The Argosy, Vol. 75, No. 4 — page 129: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MESQUITE RANCH. weapon hit the trail and bounded off into the chasm. “Move on! Step lively!” rang down the trail in a woman’s voice. The man, who knew the futility of disobedience, paused just for a per- ceptible instant as he heard the words. Natalie almost laughed aloud. ‘There was something delightfully funny to her in the contrast between the sur- roundings and those in which the words she had used had gained their immortality. Thousands of miles stretched be- tween her and the New York subway; but the guards who hounded the pas- sengers with their admonition never used it more frequently or to more ad- vantage than Natalie now employed it. If the two men ahead showed signs of lagging she called it. Ifa suspicion that they contemplated revolt came, she hurled it at them. With her two companions marching with guns aimed, she nagged and urged and bullied Gill and the stranger. It must have been maddening to her victims. Neither of them dared look back. A bullet warned them. Both believed that Radford was one of the men with her. Once they essayed escape when they came to the place in the trail where they had come into it from their wanderings about in search of Radford. If the rift in the perpendicular wall had been a sudden one, into which they might have dodged and taken their part in preventing the pursuers such uncontested privileges, it would have served them. But a gradual, smooth - faced ap- proach was made, which afforded them no shelter, and the ladderlike trail which they must have taken went up the face of a cliff that cornered the approach without affording a crevice in which to hide. All day they marched ahead with the guns trained on them. All day Na- talie worried to find an explanation for the stranger’s familiarity. Neither of the two parties stopped to eat. Cold 831 biscuits sustained the pursuers; but the pursued were.not permitted the free- dom of their pockets, even if they had anything stowed there for food. Naturally, night was the thing hoped for by the two men who trudged grim- ly on. Natalie and her companions discussed what they should do. The sky had been as clear as a bell all day; but toward evening heavy thunder- heads piled their mountainlike masses on the peaks of the mountains below. There would be no stars. . The moon came late and might be obscured when it did appear. The two men were becoming a burden. Natalie wanted to get on to where this rugged trail led. With the faith that removes mountains of uncertainty, doubt, and undermines the impossible till it shows its unsubstantiality, she looked for- ward to meeting Radford at the end of the trail. 3 She hoped the men would escape, if only they would not retaliate for the treatment they had received by ma- king her own advance more difficult. Suddenly the vast stillness, which had been broken only by the bark of the guns when the two men had seemed to need warning, was shattered into a thousand noisy echoes. A man, shout- ing at the top of a pair of vigorous lungs, raised the hullabaloo that the rocks turned to din. “We've got him! We've got him!” he yelled. Both groups on the trail stopped short. Natalie’s heart leaped in her throat, her mouth became parched and dry; she scarcely breathed, while all her mind and soul seemed to concen- trate on the words. “Got who?” Gill howled with a kind of indignation that needed action for its full relief. “Got who, you eedjit? Got nothin’! Ye ain’t got a lick uv sense nur nothin’ else! Come howlin’ up hyah that ye got some- buddy that’s bin a chasin’ us with guns fur a whole day! Ye make me sick! ”’ All of the ranchman’s rebellion at the strain he had endured as the sharer Gomichbooks (EO)