Blood on the Range. Eli Colter

go straight back to the Valley and tell the boys not to make a move until I get there at the ranch. I won’t be twenty-four hours behind you.”

      “But Gage!” Gaston started to protest. “Vandover may be so far ahead of you that you’ll never—”

      Hardin cut him short. “He isn’t,” he snapped. “I know where he is. I haven’t been trailing him this far for nothing. And I’ll make sure of overtaking him in the shortest time possible. I’ve got a plan he won’t guess.” He straightened in the saddle and shrugged. “Get going, Doe,” he said shortly.

      For moments Gage Hardin sat motionless, watching his faithful friend fading into the cactus shadows. Behind him rugged mountains reared black and shapeless against the sky. Before him stretched the desert into which Rood Vandover had gone. Hardin’s steely eyes narrowed to slits as for a moment he hesitated with the urge to gallop his horse out into that sandy waste, hell-bent after the man whom he meant to force to give him the revenge he had awaited for years. Then every muscle tightened as he shook off the temptation. He knew a better way. His plan—the one of which he had spoken—was sure fire. This was no time to take chances. He had to be certain! And as he had said, he knew where Vandover would be, just how far he could go in the time Hardin allotted himself for his own preparations.

      “He’ll have a surprise coming to him,” he muttered, as finally he turned his horse’s head, when Gaston had passed from sight.

      Promptly he headed back to the turn-off in the canyon that would lead him to rangeland and easier going, if it did take a little more time. It would be to his advantage in the long run.

      He cast one glance back at the canyon mouth, out into the desert, just before he was out of sight of it. The moon shone down beneficently, and over all the desert nothing moved.

      It was not rangeland going all the way for Gage Hardin though, as he urged his pony on with all speed possible. Soon he left it to skirt the foothills of the frowning mountains, at times moving through narrow forest trails so slight that only with great difficulty could he force a way through the growths of young spruce and scrub oak forming a tangled mass.

      Before long, however, he dropped down over a rim and once more emerged on rangeland that was scrubby and sage-grown, far different from the rolling green acres on which his own cows fattened at the Circle Crossbar—when they were not brutally slaughtered or rustled.

      It was the slaughtering that Gage Hardin could not understand. Rustling was all in a day’s work. But too often of late he had found fine cattle killed, or wounded and left to die in agony. “Why?” had been the great, insistent question in his mind, but he was not even thinking of that now. More important questions had to be answered, and the pain in his heart left no room for material matters of business.

      Bitterness filled him, but with it was a certain grim joy. At last had come to him the opportunity to pay a blood debt which only a promise had kept him from paying long ago. He was released from that now. Now he would be sure! As he had promised he would be. And siding him were some of the finest hell-roaring waddies that ever backed a man to the limit. Once he had Rood Vandover, and Shawnessy had forced Louis Peele’s chief gunman to talk—

      Hardin made swift time in the rough going, over scraggy land and through rock-strewn small arroyos, but the hours seemed to drag interminably, though he knew he was getting nearer and nearer his goal. Ahead now was another canyon leading onto the desert that would bring him out to his destination.

      The night by now was swiftly passing, and gray beginning to steal over the land as the mountains grew blacker. The moon at last dropped down behind the horizon, leaving a misty aura to mark its passing behind the craggy tops. The shadows in the draws and coulees that had been purplish in the moonlight turned to black wells of menacing ebon.

      Only the half glow of the false dawn, a faded violet, lighted the land and the desert seen faintly beyond as one by one the stars began to wink out in the great velvet canopy overhead. It, too, was changing, turning from midnight blue to a dirty gray, streaked with promise of a rising sun.

      Hardin felt he had been traveling for days and nights when at last he rode through the final dark canyon and topped a small rise just beyond it. Looking ahead, he could see the desert plainly now, but nodded as the gray clumps of buildings rose up before it.

      He touched his tired horse lightly, though his urge was to gallop at full tilt.

      “Just a few more minutes now, boy,” he muttered to his weary mount. “Rest then. We’re almost there.”

      As though he understood, the horse whinnied lightly, and tossed his head. And as though he also understood the urge for speed in the man who bestrode him, he broke into a canter, headed for the dark clumps of buildings beyond.

      “Surprise,” Gage Hardin was muttering through his teeth. “Surprise for you, Rood Vandover—pronto!”

      CHAPTER II

      A DESERT-BRED HORSE

      TEN minutes later, approaching the buildings in the graying morning, Gage Hardin crossed sun-baked land and over a rocky terrain so burned from the shimmer of the desert heat that even the yuccas and the stunted junipers appeared rocks themselves. And the nearer he came to his destination the harder his heart grew within him, the greater his determination.

      All through his ride he had tried with might and main to put thoughts of Lonny Pope from him, but the picture of the laughing-eyed waddy persisted. He could hear his voice as he had so often heard it, raised in some lilt of the range. And Mary—

      Mary’s cabin—he could see it. Made of logs that kept out the heat of summer and the cold of winter. The corral, just big enough for her few head of horses, the hitch-rack outside her gate, the little flower garden she had made; and the trees through which the sun streamed in the spring and summer, and which could sparkle so with frost in the winter when all was warm and cozy inside. The small living room she had made home, where they always sat together before the red-hot pot-bellied stove, dreaming their dreams of the days to come, while he held her hand.

      He could see that room as plainly as though it were thrown on a screen before him. Friendly, low-ceilinged, speaking so eloquently of a woman’s touch, with the geraniums in the windows, the snowy white curtains. Somewhere Mary had got hold of a buffalo robe which she used for a rug—and how he used to laugh at her because she had hung flintlock guns and rifles on her walls. And Indian blankets. She had said it was the touch of the frontier, since she had come out here to make it her home and meant always to be a ranch girl.

      The thoughts were bittersweet to Gage Hardin. How much they had planned, and now . . . Where was Mary now? Mary with her corn-silk hair, her cheeks like ocatilla blooms, her eyes like the sky at morning—

      With such pictures before his mind’s eye, it seemed an eternity before Hardin could traverse the space to the buildings sprawled at the edge of the desert. In fact it was less than thirty minutes. Hardin had made good time, far better time than had he headed straight into the desert. And this way he would have a chance.

      Riding straight to the largest of the buildings, the ranch house, he dismounted and left his sweat-lathered, hard-ridden horse standing ground-hitched in the yard. Spurs jingling, he strode up to the front of the house, climbed the porch steps and knocked on the front door.

      A third knock was necessary to bring response from within and his impatience grew. He was again lifting his fist for a thunderous pounding when he at last heard someone stir, then saw a light appear in a window at his left, obviously a bedroom. He watched the light being lifted and borne from room to room until it shone finally through the window beside the door at which he had knocked.

      There was a rattling of a bar inside, then the door opened. It disclosed an elderly man with a short gray beard and a long gray night shirt that flapped around spindled legs. The gray man held the lamp high and peered outward with sharp gray eyes that gleamed under jutting, bushy gray eyebrows.

      A gleam of approval came into the keen eyes, though, as he sized up Gage Hardin; a look that held a certain