Knights of the Range. Zane Grey

Rancho.”

      “You wouldn’t be afraid to trust him?”

      “It seems onreasonable, but I reckon I wouldn’t,” replied Britt, thoughtfully.

      “Is he—coming?” she asked, hurriedly.

      Britt glanced back over his shoulder to scan the rolling range. As he did not reply immediately, Holly grew conscious of a blank restless merging of relief and regret.

      “There he is, just toppin’ a rise,” answered Britt, at length. “Didn’t see him at fust. We might have knowed thet hombre——”

      But Holly did not hear any more of Britt’s drawl. She suddenly grew deaf and dumb to all outside stimuli. Her sickness and conjecture vanished in a rush of startling glad certainty, which as quickly affronted her. Holly, in consternation, and with a sinking of her heart, tried to take refuge in the thought that this had been the most exciting and upsetting day of her life. But an uneasy, unstable sense of weakness remained with her.

      “Holly, there’s a caravan in,” spoke up Britt, eagerly, pointing toward the long grove of cottonwoods, above which rose columns of blue smoke. “Fust from Las Animas this spring. Must be Buff Belmet. He’ll have loads of stuff fer us.”

      “Yes, indeed, and high time. Let us ride over to greet him,” replied Holly, suddenly animated.

      The afternoon sun shone on a natural scene of rangeland that never failed to awe and delight Holly. High on the gray-sloped, green-topped hill blazed the red of the old mansion. She could picture Don Carlos there in the days of the Spaniards, monarch of all he surveyed. It was hers, that indestructible home, vine-covered and weather-stained, a monument to the friendship between Don Carlos and the Indians, and likewise for her father’s day. No enemy had ever darkened that open portal. No man of any degree had ever been turned away from that door. Holly had kept faith with father and grandfather. She prayed that she might still do so in this wilder day yet to come.

      Soon the galloping horses reached the zone of cottonwoods, and then the wide clear brook babbling over gravelly bars. In the long half-circle on the other side, the caravan had halted for camp. How the great broad-wheeled, boat-bodied, gray-canvassed prairie-schooners thrilled Holly! They not only represented the forerunners of the western empire, but they seemed to be bridges across the plains to civilization. There were scores of these immense long-tongued wagons. Sturdy oxen were grazing away across the open; rolling mules were lifting the dust in many places; a hundred brace of horses had taken to the grass, while many were being unhitched. A dozen huge fires were burning. Red-shirted men stood out conspicuously among a horde of others, and all were busy as ants. The camp shone with color and hummed with activity. It was a scene of a kind which never palled on Holly.

      As Britt and Holly rode up to the first group, several men advanced to greet them. Holly recognized a sturdy, bearded freighter who boomed at Britt, and then the magnificent Buff Belmet, scout and plainsman, a friend of her father’s, and famous across the frontier. At the age of ten he had driven one of these great wagons. He had lost mother, father, brother and childish sweetheart on his first trip across the plains. At twenty he was a leader of caravans and a noted Indian fighter. And now at thirty he had the lined stern face, the piercing half-shut gray eye, the wonderful poise of the frontiersman to whom all had happened except death.

      The greetings were as between friends long separated.

      “An’ air you still single an’ fancy-free, Miss Holly?” queried the grizzled Jones.

      “At least, I’m still single,” replied Holly, with a laugh.

      “What’s the matter with these young ranchers an’ rangehands out hyar?”

      “Tom, it’s a case of too many to pick from,” drawled Britt. “How many wagons this trip? You shore come heeled.”

      “We left Las Animas with thirty-eight,” replied Belmet, “an’ we picked up twenty on the way. Jest as well, otherwise we might had more’n a brush with some Kiowas on the Dry Trail.”

      “I seen yore decorations,” replied Britt, pointing to the feathered arrows that stuck out in grim suggestiveness from the wagons. “Look there, Holly.”

      “I saw them long ago,” she replied, her eyes dilating.

      “How aboot my supplies, Buff?” inquired the foreman.

      “Six wagons, Cap. I’ll leave them hyar for your boys to unpack, an’ pick them up on my way back from Santa Fe.”

      “Fine. We shore need them. An’ Miss Holly has been frettin’ more aboot——”

      “Now, Cappy, don’t betray my vanity,” gayly interrupted Holly. “Even if all my pretty things did come I’ll never be vain again.”

      “Wal, Miss Holly, you don’t ’pear your usual bloomin’ self atall,” chimed in Jones.

      “No wonder, Tom. She had a scare oot on the range today. An’ believe me, I had one, too,” replied Britt, seriously.

      “Friends, I’ve had a scare for every one of these,” said Belmet, putting his finger to the white hairs over his temples.

      “Britt, this hyar New Mexico was gettin’ hot last year,” interposed Jones, wagging his head. “Buff will agree with me, I’ll bet. You’re in for hell.”

      “I’d rather not give Miss Holly another scare today,” rejoined the scout.

      “I’ll tell you aboot it,” said Britt. “You know, Buff, how things happen right oot of a clear sky. This would have been plumb bad but fer a queer deal.” Whereupon Britt briefly told the story without mentioning Frayne’s name.

      “Miss Holly, ain’t you ever goin’ to grow up?” queried Jones, reprovingly. “This range ain’t safe fer a girl no more.”

      “I fear I discovered that today.”

      Belmet shook his eagle head in grave portent. “It’s comin’, Cap. I told Colonel Ripple thet years ago. Too big an’ wild a range. Too many great herds of cattle. In Maxwell’s day beef was cheap. He couldn’t give it away. But this is a new era. The range offers easy pickin’ fer rustlers, an’ good markets. All the bad outfits will flock into New Mexico.”

      “I had thet figgered, an’ I’m goin’ to meet the situation with an ootfit of my own.”

      “Thet’s the Texas idee, Cap. You’ll give them a run for your beef.”

      “Buff, did you ever run into or heah of a fellar whose handle is Frayne—Renn Frayne?”

      “Frayne? I know him. Not likely to forget him, either. Cap, I was present in Abilene some years back when Frayne made your Texas gunman, Wess Hardin, take water.”

      “No!” ejaculated Britt, incredulously.

      “Hard to believe, an’ thet’s why it’s not generally known. But I saw it. Frayne bluffed Hardin. Dared him to draw. An’ would have killed him, too.”

      “Wal, I’ll be darned. Who is this Frayne, Buff?”

      “I don’t know who he is, but I can tell you what he is.”

      “Go ahaid. Miss Holly an’ me air shore interested. It was Frayne who did the shootin’ today.”

      “You don’t say? . . . I met Frayne first time after the war. Young fellar, footloose an’ wild, with a hand for guns. He was a cow-puncher. He became one of many hard-shootin’ hombres. I heerd of him often after thet, but never seen him again until thet time in Abilene. Then he was classed with the best of gunmen. An’ you know, you could count them on the fingers of one hand. Let’s see. That was three years ago. After thet he killed Strickland’s foreman, an’ went on the dodge.”

      “Crooked?”

      “No. It was the other way around, as I heerd. Strickland was a power in Kansas. An’ any one who bucked him had sheriffs