Glory of Gold

by Vingie E. Roe

 

Glory of Gold

If You Want Somethings Take It—a Perfectly
Normal Impulse, Perhaps, but There Are Ways
and Ways of Doing It. How It Worked Out in
the Lives of a Primitive Girl, a Wonder-Horse
and a Plain Man Makes a Striking Romance

By Vingie E. Roe

A SLIM silver sickle rode down the western sky. From the south a little wind was coming, soft and whispering, to stir the leaves of the cottonwoods that lined the drying wash. It was sweet with the scent of miles of small blue flowers, cool with coming night. It lifted the fine silk curls on a girl's temples and kissed her satin cheek, and a man's eyes envied it hungrily.

He stood beside her, his hand on her horse's mane, his own cow-pony drooping in hip-dropped rest a little way apart.

He was young and lean with constant riding, and the gray eyes that searched her dusky ones were sick with longing beneath their smiling raillery.

“Some day,” he stated in his soft, low voice, “I'm going to hold out my arms and you're going to come to me—running—and I'll have my dream come true, the dream of your face against my heart. Some day you'll give me my kiss.”

A smile curled up the corners of her mouth, a slightly cruel smile, yet beautiful withal.

“And why,” she asked, “should you have all this?”

“For no reason on God's earth,” he answered slowly, “except that my heart's so bound up with you that other breath's denied me. If I don't see you once in a while, Arland, I feel like there isn't enough air on all the Willasanna range—like I'm dying of thirst in sight of water.”

“Many men talk to me after this fashion,” she said. “I'm tired of it.”

“Yes?”

“Yes; and they boast—like you.”

“I thought I was original.”

“No. There's Chase and Hansell.”

“Chase? Is he in this running, too?”

“Bah!” she said, and her voice was hard. “What man in all this country isn't?”

The man threw back his head and laughed.

“Whew! You don't hate yourself, Arland, and that's a fact! But who could blame them? Those eyes of yours, now, and the red mouth of you—why, I'd go through hell's fire for a kiss from it myself. But Chase—damn him!—I've wanted to kill him for some several moons on account of Gloria de Oro, and this intensifies that desire. If he gets you, Arland, you'll be minus a bridegroom, so help me; for I'll let daylight in him then and no mistake.”

At that speech, her dark eyes looked straight at him in a sort of fright.

“Gloria de Oro,” she said; “are you after him?”

“Have been for two years, and so has Chase. It's a matter of pride between us. Chase and I have side-stepped each other for quite a while.” He might have mentioned a certain night in Santa Ansan when they had side-stepped each other's bullets as well. “So don't set your heart on him, little girl. And now you'd better run home, for it's getting dark mighty fast and you're a long way from Rancho Gordo. You—you don't think you could give me that kiss now, do you?”

“Not now or ever, Mister High-and-Mighty,” she said coldly. “You'll never get a kiss from me. I'm sick of men.”

And without more words she whirled the horse beneath her, a good blue roan, and was in instant flight away toward the north.

The man mounted and sat watching her, his broad hat in his hand.

“Spirits of speed,” he murmured in admiration, “how she rides! Straight up like an Indian, and loosely—born to it like a bird to the air. O Lord, will I ever get that wild, small body in my arms? She's like a bird—and like a panther, too. There was that vaquero from over Palmo way who tried to kiss her at the dance—he carries the scars where she scratched him yet, they say. Ah, well——”

He struck the pony gently with the hat he held and loped away toward the south. Far down in the mauve shadows he could see the lights of the Double Arrow, whose wide ranges were his own, and the peace of possession warmed him pleasurably.

NIGHT had long since fallen when the girl on the blue roan rode into the home corral at Rancho Gordo. She gave the horse into eager hands and went up the steps and into the deep old house with the quick and haughty step of a potentate. In the living-room three men lounged and smoked, waiting for the tap of the big bell that hung by the kitchen door to announce supper.

“Hello, kid!” said Ben Mead, reaching for her hand as she passed.

She stopped and looked her stepfather square in the face.

“You, too?” she said. “Must I begin to pack a gun?”

There was vitriol in her voice, and the laugh that went up shook in the smoked beams above.

Chase and Hansell rigged the big boss unmercifully, and the girl went on into an other room without a word to them. She flung her fringed gloves on a blanketed couch and her face was hard with frowning in the gloom. Her voice, however, was soft as velvet as she went on into still another room, a dim room where a huge bed stood by the west windows that the woman who lay day in day out upon it might see the pageant of the plains sunsets.

“Mother?” she asked softly of the silence.

“Darling,” came the answer in the lilting voice of the soul that finds only the good in each passing hour, “where have you been?”

“Out on the range on Roamer. It's early summer, you know, and the world is fair.”

She sat down on the bed's edge and for a long time conversed in the slow, intimate way of women who understand each other. Sarah Mead knew this half-wild daughter of hers, yet never ceased to marvel at her strength, her manlike poise and courage.

“You're like your father, Arland,” she would say sometimes. “Lin Brace was a man from the ground up. He won me fighting and carried me from my father's door on his saddle-horn. I didn't love him then, and I wept when we stood before the priest—but he was right, for I loved him after—Mary Mother, how I loved him to the day of his death in that Mexican mine!”

Arland gazed out the window where the mauve and lavender had turned to purple-black, thick-sewn with stars.

“He must have been a man,” she said softly, “to win and hold you so, to live his wild life in Mexico and to make his stake while he was still young. I've never been able to see, for the life of me, how and why you married Ben.”

A sigh from the shadows answered.

“He was very good to me, and I was sick with loneliness,” said Sarah Mead, “and you were so little.”

The girl said no more, but she thought derisively of the rich Rancho Gordo bought with that “stake” which her unknown father had made in his pride and his youth.

Chase and Hansell stayed late that night, and there was sound of laughter and slapping cards in the living-room where Prince, the range boss, made a fourth at poker.

Arland sat with her mother for a long time, as was her habit, made her comfortable and slipped to her own room on noiseless feet. She was weary to her young heart's core of men and all their ways. But, once alone, she did not sleep. Instead she waited by her window for the slow quieting of the life at Rancho Gordo, and she was fully dressed.

The little soft wind of dusk had freshened. It came out of the south, sweet and cool with the night-feel. The slender sickle of moon was gone and uncounted stars sparkled on the black-velvet dome of the sky. Where the Little Snake cut down across the Willasannas, cottonwoods and alders stood in ghostly ranks, and there was the slow shine of water where the starlight struck.

AND here in the night and the silence a shadow waited in the shadows, a great dark bulk, massive and yet slim-seeming, that stood in utter stillness save for the even breathing that made scarce a lifting of the satin sides. Snow-white hoofs close together, his great head lifted to quest the pleasant wind, his huge mane standing above it like a milky cloud, his vanity of tail fan-spread behind his heels, a horse, a wild horse, stood in the deepest darkness beneath the alder trees. No part of him showed in the starlight, so cunning had a hard life made him, and only night-trained senses would have found him there.

An hour passed by the wheeling stars and he had not moved so much as one white hoof.

Gloria de Oro, ten years old to the certain knowledge of the Willasanna range, untamed, uncaught, unequaled, a pride and an institution of the plains country, waited in mysterious and nerve-tense quiet for something or some one.

The Mexicans and Indians called him “Gloria de Oro”—Glory of Gold—from the wonderful yellow coat that wrapped him from head to heel like a blanket. There was on him no spot of color, no hair of an other shade except the great white mane and tail that flowed and billowed with his running almost to knee and heel.

So he stood, in his poise and his perfection, waiting in that flawless patience which reaches its highest point in the animals.

Then, with some vagrant whiff of the pleasant wind, the breath stopped in his lungs altogether and he listened with all his body. Even with those proud hoofs on the earth he listened, feeling for the first faint vibration. Every delicate hair on his soft hide pricked with listening. Suddenly he let out the holden breath and the questing nostrils flared wide to catch all the scents the breeze might carry; for he knew that that for which he waited was coming.

Far up along the open plains beyond the Little Snake there came presently the beat and rhythm of a horse's hoofs in flight, and Gloria de Oro moved for the first time in his patient vigil, moved all over his flexible body as if a set of springs vibrated to a touch. And out of the night and the starlit silence Arland Brace came riding on Roamer, came straight to the alders and sent before her a soft, peculiar whistle, two notes, one falling, one rising, that called with a thrilling intimacy.

Called and was answered as surely and gladly as if human spoke to human, for Gloria de Oro whinnied deep in his mighty chest and stepped forth like a king to meet her—old Glory of Gold, on whose satin hide no man's hand had ever lain! The girl flung down from Roamer, who drew a breath and stood, and, running forward, put her arms up about the crested neck with a veritable passion of love. The golden stallion bent his great head to nuzzle her shoulder, fluttered his nostrils against her cheek.

“Golden beauty!” she whispered into the silken cloud of the falling mane. “Arland's comfort—her hope and her happiness!”

Like lovers they fondled each other for a space, soft muzzle tucked into softer throat, and the girl kept up her whispering.

“They're after you, my beauty,” she said hardly; “and after me as well. Men—the spoilers! Me they would buy or conquer, and you they'd break. I hate the breed!”

From the breast of her dark garment she brought forth the old wile of man to beast, a bribe—sugar, a lump of the brown product brought from the far-distant railroad in barrels for the winter's supply—and held it on the palm of her soft hand for the eager lips to nibble. Many a pound had gone to the sleekening and coaxing of Glory of Gold in the two years since she had first put hand upon him. Standing in the dark beside the alder trees, Arland thought of those two years and the one before them when she had spent days on end in the open reaches, patient, intent, and watched the stallion circle and sniff and pound the earth with his ringing hoofs. It had taken time and unlimited patience to bring him near, step by step and day by day, and always she had feared discovery—and Ben Mead.

When Gloria de Oro had finished the last sweet crumb, Arland turned and led Roamer into the darker shadows, where she left him tied to the ground with a trailing rein. Then she came back to where the other had moved to follow. She pulled the great head down to earth, flung herself across the high arch of the neck, spoke once, and was lifted with a fling as the stallion raised his head again. With a swift motion, she slid to his back, threw her right foot over and was mounted as gallantly as was ever warrior of old.

Old Glory of Gold swept instantly out from the shadows and stretched away down the dusky plain, for this was an old game to them.

Arland Brace on his back was another person from the moment of that magnificent start. From her face all trace of strain was swept away as by a magic touch. She forgot the ailing woman whom she so desperately loved back at Rancho Gordo, forgot the look on Chase's secretive features, the hard and calculating eyes of her stepfather—forgot also the man from the Double Arrow, the lean dark rider with the good gray eyes, who boasted that some day she would come to him—running.

Of all the predatory males who coveted her, Rod Callentry was the hardest to forget, because of the quiet assurance that left her no surety of her own.

But with the cut of the wind by her cheek, the singing note of the resonant earth beneath the drumming feet as the old king gathered speed and all the unpeopled plains spread out for her amphitheatre, Arland Brace forgot her troubles and her looming dangers and was alight with joy.

An hour before dawn, Arland turned Roamer into the home corral and crept silently to her room. She was up betimes, and there was on her lovely face no sign of that wild tryst where the alders grew beside the Little Snake.

AT SANTA ANSAN, Chase, big and burly, handsome after a certain coarse fashion, leaned on the bar and listened to a conversation.

“Thees Alsandro,” boasted a decorated Mexican from across the border, dark eyes sparkling with the tale of prowess he was recounting, “he is the bes' han' weeth the caballo. In Chihuahua he is send for always at the breaking. He brings always the wild horse from the mountains. None escapes. Weeth Alsandro there is no failure. Not ever.” A little later Chase sat at a table with the speaker, drank and talked in Spanish patois, drank again and presently there was the muffled clink of gold as the two parted.

“It cannot be longer than a month, señor,” he stated, as he swung toward the street of the squalid town; “perhaps not so long. And we must be ready.”

“For gold, señor,” returned the other, with a flash of white teeth beneath his small mustache, “Alsandro is always ready.”

Early summer on the Willasannas is heaven brought to earth. Blue flowers scent the wanton breezes and miles of dark-green grass turn silver under the winds' feet. Arland spent nearly all her days in the room at Rancho Gordo that faced the west, for the patient face of Sarah Mead was taking on new lines, vague slants and shades of etheriality.

It bore a handwriting of the spirit that was plain as print to the anguished eyes of her daughter. But though her heart sank in her breast with a deadly fear, the girl was all bright talk and easy hopefulness. This gentle mother was her only human tie. Men she hated and feared with a flame and fire that seared her soul with bitterness.

In her mother's room she met Ben Mead with pleasantness. Outside its door she watched his shifting eyes in cold silence. And she saw the new confidence with which Chase came and went, the understanding that seemed to be between the two. There were many close talks, held in out-of-the-way places, stray conversations that stopped abruptly if she chanced to pass. There was a smiling boldness in Chase's eyes which she could not fathom, and Hansell was sulky. Once the former blocked her way in a passage of the old house and laid a hand on her shoulder. She struck it down with a loathing he could not mistake and turned back. It was then she took to “packing” a gun, as she had threatened.

More than once in the days that followed she looked with tragic eyes at the rolling ranges of Rancho Gordo and knew that they were slipping fast from her mother's failing hand, saw the shadow of Ben Mead's fingers stretched already over them. And the two men continued to talk and whisper, watching like twin vultures from the edge of life. She was thankful for one thing—her stepfather was still kind to the woman in the west room. Arland was becoming worn with her ceaseless vigils and her fears. There were dark circles beneath her imperious eyes. She missed the stirring comfort of her clandestine flings on the wild stallion's back, fretted for his lonely waitings beneath the alder trees.

But a sterner grief was on her, and she waited, as we all must sometime wait, for the terrible feet of the Reaper to stop beside our beloved.

The leaden days dragged by and the longing became an ache, so that once more she drifted away on Roamer in the dark and the silence. The sickle of moon had waxed and waned and the plains were velvet-black as they must always be when she made the pilgrimage. Old Gloria de Oro had waited many nights in vain beside the Little Snake and he was wild with joy at her appearance, nuzzled her roughly in his eagerness and stepped about her pridefully. In a way, they were both fugitives, and Arland hid her unhappy face in the flowing mane, and scant hard tears trickled amid its shining floss.

“Men—damn them!” she sobbed. “But for them we would be safe, here in the land of our birthright. When the time comes, sweetheart, if we can escape their net together, we will go straight out of the Willasannas to another world and try to forget the purple ranges.”

And run as he would that night, sail like a bird all down the sounding levels with curvet and spring, Gloria de Oro could put no joy in his beloved's heart. She was like a dead thing swaying above him, sodden and inert.

ONE day in the week that followed, Rod Callentry came to Rancho Gordo, carrying some titbit of sweets made by the cunning, skilled hands of Felicita, old and brown and kindly, who ruled the domestic domain of the Double Arrow.

His cool gray eyes were guarded when he spoke to Ben Mead and glanced without speech at Chase, who was there again.

“We heard at the Double Arrow that Mrs. Mead is not so well,” he said, “and Felicita would send the candied fruit.”

“Mighty good of you, Callentry!” said Mead civilly, but there was a covert sneer beneath. Arland, holding the inner door, looked at them all with frowning eyes.

“Bring them,” she said shortly, and Callentry followed her. Sarah Mead's dim eyes brightened at the man's advent, and she glowed palely.

Afterward, clanking out through the deep rooms, the rider stopped a second and searched the girl's drawn face.

“If—when”—he floundered—“if you need help, Arland, if Chase or—I'd lay down my life and all the Double Arrow for your sake—I want you to know it.”

She raised smoldering eyes to his.

“And the price?” she asked bitterly.

“Nothing,” he gritted. “Not so much as a word or a look!”

Then he was gone, and she went frowning about her work.

That day, too, Chase tried to kiss her and she struck him with the handle of a loaded quirt, leaving a red weal where the blood oozed.

“You little hussy!” cried the man. “I'll pay you for that! Is it because of Callentry's politeness, I wonder? Bah! That won't last long!” And he laughed sharply, snapping his thick fingers.

“Threats again!” thought Arland savagely. “I hope they kill each other off.” But an uneasy memory of Rod's honest eyes hung at the back of her brain beneath her other troubles.

That week a stranger came to Rancho Gordo. He was young and dark and handsome, and he rode a loose-limbed scarecrow of a horse whose fame was broad across the border. His slow-moving eyes smiled al ways; his slim brown fingers were stained from a thousand cigarettes. He was Mexican from his silver-weighted sombrero to his vanity of carven spurs, and Chase called him “Alsandro.” This languorous stranger put a new fear in Arland's heart, a nameless fear that twitched her fingers, brought her broad awake in her scant and needed sleep. It was not personal fear. Rather it was a foreboding, an intuition, that he meant harm to something that she loved—the seventh sense of woman sounding its warning. He was another of that tribe she hated—men, men always, with their threats and their conquering, their hardness and their evil looks. She wished to high heaven that she might sweep them all from the face of earth—and again she thought of Callentry—Callentry with his kind gray eyes, his gentle voice that bragged.

And that week, too, Sarah Mead passed quietly out in the night, and none knew of her going for an hour, though Arland and two of the serving-women drowsed in their chairs beside her. She was hardly under the earth in the garden that faced the sunset she had loved when Chase told Arland that he loved her.

“Leave me—you toad!” she said, shuddering, and for once the man backed down from suffering virtue. The anguished flame in her hollow eyes promised action, and the bully knew limits when he met them.

At Rancho Gordo there was a perking-up, a quickening of interest, a sweeping-out and garnishing of methods, as it were. Ben Mead's voice took on a more masterful tone. But still he cringed to Chase in a way.

Hansell had disappeared, and most of the questionable characters that had frequented the rancho ceased their troubling, for all the world as if an ultimatum had gone forth, a warning off preserves.

This quickening took form in the gathering-in of all the horses that ran on Mead's own ranges. The cowboys ran them into the different corrals and there was a great singling-out and selecting, and Arland, watching somberly from the windows, saw that these were the pick of the strings, the fastest, most enduring. Everywhere among them was the Mexican, Alsandro, looking to this and that one. Chase was there with Cyclone and Ben Mead with his brown Rawhide. And Arland felt her heart grow cold.

The preparation narrowed until the night and the morning were left before the culmination, and Ben Mead called her to the living-room and sent the servants out. Chase lounged by a table, smoking, and his fat face was like a vulture's for unwholesomeness.

“Arland,” said her stepfather, grinning, “let me interduce your future husband—Mr. Bill Chase, of Ciudad, Mexico.” And he waved a hand in derisive playfulness. The girl stood still against the door that led to the inner room where Sarah Mead had waited so long for release—that sickeningly empty room—and one hand felt of her throat helplessly.

“Stop fooling!” she said suddenly, straightening up.

The playfulness left the ugly face of Mead.

“I'm not fooling,” he said sharply. “Chase goes south to Mexico in a day or two—and you're going with him. If you go quietly and don't make a fuss, he says he'll marry you.”

“Marry me?” She threw back her head and hollow laughter struck on the silence. “Chase? The toad! If he touches me, I'll kill him!”

Chase roused himself in his chair, and his cheeks turned livid with rage.

“Take care, you young hussy!” he warned. “A man's woman minds him well in Mexico.”

Arland ignored him contemptuously. She looked at Ben Mead and spoke.

“So you're selling me, are you?” she asked. “Want to get me out of the way. Rancho Gordo's too rich pickings for the daughter, whose father's money bought it, to share, is it?”

She leaned forward and struck a thin hand against its mate, as that fighting father might have done.

“That you may get, you unclean thief! I cannot stop you in your tricks; but not one hair of my head will you bargain off. I'll see to that!”

And she flung open the door and, springing through, locked it against them.

Wild plans passed through her brain of escape, now, to-night—of a last swift run on Roamer—of Gloria de Oro—and of that great sailing journey out of the Willasannas forever. But that modest mound in the garden where the straw-flowers grew was too new—too pitifully new—for her to leave it yet. At that piteous thought she fell to quivering with sorrow and slid down along the door to cover her face with her hands and fall to weeping, lowly, hardly, in the slow despair of the utterly bereft.

DAWN came up alight at Rancho Gordo. There was stir and movement, and Arland heard the clank of spur and rattle of accouterments. The men ate by candle-light and went away swiftly, leaving silence. She came forth and questioned the serving-women, but there was a curious reticence among them, as if they must not speak. She visited the mound in the garden and stood a while by the poplar trees aimlessly. Life had become aimless to her. There was nothing for her to do, no place where she was needed. The great spread of the Willasannas, pale rose in the sun's first rays, was bittersweet to her in its beauty and its sense of poignant loss. All her memories were center here. She gazed with frowning eyes along the vast reaches that traveled south and west into infinitude.

To the east the Willasanna Hills rose in majesty. It was a splendid land, widespread and noble, and her throat ached with nostalgia already.

Her vision warped suddenly with the hot and bitter tears that stung her eyes; her lips worked soundlessly—and on the film that drew the levels out of line she saw distorted dots that danced grotesquely.

She dashed the tears away and her eyes narrowed and became keen as a hawk's, so that she recognized the dots for men and horses spread in a vast half-moon far out toward e Little Snake—the men of Rancho Gordo.

Toward Deep Coulee they went, and they were spread for drifting.

What were they going to drift? The cold points of her eyes became tiny flames. A thousand thoughts ran swiftly through her mind—Callentry's words of Chase and Gloria de Oro—Mead's of Mexico City and Chase's going—a stray bit of talk concerning Alsandro and his prowess as a catcher of wild horses in the hills across the border—and then she knew. Knew, and her heart stopped beating to plunge on again, stifling her.

It was Gloria de Oro they were after at last in full panoply of the hunt. Chase, for two years coveting the golden horse—and her—would have them both to take out of the Willasannas! Chase, bought by Ben Mead's money she knew beyond a doubt to clear the way for him to undisputed sway at Rancho Gordo! Chase, the bully—the brute! Chase to bind Glory of Gold and break his heart with spur and quirt! Rage that had not mounted at his threats to her came boiling up like a flood within her at that picture, and she flung into the house, tearing at her garments. It took but a matter of moments to don her riding-clothes, and she came running through the living-room fastening her belt. A good gun hung on her thigh and a quirt was on her wrist. Her face was white as a moon in mist, her dark eyes blazing.

Josefina, her serving-woman, blocked the way, catching at her.

“Señorita,” she besought, “you are not to leave the rancho—Señor Boss's orders——”

“You traitor!” said the girl, and struck her full across the lips.

At the corrals, a Mexican vaquero stepped out and shook his head, but she turned and looked at him with her hand upon the gun, and he turned back.

The bunch of horses left in the corrals was wild and troublesome, and it was long before she had selected, roped and saddled Buckskin, not so young as he might have been, but good once. Then she was in the saddle and gone with only a glance at the garden beneath the poplars.

At the back of her mind was a sharp thought that this was for farewell, that never again would she come sailing home to Rancho Gordo in the twilight. The die was in the casting, and she played a high game with only a gambler's chance—a long chance. If she lost—there was the gun against her thigh, comforting her.

Buckskin, fresh and angry, laid down to earth and ran as he had not run for many moons, but he was old and stiff and his shoulders had been starched, and the woman on his back beheld that far line beat out to the southwest and disappear. With what arch cunning did Chase know the haunts of the wild stallion! Her heart sank as she visioned them startling him from Deep Coulee, cutting him off from water at the Little Snake.

She knew the usual mode of capture of these wild steeds, the cruel relays, the ceaseless driving, the anguish of fatigue and thirst that always won at last. Sometimes, true, it was death that won, according to the temper of the victim. And death it would be for old Glory of Gold, she knew in her heart, for he would never surrender. Not while one white hoof could pass before the other, while there was breath in his deep lungs. Death it would be—perhaps for both—unless Fate, so long against her, should play in her hand on that one long chance.

She beat Buckskin unmercifully with the quirt and got his best.

She made for the country beyond Deep Coulee where the broken mounds and weathered mesas stood. The long chance led her there.

AND out on the great levels the net spread for Gloria de Oro beat its wide circle—with the golden king in sweeping flight before it; for they found him in his haunts beyond the Little Snake.

For years the king had stagged alone throughout that country, unmolested by any but some lone rider, for the unwritten law concerning him had been that only he who should take him single-handed should own the splendid horse. Gloria de Oro was an institution, a pride, almost a legend, and this that happened now in the early day was against all precedent.

Not a rancher on the Willasannas but would have protested to the point of battle against it. It was injustice. It was underhand advantage, and none but Mead and Chase or Hansell would have dared to do it.

Gloria de Oro did not know all this. He knew merely that the unpeopled plains were suddenly alive with enemies who appeared at every point, and he tossed high his unconquered head, lifted his flaring tail a bit and sailed away from them with consummate ease. Like a bird skimming still waters, he drifted down the levels, magnificent, easeful, a thing of vast beauty, of unbelievable speed.

“Santa Maria!” ejaculated Alsandro, who knew horseflesh well. “Un grande caballo!”

But far down ahead more enemies appeared, and Gloria de Oro swept back in a wide arc toward the Little Snake. The sun came well up and with it more riders, it seemed. They were here, there and everywhere, and they seemed to have no purpose but to keep him going. Gloria de Oro was hard and fit in every fine, firm muscle. Speed was a joy to him, had ever been. So he swept and circled, stretched out in long spectacular flights that made Chase's evil eyes glow with desire. He was a wonder for endurance and for swiftness, but always there came after him one—a long, lean scarecrow of a horse whose tireless limbs ate up the distances almost as fast as he created them. Always this dark creature was somewhere near; always it circled and swept even as he circled and swept. How could he know that this was that great horse of Alsandro, whose fame was in the land across the border?

But one, watching with strained and hollow eyes from the high vantage of a flat-topped mesa, saw and understood.

“This is why he came,” groaned Arland Brace. “Chase, the devil, brought him.”

THE morning wore away and the great play went on in the levels beneath the mesas between the Little Snake and the mouth of Deep Coulee.

When the sun stood overhead, Gloria de Oro was running as strongly as he had at dawn. His bright-yellow skin glistened in dry perfection, for he was hard, hard. The riders stopped by relays of twos and threes to drink a cup of coffee at a fire and to change horses.

“By —— ——!” swore Chase excitedly. “If he ain't the great king and no mistake! He'll bring me a fortune in Mexico City.”

“You'll need it,” said Mead grimly, “to hold that damned wildcat I'm giving you.”

The men swung out again and once more took up the harrying of the quarry. Here—there—turn and feint and turn again—so Glory of Gold ran on into the afternoon without a moment's rest. The girl on the mesa gripped her hands and her face was wet with sweat.

Twice she fingered her gun and frowned at the tiny figure of Chase circling below. Buckskin waited patiently, hid in a crevasse of the mesa's rotten stone. The strain was telling on her. Her knuckles stood white in her clenched fists; her face was pale. It seemed there was a tight band about her throat that hindered her breathing.

“It's only a matter of hours,” she muttered to herself aloud. “They'll ride in the night—for there's a moon. He hasn't been to water since last night.”

And she deliberately began to descend the sliding steeps toward the plain below. What she meant to do in this last moment of extremity was not plain to her. She only knew that she was going—somewhere, for some purpose, some bleak and deadly purpose—perhaps to ride out and blow that grinning fat face of Chase's into a redder blotch of nothingness—to——

She reached the spot where she had left Buckskin, mounted and rode out to stand against the sandstone wall of the mesa, a far, lone figure.

She sat and waited on her destiny, and her heart was bitter and dead as ashes. She thought once of her mother and then of Rod Callentry's smiling face with the kindly eyes, heard him say again, “I'd lay down my life and all the Double Arrow for your sake.” For some vague reason it sounded sweet in memory, as if in all that tribe of men she hated here was a gleam of right and honor. But her mother was dead and Rod Callentry belonged to the Willasannas—the Willasannas that she had forsworn.

When the sun went down—when she should see that sailing golden streak out yonder falter in his steady stride—once again she fingered the gun upon her thigh. Thank God, she was not afraid of death! It was preferable a thousand times to life with Chase.

The light was falling toward the west and long blue shadows of the mesas were beginning to lengthen on the plain when something happened.

Gloria de Oro, running bravely as he had at dawn despite the swollen tongue that was beginning to show between his lips, searching the levels with desperate eyes, saw that far, lone figure in the mesa's shadow.

Eagerly he tossed his head, strained his hawk's vision, opened his mouth for a scream that was hoarse with suffering, and, turning sharply, thundered away toward it, straight as a homing bird. Every man in the outfit saw that sudden change of front and glanced swiftly for its reason. They saw, too, a rider whom none had noticed by the mesa's flank—saw it leave its horse's back and start running with outstretched arms to meet the king. Saw the stallion master a burst of greater speed—saw the distance close between them—saw them meet and slide together in a cloud of flying turf. Then the great head went down, flung up, and Gloria de Oro turned to face them with a rider on his back.

From all around they raced in toward them, and it was Chase who recognized her first.

“You hussy!” he screamed like a lunatic, the coarse face red with rage.”

“Stand back!” cried Arland Brace. “I'll kill the first that comes!”

Her lips were curled from her teeth; her face was pale as wax; the gun in her hand trembled only with the anguished panting of the stallion's sides.

“Stand back!” she said again, but Chase struck Cyclone, who leaped forward. There was the sharp crack of the gun and the red face slid spectacularly down behind Cyclone's mane.

She faced the rest in cold stillness. Nothing moved about her save her blazing eyes.

Then, in a terrible silence, she touched Glory of Gold and turned him from his enemies, turning herself to face them, and step by step they drew apart—slowly at first, then with a flash of the power that had made him what he was, the best horse in the cattle-land, they leaped out together on that last great journey toward the sunset and the outside world. Nothing followed save the screaming oaths of Chase, not so dead as she could have wished, nursing a shattered shoulder and raving of Mead's price and its ultimate loss.

DAY had gone from the Willasannas.

Twilight and stars had come before the late moon, and the soft wind from the south brought its whispered peace. At the Double Arrow, Rod Callentry sat in the shadows at his ranch-house door, smoked his sweet pipe and dreamed in a sort of pensive sadness. Of late his dreams had lost their hopefulness, taken on a shade of distance and unattainability. The windows that he had dared to hope would some day hold an imperious face seemed empty as his heart.

And then, against the great red disk of that rising moon, something moved, came over the last small rise of land—the figure of a horse, a superhorse, tall, majestic, powerful, whose crested head hung low with weariness, whose gallant feet all but stumbled in their progress and on whose back a slim figure drooped. Out of the night and the travail they came slowly to the beaten yard, and Arland Brace spoke from the dusk.

“Rod,” she said unevenly, “we've come—Gloria de Oro and—I—to give ourselves—to you. We've come—through—hell's fire—Rod—to bring you that kiss—to make—your dream—come true.” And she slid incontinently down into the loving arms that reached for her in a sort of holy wonder. The proud black head was drooping and there were tears on the weary face. She hid them on his breast and finished her recital.

“I tried to—to leave the Willasannas,” she sobbed, “to go on out to another country—to leave it all forever. But I could not—always your face came before me—and your honest eyes—and I—turned south to the Double Arrow at last. Oh, Rod—we've come to you—not in our pride, untamed—but creeping—creeping—Gloria de Oro—and I—”

The tears drowned out the halting voice, and, at the reverent lips upon her hair, the gentle hand reached to the drooping stallion's side. Arland knew in her surcharged heart that they, two poor hunted things, had found their own.