Rebel Sloan confronted the pallid third of that trio, and waved a ruthless hand aloft.

  “Rustler, you see them?”

  The reply was an incoherent affirmative.

  “Do you want to save yore neck?”

  “Gawd Almighty!—Yes—yes!—Gimme—a chance.”

  “Will you talk?”

  “I—I’ll tell—all,” he whispered, in eager huskiness, his dark, awful eyes lighting with hope.

  “Boss, come heah,” called Sloan.

  Britt hurriedly got out his pencil and note-book, and ran over. Brazos joined them.

  “Watch them ropes, you cowboys,” yelled Sloan. The rustling and threshing of foliage above attested to the violence of the hanged men.

  “What’s yore name?”

  “Jeff Saunders.”

  “Wal, Saunders, this heah is Britt—Holly Ripple’s foreman. What he says you can rely on.”

  “Britt—if—if I squeal will you let me go?”

  “Yes, provided yore information is conclusive, an’ you swear to leave the country.”

  “I know enough, sir, an’ I swear…. I’m only too glad.”

  “Who you ridin’ fer?”

  “Sewall McCoy.”

  “How long hev you rode fer him?”

  “Two years. I come to New Mexico with his outfit.”

  “Is McCoy back of this deal involvin’ my cowboys?”

  “McCoy an’ Slaughter together,” rejoined Saunders, gulping to get his words out quickly. “They joined outfits. Slaughter was the dark hoss. He’s got fourteen hands, not countin’ this Lascelles. They’re located at Aspen Springs, up in the hills.”

  “What was their game?”

  “A few quick drives this fall. Then big deals next spring. McCoy has buyers all over. When the railroad gets heah he aims to ship a hundred thousand cattle, before the law comes.”

  “How many cattle in his herd?”

  “Five thousand. All Texas longhorns. He aims to keep thet herd as is, only addin’ branded calves.”

  “Who’s he stealin’ from?”

  “A little from all cattlemen. But concentratin’ on Ripple stock.”

  “From Chisum, too?”

  “No. I reckon McCoy is shy of Jingle-bob cattle.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Mebbe ’cause Chisum will let him alone, so long as he steers clear of the Seven Rivers range.”

  “How did McCoy corrupt Talman an’ Trinidad?”

  “Money. Talman was leavin’ the range before winter. Trinidad was sore because Talman didn’t divvy. Thet’s why they camped with us last night. Trinidad refused to go back to your ranch. He cussed Talman mighty hard.”

  “All right, Saunders. Thet will do. Sign yore name heah…. Somebody untie his hands.”

  After this signature was added to Britt’s note-book, Sloan turned Saunders loose. “Grab yore saddle, an’ things. Pick oot yore gun. Fork yore hawse an’ ride a bee-line somewhere far an’ wide. Fer yore good luck might not last.”

  A poignant cry caused Britt to wheel as on a pivot. Brazos was on his knees beside Mason, who had slumped off the pack to the ground and now sat propped there with strange ashen face.

  “Laigs!”

  Agony rang in that cry. Brazos’ nervous hands plucked at Mason’s stained shirt.

  “It’s all—right, pard,” replied the wounded cowboy, weakly. “We done fer thet outfit … what we come fer!—Funny, how most of these double-crossers show yellow. Pity aboot Trin…. I’m glad he cashed game.”

  “Old man, you’ve lied to me,” exclaimed Brazos, fearfully.

  “Wal, it’s the—last time,” replied Laigs, with a ghost of a smile.

  “Fellars, come heah,” faltered Brazos, appealing for help, when perhaps he felt instinctively there was none. He opened Mason’s wet shirt. In the middle of the cowboy’s chest, just below the breast bone, showed an ugly red hole. Only a froth of blood appeared outside. Brazos slipped his hand round to Mason’s back.

  “Oh—my—Gawd!” he cried, in terror, and when he brought his hand out it was dripping blood. “Laigs! Yu got in front—of me!” Brazos’ passionate protest of remorse and sorrow broke at the end.

  “Wal, pard—you’d done the same for me…. Only I wasn’t—quick enough.—I oughta shot—an’ yelled afterwards…. Don’t take on so, Brazos.”

  Britt bent over to examine Mason’s injury. A heavy .45 calibre slug had gone clear through the lad. His moments were numbered.

  “Laigs. You haven’t got long…. Is there anythin’?”

  “Don’t know what become of—my people. But thet’s no matter…. Gimme a smoke.”

  They gathered around Mason and some one gave him a lighted cigarette. He puffed with difficulty, but composedly. He could not inhale.

  “Let’s play a hand of draw.”

  Santone had a greasy deck of cards which he proceeded to shuffle, and dealt to Laigs, Jackson, Mex and himself.

  “Dog-gone! I always was lucky,” said Mason. “Gimme two cairds…. What’re you bettin’, Jack?”

  “I done got you skinned, Laigs. I sho has…. It’s goin’ up.”

  “Raise you…. Rest of you layin’ down, huh? You darn black scamp! I’ll call an’ lay down three aces.”

  “Thet’s good, Laigs. I wuz bluffin’.”

  “You oughta know better, Jack…. Yore deal, Mex…. An’ rustle…. Gettin’ kinda dark already.”

  But the sun was shining bright and gold now, bathing the glade in a glamour of light. A breeze stirred the tree-tops. Somewhere a raven croaked. The cattle were bawling. Across the golden patch of grass where the cowboys knelt swayed the sinister black shadows of the hanging men—now quiet.

  Laigs picked up his cards with steady fingers. Brazos knelt behind, holding him up.

  “Thet’s dog-gone-funny,” said Mason, faintly. “These cairds—sorta blur…. Fellars—I cain’t see!”

  He dropped the cards to the grass and his head fell back against Brazos.

  “Pard—sing—Lone Prairiee.”

  Brazos appeared to quiver through all his lithe frame. He lifted his working face to the sunlit boughs and closed his eyes. In a moment the convulsive quiverings ceased. His features shone wtih a stern, sad and beautiful light. Brazos was the singer of the outfit. He had a clear tenor voice. It broke and quavered, piercingly sweet. He began again.

  “O bury me not on the lone prairie,

  The word came low and mournfully

  From the pallid lips of a boy who lay

  On his death bed at the close of day.

  He had wrestled with pain till o’er his brow

  Death’s shadows fast were creeping now;

  He thought of his home and the loved ones nigh

  As the cowboys gathered to see him die.

  ‘O bury me not’—and his voice failed there,

  But we paid no heed to his dying prayer;

  In a shallow grave just six by three

  We buried him there on the lone prairie.

  Where the dew drops shine ——”

  Britt reached out to silence the singer. Laigs was dead.

  Chapter Eleven

  1874, AS HAD been predicted by Buff Belmet and other frontiersmen, ushered in for eastern and central New Mexico the bloodiest era that ever made history for the West.

  There were two reasons for this fact—the rich vast grass ranges that had lured venturesome cattlemen in the sixties to run cattle over the limitless acres once owned by the Spanish dons; and secondly because there was no semblance of law in all the broad land. Rustlers, desperadoes, wild cowboys, adventurers flocked into New Mexico. At one period, from 1874 to 1879, New Mexico held more desperate and vicious men than ever assembled any other place or time in the settlement of that range country west of Texas and Kansas.

  This period saw the inception and development of the Lincoln County War, the bloodiest of all frontier wars, in which three hundred men were killed. It saw the rise of Billy the Kid, Jesse Evans, mere youths in years, but who had no peers in cold nerve, or gun-craft, or bloody deeds. At sixteen they were cowboy comrades, riding the same ranch. Before they were twenty they got into different factions and swore to kill each other. But Billy the Kid, and Jesse Evans never met face to face. Evans admitted Billy’s superiority with a rifle, but claimed he could beat him to a gun. The saloons of Lincoln and Roswell waited and gambled on the meeting of these two cowboys. No doubt Billy and Jesse avoided the encounter that meant a draw on sight.

  Don Carlos’ Rancho stood at the gateway of the pass through which the Old Santa Fe Trail wound up off the Great Plains. The Mexican village had at one time or another harbored every Western character, good or bad, who passed that way. In the spring of 1875 Holly Ripple closed her famous, hospitable door to the travelling public. The old, leisurely, singing, glamorous Spanish days passed away; and the new day was hard, keen, vivid, uncertain and raw.

  Britt saw with regret the snow gradually melt off the uplands of the rolling range. The flowers sprang up as if by magic, and so did riders coming down out of the hills.

  May brought the first caravan and the news from outside. Las Animas was teeming. The railroad was forging west. Cattle, stage-coaches, pack-trains, lone, furtive-eyed riders, wagon-trains of settlers, bands of horsemen who asked no questions and said nothing about themselves—movement of all these came upon the heels of the vanishing snow.

  Six months had slipped away into the past, quietly for Britt and his outfit, riding less than in the summer, with their enemies holed-up, like ground-hogs, until the warm winds would blow again. There had been no rustling of cattle since those raids of last fall. But following Rebel Sloan’s round-up of one of these gangs, with report and gossip flying like wildfire over the range, there had been plenty to disturb the peace of the Ripple contingent.

  Britt had called a conference in San Marcos of a number of cattlemen within a hundred-mile radius of Don Carlos’ Rancho. Doane, Halstead, Clements, his nearest range neighbors, and Bill Wood, the Sedgwick brothers, newcomers in the country, and Hardy Wilson—all these cattlemen had met Britt, to have laid before them the startling facts of the McCoy-Slaughter combine. The result was far-reaching, but very different from what Britt had planned and hoped for. One of these ranchers, in Britt’s opinion, no other than Bill Wood, had told of the conference and its purpose, with the result that Britt’s hope for a unified front against the rustlers was frustrated. It would have been better if Britt had kept his counsel, as well as the Saunders confession, from everybody except his own men. McCoy was stronger in the range than Britt had estimated; he had powerful friends who were not friendly to Texans. He dominated the ranchers of small herds and little means. Moreover he developed a tendency to go to town and drink and gamble, during which times he was dangerous. He made veiled threats, and in open defiance of Britt and his several notorious cowboys, he attached to his outfit a gunman late from the Kansas border, one Jeff Rankin, whose reputation as a killer came with him and needed no boasting by McCoy. But the loud-mouthed McCoy did brag that he had a man to match Renn Frayne.

  After this one blunder Britt kept his mouth closed and his men away from San Marcos. With the Pecos Valley War between bitter factions not wholly ended and the Lincoln County War in its incipiency Britt saw how easily he could be involved in one or the other, or have a private war on his hands.

  He and Frayne and Jim talked often and long about how to meet the future. In any case they had a fight on their hands. Doane and his neighbor ranchers feared to ally themselves openly against McCoy. But they ran few cattle compared to the Ripple estate, and knew their own losses would be inconsequential provided they were neutral.

  The foreman and his confidants, especially Frayne, worked out a plan that to Britt seemed formidable. They would not make any more cattle drives to the railroad for an indefinite period; they would concentrate all their stock on the thirty mile range between Cottonwood Creek and the hills; they would no longer split up the outfit into small bunches for isolated trips; they would ride and watch the range in a body, sixteen strong, on the swiftest horses. They would be heavily armed and they would shoot first.

  Frayne was the genius of this carefully thought-out defense. He did not think Slaughter and McCoy could last out the summer if they resorted to stealing cattle again. Frayne was non-committal in regard to Jeff Rankin, the gunman imported obviously to kill him and Brazos. Nevertheless it was clear to Britt that Frayne knew beforehand the result of a possible encounter between himself and McCoy’s desperadoes. Most significant to Britt had been the constant gun and rifle practice that Frayne insisted upon. The last caravan before winter arrived the preceding year had brought a large consignment of weapons and ammunition Britt had ordered to meet the very contingency that now threatened. New .44 calibre Winchester rifles, and the new 1871 model Colt .45 guns were presented to the Ripple outfit. And Britt, urged by Frayne, had the boys constantly at practice, especially with the rifles. They all became skilled marksmen. The practice of shooting at coyotes and jack-rabbits from a running horse grew to be fun and spirited rivalry, instead of work. Brazos led them all with the six-shooter, but Jackson paired with the Kentuckian Blue, who had been a squirrel hunter as a boy, in preeminence with the rifle. McCoy’s riders would possess but few of the long arms, and constant practice with either of them or the short arms was out of the question. Ammunition in any quantity cost a good deal of money, an expense to which McCoy and Slaughter would not go. That was a detail they overlooked. McCoy had paid hundreds of dollars to corrupt Ripple cowboys, but he probably never thought of making his own unerring marksmen.

  Range gossip this spring had it that Britt’s wild outfit of Texans and half-breeds, topped by an outlaw who had killed many men, were intimidated and afraid to frequent the old drinking-saloons and gambling-halls. Gossip from San Marcos came by stage, by rider, and by queer ways that could not be traced. The whole range was buzzing. But what with Chisum about to declare war on rustlers, the Murphy-McSween factions of Lincoln up in arms, the coming of the railroad and the influx of strangers, Holly Ripple’s troubles scarcely held first place in popular clamor.

  The death of Laigs Mason had changed Brazos Keene. He grieved for months, and when he got over that the boyish, fun-loving, devilish glee had apparently gone forever. Brazos drank a good deal, and drifted toward that fiery, untamed, passionate spirit that had heretofore flared up only seldom and fleetingly. Nevertheless he failed in nothing else.

  The tragic end of Talman and Trinidad, as well as Mason’s, had likewise worked stern havoc in the devil-may-care minds of the other cowboys. A fatal carelessness which had once marked them almost totally disappeared. They gambled, they drank, they played tricks, but they were changed. They had become cemented in comradeship. Holly Ripple’s faith, the spell of Brazos Keene’s loss, the creed of Laigs Mason, the example of Renn Frayne—these laid their inscrutable and ineradicable hold upon their primitive minds.

  Best of all, and in spite of many adverse conditions, Holly Ripple was happy. Britt, stifling his conscience, hugged that to his bosom. As Holly’s twenty-first birthday approached, she grew lovelier than she had ever been, more of a woman, though still capable of girlish fits of temper and pouts of wilfulness. In those winter months, while confined mostly to the house, she had lost her tan and something of the robustness that had come with a summer’s riding, to gain again that pearl whiteness of face and black brilliance of eye for which her Spanish mother had been noted.

  Holly Ripple was happy. And Britt knew he dared take the glory of that fact to himself. He had betrayed Frayne’s secret.

  Britt often ruminated over the occasion of his faithlessness to Frayne. When he had an idle hour in the dusk beside the fire he often saw Holly’s glorious eyes of rapture in the heart of the coals. Frayne would know some day and bless him for it. He had played fair, he had kept faith as long as he could, and that had been until Holly’s heart was breaking. Weeks and months of Frayne’s strange aloofness, his cold, stern avoidance of her, his inexplicable reaction to that kiss of gratitude she had given him—these had at last paled her cheeks and shamed her into seclusion, and would have destroyed her but for Britt’s revelation.

  Christmas Eve he had found Holly alone, weeping before her fire, prey to the old memories of her father and to the hopeless despair of the future.

  “Holly lass, I have a Christmas gift for you,” he said, taking her hands.

  “Oh, Cappy—I—I don’t want—any gifts.”

  “Not anythin’ from me, or Brazos, or the boys?”

  “You are dears—to—to remember me—but I can’t care….”

  “Not anythin’ from Renn?”

  A little shock went through Holly, and the fire-bent eyes gazed up hungrily.

  “From Renn?” she whispered.

  “I reckon.”

  “Did he send me ——?”

  “No, not directly. It has come through me.”

  “I don’t want it then,” she replied, moodily.

  “Wal, you can heah aboot it, cain’t you?” he went on, persuasively, his heart warming, stirring his courage to this momentous and dangerous revelation.

  “If it pleases you, Cappy dear.”

  “Wal, I’ll pull up this chair an’ set heah beside you…. Nice fire, Holly. Cedar wood burns so pretty. You see pictures in the coals. An’ it’s snowin’ oot an’ gettin’ darker’n the ace of spades. The boys air all in, comfortable as bugs in a holler log, an’ comparin’ the presents you gave them…. All except Frayne. He’s by the fire, lonesomer’n ever, with eyes you cain’t look into.”

  “Sad! Lonely!—He might be here—with me,” cried Holly, passionately.

  “So he might. Wal, if you still care, be patient.”

  “Still care?—It is killing me,” she murmured, hollow-voiced.