“I could take you and your boys along. You look suspicious. You must have bought those clothes five years ago, and yet you’ve been traveling for five hundred miles near towns. Very queer. But instead of forcing you, I’m going to do the opposite. Saunderson, if that girl gets into those mountains with Hunter she’s lost. No man on earth could follow her. For Heaven’s sake tell me where she’s gone. I love her, I tell you frankly, but I want to stop her in the first place simply to keep her from marrying an outlaw. Is she cut out for camp life like this? Answer that, Saunderson, and you know that camp life in winter”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Sam Dugan gravely.
“I’ll give her a home and she won’t have to marry me for it. I’ll swear that to you, Saunderson. I know you’re only trying to do what’s best for the girl, so you see I open my mind to you. Another thing - you and your two boys might need a bit of a stake. I’m the man that can fix that for you.”
“How high would you go?” asked Sam Dugan curiously.
“Five thousand - ten thousand,” was the unhesitating answer.
Sam Dugan sighed. Curiously enough, it was the very sum which he had set before him as a goal.
“I guess you’re straight about her,” said Dugan. “I figure if you’ll pay ten thousand just to find her trail you sure love her, and”
“Part of that sum I’ll give you in gold. I’ll give you my note for the rest and”
“I don’t want the money. I only wanted to find out if you was really fond of her, and you are. I’ll show you the way. But maybe you’re too late.” He pointed. “Look yonder to Old Arrowhead. Ride straight for the center of the hill, and you’ll catch her trail. And ride hard.”
A muffled shout from Hal Dunbar, and he was in the saddle on the weary gray. His men followed him with less alacrity. Sam Dugan, however, watching them stream out of the grove and across the open country, shook his head as he turned back to his two sons.
“Word breaking don’t generally bring no good to nobody,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe I’ve been all wrong to tell the big chap. But I done what I thought was right.”
Meantime Hal Dunbar was urging his men on with shouts. For the gray could not keep pace. Only fox-faced Riley drew back beside the big boss.
“There’s a gorge up there and a small bridge across it,” he said. “If they get across that and have time to break down the bridge, we’re done for.”
Hal Dunbar groaned and returned no answer except by spurring his horse cruelly. The gray, attempting in vain to increase his speed, stumbled and staggered and then went on with greater labor than ever. His head was hanging, his sides working like bellows, and the noise of his breathing was a horrible, bubbling, rasping sound. Riley, with a glance, knew that the gray was being ridden to death, but he said nothing. Advice, when Hal was in one of his furies, only maddened him the more.
Meantime they were working up the hill rapidly.
“They’ve sighted us,” called Riley at length; “and if they start for the bridge we can never stop them.”
“Where are they?” asked Hal Dunbar, ceasing for the instant his steady labor of flogging the gray and spurring him on.
“Up yonder. There’s their guard!”
He pointed to a gray streak, moving with incredible speed and smoothness across the face of the hill.
“The Ghost,” replied Hal Dunbar with a significant nod. “The beast is their outpost, eh.” He groaned as he spoke. “One last try, boys!” he yelled to his men. “Drive the horses. We’ve only got seconds left to us!”
He suited his actions to his words by spurring the gray again, but that honest horse had given the last of his strength already and had been running on his nerve alone for some time, crushed by the huge burden of Hal Dunbar. Now he threw up his head as though he had been struck and fell like a clod.
He dropped straight down, and Dunbar, unhurt, kicked his feet out of the stirrups and ran on, cursing. There was no pity for the horse in him, only a wild anger that he should be hampered at such an hour even by the horseflesh which he rode. But he had not taken a dozen steps when a rifle exploded far up the slope, and a bullet hummed wickedly past him, yet it was far above his head.
“Shall we rush ‘em?” he called to Riley.
“Rush Pete Reeve?” said the other sneeringly. “I’d as soon rush dynamite. Get the boys to cover.”
He was following his own suggestion as he spoke, and the rest of the men needed no order. They dived from their horses and took up their positions behind the big rocks which littered the side of Old Arrowhead Mountain. Riley found a place close to the ranch owner.
“I dunno what’s happened,” he said. “They ought to be across that bridge by now, but they ain’t. Listen!”
The rifle snapped above them again, and one of the men cursed as the bullet splashed on the rock above his head.
“He’s just shooting to warn us that he means trouble,” interpreted Riley. “When Reeve shoots to kill he either kills or he doesn’t shoot at all. Ain’t many bullets he’s wasted on thin air, I can tell you. He’s trying to hold us back with his lead, and that simply means that something has happened to the bridge and he can’t get across it.”
“Then,” gloated Hal Dunbar, “I’ve got ‘em in the hollow of my hand.”
He shouted a few orders - men scampered from rock to rock until the cordon had been drawn in a perfect semicircle all the way around the crest of the hill. The three fugitives were hemmed in with only one way of escape without fight, and that way led across a twenty-five foot gorge.
“If you got a white handkerchief,” said Hal Dunbar, “put it up on the end of your revolver for a flag of truce, and then go up and talk to them. Tell them that all I want is the girl. The rest of ‘em can go. Tell ‘em that. Also tell them that if money talks to them I’ll hold as long a conversation as they want.”
“D’you mean that you’d let both of ‘em go if they give you the girl?”
“Sure I don’t,” replied Hal Dunbar, chuckling. “I only want to get her out of the way before I finish those two skunks. But make all the promises you want to make. A promise made to an outlaw isn’t a promise at all, is it?”
“Maybe not - I guess not,” said Riley.
And straightway he tied a white handkerchief to the end of his revolver and waved it above the rock.
There was an answering call from up the hill.
“All right!”
Riley rose and started up the slope.
Chapter XXXI
Facing the Enemy
Little Pete Reeve, lying prone among the rocks at the crest of the hill and keeping a sharp outlook, reported what happened to Hunter and the girl. She had lost her courage with the firing of the first shot and sat white and sick of face, leaning into the arms of Charlie Hunter. The big man soothed her as well as he could.
“But if something happens,” she kept saying, “it will all have been my fault. I laid the trail that they followed to you.”
And so the voice of cunning Riley came to them from the other side of the knoll, where he had been stopped by the challenge of Pete Reeve before he should clear the top and be able to see that the bridge had actually fallen and that the three were definite and hopeless prisoners.
“Look here, Reeve,” said Riley, “we know what’s happened. Something’s busted the bridge, and you fellows can’t get over. Now, the boss doesn’t care about you and Bull Hunter. He’s got only one thing he’s thinking about, and that’s the girl. He says if you’ll let her come down to him, he’ll let you two go clear.”