And now suddenly Virginia found that she was giving herself over utterly, unexpectedly to a keen, pulsing joy of life. She had surrendered into the sheriff"s hands the little leather-case which contained her emergency bottles and instruments; they had left San Juan a couple of hundred yards behind, their horses were galloping; her stirrup struck now and then against Norton"s boot. John Engle had not been unduly extravagant in praise of the mare Persis; Virginia sensed rather than saw clearly the perfect, beautiful creature which carried her, delighted in the swinging gallop, drew into her soul something of the serene glory of a starlit night on the desert. The soft thud of shod hoofs upon yielding soil was music to her, mingled as it came with the creak of saddle leather, the jingle of bridle and spur-chains. She wondered if there had ever been so perfect a night, if she had ever mounted so finely bred a saddle animal.
Far ahead the San Juan mountains lifted their serrated ridge of ebony.
On all other sides the flat-lands stretched out seeming to have no end, suggesting to the fancy that they were kin in vast.i.tude to the clear expanse of the sky. On all hands little wind-shaped ridges were like crests of long waves in an ocean which had just now been stilled, brooded over by the desert silence and the desert stars.
"I suppose," said Norton at last, "that it"s up to me to explain."
"Then begin," said Virginia, "by telling me where we are going."
He swung up his arm, pointing.
"Yonder. To the mountains. We"ll reach them in about two hours and a half. Then, in another two hours or so, we"ll come to where Brocky is.
Way up on the flank of Mt. Temple. It"s going to be a long, hard climb. For you, at the end of a tiresome day. . . ."
"How about yourself?" she asked quickly, and he knew that she was smiling at him through the dark. "Unless you"re made of iron I"m almost inclined to believe that after your friend Brocky I"ll have another patient. Who is he, by the way?"
"Brocky Lane? I was going to tell you. You saw something stirring in the patio at Engle"s? I had seen it first; it was Ignacio who had slipped in under the wide arch from the gardens at the rear of the house. He had been sent for me by Tom Cutter, my deputy. Brocky Lane is foreman of a big cattle-ranch lying just beyond the mountains; he is also working with me and with Cutter, although until I"ve told you n.o.body knows it but ourselves and John Engle. . . . Before the night is out you"ll know rather a good deal about what is going on, Miss Page," he added thoughtfully.
"More than you"d have been willing for me to know if circ.u.mstance hadn"t forced your hand?"
"Yes," he admitted coolly. "To get anywhere we"ve had to sit tight on the game we"re playing. But, from the word Cutter brings, poor old Brocky is pretty hard hit, and I couldn"t take any chances with his life even though it means taking chances in another direction."
He might have been a shade less frank; and yet she liked him none the less for giving her the truth bluntly. He was but tacitly admitting that he knew nothing of her; and yet in this case he would prefer to call upon her than on Caleb Patten.
"No, I don"t trust Patten," he continued, the chain of thought being inevitable. "Not that I"d call him crooked so much as a fool for Jim Galloway to juggle with. He talks too much."
"You wish me to say nothing of to-night"s ride?"
"Absolutely nothing. If you are missed before we get back Struve will explain that you were called to see old Ramorez, a half-breed over yonder toward Las Estrellas. That is, provided we get back too late for it to appear likely that you are just resting in your room or getting things shipshape in your office. That"s why I am explaining about Brocky."
"Since you represent the law in San Juan, Mr. Norton," she told him, "since, further, Mr. Engle indorses all that you are doing, I believe that I can go blindfolded a little. I"d rather do that than have you forced against your better judgment to place confidence in a stranger."
"That"s fair of you," he said heartily. "But there are certain matters which you will have to be told. Brocky Lane has been shot down by one of Jim Galloway"s crowd. It was a coward"s job done by a man who would run a hundred miles rather than meet Brocky in the open. And now the thing which we don"t want known is that Lane even so much as set foot on Mt. Temple. We don"t want it known that he was anywhere but on Las Cruces Rancho; that he was doing anything but give his time to his duties as foreman there."
"In particular you don"t want Jim Galloway to know?"
"In particular I don"t want Jim Galloway to so much as suspect that Brocky Lane or Tom Cutter or myself have any interest in Mt. Temple,"
he said emphatically.
"But if the man who shot him is one of Galloway"s crowd, as you say. . . ."
"He"ll do no talking for a while. After having seen Brocky drop he took one chance and showed half of his cowardly carca.s.s around a boulder. Whereupon Brocky, weak and sick and dizzy as he was, popped a bullet into him."
She shuddered.
"Is there nothing but killing of men among you people?" she cried sharply. "First the sheepman from Las Palmas, then Brocky Lane, then the man who shot him. . . ."
"Brocky didn"t kill Moraga," Norton explained quietly. "But he dropped him and then made him throw down his gun and crawl out of the brush.
Then Tom Cutter gathered him in, took him across the county line, gave him into the hands of Ben Roberts who is sheriff over there, and came on to San Juan. Roberts will simply hold Moraga on some trifling charge, and see that he keeps his mouth shut until we are ready for him to talk."
"Then Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter were together on Mt. Temple?"
"Near enough for Tom to hear the shooting."
They grew silent again. Clearly Norton had done what explaining he deemed necessary and was taking her no deeper into his confidences.
She told herself that he was right, that these were not merely his own personal secrets, that as yet he would be unwise to trust a stranger further than he was forced to. And yet, unreasonably or not, she felt a little hurt. She had liked him from the beginning and from the beginning she felt that in a case such as his she would have trusted to intuition and have held back nothing. But she refrained from voicing the questions which none the less insisted upon presenting themselves to her: What was the thing that had brought both Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter to Mt. Temple? What had they been seeking there in a wilderness of crag and cliff? Why was Roderick Norton so determined that Jim Galloway should not so much as suspect that these men were watchful in the mountains? What sinister chain of circ.u.mstance had impelled Moraga, who Norton said was Galloway"s man, to shoot down the cattle foreman? And Galloway himself, what type of man must he be if all that she had heard of him were true; what were his ambitions, his plans, his power?
Before long Norton pointed out the shadowy form of Mt. Temple looming ever vaster before them, its ma.s.s of rock, of wind-blown, wind-carved peaks lifted in sombre defiance against the stars. It brooded darkly over the lower slopes, like an incubus it dominated the other spines and ridges, its gorges filled with shadow and mystery, its precipices making the sense reel dizzily. And somewhere up there high against the sky, alone, suffering, perhaps dying, a man had waited through the slow hours, and still awaited their coming. How slowly she and Norton were riding, how heartless of her to have felt the thrill of pleasure which had possessed her so utterly an hour ago!
Or less than an hour. For now again, wandering out far across the open lands, came the heavy mourning of the bell.
"How far can one hear it?" she asked, surprised that from so far its ringing came so clearly.
"I don"t know how many miles," he answered. "We"ll hear it from the mountain. I should have heard it to-day, long before I met you by the arroyo, had I not been travelling through two big bands of Engle"s sheep."
Behind them San Juan drawn into the shadows of night but calling to them in mellow-toned cadences of sorrow, before them the sombre canons and iron flanks of Mt. Temple, and somewhere, still several hours away, Brocky Lane lying helpless and perhaps hopeless; grim by day the earth hereabouts was inscrutable by night, a mighty, primal sphinx, lip-locked, spirit-crushing. The man and girl riding swiftly side by side felt in their different ways according to their different characters and previous experience the mute command laid upon them, and for the most part their lips were hushed.
There came the first slopes, the talus of strewn, broken, disintegrating rock, and then the first of the cliffs. Now the sheriff rode in the fore and Virginia kept her frowning eyes always upon his form leading the way. They entered the broad mouth of a ravine, found an uneven trail, were swallowed up by its utter and impenetrable blackness.
"Give Persis her head," Norton advised her. "She"ll find her way and follow me."
His voice, low-toned as it was, stabbed through the silence, startling her, coming unexpectedly out of the void which had drawn him and his horse gradually beyond the quest of her straining eyes. She sighed, sat back in her saddle, relaxed, and loosened her reins.
For an hour they climbed almost steadily, winding in and out. Now, high above the bed of the gorge, the darkness had thinned about them; more than once the girl saw the clear-cut silhouette of man and beast in front of her or swerving off to right or left. When, after a long time, he spoke again he was waiting for her to come up with him. He had dismounted, loosened the cinch of his saddle and tied his horse to a stunted, twisted tree in a little flat.
"We have to go ahead on foot now," he told her as he put out his hand to help her down. And then as they stood side by side: "Tired much?"
"No," she answered. "I was just in the mood to ride."
He took down the rope from her saddle strings, tied Persis, and, saying briefly, "This way," again went on. She kept her place almost at his heels, now and again accepting the hand he offered as their way grew steeper underfoot. Half an hour ago she knew that they had swerved off to the left, away from the deep gorge into whose mouth they had ridden so far below; now she saw that they were once more drawing close to the steep-walled canon. Its emptiness, black and sinister, lay between them and a group of bare peaks which stood up like cathedral spires against the sky.
"This would be simple enough in the daytime," Norton told her during one of their brief pauses. "In the dark it"s another matter. Not tired out, are you?"
"No," she a.s.sured him the second time, although long ago she would have been glad to throw herself down to rest, were their errand less urgent.
"We"ve got some pretty steep climbing ahead of us yet," he went on quietly. "You must be careful not to slip. Oh," and he laughed carelessly, "you"d stop before you got to the bottom, but then a drop of even half a dozen feet is no joke here. If you"ll pardon me I"ll make sure for you."
With no further apology or explanation he slipped the end of a rope about her waist, tying it in a hard knot. Until now she had not even known that he had brought a rope; now she wondered just how hazardous was the hidden trail which they were travelling; if it were in truth but the matter of half a dozen feet which she would fall if she slipped? He made the other end of the short tether fast about his own body, said "Ready?" and again she followed him closely.
There came little flat s.p.a.ces, then broken boulders to clamber over, then steep, rugged climbs, when they grasped the rough rocks with both hands and moved on with painful slowness. It seemed to the girl that they had been climbing for long, tedious hours since they had slipped out of their saddles; though to him she said nothing, locking her lips stubbornly, she knew that at last she was tired, very tired, that an end of this laborious ascent must come soon or she would be forced to stop and lie down and rest.
"Fifteen minutes more," said the sheriff, "and we"re there. We"ll use the first five minutes of it for a rest, too."
He made her sit down, unstoppered a canteen which, like the coil of rope, she had not known he carried, and gave her a drink of water which seemed to her the most wonderfully strength-making, life-giving draft in the world. Then he dropped down at her side, looked at his watch in the light of a flaring match carefully cupped in his hand, and lighted his pipe.
"Nearly midnight," he told her.
Without replying she lay back against the slope of the mountain, closed her eyes and relaxed, breathing deeply. Her chest expanded deeply to the long indrawn breath which filled her lungs with the rare air. She felt suddenly a little sleepy, dreaming longingly of the unutterable content one could find in just going to sleep with the cliff-scarred mountainside for couch.