He resumed his watch at the little hole that he had drilled beside the weight-bowed jamb of the door in the earth front of their refuge. She sat silent in her dark corner across from him, only now and then shaking her glove at the horses when one of them pricked up his ears and shewed a desire to dodge out into the sunlight and pleasant grazing spread on the hillside.
It was cold and moldy in the dugout, and the timbers across the roof were bent under the weight of the earth. It looked unsafe, but there was only one place in it that a bullet could come through, and that was the open door. There was no way to shut that; the original battens of the homesteader lay under foot, broken apart and rotting.
“Well, it beats me!” said he, his eye to the peephole in the wall.
“If I’d keep one of the horses on this side it wouldn’t crowd your corner so,” she suggested.
“It would be better, only they’ll cut loose at anything that passes the door. They’ll show their hand before long.” He enlarged the hole to admit his 217 rifle barrel. She watched him in silence. Which was just as well, for she had no words to express her admiration for his steadiness and courage under the trying pressure of that situation. Her confidence in him was so entire that she had no fear; it did not admit a question of their safe deliverance. With him at her side, this dangerous, grave matter seemed but a passing perplexity. She left it to him with the confidence and up-looking trust of a child.
While she understood the peril of their situation, fear, doubt, had no place in her mind. She was under the protection of Alan Macdonald, the infallible.
No matter what others may think of a man’s infallibility, it is only a dangerous one who considers himself endowed with that more than human attribute. Macdonald did not share her case of mind as he stood with his eye to the squint-hole that he had bored beside the rotting jamb.
“How did you find her? where was she?” she asked, her thoughts more on the marvel of Nola’s return than her own present danger.
“I lost Thorn’s trail that first day,” he returned, “and then things began to get so hot for us up the valley that I had to drop the search and get those people back to safety ahead of Chadron’s raid. Yesterday afternoon we caught a man trying to get through our lines and down into the valley. He was a half-breed trapper who lives up in the foothills, carrying a note down to Chadron. I’ve got that curious piece of writing around me somewhere—you 218 can read it when this blows by. Anyway, it was from Thorn, demanding ten thousand dollars in gold. He wanted it sent back by the messenger, and he prescribed some picturesque penalties in case of failure on Chadron’s part.”
“And then you found her?”