CHAPTER XLI
Avalanche
WHEN Alan Law denied her and would have none of her, when he threw himself off into the storm rather than endure association with her in the shelter of the rock, Judith Trine, whose nature Love was strangely altering, swallowed her chagrin and followed him with the solicitude of one whose love can recognize no wrong in its object. Through all the remainder of that day of terror she was never far from his side, never out of touch with him, though she did not again offer to touch him after that first rebuff.
What did it matter? she asked herself. All along she had known that he could never love her, that his love was pledged to her own sister Rose. So why should she complain if he despised and rebuffed her, preferred the fury of the tempest to refuge from it in her company? Her love was no less sweet to her for that. And she could not forget that he had come in search of her, spurred inexorably by that sentiment in his nature which would not let him spare himself while a woman needed to be served.
Once it caught her in the open, the storm flew at her throat like a maddened animal that thirsted for blood. Its shriek of eldritch joy fairly deafened her. Judith was well-nigh swept off her feet, while Alan, in the weakness of his fatigue and suffering, actually staggered and was beaten to his knees.
Yet when he was warned of her approach by some subtle instinct he rose and battled blindly on. …
With the meekness of the strong, she made herself his shadow. And she was now the stronger, for she had had more than an hour's rest beside the water-hole which he had missed on the way of that rocky windbreak. Sooner or later his strength must fail him and he would need her: till then she was content to bide her hour.
It befell presently in startling fashion: she was not a yard behind him when he vanished abruptly. The next moment Judith herself was trembling on the crumbling brink of an arroyo of depth and width interminable in the obscurity of the duststorm. Down this, evidently, Alan had fallen.
At once she scouted along that brink until she found a spot which seemed to offer a less sheer descent, and let herself down.
Alan she found lying insensible. There was a slight cut upon his brow, a bruise about his left temple. She tore linen from her bosom, and with sparing aid from the canteen washed the cut clean and bandaged it. Then she pillowed his head upon her lap, and bending over him made of her body an additional shelter from the swirling clouds of dust.
From the insensibility induced by that blow upon his temple the man passed quietly into slumbers of profound physical exhaustion. And for hours on end Judith nursed him there, scarce daring to move; save to minister to his needs. In the course of the first hour she was once startled by the spectral vision, through the driving sheets of dust, of a horse that plodded up the arroyo bearing two riders on his back.
Weary with the weight of its double burden, it went slowly, and passed so near to Judith that she was able to recognize the features of her sister and Tom Barcus. Riding with heads bowed to the blasts they passed without seeing the fierce-eyed woman who crouched there over the body of a man who lay so still that he might have been dead.
Be sure she made never a sign to catch their attention.
This hour, at least, was hers; Rose would never grudge it to her when it had passed!
Within the next succeeding hour twilight stole athwart the desert, turning its heat to chill, its light to violet. Then night shut down upon the world. Not before that hour did the storm subside and give place to a bright, clear night of stars and moonlight.
Growing more intense, the cold eventually roused the sleeping man.
Hardly had his eyes unclosed and looked up into the eyes of Judith bending over him than he started up and out of her embrace, got unsteadily to his feet, and staggered away, with a gesture of exorcism. Hugging her new-born humility to her, Judith followed patiently, at a little distance.
Not far from where they had rested there was a break in the wall of the arroyo. Through this he scrambled painfully, the unheeded woman at his heels.
A pause there afforded both time to regain their breath and survey the desert for signs of assistance. It offered none. For leagues in any quarter it stretched without a break. The southward hills, however, seemed the nearer. They seemed to have won by now at least two thirds of the way across. And low down upon the slope of one of the hills a tiny light shone like a friendly star.
With tacit consent both turned that way, Alan leading, Judith his pertinacious shadow.
And then of a sudden she collapsed. The white world swam giddily about her, rocking like a confused sea. Her knees became as water. … She sank silently to the earth.
He turned and came back to her, lifted her head, and plied her in turn with the dregs of the canteen. With a sigh and a little shiver she revived. Then, with a struggle, she sat up.
Neither spoke.
She shivered again in his arms, and he put his coat about her shoulders. It wrung her heart that he should so expose himself for her sake, yet not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.
Then they struggled on in strange, dumb companionship of misery.
Thus an hour passed, and for all their desperate struggles neither could see that the light on the mountainside was a yard nearer.
Suddenly Alan, again exhausted, dropped as if shot. Instantly she was kneeling by his side. But in the act of bending over him she drew back to stare amazed at two twin glaring eyes sweeping down upon them with all the speed attainable by a six-cylinder touring-car negotiating a trackless desert.
When Judith did move, it was not to comfort Alan. Her first act was to draw from her pocket a heavy, blunt-nosed revolver, break it at the breech, and blow its barrel clear of dust. Her hand went next to the holster on Alan's hip. From this she extracted his Colt's .45, treating it as she had the other. Then she crouched low above the man she loved, as if thinking to escape notice from the occupants of the motor-car. But the glare of the headlights fell upon them and, as was inevitable, discovery followed. The motor-car stopped within twenty feet. Three men jumped out and ran toward them, leaving two in the car—the chauffeur and one who occupied a corner of the rear seat—an aged man with the face of a damned soul doomed for a little time to live upon this earth in the certain foreknowledge of his damnation.
Judith Trine leaped to her feet and stood over the body of Alan, a revolver poised in either hand.
"Halt!" she ordered. "Hands up!"
The three men obeyed without a moment's hesitation, her father's creatures, they knew the daughter far too well to dream of opposing her will.
In the six hands three revolvers glimmered; but at her command all three dropped to the earth.
Then, sharply, "Stand back two paces!" she required. They complied, and she pocketed their weapons.
"Now, Marrophat—and you, Hicks, pick Mr. Law up and carry him into the car. If one of you lift a finger to harm him, that one shall answer to me."
Still none ventured to dispute her. The two men designated lifted Alan Law and bore him with every care toward the motor-car.
Then the man in the rear seat lifted up a weirdly sonorous voice:
"Stop!" he cried. "Drop that man! Judith, I command you"
"Be silent!" the girl cut in sharply. "I command here—if it's necessary to tell you."
Then the old man broke out in exasperation that waxed into fury. As well command the sea to still its voice: her father raged like the madman that he was, for the time being divested of his habitual mask of frigid heartlessness. The desperate girl turned to the third man.
"Now, Jimmy," she said crisply, "into that car— be quick—and gag him."
"If you do," the father foamed, "I'll have your life"
The man named Jimmy hesitated between fear of the one and awe of the other; but his hesitation vanished when the girl pulled trigger and two bullets, bored into the earth near his feet. Then with alacrity he jumped into the car and, ignoring the threats of the old man, proceeded to execute Judith's order.
"Now out with you!" she instructed in a tolerant tone when that task was finished and Marrophat and Hicks had placed Alan gently on the floor of the car.
A flourish of her weapons gained instant indulgence of this wish.
She stepped up on the running-board and addressed the terrified chauffeur.
"Straight ahead, my man!" she said. "Make for the nearest pass through those hills yonder, and don't delay unless you're anxious for trouble."
The car began to move. The three men left in the desert made no effort to plead their cause. It was not until five minutes later that she realized what had made them so content to abide by her will.
Then she heard their voices lifted together in a howl that was quickly answered, first, by fainter yells from a distant quarter of the desert, then by a growing rumour of galloping hoofs.
The night glasses in the car afforded her glimpses of some six or seven horsemen making toward the spot where Marrophat, Hicks, and Jimmy waited beside a beacon which they had lighted.
Half a dozen sentences exchanged with the chauffeur advised her that these were horsemen from the town of Mesa who had charged themselves with the duty of avenging the death of Hopi Jim Slade, who had followed Rose and Barcus until these last eluded them in the duststorm; who had later effected a junction with the car and been purchased to the uses of her father.
The subsequent division of forces, it appeared, was due to the fact that two passes were available for escape by way of the southern hills. The horsemen had been designated to investigate and shut up the trail toward the east, while the car with Trine had set out to perform like service in the west.
Exacting his utmost speed from the chauffeur, Judith set herself to revive Alan. With the aid of such stores of food and drink as the car carried, this was quickly accomplished. Alan was soon sitting up and taking stock of the situation as he devoured sandwiches and emptied a canteen.
Then, ignoring the fact that proximity with him threatened to end the life of Trine with a stroke of apoplexy, he stationed himself on the rear seat, kneeling, his .45 ready for use if the horsemen drew too near.
The mountain pass was about a mile distant. The light on the hillside, according to the chauffeur, was that of a prospector who had camped there temporarily. There was nothing, then, to be feared from that quarter. The horsemen, having paused to take counsel with Marrophat and his companions, had resumed their hot pursuit.
Their own case, Alan realized, was becoming desperate, the motor-car was now labouring through, deeper sand, and the posse was coming up rapidly.
A long-range pistol duel was in progress before the car had covered half the remaining distance to the pass. By the time it entered this last the pursuit was not a hundred yards behind. The body of the car was struck half a dozen times, its passengers escaped only by what they chose to term a miracle.
And a minor miracle of fact was already at work in their behalf, though they were unconscious of it. Two hundred feet above the trail two men were working with desperate haste at some mysterious business, though none noticed them.
Only the chauffeur was aware of a woman running down the hillside at an angle, to intercept the car several hundred yards from the mouth of the pass. As it drew near the spot where she paused the head of the pursuing party swept into the mouth of the ravine.
And then a great explosion rent the peaceful hush of night, that till then had been profaned only by the spattering cracks of the revolver fusillade. From the side of the hill directly opposite the mouth of the pass shot forth a wide sheet of dusky flame.
As the roar of dynamite subsided the entire side of the hill slid ponderously down, choking the ravine with débris to the depth of thirty or forty feet and burying the leaders of the pursuit beyond hope of rescue.
Only an instant later the motor-car jolted to a bait, and Rose and Barcus were standing beside the door, jabbering joyful greetings mixed with incoherent explanations of the manner in which they had come to seek shelter for the night in the prospector's shack, and, roused by the noise of firing and recognizing Alan in the car by the aid of night glasses, had with the prospector's aid hit upon this scheme of shooting a landslide in between the pursuit and its devoted quarry.