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A ball from the weapon of one of Shan Rhue's gang had clipped a lock of hair from her forehead, creasing the skull. By a miracle her life was saved, for the merest fraction of an inch lay between her and death. During the hurly-burly of the fight, and as Ted was grasped in the powerful arms of Shan Rhue, one of the gang rushed up to her as she lay in the dust and picked her up.
Ted took heart at this, although his body was racked with pains, caused by the innumerable wrenchings to which it had been subjected. Suddenly Shan Rhue was all in. His body flattened out upon the ground, and he lay there panting laboriously. Ted sprang to his feet gasping. Thus for a few minutes both remained, amid intense silence from the crowd. Shan Rhue's body was heaving painfully.
She doubted if she could have walked even if she had been permitted to leave the stage. But as she lay there she thought, and from the scraps of conversation she had heard, and from what her guide was about to tell her when he was interrupted by the driver, she knew that she had been captured and abducted during the fight by Shan Rhue's men, and that she was in the Wichita Mountains.
But although he escaped with his lieutenant, Sol Flatbush, the men of his band, who had been captured by the soldiers, were convicted and sent to prison for long terms, after they had confessed that Shan Rhue's organization had made a business of rustling cattle all through the Southwest for many years.
"Well, that's over," said Ted, as the last of them faded out of sight at the end of the valley. "But our work is just begun. We've got to find those five hundred head of stolen Circle S cattle." "I suggest that we take a look behind that shelter of Shan Rhue's, and see if there is a passage leading from it," said Stella.
She had been captured by Shan Rhue's ruffians, and she knew that she was in a precarious predicament, for she could hope for no mercy from Ted's merciless and beaten enemy. She would be used to punish Ted, and she sighed at the thought of what grief her disappearance would cause her aunt and the boys. Suddenly the curtain on the window was drawn aside.
Are you such a coward that you will punish a woman for your spite against a man? I did not think that of you. I believe Stella Fosdick was carried off by you, of your men, acting under your instructions." Shan Rhue's only reply was a sneering laugh.
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