“Do you feel strong—strong enough to ride fast?” he asked. “There's only one man with me, and there are five of them. It's murder to let him fight it alone!”
“Yes—yes—” whispered the girl, her arms tightening round him. “Ride fast—or put me off. I can follow—”
It was the first time that he had heard her voice since that last evening up at Lac Bain, many months before, and the sound of it thrilled him.
“Hold tight!” he breathed.
Like the wind they swept across the prairie and up the slope of the hill. At the top Philip reined in. Three or four hundred yards distant lay a thick clump of poplar trees and a thousand yards beyond that the first black escarpments of the Bad Lands. In the space between a horseman was galloping fiercely to the west. It was not Billinger. With a quick movement Philip slipped the girl to the ground, and when she sprang a step back, looking up at him in white terror, he had whipped out one of his big service revolvers.
“There's a little lake over there among those trees,” he said. “Wait there—until I come back!”
He raced down the slope—not to cut off the flying horseman—but toward the clump of poplars. It was Billinger he was thinking of now. The agent had fired three shots. There had followed other shots, not Billinger's, and after that his carbine had remained silent. Billinger was among the poplars. He was hurt or dead.
A well-worn trail, beaten down by transient rangerss big revolver showing over his horse's ears. A hundred paces and the timber gave place to a sandy dip, in the center of which was the water hole. The dip was not more than an acre in extent. Up to his knees in the hole was Billinger's riderless horse, and a little way up the sand was Billinger, doubled over on his hands and knees beside two black objects that Philip knew were men, stretched out like the dead back at the wreck. Billinger's yellow-mustached face, pallid and twisted with pain, looked over them as Philip galloped across the open and sprang out of his saddle. With a terrible grimace he raised himself to his knees, anticipating the question on Philip's lips.
“Nothing very bad, Steele,” he said. “One of the cusses pinked me through the leg, and broke it, I guess. Painful, but not killing. Now look at that!”
He nodded to the two men lying with their faces turned up to the hot glare of the sun. One glance was enough to tell Philip that they were dead, and that it was not Billinger who had killed them. Their bearded faces had stiffened in the first agonies of death. Their breasts were soaked with blood and their arms had been drawn down close to their sides. As he looked the gleam of a metal buckle on the belt of the dead man nearest him, caught Philip's eye. He took a step nearer to examine it and then drew back. This bit of metal told the story—it bore the letters R.N.W.M.P.