AFTER SHERIFF ELBERT'S posse had caught and saddled, Dale and Hal watched them ride into the hill country back of the ranch.
'If our boys got to the pass in time and closed it, this may be the end of the road for the Black gang,' Hal said.
'I hope so,' Dale replied, and took a long deep breath. 'It's a miracle you're still alive.'
'You were in our little local war too,' he reminded her. 'I won't soon forget seeing you blaze away at those fellows in the pasture. You are one up on Marshal Blücher, if he really turned the tide at Waterloo. This was the second battle you have saved.'
'My father brought me up outdoors.' She smiled wryly. 'You can't be both a cowboy and a lady. At least I couldn't manage it.'
He knew she was not fishing for a compliment. She was regretting that the conditions of her life had made her hard and unfeminine. Some instinct deeper than his judgment denied that this was true. The lovely lines of the slender graceful body, the fine dark eyes lighting a beautifully modeled face, the light and jocund tread that made her walk a joy to see, expressed a personality gentle and womanly. She had plenty of spunk, and the hostility she had inherited seemed always to be setting a spark to it. If necessary she could be hard, but his guess was that when she gave her heart to a man the surrender would be generous.
They walked back into the house. She lit a cigarette for him and another for herself.
He said, with a whimsical smile, 'When we have taken care of these hill gentry you may find it hard to start hating me again, since we've been through so much together.'
Beneath the tan a warm color beat into her cheeks. 'I'll never hate you again,' she said, and looked at the tip of her cigarette as if to make sure she had a good light. 'Frank was right when he told me I was a hundred per cent pigheaded.'
'Something to be said on both sides,' Hal threw out. 'You hold your convictions tightly. Frank is easy-going. He doesn't hate people, at least not often.'
'Neither do you. I don't suppose you really hate Frawley or Fenwick, though both of them would give anything for a chance to kill you.'
'Perhaps you can't hate anybody for whom you have a contempt, but I certainly won't be sorry to have the law close on them.'
'I've been an awful prig,' she confessed, after a moment of thought. 'I hope I've learned to have some tolerance. Because Tom Wall had killed a man, I thought of him as a murderer — and as it turned out I might so easily have killed one myself.'
'Did you think of me as one?' he asked.
'No,' she answered swiftly. 'Not for an instant.'
He pressed the lighted tip of his cigarette against the bottom of an ash tray and did the same with the one in her hand. She looked at him, surprised.
'We can do better with our time now than smoke,' he told her.
Her startled glance, born of an immense surprise, flickered over him. A faint tremor passed through her body. He took her hands in his and looked into her eyes.
'Is it to be the way I want?' he asked. 'That you and I will walk together all our lives?'
'Is that what you want — too?' she answered.
'That's what I want.'
'Even though I am — the way I am?'
'Because you are the way you are.'
'But you've always laughed at me — and showed me up — and enjoyed making me mad.'
He laughed, still teasing her. 'And you've always lectured me — and disapproved of me — and thought I was a show-off.'
'Oh, no — never the last,' she protested. 'I thought you were too reckless. I still do. Something inside of you bubbles up when you are in danger. You've kept me so worried.'
'There's an easier way to wipe away differences than by talk,' he said, and took her in his arms.
Her warm strong body clung to his. She met his kisses with a passion keen-edged. A trumpet of joy sounded in her heart. She had found her man, the one with whom she wanted to live through the marching years, one to whom she would love making a thousand surrenders.
When at last she freed herself, she said, mirth in her eyes, 'Isn't there something you have forgotten?'
He knew what she meant. 'Oh, that,' he said gaily. 'Lovers don't need words to tell each other what they feel. You and I have used words to build a wall between us, and the first kiss blew them all away.'
'Still, you might say it, for the record.' He loved the laughter in her face. 'Not enough of them to start another quarrel. Just three words.'
He said them.
She remembered of a sudden his wound. 'Oh, my dear — your arm!'
'A scratch. When the doctor gets here he'll laugh at you for calling him.' He added, 'If I were overseas a nurse would dab something on it and a sergeant would hustle me back to my job.'
'Why aren't you in the army? I've wondered at that, though I'm glad you're not.'
He explained to her that he had been repeatedly rejected because the authorities thought he was needed at home to raise beef. 'And now I can get in,' he chuckled. 'I'm going to marry a woman who knows all about raising stock. She can run the M K in addition to the Seven Up. That's why I'm marrying her.'
'I'll run them both and keep you as a foreman,' she threatened.
'We'll see about that, Mrs. Stevens,' he told her.
'Now that I have stopped worrying about these hill desperadoes, you are going to give me an entire new set of anxieties,' she complained, but with a smile.
'No need to worry. You've seen how the bad penny keeps turning up all right.'
She made him sit down to rest. They spent a happy half-hour together, during which the world inhabitants were limited to two. At the end of that time she came back to matters mundane.
'I wish somebody would come back from the hills and tell us that those dreadful men have been captured,' she said. 'They may have slipped past our boys and got away.'
Hal glanced by chance at the nearest window. What he saw brought him abruptly to his feet. Dale looked at his face and was shocked at the change in it.
'Go down into the cellar — quick!' he ordered. Swift strides were taking him to the table where he had laid down his revolver.
'What is it?' she asked, the color draining from her face.
'Don't talk,' he told her harshly. 'Go.'
She heard the sound of softly padding feet coming along the passage from the kitchen.
CHAPTER 41
A Clean-Up
WHEN BRICK FENWICK soft-footed into the livingroom, Frawley at his heels, Dale was standing by the bookcase, her face washed of color. Hal was on the opposite side of the room, near the head of the lounge. He held a revolver in his hand about waist-high, the barrel pointed floorward. The eyes in his hard-set lean face did not lift from the shallow glittering ones of the boy killer.
The outlaws were caught at momentary disadvantage. They both carried rifles, and at short range that weapon is unwieldy and slow to handle. With so much at stake, they had not dared to leave the rifles in the hall.
Frawley's huge rounded shoulders filled the doorway. 'Don't start anything,' he cried to Stevens. 'All we want is a key to a car.'
Without lifting his gaze from Hal, Fenwick snapped an order from the side of his mouth to the other ruffian. 'Keep yore trap shut. I'm runnin' this.'
Hal said, his voice quiet and even, 'There will be no shooting here unless you start it.'
Even then, in the dreadful stress of that moment, Dale was proud of her man. He carried his lean, flat-muscled body as one does who is physically fit and very sure of himself. The poised alertness of him told how well-balanced his reflexes were.
'I've a mind to blast you right now,' Fenwick croaked. 'You're living on borrowed time, damn you.'
A tight hard ball knotted below Dale's heart. She reached a hand to the top of the bookcase to steady herself. The weight of it shook for an instant a small statuette standing there, the head of the Praxiteles Hermes.