It had been Patty's intention to ride back to her cabin in the evening, but Mrs. Samuelson would not hear of it. And, indeed the girl did not insist, for despite the fact that she had become thoroughly accustomed to her surroundings, the anticipation of a dinner prepared and served by the highly efficient Wong Yie, in the tastefully appointed dining room, with its real silver and china, proved sufficiently attractive to overcome even her impatience to begin the working out of her father's map. And the realization fully justified the anticipation. When the meal was finished the two women had talked the long evening away before the cheerful blaze of the wood fire, and when at last she was shown to her room, the girl retired to luxuriate in a real bed of linen sheets and a box mattress.
CHAPTER XV
THE HORSE RAID
Patty did not know how long she had slept when she awoke, tense and listening, sitting bolt upright in bed. Moonlight flooded the room through the windows thrown wide to admit the chill night air. Beyond the valley floor, green with the luxuriant second crop of alfalfa, she could see the mountains looming dim and mysterious in the half-light.
The whole world seemed silent as the grave—and yet, something must have awakened her. She shuddered, partly at the chill that struck at her thinly clad shoulders, and partly at the recollection of some of the scenes those selfsame mountains had witnessed, during the uprisings, and which her hostess had so vividly recounted. The girl smiled, and gazing toward the mountains, pictured long lines of naked horsemen stealing silently into the valley. She started violently. Through the open window came sounds, the muffled thud of hoofs upon the soft ground, the low rattle of bit-chains and spur-rowels, and the creak of saddle leather. There were horsemen in the valley, and the horsemen were passing almost beneath her windows—and they were moving stealthily.
For a moment her heart raced madly—the fancy of those conjured horsemen, and then the mysterious sounds from the night that were not fancy, combined in just the right proportion to overcome her with a momentary terror. She realized that the sounds were passing—growing fainter, and leaping from the bed, rushed to the window and peered out. Only silence—profound, unbroken silence, and the moonlight. In vain she strained her ears to catch a repetition of the faint sounds, and in vain she peered into the dark shadows cast by the bunk house and the pole horse-corral. Her windows commanded the eastern wall of the valley, and its upper reaches. Had there actually been horsemen, or were the sounds part of her vivid vision of the long ago? "No," she muttered, "those sounds were real," and she leaned far out of the window in a vain effort to catch a glimpse of the trail that led down the creek toward Pierce's.
For some time she remained at the window and then, shivering, crept back to bed, where she lay speculating upon the identity of these horsemen who passed in the night. She knew that a horse raid had been expected. Could these raiders have had the audacity to pass through the very dooryard of the ranch, knowing as they must have known, that four armed and determined cowboys occupied the bunk house?
And who were these raiders? At Thompson's she had heard Monk Bethune's name mentioned in connection with possible horse-thieving. Bethune had spoken of hurried trips, "to the northward." She remembered that upon the occasion of their first meeting, she had heard him dickering with Watts for the rent of his horse pasture, and she recollected the incident of the changed name. Then, again, only a few days before, she had parted with him when he struck off the trail to the eastward with the excuse that he was going over onto the east slope on a matter having to do with some horses. Bill had mentioned, in talking to Mrs. Samuelson, that he had been riding through the horses on the east slope. Could it be possible that the suave Bethune was a horse-thief? On the other hand, Bethune had openly hinted that Vil Holland was a horse-thief—and yet, these other people all believed that he was persistently on the trail of the horse-thieves.