, and such eyes Jed Stone had never seen. If he had been the real desperado he pretended, he would have flinched and quailed under their magnificent fury.

  While they sat at the meagre supper, Stone bedevilled Gloriana in every way conceivable, yet to his satisfaction it did not prevent her from eating her share. That was the answer. Let even the effete Easterner face the facts of primal life and the balance was struck.

  Darkness soon settled down, and twice Gloriana fell asleep beside the fire. “Let’s sit up — all night,” she begged of Molly.

  “I’d be willin’, if he’d let us. But, Glory, dear, you jest couldn’t. You’d fall over. An’ by mawnin’ you’d be froze. We’ll have to sleep with Stone. He’s put all the blankets on thet bed. An’ I’ll sleep in the middle — so he cain’t touch you.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” retorted Gloriana. And when they reached the wide bed under the oak tree she crawled in the middle and stretched out, as if she did not care what happened.

  “Wal, now, thet’s somethin’ like,” declared the outlaw, as he saw the pale faces against the background of blankets. He sat down on the far side of the bed and in the gloom contrived to remove his boots and spurs. “Gurls, I’m liable to have nightmare. Often do when I’m scared or excited. An’ I’m powerful dangerous then. Shot a bedfellow once, when I had a nightmare. So you wanta kick me awake in case I get to dreamin’.”

  It was not remarkable to Stone that almost before he had ceased talking Gloriana was asleep. He knew what worn-out nature would do. Nevertheless, as soon as Molly had dropped off he made such a commotion that he would almost have awakened the dead. Then he began to snore outrageously, and between snores he broke out into the thick weird utterance of a man in a nightmare.

  “Molly — Molly!” cried Gloriana, in a shrill whisper, as she clutched her friend madly. “He’s got it!”

  “Sssh! Don’t wake him. He won’t be dangerous unless he wakes,” replied Molly.

  Jed made the mental reservation that his little ally was all right, and began to rack his brain for appropriate exclamations:

  “AGGH! I’ll — carve — your — gizzard!”

  And he sprang up to thump back. Then he gave a capital imitation of Malloy’s croaking laugh. Then he shouted: “You can’t have the gurl! She’s mine, Croak, she’s mine!...I’ll have your heart’s blood!”

  After which he snored some more, while listening intently. He did not hear anything, but he thought he felt the bed trembling. Next he rolled over, having thrown the blankets, to bump hard into Gloriana. But that apparently did not awaken him. He laid a heavy arm across both the girls and went on snoring blissfully.

  “Molly,” whispered Gloriana, in very low and blood-curdling voice. “Let’s — kill him — in his sleep!”

  “Oh I wish we could, but we’re not strong enough,” replied Molly, horrified. “Don’t you dare move!”

  In the grey of dawn he got up, pulled on his big boots, and went at the camp-fire tasks, careful not to make noise. His two babes in the woods were locked in sleep, also in each other’s arms. Stone cooked the last of the meat and boiled the last of the coffee. A few biscuits were left, hard as rocks. Then he went to awaken the girls. Their heads were close together, one dark, the other amber, and their sweet pale faces took the first flush of the sunrise. It was a picture the outlaw would carry in his memory always, and he found himself thanking God that he had come upon Croak Malloy before they had suffered harm.

  “Gurls, roll out,” he called.

  Molly awakened first and was bright and quick in an instant. She smiled, and Jed thought he would treasure that smile. Then Gloriana’s eyes popped open. Dim gulfs of sleep! Stone turned away from them with a conscience-stricken pang.

  “Rustle an’ eat. I gotta hunt the horses,” he said.

  Upon his return they had finished eating. Molly said: “Glory’s bag is missin’. With all her outdoor clothes!”

  “Shore. I hid it. I don’t want her dressin’ up. She looks so cute in thet outfit,” he replied. “Saddle your hoss, you starin’ idgit,” he said to Gloriana. “An’ Molly, rustle with the bed an’ packs while I eat.”

  Molly proved as capable as any cowboy, but poor Gloriana could not get the saddle up, and when the pinto bit and kicked at her, which was no wonder, she gave up coaxing and struck it smartly with a branch.

  “Hyar! Don’t beat thet pony,” expostulated Stone. “Who’d ever think you’d show cruelty to a dumb beast?”

  “Dumb! He sure is,” replied Gloriana, “and he’s not the only —— thing around that ought to be beaten.”

  “Molly, you cain’t never tell aboot people till you get them in the woods,” said Stone, reflectively. “Their real natoor comes out. I reckon Glory, hyar, would have murdered Croak Malloy in cold blood if he’d got away with her. It’s turrible to contemplate.”

  Soon they were mounted and riding in single file, as on the day before. Stone led them out of this gorge, miles and miles through the forest, out into the sunny desert, and back again, and finally, without a halt to the rim of the Black Brakes. He followed along that until mid-afternoon, when he came to a trail he knew, which was seldom used even by rustlers, unless pressed. Here they had to walk down and it was no fun. “Don’t let your hoss fall on you,” was all Stone said. At a particularly bad descent Gloriana and her pinto both fell, and she miraculously escaped being rolled on. “Whew!” ejaculated Stone. “I reckoned you was a goner then. The Lord shore watches over you.”

  “I don’t care,” panted the girl. “I’d sooner die — that way — than some other way.” Her spirit was hard to break. She seemed to recover her courage after each successive trial. But her strength was almost spent. Stone calculated their position at that hour was less than a dozen miles below Yellow Jacket. And his intention was, if Gloriana could stand it, to climb out of the brakes and ride to the head of Yellow Jacket, where he could show the girls their way and then take leave of them. There was a risk of being held up along the trail by one or more of the Diamond outfit, but since he had the girls to credit him with their rescue he had little to worry about. Still, he did not want that to happen. He had planned a climax to his plot.

  The sun set behind the western wall of the brakes; a mellow roar of running water filled the forest with dreaming music. Stone thought it about time to choose a place to camp, and he desired it to be remote from the trail, which he believed ran somewhat to his left along the stream. With this end in view he wormed his way through the woods toward the wall they had long since descended.

  It loomed above him, grey and lofty, always silent and protective. And suddenly he emerged into an open space, where tall spruces and wide-spreading sycamores dominated the green. The glade appeared familiar, and as Gloriana and Molly rode out of the forest he reined his horse.

  “O my God — look!” cried Molly, in accents of horror.

  Simultaneously, then, Stone’s sense accounted for a smell of burned wood, the pile of charred logs that was once the trapper’s cabin, and three grotesque and hideously swaying figures of men, hanging limp by their necks from a prominent branch of a sycamore.

  Stone’s shock had its stimulus in Gloriana’s shriek. She swayed and slid out of the saddle. He caught her and lifted her in front of him, a dead weight.

  “Jed — this heah is too much,” expostulated Molly, hoarsely. She looked as if she, too, would faint.

  Cursing under his breath, he turned to the girl. “I swear it was accident,” he vowed, earnestly. “We were east of the trail, an’ if I thought aboot it at all, I reckoned we were far from thet old cabin. By Gawd! I’m sorry, Molly. It is too much.”

  “Jed, I’ll be — keelin’ over, too,” gasped Molly. “Thet’s a hard sight for me, let alone Glory...If I recognised Darnell, she recognised him, you bet.”

  “Shore she did. I never seen him but once, an’ I knew him. An’ there’s my old Sheriff Lang, his star still a-shinin’ on his vest. An’ Joe Tanner...Wal, thet’s shore a cowboy job, slick an’ clean. Thet’s the way of the West!”

  Stone halted in the first likely spot for camp, and slipping out of his saddle with Gloriana in his arms, he laid her down on a soft pine-needle mat. She was conscious.

  “Tend to her, Molly,” said Stone, briefly, and he turned to look after the horses. Then he cut ample spruce boughs for two beds, and made them, one of which, for the girls, he laid in a protected niche of the cliff. Having finished these tasks, he approached his prisoners.

  “There’s nothin’ to eat.”

  “Small matter, Jed. Our appetites are shore not a-rarin’,” replied Molly.

  Gloriana transfixed him with solemn tragic eyes.

  “I take back — calling you a liar,” she said, simply.

  “Thanks. I accept your apology.”

  “Who — who did that?” she asked, with gesture to indicate the tragedy down the valley.

  “What? Who did what?”

  “Hanged those men?”

  “I reckon thet was Curly Prentiss an’ his pards. Shore young Jim had a hand in it, onless, of course, Curly an’ Jim got killed by the rustlers. Some of the Diamond were done for, thet’s shore.”

  “But — you — said—” she faltered, piteously.

  “Shore. I said I reckoned it wasn’t Jim or Curly. I forgot thet. Must have been one or more of them daredevils. Bud or Lonestar — an’ mebbe Slinger. I seen where blood had dripped on the leaves, about saddle-high, along the trail. Some cowboys packed out, shore.”

  That surely finished Gloriana and all but did the same for Molly. She had just strength left to help Stone carry Gloriana to bed. The outlaw then sought his own rest, and the meditations inspired by the latest developments. This adventure had not lost its sting, despite the knocking at the gate of his conscience. Tomorrow would see the end of it and he must not fail in the task he had set himself.

  Morning disclosed Molly to be herself again, and Gloriana able to get up, though she could not stand erect. She could do nothing but watch the others saddle and pack. Still, her perceptions were all the keener, and she paid Molly mute and eloquent tribute of appreciation.

  “I’m made of straw and water,” she said, humbly.

  “Wal, Gloriana, darlin’, a thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” rejoined Stone, with gallant cheerfulness.

  Before they reached the head of the Yellow Jacket, which Stone was approaching, he had fears the Eastern girl would not make it. Yet a little rest enabled her to go on, without complaint, without appeal for mercy.

  At last Stone espied the new road, where it turned to go down into the canyon. He halted before the girls noticed it and dismounted near the rim.

  “Wal, we’ve reached the partin’ of the trails,” he said. “There’s a ranch down heah where one of you can go an’ send word to the cowboys. ‘Cause I can’t take you both with me any farther, I’m a hunted desperado, you know. An’ I’ve gotta hole up till all this blows over. One of you goes with me.”

  “Take us both — Jed,” implored Molly, and that plainly was her last word in this trick perpetrated upon an innocent tenderfoot.

  “No, Molly, I will go,” interposed Gloriana. “You love Jim. He worships you...There’s no one cares for me or — or whom I care for...And I’m not strong, as you’ve seen from my miserable frailty on this ride. I won’t live long, so it’ll not matter much.”

  Molly, with eyes suddenly full of tears, averted her gaze. Stone regarded the Eastern girl with poignant emotion he gladly hid.

  “Ahuh. So you’ll go willin’?”

  “Yes, since you compel me. But on one condition.”

  “An’ what’s thet?”

  “You must — marry me honestly. I have religious principles.”

  “Wal, I reckon I could fetch a padre down into the brakes — where we’ll be hidin’,” replied Stone. “An’ so — Miss Gloriana Traft — you’d marry me — Jed Stone of the Hash-Knife — thief, killer, outlaw, desperado — to save your friend?”

  “Yes, I’ll do even that for Jim and Molly.”

  Suddenly Jed Stone turned away, gripped by a whirlwind of passion. It had waylaid him, at this pathway of middle life, like a tiger in ambush. All the hard, bitter years of outlawry rose like a hydra-headed monster to burn his soul with the poison of hate, revenge, lust, and the longing to kill. To wreak his vengeance upon civilisation by despoiling the innocence and crushing the life of this young girl! The thing roared in his brain, a hell-storm of fury. He had never realised the depths into which he had been thrust until this madness wrapped him in a whirling flame.

  Far beyond his hope had he succeeded in forcing latent good into being. This Eastern girl had really defeated him. What could be greater than sacrificing virtue and life itself for her friend? Stone bowed under that. Gloriana Traft had love — which was greater than all the fighting instincts he had meant to rouse. It would have been an error of nature to have created such a beautiful being as this girl and not have endowed her with unquenchable spirit. She was as noble, in her extremity, as she was beautiful. Her eyes and lips, the turn of her face, were no falsehoods. And so Jed Stone divined how he was to profit by the courage of a girl he had driven to such desperate straits. The lesson, the good, would rebound upon him.

  “Ride over hyar a step,” he said to the girls, and he pointed down into the canyon. “This is Yellow Jacket, an’ thet new house you see way down there in the green is Jim Traft’s.”

  While they stared he went back to mount his own horse and turn to them again.

  “The road is right hyar,” he went on, as coolly and casually as if that fact was nothing momentous. “Shore you can make it thet fer.”

  Then he patted Molly’s dusky tousled head: “Good-bye, little wood-mouse. Be good—”

  “Oh, Jed,” cried Molly, wildly, with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Remember aboot never — rustlin’ no more!”

  Stone turned to the Eastern girl. “Big-eyes!” he called her, for that was the most felicitous of all names for her then. “So long! — Marry Curly or Bud, an’ have some real Western kids...But don’t never forget your desperado!”

  As he spurred away he heard her poignant call: “Oh wait — wait!” But Jed Stone rode as never had he from sheriffs and posse, from vengeful cowboys who pursued with gun and rope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IT WAS SUNDAY evening at the ranch-house down in Yellow Jacket. The big living-room shone bright and new with lamp and blazing fire. Jim had been endeavouring to write a letter to his uncle, reporting loss of two thousand head of Diamond brand stock, and the fight at the cabin down in the brakes, which had entailed a more serious loss. But the letter for many reasons was difficult to write. For one thing, Molly and Gloriana would surely see it, and as Gloriana took care of her uncle’s mail she would be very likely to read it first. And it had to be bad news. Jim could not gloss over the deaths of Uphill Frost and Hump Stevens, nor the serious condition of Slinger Dunn and Bud Chalfack. Moreover, he found it impossible to confess to his part in that fight. On the moment Curly was trying to keep the fretful and feverish Bud from reopening wounds. Lonestar Holliday read quietly by the lamplight across the table from Jim, but he could not sit still, and as he moved his bandaged foot from one resting-place to another he betrayed the pain he was suffering. Jack Way wore the beatific smile which characterised his visage while writing to the absent bride.

  “I can’t write to Uncle Jim,” began Jim. “If he doesn’t show up here in a few days I’ll have to ride to Flag.”

  “An’ take Jack with you?” queried Bud, in a terrible voice.

  “Yes. Jack has a wife, you know.”

  “An’ leave the rest of us hyar fer Croak Malloy to wipe out, huh?”

  Jim paced the floor. The matter was not easy to decide, and more than once he had convinced himself that the longing to see Molly had a good deal to do with the need to go to Flagerstown.

  “Of course, if you boys think there’s a chance of Malloy coming back—”

  “Wal, Jim,” interposed Curly, coolly. “As I see it you’d better wait. We’ve managed to get along without a doctor, an’ I reckon we can do the same without reportin’ to old Jim. He’ll roar, shore, but let him roar. This last few weeks hasn’t been any fun fer us. Somebody will get wind of thet fight an’ Flag will heah aboot it.”

  “All right, I’ll give up the idea about going, as well as writing. It’ll be a relief,” replied Jim, and indeed the outspoken renunciation helped him. “You know one reason I wanted to go was to block Uncle Jim’s fetching Molly and Glory down here.”