"I take it all back then—every word of it!" she cried. "You are braver, kinder, more generous to me than my own people—more chivalrous. You would have gone to your death without telling them that I took you to my room. But my own father, who has known me all my life, insults me grossly."
"I was wrong," Sanderson admitted uneasily.
Keller climbed the pasture fence, and came running up at the same time as Phil and Slim.
"Menendez is alive!" he cried. "He is at the Twin Star Ranch. The boys there are taking care of him, and the doctor says he will pull through."
"Who told you?"
"Bob Tryon. I met him not five minutes ago. He is on his way here."
This put a new face on things. If Menendez were still alive, Weaver could be held to await developments. Moreover, since the sheep herder was a prisoner at the Twin Star Ranch, retaliation would follow any measures taken against the cattleman.
Phyllis gave a glad little cry. "Then it's all right now."
Weaver's face crinkled to a leathery grin. "Mighty unfortunate—ain't it, boys? Puts a kind of a kink in our plans for the little entertainment we were figuring on pulling off. But maybe you've a notion of still going on with it."
"If we don't, it won't be on your account, seh, I don't reckon," Sanderson answered reluctantly.
But though he would not admit it, the old man was beginning to admire this big fellow, who could afford to miss his enemies on purpose even in the midst of a deadly duel. He was coming to a grudging sense of quality in Weaver. The cattleman might be many things that were evil, but undeniably he possessed also those qualities which on the frontier count for more than civilized virtues. He was game to the core. And he knew how to keep his mouth shut at the right time, no matter what it was going to cost him. On the whole Buck Weaver would stand the acid test, the old soldier was coming to think. And because he did not want to believe any good of his enemy, old Jim Sanderson, when he was alone in the corral with the horses or on a hillside driving his sheep, would shake his gnarled fist impotently and swear fluently until his surcharged feelings were relieved.
Chapter XV
The Brand Blotter
Two riders followed the trail to Yeager's Spur—one a man, brown and forceful; the other a girl, with sunshine in her dancing eyes and a voice full of the lilt of laughter. What they might come to be to each other both were already speculating about, though neither knew as yet. They were the best of friends—good comrades, save when chance eyes said unguardedly too much. For the girl that sufficed, but it was not enough for the man. He knew that he had found the one woman he wanted for his wife. But Phyllis only wondered, let her thoughts rove over many things. For instance, why queer throbs and sudden shyness swept her soft young body. She liked Larrabie Keller—oh, so much!—but her untutored heart could not quite tell her whether she loved him. His eyes drilled into her electric pulsations whenever they met hers. The youth in him called to the youth in her. She admired him. He stirred her imagination, and yet—and yet——
They rode through a valley of gold and russet, all warm with yellow sunlight. In front of them, the Spur projected from the hill ridge into the mountain park.
"Then I think you're a cow-puncher looking for a job, but not very anxious to find one," she was hazarding, answering a question.
"No. That leaves you one more guess."
"That forces me to believe that you are what you say you are," she mocked; "just a plain, prosaic homesteader."
She had often considered in her mind what business might be his, that could wait while he lingered week after week and rode trail with the cowboys; but it had not been the part of hospitality to ask questions of her friend. This might seem to imply a doubt, and of doubt she had none. To-day, he himself had broached the subject. Having brought it up, he now dropped it for the time.
He had shaded his eyes, and was gazing at something that held his attention—a little curl of smoke, rising from the wash in front of them.
"What is it?" she asked, impatient that his mind could so easily be diverted from her.
"That is what I'm going to find out. Stay here!"
Rifle in hand, Keller slipped forward through the brush. His imperative "Stay here!" annoyed her just a little. She uncased her rifle, dropped from the saddle as he had done, and followed him through the cacti. Her stealthy advance did not take her far before she came to the wash.
There Keller was standing, crouched like a panther ready for the spring, quite motionless and silent—watching now the bushes that fringed the edge of the wash, and now the smoke spiral rising faintly from the embers of a fire.
Slowly the man's tenseness relaxed. Evidently he had made up his mind that death did not lurk in the bushes, for he slid down into the wash and stepped across to the fire. Phyllis started to follow him, but at the first sound of slipping rubble her friend had her covered.
"I told you not to come," he reproached, lowering his rifle as soon as he recognized her.
"But I wanted to come. What is it? Why are you so serious?"
His eyes were busy making an inventory of the situation, his mind, too, was concentrated on the thing before him.
"Do you think it is rustlers? Is that what you mean?" she asked quickly.
"Wait a minute and I'll tell you what I think." He finished making his observations and returned to her. "First, I'll tell you something else, something that nobody in the neighborhood knows but you and Jim Yeager. I belong to the ranger force. Lieutenant O'Connor sent me here to clean up this rustling that has been going on for several years."
"And a lot of the boys thought you were a rustler yourself," she commented.
"So did one or two of the young ladies," he smiled. "But that is not the business before this meeting. Because I'm trained to it I notice things you wouldn't. For instance, I saw a man the other day with a horse whose hind hoof left a trail like that."
He pointed to one, and then another track in the soft sand. "Maybe that might be a coincidence, but the owner of that horse had a habit of squirting tobacco juice on clean rocks—like that—and that."
"That doesn't prove he has been rustling."
"No; but the signs here show he has been branding, and Buck Weaver ran across these same marks left by a waddy who surely was making free with a Twin Star calf."
"How long has he been gone?"
"There were two of them, and they've been gone about twenty minutes."
"How do you know?"
He pointed to a stain of tobacco juice still moist.
"Who is he?" she asked.
He knew her stanch loyalty to her friends, and Tom Dixon had been a friend till very lately. He hesitated; then, without answering, made a second thorough examination of the whole ground.
"Come—if we have any luck, I'll show him to you," he said, returning to her. "But you must do just as I say—must be under my orders."
"I will," she promised.
Forthwith, they started. After they had ridden in silence for some distance, covering ground fast, they drew to a walk.
"You know by the trail for where they were heading," she suggested in a voice that was a question.
"I guessed."
Presently, at the entrance to a little cañon, Keller swung down and