Frank Mayer

“ That night when Douglass returned, he bore in his arms a tiny antelope kid which he laughingly entrusted to her tender mercies. In his ride over the range he had come upon one of the pitiful little tragedies common to the great Outdoors with its unending struggle of the weak against the strong and merciless. In a little hollow of the foothills its mother, hamstrung by a pair of wolves and exhausted by her gallant fight against the inevitable, was making a last frantic effort to defend her offspring cowering between her feet. ”

“ Again and again as the stricken giant reeled tottering about, came that snake-like glide and merciless thrust until finally, his veins drained of their vital flood, Coogan fell on his face in the crimsoned snow.
And then above the rush of hurrying feet, above the cries of blasphemous wonder and alarm as the Palace vomited out its raucous filth, there arose a cackling horror that Douglass would never forget as long as he lived, the vacuous gibbering of Dolores Ysobel de Tejada, kissing her blood-stained cuchilla and screaming weird endearments to two dead men in Jalisco. ”

“ There were few, even in this land of reckless men, who cared to arouse the slumbering devil under the quiet demeanor of this gray-eyed range rider who killed first and argued afterward.
From the pinnacle of a great faith in his kind he had been hurled headlong to the depths of unbelief and suspicion. He had seen Loyalty mocked and betrayed; starving Intelligence bought with a price by crime-opulent Ignorance; naked Virtue crouched shivering in the shadow of exalted, ermined Vice; the sots and trulls of bestial Sensuality deified and worshiped in the public places. ”

“ With the single exception of Red, who loyally worshiped at the shrine of his first-loved divinity, every man for miles around did open and unblushing homage to the bewitching goddess, who found in their frank adoration a charm and satisfaction unknown to her previous inane piracies on the placid shallows of the social millpond. Out here on the high seas of unshackled independence, where every man was a viking in his own right and cruised with unbridled license through the deeps of his own will, each conquest was a victory to be written large on the tablet of her vanity. ”

“ Punk sighed dolorously and rested his head on his bowed arms. Then he raised it again and with a comical imitation of Douglass's abstraction looked into vacancy. Holy was gurgling ecstatically, his delight finding vent in a yell of irrepressible joy as Punk fumbled twistingly with his bare upper lip in emulation of Douglass's impatient twirls of his mustache.
His wandering thoughts recalled by that raucous guffaw, Douglass glared with cold disfavor at the twain, somehow realizing that he was more or less concerned in their horse-play. "What's the matter with you damn fools?" ”

“ In the distance the Shoubrah palaces gleamed even more fairy-like than usual; the Abbasieyeh camps were astir with multi-hued life, and on its frowning rock the distant citadel was a gem in red bronze.
On the bosom of the world's most mysterious river, the brown sails were gleaming like the wings of great birds, and inshore the graceful lateens under the dipping shadoofs were closely folded as they lay at rest. Over beyond Ghizeh loomed the Pyramids which she was to visit on the morrow, the Sphinx in its majesty between. ”

“ She was generous in her estimation of their worth and strove to enthuse over their many excellences, but to her irritation, suddenly realized that she was weighing them all against a gray-eyed man in a fire-rent shirt, with smoke-grimed face and singed hair.
She turned uneasily in her hammock, catching through the wistaria a glimpse of the open door of the dimly-lit bunkhouse. She could see the intermittent glow of Red's cigarette, and the glisten of the polished steel in the holster, hung carelessly on his bed-post. ”

“ So wise a man as Solomon declared, centuries ago, that the way of a man with a maid was beyond even his great understanding; but the composite intelligence of all the wise men that ever were or ever will be created cannot elucidate the greater mystery of the ways of a maid with a man. By all accepted rules and conventions, Miss Carter should have ostentatiously wiped her arms with a lace handkerchief, extravagantly casting it aside later with an air of loathing and disgust, and stalked out of the room with superior dignity without deigning him even a contemptuous glance. ”

“ It would be passing sweet to have that helpless, sightless thing listen unseeingly to his maltreatment of the woman.
At that moment his horse, which had been picketed some distance away in the brush, discovered the presence of the two horses in the glade and gave a loud whinny of salutation. Douglass was on his feet in a second, his hand upon his revolver butt. The presence of another horse in that cañon was a suspicious thing and as he inclined his head toward the direction from which the whinny had come, his sharp eye discerned the gleam in the clematis. ”

“ As Coogan hopped about with muttered oaths, trying to secure an effectual footing, a dark, slender figure seemed to rise out of the ground at his side. Douglass caught the blue gleam of polished steel in the moonlight just above Coogan's neck, heard the soft thud of a well-driven blow; he gave a great cry of warning but it fell upon unheeding ears. The man, releasing his hold upon the horse, staggered blindly about, thrusting savagely at random, a queer bubbling cry welling from his lips. ”

“ Through its folds the rise and fall of her bosom were distinctly perceptible. He whirled his horse with a deep-chested oath and rode unseen to the stables. Taking something from his saddle-roll, he tiptoed back to the veranda and without once looking at the sleeping girl laid it on the open novel.
Waking an hour later, she chanced to look casually at the tabour. With a little cry of pleasure she picked up the heart-shaped bit of moist moss with its embedded cluster of mountain heart's-ease and her eyes were very soft as she laid it to her lips. ”

“ It is singular upon what strange things the pivot of fate and fortune turns. Had he been ordinarily economical of that fuse these annals would end grewsomely with this chapter. For, as he lighted the fuse and walked leisurely out of the short tunnel, directing his steps toward a sheltering abutment of the ledge which assured protection from the flying fragments loosened by the explosion of the heavy charge, Grace Carter slowly sauntered into view on the other side of the tunnel mouth, her hands full of some mountain blooms which she had gathered on the opposite slope of the ridge. ”

“ I realize now that it was impossible for me to have ever entered into the holy of holies; and yet, dear, can you blame me for hoping?
"I know now that I could never have entered fully into your life; the clay of my being leans too awry for that. But am I to blame for the shaking of the Potter's hand? I sought with all the assiduity of a weak woman's love, but there was a door to which I never found the key, a veil behind which I could not peer. ”

“ He was not one moment too soon, for as his arm encircled Constance's waist, her horse went floundering down to a broken neck on the rocks thirty feet below. Even then for a few moments the issue was in doubt; Mrs. Brevoort was an exceedingly well-nurtured young woman, and one hundred and forty pounds of limp humanity is difficult to sustain with one arm while on the back of a horse struggling to retain his footing on the treacherous edge of a loose-earth precipice. But that arm had the strength of a steel bar, and its possessor was the best horseman in a land where all men rode for a living. ”

“ The meadows, lush with the largess of the melting snow fields above, resounded to the liquid gurgling of myriads of red and yellow-shouldered blackbirds wheeling and swinging over them in clouds of parti-colored animation; the streams, no longer mere empty stretches of thirsty sand and dry white bowlders, were roaring the lusty pean of well-filled bellies and over-flushed veins. Far and near the land was dotted with slowly-moving cattle, nipping gratefully at the succulent grass tips, their formerly lank and rough-haired flanks distended with the young year's generous bounty. ”

“ Outside somewhere a raven, scavengering indolently about the corrals, croaked gutturally; never again as long as she lived would Grace Carter hear without shuddering the uncanny dissonance of that foul bird. In the silence of that suddenly oppressive room the ticking of the little cheap alarm clock on the mantel beat upon her brain like the strokes of a drum, seeming to her disordered mind to say "Kill-Ken!—Kill-Ken!" ”

“ Even through the murk of the gathering night the clenched hands and swelling neck cords were visible to that sharp eye.
"Haow d'yuh like to be Matlock?"
A match snapped sharply as some inveterate smoker kindled his cigarette. A man sat bolt upright in his blankets and Hungry swore angrily. The camp sank to rest but not exactly to sleep, as the occasional clearing of a throat evinced. Eventually, when the fire had sunk to a heap of smouldering coals, tired nature asserted itself and the men slept.
To Douglass alone came neither sleep nor rest. ”

“ The men, as much from preference as from necessity, spread their blankets under the open sky.
The sportsman's instinct was strong in Brevoort, so he and Douglass went out with their rifles, returning in less than an hour with a splendid buck deer and a dozen grouse. The little stream had also yielded up to Carter, who was an expert fly-fisherman, some two-score delicious trout, and the resulting meal was one fit for the gods. All cowboys are from necessity good cooks, and the fluffy, golden brown biscuits and fragrant coffee of Red's making were unexceptionable. ”

“ Robert Carter was far too astute a politician to openly offer any opposition to her daughter's devotion for Douglass, though fully determined to unravel what she deemed a preposterous and altogether undesirable entanglement.
Having herself fought the hard fight against the ogres of Poverty and Adversity, she had no foolish illusions in the premises, and had long ago resolved that her daughter should be spared the grim heartaches that even love cannot wholly bar from the proverbial cottage. ”

“ Now the world always accepts a man at his own valuation in absence of evidence to the contrary, and he had vindicated his position so far as his range work went; he was concededly the best rider, roper, pistol shot and poker player in his circumscribed little world, and had, besides, the enviable reputation of never "falling down" in anything he essayed. In the flush of his present successes he entirely overlooked his previous grievous failures, as is man's wont the world over; the world was his own succulent oyster, and he, himself, the proper blade for its opening. ”

“ For the first time he was resenting morosely the necessity of preparing his own supper at the end of his journey, and he was nowise gentle in the roping of a fresh mount for the morrow's work on his arrival at the outlying camp, where he ate perfunctorily and without gust; despite his harsh fatigue a great restlessness sent him wide, with pipe in mouth, into the stellar splendor that beatifies every clear Colorado night.
The thin, pure air was surcharged with ozone and delicately perfumed with the aroma of the lemonia crushing beneath his feet. ”

“ The wolf of twenty centuries hence will be fully the equal of the wolf of to-day. And why? Because of the virtue of perfect natural selection—the fittest to the fittest, without the let and hindrance of sickly sentimentality, the unnatural joining by Man-god made crimes of the unfit to the fit. Wolves breed wolves, with full powers of the highest enjoyment of Life and Love. Humanity begets weaklings, cowards, driveling idiots whose highest evolution is that shapeless thing called Hope, whose greatest virtue is submission to the anomalies of civilization. ”

“ For the last twenty-four hours had he been in momentary expectation of that sinister song, of a possible succeeding agony of blindness, for he realized that he was now in the hands of the gods, and more or less at the mercy of the desperate man whom he had been relentlessly pursuing for the last three days, a man who would just as relentlessly kill him if the opportunity offered, a man who knew every inch of these mountain fastnesses in which he had taken refuge in his last extremity. ”

“ In the apparent vacancy of that soft-swelling knoll to the west looms up the phantom bulk of an antelope, disproportionately large and deceptively black against the sun. A dun-colored heap of trash at the foot of a sagebrush in the bight of the dry creek-bed below resolves itself into a very live-looking coyote which blinks yearningly at the unattainable venison on the knoll above, wistfully licks his chops and slinks evilly in the wake of the grouse broods. ”

“ Out of the dust blur, an animated lead-blue bullet, shot the great stallion, his head held low, his body extended until his stomach brushed the sagebrush beneath. The roan, taking the bit between his teeth, turned as on a pivot, almost unseating his rider, and raced undirected towards the exact point where the escaping animal could be best intercepted, intent only on the well-understood work which was logically his duty. ”