“I mean—are you?”
“At your service, Miss Lee.”
She had heard for years of this lieutenant of rangers, who was the terror of all Arizona “bad men.” Her father, Jack Flatray, the range riders whom she knew—game men all—hailed Bucky O’Connor as a wonder. For coolness under fire, for acumen, for sheer, unflawed nerve, and for his skill in that deadly game he played of hunting down desperadoes, they called him chief ungrudgingly. He was a daredevil, who had taken his life in his hands a hundred times. Yet always he came through smiling, and brought back with him the man he went after. The whisper ran that he bore a charmed life, so many had been his hairbreadth escapes.
“Come in,” the girl invited. “Father said, if you came, I was to keep you here until he got back or sent a messenger for you. He’s hunting for the criminals in the Roaring Fork country. Of course, he didn’t know when you would get here. At the time he left we hadn’t been able to catch you on the wire. I signed Mr. Flatray’s name at his suggestion, because he was in correspondence with you once about the Roaring Fork outlaws. He is out in the hills, too. He started half an hour after the kidnappers. But he isn’t armed. I’m troubled about him.”
Again the young man’s white-toothed smile flashed. “You’d better be. Anybody that goes 220 hunting Black MacQueen unarmed ought to be right well insured.”
She nodded, a shadow in her eyes. “Yes—but he would go. He doesn’t mean them to see him, if he can help it.”
“Black sees a heap he isn’t expected to see. He has got eyes all over the hills, and they see by night as well as by day.”
“Yes—I know he has spies everywhere; and he has the hill people terrorized, they say. You think this is his work?”
“It’s a big thing—the kind of job he likes to tackle. Who else would dare do such a thing?”