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"I'd play a slow hand on that line, King, and a careful one, if I were you," advised Neel. "If you take these men's guns away from them they'll be at the mercy of Chadron's brigands. I tell you, man, I know the situation in this country!" "Thank you," said King, in cold hauteur. Chadron's eyes were lighting with the glitter of revenge.
There was a more comfortable thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of living to win the hand that it had covered. Chadron's ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him, although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light.
In a little while they rounded the screen of brush which hid them from the ranchhouse and from those who Frances knew would be their pursuers in a moment. Quickly she told him of her reason for wanting to go to the post, and Chadron's reason for desiring to hold her at the ranch. Macdonald looked at her with new life in his weary eyes. "We'll win now; you were the one recruit I lacked," he said.
I've got that curious piece of writing around me somewhere you can read it when this blows by. Anyway, it was from Thorn, demanding ten thousand dollars in gold. He wanted it sent back by the messenger, and he prescribed some picturesque penalties in case of failure on Chadron's part." "And then you found her?"
But the fiddle he still held on his knee, stroking its smooth back with loving hand, as if he would soothe Mrs. Chadron's regrets and longings and back-tugging pains by that vicarious caress. So he sat petting his instrument, and after a little she looked at him, her eyes red, and tear-streaks on her face.
He began to talk the moment the light struck him, and when he had finished his little explanation he was standing beside Mrs. Chadron's saddle. "Go to the house and lie down, Banjo," Mrs. Chadron said; "I ain't time to fool with you!" "Are you two aimin' to go to the post after help?" Banjo steadied himself on his legs by clinging to the horse's mane as he spoke.
His shoulders were broad and heavy, and even now, although not dressed for the saddle, there was an up-creeping in the legs of his trousers, and a gathering at the knees of them, for they were drawn down over his tall boots. That was Chadron's way of doing the nice thing when he went abroad in his buckboard.
There, through the smoke of many quick shots that drifted into the open door, he saw the two cowboys fallen with outflung arms. In the road a few rods distant Mark Thorn was mounting one of Chadron's horses. The old outlaw flung himself flat along the horse's neck, and presented little of his vital parts as a target. As he galloped away Macdonald fired, but apparently did not hit.
Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring when the musician, heading for Chadron's after playing for a dance, had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse into it.
On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron's ball, when Major King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official business to the army post at Cheyenne.
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