“That’s something for the girl to answer, not me,” answered Pete Reeve. “Keep back a bit while I talk to them.”
He turned and said softly: “You’ve heard what he said; maybe he means it and maybe he don’t. I think he’d have his fill of fighting before he got us, but he could starve us out. That’s the straight of how we stand just now. I want you to know that pretty clear. I also want you to know that there ain’t one chance in a million of you or any one of us getting away. This is a tight trap. But if you want to stay, then the three of us stick, and welcome.”
“There’s only one answer to give him,” said the girl, rising to her feet steadily enough. “Tell him that I’m coming. But first I want to hear Hal Dunbar swear to let you both go free.”
“Shall I tell him that?” asked Pete Reeve.
“No,” interrupted Charlie Hunter, speaking for the first time. “Tell him to go back. He gets no sight of Mary Hood.”
“She’ll talk up for herself, I guess,” said Pete Reeve, gloomily, as he saw the one possible chance of escape slipping away from them.
“No,” answered Bull Hunter solemnly. “She’s come up here to me, and she’s mine. I’d rather have her dead than belonging to Hal Dunbar, and she’d rather die than leave us. Is that so, Mary?”
It was the first time that either the girl or Reeve had heard the giant speak with such calm force, but in the crisis he was changing swiftly and expanding to meet the exigencies of that grim situation. He stood up now - and the little hollow at the top of the hill was barely deep enough to cover him from the eyes of the men down the slope.
“Tell him that,” he continued.
“It’s a crazy answer,” muttered Pete Reeve. “And you’ve got no right to put words in her mouth.”
“Every right in the world to,” said the big man with the same unshaken calm. “In the first place I don’t trust Dunbar. A gent that’ll hound a woman the way he’s hounded Mary Hood isn’t worth trusting. Suppose we die? I wouldn’t live a happy day in a hundred years if I knew I’d bought my life by sending Mary back to Dunbar. Pete, you know I’m right.”
The little man nodded. “I couldn’t help hoping it would be the other way.”
“You can leave if you want to, Pete. They’ll be glad to let you through. That’ll make their odds still bigger.”
The little man smiled. “Leave you in a pinch like this?” he said. “After what we’ve been through together?”
He turned sharply on Riley. The latter, during the conversation between Reeve and Bull Hunter had stolen a few paces farther up the hill until his eye came above the ridge. There across the gorge where there had once been the bridge was now empty space. Riley shrank back again, grinning and satisfied.
“You seen, did you?” asked Pete Reeve grimly. “For spying like that you’d ought to be shot down like a dog, Riley. But I’m not that kind. Go back and tell your rat of a master that we’ll not let the girl go back to him. Tell him we know there’s all sorts of prices for a life, but when a woman is the price then the man that lets her pay ain’t man enough to be worth saving.”
It had not been exactly the attitude of Pete Reeve the moment before, but, having been persuaded, he was not one to miss a rhetorical opening of this size.
Riley sneered at him. “That’s what you say now,” he said. “But we ain’t going to rush you, Reeve. We’re going to sit down and wait for the heat and the thirst to do the work with you. May take more than to-day. Then again, it mat be that you’ll change your mind before night. But we’ll get you, Reeve, and we’ll get the girl, and we’ll cart your scalps to the sheriff and collect the prices on your heads. So long, Pete.”
He waved his hand to them with a mocking grin and strode off down the slope.
“It’s going to be a long play,” he reported to his chief. “the girl won’t hear no reason, or rather she lets Bull Hunter do her thinking and her talking for her. We’ll have to find the nearest water and start carting it here, because the thing that’s going to beat them up on the hill before night is that!”
He pointed above his head toward the sun. It was losing its morning color and rapidly becoming a blinding white. Its heat was growing every moment, and before noon the effect would be terrible, for Old Arrowhead Mountain was a mass of rock which instantly was heated along its surface until the stone burned through the soles of boots, and the reflected warmth became furnace-like.
For the circle of guards along the lower slopes, the watch through the day was bad enough, though they had the shelter of tall rocks here and there, and one of them was steadily at work bringing freshly filled canteens. But for the trio imprisoned at the top of the hill it was a day of torture.
The small basin in which they were was perfect for gathering and focusing the rays of the sun. By ten in the morning the heat had become intolerable, and still that heat was bound to increase by leaps and bounds for five hours!
Mary Hood endured the torment without a word, though her pallor increased as the time went on. There was one tall pine standing on the very verge of the cliff, but storm and lightning had blasted away most of the limbs except toward the top, and it gave them hardly any shade worth mentioning. Only in the shadow of the trunk there was room for Mary Hood, and the men forced her to stay there. Pete Reeve, withered and bloodless, endured the oven heat better than the others; Bull Hunter, suffering through all of his great bulk, went panting about the work of fanning Mary, or talking as cheerily as he could to keep her mind from the horror of their situation.
Then at noon, with the sun hanging straight above them and the heat a steady agony, unrelieved by a breath of wind, Hal Dunbar came up under another flag of truce and made a final appeal. Their reply was merely to order him back, and he went, trailing curses behind him.
That newly refused offer of help made everything seem more terrible than before. It was the last offer, they knew, that would be received from big Hal Dunbar. After that he would merely wait, and waiting would be more effective than bullets. There remained a single half pint of hot water in the bottom of Bull Hunter’s canteen, and this they reserved for Mary Hood.
Twice that afternoon she tried to fight them away, refusing the priceless liquid, but Bull Hunter forced her like a stubborn child and made her take a small swallow. But that was merely giving an edge to the thirst of the girl, and as for Hunter and Reeve, their tongues were beginning to swell. They spoke seldom, and when they did, their syllables were as thick as from drunkenness.
When the crisis of the afternoon came, between half past two and half past three, they made their decision. They would wait until full night, then they would mount their horses and ride down the slope with Mary behind them to be given shelter from the bullets. It was an entirely hopeless thought, they knew perfectly well. Such men as Jack Hood and Hal Dunbar, in particular, did not miss close shots. Those two alone could account, shooting as they would from behind perfect shelter, for a dozen men. But there was nothing else for it. The horses were going mad with thirst. Mary Hood was becoming feverish, and Bull Hunter was at the last of his endurance.
Wind came out of the north, at this moment, but it served rather to put the hot air in circulation than to bring any relief of coolness.
So the day wore on, and the shadows grew cooler and more blue along the sides of the tall mountain above them. There was a haven for them almost within reach of the hand, and yet they were hopelessly barred from it by the small distance across the gulch. All the time they could see the flash and sparkle of silver-running spring water on the slope not a hundred yards above them.
The shadows began to lengthen. It was impossible to find more than one shelter from the sun, and they lay at full length, praying for night. And so Bull Hunter, watching the shade of the great pine tree lengthen and stretch across the cañon, received his great idea and sat bolt erect. Thirst and excitement choked him. He could only point and gibber like a madman, and then speech came.