THE HUNTED WOMAN (Western Thriller). James Oliver Curwood
way in which Joanne had taken his invitation was as delightful as it was new to him. She had become both guest and hostess. With her lovely arms bared halfway to the shoulders she rolled out a batch of biscuits. "Hot biscuits go so well with marmalade," she told him. He built a fire. Beyond that, and bringing in the water, she gave him to understand that his duties were at an end, and that he could smoke while she prepared the supper. With the beginning of dusk he closed the cabin door that he might have an excuse for lighting the big hanging lamp a little earlier. He had imagined how its warm glow would flood down upon the thick soft coils of her shining hair.
Every fibre in him throbbed with a keen and exquisite satisfaction as he sat down opposite her. During the meal he looked into the quiet, velvety blue of her eyes a hundred times. He found it a delightful sensation to talk to her and look into those eyes at the same time. He told her more about himself than he had ever told another soul. It was she who spoke first of the manuscript upon which he was working. He had spoken of certain adventures that had led up to the writing of one of his books.
"And this last book you are writing, which you call 'Mothers,'" she said. "Is it to be like 'Fair Play?'"
"It was to have been the last of the trilogy. But it won't be now, Ladygray. I've changed my mind."
"But it is so nearly finished, you say?"
"I would have completed it this week. I was rushing it to an end at fever heat when—you came."
He saw the troubled look in her eyes, and hastened to add:
"Let us not talk about that manuscript, Ladygray. Some day I will let you read it, and then you will understand why your coming has not hurt it. At first I was unreasonably disturbed because I thought that I must finish it within a week from to-day. I start out on a new adventure then—a strange adventure, into the North."
"That means—the wild country?" she asked. "Up there in the North—there are no people?"
"An occasional Indian, perhaps a prospector now and then," he said. "Last year I travelled a hundred and twenty-seven days without seeing a human face except that of my Cree companion."
She had leaned a little over the table, and was looking at him intently, her eyes shining.
"That is why I have understood you, and read between the printed lines in your books," she said. "If I had been a man, I would have been a great deal like you. I love those things—loneliness, emptiness, the great spaces where you hear only the whisperings of the winds and the fall of no other feet but your own. Oh, I should have been a man! It was born in me. It was a part of me. And I loved it—loved it."
A poignant grief had shot into her eyes. Her voice broke almost in a sob. Amazed, he looked at her in silence across the table.
"You have lived that life, Ladygray?" he said after a moment. "You have seen it?"
"Yes," she nodded, clasping and unclasping her slim white hands. "For years and years, perhaps even more than you, John Aldous! I was born in it. And it was my life for a long time—until my father died." She paused, and he saw her struggling to subdue the quivering throb in her throat. "We were inseparable," she went on, her voice becoming suddenly strange and quiet. "He was father, mother—everything to me. It was too wonderful. Together we hunted out the mysteries and the strange things in the out-of-the-way places of the earth. It was his passion. He had given birth to it in me. I was always with him, everywhere. And then he died, soon after his discovery of that wonderful buried city of Mindano, in the heart of Africa. Perhaps you have read——"
"Good God," breathed Aldous, so low that his voice did not rise above a whisper. "Joanne—Ladygray—you are not speaking of Daniel Gray—Sir Daniel Gray, the Egyptologist, the antiquarian who uncovered the secrets of an ancient and wonderful civilization in the heart of darkest Africa?"
"Yes."
"And you—are his daughter?"
She bowed her head.
Like one in a dream John Aldous rose from his chair and went to her. He seized her hands and drew her up so that they stood face to face. Again that strange and beautiful calmness filled her eyes.
"Our trails have strangely crossed, Lady Joanne," he said. "They have been crossing—for years. While Sir Daniel was at Murja, on the eve of his great discovery, I was at St. Louis on the Senegal coast. I slept in that little Cape Verde hotel, in the low whitewashed room overlooking the sea. The proprietor told me that Sir Daniel had occupied it before me, and I found a broken fountain pen in the drawer of that sickly black teakwood desk, with the carved serpent's head. And I was at Gampola at another time, headed for the interior of Ceylon, when I learned that I was travelling again one of Sir Daniel's trails. And you were with him!"
"Always," said Joanne.
For a few tense moments they had looked steadily into each other's eyes. Swiftly, strangely, the world was bridging itself for them. Their minds swept back swiftly as the fire in a thunder-sky. They were no longer strangers. They were no longer friends of a day. The grip of Aldous' hands tightened. A hundred things sprang to his lips. Before he could speak, he saw a sudden, startled change leap into Joanne's face. She had turned her face a little, so that she was looking toward the window. A frightened cry broke from her lips. Aldous whirled about. There was nothing there. He looked at Joanne again. She was white and trembling. Her hands were clutched at her breast. Her eyes, big and dark and staring, were still fixed on the window.
"That man!" she panted. "His face was there—against the glass—like a devil's!"
"Quade?"
"Yes."
She caught at his arm as he sprang toward the door.
"Stop!" she cried. "You mustn't go out——"
For a moment he turned at the door. He was as she had seen him in Quade's place, terribly cool, a strange, quiet smile on his lips. His eyes were gray, smiling steel.
"Close the door after me and lock it until I return," he said. "You are the first woman guest I ever had, Ladygray. I cannot allow you to be insulted!"
As he went out she saw him slip something from his pocket. She caught the glitter of it in the lamp-glow.
CHAPTER VII
It was in the blood of John Aldous to kill Quade. He ran with the quickness of a hare around the end of the cabin, past the window, and then stopped to listen, his automatic in his hand, his eye piercing the gloom for some moving shadow. He had not counted on an instant's hesitation. He would shoot Quade, for he knew why the mottled beast had been at the window. Stevens' boy had been right. Quade was after Joanne. His ugly soul was disrupted with a desire to possess her, and Aldous knew that when roused by passion he was more like a devil-fish than a man—a creeping, slimy, night-seeking creature who had not only the power of the underworld back of him, but wealth as well. He did not think of him as a man as he stood listening, but as a beast. He was ready to shoot. But he saw nothing. He heard no sound that could have been made by a stumbling foot or a moving body. An hour later, the moon would have been up, but it was dark now except for the stars. He heard the hoot of an owl a hundred yards away. Out in the river something splashed. From the timber beyond Buffalo Prairie came the yapping bark of a coyote. For five minutes he stood as silent as one of the rocks behind him. He realized that to go on—to seek blindly for Quade in the darkness, would be folly. He went back, tapped at the door, and reëntered the cabin when Joanne threw back the lock.
She was still pale. Her eyes were bright.
"I was coming—in a moment," she said, "I was beginning to fear that——"
"—he had struck me down in the dark?" added Aldous, as she hesitated. "Well, he would like to do just that, Joanne." Unconsciously her name had slipped from him. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to call her Joanne now. "Is it necessary for me to tell you what this man Quade is—why he was