Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words, and his association with them, seemed to convict him there in the silence of that black-walled court of night.
It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his associates by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree the blame, even passive knowledge of the intent, of that base offense.
At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together, she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses. They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.
She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.
The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate by and by on Frances’ arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow of her life.
Frances cheered her as much as might be with promises of the coming day. At the first streak of dawn, she told Mrs. Chadron, she would ride to the post and engage her father in the quest for the stolen girl. Soldiers would be thrown out over the country for miles on every side; the cowards would be hemmed in within a matter of hours, and Nola would be at home, laughing over the experiences of her tragic night.
Frances was in the saddle at daybreak. She had left Mrs. Chadron in an uneasy sleep, watched over by Maggie. Banjo had not returned; no word had reached them from any source. Alvino let Frances out through the gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the abductor’s trail as 169 far as possible without being led into strange country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pass that way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there.
The tracks of the raider’s horse were deep in the soft soil. She followed them as they cut across the open toward the river road, angling northward. At a place where the horse had stopped and made a trampling in the lose earth—testimony of the fight that Nola had made to get away—Frances started at the sight of something caught on a clump of bull-berry bushes close at hand. She drew near the object cautiously, leaning and looking in the half light of early morning. Presently assured, she reached out and picked it up, and rode on with it in her hand.
Presently the trail merged into the river road, where hoofprints were so numerous that Frances was not skilful enough to follow it farther. But it was something to have established that the scoundrel was heading for the homesteaders’ settlement, and that he had taken the road openly, as if he had nothing to fear. Also, that bit of evidence picked from the bushes might serve its purpose in the right time and place.