Somewhere in her soul she found the courage to murmur: “You are!” But aloud she said: “I’ve run away, Charlie, and there was only one place in the world I could goand that was to you.”
His bewilderment was changing gradually to joy, and then full understanding came upon that slow mind. He checked a gesture as though he would sweep her into his arms, and instead he raised her hand and touched it with his lips.
She loved him for that restraint. He had changed indeed from the Bull Hunter she had first known, growing leaner of face and more active of eye.
He looked years older, and it seemed to the girl that in his eye there was a touch of that same restless light she had noted in the faces of the Dugan men. The brand of the hunted was being printed on him.
Now he drew her to a place sitting between them, and the questions poured out at her. So she told all the story, only lightening the blame on her father for shame’s sake. But when she came to the story of the Dugans, Pete Reeve exclaimed: “I never knew he had it in him. I’ve had the hatchet out for Dugan ten years. Here’s where I bury it.”
“Heaven only knows,” said Charlie Hunter, when the story was ended, “what I’ve done to deserve you, but now that you’re here, I’ll keep you, Mary, to the end of things. Not even Hal Dunbar can take you away while I have Pete Reeve to help. I’d given you up forever. We were going to ride north and get into a new country where neither of us is known. But the three of us can do the same thing. Can you stand the hard travel, Mary?”
Mary Hood laughed, and that was answer enough.
“We can’t keep on the trail we started,” explained Pete Reeve. “I’ll show you why.”
He took her to the edge of the gulch of which Sam Dugan had spoken. It was a full twenty-five feet across and a perilous drop between sheer walls of over eight hundred feet. Once a narrow bridge had been hung across the gorge, now she could see, far below, the broken remnants of it.
“We’ve got to go back and climb around to the right. Costs another day’s work, the breaking of this little bridge.”
“But why do you keep your camp so carelessly?” asked the girl. ”Any one could have surprised you just as I did.”
“No enemy could,” answered Pete Reeve. “There’s our guard, and he can’t be beat.”
He pointed to a great, gray-coated dog who lay stretched at full length among the rocks a little farther down the hill.
“The Ghost knew you,” said Reeve, “or he would of give us warning while you were a thousand yards away. Now we’ll have to pack up and hurry.”
“Somehow,” murmured the girl, “I don’t like the thought of turning back. It seems unlucky.”
“We got to,” answered Pete Reeve, “because we got to make a big circle and come through Patterson City and get a minister. Then we can hit north again.”
To this, of course, she had no reply.
Chapter XXIX
The Sign
When Sam Dugan came back to his camp he gave quick orders.
“Get the shovel, Joe,” he commanded, “and cover that fire. We done a fool thing in starting it in plain daylight. That smoke can be seen about five miles away. Get the hosses ready, Harry. We mooch out of here as fast as we can. We sure stayed too long.”
Indeed, they had never lighted a fire in broad daylight for many a month, but for the sake of Mary Hood they had broken that time-honored custom. When the father saw that the preparations were well under way, he stepped to the edge of the circle of trees and walked around it, keeping an anxious watch on the hill tops and the big, swift slopes of the mountains.
Presently, over a southern crest, he saw four horsemen riding straight for the trees.
“Quick,” he shouted to his sons. “We got to run for it!”
But as he turned back into the trees again his eyes flashed toward the west, and he made out a scattering half dozen more hard riders breaking out of a grove. It was easy to see that the Dugans had been surrounded, and that the aim of all those men was the group of trees from which the smoke had been seen to rise. He made his resolution at once and went back to tell it to his sons.
“They got us dead to rights,” he said quietly. “They’s ten men in sight and maybe ten more coming after them. Boys, we might make a long stand in these trees and hold ‘em off, but they could starve us to death. They’s just one chance we got agin’ bad luck, and that is that these gents ain’t on our trail. If they don’t know us, it’s all right. If they do know us, we’re lost. Now go straight ahead with your packing up, but take it slow. When they’s a bunch of gents around asking questions it’s always a good thing to have plenty to keep your hands busy with. These folks will be here pronto - they’re here now. I’ll do the talking!”
Even as he spoke, the first of the riders crashed through the shrubbery beyond the trees, and a moment later, from every side, ten grim-faced men were in view surrounding the little clearing where the camp fire had burned.
They discovered old Sam Dugan in the act of tamping down the tobacco in his corncob pipe. He continued that work and even lighted the pipe while the leader of the newcomers was speaking. He was such a man as Sam Dugan had never seen. He and his tall sons were dwarfed by the mighty dimensions of this man. The stout gray horse from which he dismounted was down-headed from the weariness of bearing that load. He had been riding long and hard, and the lines of continued exertion had made his handsome face stern.
He looked Sam Dugan fiercely up and down.
“We’ve come on a trail that points pretty straight toward this camp fire you’ve just put out so quickly,” he said. “We want to know if you’ve seen a girl pass this way. A very pretty girl riding a bay mare.
Sam Dugan stopped and rubbed his knuckles through his beard in apparent thought.
“Girl on a bay mare. I dunno, I dunno. Boys, you ain’t seen anybody like that around in sight? Nope, I guess we ain’t seen her, partner. Sorry about it. Runaway, maybe?”
His calm seemed to madden the big stranger, but the latter controlled an outburst.
“Look here, my friend,” he continued, “I’m Hal Dunbar. I’m a little outside of my own country, but if you were down there they’d tell you that I’m a man of my word, and I promise you that if you have seen that girl in passing and can give me any idea where she’s gone, I’ll make it mighty well worth your while to talk.”
“Well,” said Sam Dugan genially, “that sounds to me like pretty easy money, and if I could get hold on it I sure would. But when I don’t know I can’t very well tell, and I guess that’s about all that there is to it.”
“H’m,” said Dunbar growlingly. “It looks that way. But bad luck is certainly following me on this trail. However, we’ll keep trying. Heads up, boys. We’ve got a lot more riding before us, it seems, and I hoped that this might be the end of the trail.”
Jack Hood tapped his friend Riley on the arm. “There’s something a bit queer about it,” he said to Riley. “That fire was burning high just a minute ago. Look at that stick poking out through the dirt. It ain’t half charred. That fire wasn’t burned out by no means. But inside of five minutes they got that fire covered and their packs about made up. I admit there ain’t very much in those packs, but still it’s fast work. And now them two long, lanky gents are lazying along as if they didn’t have any hurry at all in mind. Looks to me, Riley, like the three of them made up their minds for a quick start a while back, and then changed their minds pronto. Talk to ‘em, Riley.”