The Ranchman

by Charles Alden Seltzer

Carrington laughed lowly. “We didn’t need her, anyway,” he said, and the other laughed with him.

The laugh restored Carrington’s good-nature, and he left the man and went into the front room of the house. Had he paused on the porch to listen, or had he glanced toward the big slope that dropped to the basin, he would not have entered the house just then. And he would have paused on the porch had it not been that the intensity of his desires drove him to concentrate all his senses upon Marion.

He crossed the porch and entered the room, and then halted, staring downward with startled eyes at the body of the guard huddled on the floor, a thin stream of blood staining the carpet beneath his head.

Cursing, Carrington stepped into the other room—the room in which he had fought with Taylor—the room in which he had left Marion Harlan bound and sitting on a chair. The lamp on the shelf was still burning, and in its light Carrington saw the rope he had used to bind the girl’s hands.

A bitter rage seized him as he looked at the rope, and he threw it from him, cursing. In an instant he was outside the house and had leaped upon his horse. He headed the animal toward the long slope leading to the Arrow trail, for he suspected the girl would go straight back there, despite any conviction she might have of Taylor’s guilt—for there she would find Parsons, who would give her what comfort he could. Or she might stop at the Mullarky cabin. Certainly she would not go to Dawes, for she must know that he ruled Dawes—Parsons must have told her that—and that if she went to Dawes, she would be merely postponing her surrender to him.

He had plenty of time, even if she were in Dawes, he meditated as he sent his horse over the crest of the slope, for there were no trains out of the town during the night, and if she were not at the Arrow or Mullarky’s, he was sure to catch her later.

He was half-way down the slope, his horse making slow work of threading its way through the gnarled chaparral growth, when, looking downward, he saw another horse leaping up the slope toward him.

In the glare of the moon that was behind Carrington, he could see horse and rider distinctly, and he jerked his own horse to a halt, cursing horribly. For the horse that was leaping toward him like a black demon out of the night was Spotted Tail. And Spotted Tail’s rider was Taylor. Carrington could see the man’s face, with the terrible passion that distorted it, and Carrington wheeled his horse, making frenzied efforts to escape up the slope.

Carrington was not more than a hundred feet from the big black horse and its indomitable rider when he wheeled his own animal, and he had not traveled more than a few feet when he realized that Spotted Tail was gaining rapidly.

Cursing again, though his face was ghastly with the fear that had seized him, Carrington slipped from his horse, and, running around so that the animal was between him and Taylor, he drew a heavy pistol from a hip-pocket. And when the oncoming horse and rider were within twenty-five or thirty feet of him, Carrington took deliberate aim and fired.