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Updated: April 30, 2025
"Let's go and look for their tracks," she suggested, forcing a note of eagerness into her words, "so we can tell the men, when they come back to pick up the trail, how many there were and which way they went." "Oh, if Chance was only able to go after them, if he was only able!" Mrs. Chadron wailed, following Frances as she hurried along the wire fence that cut the garden from the river.
Frances felt that there was no necessity for waking her out of that much-needed repose, for the plan that she had formulated within the past few minutes did not include an appeal for Mrs. Chadron's assistance in it. Experience told her that Mrs. Chadron would accept unquestioningly the arrangements and orders of her husband, in whom her faith was boundless and her confidence without bottom.
In the background a captain and two lieutenants, who had arrived with Chadron and King, stood doubtful, it seemed, of their part in that last act of the cattleman's rough melodrama. Frances had returned to Macdonald's side, fearful that the excitement might bring on a hemorrhage in his wound.
"There is nothing to tell you," said she, resentful of the meddling of Nola Chadron, which his own light conduct with her had in a manner justified. "Then I can only imagine the truth," he told her, bitterly. "But surely you didn't give him the glove, surely you cannot love that wolf of the range, that cattle thief, that murderer!"
He snapped his dry old eyelids like flints over the steel of his eyes, and stood as straight as the human body could be drawn, one hand on his sword hilt, the other pointing a trembling finger at Chadron's face. "You cattlemen run this state, and one or two others here in the Northwest, I'm aware of that, Chadron. But there's one thing that you don't run, and that's the United States army!
Well, I can put you higher just as easy. But the purty I want for my trouble is that feller's scalp." There was the sound of somebody walking about, in quick, nervous strides. Frances knew that Major King had got up from his usurped place at the desk place unworthily filled, this low intrigue with Chadron aside, she knew and was strutting in the shadow of his promised glory.
Two shots in that quiet room, one following the other so closely that they seemed but a divided one; two shots, delivered so quickly after Nola's awful scream that no man could whip up his shocked nerves to obedience fast enough to interpose. Saul Chadron pitched forward, his hands clutching, his arms outspread, and fell dead, his face groveling upon the floor.
"I lost Thorn's trail that first day," he returned, "and then things began to get so hot for us up the valley that I had to drop the search and get those people back to safety ahead of Chadron's raid. Yesterday afternoon we caught a man trying to get through our lines and down into the valley. He was a half-breed trapper who lives up in the foothills, carrying a note down to Chadron.
Frances took advantage of Banjo's trip to the reservation to send a note to her father apprising him of the tragedy at the ranch. Banjo buttoned it inside his coat, mounted his horse, and rode away. Mrs. Chadron watched him out of sight with lamentations. "I wish he'd 'a' stayed it 'd 'a' been all right with Saul; Saul didn't mean any harm by what he said.
"Where's my daughter, Chadron, you cutthroat! Where's Miss Landcraft? If the lightest hair of her head has suffered, by God! I'll burn this house to the sills!" Colonel Landcraft stood before Chadron in his worn regimentals, his old campaign hat turned back from his forehead as if he had been riding in the face of a wind. Macdonald, looking up at Frances from his couch, spoke to her with his eyes.
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