CHAPTER XV
CHECKMATED
For a minute or two Dorothy struggled to free herself from her burly captor, but it was the struggle of the gazelle with the tiger, and the tiger prevailed. He laughed brutally, and put his knee upon her chest.
Even then she managed to slide her hand down to her side, where, after the manner of most people in that land, she carried a sheath-knife. This she succeeded in drawing, but the half-breed saw the gleam of the steel and caught her wrist with his vice-like fingers.
"Ho, Leon!" he yelled; "coom quick, and bring ze rope!"
It was a wonderful change that had come over the cross-eyed one. A few minutes before and he had been an abject coward; now he was the blustering bully and villain, with his worst passions roused, and ready to take any risks to gratify his thirst for revenge.
As for Dorothy, she saw the futility of struggling, and lay still. What could have happened to her father and Jacques that they did not come up? Surely they must be near at hand. Was God going to allow these men, whose lives she and her father had spared, to prevail? She did not doubt that they meant to put her cruelly to death. She breathed a prayer for Divine aid, and had a strange presentiment that she was to be helped in some mysterious way.
In a minute or two Leon was also upon the roof. In his hand he held some strips of undressed buck-skin and a jack-knife. He seemed to have forgotten all about his late peril in the paramount question of how they were to revenge themselves upon the girl who a short time before had outwitted them. The cross-eyed one hated her because she had rapped him over the knuckles and given him a bad five minutes when she had possession of the gun. Leon was furious because she had brought about his introduction to Bruin so cleverly, and given him beyond doubt the worst ten minutes he ever had in his life. Like most gentlemen of their stamp, they quite lost sight of the fact that they themselves had been the aggressors, and that, had it not been for the girl's goodness of heart, they would in all probability have both been killed.
Perhaps the strangest feature of the situation to Dorothy was that Leon did not seem to resent his worthy mate's late secession from the path of loyalty, or, to put it more plainly, his cold-bloodedness in laying him the odds in favour of the bear. Probably they knew each other so well and were so accustomed to be kicked when down that Leon took the affair as a matter of course. Dorothy rightly concluded, however, that this seeming indifference was merely the outcome of the cunning half-breed nature, which never forgot an insult and never repaid it until the handle end of the whip was assured.
The first thing that the two villains proceeded to do was to tie Dorothy's hands, not too closely, however, behind her back. It was useless to attempt resistance, as they were both powerful men, and they would only have dealt with her more roughly had she done so. Then the cross-eyed one proposed that they should take her into the empty hut and tie her up. If they succeeded in getting another rifle, as they expected they would, they could wait inside and shoot the rancher and Jacques as they unsuspiciously approached with the horses. Bastien Lagrange could then be easily disposed of. It would be necessary to put something in the girl's mouth—Leon suggested his old woollen head-gear which the bear had chewed up—until her friends were ambushed, as otherwise she might give the alarm. Afterwards they could dispose of her at their sweet leisure. This and more they discussed with such candour and unreserve that had only the occasion and necessity been different, the greatest credit would have been reflected on them.
"Oh, you fiends!" cried the girl as the horror of the situation dawned upon her. "Would you murder the men in cold blood who spared your lives when they had every right to take them? You cowards! Why don't you shoot me? Do you think I am afraid of being shot?"
It was all like some horrible nightmare to her just then. Brief time seemed such an eternity that she longed for it to come to an end. She felt like one who, dreaming, knows she dreams and struggles to awake.
The cross-eyed one was evidently delighted to see that he had at length aroused this hitherto wonderfully self-possessed girl to such a display of emotion; she looked ever so much handsomer now that she was angry. His watery, awry eyes gleamed, and his thick underlip drooped complacently. He would see if she had as much grit as she laid claim to. It was all in the day's sport; but he would have to hurry up.
He seized the Winchester, and, holding it in front of him, jerked down the lever as he had seen Dorothy do, so as to eject the old and put a fresh cartridge into the breech. But the old cartridge, in springing out, flew up and hit him such a smart rap between the eyes that Leon at once seized his little opportunity and laughed ironically.
"Good shot, Lucien!" he cried. "Encore, mon ami!"
Lucien's eyes were watering and smarting, and he felt quite like shooting his sympathetic friend on the spot, but he kept his wrath bravely under, and resolved to show Leon in a very practical fashion how he could shoot on the first auspicious occasion. Yes, such a blessed opportunity would be worth waiting and suffering for.
And now they prepared to remove Dorothy from the roof, and take her inside the hut. Leon was to descend first, and then Lucien was to make her jump into the snowdrift, where she would stick, and Leon would be waiting for her.
Poor Dorothy knew that if help did not come speedily she would be undone. She prayed for Divine aid. She could not believe that God would look down from Heaven and see these fiends prevail. God's ways, she was aware, were sometimes inscrutable, and seemed to fall short of justice, but she knew that sooner or later they invariably worked out retributive justice more terrible than man's. This was to be made plain to her sooner than she imagined, and unexpectedly, as God's ways occasionally are.
Leon descended, and his comrade, with an evil light in his eyes and an oath on his lips, came towards Dorothy to force her to jump on to the snowdrift; but villain number two stopped him.
"Ze gun, Lucien," he said, "hand me ze gun first time."
The half-breed grasped the Winchester by the barrel and handed it down to his comrade, but as he did so he was unaware of the fact that the lever, in pumping up a fresh cartridge, had also put the weapon on full cock. Leon, in grasping it, did so clumsily, and inadvertently touched the trigger. In an instant the death-fire spurted from the muzzle, and Lucien fell forward with a bullet through his brain.
Not always slow are the ways of Him Who said, "Vengeance is Mine."
The girl sank back in horror at the sight. To see a man sent to his account red-handed is a terrible thing.
The fatal shot was still ringing in her ears when another sound broke in upon the reverberating air. It was the muffled drumming of hoofs and the hurried exclamations of voices which she recognised. It was her father and the others returning with the horses. She staggered to her feet again as best she could, for her hands, being tied behind her back, made rising a difficult matter. She must have presented a strange sight to the party, bound as she was, and with her long hair streaming behind her. She heard her father's cry of apprehension, and the next moment she caught sight of the remaining rebel scuttling like a startled iguana towards the dense plantation, where it would have been quite possible for him to have eluded pursuit. But before he reached it there was a sharp ping. He threw up his hands and fell dead on his face. Douglas had made sure of him.
"It's all right, dad, and I'm not hurt," said the girl reassuringly, as her father ran towards her with a look of anguish on his face. "You just came in the nick of time; they were going to ambush you. Don't let the horses go too near the corral, as they will be stampeded again. A dead bear is lying there."
In a few minutes she had told her father what had occurred, and he had explained the delay. It had been as the two rebels had said. The horses had gone off the trail into a deep snowdrift, and it had required a great deal of hard work to get them out. They had not heard the shot which Dorothy had fired at the bear, for the very sufficient reason that two bluffs intervened, and the fairly strong chinook wind carried away all sound. They had not thought there was any reason to be apprehensive about her, but they had worked toilsomely to get back. Bastien had proved a pleasant surprise in this respect—he had, doubtless, by no means incorrect views regarding Riel's powers of pursuit and revenge. That the two rebels should have come back, and that a bear—a sure harbinger of spring—should have made itself so intrusive were contingencies the party could hardly have foreseen. As it was, Dorothy, save for the fright, was little the worse for the rough handling she had received, so they resolved to proceed on their way in about an hour's time, when certain necessary duties had been fulfilled.
Before the ruddy sun began to go down behind the pine-crested bluffs and far-stretching sea of white-robed prairie in a fairy cloudland of crimson and gold and keenest blue, the horses were hitched up into the sleighs, and the fugitives were bowling merrily up the valley so as to strike the main trail before nightfall.