The Cross Pull/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
The man had slipped to the cabin, his feet making no sound on the soft pine-straw carpet and leaf mold on the slope. The door stood open and he peered inside. The last rays of the dying fire threw a fitful illumination across the bunk where the girl lay rolled in her blanket. She was alone and he stepped inside.
At the first footfall she opened her eyes, thinking that for some reason Moran had come to waken her. It might be that Dad Kinney had come at last.
Then she saw that it was neither of these. The man wore western apparel which was so new as to seem out of place. The broad brim of his hat was stiff and straight, announcing only a few days of wear. Unversed as she was in such matters she still knew that this was an eastern man garbed out in new regalia which he deemed suitable for the west. The hat shaded his face but his presence in the cabin was like a contagion of evil and she knew him—and screamed.
“Clark! she cried. “Clark Moran! Flash! Flash!” Then he was beside her, sitting on the edge of the bunk and reaching out to take her in his arms.
“Don’t excite yourself, my dear,” he said. “No one can hear you. A long hunt hasended. We’ll have our honeymoon after all; a trifle belated, perhaps, but all the sweeter for that.”
She noted the gun swinging at his hip and feared for Moran should she call again. She braced her hands against his chest. The blanket fell back and the man’s arms gripped her more convulsively.
He sprang suddenly erect, his face paling as a sudden awful cry rang out in the canyon.
At the first note from the girl Moran had leaped from his blankets, snatching his belt from beneath his rolled coat which answered for a pillow. He jerked the heavy automatic from the holster and dropped the belt as he ran. Before the man had recovered from the shock of the lobo howl Moran had him covered from the door.
Dim as the light was Moran still recognized the handsome, dissipated face of Luther Nash. A cold apprehension clutched him—a sudden thought that Nash was at the bottom of this reason why Betty could not give herself to him; that she might have come under his influence as so many others had before. However, when he spoke there was no sign of these thoughts reflected in his voice.
“All right Nash—you can start explaining now,” he said. His tones were flat and even but suddenly the girl knew what he had meant when he had said that if necessary he would keep her as Flash would keep his mate.
Before Nash could reply a gray shape landed on the sill and made one twelve-foot leap straight for his throat. The man shrank back a step, both arms upflung to protect his face. This backward step and the length of the spring caused Flash to fall short and his teeth only tore one leather sleeve. Before he could spring again, even before his feet were on the floor, Moran’s warning command thundered in his ears. There was no mistaking the sincerity of his tone.
“Flash! You, Flash! Down!” he roared. Flash stood bristling in front of Nash, backing from him inch by inch, impelled against his will by the stern insistence of his master’s voice. He knew that Betty was unhurt, that Moran did not wish him to kill this man, yet he knew too that the stranger was an enemy to them all. Then he noticed that Moran’s gun menaced Nash. Moran must intend to kill this man himself. Flash backed close to where the girl sat upright on the bunk, her blanket held close about her. He stood guard there, his hair bristling and his lips drawn back from the dripping fangs. For the first time the girl really knew the absolute savagery that was part of Flash.
Moran spoke again, his voice as flat as before.
“All right, Nash, you can go on now and state your case,” he said.
Nash’s nerves were twitching from the nearness of the beast who seemed eager to try for his throat again but he sensed that he had an implacable judge in Moran and strove for self-control.
“Watch that hound,” he said hoarsely. “I’m on lawful business. She’s mine and I’ve come to take my own.”
“She may have been yours once,” Moran returned. “Whatever she may have been to you is past. Your claim is smashed. She’s mine from now on out.”
The girl knew then that he had spoken the truth when he had held her in his arms and told her that he wanted her regardless of what had gone before, In that instant all reservations were swept aside, and she knew that he could have his way with her no matter where that way led.
“How did you guess that you could find her here?” Moran inquired.
“That article in the papers,” said Nash. “About the girl who turned up in a little town at the foot of the hills and bought a blanket, a few articles of underwear and a walking suit. She caught the Shoshone stage, left it ten miles below the upper ranger station and disappeared. The eastern papers took it up—and I knew it was my charming runaway wife.”
Moran turned and the girl’s white face confirmed the truth of this assertion but her eyes looked unflinchingly into his. It was this name, now hers, that she had so disliked. A wave of nausea swept him at the thought of her being the wife of a beast like Nash.
Nash sought to take advantage of this long look between them and his hand stole nearer to the gun at his hip. Flash tensed his muscles for a spring and his snarl warned Moran. His gun steadied as his eyes came back to Nash.
“Very well, Nash. I’ve heard you out,” he said. “You can be going now.”
“Going! Me?” Nash exclaimed. “Do you mean that you’re going to keep my wife here with you—alone?”
“Just that,” said Moran. “Your ideas of propriety seemed to have undergone a change since last we met. I’ll take charge of your gun and you can start.” He pulled Nash’s gun from its holster and stepped back, He knew that Nash could not have found his way so far into the hills alone. “Who is with you?’ he asked.
“I came alone.” His eyes slipped away from Moran’s as he answered.
“Then you fired that shot I heard this afternoon. I notice considerable elk hair on your clothes. You killed an elk for meat?” Nash nodded assent and Moran flipped out the cylinder of the gun and squinted through the barrel toward the fire, snapped it shut and looked at Nash. “You can trot along back to the man who killed that elk,” he said, motioning to the door.
Nash felt safe since he had been deprived of his gun; more secure than while he had worn it. He shook his finger at Moran.
“I’ll break you for this, Moran,” he threatened. “Don’t you know there is such a thing as law? You can’t come between man and wife.” He turned to the girl. “You think you tricked me. Remember what this means when I go. The pretty little story of this cabin given to the world.” He waited for her answer but it did not come and he turned back to Moran. “A fine case you’ll have. She lied to me—married me to get a few proofs that won’t matter in the end; she left me—walked to the door with her arm around the preacher, damn him, and ran. She came out here to live with you. What do you think the courts will have in store for a pair like you!”
“We’ll take a chance,” said Moran. A load seemed lifted from his heart. She had tricked Nash; by his own admission she had beat him at his own game, whatever that game had been; she had been forced to marry him to gain her purpose, then fled instantly and defeated his. “Nash, there are no courts within a hundred miles,” he said. “Some day, in our good time, we’ll come out and see what those courts have to say. In the meantime if you try just once to enforce your ideas of man-made laws in here I’ll enforce the law of the hills on you. I hope that’s plain; at least it’s final. You can start now.” He strode to the door and stood beside it waiting for Nash to pass. He started to speak but Moran held up his hand, and Nash went out into the night without another word.
Instead of turning up the game trail in the direction from which he had come, Nash turned downstream. He would find Brent camped where the next canyon to the south opened out into the bottoms below the junction of the two small streams. Nash knew of a dozen men within twenty miles who would kill a man for a thousand, or for half of that, with as little concern as most would feel over shooting down a deer. He would start in the morning for the place where these men held out.
Nash never knew that immediately after he left the two in the cabin they saved his life by a narrow margin; as he passed through the door Flash suddenly knew that Moran was allowing this man to escape. Unerringly he knew that this was a grave mistake and he sought to rectify it. He moved stealthily toward the door. If he had gained it Nash would never have reached Brent’s camp that night. Betty saw and understood.
“Flash!” she called. “Flash! Come here!”
For a single second he hesitated and that second gave Moran time to see and he shoved the door shut with his foot as Flash jumped for it.
Moran sat on the bunk beside the girl.
“What was it, Betty?” he asked. “What hold did he have to drive you far enough to marry him?”
“He had wanted me to for years,” she said. “I loathed him. Dad was away. Then he told me that my father had built this cabin over thirty years ago—told me why and showed the proofs; said he would publish them and the officers would be waiting when Dad came home. I lied to him; promised without ever intending to go through with it. I played for time but he said he would turn the proofs over to the law that day unless I complied at once; that he would give them to me if I did.” She produced two papers, yellowed with age, from the crack between the bunk and wall and handed them to Moran.
She watched him anxiously, giving frequent words of explanation as he sat before the fire and studied them.
One was a map without a single word, merely one small sheet covered with queer lines. Moran oriented it and knew it for the stream lines of the Land of Many Rivers. One portion was filled in with a sketch of even the smallest tributary creeks. In that part there was a single square dot and from it’s location Moran knew that indicated the cabin in which he sat.
It had been smuggled inside the prison walls to another man—a boyhood friend less fortunate in his efforts to evade capture than was the man who drew the map. On his release he had found the cabin and found that letter telling where and under what new name to find his friend—the friend who had changed both name and mode of life and whose money had enabled both to break away from the wild outlaw days of youth. A quarter century later Nash had gained knowledge and possession of these documents while settling up this man’s estate.
“I ran away and came out here the minute he handed them to me,” she said. “I wrote to Kinney from the train, telling him to meet me here. I mailed another which will explain everything to my father when he gets home.”
Moran turned to where Flash was sniffing at the door.
“I’m half way tempted to open the door and let him go,” he said. “Nash will never trouble anyone again if Flash gets out of this house tonight.”
The girl shivered slightly.
“Not that way,” she said.
Flash had noted the papers which Moran held and his hope of escape was renewed. He had come to look on all papers as messages for him to carry. True they were both in the cabin and he did not know where this message was to go but that mattered not at all if only it afforded him an opportunity to be free of those four confining walls.
This hope died as Moran tossed both map and letter into the fire. Then Moran crossed to the door, driving a wooden peg behind the bar which wedged it shut.
“Too bad, Flash,” he sympathized. “But Betty is right. Your way is my way—but it’s not the best.”