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A thousand thoughts, more or less puzzling, had arisen and been disposed of during the hour that had elapsed since he left Mrs. Belding's. But still he began to be sure that there was one groping for recognition which as yet he had not recognized. The more ho dwelt upon it, the more it seemed to attach itself to the song Alice had sung, but he could not give it any definiteness.
Belding saw a powerful, spare, ragged man, with dark, gaunt face and eyes of flame. Then Nell came running from the house, her golden hair flying, her hands outstretched, her face wonderful. "Dick! Dick! Oh-h-h, Dick!" she cried. Her voice seemed to quiver in Belding's heart. Belding's eyes began to blur. He was not sure he saw clearly.
Then Radford Chase, livid and snarling, burst out: "I'll talk till I'm black in the face. You can't stop me!" "You'll go black in the face, but it won't be from talking," hissed Belding. His big arm swept down, and when he threw it up the gun glittered in his hand. Simultaneously with the latter action pealed out a shrill, penetrating whistle. The whistle of a horse! It froze Belding's arm aloft.
He stepped back a few paces; and this, an ominous action for an armed man of his kind, instead of adding to the fear of the Chases, seemed to relieve them. If there had been any pity in Belding's heart he would have felt it then.
"You found the woman's weakness her love for the girl. You found the girl's weakness her pride and fear of shame. So you drove the one and hounded the other. God, what a base thing to do! To tell the girl was bad enough, but to threaten her with betrayal; there's no name for that!" Belding's voice thickened, and he paused, breathing heavily.
This point was the farthest Gale had ever penetrated into the rough foothills, and he had Belding's word for it that no white man had ever climbed No Name Mountains from the west. But a white man was not an Indian. The former might have stolen the range and valley and mountain, even the desert, but his possessions would ever remain mysteries.
"It isn't business, it's you," he went on bluntly. "I've tried to tell you before but you wouldn't let me." "It's a heavenly evening for a proposal." "Do you mean that?" he gasped. "Why shouldn't I? The moon is just coming up and the river is quiet and we can hear the rapids, and here you are at my feet. What more could a girl ask?" Something twitched at Belding's fancy.
Many a dark-skinned raider bestrode one of Belding's fast horses, and indeed all except his selected white thoroughbreds had been stolen. So the job of the rangers had become more than a patrolling of the boundary line to keep Japanese and Chinese from being smuggled into the United States. Belding kept close at home to protect his family and to hold his property.
The canyons of distant mountain showed deep and full of lilac haze. Nell sat perched high upon the topmost bar of the corral gate. Dick leaned beside her, now with his eyes on her face, now gazing out into the alfalfa field where Belding's thoroughbreds grazed and pranced and romped and whistled. Nell watched the horses. She loved them, never tired of watching them.
But Belding's words signified little. The dark shade of worry and solicitude crossing his face told more than his black amaze. The ranger stopped unbuckling the saddle girths, and, looking at Belding, broke into his slow, cool laugh. "Tom, you recollect that whopper of a saguaro up here where Carter's trail branches off the main trail to Casita?
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