In less than thirty seconds the first of the hunt appeared well behind him. They made no delay. In the tangle of hills before them, a dozen Diablos, with a dozen giant Bull Hunters, might be riding. Straightforward they spurred their mounts. Another group and another followed, drawing in toward the center, spurring hard. Their voices crashed against the opposite slopes, and in another moment were lost in the confusion of hills.
The last group and the closest drove past the clump of lodge-poles, not fifty feet away. Certainly they could have seen the outlines of the horse hidden among the saplings and pinned helpless there, but they had no time for a sideward glance. They were too busy closing in toward the center.
Bull Hunter waited until these too had passed out of sight, and then he sent Diablo out of the thicket, cantering straight back toward the Dunbar ranch.
Chapter XVI
A Knight-Errant
It had been Mary Hood who heard the cry: “Bull Hunter is here, up to some deviltry. Everybody out!” And it was she who stood on the veranda, dressed in white, and looked down to the giant, as he waved his hat.
When the hunt swept after the fugitive, into the forest behind the stables, she ran up to a top window of the big house. Here, with a pair of field glasses, she followed the chase across the rolling ground, her heart leaping involuntarily in sympathy with the magnificent black and his endangered rider. When they disappeared, even Hal Dunbar, far to the rear, his gray laboring under the weight of his big master, she turned from the window and went thoughtfully down to her own room.
She was remembering that first day when Bull Hunter came to the house of Dunbar, a mighty man indeed, as tall as Hal Dunbar and as bulky, with an even greater suggestion of muscular power. To most people he seemed inhumanly large, but the girl, accustomed all her life to the gigantic Dunbar, looked on the size of Bull Hunter as a more or less common thing.
As she recalled it, the stranger on that first day had talked like a child, simply and directly; but Hal Dunbar had told her that Hunter was a snake in the grass; and before the stranger left the house, he had shot down her father, the redoubtable Jack Hood, and left him dangerously wounded. That made him the mortal enemy, not only of Jack Hood but of all the Dunbars, for Jack Hood was something more than a mere foreman of the great ranch. He had directed it for half his life, his daughter was the prospective wife of Hal, the young owner, and Jack Hood himself was really an integral part of the owner’s household.
Yet, thinking of the stranger, she found that she did not hate him as she should. No matter how terrible he might be to men, she felt that she could control him by as small a thing as the lifting of her finger. There was even something horrible in the way in which the Dunbar men had rushed out at the first appearance of the poor fellow, like a pack of wolves.
By this time perhaps, he was dead; or his death would come certainly before noon, since no one man could be expected to escape from so many hard riders. And at his death
At this point in her reflections a deep, smooth bass voice, outside the house, cut in on her thoughts: “Mary Hood! Oh, Mary Hood!”
And she knew, though she had only heard that voice on one occasion, that it was Bull Hunter who called. She ran to the window. There he stood, tall and mighty, beside the shining stallion. He was unchanged, only a little leaner and harder and more tanned of face, a trifle more alert in carriage.
She looked on him with a shrinking of the heart, as if he were a ghost of the broad daylight. She had seen him, it seemed, only a moment before, riding across the rolling pasture lands, with the stream of hunters behind him, and now he stood here alone. She rubbed her eyes; the vision persisted.
“Mary Hood!” he was calling again. “Oh, Mary Hood!”
The madman! Did he not know that if there were one able-bodied man in the house, he would be shot down like a dog if that call were heard? Lucky for him that every soul had taken to the saddle for the hunt! And then, remembering that she was alone in the place, she trembled with a new fear. But only for a moment, and then she was calm again. She went boldly to the window and leaned out a little.
He saw her at once and, for a moment, stared up without speaking. Then he dragged off his sombrero, leaving his hair wild and blowing. It was more than an act of courtesy. There was a touch of worship in the gesture and in the uplifted face that made her uneasy. Then he raised a locket on a chain.
“I have brought back to you,” he said, “something that was taken from your father.”
And for this he had been hunted away like a mad dog! She cried out one grateful word and then hurried downstairs, through the big house and onto the veranda. There she paused a moment.
Seen from the level he was larger than from above, and since she had first known him, there had come into his face that wild, uneasy look which she had noted, once or twice before, in outcasts of the mountains. He was holding up the locket and smiling. No matter what he had done, no matter if he had killed every one of the men who had hunted him, she had no cause to fear him. She went down the steps from the veranda very slowly and crossed the terrace. When she had taken the locket she drew back in surprise at the temerity which had led her to face this man alone.
“I took it from the man who stole it from your father,” he said simply. “I knew that you would be unhappy without it.”
He talked slowly to the girl, picking his words. With Pete Reeve he used the rough language of the cow-punchers, but the girl appealed in a different way, and there was enough knowledge of good English in him to enable him to respond.
“They shall all know about it,” she answered. “They shall all know why you came here, to be driven away like a dog! But how did you break through them? And if you fought my father”
“There was no fight. I ran away from them and hid and then came back.”
A quiet way of stating a remarkable fact, for how could one man hide from twenty, on ground which the twenty knew like the pages of a book? But she felt at once that he could never be induced to talk about his personal exploits. She found herself smiling at him with a new liking.
“It was so lucky that the thief mean your friend” She found herself involved in a hopeless mess of words. Of course the thief was some partner of Bull Hunter’s.
“He is a thief,” said Bull, “but he is not my friend. I am an honest man - so far.”
At least he had taken no offense; but she knew that she was crimson. She could tell it by the wonder with which the big man searched her face.
He went on talking to spare her embarrassment. “Because I knew him well enough to learn he had this locket in his possession, you thought he was my friend. But even if I live with thieves, I am not a thief, Mary Hood.”
“Of course you aren’t. And I”
“I didn’t care anything about the locket when he first showed it to me,” he continued, “until I saw the faceit is very like you.” He paused a moment. “It was hard for me to bring it back.”
“You have done so much to bring a mere locket back to me?” she asked, thrilling at the thought of it. “And, besides the long journey, to face all of Hal’s men”
He broke in as she paused, and he was frowning in his honesty and bewilderment as to the choice of words. “It isn’t just to bring you the locket,” he went on. “I wanted to see you a lot, and I wanted to see you smile, perhaps, when you took the locket. I guess that’s the chief reason.”
She was somewhere between blushing and laughter at his painful simplicity.
“Otherwise,” he continued, “I could have found some one else to take it back, some one who wouldn’t have been in any danger from your friends. So you see what I have done has been quite bad. It made so many men ride so hard.”