"I hope you saved some of that lovely Wild West for me, Mr. Haines,"
said Pauline, as the finest pair of horses in the Double Cross stable whisked them along the road to the ranch.
"Very little left, Miss Marvin--very little left; still--whoa, there! What"s this?"
At a bend in the road five masked and mounted men had dashed from cover and quickly surrounded the buckboard with a small circle of leveled gun-barrels.
Pauline had time to cry out only once before she felt herself gripped by powerful hands and dragged from the wagon seat, where Hal Haines sat shaking with laughter. He stood up and started to draw his revolver slowly. From behind him a la.s.so was thrown lightly and the noose tightened around his arms.
He kept on laughing, although he was a little afraid the boys were overdoing matters. He knew his wife would never forgive him for this actual kidnapping of Pauline--he certainly had never intended it.
And she was really frightened. He could tell that by her cries as she was thrust across the pommel of the masked leader"s horse and the horse was spurred to a tearing gallop down the road.
Haines tried to shout a command and call the joke off, but the riders had all followed after their leader, and he was alone in the buckboard.
"They needn"t have been so realistic with their knots," he said, as he struggled to free himself from the rope.
It was ten minutes before he wriggled free. He picked up the lines and drove on toward the ranch--a little nervous now over the receptions he would get, but still laughing.
At the fork where the road to the mountains left the main highway, Haines flashed out his revolver in real excitement. Another group of five masked men had driven their horses out of a clump of small trees.
They fired their revolvers as they surrounded the buckboard. Then suddenly discovering that there was no woman pa.s.senger, they tore off their masks and came up with quick, eager inquiries.
Perhaps for the first time in his life Hal Haines knew what fear was-- not fear for himself, but for another.
"Boys, there was another party on the road. They took her. I took "em for you," he said in a stifled voice. "Come on. Cabot, give me your horse; take the rig back and tell Mrs. Haines."
He sprang into the saddle, and, filling their revolvers as they rode, the band of jesters, who had suddenly turned so grimly serious, dashed back toward town.
Two miles from where Tom Patten had swung Pauline to his saddle bow they picked up the train hoofs that left the road and made toward the mountains.
The men who had set out so gaily a few hours before rode silently, fiercely now. Mile after mile swept behind them as they held to the trail. Sometimes it followed the roads, sometimes it broke over open country. At last it reached the hills and stopped at the river.
Patten"s band had ridden in the water upstream. After a mile of it the leader ordered three of them out on the south side. They left silently, rode five miles across country and separated, each taking a different route. Patten and one companion kept on with Pauline who was now almost insensible. At last they left the stream on the north bank and climbed into the higher hill country where they entered a thicket and stopped.
"Here we are," said Patten. His companion dismounted and lifted Pauline from the other"s saddle.
With a swift daring and dexterity, born of fear, she flung aside his arms and sprang toward the horse he had just left. She tried to mount, but her strength was gone. They tied her feet with a rope and seated her on a great fallen tree, while they cleared away a tangle of bushes and began to tug with their combined strength at a giant rock, which the bushes had concealed.
The stone moved inch by inch until behind it Pauline saw, with a chill shudder, the black opening of a cave.
She flung herself from the log pleading piteously. They cut the rope that bound her feet and led her to the cave. As the giant stone was rolled back into its place she uttered one wild far-echoing cry. Then darkness!
For many minutes Pauline lay prostrate. A dim light from some hidden orifice in the top of the cave behind a shelving wall, seemed to become brighter as her eyes became more accustomed to the shadows. She arose and began to inspect the cave.
It was a chamber of rock about forty feet long and twenty feet wide.
The bottom and roof converged slightly towards the end farthest from the giant boulder that formed the door. But even there the cave was twenty-five feet high.
The boulder door was set into the rock portal, and not a wisp of light came through the brush that, covered the crevice. Pauline, after a brief hopeless test of her frail strength against the weight of the granite ma.s.s, moved slowly along the wall to the extremity of the chamber.
Here, about seven feet from the floor, ran a ledge of rock, between two and three feet in width; and, from this ledge upward the wall slanted at an angle of forty-five degrees to a wide shelf or fissure. It was from this fissure that the faint light came.
Pauline groped her way back along the other wall to the front of the cave again. Despairing, she sat down on the chill stone. The events of the last few hours had left her in a state of mental vertigo. The hold-up of the buckboard and her carrying off by the bandits seemed fantastically impossible.
So this was her "escape" from scenes of adventure. This was the "great, safe, quiet West," where she should forget her perils in New York and wait for others to forget them. She thought of her promise to Harry that she would not try to get into any more sc.r.a.pes. In her former dangers--even when there seemed hope--she had a buoying trust that there was one man who could save her. He had always saved her. In his protecting shelter she had come to feel almost immune from harm. But with Harry three thousand miles away and totally ignorant of her need of him no sense of imagined protection sustained her now. She took it for granted that Mr. Haines had been made a prisoner or killed. She knew the word would reach Mrs. Haines and the latter would invoke all the powers in the State to find her; but she was, sure she would be dead before anyone unearthed this fearful hiding place.
The light at the far end of the cave grew steadily more dim and Pauline judged that the day was waning.
A rustling sound caught her ear. Sounds are animate or inanimate.
This was unmistakably the sound of a living thing.
Pauline trembled a little but she stood up. Was it man or beast that she had for companion in the mysterious cave?
She took a faltering step forward. The sound seemed to come nearer.
The cave had gone almost pitch dark, and, suddenly, from the mid-level of the back wall--from the rock ledge--there flashed upon the sight of the imprisoned girl two beady, burning eyes.
CHAPTER XIV
THE GREAT WHITE QUEEN
Hal Haines" best driving team was lathered with foam and the buckboard swung through the gate on two wheels as Bill Cabot drove back to the Double Cross Ranch.
The young cowboy whom Haines had ordered to carry the news of disaster to Mrs. Haines, seeing the buckboard and only Cabot driving, knew instantly that something had gone wrong.
"What is it, Will?" she called, running down to the gate. "Didn"t she come? Has anything happened to Hal?"
"She was held up and carried off, Mrs. Haines."
"I know; I know. You played the joke; but what happened?" She looked at the foaming horses. "What made you drive home like this?" she demanded.
"She wasn"t carried off by us, Mrs. Haines. Some other crowd got ahead of us--some crowd that meant what they was doing. The Boss and the boys has got the trail by this time, I guess. The Boss said I should come and tell you."
For a moment Mrs. Haines looked at him in doubt.
"Is this another joke, Will?" she asked. "There hasn"t been a hold-up in this section for ten years."
"I guess the jokin" is all knocked out"ve all of us," answered Bill, turning shamefacedly away. "No, ma"am, this is the truth and--and I wish the Boss had took some one else"s horse instid of mine."
"Never mind. They"ll have all the men in Montana out to find that girl, if this isn"t a hoax," cried Mrs. Haines in a voice that choked.
"Go tell the other boys to get ready. The Sheriff will want them, if Hal doesn"t."
She sped back to the house and with a trembling hand rang the bell of the old-fashioned telephone that furnished a new blessing to the ranches.
A moment later Curt Sikes, the telegraph operator at Rockvale, almost fell from his chair as he took the following message over the wire at Mrs. Haines"s dictation:
Harry Marvin,