"Send her to a new mining camp. Colonel Macon, you have the gambling spirit; you are willing to take great chances!"
"So! So!" murmured the colonel, a little taken aback. "But I should never send her except with an adequate protector."
"An adequate protector even against these celebrated gunmen who run the camp as you have already admitted?"
"An adequate protector--you are the man!"
Donnegan shivered.
"I? I take your daughter to the camp and play her against Nelly Lebrun to win back Jack Landis? Is that the scheme?"
"It is."
"Ah," murmured Donnegan. And he got up and began to walk the room, white-faced; the colonel watched him in a silent agony of anxiety.
"She truly loves this Landis?" asked Donnegan, swallowing.
"A love that has grown out of their long intimacy together since they were children."
"Bah! Calf love! Let the fellow go and she will forget him. Hearts are not broken in these days by disappointments in love affairs."
The colonel writhed in his chair.
"But Lou--you do not know her heart!" he suggested. "If you looked closely at her you would have seen that she is pale. She does not suspect the truth, but I think she is wasting away because Jack hasn"t written for weeks."
He saw Donnegan wince under the whip.
"It is true," murmured the wanderer. "She is not like others, heaven knows!" He turned. "And what if I fail to bring over Jack Landis with the sight of Lou?"
The colonel relaxed; the great crisis was past and Donnegan would undertake the journey.
"In that case, my dear lad, there is an expedient so simple that you astonish me by not perceiving it. If there is no way to wean Landis away from the woman, then get him alone and shoot him through the heart. In that way you remove from the life of Lou a man unworthy of her and you also make the mines come to the heir of Jack Landis--namely, myself. And in the latter case, Mr. Donnegan, be sure--oh, be sure that I should not forget who brought the mines into my hands!"
10
Fifty miles over any sort of going is a stiff march. Fifty miles uphill and down and mostly over districts where there was only a rough cow path in lieu of a road made a prodigious day"s work; and certainly it was an almost incredible feat for one who professed to hate work with a consuming pa.s.sion and who had looked upon an eight-mile jaunt the night before as an insuperable burden. Yet such was the distance which Donnegan had covered, and now he drove the pack mule out on the shoulder of the hill in full view of The Corner with the triangle of the Young Muddy and Christobel Rivers embracing the little town. Even the gaunt, leggy mule was tired to the dropping point, and the tough buckskin which trailed up behind went with downward head. When Louise Macon turned to him, he had reached the point where he swung his head around first and then grudgingly followed the movement with his body. The girl was tired, also, in spite of the fact that she had covered every inch of the distance in the saddle. There was that violet shade of weariness under her eyes and her shoulders slumped forward. Only Donnegan, the hater of labor, was fresh.
They had started in the first dusk of the coming day; it was now the yellow time of the slant afternoon sunlight; between these two points there had been a body of steady plodding. The girl had looked askance at that gaunt form of Donnegan"s when they began; but before three hours, seeing that the spring never left his step nor the swinging rhythm his stride, she began to wonder. This afternoon, nothing he did could have surprised her. From the moment he entered the house the night before he had been a mystery. Till her death day she would not forget the fire with which he had stared up at her from the foot of the stairs. But when he came out of her father"s room--not cowed and whipped as most men left it--he had looked at her with a veiled glance, and since that moment there had always been a mist of indifference over his eyes when he looked at her.
In the beginning of that day"s march all she knew was that her father trusted her to this stranger, Donnegan, to take her to The Corner, where he was to find Jack Landis and bring Jack back to his old allegiance and find what he was doing with his time and his money. It was a quite natural proceeding, for Jack was a wild sort, and he was probably gambling away all the gold that was dug in his mines. It was perfectly natural throughout, except that she should have been trusted so entirely to a stranger. That was a remarkable thing, but, then, her father was a remarkable man, and it was not the first time that his actions had been inscrutable, whether concerning her or the affairs of other people. She had heard men come into their house cursing Colonel Macon with death in their faces; she had seen them sneak out after a soft-voiced interview and never appear again. In her eyes, her father was invincible, all-powerful. When she thought of superlatives, she thought of him. Her conception of mystery was the smile of the colonel, and her conception of tenderness was bounded by the gentle voice of the same man.
Therefore, it was entirely sufficient to her that the colonel had said: "Go, and trust everything to Donnegan. He has the power to command you and you must obey--until Jack comes back to you."
That was odd, for, as far as she knew, Jack had never left her. But she had early discarded any will to question her father. Curiosity was a thing which the fat man hated above all else.
Therefore, it was really not strange to her that throughout the journey her guide did not speak half a dozen words to her. Once or twice when she attempted to open the conversation he had replied with crushing monosyllables, and there was an end. For the rest, he was always swinging down the trail ahead of her at a steady, unchanging, rapid stride. Uphill and down it never varied. And so they came out upon the shoulder of the hill and saw the storm center of The Corner. They were in the hills behind the town; two miles would bring them into it. And now Donnegan came back to her from the mule. He took off his hat and shook the dust away; he brushed a hand across his face. He was still unshaven. The red stubble made him hideous, and the dust and perspiration covered his face as with a mask. Only his eyes were rimmed with white skin.
"You"d better get off the horse, here," said Donnegan.
He held her stirrup, and she obeyed without a word.
"Sit down."
She sat down on the flat-topped boulder which he designated, and, looking up, observed the first sign of emotion in his face. He was frowning, and his face was drawn a little.
"You are tired," he stated.
"A little."
"You are tired," said the wanderer in a tone that implied dislike of any denial. Therefore she made no answer. "I"m going down into the town to look things over. I don"t want to parade you through the streets until I know where Landis is to be found and how he"ll receive you. The Corner is a wild town; you understand?"
"Yes," she said blankly, and noted nervously that the reply did not please him. He actually scowled at her.
"You"ll be all right here. I"ll leave the pack mule with you; if anything should happen--but nothing is going to happen, I"ll be back in an hour or so. There"s a pool of water. You can get a cold drink there and wash up if you want to while I"m gone. But don"t go to sleep!"
"Why not?"
"A place like this is sure to have a lot of stragglers hunting around it. Bad characters. You understand?"
She could not understand why he should make a mystery of it; but then, he was almost as strange as her father. His careful English and his ragged clothes were typical of him inside and out.
"You have a gun there in your holster. Can you use it?"
"Yes."
"Try it."
It was a thirty-two, a woman"s light weapon. She took it out and balanced it in her hand.
"The blue rock down the hillside. Let me see you chip it."
Her hand went up, and without pausing to sight along the barrel, she fired; fire flew from the rock, and there appeared a white, small scar.
Donnegan sighed with relief.
"If you squeezed the b.u.t.t rather than pulled the trigger," he commented, "you would have made a bull"s-eye that time. Now, I don"t mean that in any likelihood you"ll have to defend yourself. I simply want you to be aware that there"s plenty of trouble around The Corner."
"Yes," said the girl.
"You"re not afraid?"
"Oh, no."
Donnegan settled his hat a little more firmly upon his head. He had been on the verge of attributing her gentleness to a blank, stupid mind; he began to realize that there was metal under the surface. He felt that some of the qualities of the father were echoed faintly, and at a distance, in the child. In a way, she made him think of an unawakened creature. When she was roused, if the time ever came, it might be that her eye could become a thing alternately of fire and ice, and her voice might carry with a ring.
"This business has to be gotten through quickly," he went on. "One meeting with Jack Landis will be enough."