“Gene,” Shute said abruptly, resting his big hands on the pommel of the saddle, “don’t sell any more supplies to Caradec or any of his crowd.” He added harshly, “I’m not askin’ you.
I’m tellin’ you. And if you do I’ll put you out of business and run you out of the country. You know I don’t make threats. The chances are Caradec won’t be alive by daybreak anyway, but just in case, you’ve been told!” Without giving Baker a chance to reply, Dan Shute touched spurs to his horse and led off down the south trail toward the Crazy Man. The door slammed behind Baker.
“Where are they going?” Ann wanted to know, her eyes wide. “What are they going to do?” Gene stared after them bleakly. This was the end of something. “They are goin’ after Caradec and his crowd, Ann.” “What will they do to him?” Something inside her went sick and frightened. She had always been afraid of Dan Shute. The way he looked at her made her shrink. He was the only human being of whom she had ever been afraid.
He seemed without feeling, without decency, without regard for anything but his own immediate desires. “Kill him,” Baker said. “They’ll kill him. Shute’s a hard man, and with him along, that’s a mighty wicked lot of men.” “But can’t someone warn him?” Ann protested.
Baker glanced at her. “So far as we know, that Caradec is a crook and maybe a killer, Ann. You ain’t gettin’ soft on him, are you?” “No!” she exclaimed, startled. “Of course not!
What an idea! Whv, I’ve scarcely talked to him!” Yet there was a heavy, sinking feeling in her heart as she watched the riders disappear in the dust along the southward trail. If there was only something she could do! If she could warn them! Suddenly she remembered the bay horse her father had given her. Because of the Indians, she had not been riding in a long time, but if she took the mountain trail . . .
Hurrying through the door she swiftly saddled the bay. There was no thought in her mind. She was acting strictly on impulse, prompted by some memory of the way the hair swept back from Rafe’s brow, and the look in his eves when he met her gaze.
She told herself she wanted to see no man killed, that Bo “conHarsh and Johnny Gill were her friends. Yet even in her heart she knew the excuse would not do. She was thinking of Rafe, and only of Rafe. The bay was in fine shape and impatient after his long restraint in the corral. He started for the trail eagerly, and his ears pricked up at every sound. The leaves had turned to red and gold now, and in the air there was a hint of frost. Winter was coming. Soon the country would be blanketed inches deep under a thick covering of snow. Hastily, Ann’s mind leaped ahead. The prairie trail, which the Shiite riders had taken, swept wide into the valley, then crossed the Crazy Man, and turned to follow the stream up the canyon. By cutting across over the mountain trail, there was every chance she could beat them to the ranch. In any case, her lead would be slight, because of the start the bunch had. The trail crossed the mountainside through a long grove of quaking aspens, their leaves shimmering in the cool wind, dark green above, a gray below. Now, with oncoming autumn, most of the leaves had turned to bright yellow intermixed with crimson, and here and there among the forest of mounting color were the darker arrowheads of spruce and lodgepole pine.
Once, coming out in a small clearing, she got a view of the valley below. She had gained a little, but only a little. Frightened, she touched spurs to the bay, and the little horse leaped ahead and swept down through the woods at a rapid gallop.
Ahead, there was a ledge. It was still a good six miles off, however, but from there she could see the canyon of the Crazy Man and the upper canyon. A rider had told her that Caradec had been putting up hay in the wind-sheltered upper canyon and was obviously planning on feeding his stock there by the warm spring.
She recalled it because she remembered it was something her father had spoken of doing. There was room in the upper valley for many cattle, and if there was hay enough for them, the warm water would be a help. With only a little help the cattle could survive even the coldest winter. Fording the stream where Caradec had encountered the young squaw, she rode higher on the mountain, angling across the slope under a magnificent stand of lodgepole pine. It was a splendid avenue of trees, all seemingly of the same size and shape, as though cast from a mold. Once she glimpsed a deer, and another time in the distance in a small, branching valley she saw a small bunch of elk. This was her countrv. No wonder her father had loved it, w-anted it, worked to get and to keep it.
Had he paid the mortgage? But why wouldn’t Bruce have told her if he had? She could not believe him dishonest or deceitful. And certainly he had made no effort to foreclose, but had been most patient and thoughtful with her. What would he think of this ride to earn a man he regarded as an enemy?
But she could not sit idly by and know men were about to be killed. She would never forgive herself if that happened and she had made no effort to avert it.
Too often she had listened to her father discourse on the necessity for peace and consideration of the problems of others. She believed in that policy wholeheartedly, and the fact that occasionally violence was necessary did not alter her convictions one whit. No system of philosophy or ethics, no growth of government, no improvement in living, came without trial and struggle. Struggle, she had often heard her father say, quoting Hegel, was the law of growth.
Without giving too much thought to it, she understood that such men as Rafe Caradec, Trigger Boyne, Tex Brisco, and others of their ilk were needed. For all their violence, their occasional heedlessness and their desire to go their own way, they were men building a new world in a rough and violent land where everything tended to extremes. Mountains were high, the prairies wide, the streams roaring. the buffalo by the thousand and tens of thousands. It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes. The hay pony trotted down the trail and then around a stand of lodgepole. Ann brought hirn up sharply on the lip of the ledge that had been her first goal.
Below her, a vast and magnificent panorama, lay the ranch her father had pioneered. The silver curve of the Crazy Man lay below and east of her, and opposite her ledge was the mighty wall of the canyon. From below, a faint thread of smoke among the trees marked the cabin. Turning her head, she looked west and south into the upper canyon. Far away, she seemed to see a horseman moving, and the black dot of a herd. Turning the bay, she started west, riding fast. If they were working the upper canyon she still had a chance.
An hour later, the little bay showing signs of his rough traveling, she came down to the floor of the canyon. Not far away, she could see Rafe Caradec moving a bunch of cattle into the trees.
He looked around at her approach, and the black, flatcrowned hat came off his head. His dark, wavy hair was plastered to his brow with sweat, and his eyes were gray and curious.
“Good mornin”!” he said. “This is a surprise!” “Please!” she burst out. “This isn’t a social call! Dan Shute’s riding this way with twenty men or more. He’s going to wipe you out!” Rafe’s eyes sharpened. “You sure?” She could see the quick wonder in his eyes at her warning.
Then he wheeled his horse and yelled, “Johnny!
Johnny Gill! Come a-runnin’!” Jerking his rifle from his boot, he looked at her again. He put his hand over hers suddenly, and she started at his touch. “Thanks, Ann,” he said simply. “You’re regular!” Then he was gone, and Johnny Gill was streaking after him. As Gill swept by, he lifted a hand and waved.
There they went. And below were twenty men, all armed. Would they come through alive? She turned the bay and, letting the pony take his own time, started him back over the mountain trail …. Rafe Caradec gave no thought to Ann’s reason for warning him. There was no time for that. Tex Brisco and Bo Marsh were at the cabin. They were probably working outside, and their rifles would probably be in the cabin and beyond them. If they were cut off from their guns, the Shute riders would mow them down, kill them at long range with rifle fire. Rafe heard Gill coming up and slacked off a little to let the little cowhand draw alongside.