Banjo"s little horse, eager for the fellowship of its kind as his master was for his own in his way, threw up its head and whinnied.
Banjo churned it with his heels, slapped it on the side of the head, and shut off the shrill call in a grunt, but the signal had gone abroad. From the blackness ahead it was answered, and the slow wind prowling down from the hills ahead of dawn carried the scent of cigarettes to them as they waited breathlessly for results.
"They"re dismounted, and waiting for daylight," she said. "We must ride around them."
They were leaving the road, the low brush rasping harshly on their stirrups--as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances--when a dash of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate.
Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to know what they should do.
"Keep that little fool horse still!" she said.
Now the patrol, which had stopped to hail, was coming on again.
Banjo"s horse was not to be sequestered, nor his craving for companionship in that lonesome night suppressed. He lifted his shrill nicker again, and a shot from the outriders of cavalry was the answer.
"Answer them, tell them who you are Banjo--they all know you--and I"ll slip away. Good-bye, and thank you for your brave help!"
"I"ll go with you, they"ll hear one as much as they"ll hear two."
"No, no, you can help me much better by doing as I tell you. Tell them that a led horse got away from you, and that"s the noise of it running away."
She waited for no more words, for the patrol was very near, and now and then one of them fired as he rode. Banjo yelled to them.
"Say, you fellers! Stop that fool shootin" around here, I tell you!"
"Who are you?" came the answer.
"Banjo, you darned fool! And I tell you right now, pardner, the first man that busts my fiddle with a bullet"ll have to mix with me!"
The soldiers came up laughing, and heard Banjo"s explanation of the horse, still dimly heard, galloping off. Frances stopped to listen.
Presently she heard them coming on again, evidently not entirely satisfied with Banjo"s story. But the parley with him had delayed them; she had a good lead now.
In a little swale, where the greasewood reached above her head, she stopped again to listen. She heard the troopers beating the bushes away off to one side, and knew that they soon would give it up. When they pa.s.sed out of her hearing, she rode on, slowly, and with caution.
She was frontiersman enough to keep her direction by the north star--Colonel Landcraft had seen to that particular of her education himself--but Polaris would not tell her which way to go to find Alan Macdonald and his dusty men standing their vigil over their cooped-up enemies. Nothing but luck, she knew, could lead her there, for she was in a sea of sage-brush, with the black river valley behind her, the blacker hills ahead, and never a mark of a trail to follow anywhere.
She had rounded the cavalry troop and left it far behind; the silence which immersed the sleeping land told her this. No hoof but her own mount"s beat the earth within sound, no foot but hers strained saddle-leather within reach of her now, she believed.
There was only one thing to do; ride slowly in the direction that she had been holding with Banjo, and keep eyes, ears, and nose all on the watch. The ways of the range were early; if there was anybody within a mile of her to windward she would smell the smoke of his fire when he lit it, and see the wink of it, too, unless he built it low.
But it was neither the scent of fire nor the red eye of it winking on the hill that at length gave her despairing heart a fresh handful of hope--nothing less indeed than the aroma of boiling coffee. It had such a feeling of comfort and welcome, of domesticity and peace in it that she felt as if she approached a door with a friend standing ready to take her horse.
Her horse was not insensible to the cheer that somebody was brewing for himself in that wild place. She felt him quicken under her, and put up his head eagerly, and go forward as if he was nearing home. She wondered how far the smell of coffee would carry, and subsequent experience was a revelation on that point.
She had entered the hills, tracking back that wavering scent of coffee, which rose fresh and sudden now, and trailed away the next moment to the mere color of a smell. Now she had it, now she lost it, as she wound over rugged ridges and through groves of quaking-asp and balm of Gilead trees, always mounting among the hills, her eager horse taking the way without guidance, as keen on the scent as she.
It must have taken her an hour to run down that coffee pot. Morning was coming among the fading stars when she mounted a long ridge, the quick striding of her horse indicating that there was something ahead at last, and came upon the camp fire, the coffee, and the cook, all beside a splintered gray rock that rose as high as a house out of the barrenness of the hill.
The coffee-maker was a woman, and her pot was of several gallons"
capacity. She was standing with the cover of the boiler in one hand, a great spoon in the other, her back half bent over her beverage, in the position that the sound of Frances" coming had struck her. She did not move out of that alert pose of suspicion until Frances drew rein within a few feet of her and gave her good-morning. When the poor harried creature saw that the visitor was a woman, her fright gave place to wonder.
Frances introduced herself without parley, and made inquiry for Macdonald.
"Why, bless your heart, you don"t aim to tell me you rode all the way from the post in the night by yourself?" the simple, friendly creature said. "Well, Mr. Macdonald and most of the men they"ve left to take them scoun"rels sent in here by the cattlemen to murder all of us over to the jail at Meander."
"How long have they been gone?"
"Why, not so very long. I reckon you must "a" missed meetin" "em by a hair."
"I"ve got to catch up with them, right away! Is there anybody here that can guide me?"
"My son can, and he"ll be glad. He"s just went to sleep back there in the tent after guardin" them fellers all night. I"ll roust him out."
The pioneer woman came back almost at once, and pressed a cup of her coffee upon Frances. Frances took the tin vessel eagerly, for she was chilled from her long ride. Then she dismounted to rest her horse while her guide was getting ready, and warm her numb feet at the fire.
She told the woman how the scent of her coffee had led her out of her groping like a beacon light on the hill.
"It"s about three miles from here down to the valley," the woman said.
"Coffee will carry on the mornin" air that way."
"Do you think your son--?"
"He"s a-comin"," the woman replied.
The boy came around the rock, leading a horse. He was wide awake and alert, bare-footed, bareheaded, and without a coat. He leaped nimbly onto his bare-backed beast, and Frances got into her saddle as fast as her numb limbs would lift her.
As she road away after the recklessly riding youth, she felt the hope that she had warmed in her bosom all night paling to a shadow. It seemed that, circ.u.mstances were ranging after a chart marked out for them, and that her own earnest effort to interfere could not turn aside the tragedy set for the gray valley below her.
Morning was broadening now; she could see her guide distinctly even when he rode many rods ahead. Dawn was the hour for treacherous men and deeds of stealth; Chadron would be on the way again before now, with the strength of the United States behind him to uphold his outlawed hand.
When they came down into the valley there was a low-spreading mist over the gray sage, which lent a warmth to the raw morning wind. There was a sense of indistinctness through the mist which was an ally to Chadron. Ten rods away, even in the growing morning, it would have been impossible to tell a cowboy from a cavalryman.
Here a haystack smoldered in what had been a farmstead yard; its thin blue smoke wavered up in the morning, incense over the dead hope of the humble heart that had dreamed it had found a refuge in that spot.
At the roadside a little farther on the burned ruins of a cabin lay.
It had stood so near the wheel track that the heat of its embers was warm on Frances" face as she galloped by. The wire fence was cut between each post, beyond splicing or repair; the shrubs which some home-hungry woman had set in her dooryard were trampled; the well curb was overthrown.
Over and over again as they rode that sad picture was repeated.
Destruction had swept the country, war had visited it. Side by side upon the adjoining lines many of the homesteaders had built their little houses, for the comfort of being near their kind. In the corner of each quarter section on either side of the road along the fertile valley, a little home had stood three days ago. Now all were gone, marked only by little heaps of embers which twinkled a dying glow in the breath of the morning wind.
Day was spreading now. From the little swells in the land as she mounted them Frances could see the deeper mist hovering in the low places, the tops of tall shrubs and slender quaking-asp showing above it as if they stood in snow. The band of sunrise was broadening across the east; far down near the horizon a little slip of lemon-rind moon was faltering out of sight.
But there was no sight, no sound, of anybody in the road ahead. She spurred up beside her guide and asked him if there was any other way that they might have taken. No, he said; they would have to go that way, for there was only one fordable place in the river for many miles. He pointed to the road, fresh-turned by many hoofs, and clamped his lean thighs to his bare horse, galloping on.
"We"ll take a cut acrosst here, and maybe head "em off," he said, dashing away through the stirrup-high sage, striking close to the hills again, and into rougher going.
The ache of the most intense anxiety that she ever had borne was upon Frances; hope was only a shred in her hand. She believed now that all her desperate riding must come to nothing in the end.
She never had been that long in the saddle before in her life. Her body was numb with cold and fatigue; she felt the motion of her horse, heard its pounding feet in regular beat as it held to its long, swinging gallop, but with the detached sense of being no party to it.
All that was sharp in her was the pain of her lost struggle. For she expected every moment to hear firing, and to come upon confusion and death at the next lift of the hill.
In their short cut across the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger.
Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale.