"This is not a good place for my daughter," she said, her eyes carefully fixed upon the ground. "It is better that she should go to the Sisters' school and learn her catechism." So Marcelina was sent away from the evil men of Verde, for she was already a woman; but in the haste of packing she managed to snatch just one of the forbidden blue handkerchiefs, branded M.
It was a sombre welcome which awaited the lone rustler of Lost Dog Cañon when, driven perforce to town, he led his pack-horse up to the store. For a minute he sat in his saddle, silent and watchful; then, throwing his bridle-reins on the ground, he stalked defiantly through the door. A couple of IC cowboys were sitting at the card-table in the corner, playing a three-handed game of poker with Angy, and at sight of him they measured the distance to the door with their eyes.
"W'y, hello there, Pecos!" cried Angy, kicking over the table in his haste to grasp him by the hand. "Where you been all the time—we thought for a time here you was dead!"
"Might as well 'a been," said Pecos, gruffly, "for all anybody give a dam'!"
"Why? What was the matter? Did you git lost?"
"I lay out on the mesa for two days," answered the cowboy, briefly, "and about a month afterwards a feller come out to my camp to see if I was dead. This is a hell of an outfit," he observed, glancing malevolently at the IC cowboys, "and by the way," he added, "where was you all the time, Angy?"
Angevine Thorne's lips trembled at this veiled accusation and he stretched out his hands pleadingly. "I swear, Pardner," he protested, "I never heard a word about it until last Saturday! I was in the Geronimo jail."
"Oh!" said Pecos, and without more words he gave him his own right hand. The cowboys, who had been uneasy witnesses of the scene, seized upon this as a favorable opportunity to make their escape, leaving the two of them to talk it out together.
"What in the world happened to us, Angy?" demanded Pecos in a hushed voice, when the effusion of reconciliation had passed, "did Crit put gun-powder in our whiskey or was it a case of stuffed club? I was plumb paralyzed, locoed, and cross-eyed for a week—and my head ain't been right since!" He brushed his hand past his face and made a motion as of catching little devils out of the air, but Angy stayed his arm.
"Nothin' like that, Pecos," he pleaded, hoarsely, "I'm on the ragged edge of the jim-jams myself, and if I get to thinkin' of crawly things I'll sure get 'em! No, it was jest that accursed liquor! I don't know what happened—I remember Crit takin' me down to Geronimo and givin' me five dollars and then it was all a dream until I found myself in the jag-cell. But it's the liquor that does it, Pecos—that and the capitalistic classes and the officers of the law. They's no hope for the common people as long as they keep on drinkin'—there's always some feller like Crit to skin 'em, and the constables to run 'em in. It's a conspiracy, I tell you; they're banded together to drug and rob us—but, Pardner, there is one man who is going to balk the cowardly curs. Never, never, never, will I let another drop of liquor pass my lips!" He raised his hand to heaven as he swore the familiar oath, hoping and yet not hoping that some power would come down to him to help him fight his fate. "Will you join me, Cumrad?" he asked, laying hold of Pecos's shoulder. "You will? Well, let's shake on it—here's to the revolution!"
They shook, and turned instinctively toward the bar, but such a pledge cannot be cemented in the usual manner, so Angy led the way outside and sought a seat in the shade.
"Where's my little friend Marcelina?" inquired Pecos, after a long look at the white adobe with the brush ramada which housed the Garcia family, "hidin' behind a straw somewhere?"
"Gone!" said Angy, solemnly. "Gone, I know not where."
"What—you don't mean to say—" cried Pecos, starting up.
"Her mother sent her down to Geronimo the day that I came up," continued Babe, winking fast. "It looks as if she fears my influence, but she will not say. Poor little Marcelina—how I miss her!" He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and shook his head sadly. "Verde ain't been the same to me since then," he said, "an' life ain't worth livin'. W'y, Pecos, if I thought we done something we oughten to when we was drunk that time I'd go out and cut my throat—but the Señora is powerful mad. Kin you recollect what went on?"
A vision of himself trying to barter his mail-order package for a kiss flashed up before Pecos in lines of fire, but he shut his lips and sat silent. The exaltation and shame of that moment came back to him in a mighty pang of sorrow and he bowed his head on his arms. What if, in the fury of drink and passion, he had offered some insult to his Señorita—the girl who had crept unbeknown into his rough life and filled it with her smile! No further memory of that black night was seared into his clouded brain—the vision ended with the presentation of the package. What followed was confined only to the limitations of man's brutal whims. For a minute Pecos contemplated this wreck of all his hopes—then, from the abyss of his despair there rose a voice that cried for revenge. Revenge for his muddled brain, for the passion which came with drink: revenge for his girl, whom he had lost by some foolish drunken freak! He leapt to his feet in a fury.
"It's that dastard, Crit!" he cried, shaking his fists in the air. "He sold us his cussed whiskey—he sent us on our way! And now I'm goin' to git him!"
Angy gazed up at him questioningly and then raised a restraining hand.
"It's more than him, Cumrad," he said solemnly. "More than him! If Crit should die to-morrow the system would raise up another robber to take his place. It's the System, Pecos, the System—this here awful conspiracy of the capitalistic classes and the servile officers of the law—that keeps the poor man down. Worse, aye, worse than the Demon Rum, is the machinations which puts the power of government into the monopolistic hands of capital and bids the workingman earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. There is only one answer to the crime of government—the revolution!"
"Well, let 'er go then," cried Pecos, impulsively. "The revolution she is until the last card falls—but all the same I got my eye on Crit!"
CHAPTER IX
DEATH AND TAXES
The iron hand of the law after hovering long above the Verde at last descended suddenly and with crushing force upon the unsuspecting cowmen. For a year Boone Morgan had been dallying around, even as other sheriffs had done before him, and the first fears of the wary mountain men had speedily been lulled into a feeling of false security. Then the fall round-ups came on and in the general scramble of that predatory period Morgan managed to scatter a posse of newly appointed deputies, disguised as cowboys, throughout the upper range. They returned and reported the tally at every branding and the next week every cowman on the Verde received notice that his taxes on so many head of cattle, corral count, were due and more than due. They were due for several years back but Mr. Boone Morgan, as deputy assessor, deputy tax-collector, and so forth, would give them a receipt in full upon the payment of the fiscal demand. This would have sounded technical in the mouth of an ordinary tax-collector but coming from a large, iron-gray gentleman with a six-shooter that had been through the war, it went. Upton paid; Crittenden paid; they all paid—all except Pecos Dalhart.
It was at the store, shortly after he had put the thumb-screws on Ike Crittenden and extracted the last ultimate cent, that Boone Morgan tackled Pecos for his taxes. He had received a vivid word-picture of the lone resident of Lost Dog from his deputy, Bill