Chapter XXXI: Betty Makes a Discovery

“To-morrow,” Betty said, and did a little skip-step across the floor to put away the frying-pan she had been washing.

“You have dancing feet,” Hollister told her.

“When I have a dancing heart.”

To the man sitting before the fire she bloomed in that dark cabin like a poppy in the desert. She was a hundred miracles each hour to him. He saw the exquisite mystery of her personality express itself in all she was and did--in the faint crimson just now streaming through her cheeks beneath the warm and tawny skin, in the charmingly shy gesture with which she had accepted his compliment, in the low, vibrant voice that played so wonderfully on his heartstrings. Not often is a sweet and singing soul clothed so exquisitely in a body of grace so young and lissom and vital.

“And that’s whenever there’s an excuse for it,” he said, smiling at her. “But why feature to-morrow? Is it your birthday?”

“We’re going home to-morrow.”

“Are you? I didn’t know.”

He fell silent, looking into the fire. It was not an unexpected announcement. These good days could not go on forever. She had done more for him than any other friend he had ever had. But, of course, life made its claims on her. She had to respond to them. It was a wholly undeserved happiness that she had stayed till he was out of danger and on the road to health. He wanted to tell her how he felt about it, but he would never be able to do that. Inside, he seemed to melt to a river of tears whenever he let himself dwell on her amazing goodness to one who had been dead when first she gave him her little hand and now was alive again.

“Umpha, to-morrow. I’m crazy to see Ruthie, and what the boys are doing on the ranch.”

“I’ve been an awful nuisance,” he admitted.

“Haven’t you?” The little laugh that welled out of her was sweet and mocking. It enveloped him with her gracious and tender young womanhood.

He liked to think that her nursing had pulled him through just as earlier her faith had rekindled in him self-respect and courage. The facts might not quite justify this, but he did not intend to let brutal actualities murder a beautiful dream.

“But you can always point with pride, as the politicians say. I’m a credit to your nursing. Off your hands in ten days.”

“You’re not off my hands yet. You’re going to the Diamond Bar K with us.”

The blood drummed faster through his heart. He felt a stinging of the senses. Was there no end to the goodness of this astonishing and disturbing girl? Must she always be flinging out life lines to him?

“Good of you--awf’ly good of you.” He looked at the fire, not at her. His voice was suspiciously low. “I might have known, knowing you. But I can’t impose myself any longer. I’ll be all right now at the camp.”

“Do you think Dad and I will quit in the middle of a good job? No, sir. We’re going to get credit for finishing it. Lon’s breaking the road with a sled to-day. You’re to go down in it. Dr. Rayburn says he hasn’t time to go up to the camp to look after your bandages. You’ll have to put up with us for a while.”

“I could go to the hotel at Wild Horse,” he suggested.

“You’ve never eaten a meal there. I see that. It’s impossible. No, it’s all settled. You’re coming to the ranch.”

“Of course you know I can’t ... I can’t ... thank you.” His voice shook. This annoyed him. He told himself savagely not to act like a baby.

“Oh, everybody works at the Diamond Bar K,” she said lightly. “Ruthie can’t go to school through the deep snow. You claim to be a college man. We’ll find out whether you can teach the First Reader and two times two.”

He tried to answer in the same spirit. “If you’re going to call every bluff I make, I’ll be more careful. Anyhow, I didn’t study the First Reader at college. Don’t think they teach it at Massachusetts Tech.”

Later in the day he spoke to Reed on the subject. “I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself. I can put up at the Wild Horse House till I’m strong enough to go back to camp.”

Reed had come out of the old-time cattle days when there were always a plate and a bed at the ranch for whoever might want them. He still kept open house.

“Always room for one more, boy. Anyhow, if Betty’s got it fixed up that way in her mind, you’d as well make up yours to do as she says. It’ll be her say-so.” The owner of the Diamond Bar K grinned at him confidentially, as one fellow victim of feminine tyranny to another.

Forbes arrived late in the afternoon and reported heavy roads. He had brought a four-horse team, and it had been all they could do to break through. They had dragged a sled with the body of a wagon on the wide runners.

“Deep drifts below the rim in the cut the other side o’ Round Top. Be all right if the wind don’t blow to-night,” he said.

The wind blew, and was still whistling when it came time to start. But the sun was shining and the sky clear.

Betty was doubtful, on account of the patient.

“If we wrop him up good, he’ll be all right,” Lon said. The big foreman did not want to stay in the hills until the trail he had broken was filled up again with drifts.

“Yes,” agreed Reed.

Tug and Betty were tucked in with warm blankets. Forbes took the reins and drove out of the draw, past the Howard place, and up the steep hill beyond. Betty had seen to it that her patient was wrapped to the nose in an old fur coat of her father. The whipping wind did not distress him.

From the summit they could see the great white wastes, stretching mile on mile. The snow was soft and heavy, and the wind had not drifted it a great deal since Lon had driven through the previous day. But the horses were pulling a load, and soon the sweat stood out on their bodies.

They reached and circled Round Top, passed a treacherous dugway, and moved into the deep drifts below the rim. Betty looked up once and a little shudder ran down her spine. The wind up on the bluff had a clean sweep. Over the edge yawned a great snow comb that might at any moment loosen and come down to bury them in an immense white mausoleum. It might, on the other hand, hang from the rim for months.

Lon cracked his whip close to the ear of the off leader. It might almost have been a signal. From far above came the sound of an answering crack. Reed looked up quickly. The snow comb slid forward, broke, and came tearing down. It gathered momentum in its plunge, roaring down like an express train.

The cowman flung Betty into the bed of the sled and crouched over her as a protection against the white cloud of death rushing at them.

The avalanche swept into the ravine with thunderous noise, a hundred tons of packed snow. The bulk of its weight struck in front of the horses, but the tail of the slide whipped a giant billow upon them and buried team and sled.

Betty fought and scrambled her way out of the snow. From it her father’s head was emerging a few yards away.

“Hurt?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“Jarred up. That’s all. Seen anything of Lon?”

The head and broad shoulders of the foreman pushed up. Lon shook snow out of his hair, eyes, and ears.

The others exchanged bulletins with him. He was, he said, as rampageous as a long-legged hill two-year-old.

“Mr. Hollister!” Betty quavered.

The engineer was nowhere to be seen. They called, and no answer came. Betty’s heart dropped like a plummet. She turned upon her father anguished eyes. They begged him to do something. He noticed that her cheeks were blanched, the color had ebbed from her lips. His daughter’s distress touched him nearly. He could not stand that stricken look.

“I’ll find him,” he promised.

Jammed between two trees, upside down, with one end sticking out of the snow, they found the wagon bed at the bottom of the ravine. Forbes spoke to Reed in a low voice, for his ears alone.

“Not a chance in fifty of findin’ him in all this snow, an’ if we do, he’ll not be alive.”

“Yes,” agreed the ranchman. “If a fellow knew where to look. But no telling where the snow carried him.”

“Might still be under the wagon bed, o’ course.”

“Might be.”

A low groan reached them. They listened. It came again, from under the bed of the wagon apparently.

“He’s alive,” Clint called to Betty.

The drooping little figure crouched in the snow straightened as though an electric current had been shot through it. The girl waded toward them, eager, animate with vigor, pulsing with hope.

“Oh, Dad. Let’s hurry. Let’s get him out.”

Reed rapped the wagon bed with his knuckles. “How about it, Hollister? Hurt much?”

“Knocked out,” a weak voice answered. “Guess I’m all right now. Arm scraped a bit.”

The handle of a shovel stuck out of the snow like a post. Lon worked it loose, tore the lower part free, and brought it to the bed. He began to dig. Reed joined him, using his leather gauntlets as spades. It took nearly half an hour to get Hollister out. He came up smiling.

“Cold berth down there,” he said by way of comment.

“You’re not really hurt, are you?” Betty said.

“Nothing to speak of. The edge of the sled scraped the skin from my arm. Feels a bit fiery. How about the horses?”

Lon and his employer were already at work on them. Three of the animals had pawed and kicked till they were back on their feet. The men helped them back to the road, after unhitching them from the sled. It was necessary to dig the fourth horse out of a deep drift into which it had been flung.

Betty sat beside Hollister in the wagon bed on a pile of salvaged blankets. She felt strangely weak and shaken. It was as though the strength had been drained out of her by the emotional stress through which she had passed. To be flung starkly against the chance, the probability, that Tug was dead had been a terrible experience. The shock had struck her instantly, vitally, with paralyzing force. She leaned against the side of the bed laxly, trying to escape from the harrowing intensity of her feeling. That she could suffer so acutely, so profoundly, was a revelation to her.

What was the meaning of it? Why had the strength and energy ebbed from her body as they do from one desperately wounded? It was disturbing and perplexing. She had not been that way when her father was shot. Could she find the answer to the last question in the way she had put it? Desperately wounded! Had she, until hope flowed back into her heart, been that?

“You’re ill,” she heard a concerned, far-away voice say. “It’s been too much for you.”

She fought against a wave of faintness before she answered. “I suppose so. It’s--silly of me. But I’m all right now.”

“It’s no joke to be buried in an avalanche. Hello! Look there!”

Her gaze followed the direction in which he was pointing, the edge of the bluff above. Two men were looking down from the place where the slide had started. It was too far to recognize them, but one carried a rifle. They stood there for a minute or two before they withdrew.

“Do you think--that they--?”

His grave eyes met hers. “I think they attempted murder, and, thank God! failed.”

“Don’t say anything to Dad--not now,” she cautioned.

He nodded assent. “No.”

Reed had looked at his watch just before the avalanche had come down on them. The time was then ten o’clock. It was past two before the outfit was patched up sufficiently to travel again.

Not till they were safely out of the hills and gliding into Paradise Valley did the cowman ask a question that had been in his mind for some time.

“Why do you reckon that slide came down at the very moment we were in the ravine?”

“I’ve been wonderin’ about that my own se’f. O’ course, it might just a-happened thataway.” This from Forbes.

“It might, but it didn’t.”

“Meanin’?”

“There was an explosion just before the slide started. Some one dynamited the comb to send it off the bluff.”

“Are you guessin’, Clint? Or do you know it for a fact?”

“I’m guessing, but I pretty near know it.”

Betty spoke up, quietly, unexpectedly. “So do Mr. Hollister and I.”

The two ranchmen pivoted simultaneously toward her. They waited, only their eyes asking the girl what she meant.

“While you were digging, Mr. Hollister saw two men up there. He pointed them out to me.”

“And why didn’t you show ’em to me?” demanded her father.

“What would you have done if I had?” she countered.

“Done! Gone up an’ found out who they were, though I could give a good guess right now.”

“And do you think they would have let you come near? We could see that one of them had a rifle. Maybe both had. They didn’t stay there long, but I was afraid every second that you’d look up and see them.”

The foreman grunted appreciation of her sagacity. “Some head she’s got, Clint. You’d sure have started after them birds, me like as not trailin’ after you. An’ you’d sure never have got to ’em.”

The cowman made no comment on that. “He timed it mighty close. Saw us coming, of course, an’ figured how long it would take us to reach where we did. Good guessing. An old fox, I’ll say.”

“Same here.”

“He didn’t miss smashing us twenty seconds,” Hollister said. “As it was, that’s no kind of snowstorm to be out in without an umbrella and overshoes.”

Betty looked at him and smiled faintly. It was all very well to joke about it now, but they had missed being killed by a hair’s breadth. It made her sick to think of that cackling little demon up there on the bluff plotting wholesale murder and almost succeeding in his plan. She lived over again with a bleak sinking of the heart that five minutes when she had not known whether Tug Hollister was dead or alive.

If he had been killed! She knew herself now. Justin’s instinct of selfishness had been right, after all. His niggardliness resolved itself into self-protection. He had been fighting for his own. Even his jealousy stood justified. She had talked largely of friendship, had deceived herself into thinking that it was expression of herself she craved. That was true in a sense, but the more immediate blinding truth was that she loved Hollister. It had struck her like a bolt of lightning.

She felt as helpless as a drowning man who has ceased struggling.