'Good evening, Mrs. Kendall,' he said, every sense keyed to alertness. Danger might be ready to explode at him from the house, though his relaxed attitude in the saddle showed no evidence of his awareness of it. 'Aleck at home?'
Hal could see that her angular body was braced rigidly. That might mean only that the word had run through all the gulches and pockets of these hills that he was an enemy who must be guarded against.
'No, he's not,' she answered. 'He's gone — I don't know where.' She added, as an apparent afterthought, 'Looking for strays.'
Her visitor was relieved. She had been about to tell him where her husband was and had remembered in time to be cautious. Hal did not care where Aleck was, since he was not on the ranch watching him.
In spite of her obvious hostility, Hal felt a little rush of sympathy for her. As children they had gone to the same public school at Big Bridge. He had watched her grow up into a pretty girl with the color of wild roses fluttering in her cheeks. Several times, on his summer vacations from college, he had treated her to ice cream sodas at the drugstore, and once he had taken her to a barn dance. In those days she had been gay and full of laughter. But she had made a bad mistake in marriage, and life had done this to her.
'No see you for a long time, Sally,' he said. 'We ought to be more neighborly. Great Scott, it's — why, it must be ten years since I took you to the Peterson dance. You were the prettiest girl in the valley.'
A slow flush beat into her thin cheeks. She needed no reminder of the time when she could not see him without a pulse of excitement beating fast in her throat. She would have jumped then at the chance to marry him, but she knew now that no thought of such a result of their friendship had been in his mind.
'What are you doing here?' she asked stiffly.
'I'm hunting a bull that broke through a fence. Thought it might have strayed up this way.'
'You had better turn and go home,' she warned. 'Don't you know that any one of half a dozen men in this district would shoot you as they would a coyote?'
'Can you tell me where any of them are today?' he asked, smiling at her.
'No, I can't, and I wouldn't if I could.' She flung out the retort violently, then let her voice drop to an anticlimax. 'Aleck isn't one of those who would hurt you,' she said sullenly.
'I know that, Sally,' he agreed gently. 'Aleck is all right. It's a pity he homesteaded here, though it is a good spread.'
Kendall was a shiftless rancher. The rundown appearance of the house and other buildings testified to that, but he was a friendly and good-natured wastrel. 'There is a gang of ruffians around here who have murdered one man and want to kill more of us. Do you blame me for throwing in against them?'
'I blame you for riding up here alone, since you know that. Haven't you a lick of sense, Hal Stevens? Why did you come here? What do you want of me?'
'Sheriff Elbert rode in to the Double B today with a posse to arrest some of these outlaws,' he told her. 'He doesn't want Aleck. There is no charge against him. I hope he has kept his hands clean. But the sheriff wants Frawley and Fenwick and Polk, and three-four others. He won't get them, because news of his coming will have got in ahead of him. They have holed-up somewhere. I don't want to run into them. I am not asking you where they are, but where they are not.'
'What do you mean?' she frowned, puzzled.
'I want to go into the Rabbit Ear Gulch country — or at least into the outskirts of it — without meeting any of the Black gang unexpectedly,'
'But what do you want to do there?'
'Never mind about that, Sally. If Aleck isn't one of them, I'm not going to do him any harm.'
'He isn't. Aleck keeps out of their deviltry, but you're not fool enough not to know that he must keep his mouth shut and so must I.'
'I know that. I don't want to find out from you where the hiding place of these scoundrels is. You probably don't know exactly where they hole-up. But you can tell me this — and forget afterward you have told me. If I went to Ed Mullins's place, would I be likely to bump into them?'
Looking at him, the woman felt again for a moment the hot excitement that had so stirred her blood in the days of her warm youth. He still had the same lean clean build, the same reckless dancing eyes, wrinkled at the corners now from having squinted into a thousand summer suns. And he still carried his lithe body with that grace which was neither insolence nor pride, but had a touch of kinship with both — the poised power of leashed strength she had never seen in any other man.
'Go home, before anything happens to you,' she pleaded.
He smiled at her. 'You haven't answered my question, Sally. I'm not going home until I've finished my business.'
'But you won't tell me what it is,' she said sulkily.
'If you don't know, you can't tell your husband,' he reminded her.
'If I told him, he would never peep. But all right. Don't tell me.' She said, ungraciously: 'I don't think they will be at Ed's place today. They will be deeper in the hills.'
'Good. Enough said.' He gathered the reins, but before he started asked a friendly question. 'How have things been going with you, Sally?'
'I'm all right.' She brushed his interest aside rudely. 'Worry about yourself. They say you've grazed death a dozen times in these last weeks.'
'Yet I am here,' he answered lightly.
'For how long?'
As he rode out of the park to the bench above, the last challenge she had flung at him lingered in his mind. He could turn right toward the pleasant plain he had left an hour ago, or he could head toward the notched peaks which lay sharp and bleak above the huddled hills and tangled gorges to the left. What he had in mind was perilous, perhaps foolhardy. But at this same hour a hundred thousand American boys were following the hard straight path leading to certain and desperate danger. They were not going forward because they liked it, or because they were being driven by anything except the spark of self-respect burning in them that would not let them falter. It was their job. Well, this was his, a small one compared to theirs. Even to let the two sift through his mind together made him ashamed.
His buckskin climbed steadily, following no path, circling rocks, turning back where sheer cliffs in front of him made an impasse and searching for breaks in the rock walls that would permit a passage. There was an easier way to Mullins's mountain ranch, but it was essential to his purpose that he meet nobody en route. He did not worry about the tight-lipped, taciturn woman with whom he had talked. As long as he was in the hills, she would make no reference to his visit.
By way of a box cañon he came to a crotch in the hills from which he could look down on the cabin and the corrals Mullins had built in this mountain pocket. Already the hard dry peaks back of it were taking on the colors of sunset, the gorges in them filled with lakes of violet and purple. Through glasses he watched the clearing below, scanning every acre of it for signs of human life. No smoke came from the chimney. The door of the house was closed. Mullins had a shepherd dog. It was not moving about the homestead. Cattle and horses grazed in the pasture. Since a small stream ran through it, they could take care of themselves if the owner was absent.
Cautiously he rode down to the steading, alert for the least suspicious movement. The bay horse Mullins usually rode was not in the pasture. Hal was convinced the man was absent. He dismounted, opened the door of the cabin, and walked inside. The place was neater and cleaner than he had expected it would be. Fresh bedding and a swept floor, clothes hung up in an orderly way on a rack, surprised the uninvited visitor. There were evidences that the owner had left in haste. The table was set for dinner, but the meal had not been eaten. Half-cooked potatoes were on a stove in which only a few embers of fire were left. Coffee had been put in the pot, but no water had yet been added. It was plain that word had reached Mullins of man-hunters in the hills and that he had beaten a hurried retreat. He would not be back as long as Sheriff Elbert's posse was in the Rabbit Ear district. That might be for two or three days.