CHAPTER XXIII
The morning swift events were going forward in the Spout found Hilma Ring, ten miles away on the lower reaches of Teapot, preparing to flee from the loneliness and the oppression of conflicting doubts which had been ever at her elbow since that day, a week gone, when she had ridden back to her cabin after the encounter with Original in the wild country by Crazy Squaw.
Seven days and nights the girl had been alone, seeing but one human soul and that the livery-man who had brought her horse, Christian, out from town in exchange for the one Original had forced her to mount when he recovered the stolen Tige from her. Seven days and nights had she groped in the dark labyrinth called life, seeking a sure path out of all the bewildering perplexities that encompassed her. The steady espionage of the wilderness upon her—blank, impersonal stare of the mountains by day and a myriad winking eyes by night—soon would drive her mad, Hilma thought. She had heard her father tell of old trappers down from the Broken Horns who communed with "ha'ants" in every hollow stump and held long arguments with invisible creatures of the forests. Perhaps she would soon be making friends with the Unseen if she remained longer alone; when Hilma caught herself talking her thoughts aloud a cold terror of premonition swept over her.
The girl reviewed every possible course open to her. To return to Two Moons? Then she would be absolutely in the hollow of Original Bill's hand. Some caprice of his had freed her when he caught her escaping from jail; another caprice might just as easily lodge her behind bars. Moreover, Hilma feared she might not be able to hold herself in hand in the event of another encounter with the man. To go to the Spout? Even if Zang Whistler were there—and of a surety he was still in the care of that sheriff with the flaming beard—the girl could not bring herself to a surrender of convenience; only her pledged word pointed to Zang as an accepted master of her destinies.
But one course remained: She would go to Woolly Annie over on Poison Spider—her father had said the big shepherdess was square—she would go to her, ask her to outfit the sheep wagons that had been the property of Old Man Ring and permit Hilma Ring to throw in her lot with the sheep queen's. Did she not have sheep on Woolly Annie's range? The sheep books she had carried away from the cabin and somewhere lost proved that fact. Woolly Annie surely would not demand proof of possession. Stronger than all practical demands of the hour, however, was the girl's poignant agony of lonesomeness crying to be abated.
So on this morning of golden glory when the Spout first heard the clatter of rifles and the three who had descended the Ladder found themselves suddenly trapped, Hilma Ring hurried her breakfast and gathered together a small bundle of clothes in preparation for the long ride cross country to the domain of the sheep queen. She went out to the corral to saddle the somnolent Christian.
Hilma had the saddle on the horse and was just about to mount to ride him to the cabin door when her eye fell upon three swiftly moving dots against the brown flank of a long hill off to the west. They were horsemen coming at full tilt toward the cabin. Hardly had she caught sight of this prodigy when the three dropped out of sight behind a swale and over the crest of the divide behind them swept more dots. Hilma counted ten. More horsemen, and they were burning the wind. In a minute they, too, were hidden by the rise of a nearer swell in the land.
She sat on Christian's back puzzling an explanation for this sudden appearance of life and action in the unpeopled spaces. Then, topping the crest of a long slope leading down to her own cabin, appeared the three horsemen in advance. Two of them were riding bent low over their saddles; a third, a little back of abreast, sat stiffly upright and rode somewhat clumsily. Hilma hastily dismounted, sensing that somehow she was to be involved in this hurricane of action. Just as the ten following horsemen appeared on the crest of the hill and a jet of white smoke puffed out before one of them, the three in advance thundered straight into the dooryard.
Two threw themselves to the ground and raced to the side of the third. Him they dragged without gentleness from his saddle. Even as the man fought futilely and with hands held stiffly before him, Hilma recognized the features under the flapping hat brim. It was Zang Whistler. His hands were manacled.
With a gasp she leaped inside the door and her hands seized the heavy beamed barrier of slabs to slam it in the faces of the three. But before she could achieve her purpose Whistler was catapulted through the doorway. The man who propelled him with viselike grip, in shirt and trousers, was Original Bill. The third man, unknown to Hilma, leaped to the saddles and withdrew from their scabbards two short rifles; then he, too, was shouldering his way into the cabin.
Bang! went the door; the heavy beam was pushed through the staples. That instant a white splinter of wood leaped inward from the near side of the door and a tiny bit of blue sky peeked like an inquisitive eye into the cabin.
"Take that front window there, Timberline!" Original shouted, "an' hold 'em off while I fix up Zang here."
Beyond the first flash of recognition that had passed between the range inspector and the girl as he was rushing the outlaw through the door, Original had completely ignored her presence during the tumultuous seconds after his invasion of the cabin. Now he had wrestled Zang to the floor on the far side of the interior next to the fireplace, and with incredible swiftness he was throwing about the outlaw's threshing legs binding nooses of a hair rope he had slung over his arm the instant of his leap from the saddle.
The close confines of the log-walled room roared with the discharge of a rifle. The gaunt figure of Timberline Todd, crouching at a corner of one of the windows flanking the door was enveloped with wreathing smoke; his right elbow jerked pistonlike as he threw a fresh shell into the chamber of his muley. Faintly came the sound of shots without.
Original, slipping the final knot that bound his captor's legs, heard a metallic click behind him. He threw a hasty glance over his shoulder. Hilma, standing a few feet behind him, was just raising a rifle to her shoulder; its octagonal snout bore down on him. He caught a flash of bared teeth and the cold eyes of murder laid against the rifle stock.
The man acted quicker than light. He threw himself on his curved back, driving one booted foot at the rifle muzzle. His heel struck the barrel the instant death jetted from it; a bullet flattened against the stones of the fireplace and dropped within two inches of Zang Whistler's head.
Original was on his feet like a cat. As Hilma's right hand swung the ejector he closed with her. His grip was upon the rifle, one hand below hers on the barrel, the other tightened like a steel clamp across her hand at the breech.
They battled. It was crude, primitive combat. Gone were restricting conventions laid by the ages against man who fights with woman. Sped were all the subtleties of sex and the niceties of chivalry. The man, with enemies outside the door and an enemy within, was moved by the single impulse of self-preservation. He fought to live. The woman was driven by hate,—by a consuming passion to wipe out the wound to her pride this man had given with his kiss in the wilderness. No thought of loyalty for Whistler, her lover, prompted Hilma; she had no idea of securing his freedom by attacking his enemies.
Hand grip to hand grip, this was an issue between Original Bill and Hilma Ring,—alone.
With a vicious twist Original wrenched the rifle from her hands. Up shot her right hand before he could imprison it and four red slashes leaped from eyes to chin across the man's face.
He laughed, but there was no humor in that laugh. Now he had an arm about her waist, and her right hand was gripped in the vise of his fingers. She felt his muscles straining against hers. His breath was hot upon her cheek. Slowly, slowly her right arm was being brought up behind her back.
Hilma writhed and her left hand, clenched, beat at his eyes, pounded on his cheek. Something deeper and more consuming than the rage in her whipped her body to exert almost demoniac strength. For through the mist of battle her brain read clearly that in the issue she herself had forced—in the test for which she alone was responsible—this man was inexorably imposing his mastery over her. He was breaking her; all the rebellious and self- centered creature called Hilma Ring was being crushed in the press of crude force.
Now burning pains began to shoot up the tortured right arm. It seemed packed in burning coals. Surely in another instant bones would break.
Hilma screamed, and her nails drove at Original's face. He quickly buried his unprotected eyes against her shoulder so that she could not reach them. Once more the girl heard a low laugh.
Then she vented a tremulous sob and pitched forward in weakness. A cloud rushed down and enveloped her. She felt herself dropping into nothingness.
Original let the girl's body slide to the floor. Then with strips from a dish towel he securely bound her hands behind her and tied her feet together. He carried her to one of the bunk beds, laid her therein, then swiftly made a barricade before her of the table set on edge, the trunk and a bundle of blankets. A bullet zipping through the walls or windows would be stopped by these obstructions.
Original's combat with the girl had occupied hardly a minute and had been observed only by the helpless Zang, lying with his back propped against the fireplace. At its swift conclusion Original seized his own rifle and took his place at a window covering the corral and wagon shed some thirty yards from the house and in the direction of the creek. Timberline, at his post, had been steadily firing whenever a mark presented itself; the pile of brass shells at his feet was momentarily growing.
The stand of these two, Original and Timberline, in Hilma's cabin was, in truth, the recourse of desperation following an escape more than miraculous from the trap in the Spout. There while the attack of Andy Dorson's blundering cow-punchers was in full swing—and Original could only hope for an outcome favorable to the invaders—he had determined upon the bold stroke of making a break for freedom out of the south pass. With Zang's burly bodyguard left behind, but clinging desperately to the prisoner he had risked his life to get, Original and his two companions had pushed down the road to Tisdale's. There had been a running fight with the crowd of horsemen that had passed their retreat; Hank Rogers had been shot out of his saddle; the outlaws had been beaten back. But, with Zang transferred to Rogers' horse and flight into the open country begun, the outlaws had been quick to rally for pursuit. Hilma's cabin Original had seized as a citadel fortuitously thrown his way after a heart-breaking pursuit across country.
Two against ten; the odds were heavy. Both men well realized the chance of relief by their companions of the Spout expedition was one in a thousand. But the gaunt old range man and the little inspector each possessed to the full that calm fatalism that was the endowment of men of their clan, inured to the chances of the Big Country.
They were quick to appreciate that certain elements played with them. The cabin looked out upon unbroken prairie through two windows at the front and one at the eastern end; its back and western side were without windows, but equally without a second door to be rushed. The only possible cover offered the attackers was that of the corral and stable whose open front faced the cabin.
It would have been simple for the Spout men to slip up on the blind side of the cabin and fire the roof, but such tactics were denied by the presence of their leader, a prisoner, in the house. A rush could only be made across the flat dooryard swept by the fire from two windows.
As long as there was only one answering rifle from the cabin the outlaws risked circling their horses, Indian fashion, at about a hundred yards from the log fort and taking flying shots at the window whence Timberline's rifle spoke. But when the smoke of shots began to jet from the second window to the front and one horse went down in a kicking sprawl, the attackers made a rush for the cover of the corral and shed. Sure of their ultimate triumph, they settled down to siege tactics. They could well afford to wait until dark; then the house would be rushed.
It was a deadly game played there in the wide spaces of the prairie. Timberline at his window, Original on his belly behind a hole he had dug out with his knife through the clay chinking between the logs, strained their eyes at the distant cracks between the boards of the shed. Whenever by so much as an inch something cut the thin strip of blue sky showing through, the rifle of one or the other probed that substance with a bullet. Instantly from the shed wall answering puffs of smoke sprouted, and the thud of a bullet sounded against the heavy logs. All the windows were long since splintered; glinting shards of glass lay thickly over the cabin floor. Now and again there would be a smart "ping" of a missile that had ripped through window frame or between logs and found lodgment within the cabin. Once there was a clear bell stroke; the painted likeness of the Minnesota State capitol cross the glass of the clock's pendulum case dissolved into dust.
Zang Whistler, bound and manacled, sat propped against the fireplace stones, silent. A saturnine smile seemed fixed on his features. From the bunk behind the barricade where Hilma lay there was not a sound.
Original found his cartridges running low. Remembering the rifle he had wrested from the girl, he started on hands and knees on a search for ammunition to supply that weapon. Just as he was lifting himself cautiously toward a shelf where he had spied some paper cartridge boxes he heard a sharp metallic snap and, turning his head, he saw a round hole through the side of the blue zinc trunk he had upended to protect the girl.
He stepped quickly to the bunk where she lay and peered over the top of the pile of stuff there. In the shadow was the girl's face turned toward his. Her hair, tumbled in the fight, lay like a glory all round her head. But the eyes meeting his did not flash the defiance he expected. Instead there was something in their blue-black depths wholly startling to the man,—something of dawning wonder and a groping for light in strange environs of the spirit.
"Are you hurt?" Original asked.
"No," she answered hardly above a breath.
A long sigh sounded behind him. Original whirled in time to see the gaunt tower of bone that was Timberline Todd slowly buckle and come slipping down by the window frame. His head as it fell back showed a round red spot just over the eyes. One gnarled hand fluttered for an instant as it touched the floor. It was as if Timberline were waving good-by.
"Old friend—old friend," Original muttered chokingly as he placed Timberline's battered hat over his face. Then with Hilma's rifle and three full boxes of cartridges he took his place at the chink in the logs close to the floor. The slow siege went on, odds ten to one.
Hilma, lying on her bound hands in the dark bunk, heard the slow, steady pound of Original's rifle as it spoke defiance through the dreary hours. Though she could not see the sprawling figure of the cabin's lone defender because of the barricade he had piled to protect her, her mind visualized him a giant speaking with thunderous voice,—a giant beset by jackals and fighting desperately for life against great odds.
"He is force! He is power!" a voice seemed to whisper to her, a strange voice never before heard by her inner ear of the soul. "If he fights this way to save himself, how would he battle to protect one beloved by him!"
Came a moment when the girl realized the pulse beat of Original's rifle was stilled; she could not recall how long had been the interval of complete silence in the cabin. Cold terror struck at her heart. Painfully she worked herself to an elbow, thence to a sitting position which brought her eyes over the top of the barricade.
She saw Zang sitting, back against the fireplace, with his head turned to bring his fixed gaze on something beyond. Following this gaze, her eyes fell upon a sprawling figure against the wall.
It was the man who had mastered her, muscle against muscle. He lay like one asleep, head across the tip of the rifle and pillowed on an arm. From beneath his body a slow black stream pushed out across the cabin floor.
Then the cabin door was cautiously thrust half open. A revolver's wicked snout slowly peeked in; a man's head followed, then his body.
"Come on, boys," he called back through the door, "we got the cuss at last."