Soon after he found himself in pleasant quarters, and his wounds were skilfully dressed by the fair hands of the good Samaritan who once more appeared in her character of Bonnie Belle.
When Ruth had seen Surgeon Powell in comfortable quarters at the Frying Pan, she mounted her horse and rode alone out of Pocket City.
There were few miners abroad at that hour, and if any one saw her at all they supposed in the darkness that she was a man.
Even had they known it to be Bonnie Belle she would have gone unquestioned as to the cause of her late ride, no matter how much any one would have wondered as to the reason.
She rode directly toward Hangman’s Gulch, and that was a sure sign that she would meet no one on that trail, which the bravest of the miners would not travel by night.
And yet there in that weird spot, among the graves of a score of victims of border justice or injustice, as the case might be, with the gallows rising above him, stood a man then under sentence of death to die by hanging; a man who could count his victims by the score, a man revengeful, merciless, and wicked far beyond his kind.
It was Arden Leigh, known on the frontier as Silk Lasso Sam, and if the spot had haunting memories for him he did not reveal the fact by word or deed.
He uttered an impatient oath now and then, as time passed and he did not hear his sister returning, and at last, losing his patience as time stole on, he was moving down toward the mouth of the gulch, when his ears caught the clatter of hoof-falls.
“She is coming,” he muttered.
Then, as he darted back into the shadow, he drew a revolver and said: