"With Ned Bannister the gentleman.If there is another side to him I don't know it personally."He flushed underneath the tan, but very plainly with pleasure."Your opinions are right contrary to Hoyle, ma'am.Aren't you aware that a sheepman is the lowest thing that walks? Ask Mr.McWilliams.""I have known stockmen of that opinion, but--"The foreman's sentence was never finished.From a clump of bushes a hundred yards away came the crack of a rifle.A bullet sang past, cutting a line that left on one side of it Bannister, on the other Miss Messiter and her foreman.Instantly the two men slid from their horses on the farther side, dragged down the young woman behind the cover of the broncos, and arranged the three ponies so as to give her the greatest protection available.Somehow the weapons that garnished them had leaped to their hands before their feet touched the ground.
"That coyote isn't one of our men.I'll back that opinion high," said McWilliams promptly.
"Who is he?" the girl whispered.
"That's what we're going to find out pretty soon," returned Bannistergrimly."Chances are it's me he is trying to gather.Now, I'm going to make a break for that cottonwood.When I go, you better run up a white handkerchief and move back from the firing-line.Turn Buck loose when you leave.He'll stay around and come when I whistle."He made a run for it, zigzagging through the sage-brush so swiftly as to offer the least certain mark possible for a sharpshooter.Yet twice the rifle spoke before he reached the cottonwood.
Meanwhile Mac had fastened the handkerchief of his mistress on the end of a switch he had picked up and was edging out of range.His tense, narrowed gaze never left the bush-clump from which the shots were being pumped, and he was careful during their retreat to remain on the danger side of the road, in order to cover Helen.
"I guess Bannister's right.He don't want us, whoever he is."And even as he murmured it, the wind of a bullet lifted his hat from his head.He picked it up and examined it.The course of the bullet was marked by a hole in the wide brim, and two more in the side and crown.
"He ce'tainly ventilated it proper.I reckon, ma'am, we'll make a run for it.Lie low on the pinto's neck, with your haid on the off side.That's right.Let him out."A mile and a half farther up the road Mac reined in, and made the Indian peace-sign.Two dejected figures came over the hill and resolved themselves into punchers of the Lazy D.Each of them trailed a rifle by his side.
"You're a fine pair of ring-tailed snorters, ain't y'u?" jeered the foreman."Got to get gay and go projectin' round on the shoot after y'u got your orders to stay hitched.Anything to say for yo'selves?"If they had it was said very silently.
"Now, Miss Messiter is going to pass it up this time, but from now on y'u don't go off on any private massacrees while y'u punch at the Lazy D.Git that? This hyer is the last call for supper in the dining-cah.If y'u miss it, y'u'll feed at some other chuckhouse." Suddenly the drawl of his sarcasm vanished.His voice carried the ring of peremptory command."Jim, y'u go back to the ranch with Miss Messiter, AND KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN.Missou, I need y'u.We're going back.I reckon y'u betterhang on to the stirrup, for we got to travel some.Adios, senorita!"He was off at a slow lope on the road he had just come, the other man running beside the horse.Presently he stopped, as if the arrangement were not satisfactory; and the second man swung behind him on the pony.Later, when she turned in her saddle, she saw that they had left the road and were cutting across the plain, as if to take the sharpshooter in the rear.
Her troubled thoughts stayed with her even after she had reached the ranch.She was nervously excited, keyed up to a high pitch; for she knew that out on the desert, within a mile or two of her, men were stalking each other with life or death in the balance as the price of vigilance, skill and an unflawed steel nerve.While she herself had been in danger, she had been mistress of her fear.But now she could do nothing but wait, after ordering out such reinforcements as she could recruit without delay; and the inaction told upon her swift, impulsive temperament.Once, twice, the wind brought to her a faint sound.
She had been pacing the porch, but she stopped, white as a sheet.Behind those faint explosions might lie a sinister tragedy.Her mind projected itself into a score of imaginary possibilities.She listened, breathless in her tensity, but no further echo of that battlefield reached her.The sun still shone warmly on brown Wyoming.She looked down into a rolling plain that blurred in the distance from knobs and flat spaces into a single stretch that included a thousand rises and depressions.That roll of country teemed with life, but the steady, inexorable sun beat down on what seemed a shining, primeval waste of space.Yet somewhere in that space the tragedy was being determined--unless it had been already enacted.
She wanted to scream.The very stillness mocked her.So, too, did the clicking windmill, with its monotonous regularity.Her pony still stood saddled in the yard.She knew that her place was at home, and she fought down a dozen times the tremendous impulse to mount and fly to the field of combat.
She looked at her watch.How slowly the minutes dragged! It could not be only five minutes since she had looked last time.Again she fell to pacing the long west porch, and interrupted herself a dozen times to stop and listen.
"I can bear it no longer," she told herself at last, and in another moment was in the saddle plying her pinto with the quirt.
But before she reached the first cottonwoods she saw them coming.Her glasses swept the distant group, and with a shiver she made out the dreadful truth.They were coming slowly, carrying something between them.The girl did not need to be told that the object they were bringing home was their dead or wounded.
A figure on horseback detached itself from the huddle of men and galloped towards her.He was coming to break the news.But who was the victim? Bannister or McWilliams she felt sure, by reason of the sinking heart in her; and then it came home that she would be hard hit if it were either.
The approaching rider began to take distinct form through her glasses.As he pounded forward she recognized him.It was the man nicknamed Denver.The wind was blowing strongly from her to him, and while he was still a hundred yards away she hurled her question.
His answer was lost in the wind sweep, but one word of it she caught.That word was "Mac."
