The Best Western Novels of William MacLeod Raine. William MacLeod Raine
does it mean?"
"Branding!" cried the girl.
"That's right—branding. And when the cow is dead what does it mean?" Brill asked, his eyes full on Phil.
"Rustling!" she breathed again.
"You've said it, Phyl. We've got one of them at last," he cried jubilantly.
Phil, hanging between doubt and suspicion and shame, brightened at the enthusiasm of the other.
"Right you are, Brill. We'll solve this mystery once for all."
Healy, unstrapping the case in which lay his rifle, shot a question at the boy. "Armed, Phil?"
The lad nodded. "I brought my six-gun for rattlesnakes."
"Are you going to—to——" cried Phyllis, the color gone from her face.
"We're going to capture him alive if we can, Phyl. You're to wait right here till we come back. You may hear shooting. Don't let that worry you. We've got the drop on him, or will have. Nobody is going to get hurt if he acts sensible," Healy reassured.
"Don't you move from here. You stay right where you are," her brother ordered sharply.
"Yes," she said, and was aware that her throat was suddenly parched. "You'll be careful, won't you, Phil?"
"Sure," he called back, as he put his horse at a canter to follow his friend up the draw.
The sound of the hoofs died away, and she was alone. That they were going to circle in and out among the tangle of hills until they were opposite the miscreant, she knew, but in spite of Brill's promise she had a heart of water. With trembling fingers she raised the glasses again, and focused them on that point which was to be the centre of the drama.
The man was moving about now, quite unconscious of the danger that menaced him. What she looked at was the great crime of Cattleland. All her life she had been taught to hold it in horror. But now something human in her was deeper than her detestation of the cowardly and awful thing this man had just done. She wanted to cry out to him a warning, and did in a faint, ineffective voice that carried not a tenth of the distance between them.
She had promised to remain where she was, but her tense interest in what was doing drew her forward in spite of herself. She rode along the ridge that bordered the park, at first slowly and then quicker as the impulse grew in her to be in at the finish.
The climax came. She saw him look round quickly, and in an instant his pony was at the gallop and he was lying low on its neck. A shot rang out, and another, but without checking his flight. He turned in the saddle and waved a derisive hand at the shooters, then plunged into a wash and disappeared.
What inspired her she could never tell. Perhaps it was her indignation at the thing he had done, perhaps her anger at that mocking wave of the hand with which he had vanished. She wheeled her horse, and put it at a canter down the nearest draw so as to try to intercept him at right angles. Her heart beat fast with excitement, but she was conscious of no fear.
Before she had covered half the distance, she knew she was going to be too late to cut off his retreat. Faintly, she heard the rhythm of hoofs striking the rocky bottom of the draw. Abruptly they ceased. Wondering what that could mean, she found her answer presently. For the pounding of the galloping broncho had renewed itself, and closer. The man was riding up the gulch toward her. He had turned into its mesquite-laced entrance for a hiding place. Phyllis drew rein, and waited quietly to confront him, but with a pulse that hammered the moments for her.
A white-stockinged roan, plowing a way through heavy sand, labored into view round the bend, its rider slewed in the saddle with his whole attention upon the possible pursuit. Not until he was almost upon her did the man turn. With a startled exclamation at sight of the motionless figure, he pulled up sharply. It was the nester, Keller.
"You," she cried.
"Happy to meet you, Miss Sanderson," he told her jauntily.
His revolver slid into its holster, and his hat came off in a low bow. White, even teeth gleamed in a sardonic smile.
"So you are a—rustler," she told him scornfully.
"I hate to contradict a lady," he came back, with a kind of bitter irony.
She saw something else, a deepening stain that soaked slowly down his shirt sleeve.
"You are wounded."
"Am I?"
"Aren't you?"
"Come to think of it, I believe I am," he laughed shortly.
"Badly?"
"I haven't got the doctor's report yet." There was a gleam of whimsical gayety in his eyes as he added: "I was going to find him when I had the good luck to meet up with you."
He was a hunted miscreant, wounded, riding for his life as a hurt wolf dodges to shake off the pursuit, but strangely enough her gallant heart thrilled to the indomitable pluck of him. Never had she seen a man who looked more the vagabond enthroned. His crisp bronze curls and his superb shoulders were bathed in the sunpour. Not once, since his eyes had fallen on her, had he looked back to see if his hunters had picked up the lost trail. He was as much at ease as if his whole thought at meeting her were the pleasure of the encounter.
"Can you ride?" she demanded.
"I can stick on a hawss if it's plumb gentle. Leastways I've been trying to for twenty years," he drawled.
Her impatient gesture waved his flippancy aside. "I mean, are you too much hurt to ride? I'm not going to leave you here like a wounded coyote. Can you follow me if I lead the way?"
"Yes, ma'am."
She turned. He followed her obediently, but with a ghost of a smile still flickering on his face.
"Am I your prisoner, Miss Sanderson?" he presently wanted to know.
"I'm not thinking of prisoners just now," she answered shortly, with an anxious backward glance.
Presently she pulled up and wheeled her horse, so that when he halted they sat facing each other.
"Let me see your arm," she ordered.
Obediently he held out to her the one that happened to be nearest. It was the unwounded one. An angry spark gleamed in her eye.
"This is no time to be fresh. Give me the other."
"Yes, ma'am." he answered, with deceptive meekness.
Without comment, she turned back the sleeve which came to the wrist gauntlet, and discovered a furrow ridged by a rifle bullet. It was a clean flesh wound, neither deep nor long enough to cause him trouble except for the immediate loss of blood. To her inexperience it looked pretty bad.
"A plumb scratch," he explained.
She took the kerchief from her neck, and tied it about the hurt, then pulled down the sleeve and buttoned it over the brown forearm. All this she did quite impersonally, her face free of the least sympathy.
"Thank you, ma'am. You're a right friendly enemy."
"It isn't a matter of friendship at all. One couldn't leave a wounded jack rabbit in pain," she retorted coldly, taking up the trail again.
There was room for two abreast, and he chose to ride beside her. "So you tied me up because it was your Christian duty," he soliloquized aloud. "Just the same as if I had been a mangy coyote that was suffering."
"Exactly."
He let his cool eyes rest on her with a hint of amusement. "And what were you thinking of doing with me now, ma'am?"
"I'm going to take you up to Jim Yeager's mine. He is doing his assessment work now, and he'll look out for you for a day or two."
"Look out for me in a locked room?" he wanted to know casually.
"I didn't say so. It isn't my business to arrest criminals," she told him icily.
His