"I Conquered"

Produced by Andrew Sly, Al Haines and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

[Frontispiece: _The Captain tore at the shoulders and neck of the gray horse with his gleaming teeth_. Page 96]

"I Conquered"

By HAROLD TITUS

With Frontispiece in Colors

By CHARLES M. RUSSELL

A. L. Burt Company

Publishers New York

Published by Arrangements with Rand, McNally & Company

_Copyright, 1916,_

By Rand McNally & Company

The Contents

Chapter

I. Denunciation II. A Young Man Goes West III. "I've Done My Pickin'" IV. The Trouble Hunter V. Jed Philosophizes VI. Ambition Is Born VII. With Hoof and Tooth VIII. A Head of Yellow Hair IX. Pursuit X. Capture XI. A Letter and a Narrative XII. Woman Wants XIII. VB Fights XIV. The Schoolhouse Dance XV. Murder XVI. The Candle Burns XVII. Great Moments XVIII. The Lie XIX. Through the Night XX. The Last Stand XXI. Guns Crash XXII. Tables Turn; and Turn Again XXIII. Life, the Trophy XXIV. Victory XXV. "The Light!" XXVI. To the Victor

"__I Conquered"

Chapter I

Denunciation

Danny Lenox wanted a drink. The desire came to him suddenly as he stood looking down at the river, burnished by bright young day. It broke in on his lazy contemplation, wiped out the indulgent smile, and made the young face serious, purposeful, as though mighty consequence depended on satisfying the urge that had just come up within him.

He was the sort of chap to whom nothing much had ever mattered, whose face generally bore that kindly, contented smile. His grave consideration had been aroused by only a scant variety of happenings from the time of a pampered childhood up through the gamut of bubbling boyhood, prep school, university, polo, clubs, and a growing popularity with a numerous clan until he had approached a state of established and widely recognized worthlessness.

Economics did not bother him. It mattered not how lavishly he spent; there had always been more forthcoming, because Lenox senior had a world of the stuff. The driver of his taxicab--just now whirling away--seemed surprised when Danny waved back change, but the boy did not bother himself with thought of the bill he had handed over.

Nor did habits which overrode established procedure for men cause him to class himself apart from the mass. He remarked that the cars zipping past between him and the high river embankment were stragglers in the morning flight businessward; but he recognized no difference between himself and those who scooted toward town, intent on the furtherance of serious ends.

What might be said or thought about his obvious deviation from beaten, respected paths was only an added impulse to keep smiling with careless amiability. It might be commented on behind fans in drawing rooms or through mouths full of food in servants' halls, he knew. But it did not matter.

However--something mattered. He wanted a drink.

And it was this thought that drove away the smile and set the lines of his face into seriousness, that sent him up the broad walk with swinging, decisive stride, his eyes glittering, his lips taking moisture from a quick-moving tongue. He needed a drink!

Danny entered the Lenox home up there on the sightly knoll, fashioned from chill-white stone, staring composedly down on the drive from its many black-rimmed windows. The heavy front door shut behind him with a muffled sound like a sigh, as though it had been waiting his coming all through the night, just as it had through so many nights, and let suppressed breath slip out in relief at another return.

A quick step carried him across the vestibule within sight of the dining-room doorway. He flung his soft hat in the general direction of a cathedral bench, loosed the carelessly arranged bow tie, and with an impatient jerk unbuttoned the soft shirt at his full throat. Of all things, from conventions to collars, Danny detested those which bound. And just now his throat seemed to be swelling quickly, to be pulsing; and already the glands of his mouth responded to the thought of that which was on the buffet in a glass decanter--amber--and clear--and--

At the end of the hallway a door stood open, and Danny's glance, passing into the room it disclosed, lighted on the figure of a man stooping over a great expanse of table, fumbling with papers--fumbling a bit slowly, as with age, the boy remarked even in the flash of a second his mind required to register a recognition of his father.

Danny stopped. The yearning of his throat, the call of his tightening nerves, lost potency for the moment; the glitter of desire in his dark eyes softened quickly. He threw back his handsome head with a gesture of affection that was almost girlish, in spite of its muscular strength, and the smile came back, softer, more indulgent.

His brow clouded a scant instant when he turned to look into the dining room as he walked down the long, dark, high-ceilinged hall, and his step hesitated. But he put the impulse off, going on, with shoulders thrown back, rubbing his palms together as though wholesomely happy.

So he passed into the library.

"Well, father, it's a good morning to you!"

At the spontaneous salutation the older man merely ceased moving an instant. He remained bent over the table, one hand arrested in the act of reaching for a document. It was as though he held his breath to listen--or to calculate quickly.

The son walked across to him, approaching from behind, and dropped a hand on the stooping, black-clothed shoulder.

"How go--"

Danny broke his query abruptly, for the other straightened with a half-spoken word that was, at the least, utmost impatience; possibly a word which, fully uttered, would have expressed disgust, perhaps--even loathing! And on Danny was turned such a mask as he had never seen before. The cleanly shaven face was dark. The cold blue eyes flashed a chill fire and the grim slit of a tightly closed mouth twitched, as did the fingers at the skirts of the immaculate coat.

Lenox senior backed away, putting out a hand to the table, edging along until a corner of it was between himself and his heir. Then the hand, fingers stiffly extended, pressed against the table top. It trembled.

The boy flushed, then smiled, then sobered. On the thought of what seemed to him the certain answer to the strangeness of this reception, his voice broke the stillness, filled with solicitude.

"Did I startle you?" he asked, and a smile broke through his concern. "You jumped as though--"

Again he broke short. His father's right hand, palm outward, was raised toward him and moved quickly from side to side. That gesture meant silence! Danny had seen it used twice before--once when a man of political power had let his angered talk rise in the Lenox house until it became disquieting; once when a man came there to plead. And the gesture on those occasions had carried the same quiet, ominous conviction that it now impressed on Danny.

The voice of the old man was cold and hard, almost brittle for lack of feeling.

"How much will you take to go?" he asked, and breathed twice loudly, as though struggling to hold back a bursting emotion.

Danny leaned slightly forward from his hips and wrinkled his face in his inability to understand.

"What?" He drawled out the word. "Once more, please?"

"How much will you take to go?"

Again the crackling, colorless query, by its chill strength narrowing even the thought which must transpire in the presence of the speaker.

"How much will I take to go?" repeated Danny. "How much what? To go where?"

Lenox senior blinked, and his face darkened. His voice lost some of its edge, became a trifle muffled, as though the emotion he had breathed hard to suppress had come up into his throat and adhered gummily to the words.

"How much money--how much money will you take to go away from here? Away from me? Away from New York? Out of my sight--out of my way?"

Once more the fingers pressed the table top and the fighting jaw of the gray-haired man protruded slowly as the younger drew nearer a faltering step, two--three, until he found support against the table.

There across the corner of the heavy piece of furniture they peered at each other; one in silent, mighty rage; the other with eyes widening, quick, confusing lights playing across their depths as he strove to refuse the understanding.

"How much money--to go away from New York--from you? Out of your _way_?"

Young Danny's voice rose in pitch at each word as with added realization the strain on his emotions increased. His body sagged forward and the hands on the table bore much of its weight; so much that the elbows threatened to give, as had his knees.

"To go away--why? Why--is this?"

In his query was something of the terror of a frightened child; in his eyes something of the look of a wounded beast.

"You ask me why!"

Lenox senior straightened with a jerk and followed the exclamation with something that had been a laugh until, driven through the rage within him, it became only a rattling rasp in his throat.

"You ask me why!" he repeated. "You ask me why!"

His voice dropped to a thin whisper; then, anger carrying it above its normal tone:

"You stand here in this room, your face like suet from months and years of debauchery, your mind unable to catch my idea because of the poison you have forced on it, because of the stultifying thoughts you have let occupy it, because of the ruthless manner in which you have wasted its powers of preception, of judgment, and ask me why!"

In quick gesture he leveled a vibrating finger at the face of his son and with pauses between the words declared: "_You_--are--why!"

Danny's elbows bent still more under the weight on them, and his lips worked as he tried to force a dry throat through the motions of swallowing. On his face was reflected just one emotion--surprise. It was not rage, not resentment, not shame, not fear--just surprise.

He was utterly confused by the abruptness of his father's attack; he was unable to plumb the depths of its significance, although an inherent knowledge of the other's moods told him that he faced disaster.

Then the older man was saying:

"You have stripped yourself of everything that God and man could give you. You have thrown the gems of your opportunity before your swinish desires. You have degenerated from the son your mother bore to a worthless, ambitionless, idealless, thoughtless--drunkard!"

Danny took a half-step closer to the table, his eyes held on those others with mechanical fixity.

"Father--but, dad--" he tried to protest.

Again the upraised, commanding palm.

"I have stood it as long as I can. I have suggested from time to time that you give serious consideration to things about you and to your future; suggested, when a normal young man would have gone ahead of his own volition to meet the exigencies every individual must face sooner or later.

"But you would have none of it! From your boyhood you have been a waster. I hoped once that all the trouble you gave us was evidence of a spirit that would later be directed toward a good end. But I was never justified in that.

"You wasted your university career. Why, you weren't even a good athlete! You managed to graduate, but only to befog what little hope then remained to me.

"You have had everything you could want; you had money, friends, and your family name. What have you done? Wasted them! You had your polo string and the ability to play a great game, but what came of it? You'd rather sit in the clubhouse and saturate yourself with drink and with the idle, parasitic thoughts of the crowd there!

"You have dropped low and lower until, everything else gone, you are now wasting the last thing that belongs to you, the fundamental thing in life--your vitality!

"Oh, don't try to protest! Those sacks under your eyes! Your shoulders aren't as straight as they were a year ago; you don't think as quickly as you did when making a pretense of playing polo; your hand isn't steady for a man of twenty-five. You're going; you're on the toboggan slide.

"You have wasted yourself, flung yourself away, and not one act or thought of your experience has been worth the candle! Now--what will you take to get out?"

The boy before him moved a slow step backward, and a flush came up over his drawn face.

"You--" he began. Then he stopped and drew a hand across his eyes, beginning the movement slowly and ending with a savage jerk. "You never said a word before! You never intimated you thought this! You never--you--"

He floundered heavily under the stinging conviction that of such was his only defense!

"No!" snapped his father, after waiting for more to come. "I never said anything before--not like this. You smiled away whatever I suggested. Nothing mattered--nothing except debauchery. Now you've passed the limit You're a common drunk!"

His voice rose high and higher; he commenced to gesticulate.

"You live only to wreck yourself. Yours is the fault--and the blame!

"It is natural for me to be concerned. I've hung on now too long, hoping that you would right yourself and justify the hopes people have had in you. I planned, years ago, to have you take up my work where I must soon leave off--to go on in my place, to finish my life for me as I began yours for you! I've had faith that you would do this, but you won't--you can't!

"That isn't all. You're holding _me_ back. I must push on now harder than ever, but with the stench of your misdeeds always in my nostrils it is almost an impossibility."

Danny raised his hands in a half-gesture of pleading, but the old man motioned him back.

"Don't be sorry; don't try to explain. This had to come. It's an accumulation of years. I have no more faith in you. If I thought you could ever rally I'd give up everything and help you, but not once in your life have you shown me that you possessed one impulse to be of use."

His voice dropped with each word, and its return to the cold normal sent a stiffness into the boy's spine. His head went up, his chin out; his hands closed slowly.

"How much money will you take to get out?"

The old man moved from behind the table corner and approached Danny, walking slowly, with his hands behind him. He came to a stop before the boy, slowly unbuttoned his coat, reached to an inner pocket, and drew out a checkbook.

"How much?"

Danny's gesture, carried out, surely would have resulted in a blow strong enough to send the book spinning across the room; but he stopped it halfway.

His eyes were puffed and bloodshot; his pulse hammered loudly under his ears, and the rush of blood made his head roar. Before him floated a mist, fogging thought as it did his vision.

The boy's voice was scarcely recognizable as he spoke. It was hard and cold--somewhat like the one which had so scourged him.

"Keep your money," he said, looking squarely at his father at the cost of a peculiar, unreal effort. "I'll get out--and without your help. Some day I'll--I'll show you what a puny thing this faith of yours is!"

The elder Lenox, buttoning his coat with brisk motions, merely said, "Very well." He left the room.

Danny heard his footsteps cross the hall, heard the big front door sigh when it closed as though it rejoiced at the completion of a distasteful task.

Then he shut his eyes and struck his thighs twice with stiff forearms. He was boiling, blood and brain! At first he thought it anger; perhaps anger had been there, but it was not the chief factor of that tumult.

It was humiliation. The horrid, unanswerable truth had seared Danny's very body--witness the anguished wrinkles on his brow--and his molten consciousness could find no argument to justify himself, even to act as a balm!

"He never _said_ it before," the boy moaned, and in that spoken thought was the nearest thing to comfort that he could conjure.

He stood in the library a long time, gradually cooling, gradually nursing the bitterness that grew up in the midst of conflicting impulses. The look in his eyes changed from bewilderment to a glassy cynicism, and he began to walk back and forth unsteadily.

He paced the long length of the room a dozen times. Then, with a quickened stride, he passed into the hall, crossed it, and entered the dining room, the tip of his tongue caressing his lips.

On the buffet stood a decanter, a heavy affair of finely executed glassworker's art. The dark stuff in it extended halfway up the neck, and as he reached for it Danny's lips parted. He lifted the receptacle and clutched at a whisky glass that stood on the same tray. He picked it up, looked calculatingly at it, set it down, and picked up a _tumbler_.

The glass stopper of the bottle thudded on the mahogany; his nervous hand held the tumbler under its gurgling mouth. Half full, two-thirds, three-quarters, to within a finger's breadth of the top he filled it.

Then, setting the decanter down, he lifted the glass to look through the amber at the morning light; his breath quick, his eyes glittering, Danny Lenox poised. A smile played about his eager lips--a smile that brightened, and lingered, and faded--and died.

The hand holding the glass trembled, then was still; trembled again, so severely that it spilled some of the liquor; came gradually down from its upraised position, down below his mouth, below his shoulder, and waveringly sought the buffet.

As the glass settled to the firm wood Danny's shoulders slacked forward and his head drooped. He turned slowly from the buffet, the aroma of whisky strong in his dilated nostrils. After the first faltering step he faced about, gazed at his reflection in the mirror, and said aloud:

"And it's not been worth--the candle!"

Savagery was in his step as he entered the hall, snatched up his hat, and strode to the door.

As the heavy portal swung shut behind the hurrying boy it sighed again, as though hopelessly. The future seemed hopeless for Danny. He had gone out to face a powerful foe.

Chapter II

A Young Man Goes West

From the upper four hundreds on Riverside Drive to Broadway where the lower thirties slash through is a long walk. Danny Lenox walked it this June day. As he left the house his stride was long and nervously eager, but before he covered many blocks his gait moderated and the going took hours.

Physical fatigue did not slow down his progress. The demands upon his mental machinery retarded his going. He needed time to think, to plan, to bring order out of the chaos into which he had been plunged. Danny had suddenly found that many things in life are to be considered seriously. An hour ago they could have been numbered on his fingers; now they were legion. It was a newly recognized fact, but one so suddenly obvious that the tardiness of his realization became of portentous significance.

Through all the hurt and shame and rage the great truth that his father had hammered home became crystal clear. He had been merely a waster, and a sharp bitterness was in him as he strode along, hands deep in pockets.

The first flash of his resentment had given birth to the childish desire to "show 'em," and as he crowded his brain against the host of strange facts he found this impulse becoming stronger, growing into a healthy determination to adjust his standard of values so that he could, even with this beginning, justify his existence.

Oh, the will to do was strong in his heart, but about it was a clammy, oppressive something. He wondered at it--then traced it back directly to the place in his throat that cried out for quenching. As he approached a familiar haunt that urge became more insistent and the palms of his hands commenced to sweat. He crossed the street and made on down the other side. He had wasted his ability to do, had let this desire sap his will. He needed every jot of strength now. He would begin at the bottom and call back that frittered vitality. He shut his teeth together and doggedly stuck his head forward just a trifle.

The boy had no plan; there had not been time to become so specific. His whole philosophy had been stood on its head with bewildering suddenness. He knew, though, that the first thing to do was to cut his environment, to get away, off anywhere, to a place where he could build anew. The idea of getting away associated itself with one thing in his mind: means of transportation. So, when his eyes without conscious motive stared at the poster advertising a railroad system that crosses the continent, Danny Lenox stopped and let the crowd surge past him.

A man behind the counter approached the tall, broad-shouldered chap who fumbled in his pockets and dumped out their contents. He looked with a whimsical smile at the stuff produced: handkerchiefs, pocket-knife, gold pencil, tobacco pouch, watch, cigarette case, a couple of hat checks, opened letters, and all through it money--money in bills and in coins.

The operation completed, Danny commenced picking out the money. He tossed the crumpled bills together in a pile and stacked the coins. That done, he swept up the rest of his property, crammed it into his coat pockets, and commenced smoothing the bills.

The other man, meanwhile, stood and smiled.

"Cleaning up a bit?" he asked.

Danny raised his eyes.

"That's the idea," he said soberly. "To clean up--a bit."

The seriousness of his own voice actually startled him.

"How far will that take me over your line?" he asked, indicating the money.

The man stared hard; then smiled.

"You mean you want that much worth of ticket?"

"Yes, ticket and berth--upper berth. Less this." He took out a ten-dollar bill. "I'll eat on the way," he explained gravely.

The other counted the bills, turning them over with the eraser end of his pencil, then counted the silver and made a note of the total.

"Which way--by St. Louis or Chicago?" he asked. "We can send you through either place."

Danny lifted a dollar from the stack on the counter and flipped it in the air. Catching it, he looked at the side which came up and said:

"St. Louis."

Again the clerk calculated, referring to time-tables and a map.

"Denver," he muttered, as though to himself. Then to Danny: "Out of Denver I can give you the Union Pacific, Denver and Rio Grande, or Santa Fe."

"The middle course."

"All right--D. and R.G."

Then more referring to maps and time-tables, more figuring, more glances at the pile of money.

"Let's see--that will land you at--at--" as he ran his finger down the tabulation--"at Colt, Colorado."

Danny moved along the counter to the glass-covered map, a new interest in his face.

"Where's that--Colt, Colorado?" he asked, leaning his elbows on the counter.

"See?" The other indicated with his pencil.

"You go south from Denver to Colorado Springs; then on through Pueblo, through the Royal Gorge here, and right in here--" he put the lead point down on the red line of the railroad and Danny's head came close to his--"is where you get off."

The boy gazed lingeringly at the white dot in the red line and then looked up to meet the other's smile.

"Mountains and more mountains," he said with no hint of lightness. "That's a long way from this place."

He gazed out on to flowing Broadway with a look somewhat akin to pleading, and heard the man mutter: "Yes, beyond easy walking from downtown, at least."

Danny straightened and sighed. That much was settled. He was going to Colt, Colorado. He looked back at the map again, possessed with an uneasy foreboding.

Colt, Colorado!

"Well, when can I leave?" he asked, as he commenced putting his property back into the proper pockets.

"You can scarcely catch the next train," said the clerk, glancing at the clock, "because it leaves the Grand Central in nineteen min--"

"Yes, I can!" broke in Danny. "Get me a ticket and I'll get there!" Then, as though to himself, but still in the normal speaking tone: "I'm through putting things off."

Eighteen and three-quarters minutes later a tall, young man trotted through the Grand Central train shed to where his Pullman waited. The porter looked at the length of the ticket Danny handed the conductor.

"Ain't y'll carryin' nothin', boss?" he asked.

"Yes, George," Danny muttered as he passed into the vestibule, "but nothing you can help me with."

With the grinding of the car wheels under him Danny's mind commenced going round and round his knotty problem. His plan had called for nothing more than a start. And now--Colt, Colorado!

Behind him he was leaving everything of which he was certain, sordid though it might be. He was going into the unknown, ignorant of his own capabilities, realizing only that he was weak. He thought of those burned bridges, of the uncertainty that lay ahead, of the tumbling of the old temple about his ears--

And doubt came up from the ache in his throat, from the call of his nerves. He had not had a drink since early last evening. He needed--No! That was the last thing he needed.

He sat erect in his seat with the determination and strove to fight down the demands which his wasting had made so steely strong. He felt for his cigarette case. It was empty, but the tobacco pouch held a supply, and as he walked toward the smoking compartment he dusted some of the weed into a rice paper.

Danny pushed aside the curtain to enter, and a fat man bumped him with a violent jolt.

"Oh, excuse me!" he begged, backing off. "Sorry. I'll be back in a jiffy with more substantial apologies."

Three others in the compartment made room for Danny, who lighted his cigarette and drew a great gasp of smoke into his lungs.

In a moment the fat man was back, his eyes dancing. In his hand was a silver whisky flask.

"Now if you don't say this is the finest booze ever turned out of a gin mill, I'll go plumb!" he declared. "Drink, friend, drink!"

He handed the flask to one of the others.

"Here's to you!" the man saluted, raising the flask high and then putting its neck to his mouth.

Danny's tongue went again to his lips; his breath quickened and the light in his eyes became a greedy glitter. He could hear the gurgle of the liquid; his own throat responded in movement as he watched the swallowing. He squeezed his cigarette until the thin paper burst and the tobacco sifted out.

"Great!" declared the man with a sigh as he lowered the flask. "Great!"

He smacked his lips and winked. "Ah! No whisky's bad, but this's better'n most of it!"

Then, extending the flask toward Danny, he said: "Try it, brother; it's good for a soul."

But Danny, rising to his feet with a suddenness that was almost a spring, strode past him to the door. His face suddenly had become tight and white and harried. He paused at the entry, holding the curtain aside, and turned to see the other, flask still extended, staring at him in bewilderment.

"I'm not drinking, you know," said Danny weakly, "not drinking."

Then he went out, and the fat man who had produced the liquor said soberly:

"Not drinking, and havin' a time staying off it. But say--ain't that some booze?"

Long disuse of the power to plan concretely, to think seriously of serious facts, had left it weak. Danny strove to route himself through to that new life he knew was so necessary, but he could not call back the ability of tense thinking with a word or a wish. And while he tried for that end the boy commenced to realize that perhaps he had not so far to seek for his fresh start. Perhaps it was not waiting for him in Colt, Colorado. Perhaps it was right here in his throat, in his nerves. Perhaps the creature in him was not a thing to be cleared away before he could begin to fight--perhaps it was the proper object at which to direct his whole attack.

Enforced idleness was an added handicap. Physical activity would have made the beginning much easier, for before he realized it Danny was in the thick of battle. A system that had been stimulated by poison in increasing proportion to its years almost from boyhood began to make unequivocal demands for the stuff that had held it to high pitch. Tantalizingly at first, with the thirsting throat and jumping muscles; then with thundering assertions that warped the vision and numbed the intellect and toyed with the will. He gave up trying to think ahead. His entire mental force went into the grapple with that desire. Where he had thought to find possible distress in the land out yonder, it had come to meet him--and of a sort more fearful, more tremendous, than any which he had been able to conceive.

Through the rise of that fevered fighting the words of his father rang constantly in Danny's mind.

"He was right--right, right!" the boy declared over and over. "It was brutal; but he was right! I've wasted, I've gone the limit. And he doesn't think I can come back!"

While faith would have been as a helping hand stretched down to pull him upward, the denial of it served as a stinging goad, driving him on. A chord deep within him had been touched by the raining blows from his father, and the vibrations of that chord became quicker and sharper as the battle crescendoed. The unbelief had stirred a retaliating determination.

It was this that sent a growl of defiance into Danny's throat at sight of a whisky sign; it was the cause of his cursing when, walking up and down a station platform at a stop, he saw men in the buffet car lift glasses to their lips and smile at one other. It was this that drew him away from an unfinished meal in the diner when a man across the table ordered liquor and Danny's eyes ached for the sight of it, his nostrils begged for the smell.

So on every hand came the suggestions that made demands upon his resistance, that made the weakness gnaw the harder at his will. But he fought against it, on and on across a country, out into the mountains, toward the end of his ride.

The unfolding of the marvels of a continent's vitals had a peculiar effect on Danny.

Before that trip he had held the vaguest notions of the West, but with the realization of the grandeur of it all he was torn between a glorified inspiration and a suffocating sense of his own smallness.

He had known only cities, and cities are, by comparison, such puny things. They froth and ferment and clatter and clang and boast, and yet they are merely flecks, despoiled spots, on an expanse so vast that it seems utterly unconscious of their presence. The boy realized this as the big cities were left behind, as the stretches between stations became longer, the towns more flimsy, newer. A species of terror filled him as he gazed moodily from his Pullman window out across that panorama to the north. Why, he could see as far as to the Canadian boundary, it seemed! On and on, rising gently, ever flowing, never ending, went the prairie. Here and there a fence; now a string of telephone poles marching out sturdily, bravely, to reduce distance by countless hours. There a house, alone, unshaded, with a woman standing in the door watching his speeding train. Yonder a man shacking along on a rough little horse, head down, listless--a crawling jot under that endless sky.

Even his train, thing of steel and steam, was such a paltry particle, screaming to a heaven that heard not, driving at a distance that cared not.

Then the mountains!

Danny awoke in Denver, to step from his car and look at noble Evans raising its craggy, hoary head into the salmon pink of morning, defiant, ignoring men who fussed and puttered down there in its eternal shadow; at Long's Peak, piercing the sky as though striving to be away from humans; at Pike, shimmering proudly through its sixty miles of crystal distance, taking a heavy, giant delight in watching beings worry their way through its hundred-mile dooryard.

Then along the foothills the train tore with the might of which men are so proud; yet it only crawled past those mountains.

Stock country now, more and more cattle in sight. Blase, white-faced Herefords lifted their heads momentarily toward the cars. They heeded little more than did the mountains.

Then, to the right and into the ranges, twisting, turning, climbing, sliding through the narrow defiles at the grace of the towering heights which--so alive did they seem--could have whiffed out that thing, those lives, by a mere stirring on their complacent bases.

And Danny commenced to draw parallels. Just as his life had been artificial, so had his environment. Manhattan--and this! Its complaining cars, its popping pavements, its echoing buildings--it had all seemed so big, so great, so mighty! And yet it was merely a little mud village, the work of a prattling child, as compared with this country. The subway, backed by its millions in bonds, planned by constructive genius, executed by master minds, a thing to write into the history of all time, was a mole-passage compared to this gorge! The Woolworth, labor of years, girders mined on Superior, stones quarried elsewhere, concrete, tiling, cables, woods, all manner of fixtures contributed by continents; donkey engines puffing, petulant whistles screaming, men of a dozen tongues crawling and worming and dying for it; a nation standing agape at its ivory and gold attainments! And what was it? Put it down here and it would be lost in the rolling of the prairie as it swelled upward to meet honest heights!

No wonder Danny Lenox felt inconsequential. And yet he sensed a friendly something in that grandeur, an element which reached down for him like a helping hand and offered to draw him out of his cramped, mean little life and put him up with stalwart men.

"If this rotten carcass of mine, with its dry throat and fluttering hands, will only stick by me I'll show 'em yet!" he declared, and held up one of those hands to watch its uncertainty.

And in the midst of one of those bitter, griping struggles to keep his vagrant mind from running into vinous paths, the brakes clamped down and the porter, superlatively polite, announced:

"This is Colt, sah."

A quick interest fired Danny. He hurried to the platform, stood on the lowest step, and watched the little clump of buildings swell to natural size. He reached into his pocket, grasped the few coins remaining there, and gave them to the colored boy.

The train stopped with a jolt, and Danny stepped off. The conductor, who had dropped off from the first coach as it passed the station, ran out of the depot, waved his hand, and the grind of wheels commenced again.

As the last car passed, Danny Lenox stared at it, and for many minutes his gaze followed its departure. After it had disappeared around the distant curve he retained a picture of the white-clad servant, leaning forward and pouring some liquid from a bottle.

The roar of the cars died to a murmur, a muttering, and was swallowed in the canyon. The sun beat down on the squat, green depot and cinder platform, sending the quivering heat rays back to distort the outlines of objects. Everywhere was a white, blinding light.

From behind came a sound of waters, and Danny turned about to gaze far down into a ragged gorge where a river tumbled and protested through the rocky way.

Beyond the stream was stretching mesa, quiet and flat and smooth looking in the crystal distance, dotted with pine, shimmering under the heat.

For five minutes he stared almost stupidly at that grand sweep of still country, failing to comprehend the fact of arrival. Then he walked to the end of the little station and gazed up at the town.

A dozen buildings with false fronts, some painted, some without pretense of such nicety, faced one another across a thoroughfare four times as wide as Broadway. Sleeping saddle ponies stood, each with a hip slumped and nose low to the yellow ground. A scattering of houses with their clumps of outbuildings and fenced areas straggled off behind the stores.

Scraggly, struggling pine stood here and there among the rocks, but shade was scant.

Behind the station were acres of stock pens, with high and unpainted fences. Desolation! Desolation supreme!

Danny felt a sickening, a revulsion. But lo! his eyes, lifting blindly for hope, for comfort, found the thing which raised him above the depression of the rude little town.

A string of cliffs, ranging in color from the bright pink of the nearest to the soft violet of those which might be ten or a hundred miles away, stretched in mighty columns, their varied pigments telling of the magnificent distances to which they reached. All were plastered up against a sky so blue that it seemed thick, and as though the color must soon begin to drip. Glory! The majesty of the earth's ragged crust, the exquisite harmony of that glorified gaudiness! Danny pulled a great chestful of the rare air into his lungs. He threw up his arms in a little gesture that indicated an acceptance of things as they were, and in his mind flickered the question:

"The beginning--or the end?"

Chapter III

"I've Done My Pickin'"

Then he felt his gaze drawn away from those vague, alluring distances. It was one of those pulls which psychologists have failed to explain with any great clarity; but every human being recognizes them. Danny followed the impulse.

He had not seen the figure squatting there on his spurs at the shady end of the little depot, for he had been looking off to the north. But as he yielded to the urge he knew its source--in those other eyes.

The figure was that of a little man, and his doubled-up position seemed to make his frame even more diminutive. The huge white angora chaps, the scarlet kerchief about his neck and against the blue of his shirt, the immense spread of his hat, his drooping gray mustache, all emphasized his littleness.

Yet Danny saw none of those things. He looked straight into the blue eyes squinting up at him--eyes deep and comprehensive, set in a copper-colored face, surrounded by an intricate design of wrinkles in the clear skin; eyes that had looked at incalculably distant horizons for decades, and had learned to look at men with that same long-range gaze. A light was in those eyes--a warm, kindly, human light--that attracted and held and created an atmosphere of stability; it seemed as though that light were tangible, something to which a man could tie--so prompt is the flash from man to man that makes for friendship and devotion; and to Danny there came a sudden comfort. That was why he did not notice the other things about the little man. That was why he wanted to talk.

"Good morning," he said.

"'Mornin'."

Then a pause, while their eyes still held one another.

After a moment Danny looked away. He had a stabbing idea that the little man was reading him with that penetrating gaze. The look was kindly, sincere, yet--and perhaps because of it--the boy cringed.

The man stirred and spat.

"To be sure, things kind of quiet down when th' train quits this place," he remarked with a nasal twang.

"Yes, indeed. I--I don't suppose much happens here--except trains."

Danny smiled feebly. He took his hat off and wiped the brow on which beads of sweat glistened against the pallor. The little man still looked up, and as he watched Danny's weak, uncertain movements the light in his eyes changed. The smile left them, but the kindliness did not go; a concern came, and a tenderness.

Still, when he spoke his nasal voice was as it had been before.

"Take it you just got in?"

"Yes--just now."

Then another silence, while Danny hung his head as he felt those searching eyes boring through him.

"Long trip this hot weather, ain't it?"

"Yes, very long."

Danny looked quickly at his interrogator then and asked:

"How did you know?"

"Didn't. Just guessed." He chuckled.

"Ever think how many men's been thought wise just guessin'?"

But Danny caught the evasion. He looked down at his clothes, wrinkled, but still crying aloud of his East.

"I suppose," he muttered, "I do look different--_am_ different."

And the association of ideas took him across the stretches to Manhattan, to the life that was, to--

He caught his breath sharply. The call of his throat was maddening!

The little man had risen and, with thumbs hooked in his chap belt, stumped on his high boot heels close to Danny. A curious expression softened the lines of his face, making it seem queerly out of harmony with his garb.

"You lookin' for somebody?" he ventured, and the nasal quality of his voice seemed to be mellowed, seemed to invite, to compel confidence.

"Looking for somebody?"

Danny, only half consciously, repeated the query. Then, throwing his head back and following that range of flat tops off to the north, he muttered: "Yes, looking for somebody--looking for myself!"

The other shifted his chew, reached for his hat brim, and pulled it lower.

"No baggage?" he asked. "To be sure, an' ain't you got no grip?"

Danny looked at him quickly again, and, meeting the honest query in that face, seeing the spark there which meant sympathy and understanding--qualities which human beings can recognize anywhere and to which they respond unhesitatingly--he smiled wanly.

"Grip?" he asked, and paused. "Grip? Not the sign of one! That's what I'm here for--in Colt, Colorado--to get a fresh grip!" After a moment he extended an indicating finger and asked: "Is that all of Colt--Colt, Colorado?"

The old man did not follow the pointing farther than the uncertain finger. And when he answered his eyes had changed again, changed to searching, ferreting points that ran over every puff and seam and hollow in young Danny's face. Then the older man set his chin firmly, as though a grim conclusion had been reached.

"That's th' total o' Colt," he answered. "It ain't exactly astoundin', is it?"

Danny shook his head slowly.

"Not exactly," he agreed. "Let's go up and look it over."

An amused curiosity drove out some of the misery that had been in his pallid countenance.

"Sure, come along an' inspect our metropolis!" invited the little man, and they struck off through the sagebrush.

Danny's long, free stride made the other hustle, and the contrast between them was great; the one tall and broad and athletic of poise in spite of the shoulders, which were not back to their full degree of squareness; the other, short and bowlegged and muscle-bound by years in the saddle, taking two steps to his pacemaker's one.

They attracted attention as they neared the store buildings. A man in riding garb came to the door of a primitive clothing establishment, looked, stepped back, and emerged once more. A moment later two others joined him, and they stared frankly at Danny and his companion.

A man on horseback swung out into the broad street, and as he rode away from them turned in his saddle to look at the pair. A woman ran down the post-office steps and halted her hurried progress for a lingering glance at Danny. The boy noticed it all.

"I'm attracting attention," he said to the little man, and smiled as though embarrassed.

"Aw, these squashies ain't got no manners," the other apologized. "They set out in there dog-gone hills an' look down badger holes so much that they git loco when somethin' new comes along."

Then he stopped, for the tall stranger was not beside him. He looked around. His companion was standing still, lips parted, fingers working slowly. He was gazing at the front of the Monarch saloon.

From within came the sound of an upraised voice. Then another in laughter. The swinging doors opened, and a man lounged out. After him, ever so faint, but insidiously strong and compelling, came an odor!

For a moment, a decade, a generation--time does not matter when a man chokes back temptation to save himself--Danny stood in the yellow street, under the white sunlight, making his feet remain where they were. They would have hurried him on, compelling him to follow those fumes to their source, to push aside the flapping doors and take his throat to the place where that burning spot could be cooled.

In Colt, Colorado! It had been before him all the way, and now he could not be quit of its physical presence! But though his will wavered, it held his feet where they were, because it was stiffened by the dawning knowledge that his battle had only commenced; that the struggle during the long journey across country had been only preliminary maneuvering, only the mobilizing of his forces.

When he moved to face the little Westerner his eyes were filmed. The other drew a hand across his mouth calculatingly and jerked his hat-brim still lower.

"As I was sayin'," he went on a bit awkwardly as they resumed their walk, "these folks ain't got much manners, but they're good hearted."

Danny did not hear. He was casting around for more resources, more reserves to reinforce his front in the battle that was raging.

He looked about quickly, a bit wildly, searching for some object, some idea to engage his thoughts, to divert his mind from that insistent calling. His eyes spelled out the heralding of food stuffs. The sun stood high. It was time. It was not an excuse; it was a Godsend!

"Let's eat," he said abruptly. "I'm starving."

"That's a sound idee," agreed the other, and they turned toward the restaurant, a flat-roofed building of rough lumber. A baby was playing in the dirt before the door and a chained coyote puppy watched them from the shelter of a corner.

On the threshold Danny stopped, confusion possessing him. He stammered a moment, tried to smile, and then muttered:

"Guess I'd better wait a little. It isn't necessary to eat right away, anyhow."

He stepped back from the doorway with its smells of cooking food and the other followed him quickly, blue eyes under brows that now drew down in determination.

"Look here, boy," the man said, stepping close, "you was crazy for chuck a minute ago, an' now you make a bad excuse not to eat. To be sure, it ain't none of my business, but I'm old enough to be your daddy; I ain't afraid to ask you what's wrong. Why don't you want to eat?"

The sincerity of it, the unalloyed interest that precluded any hint of prying or sordid curiosity, went home to Danny and he said simply:

"I'm broke."

"You didn't need to tell me. I knowed it. I ain't, though. You eat with me."

"I can't! I can't do that!"

"Expect to starve, I s'pose?"

"No--not exactly. That is," he hastened to say, "not if I'm worth my keep. I came out here to--to get busy and take care of myself. I'll strike a job of some sort--anything, I don't care what it is or where it takes me. When I'm ready to work, I'll eat. I ought to get work right away, oughtn't I?"

In his voice was a sudden pleading born of the fear awakened by his realization of absolute helplessness, as though he looked for assurance to strengthen his feeble hopes, but hardly dared expect it. The little man looked him over gravely from the heels of his flat shoes to the crown of his rakishly soft hat. He pushed his Stetson far back on his gray hair.

"To be sure, and I guess you won't have to look far for work," he said. "I've been combin' this town dry for a hand all day. If you'd like to take a chance workin' for me I'd be mighty glad to take you on--right off. I'm only waitin' to find a man--can't go home till I do. Consider yourself hired!"

He turned on his heel and started off. But Danny did not follow. He felt distrust; he thought the kindness of the other was going too far; he suspected charity.

"Come on!" the man snapped, turning to look at the loitering Danny. "Have I got to rope an' drag you to grub?"

"But--you see it's--this way," the boy stammered. "Do you really want me? Can I do your work? How do you know I'm worth even a meal?"

A slow grin spread over the Westerner's countenance.

"Friend," he drawled in his high, nasal tone, "it's a pretty poor polecat of a man who ain't worth a meal; an' it's a pretty poor specimen who goes hirin' without makin' up his mind sufficient. They ain't many jobs in this country, but just now they's fewer men. We've got used to bein' careful pickers. I've done my pickin'. Come on."

Only half willingly the boy followed.

They walked through the restaurant, the old man saluting the lone individual who presided over the place, which was kitchen and dining room in one.

"Hello, Jed," the proprietor cried, waving a fork. "How's things?"

"Finer 'n frog's hair!" the other replied, shoving open the broken screen door at the rear.

"This is where we abolute," he remarked, indicating the dirty wash-basin, the soap which needed a boiling out itself, and the discouraged, service-stiffened towel.

Danny looked dubiously at the array. He had never seen as bad, to say nothing of having used such; but the man with him sloshed water into the basin from a tin pail and said:

"You're next, son, you're next."

And Danny plunged his bared wrists into the water. It was good, it was cool; and he forgot the dirty receptacle in the satisfaction that came with drenching his aching head and dashing the cooling water over his throat. The other stood and watched, his eyes busy, his face reflecting the rapid workings of his mind.

They settled in hard-bottomed, uncertain-legged chairs, and Jed--whoever he might be, Danny thought, as he remembered the name--gave their order to the man, who was, among other things, waiter and cook.

"Make it two sirloins," he said; "one well done an' one--" He lifted his eyebrows at Danny.

"Rare," the boy said.

"An' some light bread an' a pie," concluded the employer-host.

Danny saw that the cook wore a scarf around his neck and down his back, knotted in three places. When he moved on the floor it was evident that he wore riding boots. On his wrists were the leather cuffs of the cowboy.

Danny smiled. A far cry, indeed, this restaurant in Colt, Colorado, from his old haunts along the dark thoroughfare that is misnamed a lighted way! The other was talking: "We'll leave soon's we're through an' make it on up th' road to-night. It'll take us four days to get to th' ranch, probably, an' we might's well commence. Can you ride?"

Danny checked a short affirmative answer on his lips.

"I've ridden considerably," he said. "You people wouldn't call it riding, though. You'll have to teach me."

"Well, that's a good beginnin'. To be sure it is. Them as has opinions is mighty hard to teach--'cause opinions is like as not to be dead wrong."

He smeared butter on a piece of bread and poked it into his mouth. Then:

"I brought out my last hand--I come with him, I mean. Th' sheriff brought him. His saddle an' bed's over to th' stable. You can use 'em."

"Sheriff?" asked Danny. "Get into trouble?"

"Oh, a little. He's a good boy, mostly--except when he gets drinkin'."

Danny shoved his thumb down against the tines of the steel fork he held until they bent to uselessness.

Chapter IV

The Trouble Hunter

Knee to knee, at a shacking trot, they rode out into the glory of big places, two horses before them bearing the light burden of a Westerner's bed.

"My name's Jed Avery," the little man broke in when they were clear of the town. "I'm located over on Red Mountain--a hundred an' thirty miles from here. I run horses--th' VB stuff. They call me Jed--or Old VB; mostly Jed now, 'cause th' fellers who used to call me Old VB has got past talkin' so you can hear 'em, or else has moved out. Names don't matter, anyhow. It ain't a big outfit, but I have a good time runnin' it. Top hands get thirty-five a month."

Danny felt that there was occasion for answer of some sort. In those few words Avery had given him as much information as he could need, and had given it freely, not as though he expected to open a way for the satisfaction of any curiosity. He wanted to forget the past, to leave it entirely behind him; did not want so much as a remnant to cling to him in this new life. Still, he did not deem it quite courteous to let the volunteered information come to him and respond with merely an acknowledgment.

He cleared his throat. "I'm from Riverside Drive, New York City," he said grimly. "Names don't matter. I don't know how to do a thing except waste time--and strength. If you'll give me a chance, I'll get to be a top hand."

An interval of silence followed.

"I never heard of th' street you mention. I know New York's on th' other slope an' considerable different from this here country. Gettin' to be a top hand's mostly in makin' up your mind--just like gettin' anywhere else."

Then more wordless travel. Behind them Colt dwindled to a bright blotch. The road ran close against the hills, which rose abruptly and in scarred beauty. The way was ever upward, and as they progressed more of the country beyond the river spread out to their view, mesas and mountains stretching away to infinite distance, it seemed.

Even back of the sounds of their travel the magnificent silence impressed itself. It was weird to Danny Lenox, unlike anything his traffic-hardened ears had ever experienced, and it made him uneasy--it, and the ache in his throat.

That ache seemed to be the last real thing left about him, anyhow. Events had come with such unreasonable rapidity in those last few days that his harassed mind could not properly arrange the impressions. Here he was, hired out to do he knew not what, starting a journey that would take him a hundred and thirty miles from a place called Colt, in the state of Colorado, through a country as unknown to him as the regions of mythology, beside a man whose like he had never seen before, traveling in a fashion that on his native Manhattan had worn itself to disuse two generations ago!

Out of the whimsical reverie he came with a jolt. Following the twisting road, coming toward them at good speed, was the last thing he would have associated with this place--an automobile. He reined his horse out of the path, saw the full-figured driver throw up his arm in salutation to Jed, and heard Jed shout an answering greeting. The driver looked keenly at Danny as he passed, and touched his broad hat.

"Who was that?" the boy asked, as he again fell in beside his companion.

"That's Bob Thorpe," the other explained. "He's th' biggest owner in this part of Colorado--mebby in th' whole state. Cattle. S Bar S mostly, but he owns a lot of brands."

"Can he get around through these mountains in a car?"

"He seems to. An' his daughter! My! To be sure, she'd drive that dog-gone bus right up th' side of that cliff! You'll see for yourself. She'll be home 'fore long--college--East somewheres."

The boy looked at him questioningly but said nothing. "College--East--home 'fore long--" Might it not form a link between this new and that old--a peculiar sort of link--as peculiar as this sudden, unwarranted interest in this girl?

Through the long afternoon Danny eagerly awaited the coming of more events, more distractions. When they came--such as informative bursts from Jed or the passing of the automobile--he forgot for the brief passage of time the throb in his throat, that wailing of the creature in him. But when the two rode on at the shambling trot, with the silence and the immense grandeur all about them, the demands of his appetite were made anew, intensified perhaps by a feeling of his own inconsequence, by the knowledge that should he fail once in standing off those assaults it would mean only another beginning, and harder by far than this one he was experiencing.

Every hour of sober reflection, of sordid struggle, added to his estimate of the strength of that self he must subdue. He was going away into the waste places, and a sneaking fear of being removed from the stuff that had kept him keyed commenced to grow, adding to the fleshly wants.

If he should be whipped and a surrender be forced? What then? He realized that that doubting was cowardice. He had come out here to have freedom, a new beginning, and now he found himself begging for a way back should the opposition be too great. It was sheer weakness!

Cautiously Jed Avery had watched Danny's face, and when he saw anxiety show there as doubt rose, he broke into words:

"Yes, sir, Charley was sure a good boy, but th' booze got him."

He looked down at his horse's withers so he could not see the start this assertion gave Danny.

"He didn't want to be bad, but it's so easy to let go. To be sure, it is. Anyhow, Charley never had a chance, never a look-in. He was good hearted an' meant well--but he didn't have th' backbone."

And Danny found that a rage commenced to rise within him, a rage which drove back those queries that had made him weak.

Day waned. The sun slid down behind the string of cliffs which stretched on before them at their left. Distances took on their purple veils, a canopy of virgin silver spread above the earth, and the stillness became more intense.

"Right on here a bit now we'll stop," Jed said. "This's th' Anchor Ranch. They're hayin', an' full up. We'll get somethin' to eat, though, an' feed for th' ponies. Then we'll sleep on th' ground. Ever do it?"

"Never."

"Well, you've got somethin' comin', then. With a sky for a roof a man gets close to whatever he calls his God--an' to himself. Some fellers out here never seem to see th' point. Funny. I been sleepin' out, off an' on, for longer than I like to think about--an' they's a feelin' about it that don't come from nothin' else in th' world."

"You think it's a good thing, then, for a man to get close to himself?"

"To be sure I do."

"What if he's trying to get away from himself?"

Jed tugged at his mustache while the horses took a dozen strides. Then he said:

"That ain't right. When a man thinks he wants to get away from himself, that's th' coyote in him talkin'. Then he wants to get closer'n ever; get down close an' fight again' that streak what's come into him an' got around his heart. Wants to get down an' fight like sin!"

He whispered the last words. Then, before Danny could form an answer, he said, a trifle gruffly:

"Open th' gate. I'll ride on an' turn th' horses back."

They entered the inclosure and rode on toward a clump of buildings a half-mile back from the road.

Off to their right ran a strip of flat, cleared land. It was dotted with new haystacks, and beyond them they could see waving grass that remained to be cut. At the corral the two dismounted, Danny stiffly and with necessary deliberation. As they commenced unsaddling, a trio of hatless men, bearing evidences of a strenuous day's labor, came from the door of one of the log houses to talk with Jed. That is, they came ostensibly to talk with Jed; in reality, they came to look at the Easterner who fumbled awkwardly with his cinch.

Danny looked at them, one after the other, then resumed his work. Soon a new voice came to his ears, speaking to Avery. He noticed that where the little man's greeting to the others had been full-hearted and buoyant, it was now curt, almost unkind.

Curious, Danny looked up again--looked up to meet a leer from a pair of eyes that appeared to be only half opened; green eyes, surrounded by inflamed lids, under protruding brows that boasted but little hair, above high, sunburned cheek bones; eyes that reflected all the small meanness that lived in the thin lips and short chin. As he looked, the eyes leered more ominously. Then the man spoke:

"Long ways from home, ain't you?"

Although he looked directly at Danny, although he put the question to him and to him alone, the boy pretended to misunderstand--chose to do so because in the counter question he could express a little of the quick contempt, the instinctive loathing that sprang up for this man who needed not to speak to show his crude, unreasoning, militant dislike for the stranger, and whose words only gave vent to the spirit of the bully.

"Are you speaking to me?" Danny asked, and the cool simplicity of his expression carried its weight to those who stood waiting to hear his answer.

The other grinned, his mouth twisting at an angle.

"Who else round here'd be far from home?" he asked.

Danny turned to Jed.

"How far is it?" he asked.

"A hundred an' ten," Jed answered, a swift pleasure lighting his serious face.

Danny turned back to his questioner.

"I'm a hundred and ten miles from home," he said with the same simplicity, and lifted the saddle from his horse's back.

It was the sort of clash that mankind the world over recognizes. No angry word was spoken, no hostile movement made. But the spirit behind it could not be misunderstood.

The man turned away with a forced laugh which showed his confusion. He had been worsted, he knew. The smiles of those who watched and listened told him that. It stung him to be so easily rebuffed, and his laugh boded ugly things.

"Don't have anything to do with him," cautioned Jed as they threw their saddles under a shed. "His name's Rhues, an' he's a nasty, snaky cuss. He'll make trouble every chance he gets. Don't give him a chance!"

They went in to eat with the ranch hands. A dozen men sat at one long table and bolted immense quantities of food.

The boiled beef, the thick, lumpy gravy, the discolored potatoes, the coarse biscuit were as strange to Danny as was his environment. His initiation back at Colt had not brought him close to such crudity as this. He tasted gingerly, and then condemned himself for being surprised to find the food good.

"You're a fool!" he told himself. "This is the real thing; you've been dabbling in unrealities so long that you've lost sense of the virtue of fundamentals. No frills here, but there's substance!"

He looked up and down at the low-bent faces, and a new joy came to him. He was out among men! Crude, genuine, real men! It was an experience, new and refreshing.

But in the midst of his contemplation it was as though fevered fingers clutched his throat. He dropped his fork, lifted the heavy cup, and drank the coffee it contained in scorching gulps.

Once more his big problem had pulled him back, and he wrestled with it--alone among men!

After the gorging the men pushed back their chairs and yawned. A desultory conversation waxed to lively banter. A match flared, and the talk came through fumes of tobacco smoke.

"Anybody got th' makin's?" asked Jed.

"Here," muttered Danny beside him, and thrust pouch and papers into his hand.

Danny followed Jed in the cigarette rolling, and they lighted from the same match with an interchange of smiles that added another strand to the bond between them.

"That's good tobacco," Jed pronounced, blowing out a whiff of smoke.

"Ought to be; it cost two dollars a pound."

Jed laughed queerly.

"Yes, it ought to," he agreed, "but we've got a tobacco out here they call Satin. Ten cents a can. _It_ tastes mighty good to us."

Danny sensed a gentle rebuke, but he somehow knew that it was given in all kindliness, that it was given for his own good.

"While I fight up one way," he thought, "I must fight down another." And then aloud: "We'll stock up with your tobacco. What's liked by one ought to be good enough for--" He let the sentence trail off.

Jed answered with: "Both."

And the spirit behind that word added more strength to their uniting tie.

The day had been a hard one. Darkness came quickly, and the workers straggled off toward the bunk house. Tossing away the butt of his cigarette, Jed proposed that they turn in.

"I'm tired, and you've got a right to be," he declared.

They walked out into the cool of evening. A light flared in the bunk house, and the sound of voices raised high came to them.

"Like to look in?" Avery asked, and Danny thought he would.

Men were in all stages of undress. Some were already in their beds; others, in scant attire, stood in mid-floor and talked loudly. From one to another passed Rhues. In his hand he held a bottle, and to the lips of each man in turn he placed the neck. He faced Jed and Danny as they entered. At sight of the stranger a quick hush fell. Rhues stood there, bottle in hand, leering again.

"Jed, you don't drink," he said in his drawling, insinuating voice, "but mebby yer friend here 'uld like a nightcap."

He advanced to Danny, bottle extended, an evil smile on his face. Jed raised a hand as though to interfere; then dropped it. His jaw settled in grim resolution, his nostrils dilated, and his eyes fixed themselves fast on Danny's face.

Oh, the wailing eagerness of those abused nerves! The cracking of that tortured throat! All the weariness of the day, of the week; all the sagging of spirit under the assault of the demon in him were concentrated now. A hot wave swept his body. The fumes set the blood rushing to his eyes, to his ears; made him reel. His hand wavered up, half daring to reach for the bottle, and the strain of his drawn face dissolved in a weak smile.

Why hold off? Why battle longer? Why delay? Why? Why? Why?

Of a sudden his ears rang with memory of his father's brittle voice in cold denunciation, and the quick passing of that illusion left another talking there, in nasal twang, carrying a great sympathy.

"No, thanks," he said just above a whisper. "I'm not drinking."

He turned quickly and stepped out the door.

Through the confusion of sounds and ideas he heard the rasping laughter of Rhues, and the tone of it, the nasty, jeering note, did much to clear his brain and bring him back to the fighting.

Jed walked beside him and they crossed to where their rolls of bedding had been dropped, speaking no word. As they stooped to pick up the stuff the older man's hand fell on the boy's shoulder. His fingers squeezed, and then the palm smote Danny between the shoulder blades, soundly, confidently. Oh, that assurance! This man understood. And he had faith in this wreck of a youth that he had seen for the first time ten hours before!

Shaken, tormented though he was, weakened by the sharp struggle of a moment ago, Danny felt keenly and with something like pride that it had been worth the candle. He knew, too, with a feeling of comfort, that an explanation to Jed would never be necessary.

Silently they spread the blankets and, with a simple "Good night," crawled in between.

Danny had never before slept with his clothes on--when sober. He had never snuggled between coarse blankets in the open. But somehow it did not seem strange; it was all natural, as though it should be so.

His mind went round and round, fighting away the tingling odor that still clung in his nostrils, trying to blot out the wondering looks on the countenances of those others as they watched his struggle to refuse the stuff his tormentor held out to him.

He did not care about forgetting how Rhues's laughter sounded. Somehow the feeling of loathing for the man for a time distracted his thought from the pleading of his throat, augmented the singing of that chord his father had set in motion, bolstered his will to do, to conquer this thing!

But the effect was not enduring. On and on through the narrow channels that the fevered condition made went his thinking; forever and forever it must be so--the fighting, fighting, fighting; the searching for petty distractions that would make him forget for the moment!

Suddenly he saw that there were stars--millions upon countless millions of them dusted across the dome of the pale heavens as carelessly as a baker might dust silvered sugar over the icing of a festal cake. Big stars and tiny stars and mere little diffusive glows of light that might come from a thousand worlds, clustering together out there in infinite void. Blue stars and white stars, orange stars, and stars that glowed red. Stars that sent beams through incalculable space and stars that swung low, that seemed almost attainable. Stars that blinked sleepily and stars that stared without wavering, purposeful, attentive. Stars alone and lonely; stars in bunches. Stars in rows and patterns, as though put there with design.

Danny breathed deeply, as though the pure air were stuffy and he needed more of it, for the vagary of his wandering mind had carried him back to the place where light points were arranged by plan. He saw again the electric-light kitten and the spool of thread, the mineral-water clock, the cigarette sign with flowing border, the--

Whisky again! He moved his throbbing head from side to side.

"Is it a blank wall?" he asked quite calmly. "Shall I always come up against it? Is there no way out?"

Chapter V

Jed Philosophizes

Morning: a flickering in the east that gives again to the black hold of night. Another attempt, a longer glimmer. It recedes, returns stronger; struggles, bursts from the pall of darkness, and blots out the stars before it. And after that first silver white come soft colors--shoots of violet, a wave of pink, then the golden glory of a new day.

Jed Avery yawned loud and lingeringly, pushing the blankets away from his chin with blind, fumbling motions. He thrust both arms from the covers and reached above his head, up and up and--up! until he ended with a satisfied groan. He sat erect, opening and shutting his mouth, rubbed his eyes--and stopped a motion half completed.

Danny Lenox slept with lips parted. His brown hair--the hair that wanted to curl so badly--was well down over the brow, and the skin beneath those locks was damp. One hand rested on the tarpaulin covering of the bed, the fingers in continual motion.

"Poor kid!" Jed muttered under his breath. "Poor son of a gun! He's in a jack-pot, all right, an' it'll take all any man ever had to pull--"

"'Mornin', sonny!" he cried as Danny opened his eyes and raised his head with a start.

For a moment the boy stared at him, evidencing no recognition. Then he smiled and sat up.

"How are you, Mr. Avery?"

"Well," the other began grimly, looking straight before him, "Mr. Avery's in a bad way. He died about thirty year ago."

Danny looked at him with a grin.

"But Old Jed--Old VB," he went on, "he's alive an' happy. Fancy wrappin's is for boxes of candy an' playin' cards," he explained. "They ain't necessary to men."

"I see--all right, Jed!"

Danny stared about him at the freshness of the young day.

"Wouldn't it be slick," Jed wanted to know, "if we was all fixed like th' feller who makes th' days? If yesterday's was a bad job he can start right in on this one an' make it a winner! Now, if this day turns out bad he can forget it an' begin to-morrow at sun-up to try th' job all over again!"

"Yes, it would be fine to have more chances," agreed Danny.

Jed sat silent a moment.

"Mebby so, an' mebby no," he finally recanted. "It would be slick an' easy, all right; but mebby we'd get shiftless. Mebby we'd keep puttin' off tryin' hard until next time. As 'tis, we have to make every chance our only one, an' work ourselves to th' limit. Never let a chance get away! Throw it an' tie it an' hang on!"

"In other words, think it's now or never?"

Jed reached for a boot and declared solemnly:

"It's th' only thing that keeps us onery human bein's on our feet an' movin' along!"

Breakfast was a brief affair, brief but enthusiastic. The gastronomic feats performed at that table were things at which to marvel, and Danny divided his thoughts between wonder at them and recalling the events of the night before. Only once did he catch Rhues's eyes, and then the leer which came from them whipped a flush high in his cheeks.

Jed and Danny rode out into the morning side by side, smoking some of the boy's tobacco. As the sun mounted and the breeze did not rise, the heat became too intense for a coat, and Danny stripped his off and tied it behind the saddle. Jed looked at the pink silk shirt a long time.

"To be sure an' that's a fine piece of goods," he finally declared.

Danny glanced down at the gorgeous garment with a mingled feeling of amusement and guilt. But he merely said:

"I thought so, too, when I bought it."

And even that little tendency toward foppishness which has been handed down to men from those ancestors who paraded in their finest skins and paints before the home of stalwart cave women seemed to draw the two closer to each other.

As though he could sense the young chap's bewilderment and wonder at the life about him, Jed related much that pertained to his own work.

"Yes, I raise some horses," he concluded, "but I sell a lot of wild ones, too. It's fun chasin' 'em, and it gets to be a habit with a feller. I like it an' can make a livin' at it, so why should I go into cattle? Those horses are out there in th' hills, runnin' wild, like some folks, an' doin' nobody no good. I catch 'em an' halter-break 'em an' they go to th' river an' get to be of use to somebody."

"Isn't it a job to catch them?" Danny asked.

"Well, I guess so!" Jed's eyes sparkled.

"Some of 'em are wiser than a bad man. Why, up in our country's a stallion that ain't never had a rope on him. Th' Captain we've got to call him. He's th' wildest an' wisest critter, horse or human, you ever see. Eight years old, an' all his life he's been chased an' never touched. He's big--not so big in weight; big like this here man Napoleon, I mean. He rules th' range. He has th' best mares on th' mountain in his bunch, an' he handles 'em like a king. We've tossed down our whole hand time an' again, but he always beats us out. We're no nearer catchin' him to-day than we was when he run a yearlin'."

The little man's voice rose shrilly and his eyes flashed until Danny, gazing on him, caught some of his fever and felt it run to the ends of his body.

"Oh, but that's a horse!" Jed went on. "Why, just to see him standin' up on the sky line, head up, tail arched-like, ready to run, not scared, just darin' us to come get him--well, it's worth a hard ride. There's somethin' about th' Captain that keeps us from hatin' him. By all natural rights somebody ought to shoot a stallion that'll run wild so long an' drive off bunches of gentle mares an' make 'em crazy wild. But no. Nobody on Red Mountain or nobody who ever chased th' Captain has wanted to harm him; yet I've heard men swear until it would make your hair curl when they was runnin' him! He's that kind. He gets to somethin' that's in real men that makes 'em light headed. I guess it's his strength. He's bigger'n tricks, that horse. He's learned all about traps an' such, an' th' way men generally catch wild horses don't bother him at all. Lordy, boy, but th' Captain's somethin' to set up nights an' talk about!"

His voice dropped on that declaration, almost in reverence.

"Well, he's so wise and strong that he'll just keep right on running free; is that the idea?" asked Danny.

Jed gnawed off a fresh chew and repocketed the plug, shifted in his saddle, and shook his head.

"Nope, I guess not," he said gravely. "I don't reckon so, because it ain't natural; it ain't th' way things is done in this world. Did you ever stop to think that of all th' strong things us men has knowed about somethin' has always turned up to be a little bit stronger? We've been all th' time pattin' ourselves on th' back an' sayin', 'There, we've gone an' done it; that'll last forever!' an' then watchin' a wind or a rain carry off what we've thought was so strong. Either that, I say, or else we've been fallin' down on our knees an' prayin' for help to stop somethin' new an' powerful that's showed up. An' when prayin' didn't do no good up pops somebody with an idea that th' Lord wants us folks to carry th' heavy end of th' load in such matters, an' gets busy workin'. An' his job ends up by makin' somethin' so strong that it satisfied all them prayers--folks bein' that unparticular that they don't mind where th' answer comes from so long as it comes an' they gets th' benefits!

"That's th' way it is all th' time. We wake up in th' mornin' an' see somethin' so discouragin' that we want to crawl back to bed an' quit tryin'; then we stop to think that nothin' has ever been so great or so strong that it kept right on havin' its own way all th' time; an' we get our sand up an' pitch in, an' pretty soon we're on top!

"All we need is th' sand to tackle big jobs; just bein' sure that they's some way of doin' or preventin' an' makin' a reg'lar hunt for that one thing. So 'tis with th' Captain. He's fooled us a long time now, but some day a man'll come along who's wiser than th' Captain, an' he'll get caught.

"Nothin' strange about it. Just th' workin' out of things. 'Course, it'll all depend on th' man. Mebby some of us on th' mountain has th' brains; mebby some others has th' sand, but th' combination ain't been struck yet. We ain't _men_ enough. Th' feller who catches that horse has got to be all man, just like th' feller who beats out anythin' else that's hard; got to be man all th' way through. If he's only part man an' tackles th' job he's likely to get tromped on; if he's all man, he'll do th' ridin'."

Jed stopped talking and gazed dreamily at the far horizon; dreamily, but with an eye which moved a trifle now and then to take into its range the young chap who rode beside him. Danny's head was down, facing the dust which rose from the feet of the horses ahead. The biting particles irritated the membrane of his throat, but for the moment he did not heed. "Am I a man--all the way through?" he kept asking himself. "All the way through?"

And then his nerves stung him viciously, shrieking for the stimulant which had fed them so long and so well. His aching muscles pleaded for it; his heart, miserable and lonely, missed the close, reckless friendships of those days so shortly removed, in spite of his realization of what those relations had meant; he yearned for the warming, heedless thrills; his eyes ached and called out for just the one draft that would make them alert, less hurtful.

From every joint in his body came the begging! But that chord down in his heart still vibrated; his father's arraignment was in his ears, its truth ringing clearly. The incentive to forge ahead, to stop the wasting, grew bigger, and his will stood stanch in spite of the fact that his spinning brain played such tricks as making the click of pebbles sound like the clink of ice in glasses!

Then, too, there was Jed, the big-hearted, beside him. And Jed was saying, after a long silence, as though he still thought of his theme: "Yes, sir, us men can do any old thing if we only think so! Nothin' has ever been too much for us; nothin' ever will--if we only keep on thinkin' as men ought to think an' respectin' ourselves."

Thus they traveled, side by side, the one fighting, the other uttering his homely truths and watching, always watching, noting effects, detecting temptations when the strain across the worried brow and about the tight mouth approached the breaking point. With keen intuition he went down into the young fellow and found the vibrating chord, the one that had been set humming by scorn and distrust. But instead of abusing it, instead of goading it on, Jed nursed it, fed it, strengthening the chord itself with his philosophy and his optimism.

They went on down Ant Creek, past the ranches which spread across the narrow valley. Again they slept under the open skies, and Danny once more marveled at the stars.

That second morning was agony, but Jed knew no relenting.

"You're sore an' stiff," he said, "but keepin' at a thing when it hurts is what counts, is what gets a feller well--an' that applies to more things than saddle sores, too."

He said the last as though aside, but the point carried.

At the mouth of the creek, where it flows into Clear River, they swung to the west and went downstream. Danny's condition became only semi-conscious. His head hung, his eyes were but half opened. Living resolved itself into three things. First and second: the thundering demands and the stubborn resistance of his will. When Jed spoke and roused him the remaining element come to the fore: his physical suffering. That agony became more and more acute as the miles passed, but in spite of its sharpness it required the influence of his companion's voice to awaken him to its reality.

Always, in a little back chamber of his mind, was a bit of glowing warmth--his newly born love for the man who rode beside him.

It was night when they reached the ranch.

"We're arrived, sonny! This is home!" cried Jed, slapping Danny on the shoulder. "Our home."

The boy mastered his senses with an effort. When he dismounted he slumped to one knee and Jed had to help him stand erect.

Danny remembered nothing of the bed going, nor could he tell how long the little, gray-haired man stood over him, muttering now and then, rubbing his palms together; nor of how, when he turned toward the candle on the table, burning steadily and brightly there in the night like a young Crusader fighting back the shadows into the veriest corner of the room, his eyes were misted.

It was a strange awakening, that which followed. Danny felt as though he had slept through a whole phase of his existence. At first he was not conscious of his surroundings, did not try to remember where he was or what had gone before. He lay on his back, mantled in a strange peace, wonderfully content. Torture seemed to have left him, bodily torments had fled. His heart pumped slowly; a vague, pleasing weakness was in his bones. It was rest--rest after achievement, the achievement of stability, the arrival at a goal.

Then, breaking into full consciousness, his nostrils detected odors. He sniffed slightly, scarcely knowing that he did so. Cooking! It was unlike other smells from places of cookery that he had known; it was attractive, compelling.

All that had happened since his departure from Colt came back to him with his first movement. His body was a center of misery, as though it were shot full of needles, as though it had been stretched on a rack, then blistered. Dressing was accomplished to the accompaniment of many grunts and quick intakings of breath.

When he tried to walk he found that the process was necessarily slow--slower than it had ever been before. Setting each foot before the other gingerly, as if in experiment, he walked across the tiny room toward the larger apartment of the cabin.

"Mornin'!" cried Jed, closing the oven door with a gentleness that required the service of both hands. "I allowed you'd be up about now. Just step outside an' wash an' it'll be about ready. Can you eat? Old VB sure can build a breakfast, an' he's never done better than this."

"By the smell, I judge so," said Danny.

The warm breath of baking biscuits came to him from the oven. A sputtering gurgle on the stove told that something fried. The aroma of coffee was in the air, too, and Jed lifted eggs from a battered pail to drop them into a steaming kettle. The table, its plain top scrubbed to whiteness, was set for two, and the sunlight that streamed through the window seemed to be all caught and concentrated in a great glass jar of honey that served as a centerpiece.

Danny's eyes and nostrils and ears took it all in as he moved toward the outer doorway. When he gained it he paused, a hand on the low lintel, and looked out upon his world.

Away to the south stretched the gulch, rolling of bottom, covered with the gray-green sage. Over east rose the stern wall, scarred and split, with cedars clinging in the interstices, their forms dark green against the saffron of the rocks. Up above, towering into the unstained sky of morning, a rounded, fluted peak, like the crowning achievement of some vast cathedral.

The sun was just in sight above the cliff, but Danny knew that day was aging, and felt, with his peace, a sudden sharp affection for the old man who, with an indulgence that was close to motherly, had let him sleep. It made him feel young and incompetent, yet it was good, comforting--like the peace of that great stillness about him.

Except for the soft sounds from the stove, there was no break. Above, on the ridges, a breeze might be blowing; but not an intimation of it down here. Just quiet--silvery and holy.

The sun shoved itself clear of the screening trees. A jack rabbit, startled by nothing at all, sprang from its crouching under a brush shelter and made off across the gulch with the jerky lightness of a stone skipping on water. As he bobbed the grass and bushes dewdrops flew from them, catching sunbeams as they hurtled out to their death, for one instant of wondrous glory flashing like gems.

Danny Lenox, late of New York, drew a deep, quivering breath and leaned his head against the crude doorway. He was sore and weak and felt almost hysterical, but perhaps this was only because he was so happy!

Chapter VI

Ambition is Born

And then began Danny's apprenticeship. Jed, the wise, did not delay activity. He commenced with the boy as soon as breakfast had been eaten and the dishes washed.

That first day they shod a horse, Danny doing nothing really, but taking orders from Jed as though the weight of a vast undertaking rested on his shoulders.

The next day they mended fences from early morning until evening.

Gradually the realization came to Danny that he was doing something, that he was filling a legitimate place--small, surely: nevertheless he was being of use, he was creating. A pleasing sensation! One of the few truly wholesome delights he had ever experienced. Danny thought about it with almost childish happiness; then, letting his mind return again to the established rut, he was surprised to know that mere thinking about his simple, homely duties had stilled for the time it endured the restless creature within him.

The boy's bodily hurts righted themselves. Long hours of sleep did more than anything else to speed recovery. Those first two nights he was between covers before darkness came to the gulch, and Jed let him sleep until the sun was well up.

On the third evening they sat outside, Danny watching Jed put a new half-sole on a cast-off riding boot.

"They're your size," the old man said, "an' you'll have to wear boots, to be sure. Them things you got on ain't what I'd call exactly fitted to ridin' a horse."

Danny looked down at his modish Oxfords and smiled. Then he glanced up at the man beside him, who hammered and cut and grunted while he worked as though his very immortality depended on getting those boots ready for his new hand to wear.

Oh, the boy from the city could not then appreciate the big feeling of man for mankind which prompted such humble labor. It was a labor of love, the mere mending of that stiff old boot! In it Jed Avery found the encompassing happiness which comes to those who understand, happiness of the same sort he had felt back there at Colt when he saw that there was a human being who needed help and that it was in his power to give him that help. And the peace this happiness engendered created an atmosphere which soothed and made warm the heart of the boy, though he did not know why.

"Guess we'd better move inside an' get a light," Jed muttered finally. "I'll shut the corral gate. You light th' candle, will you? It's on th' shelf over th' table--stickin' in a bottle."

Danny watched him go away into the dusk and heard the creak of the big gate swinging shut before he stepped into the house and groped his way along for the shelf. He found it after a moment and fumbled along for the candle Jed had said was there. His fingers closed on something hard and cold and cylindrical. He slid his fingers upward; then staggered back with a half-cry.

"What's wrong?" asked Jed, coming into the house.

Danny did not answer him, so the old man stepped forward toward the shelf. In a moment a match flared; the cold wick of the candle took the flame, warmed, sent it higher, and a glow filled the room.

The boy looked out from eyes that were dark and wide and filled with the old horror. The hand held near his lips shook, and he turned on Jed a look that pleaded, then gazed back at the light.

The candle was stuck in the neck of a whisky bottle.

Danny opened his lips to speak, but the words would not come. That terror was back again, shattering his sense of peace, melting the words in his throat with its heat.

Jed moved near to him.

"It's a bright light--for such a little candle," he said slowly, and a stout assurance was in his tone.

"But I--I touched the bottle--in the dark!"

Danny's voice was high and strained, and the words, when finally they did come, tripped over one another in nervous haste. His knees were weak under him. Such was the strength of the tentacles which reached up to stay his struggles and to drag him back into the depths from which he willed to rise. Such was the weakness of the nervous system on which the strain of the ordeal was placed.

Jed put a hand on the boy's shoulder and gazed into the drawn face.

"It's all right, sonny," he said softly, his voice modulating from twang to tenderness in the manner it had. "Most men touches it in th' dark. But don't you see what this bottle's for? Don't you see that candle? Burnin' away there, corkin' up th' bottle, givin' us light so we can see?"

Then the other hand went up to the boy's other shoulder, and the little old rancher shook young Danny Lenox gently, as though to joggle him back to himself.

"I know, sonny," he said softly. "I know--" Then he turned away quickly and smote his palms together with a sharp crack.

"Now get to bed. I'll finish these here boots to-night and in th' mornin' we ride. If you're goin' to get to be a top hand, we've got to quit foolin' around home an' get to learn th' country. They's a lot of colts we got to brand an' a bunch of wild ones to gather. It means work--lots of it--for you an' me!"

He set to work, busily thumping on the boot.

In the morning, Danny was subdued, subdued and shaking. The spontaneity that had characterized his first days on the ranch had departed. He was still eager for activity, but not for the sake of the new experiences in themselves. That gnawing was again in his throat, tearing his flesh, it seemed, and to still the trembling of his hand it was necessary for him to clutch the saddle horn and keep his fingers clamped tightly about it as they rode along.

They climbed out of the gulch, horses picking their way up an almost impossible trail, and on a high ridge, where country rolled and tossed about them for immeasurable distances, Jed stopped and pointed out the directions to his companion.

Thirty miles to the south was Clear River with its string of ranches, and the town of Ranger, their post office. Twenty miles to the southeast was the S Bar S Ranch, the center of the country's cattle activity, and over west, on Sand Creek, a dozen miles' ride across the hills and double that distance by road, was another scattering of ranches where Dick Worth, deputy sheriff for that end of Clear River County, lived.

"An' to th' north of us," continued Jed, with a sweep of his hand, "they's nothin' but hills--clean to Wyoming! We're on th' outskirts of settlements. South of th' river it's all ranches, but north--nothin'. Couple of summer camps but no ranches. It's a great get-away country, all right!"

The riding was easy that day, and in spite of his stiffness Danny wished it were harder, because the turmoil kept up within him, and even the unbroken talk of Jed, giving him an intelligent, interesting idea of the country, could not crowd out his disquieting thoughts.

But it was easier the next day, and Danny took a deep interest in the hunt for a band of mares with colts that should be branded. Jed's low, warning "H-s-s-t! There they are!" set his heart pounding wildly, and he listened eagerly to the directions the old man gave him; then he waited in high excitement while Jed circled and got behind the bunch.

The horses came toward him, and Danny, at Jed's shout, commenced to ride for the ranch. It was a new, an odd, an interesting game. The horses came fast and faster. Now and then to his ears floated Jed's repeated cry: "Keep goin'! Keep ahead!" And he spurred on, wondering at every jump how his horse could possibly keep his feet longer in that awful footing.

But he had faith in the stout little beast he rode, and his spirit was of the sort that would not question when a man as skilled in the game as was Jed urged him along.

The mares with their colts pressed closely, but Danny kept going, kept urging speed. Straight on for the ranch he headed, and when they reached the level bottom of the gulch the race waxed warm.

"Into th' round corral!" cried Jed. "Keep goin'! You're doin' fine!"

And into the round corral Danny headed his mount, while the nose of the lead mare reached out at his pony's flank.

The gate swung shut; the mares trotted around the inclosure, worried, for there their offspring had been taken from them before. The colts hung close to their mothers, snorting and rolling their wide eyes, while the saddle horses stood with legs apart, getting their wind.

Danny's eyes sparkled.

"That's sport!" he declared. "But, say, will these horses always follow a rider that way?"

Jed loosed his cinch before he answered: "Horses is like some men. As long as they're bein' pushed from behind an' they's somebody goin' ahead of 'em, they'll follow--follow right through high water! But once let 'em get past th' rider who's supposed to be holdin' 'em up--why, then they's no handlin' 'em at all. They scatter an' go their own way, remainin' free.

"As I said, they're like men. To be sure, lots of men has got to give that what's leadin' 'em such a run that they beat it to death an' get a chance to go free!"

Danny rubbed his horse's drenched withers and agreed with a nod as Jed walked over to the gate and fumbled with the fastening.

"Say," he said, turning round, "I like th' way you ride!"

Danny looked up quickly, pleased.

"I'm glad," he said, but in the simple assertion was a great self-pride.

"Most fellers strange in th' country wouldn't fancy takin' that kind of a bust down off a point. No, sir. Not such a ride for us old heads, but for a greenhorn-- Well, I guess you'll get to be a top hand some day, all right!"

And the influence which more than all else was to help Danny become a top hand, which was to set up in his heart the great ambition, which was to hold itself up as a blazing ideal, came early in his novitiate as a horse hunter--came in a fitting setting, on a day richly golden, when the air seemed filled with a haze of holy incense, holy with the holiness of beauty. It was one of those mountain days when the immensity of nature becomes so obvious and so potent that even the beasts leave off their hunting or their grazing to gaze into wondrous distances. The sage is green and brash in the near sunlight, soft and purple out yonder; the hills sharp and hard and detailed under the faultless sky for unthinkable miles about, then soft and vague, melting in color and line, rolling, reaching, tossing in a repetition of ranges until eyes ache in following them and men are weak about their middles from the feeling of vastnesses to which measurements by figures are profane.

Jed and Danny searched for horses along two parallel ridges. Now and then they saw each other, but for the most part it had been a day of solitary riding.

Late afternoon arrived, and Danny had about abandoned hope of success. He was considering the advisability of mounting the ridge above the gulch into which he had ridden and locating Jed, though loath to leave the solitudes.

His pony picked them out and stopped before Danny's eyes registered the sight. The boy searched quickly, and over against a clump of cedars, halfway up the rise, he saw horses.

"No, that's not they," he muttered. "Jed said there were two white mares among them. Not--"

His pony started under him, gave a sharp little shudder, then moved a step backward and stood still, a barely perceptible tremor shaking his limbs.

Then a sound new and strange came to Danny. He did not know its origin, but it contained a quality that sent a thrill pulsing from his heart. Shrill it was, but not sharply cut, wavering but not breaking; alarm, warning, concern, caution--the whistle of a stallion! Then silence, while the mares stood rigid and the saddle horse held his breath.

Again it came, and a quick chill struck down Danny's spine. His searching eyes encountered the source. There, halfway between the mares and the crown of the ridge he stood, out on a little rim-rock that made a fitting pedestal, alert, defiant, feet firmly planted, with the poise of a proud monarch.

Even across the distance his coat showed the glossiness seen only on fine, short hair; his chest, turned halfway toward the rider, was splendid in breadth and depth, indicating superb strength, endurance, high courage. Danny looked with a surge of appreciation at the arch of the neck, regal in its slim strength, at the fine, straight limbs, clean as a dancing girl's; at the long, lithe barrel with its fine symmetry.

A wandering breath of breeze came up the gulch, fluttering the wealth of tail, lifting the heavy mane and forelock. The horse raised a front foot and smote the ledge on which he stood as though wrath rose that a mere man should ride into his presence, and he would demand departure or homage from Danny Lenox. He shook his noble head impatiently, to clear his eyes of the hair that blew about them. And once more came the whistle.

The mares stirred. One, a bright buckskin, trotted up the rise a dozen yards, and stopped to turn and look. The others moved slowly, eyes and ears for Danny.

Again the whistle; a clatter of loosened stones as the black leader bounded up the hillside; and the bunch was away in his wake.

"The Captain!" Danny breathed, and then, in a cry which echoed down the gulch--"The Captain!"

He was scarcely conscious of his movements, but his quirt fell, his spurs raked the sides of his pony, and the sturdy little animal, young and not yet fully developed, doing his best in making up the ridge, labored effectively, perhaps drawn on by that same raw desire which went straight to the roots of Danny's spirit and came back to set the fires glowing in his eyes.

The boy rode far forward in his saddle, his gaze on the plunging band that scattered stones and dirt as they strove for the top. But he was many lengths behind when the last mare disappeared over the rim. He fanned his pony again, and the beast grunted in his struggles for increased speed in the climbing, lunging forward with mighty efforts which netted so little ground.

As he toiled up the last yards Danny saw the Captain again, standing there against the sky, watching, waiting, mane and tail blowing about him. His strong, full, ever delicate body quivered with the singing spirit of confidence within him and communicated itself to the weakling pursuer. Just a glimpse of the man was all that the black horse wanted, then--he was off.

As Danny's horse caught the first stride in the run down the ridge he saw the Captain stretch that fine nose out to the flank of a lagging mare, and saw the animal throw her head about in pain as the strong teeth nipped her flesh, commanding more speed.

Danny Lenox was mad! He pulled off his hat and beat his pony's withers with it. He cried aloud the Captain's name. He went on and on, dropping far down on his horse's side as they brushed under the cedars, settling firmly to the seat when the animal leaped over rocks. His shirt was open at the neck, and his throat was chilled with the swift rush of air, while hot blood swirled close to the skin. His eyes glowed with the fire set there by this new fascination, the love of beautiful strength; and through his body sang the will to conquer!

It was an unfair race. Danny and his light young horse had no chance. Off and away drew the stallion and his bunch, without effort after that first crazy break down the ridge. The last Danny saw of him was with head turned backward, nose lifted, as though he breathed disdainful defiance at the man who would come in his wake with the thirst for possession high within him!

And so the boy pulled up, dropped off, and let his breathing pony rest. His legs were uncertain under him, and he knew that his pulses raced. For many minutes he strove to analyze his emotion but could not.

Jed slid off the next ridge and came up at a trot. His face was radiant. "Well, he got you, didn't he?" He laughed aloud.

"I thought he would, all along; and I knowed he had you when I see you break up over th' ridge. You've got th' fever now, like a lot of th' rest of us! Mebby you'll chase horses here for years, but you'll always have an eye out for just one thing--th' Captain. You won't be satisfied until you've got him--like all of us; not satisfied until we've done th' biggest thing there is in sight to do."

Then, as though parenthetically: "An' when we've done that we've only h'isted ourselves up to where we can see that they's a hunderd times as much to do."

"Gad, but he goes right into a fellow's heart!" breathed Danny, looking into the sunset. "I didn't know I was following him, Jed, until the pony here commenced to tire."

He laughed apologetically, as though confessing a foolishness, but his face was glowing with a new light. A fresh incentive had come to him with this awakening admiration, inciting him to emulation. The spirit of the stallion stirred in him again that vibrant chord which had been urging him to fight on, not to give up.

His ambition to overcome his weakness began to take quick, definite direction. Added to the effort of overcoming his vices would henceforth be the endeavor to achieve, to compass some worthy object. This was his aim: to be a leader to whom men would turn for inspiration; to be unconquerable among men, as the Captain was unconquerable among his kind.

As the ideal took shape, springing full-born from his excitement, Danny Lenox felt lifted above himself, felt stronger than human strength, felt as though he were forever beyond human weaknesses.

When they had ridden twenty minutes in silence Jed broke out: "Sonny, I don't want to act like 'n old woman, but I guess I'm gettin' childish! I've knowed you less than a month. I don't even know who you was when you come. We don't ask men about theirselves when they come in here. What a feller wants to tell, we take; what he keeps to hisself we wonder at without mentionin' it.

"But you, sonny--you couldn't keep it from me. I know what it is, I know. I seen it when you got off th' train at Colt--seen that somethin' had got you down. I knowed for sure what it was when you stopped by th' saloon there. I knowed how honest you was with yourself in that little meetin' with Rhues. I know all about it--'cause I've been through th' same thing--alone, an' years ago."

After a pause he went on: "An' just now, when I seen you comin' down that ridge after th' Captain, I knowed th' right stuff was in you--because when a thing like that horse touches a man off it's a sign he's th' right kind, th' kind that wants to do things for th' sake of knowin' his own strength. You've got th' stuff in you to be a man, but you're fightin' an awful fight. You need help; you ought to have friends--you ought to have a daddy!"

He gulped, and for a dozen strides there were no more words.

"I feel like adoptin' you, sonny, 'cause I know. I feel like makin' you a part of this here outfit, which ain't never branded a colt that didn't belong to it, which ain't never done nothin' but go straight ahead an' be honest with itself, good times an' bad.

"I used to be proud when they called me Old VB, 'cause they all knowed th' brand was on th' level, an' when they, as you might say, put it on me, I felt like I was wearin' some sort of medal. I feel just like makin' you part of th' VB--Young VB--'cause I can help you here an'--an' 'fore God A'mighty you need help, man that you are!"

An hour and a half later, when the last dish had been wiped, when the dishpan had been hung away, Danny spoke the next words. He walked close to the old man, his face quiet under the new consciousness of how far he must go to approach this new ideal. He took the hard old hand in his own, covered its back with the other, and muttered in a voice that was far from clear: "Good night, Old VB."

And the other, to cover the tenderness in his tone, snapped back: "Get to bed, Young VB; they's that ahead of you to-morrow which'll take every bit of your courage and strength!"

Chapter VII

With Hoof and Tooth

So it came to pass that Danny Lenox of New York ceased to exist, and a new man took his place--Young VB, of Clear River County, Colorado.

"Who's your new hand?" a passing rider asked Jed one morning, watching with interest as the stranger practiced with a rope in the corral.

"Well, sir, he's th' ridin'est tenderfoot you ever see!" Jed boasted. "I picked him up out at Colt an' put him to work--after Charley went away."

"Where'd he come from? What's his name?" the other insisted.

"From all appearances, he ain't of these parts," replied Jed, squinting at a distant peak. "An' around here we've got to callin' him Young VB."

The rider, going south, told a man he met that Jed had bestowed his brand on a human of another generation. Later, he told it in Ranger. The man he met on the road told it on Sand Creek; those who heard it in Ranger bore it off into the hills, for even such a small bit of news is a meaty morsel for those who sit in the same small company about bunk-house stoves months on end. The boy became known by name about the country, and those who met him told others what the stranger was like. Men were attracted by his simplicity, his desire to learn, by his frank impulse to be himself yet of them.

"Oh, yes, he's th' feller," they would recall, and then recite with the variations that travel gives to tales the incident that transpired in the Anchor bunk house.

Young VB fitted smoothly into the work of the ranch. He learned to ride, to rope, to shoot, to cook, and to meet the exigencies of the range; he learned the country, cultivated the instinct of directions. And, above all, he learned to love more than ever the little old man who fathered and tutored him.

And Young VB became truly useful. It was not all smooth progress. At times--and they were not infrequent--the thirst came on him with vicious force, as though it would tear his will out by the roots.

The fever which that first run after the Captain aroused, and which made him stronger than doubtings, could not endure without faltering. The ideal was ever there, but at times so elusive! Then the temptings came, and he had to fight silently, doggedly.

Some of these attacks left him shaking in spite of his mending nerves--left him white in spite of the brown that sun and wind put on him. During the daytime it was bad enough, but when he woke in the night, sleep broken sharply, and raised unsteady hands to his begging throat, there was not the assuring word from Jed, or the comfort of his companionship.

The old man took a lasting pride in Danny's adaptability. His comments were few indeed, but when the boy came in after a day of hard, rough, effective toil, having done all that a son of the hills could be expected to do, the little man whistled and sang as though the greatest good fortune in the world had come to him.

One morning Jed went to the corral to find VB snubbing up an unbroken sorrel horse they had brought in the day before. He watched from a distance, while the young man, after many trials, got a saddle on the animal's back.

"Think you can?" he asked, his eyes twinkling, as he crawled up on the aspen poles to watch.

"I don't know, Jed, but it's time I found out!" was the answer, and in it was a click of steely determination.

It was not a nice ride, not even for the short time it lasted. Young VB "went and got it" early in the melee. He clung desperately to the saddle horn with one hand, but with the other he plied his quirt and between every plunge his spurs raked the sides of the bucking beast.

He did not know the art of such riding, but the courage was there and when he was thrown it was only at the moment when the sorrel put into the battle his best.

VB got to his feet and wiped the dust from his eyes.

"Hurt?" asked Jed.

"Nothing but my pride," muttered the boy. He grasped the saddle again, got one foot in the stirrup, and, after being dragged around the inclosure, got to the seat.

Again he was thrown, and when he arose and made for the horse a third time Jed slipped down from the fence to intervene.

"Not again to-day," he said, with a pride that he could not suppress. "Take it easy; try him again to-morrow."

"But I don't want to give up!" protested the boy. "I _can_ ride that horse."

"You ain't givin' up; I made you," the other smiled. "You ought to have been born in the hills. You'd have made a fine bronc twister. Ain't it a shame th' way men are wasted just by bein' born out of place?"

VB seemed not to hear. He rubbed the nose of the frantic horse a moment, then said:

"If I could get this near the Captain-- Jed, if I could ever get a leg over that stallion he'd be mine or I'd die trying!"

"Still thinkin' of him?"

"All the time! I never forget him. That fellow has got into my blood. He's the biggest thing in this country--the strongest--and I want to show him that there's something a little stronger, something that can break the power he's held so long--and that _I_ am that something!"

"That's considerable ambition," Jed said, casually, though he wanted to hug the boy.

"I know it. Most people out here would think me a fool if they heard me talk this way. Me, a greenhorn, a tenderfoot, talking crazily about doing what not one of you has ever been able to do!"

"Not exactly, VB. It's th' wantin' to do things bad enough that makes men do 'em, remember. This feller busted you twice, but you've got th' stuff under your belt that makes horses behave. That's th' only stuff that'll ever make th' Captain anything but th' wild thing he is now. Sand! _Grit!_ Th' _wantin'_ to do it!"

A cautious whistle from Jed that afternoon called VB into a thicket of low trees, from where he looked down on a scene that drove home even more forcibly the knowledge of the strength of spirit that was incased in the glossy coat of the great stallion.

"Look!" the old man said in a low voice, pointing into the gulch. "It's a Percheron--one of Thorpe's stallions. He's come into th' Captain's band an' they're goin' to fight!"

VB looked down on the huge gray horse, heavier by three hundred pounds than the black, stepping proudly along over the rough gulch bottom, tossing his head, twisting it about on his neck, his ears flat, his tail switching savagely.

Up the far rise huddled the mares. The Captain was driving the last of them into the bunch as VB came in sight. That done, he turned to watch the coming of the gray.

Through the stillness the low, malicious, muffled crying of the Percheron came to them clearly as he pranced slowly along, parading his graces for the mares up there, displaying his strength to their master, who must come down and battle for his sovereignty.

The Captain stood and watched as though mildly curious, standing close to his mares. His tail moved slowly, easily, from side to side. His ears, which had been stiffly set forward at first, slowly dropped back.

The gray drew nearer, to within fifty yards, forty, thirty. He paused, pawed the ground, and sent a great puff of dust out behind him.

Then he swung to the left and struck up the incline, headed directly for the Captain, striding forward to humble him under the very noses of his mares--the band that would be the prize of that coming conflict!

He stopped again and pawed spitefully. He rose on his hind legs slowly, head shaking, forefeet waving in the air, as though flexing his muscles before putting them to the strain of combat.

He settled to the ground barely in time, for with a scream of rage the black horse hurtled. He seemed to be under full speed at the first leap, and the speed was terrific!

Foam had gathered on his lips, and the rush down the pitch flung it spattering against his glossy chest. His shrilling did not cease from the time he left his tracks until, with front hoofs raised, a catapult of living, quivering hate, he hurled himself at the gray. It ended then in a wail of frenzy--not of fear, but of royal rage at the thought of any creature offering challenge!

The gray dropped back to all fours, whirled sharply, and took the impact at a glancing blow, a hip cringing low as the ragged hoofs of the black crashed upon it. The Captain stuck his feet stiffly into the ground, plowing great ruts in the earth in his efforts to stop and turn and meet the rush of the other, as he recovered from the first shock, gathered headway, and bore down on him. He overcame his momentum, turning as he came to a stop, lifted his voice again, and rose high to meet hoof for hoof the ponderous attack that the bigger animal turned on him.

The men above heard the crash of their meeting. The impact of flesh against flesh was terrific. For the catch of an instant the horses seemed to poise, the Captain holding against the fury that had come upon him, holding even against the odds of lightness and up-hill fighting. Then they swayed to one side, and VB uttered a low cry of joy as the Captain's teeth buried themselves in the back of the Percheron's neck.

Close together then they fought, throwing dirt and stones, ripping up the brush as their rumbling feet found fresh hold and then tore away the earth under the might that was brought to bear in the assault and resistance. A dozen times they rushed upon each other, a dozen times they parted and raised for fresh attack. And each time the gray body and the black met in smacking crash it was the former that gave way, notwithstanding his superior weight.

"Look at him!" whispered Jed. "Look at that cuss! He hates that gray so that he's got th' fear of death in him! Look at them ears! Hear him holler! He's too quick. Too quick, an' he's got th' spirit that makes up th' difference in weight--an' more, too!"

He stopped with a gasp as the Captain, catching the other off balance, smote him on the ribs with his hoofs until the blows sounded like the rumble of a drum. The challenger threw up his head in agony and cringed beneath the torment, running sidewise with bungling feet.

"He like to broke his back!" cried Jed.

"And look at him bite!" whispered VB.

The Captain tore at the shoulders and neck of the gray horse with his gleaming, malevolent teeth. Again and again they found fleshhold, and his neck bowed with the strength he put into the wrenching, while his feet kept up their terrific hammering.

No pride of challenge in the gray now; no display of graces for the onlooking mares; no attacking; just impotent resistance, as the Captain drove him on and on down the gulch, humbled, terrified, routed.

The sounds of conflict became fainter as the Percheron strove to make his escape and the Captain relentlessly followed him, the desire to kill crying from his every line.

The battling beasts rounded a point of rocks, and the two men sprang to their horses to follow the moving fight. But they were no more than mounted when the Captain came back, swinging along in his wonderful trot, ears still flat, head still shaking, anger possessing him--anger and pride.

He was unmarked by the conflict, save with sweat and dust and foam; he was still possessed of his superb strength. He went up the pitch to his band with all the vigor of stride he had displayed in flying from it to answer the presumption of the gray. And the mares, watching him, seemed to draw long breaths, dropped their heads to the bunch grass, and, one by one, moved along in their grazing.

Jed looked at VB. What he saw in the boy's face made him nod his head slowly in affirmation.

"You're that sort, too," he whispered exultingly. "You're that sort! _His_ kind!"

Chapter VIII

A Head of Yellow Hair

The next day Jed declared for a trip to Ranger after grub. The trip was necessary, and it would be an education for VB, he said with a chuckle, to see the town. But when they were ready to start a rider approached the ranch.

"If it ain't Kelly!" Jed cried. Then, in explanation: "He's a horse buyer, an' must be comin' to see me."

And the man's desire to look over the VB stuff was so strong that Jed declared it would be business for him to stay at home.

In a way, Danny was glad of the opportunity to go alone. It fed the glowing pride in his ability to do things, to be of use, and after a short interchange of drolleries with the man Kelly, whom he instinctively liked, the boy mounted to the high wagon seat and drove off down the gulch.

It was a long drive, and hours alone are conducive to thought. Danny's mind went back over the days that had passed, wandering along those paths he had followed since that July morning in the luxuriously dim house on Riverside Drive. And the reason for his departing from the old way came back to him now, because he was alone, with nothing to divert his attention. The old turbulence arose; it wore and wore with the miles, eating down to his will, teasing, coaxing, threatening, pleading, fuming.

"Will it always be so?" he asked the distances. "When it comes to challenge me, to take away all that I hold dear, shall I always be afraid? Shan't I be able to stand and fight and triumph, merely raging because it dares tempt me instead of fearing this thing itself?"

And he spoke as he thought in terms of his ideal, as materialized in the Captain.

"But will it always be so with him?" he asked again. "Won't some horse come to challenge him some day and batter him down and make defeat all the more bitter because of the supremacy he has enjoyed? Would it then be--worth the candle?"

And as he bowed his head he thought once more of the beacon in the bottle, corking it up, driving back the shadows, making a livable place in the darkness.

Nothing is ever intrinsically curious. Curiousness comes solely from relationships. Time and place are the great factors in creating oddities. Five miles farther on VB saw a curious thing. This was at the forks of the road. To his right it went off behind the long, rocky point toward Sand Creek; to the left it wandered through the sage brush over toward the S Bar S Ranch, and ahead it ran straight on to Ranger.

Along the prong that twisted to the left went an automobile. Nothing curious about that to VB, for many times he had seen Bob Thorpe driving his car through the country.

But at the wheel was a lone figure crowned by a mass of yellow hair. That was the curious thing he saw!

All VB could distinguish at that distance with his hot eyes was yellow hair. The machine picked its way carefully along the primitive road, checking down here, shooting ahead there, going on toward the horizon, bearing the yellow hair away from him, until it was only a crawling thing with a long, floating tail of dust. But it seemed to him he could still make out that bright fleck even after the automobile had become indistinguishable.

"She's alone," muttered VB. "She's driving that car alone--and out here!"

Then he wondered with a laugh why he should think it so strange. Many times he had ridden down Fifth Avenue in the afternoon traffic congestion beside a woman who piloted her own car. Surely the few hazards of this thoroughfare were not to be compared with that!

But it was the incongruity which his association of ideas brought up that made him tingle a little. That hair! It did not belong out here. He had not been near enough to see the girl's face--he was sure it was a girl, not a grown woman--but the color of her crowning adornment suggested many and definite things. And those things were not of these waste places; were not rough and primal. They were finer, higher.

Once before he had experienced this nameless, pleasurable sensation of being familiar with the unknown. That had been when Jed had sketched with a dozen unrelated words a picture of the daughter of the house of Thorpe.

The motor car with its fair-haired pilot had been gone an hour when Danny, watching a coyote skulk among distant rocks, said aloud: "East--college--I'll bet--I--I wonder--"

Dusk had come when Young VB entered Ranger and put up at the ranch, which made as much pretense of buildings as did the town itself. Morning found him weak and drawn, as it always did after a night of the conflict, yet he was up with the sun, eager to be through with his task and back with Jed.

Purchasing supplies is something of a rite in Ranger, and under other conditions, on another day perhaps, it might have amused VB; but with the unrest within him he found little about the procedure that did not irritate.

In the store there one may buy everything in hardware from safety pins to trace chains; groceries range from canned soup to wormy nuts; in drugs anything, bounded on one end by horse liniment and on the other extreme by eye-drops guaranteed to prevent cataracts, is for sale; and overalls and sewing silk are alike popular commodities. All is in fine order, and the manager is a walking catalogue of household necessities.

VB was relieved when the buying had been accomplished. He crowded a can of ten-cent tobacco into the pocket of his new overalls and started for the team. A dozen strides away from the store building he paused to look about. It was his first inspection of Ranger in daylight, and now as he surveyed its extent his sense of humor rose above the storm within him, and he grinned.

The store, with its conventional false front, stood beside the post office, which was built as a lean-to. Next to it was a building of red corrugated iron, and sounds of blacksmithing issued from it. Behind VB was a tiny house, with a path running from it to the store, the home of the manager. Next it a log cabin. Down at the left, near the river, was another house, deserted, the ranch where he had stayed, and beyond it a trio of small shacks on the river bank.

"Ranger," he muttered, and chuckled.

The road, brown and soft with fine dust, stretched on and on toward Utah, off to the west where silence was supreme.

The buildings were all on the north side of the road.

"A south front was the idea, I suppose," VB murmured. "Mere matter of--"

His gaze had traveled across the road to a lone building erected there, far back against a sharp rise of ground. It stood apart, as though consciously aloof from the rest, a one-story structure, and across its front a huge white sign, on which in black characters was painted the word:

[Illustration: SALOON]

Unconsciously his tongue came out to wet the parched lips and his fingers plucked at the seams of the new overalls.

Why not? the insidious self argued, why not? All changes must come gradually. Nothing can be accomplished in a moment. Just one drink to cool his throat, to steady his nerves, and brace him for the fight he would make--later.

As he stood there listening to that inner voice, yet holding it off, he did not hear the fall of hoofs behind him or the jingle of spurs as a rider dismounted and approached.

But he did hear the voice--drawling, nasty, jeering:

"Was you considerin' havin' a bit o' refreshment, stranger?"

VB wheeled quickly and looked straight into the green glitter of Rhues's red-lidded eyes. The cruel mouth was stretched in an angular grin, and the whole countenance expressed the incarnate spirit of the bully.

Into Danny's mind leaped the idea that this thing before him, this evil-eyed, jeering, leering, daring being, typified all that was foul in his heart--just as the Captain typified all that was virtuous.

The intuitive repulsion surged to militant hate. He wanted to smother the breath which kept alive such a spirit, wanted to stamp into the dust the body that housed it--because it mocked him and tempted him! But Young VB only turned and brushed past the man without a word.

He heard Rhues's laughter behind him, and heard him call: "Ranger ain't no eastern Sunday school. Better have one an' be a man, like th' rest o' th' boys!"

However, when Rhues turned back to his pony the laugh was gone and he was puzzling over something. After he had mounted, he looked after the boy again maliciously.

VB was on the road in half an hour, driving the horses as fast as he dared. He wanted to be back in Jed's cabin, away from Ranger. This thing had followed him across the country to Colt; from Colt to the Anchor; and now It lurked for him in Ranger. The ranch was his haven.

The settlement by the river reached its claws after him as he drove, fastening them in his throat and shaking his will until it seemed as though it had reached the limit of its endurance.

It was dark when he reached home. A mile away he had seen the light and smiled weakly at thought of it, and the horses, more than willing, carried the wagon over the remaining distance with a bouncing that threatened its contents.

When VB pulled up before the outer gate Jed hurried from the cabin.

"VB," he called, "are you all right?"

"All right, Jed," he answered, dropping from the seat.

And the boy thought he heard the older man thank his God.

Without words, they unharnessed and went to the cabin. Kelly was sleeping loudly in the adjoining room. The table had been moved from its usual place nearer to the window, and the bottle with its burning candle was close against the pane. Jed looked at the candle, then at VB.

"I'm sorry," he said, seeing the strain about the boy's mouth. "I never thought about it until come night, Young VB. I never thought about it. I--I guess I'm an old fool, gettin' scared th' way I do. So I shoved this candle up against th' window--because I'm an old fool and thought--it might help a little."

And VB answered: "It does help, Jed! Every little thing helps. And oh, God, how I need it!"

He turned away.

Chapter IX

Pursuit

Summer drew toward its close and the work became more exacting. Jed was sure that more of his colts ran the range without brands, and the two rode constantly, searching every gulch and break for the strays. One day they went far to the east, and at noon encountered three of Bob Thorpe's men building fence.

"It's his new drift fence," Jed explained. "He's goin' to have a lot of winter pasture, to be sure he is. It'll help us, too. When we come takin' these here willow tails off this ridge they'll find somethin' new. It's so close up to the foot of the rise that they can't jump it."

"Thorpe must be rich," remarked Young VB as they went on along the fence.

"Rich don't say it! He's rollin' in money, an' he sure knows how to enjoy it. Every winter, when things gets squared away, he takes his wife an' goes to California. I s'pose he'll be takin' his girl, too--now that she's quit goin' to school."

The boy wanted to ask questions about this daughter of Bob Thorpe's, but a diffidence, for which there was no accounting, held him back. He was curious as he had been whenever he heard of or thought of her, and as he had been when he had once seen her. But somehow he did not care to admit that curiosity even to Jed, and when he tried to analyze the reason for his reticence there was no doing so.

Now came more knowledge of the waste places with weeks of riding; more knowledge of the barren area in his own heart with self-study; more pertinent, that which the Captain typified.

And all the time that struggle continued, which at times seemed only the hopeless floundering of a man in quicksands--life on the river bank so close; death below, certain, mocking his efforts.

"He has faith in himself because he is physically equipped," VB murmured one day as he saw the Captain standing against the sky on a distant ridge. "His belief in himself is justified. But I--what do I know about my own capabilities?"

Yet a latent quality in the boy was the sort that offsets doubts, else why this emulation of the stallion, why this feeling that was almost love, constant, always growing, never hesitating?

Like most men, Young VB was unprepared for the big moments of his life. Could we only foresee them, is the plaint of men! Could we only know and go out to meet them in spirit proper! And yet that very state of preparation might take from the all-encompassing grandeur of those passages a potent element.

After all, this scheme of things has its compensations, and inability to foretell the future may be one of the greatest.

With fear in his heart and black discouragement and lack of faith, Young VB went out to meet what proved to be his first great moment.

Jed had gone to the railroad, bound for the Springs, to untangle a mess of red tape that had snarled about his filing on some land. VB was left alone, and for days the young fellow saw no one. In the natural loneliness that followed, the assault came upon him with manifold force. He could not sleep, could not eat, could not remain in one place or keep his mind on a fixed purpose.

He walked about, talking to himself in the silence, trying ineffectually to do the necessary work of the ranch, trying to stifle the loud voice that begged him to forego all the struggle and let his impulses carry him where they would.

But were not his impulses carrying him? Was it not his first impulse to go on with the fight? He did not think of that.

At times it was hard indeed to differentiate between the real and the unreal. The voice that wheedled was such a twister of words and terms, and its ally, the thirst, raged with such virility that he was forced to do something with his body. To remain an unresisting victim to the torture would only invite disaster.

Throwing a saddle on his "top" horse, Young VB set out, leaving the half-prepared dinner as it was, unable even to wait for food. He rode swiftly up the gulch to where it forked, and then to the right, letting the stanch animal under him cover the ground at a swinging trot. In three hours he was miles from the ranch, far back in the hills, and climbing to the top of a stretching ridge. He breathed through his mouth, to let the air on his burning throat, and twisted his bridle reins until the stout leather was misshapen, utterly lost in the conflict which went on within, heedless of all else.

Suddenly he realized that his horse had come a long distance without rest. He dismounted in a thicket of cedars, sharply repentant that his own torment had led him to forget the beast that served him, and even the distraction of that concern brought relief.

With the cinch eased the horse stood and breathed gratefully. But he was not fagged, he was still alert and eager. His ears were set stiffly forward, and he gazed upwind, sniffing softly now and then.

"What you see, cayuse?" VB asked, trying to make out the cause of that attentiveness.

Again the sniffing, and of a sudden the horse froze, stopped his breathing, and VB, a hand on the beast's hip, felt a quick tremor run through him.

Then the man saw that which had caused the animal to tremble, and the sight set him tingling just as it always did.

A hundred yards up the ridge, sharp against the sky, commanding, watchful, stood the Captain. He had not seen or scented VB, for he looked in other directions, moving his head from point to point, scanning every nook of the country below him. Something mannish there was about that beast, a comprehensive, planned vigilance. Down below him in a sag fed the mares.

As VB looked at that watcher he felt the lust to possess crawling up, surging through him, blotting out that other desire, that torment, making his breath congest, making his mouth dry. He tightened his cinch and mounted.

The Captain did not see VB until the rider came clear of the cover in which he had halted.

For the instant only, as the rushing horseman broke through the cedars, a scudding, fluttering object hurtling across the low brush, the black stallion stood as though his feet were imbedded in the rock under him, his head full toward the rushing rider, nose up, astonishment in the very angle of his stiff ears. Then those ears went flat; the sleek body pivoted on its dainty hind feet, and a scream of angered warning came from the long throat.

Even as the Captain's front hoofs clawed the ground in his first leap, the mares were running. They drew close together, frightened by the abruptness of the alarm, scuttling away from the punishment they knew would be coming from their master if they wasted seconds.

VB was possessed again. His reason told him that a single horseman had no chance in the world with that bunch, that he could not hope to keep up even long enough to scatter the band, that he would only run his mount down, good horse that he was. But the lust urged him on, tugging at his vitals, and he gave vent to his excitement in sharp screams of joy, the joy of the hunt--and the joy of honest attempt at supreme accomplishment.

The dust trailed behind the bunch, enveloping the rushing Captain in a dun mantle, finally to be whipped away by the breeze. They tore down stiff sagebrush in their flight; and so great was the strain that their bellies skimmed incredibly close to the ground.

VB's horse caught the spirit of the chase, as do all animals when they follow their kind. He extended himself to the last fiber, and with astonishment--a glad astonishment that brought a whoop of triumph--the boy saw that the mares were not drawing away--that he was crawling up on them!

But the Captain! Ah, he was running away from the man who gave chase, was putting more distance between them at every thundering leap, was drawing closer to his slower mares, lip stretched back over his gleaming teeth, jaws working as he strained to reach them and make that band go still faster.

VB's quirt commenced to sing its goading tune, slashing first on one side, then on the other. He hung far forward over the fork of his saddle, leaning low to offer the least possible resistance to the wind. Now and then he called aloud to his pony, swearing with glad savagery.

The Captain reached his bunch, closing in on them with a burst of speed that seemed beyond the abilities of blood and bone. The man behind thought he heard those long teeth pop as they caught the rump of a scurrying mare; surely he heard the stallion's scream of rage as, after nipping mare after mare, running to and fro behind them, he found that they had opened their hearts to the last limit and could go no faster. They _could not_ do it--and the rider behind was crawling up, jump for jump, gaining a yard, losing a foot, gaining again, steadily, relentlessly.

VB did not know that Kelly, the horse buyer, and one of Dick Worth's riders had given the outlaws a long, tedious race that morning as they were coming in from the dry country to the west for water and better feed. He did not know that the band had been filling their bellies with great quantities of water, crowding them still more with grasses, until there was no room left for the working of lungs, for the stretching of taxed muscles.

He saw only the one fact: that he was gaining on the Captain. He did not stop even to consider the obvious ending of such a chase. He might scatter the band, but what of it? When the last hope had been cast the Captain would strike out alone, would turn all the energy that now went to driving his mares to making good his own escape, and then there would be no more race--just a widening of a breach that could not be closed.

But VB did not think of anything beyond the next stride. His mind was possessed with the idea that every leap of the laboring beast under him must bring him closer to the huddle of frantic horses, nearer to the flying hindquarters of the jet leader who tried so hard to make his authority override circumstance.

The slashing of the quirt became more vicious. VB strained farther forward. His lips were parted, his eyes strained open with excitement, and the tears started by that rushing streamed over his cheeks.

"E-e-eyah!" he shrieked.

The buckskin mare found a hole. Her hind legs went into the air, sticking toward the sky above that thundering clump of tossing, rushing bodies with its fringes of fluttering hair. Her legs seemed to poise a moment; then they went down slowly. The Captain leaped her prostrate body, to sink his teeth into the flank of a sorrel that lagged half a length behind the others.

VB passed so near the buckskin as she gained her faltering feet that he could have slashed her with his quirt. Yet he had no eyes for her, had no heed for any of the mares. He was playing for the bigger game.

The sorrel quit, unable to respond to that punishment, fearful of her master. She angled off to the right, to be rid of him, and disappeared through a clump of trees. The stallion shrilled his anger and disgust, slowing his gallop a half-dozen jumps as though he wanted to follow and punish her cruelly.

Then he glanced backward, threw his nose in the air and, stretching to his own tremendous speed again, stormed on.

The huddle of mares became less compact, seemed to lose also its unity of purpose. The Captain had more to do. His trips from flank to flank of the band were longer. By the time he had spurred the gray at the left back into the lead the brown three-year-old on the other wing was a loiterer by a length. Then, when she was sent ahead, the gray was lagging again. And another by her side, perhaps.

"E-e-eyah!"

VB's throat was raw from the screaming, but he did not know it--no more than he knew that his hat was gone or that his nerves still yearned for their stinging stimulant.

The cry, coming again and again, worried the Captain. Each time it crackled from VB's lips the black nose was flung high and an eye which glared orange hate even at that distance rolled back to watch this yelling pursuer.

VB saw, and began to shout words at the animal, to cry his challenge, to curse.

The galloping gray quit, without an attempt to rally. The Captain brought to bear a terrific punishment, dropping back to within thirty yards of the man who pressed him, but it was useless, for she was spent. The water and luscious grass in her dammed up the reservoirs of her vitality, would not let her respond. When the stallion gave her up and tore on after the others she dropped even her floundering gallop, and as VB raced past her he heard the breath sob down her throat.

On and across they tore, dropping into sags of the ridge, climbing sharp little pitches, swinging now to the right and bending back to the left again in a sweeping curve. The uneven galloping of the horse under him, the gulps for breath the pony made as the footing fooled him and he jolted sharply, the shiftings and duckings and quick turnings as they stormed through groups of trees, the rattle of brush as it smote his boot toes and stirrups were all unheeded by VB.

Once his shoulder met a tough cedar bough, and the blow wrenched it from its trunk. His face was whipped to rawness by smaller branches, and one knee throbbed dully where it had skimmed a bowlder as they shot past. But he saw only that floundering band ahead.

The buckskin was gone, the sorrel, the gray; next, two mares quit together, and the Captain, seeing them go, did not slacken his speed, did not even scream his rage. Only four remained, and he gambled on them as against the slight chance of recovering any of those others; for that screaming rider was closing in on him all the time.

Oh, water and grass! How necessary both are to life, but how dangerous at a time like this! Pop-pop! The teeth closed on those running hips. The vainness of it all! They could go no faster. They had tried first from instinct, then from willingness; now they tried from fear as their lord tortured them. But though the will was there, the ability could not come, not even when the Captain pushed through them, and in a desperate maneuver set the pace, showing them his fine heels and clean limbs, demonstrating how easy it was to go on and on and draw away from that rider who tugged at his muffler that wind might find and cool his throat, burning now from unalloyed hope.

And so VB, the newest horse runner on the range, scattered the Captain's band, accomplishing all that the best of the men who rode that country had ever been able to boast.

The stallion tried once more to rally his mates into escape, but their hearts were bursting, their lungs clogged. They could do no more.

Then away he went alone, head high and turning from side to side, mane flaunting, tail trailing gracefully behind him, beauty in every regal line and curve, majestic superiority in each stride he took.

He raced off into the country that stretched eastward, the loser for the time of one set of conquests but free--free to go on and make himself more high, more powerful, more a thing to be emulated even by man.

He ran lightly, evenly, without effort, and the gap between him and the rider behind, narrowed by such tremendous exertion from that lathered pony, widened with scarce an added effort.

But VB went on, driving his reeking pony mercilessly. He had ceased yelling now. His face was set; blood that had been whipped into it by his frenzy, by the rushing of the wind, by the smiting of branches, left the skin. It became white, and from that visage two eyes glowed abnormally brilliant. For the Captain was taking off the ridge where it bent and struck into the north, was plunging down over the pitch into the shadows. He was going his best, in long, keen strides that would carry him to the bottom with a momentum so tremendous that on the flat he would be running himself into a blur. And VB's face was colorless, with eyes brilliant, because he knew that along the bottom of the drop ran the new drift fence that Bob Thorpe's men were erecting.

He began to plead with his pony, to talk to him childishly, to beg him to keep his feet, to coax him to last, to pray him to follow--and in control of himself, and on time! As they dropped off the ridge, down through the sliding shale and scattered brush, VB's right hand, upraised to keep his balance, held the loop of his rope, and the other, flung behind the cantle of his saddle, grasped the coils of the sturdy hemp.

Oh, Captain, your speed was against you! You took off that ridge with those ground-covering leaps, limbs flying, heart set on reaching the bottom with a swirl of speed that would dishearten your follower. But you did not reckon on an obstruction, on the thing your eyes encountered when halfway down that height and going with all the power within you. Those fresh posts and the wires strung between them! A fence! Men had invaded your territory with their barriers, and at such a time! You knew, too, that there was no jumping it; they had set the posts so far up on the pitch that no take-off had been left.

So the Captain tried to stop. With haunches far under him, front feet straight before, belly scrubbing the brush, he battled to overcome the awful impetus his body had received up above. Sprawling, sliding, feet shooting in any direction as the footing gave, he struggled to stop his progress. It was no simple matter; indeed, checking that flight was far more difficult than the attaining of that speed. In the midst of rolling, bounding stones, sliding dust, breaking brush, the great stallion gradually slowed his going. Slow and more slowly he went on toward the bottom; almost stopped, but still was unable to bring his muscles into play for a dash to right or left.

On behind, pony floundering in the wake of the Captain, rode VB, right hand high, snapping back and forth to hold him erect, rope dangling from it crazily. He breathed through his mouth, and at every exhalation his vocal chords vibrated.

Perhaps even then the Captain might have won. The odds of the game were all against him, it is true, for breaking down the pitch as he did, it required longer for him to reach the bottom in possession of his equilibrium than it did the slower-moving horse that bore VB. It would have been a tight squeeze for the horse, but the man was in a poor position to cast his loop with any degree of accuracy.

But a flat sliding stone discounted all other factors. Nothing else mattered. The Captain came to a stop, eyes wild, ears back. With a slow-starting, mighty lunge, he made as though to turn and race down along the line of fence before VB could get within striking distance. The great muscles contracted, his ragged hoofs sought a hold. The hind legs straightened, that mighty force bore on his footing--and the stone slipped! The Captain was outlucked.

His hind legs shot backward, staggering him. His hindquarters slipped downhill, throwing his head up to confront VB. His nostrils flared, that orange hate in his eyes met the glow from his pursuer's, who came down upon him--only half a dozen lengths away!

Chapter X

Capture

It does not take a horse that is bearing a rider downhill an appreciable length of time to take one more stride. Gravity does the work. The horse jerks his fore legs from under his body and then shoots them out again for fresh hold to keep his downward progress within reason.

VB's pony went down the drop with much more rapidity than safety, in short, jerky, stiff-legged plunges, hindquarters scrooged far under his body; alert, watching his footing, grunting in his care not to take too great risks.

When the Captain, fooled by false footing, was whirled about to face the down-coming rider, the pony's fore feet had just drawn themselves out of the way to let his body farther down the slope. And when the sturdy legs again shot out to strike rock and keep horse and VB upright, the black stallion had started to wheel. But in the split second which intervened between the beginning and ending of that floundering jump, eyes met eyes. The eyes of a man met the eyes of a beast, and heart read heart. The eyes of a man who had frittered his life, who had flaunted his heritage of strength in body and bone until he had become a weakling, a cringing, whining center of abnormal nervous activities, fearing himself, met the eyes of a beast that knew himself to be a paragon of his kind, the final achievement of his strain, a commanding force that had never been curbed, that had defied alike his own kingdom and the race from which had sprung the being now confronting him.

The eyes of him who had been a weakling met the eyes of that which had been superstrong and without a waver; they held, they penetrated, and, suddenly born from the purposeless life of Danny Lenox, flamed Young VB's soul. All the emulation, all the lust this beast before him had roused in his heart, became amalgamated with that part of him which subtly strove to drag him away from debauchery, and upon those blending elements of strength was set the lasting stamp of his individuality.

His purpose flamed in his eyes and its light was so great that the horse read, and, reading, set his ears forward and screamed--not so much a scream of anger as of wondering terror. For the beast caught the significance of that splendid determination which made for conquest with a power equal to his own strength, which was making for escape. The telepathic communication from the one to the other was the same force that sends a jungle king into antics at the pleasure of his trainer--the language that transcends species!

The pony's hoofs dug shale once more, and the upraised right arm whipped about the tousled head. The rope swished angrily as it slashed the air. Once it circled--and the Captain jumped, lunging off to the left. Twice it cut its disk--and the stallion's quivering flanks gathered for a second leap. It writhed; it stretched out waveringly, seekingly, feelingly as though uncertain, almost blindly, but swiftly--so swiftly! The loop flattened and spread and undulated, drawing the long stretch of hemp after it teasingly. It stopped, as though suddenly tired. It poised with uncanny deliberation. Then, as gently as a maiden's sigh, it settled--settled--drooped--and the Captain's nose, reaching out for liberty, to be free of this man whose eyes flamed a determination so stanch that it went down to his beast heart, thrust itself plumb through the middle.

The hoarse rip of the hard-twist coming through its hondu, the whistle of breath from the man's tight teeth, the rattle of stone on stone; then the squeal from the stallion as for the first time in his life a bond tightened on him!

He shook his head angrily, and even as he leaped a third time back toward his free hills one forefoot was raised to strike from him the snaring strand. The pawing hoof did not reach its mark, did not find the thin, lithe thing which throttled down on him, for the Captain's momentum carried him to the end of the rope.

They put the strain on the hemp, both going away, those horses. VB struggled with his mount to have him ready for the shock, but before he could bring about a full stop that shock arrived. It seemed as though it would tear the horn from the saddle. The pony, sturdy little beast, was yanked to his knees and swung half about, and VB recovered himself only by grabbing the saddle fork.

The black stallion again faced the man--faced him because his heels had been cracked in a semicircle through the air by the force of that burning thing about his neck. For ten long seconds the Captain stood braced against the rope, moving his head slowly from side to side for all the world as a refractory, gentled colt might do, with as much display of fight as would be shown by a mule that dissented at the idea of being led across a ditch. He just stood there stupidly, twisting his head.

The thick mane rumpled up under the tightening rope, some of the drenched hair of the neck was pulled out as the hemp rolled upward, drawing closer, shutting down and down. The depression in the flesh grew deeper. One hind foot lost its hold in the shale and shot out; the Captain lifted it and moved it forward again slowly, cautiously, for fresh, steady straining.

Then it came. The windpipe closed; he coughed, and like the sudden fury of a mountain thunderstorm the Captain turned loose his giant forces. The thing had jerked him back in his