Chapter IX
The Man on the Bed
Beulah Rutherford found it impossible to resume a relation offriendliness toward her guest. By nature she was elemental and direct.A few months earlier she had become the teacher of the Big Creekschool, but until that time life had never disciplined her to repressthe impulses of her heart. As a child she had been a fierce, wildlittle creature full of savage affections and generosities. She stillretained more feminine ferocity than social usage permits her sex. Itwas not in her to welcome an enemy with smiles while she hated him inher soul. The best she could do was to hold herself to a brusquecivility whenever she met Beaudry.
As for that young man, he was in a most unhappy frame of mind. Hewrithed at the false position in which he found himself. It was badenough to forfeit the good opinion of this primitive young hill beauty,but it was worse to know that in a measure he deserved it. He saw,too, that serious consequences were likely to follow her discovery, andhe waited with nerves on the jump for the explosion.
None came. When he dragged himself to dinner, Beulah was stiff as aramrod, but he could note no difference in the manner of the rest. Wasit possible she had not told her father? He did not think this likely,and his heart was in panic all through the meal.
Though he went to his room early, he spent a sleepless night full ofapprehension. What were the Rutherfords waiting for? He was convincedthat something sinister lay behind their silence.
After breakfast the ranchman rode away. Jeff and Slim Sanders joggedoff on their cowponies to mend a broken bit of fence. Hal sat on theporch replacing with rivets the torn strap of a stirrup.
Beaudry could stand it no longer. He found his hostess digging aroundthe roots of some rosebushes in her small garden. Curtly she declinedhis offer to take the spade. For a minute he watched her uneasilybefore he blurted out his intention of going.
"I'll move up to the other end of the park and talk windmill to theranchers there, Miss Rutherford. You've been awfully good to me, but Iwon't impose myself on your hospitality any longer," he said.
He had dreaded to make the announcement for fear of precipitating acrisis, but the young woman made no protest. Without a word of commentshe walked beside him to the house.
"Hal, will you get Mr. Street's horse?" she asked her brother. "He isleaving this morning."
Young Rutherford's eyes narrowed. It was plain that he had been caughtby surprise and did not know what to do.
"Where you going?" he asked.
"What do you care where he is going? Get the horse--or I will," sheordered imperiously.
"I'm going to board at one of the ranches farther up the park,"explained Roy.
"Better wait till dad comes home," suggested Hal.
"No, I'll go now." Royal Beaudry spoke with the obstinacy of a timidman who was afraid to postpone the decision.
"No hurry, is there?" The black eyes of Rutherford fixed him steadily.
His sister broke in impatiently. "Can't he go when he wants to, Hal?Get Mr. Street's horse." She whirled on Beaudry scornfully. "That iswhat you call yourself, isn't it--Street?"
The unhappy youth murmured "Yes."
"Let him get his own horse if he wants to hit the trail in such ahurry," growled Hal sulkily.
Beulah walked straight to the stable. Awkwardly Beaudry followed herafter a moment or two. The girl was leading his horse from the stall.
"I'll saddle him, Miss Rutherford," he demurred, the blanket in hishand.
She looked at him a moment, dropped the bridle, and turned stifflyaway. He understood perfectly that she had been going to saddle thehorse to justify the surface hospitality of the Rutherfords to a manthey despised.
Hal was still on the porch when Roy rode up, but Beulah was nowhere insight. The young hillman did not look up from the rivet he wasdriving. Beaudry swung to the ground and came forward.
"I'm leaving now. I should like to tell Miss Rutherford how much I'min her debt for taking a stranger in so kindly," he faltered.
"I reckon you took her in just as much as she did you, Mr. Spy."Rutherford glowered at him menacingly. "I'd advise you to straddlethat horse and git."
Roy controlled his agitation except for a slight trembling of thefingers that grasped the mane of his cowpony. "You've used a word thatisn't fair. I didn't come here to harm any of your people. If I couldexplain to Miss Rutherford--"
She stood in the doorway, darkly contemptuous. Fire flashed in hereyes, but the voice of the girl was coldly insolent.
"It is not necessary," she informed him.
Her brother leaned forward a little. His crouched body looked like acoiled spring in its tenseness. "Explain yourself down that road, Mr.Street--_pronto_," he advised.
Beaudry flashed a startled glance at him, swung to the saddle, and wasaway at a canter. The look in Rutherford's glittering eyes had sent aflare of fear over him. The impulse of it had lifted him to the backof the horse and out of the danger zone.
But already he was flogging himself with his own contempt. He hadgiven way to panic before a girl who had been brought up to despise aquitter. She herself had nerves as steady as chilled steel. He hadseen her clench her strong white little teeth without a murmur througha long afternoon of pain. Gameness was one of the fundamentals of hercreed, and he had showed the white feather. It added to hispunishment, too, that he worshiped pluck with all the fervor of one whoknew he had none. Courage seemed to him the one virtue worth while;cowardice the unpardonable sin. He made no excuses for himself. Fromhis father he inherited the fine tradition of standing up to punishmentto a fighting finish. His mother, too, had been a thoroughbred. Yethe was a weakling. His heart pumped water instead of blood wheneverthe call to action came.
In dejection he rode up the valley, following the same hilly trail hehad taken two days before with Miss Rutherford. It took him past theaspen grove at the mouth of the gulch which led to the Meldrum place.Beyond this a few hundred yards he left the main road and went throughthe chaparral toward a small ranch that nestled close to the timber.Beulah had told him that it belonged to an old German named Rothgerberwho had lived there with his wife ever since she could remember.
Rothgerber was a little wrinkled old man with a strong South-Germanaccent. After Beaudry had explained that he wanted board, the ranchercalled his wife out and the two jabbered away excitedly in their nativetongue. The upshot of it was that they agreed to take the windmillagent if he would room in an old bunkhouse about two hundred yards fromthe main ranch building. This happened to suit Roy exactly and heclosed the matter by paying for a week in advance.
The Rothgerbers were simple, unsuspecting people of a garrulous nature.It was easy for Beaudry to pump information from them while he atesupper. They had seen nothing of any stranger in the valley excepthimself, but they dropped casually the news that the Rutherfords hadbeen going in and out of Chicito Canon a good deal during the past fewdays.
"Chicito Canon. That's a Mexican name, isn't it? Let's see. Justwhere is this gulch?" asked Beaudry.
The old German pointed out of the window. "There it iss, mein friend.You pass by on the road and there iss no way in--no arroyo, no gulch,no noddings but aspens. But there iss, shust the same, a trail.Through my pasture it leads."
"Anybody live up Chicito? I want everybody in the park to get a chanceto buy a Dynamo Aermotor before I leave."
"A man named Meldrum. My advice iss--let him alone."
"Why?"
Rothgerber shook a pudgy forefinger in the air. "Mein friend--listen.You are a stranger in Huerfano Park. Gut. But do not ask questionsabout those who lif here. Me, I am an honest man. I keep the law.Also I mind my own pusiness. So it iss with many. But there areothers--mind, I gif them no names, but--" He shrugged his shouldersand threw out his hands, palm up. "Well, the less said the petter. IfI keep my tongue still, I do not talk myself into trouble. Not so,Berta?"
The pippin-cheeked little woman nodded her head s
agely.
In the course of the next few days Roy rode to and fro over the parktrying to sell his windmill to the ranchers. He secured two orders andthe tentative promise of others. But he gained no clue as to the placewhere Dingwell was hidden. His intuition told him that the trail upChicito Canon would lead him to the captive cattleman. Twice heskirted the dark gash of the ravine at the back of the pasture, buteach time his heart failed at the plunge into its unknown dangers. Thefirst time he persuaded himself that he had better make the attempt atnight, but when he stood on the brink in the darkness the gulf at hisfeet looked like a veritable descent into Avernus. If he should becaught down here, his fate would be sealed. What Meldrum and Tighewould do to a spy was not a matter of conjecture. The thought of itbrought goose-quills to his flesh and tiny beads of perspiration to hisforehead.
Still, the peril had to be faced. He decided to go up the canon in theearly morning before the travel of the day had begun. The night beforehe made the venture he prepared an alibi by telling Mrs. Rothgerberthat he would not come to breakfast, as he wanted to get an early startfor his canvassing. The little German woman bustled about and wrappedup for him a cold lunch to eat at his cabin in the morning. She likedthis quiet, good-looking young man whose smile was warm for a womanalmost old enough to be his grandmother. It was not often she met anyone with the charming deference he showed her. Somehow he reminded herof her own Hans, who had died from the kick of a horse ten years since.
Roy slept in broken cat-naps full of fearful dreams, from which he wokein terror under the impression that he was struggling helplessly in thenet of a great spider which had the cruel, bloodless face of Tighe. Itwas three o'clock when he rose and began to dress. He slipped out ofthe cabin into the wet pasture. His legs were sopping wet from thelong grass through which he strode to the edge of the gulch. On a flatboulder he sat shivering in the darkness while he waited for the firstgray streaks of light to sift into the dun sky.
In the dim dawn he stumbled uncertainly down the trail into the canon,the bottom of which was still black as night from a heavy growth ofyoung aspens that shut out the light. There was a fairly well-wornpath leading up the gulch, so that he could grope his way forwardslowly. His feet moved reluctantly. It seemed to him that his nerves,his brain, and even his muscles were in revolt against the moralcompulsion that drove him on. He could feel his heart beating againsthis ribs. Every sound startled him. The still darkness took him bythe throat. Doggedly he fought against the panic impulse to turn andfly.
If he quit now, he told himself, he could never hold his self-respect.He thought of all those who had come into his life in connection withthe Big Creek country trouble. His father, his mother, Dave Dingwell,Pat Ryan, Jess Tighe, the whole Rutherford clan, including Beulah! Onequality they all had in common, the gameness to see out to a finishanything they undertook. He could not go through life a confessedcoward. The idea was intolerably humiliating.
Then, out of the past, came to him a snatch of nonsense verse:--
"Li'l' ole hawss an' li'l' ole cow, Amblin' along by the ole haymow, Li'l' ole hawss took a bite an' a chew, 'Durned if I don't,' says the ole cow, too."
So vivid was his impression of the doggerel that for an instant hethought he heard the sing-song of his father's tuneless voice. Insharp, clean-cut pictures his memory reproduced the night John Beaudryhad last chanted the lullaby and that other picture of the Homericfight of one man against a dozen. The foolish words were a bracer tohim. He set his teeth and ploughed forward, still with a quaking soul,but with a kind of despairing resolution.
After a mile of stiff going, the gulch opened to a little valley on theright-hand side. On the edge of a pine grove, hardly a stone's throwfrom where Roy stood, a Mexican _jacal_ looked down into the canon.The hut was a large one. It was built of upright poles daubed withclay. Sloping poles formed the roof, the chinks of which werewaterproofed with grass. A wolf pelt, nailed to the wall, was hangingup to dry.
He knew that this was the home of Meldrum, the ex-convict.
Beaudry followed a bed of boulders that straggled toward the pinegrove. It was light enough now, and he had to move with caution so asto take advantage of all the cover he could find. Once in the grove,he crawled from tree to tree. The distance from the nearest pine tothe jacal was about thirty feet. A clump of _cholla_ grew thick justoutside the window. Roy crouched behind the trunk for several minutesbefore he could bring himself to take the chance of covering that lastten yards. But every minute it was getting lighter. Every minuteincreased the likelihood of detection. He crept fearfully to the hut,huddled behind the cactus, and looked into the window.
A heavy-set man, with the muscle-bound shoulders of an ape, waslighting a fire in the stove. At the table, his thumbs hitched in asagging revolver belt, sat Ned Rutherford. The third person in theroom lay stretched at supple ease on a bed to one of the posts of whichhis right leg was bound. He was reading a newspaper.
"Get a move on you, Meldrum," young Rutherford said jauntily, with aneye on his prisoner to see how he took it. "I've got insideinformation that I need some hot cakes, a few slices of bacon, and acup of coffee. How about it, Dave? Won't you order breakfast, too?"
The man on the bed shook his head indifferently. "Me, I'm taking thefast cure. I been reading that we all eat too much, anyhow. What'sthe use of stuffing--gets yore system all clogged up. Now, takeEdison--he don't eat but a handful of rice a day."
"That's one handful more than you been eating for the past three days.Better come through with what we want to know. This thing ain't goingto get any better for you. A man has got to eat to live."
"I'm trying out another theory. Tell you-all about how it works in aweek or so. I reckon after a time I'll get real hungry, but it don'tseem like I could relish any chuck yet." The cattleman fell toperusing his paper once more.
Royal Beaudry had never met his father's friend, Dave Dingwell, but heneeded no introduction to this brown-faced man who mocked his guardwith such smiling hardihood. They were trying to starve the secret outof him. Already his cheek showed thin and gaunt, dark circles shadowedthe eyes. The man, no doubt, was suffering greatly, yet his mannergave no sign of it. He might not be master of his fate; at least, hewas very much the captain of his soul. Pat Ryan had described him in asentence. "One hundred and ninety pounds of divil, and ivery ounce ofivery pound true gold." There could not be another man in the BigCreek country that this description fitted as well as it did thisstarving, jocund dare-devil on the bed.
The savory odor of bacon and of coffee came through the open window toBeaudry where he crouched in the chaparral. He heard Meldrum's brusque"Come and get it," and the sound of the two men drawing up their chairsto the table.
"What's the use of being obstinate, Dave?" presently asked Rutherfordfrom amid a pleasant chink of tin cups, knives, and forks. "I'd a heaprather treat you like a white man. This 'Pache business doesn't make ahit with me. But I'm obeying orders. Anyhow, it's up to you. Thechuck-wagon is ready for you whenever you say the word."
"I don't reckon I'll say it, Ned. Eating is just a habit. One manwants his eggs sunny side up; another is strong for them hard-boiled.But eggs is eggs. When Dan went visitin' at Santa Fe, he likelychanged his diet. For two or three days he probably didn't like thegrub, then--"
With a raucous curse the former convict swung round on him. A revolverseemed to jump to his hand, but before he could fire, young Rutherfordwas hanging to his wrist.
"Don't you, Dan. Don't you," warned Ned.
Slowly Meldrum's eyes lost their savage glare. "One o' these days I'llpump lead into him unless he clamps that mouth of his'n. I won't standfor it." His voice trailed into a string of oaths.
Apparently his host's fury at this reference to his convict days didnot disturb in the least the man on the bed. His good-natured drawlgrew slightly more pronounced. "Wall yore eyes and wave yore tail allyou've a mind to, Dan. I was certainly some ind
iscreet reminding youof those days when you was a guest of the Government."
"That's enough," growled Meldrum, slamming his big fist down on thetable so that the tinware jumped.
"Sure it's enough. Too much. Howcome I to be so forgetful? If I'dwore a uniform two years for rustling other folks' calves, I reckon Iwouldn't thank a guy--"
But Meldrum had heard all he could stand. He had to do murder or getout. He slammed the coffee-pot down on the floor and bolted out of theopen door. His arms whirled in violent gestures as he strode away. Anunbroken stream of profanity floated back to mark his anabasis.
Meldrum did not once look round as he went on his explosive way to thegulch, but Roy Beaudry crouched lower behind the cactus until the manhad disappeared. Then he crawled back to the grove, slipped throughit, and crept to the shelter of the boulder bed.
It would not do for him to return down the canon during daylight, forfear he might meet one of the Rutherfords coming to relieve Ned. Hepassed from one boulder to another, always working up toward the wallof the gulch. Behind a big piece of sandstone shaped like a flatironhe lay down and waited for the hours to pass.
It was twilight when he stole down to the trail and began his returnjourney.