Tugging at the bridle to quicken his horse’s pace, he hastened forward to examine his game. He was still so excited that he was almost upon the outstretched carcass before he noticed the odd scar on its side. He bent down and saw that the mark was a cattle brand seared on the hide with a hot iron.
His first impulse was to jump on his pony and ride off. He was about to set his foot in the stirrup when the apprehensive glance with which he was peering around shifted down to the cañon. His gaze traveled back from the near edge of the chasm, up the two hundred yards of slope, and rested on the yearling as though estimating its weight.
It was a fat, thoroughbred Hereford. He could not lift it on his pony, and he had no rope to use as a drag-line. He shook his head. But the pause had given him time to recover from his panic. He shrugged his shoulders, drew a silver-handled hunting knife, and awkwardly set about dressing his kill.
CHAPTER II
A YEARLING SOLD
Three riders came galloping along the ridge towards the hunter. At sight of his pony the grizzled cowman in the lead signed to his companions and came to a sudden stop behind a clump of service-berry bushes. The others swerved in beside him, the bowlegged young puncher on the right with his hand at his hip.
“Jumping Jehosaphat!” he exulted. “We shore have got him, Mr. Knowles, the blasted–” His thin lips closed tight to shut in the oath as he turned his gaze on the lovely flushed face of the girl beside him. When his cold gray eyes met hers they lighted with a glow like that of fire through ice.
“You better stay here, Miss Chuckie,” he advised. “We’re going to cure that rustler.”
“But, Kid, what if–No, no! wait!” she cried at sight of his drawn Colt’s. “Daddy, stop him! The man may not be a rustler.”
“You heard the shooting,” answered the cowman.
“Yes, but he may have been after a deer,” answered the girl, lifting her lithe figure tiptoe in the stirrups of her man’s saddle to peer over the bushes.
“Deer?” rejoined the puncher. “Who’d be deer-hunting in July?”
“Then a bear. He fired fast enough,” remarked the girl.
“Not much chance of that round here,” said the cowman. “Still, it might be. At any rate, Kid, this time I want you to wait for me to ask questions before you cut loose.”
“If he don’t try any funny business,” qualified the puncher.
“Course,” assented Knowles. “Chuckie, you best stay back here.”
“Oh, no, Daddy. There’s only one man and between you and Kid–”
“Sho! Come on, then, if you’re set on it. Kid, you circle to the right.”
The puncher wheeled his horse and rode off around the chaparral. The girl and Knowles, after a short wait, advanced upon the hunter. They were soon within a few yards of him and in plain view. His pony stopped browsing and raised its head to look at them. But the man was stooped over, with his face the other way, and the incessant, reverberating roar of the cañon muffled the tread of their horses on the dusty turf.
The puncher crashed through the corner of the thicket and pulled up on the top of the slope immediately opposite the hunter. The latter sprang to his feet. The puncher instantly covered him with his long-barreled revolver and snapped tersely: “Hands up!”
“My–ante!” gasped the hunter. “A–a road agent!”
But he did not throw up his hands. With the rash bravery of inexperience, he dropped his knife and snatched out his automatic pistol. On the instant the puncher’s big revolver roared. The pistol went spinning out of the hunter’s hand. Through the smoke of the shot the puncher leveled his weapon.
“Put up your hands!–put them up!” screamed the girl, urging her horse forward.
The hunter obeyed, none too soon. For several moments he stood rigid, glaring half dazed at the revolver muzzle and the cool hard face behind it. Then slowly he twisted about to see who it was had warned him. The girl had ridden up within a few feet.
“You–you tenderfoot!” she flung at him. “Are you locoed? Hadn’t you any more sense than to do that? Why, if Daddy hadn’t told Mr. Gowan to wait–”
“You shore would have got yours, you–rustler!” snapped the puncher. “It was you, though, Miss Chuckie–your being here.”
“But he’s not a rustler, Kid,” protested the girl. “Where are your eyes? Look at his riding togs. If they’re not tenderfoot, howling tenderfoot–!”
“Just the same, honey, he’s shot a yearling,” said Knowles, frowning at the culprit. “Suppose you let me do the questioning.”
“Ah–pardon me,” remarked the hunter, rebounding from apprehension to easy assurance at sight of the girl’s smile. “I would prefer to be third-degreed by the young lady. Permit me to salute the Queen of the Outlaws!”
He bent over the fingers of one hand to raise his silver-banded sombrero by its high peak. It left his head–and a bullet left the muzzle of the puncher’s revolver. A hole appeared low down in the side of the sombrero.
“That’ll do, Kid,” ordered the cowman. “No more hazing, even if he is a tenderfoot.”
“Tenderfoot?” replied Gowan, his mouth like a straight gash across his lean jaws. “How about his drawing on me–and how about your yearling? That bullet went just where it ought to ’ve gone with his hat down on his head.”
There was no jesting even of the grimmest quality in the puncher’s look and tone. He was very cool and quiet–and his Colt’s was leveled for another shot.
The hunter thrust up his hands as high as he could reach.
“You–you surely can’t intend to murder me!” he stammered, staring from the puncher to the cowman. “I’ll pay ransom–anything you ask! Don’t let him shoot me! I’m Lafayette Ashton–I’ll pay thousands–anything! My father is George Ashton, the great financier!”
“New York?” queried Knowles.
“No, no, Chicago! He–If only you’ll write to him!”
The girl burst into a ringing laugh. “Oh!” she cried, the moment she could speak, “Oh, Daddy! don’t you see? He really thinks we’re a bunch of wild and woolly bandits!”
The hunter looked uncertainly from her dimpled face to Gowan’s ready revolver. Turning sharply about to the cowman, he caught him in a reluctant grin. With a sudden spring, he placed the girl between himself and the scowling puncher. Behind this barrier of safety he swept off his hat and bowed to the girl with an exaggerated display of politeness that hinted at mockery.
“So it’s merely a cowboy joke,” he said. “I bend, not to the Queen of the Outlaws, but to the Princess of the Cows!”
Her dimples vanished. She looked over his head with the barest shade of disdain in her expression.
“The joke came near to being on us,” she said. “Kid, put up your gun. A tenderfoot who has enough nerve and no more sense than to draw when you have the drop on him, you’ve hazed him enough.”
Gowan sullenly reloaded his Colt’s and replaced it in its holster.
“That’s right,” said Knowles; but he turned sharply upon the offender. “Look here, Mr. Ashton, if that’s your name–there’s still the matter of this yearling. Shooting stock in a cattle country isn’t any laughing matter.”
“But, I say,” replied the hunter, “I didn’t know it was your cow, really I didn’t.”
“Doesn’t make any difference whose brand was on the calf. Even if it had been a maverick–”
“But