"Well?" said Perris, breathing hard.
"Why, you fool," cried the foreman, "don"t you know she"s gone plumb wild about you? Didn"t she come begging to me to get you out of trouble?"
"You lie!" burst out Perris.
But by his roving glance, by the sudden outpouring of sweat which gleamed on his forehead, Hervey knew that he had shaken his man to the soul. By playing carefully on this string might he not reduce even this care-free fighter to trembling love of life? Might he not make Red Perris cringe! All cowards feel that their own vice exists in others. Hervey, in his entire life, had dreaded nothing saving Red Jim, and now he felt that he had found the thing which would make life too dear to Perris to be given up with a smile.
"Begging? I"ll tell a man she did!" nodded Hervey.
"It"s because she"s plumb generous. She thought that might turn you.
Why--she don"t hardly know me!"
"Don"t she?" sneered Hervey. "You don"t figure her right. She"s one of the hit or miss kind. She hated me the minute she laid eyes on me--hated me for nothing! And you knocked her off her feet the first shot. That"s all there is to it. She"d give the Valley of the Eagles for a smile from you."
He saw the glance of Perris wander into thin distance and soften. Then the eye of Red Jim returned to his tormentor, desperately. The blow had told better than Hervey could have hoped.
"And me a plain tramp--a loafer--me!" said Perris to himself. He added suddenly: "Hervey, let"s talk man to man!"
"Go on," said the foreman, and set his teeth to keep his exultation from showing.
Five minutes more, he felt, and Perris would be begging like a coward for his life.
CHAPTER XXII
MCGUIRE SLEEPS
Never did a fox approach a lion with more discretion than Marianne approached the careless figure of McGuire. His very att.i.tude was a warning that her task was to be made as difficult as possible. He had pushed his sombrero, limp with age and wear, far back on his head, and now, gazing, apparently, into the distant blue depths of the sky, he regarded vacantly with mild interest and blew in the same direction a thin brownish vapor of smoke. Obviously he expected an argument; he was leading her on. And just as obviously he wanted the argument merely for the sake of killing time. He was in tremendous need of amus.e.m.e.nt. That was all.
She wanted to go straight to him with a bitter appeal to his manhood, to his mercy as a man. But she realized that this would not do at all.
A strenuous attack would simply rouse him. Therefore she called up from some mysterious corner of her tormented heart a smile, or something that would do duty as a smile. Strangely enough, no sooner had the smile come than her whole mental viewpoint changed. It became easy to make the smile real; half of her anxiety fell away. And dropping one hand on her hip, she said cheerfully to McGuire.
"You look queer as a prison-guard, Mr. McGuire."
She made a great resolve, that moment, that if she were ever safely through the catastrophe which now loomed ahead, she would diminish the distance between her and her men and form the habit of calling them by their first names. She could not change as abruptly in a moment, but she understood perfectly, that if she had been able to call McGuire by some foolish and familiar nickname, half of his strangeness would immediately melt away. As it was, she made the best of a bad matter by throwing all the gentle good nature possible into her voice, and she was rewarded by seeing McGuire jerk up his head and jerk down his glance at her. At the same time, he crimsoned to the eyes, changing his weathered complexion to a flaring, reddish-brown.
"Prison-guard?" said McGuire. "Me?"
"Well," answered Marianne, "that"s the truth, isn"t it? You"re the guard and I"m the prisoner?"
"I"m watching these hosses," said McGuire. "That"s all. They ain"t no money could hire me to guard a woman."
"Really?" said Marianne.
"Sure. I used to have a wife. I know."
She laughed, a little hysterically, but McGuire treated the mirth as a compliment to his jest and joined in with a tremendous guffaw. His eyes were still wet with mirth as she said: "Too bad you have to waste time like this, with such a fine warm day for sleeping. Couldn"t you trust the corral bars to take care of the horses?"
His glance twinkled with understanding. It was plain that he appreciated her point and the way she made it.
"Them hosses are feeling their oats," said McGuire. "Can"t tell what they"d be up to the minute I turned my back on "em. Might jump that old fence and be off, for all I know."
"Well," said Marianne, "they look quite contented. And if one of them did take advantage of you and run away while you slept, I"m sure it would come home again."
He had quite fallen into the spirit of the thing.
"Maybe," grinned McGuire, "but I might wake up out of a job."
"Well," said Marianne, "there have been times when I would have weighed one hour of good sleep against two jobs as pleasant as this.
How much real damage might that sleep do?"
"If it took me out of the job? Oh, I dunno. Might take another month before I landed a place as good."
"Surely not as long as that. But isn"t it possible that your sleep might be worth _two_ months" wages to you, Mr. McGuire?"
"H-m-m," growled McGuire, and his little shifty eyes fastened keenly on her. "You sure mean business!"
"As much as anyone in the world could!" cried the girl, suddenly serious.
And for a moment they stared at each other.
"Lady," said McGuire at length, "I begin to feel sort of yawny and sleepy, like."
"Then sleep," said Marianne, her voice trembling in spite of herself.
"You might have pleasant dreams, you know--of a murder prevented--of a man"s life saved!"
McGuire jerked his sombrero low over his eyes.
"You think it"s as bad as that?" he growled, glaring at her.
"I swear it is!"
He considered another moment. Then: "You"ll have to excuse me, Miss Jordan. But I"m so plumb tired out I can"t hold up my end of this talk no longer!"
So saying, he dropped his head on both his doubled fists, and she lost sight of his face. It had come so inconceivably easily, this triumph, that she was too dazed to move, for a moment. Then she turned and fairly raced for the corral. It had all been the result of the first smile with which she went to McGuire, she felt. And as she saddled her bay in a shed a moment later she was blessing the power of laughter.
It had given her the horse. It had let her pa.s.s through the bars. It placed her on the open road where she fled away at a swift gallop, only looking back, as she reached the top of the first hill, to see McGuire still seated on the stump, but now his head was canted far to one side, and she had no doubt that he must be asleep in very fact.
Then the hill rose behind her, shutting out the ranch, and she turned to settle to her work. Never in her life--and she had ridden cross-country on blood horses in the East--had she ridden as she rode on this day! She was striking on a straight line over hill and dale, through the midst of barbed wire. But the wire halted her only for short checks. The swift snipping of the pair of pliers which was ever in her saddle bag cleared the way, and as the lengths of wire snapped humming back, coiling like snakes, she rode through and headed into the next field at a renewed gallop. She was leaving behind her a day"s work for half a dozen men, but she would have sacrificed ten times the value of the whole ranch to gain another half hour of precious time.
For when she broke down the last of the small fenced fields the sun was already down. And when twilight came, she knew by instinct, the blow would fall. Yet the distance to the shack was still terribly far.
She straightened the gallant little bay to her work, but at every stride she moaned. Oh for such legs beneath her as the legs of Lady Mary, stretching swiftly and easily over the ground! But this chopping, laboring stride--! She struck her hand against her forehead and then spurred mercilessly. As a result, the bay merely tossed her head, for she was already drawn straight as a string by the effort of her gallop. And Marianne had to sit back in the saddle and simply pray for time, while the little thirty-two revolver in the saddle holster before her, flapped monotonously, beating out the rhythm of every stride.
And the night rode over the mountains with mysterious speed. It seemed to her frantic brain that the gap between crimson sunset and pallid twilight could have been spanned by a scant five minutes. And now, when she found herself at the foot of the last slope, it was the utter dark, and above her head the white stars were rushing past the treetops. The slope was killing the mare. She fell from her labored gallop to a trot, from the trot to a shambling jog, and then to a walk. And all the time Marianne found herself listening with desperate intensity for the report of a gun out of the woods ahead!
She threw herself out of the saddle, cast hardly a glance at the drooping figure of the bay, and ran forward on foot, stumbling in the dark over fallen branches, slipping more than once and dropping flat on her face as her feet shot back without foothold from the pine needles. But she picked herself up again and flung herself at her work with a frantic determination.