Crooked Trails and Straight by William MacLeod Raine (best large ebook reader .txt) 📖

“Now,” she told him.

The imprisoned man tried to pull himself up, bracing his feet against the rough projections of the rock wall to help him. But he could not manage the climb. At last he gave it up with an oath.

“We’ll try another way,” the girl told him cheerfully.

At spaces about a foot distant she tied knots in the rope for about the first six feet.

“This time you’ll make it,” she promised. “You can get up part way as you did before. Then I’ll start my horse forward. Keep braced out from the wall so as not to get crushed.”

He growled an assent. Once more she got into the saddle and gave the word. He dragged himself up a few feet and then the cowpony moved forward. The legs of the man doubled up under the strain and he was crushed against the wall just as he reached the top. However, he managed to hang on and was dragged over the edge with one cheek scratched and bleeding.

“Might a-known you’d hurt me if you moved so fast,” he complained, nursing his wounded face in such a way as to hide it.

“I’m sorry. I did my best to go carefully,” the girl answered, stepping forward.

His hand shot forward and caught her wrist Her startled eyes flashed to his face. The man was the convict Blackwell.

“Got anything to eat with you. I’m starving,” he snapped.

“Yes. I shot some quail Let go my hand.”

He laughed evilly, without mirth. “Don’t try any of your sassy ways on me. By God, I’m a wolf on the howl.”

In spite of her supple slenderness there was strength in her small wrists. She fought and twisted till she was worn out in her efforts to free herself. Panting, she faced him.

“Let me go, I tell you.”

For answer his open hand struck her mouth. “Not till you learn your boss. Before I’m through with you a squaw won’t be half so tame as you.”

He dragged her to the horse, took from its case the rifle that hung by the saddle, and flung her from him roughly. Then he pulled himself to the saddle.

“March ahead of me,” he ordered.

As soon as they had reached the bed of the cañon lie called a halt and bade her light a fire and cook him the quail. She gathered ironwood and catclaw while he watched her vigilantly. Together they roasted the birds by holding them over the fire with sharpened sticks thrust through the wings. He devoured them with the voracity of a wild beast.

Hitherto his mind had been busy with the immediate present, but now his furtive shifting gaze rested on her more thoughtfully. It was as a factor of his safety that he considered her. Gratitude was a feeling not within his scope. The man’s mind worked just as Fendrick had surmised. He would not let her go back to the ranch with the news that he was hidden in the hills so close at hand. He dared not leave her in the prospect hole. He was not yet ready to do murder for fear of punishment. That was a possibility to be considered only if he should be hard pressed. The only alternative left him was to take her to the border as a companion of his fugitive doublings.

“We’ll be going now,” he announced, after he had eaten.

“Going where? Don’t you see I’ll be a drag to you? Take my horse and go. You’ll get along faster.”

“Do you think so?”

She opened her lips to answer, but there was something in his face—something at once so cruel and deadly and wolfish—that made the words die on her lips. For the first time it came to her that if he did not take her with him he would kill her to insure his own safety. None of the arguments that would have availed with another man were of any weight here. Her sex, her youth, the service she had done him—these would not count a straw. He was lost to all the instincts of honor that govern even hard desperate men of his class.

They struck into the mountains, following a cattle trail that wound upward with devious twists. The man rode, and the girl walked in front with the elastic lightness, the unconscious flexuous grace of poise given her body by an outdoor life. After a time they left the gulch. Steadily they traveled, up dark arroyos bristling with mesquite, across little valleys leading into timbered stretches through which broken limbs and uprooted trees made progress almost impossible, following always untrodden ways that appalled with their lonely desolation.

By dusk they were up in the headwaters of the creeks. The resilient muscles of the girl had lost their spring. She moved wearily, her feet dragging heavily so that sometimes she staggered when the ground was rough. Not once had the man offered her the horse. He meant to be fresh, ready for any emergency that might come. Moreover, it pleased his small soul to see the daughter of Luck Cullison fagged and exhausted but still answering the spur of his urge.

The moon was up before they came upon a tent shining in the cold silvery light. Beside it was a sheetiron stove, a box, the ashes of a camp fire, and a side of bacon hanging from the limb of a stunted pine. Cautiously they stole forward.

The camp was for the time deserted. No doubt its owner, a Mexican sheepherder in the employ of Fendrick and Dominguez, was out somewhere with his flock.

Kate cooked a meal and the convict ate. The girl was too tired and anxious to care for food, but she made herself take a little. They packed the saddlebags with bacon, beans, coffee and flour. Blackwell tightened again the cinches and once more the two took the trail.

They made camp in a pocket opening from a gulch far up in the hills. With her own reata he fastened her hands behind her and tied the girl securely to the twisted trunk of a Joshua tree. To make sure of her he lay on the rope, both hands clinched to the rifle. In five minutes he was asleep, but it was long before Kate could escape from wakefulness. She was anxious, her nerves were jumpy, and the muscles of arms and shoulders were cramped. At last she fell into troubled catnaps.

From one of these she awoke to see that the morning light was sifting through the darkness. Her bones and muscles ached from the constraint of the position in which the rope held them. She was shivering with the chill of an Arizona mountain night. Turning her body, the girl’s eyes fell upon her captor. He was looking at her in the way that no decent man looks at a woman. Her impulse was to scream, to struggle to her feet and run. What did he mean? What was he going to do?

But something warned her this would precipitate the danger. She called upon her courage and tried to still the fearful tumult in her heart. Somehow she succeeded. A scornful, confident pride flashed from her eyes into his. It told him that for his life he dared not lay a finger upon her in the way of harm. And he knew it was true, knew that if he gave way to his desire no hole under heaven would be deep enough to hide him from the vengeance of her friends.

He got sullenly to his feet. “Come. We’ll be going.”

Within the hour they saw some of his hunters. The two were sweeping around the lip of a mountain park nestling among the summits. A wisp of smoke rose from the basin below. Grouped about it were three men eating breakfast.

“Don’t make a sound,” warned Blackwell.

His rifle covered her. With all her soul she longed to cry for help. But she dared not take the risk. Even as the two on the edge of the bowl withdrew from sight one of the campers rose and sauntered to a little grove where the ponies were tethered. The distance was too far to make sure, but something in the gait made the girl sure that the man was Curly. Her hands went out to him in a piteous little gesture of appeal.

She was right. It was Curly. He was thinking of her at that moment despairingly, but no bell of warning rang within to tell him she was so near and in such fearful need of him.

Twice during the morning did the refugee attempt to slip down into the parched desert that stretched toward Sonora and safety. But the cordon set about him was drawn too close. Each time a loose-seated rider lounging in the saddle with a rifle in his hands drove them back. The second attempt was almost disastrous, for the convict was seen. The hum of a bullet whistled past his ears as he and his prisoner drew back into the chaparral and from thence won back to cover.

Kate, drooping with fatigue, saw that fear rode Blackwell heavily. He was trapped and he knew that by the Arizona code his life was forfeit and would be exacted of him should he be taken. He had not the hardihood to game it out in silence, but whined complaints, promises and threats. He tried to curry favor with her, to work upon her pity, even while his furtive glances told her that he was wondering whether he would have a better chance if he sacrificed her life.

From gulch to arroyo, from rock-cover to pine-clad hillside he was driven in his attempts to break the narrowing circle of grim hunters that hemmed him. And with each failure, with every passing hour, the terror in him mounted. He would have welcomed life imprisonment, would have sold the last vestige of manhood to save the worthless life that would soon be snuffed out unless he could evade his hunters till night and in the darkness break through the line.

He knew now that it had been a fatal mistake to bring the girl with him. He might have evaded Bolt’s posses, but now every man within fifty miles was on the lookout for him. His rage turned against Kate because of it. Yet even in those black outbursts he felt that he must cling to her as his only hope of saving himself. He had made another mistake in lighting a campfire during the morning. Any fool ought to have known that the smoke would draw his hunters as the smell of carrion does a buzzard.

Now he made a third error. Doubling back over an open stretch of hillside, he was seen again and forced into the first pocket that opened. It proved to be a blind gulch, one offering no exit at the upper end but a stiff rock climb to a bluff above.

He whipped off his coat and gave it to Kate.

“Put it on. Quick.”

Surprised, she slipped it on.

“Now ride back out and cut along the edge of the hill. You’ve got time to make it all right before they close in if you travel fast. Stop once—just once—and I’ll drop you in your tracks. Now git!”

She saw his object in a flash. Wearing his gray felt hat and his coat, the pursuers would mistake her for him. They would follow her—perhaps shoot her down. Anyhow, it would be a diversion to draw them from him. Meanwhile he would climb the cliff and slip away unnoticed.

The danger of what she had to do stood out quite clearly, but as a chance to get away from him she welcomed it gladly. She swung the pony with a touch of the rein and set him instantly at the canter. It was rough