Chapter XXIII: The Girl Who Was Not Afraid

Break of day in Winter time comes to the Dead Lands slowly and without enthusiasm, as if the rosy morning sun wearied at the hopeless landscape which its rays must illumine. Aimless rock formation was a drug on the creation's market the day that the Bad Lands were made. Gigantic boulders, box-like bluffs, ragged rock-spires, cliffs and plateaus of bare rock were in oversupply.

Nature, so a glimpse of the place suggests, had resolved to get rid of a vast surplus of ugly, useless stone, and with one cast of its hands flung them solidly down and made the Dead Lands. There they lie, hog-back, ridge, gully and ravine, hopelessly and aimlessly jumbled and tumbled, a scene of desolate greyness by Summer; by Winter the raw, bleak ridges and spires, thrusting themselves through the covering of snow like unto the bones of a half concealed skeleton.

Daylight crept wearily over the timber belt and spread itself slowly over the barrenness, and struck the highest rise of ground, running crosswise through the barrens, which men called "Hog-Back Ridge." Little by little it lighted up the bleak peaks and tops of ridge and rock-spire.

A wind came with it, a bleak, morning Winter wind which whined as it whipped the dry snow from high places and sent it flying across coulée and valley in the grey light of dawn. Nothing stirred with the coming of daylight. No nocturnal animal, warned of the day's coming, slunk away to its cave; no beast or bird of daylight greeted the morning with movement or song. The grey half-light revealed no living thing of life upon the exposed hump of the ridge.

The sun came, a ball of dull red, rising over the timber line. It touched the topmost spires of rock, sought to gild them rosily, gave up as their sullen sides refused to take the colour, and turned its rays along the eastern slope. Then something moved. A single speck of life stirred in the vast scene of desolation.

On the bare ground in the lea of a boulder a man sat with his back to the stone and slept. His face was hollow and lined. The corners of his mouth were drawn down as if a weight were hung on each of them, and the thin cheeks, hugging the bones so tightly that the teeth showed through, told that the man had driven himself too far on an empty stomach. Yet, even in sleep, there was a hint of a sardonic smile on the misshapen lips, a smile that condemned and made naught the pain and cruelty of his fate.

The sun crept down the slope of Hog-Back Ridge and found him. It reached his eyes. Its rays had no more warmth than the rays of the cold Winter moon, but its light pierced through the tightly drawn lids. They twitched and finally parted. Reivers awoke without yawning or moving and looked around.

It was the second morning after his flight from Cameron-Dam Camp, and he had yet to reach the Winter camp of the people of Tillie the squaw. Somewhere to the west it lay. He would reach it and reach it in good time, he swore; but he had not had a bite of food in his mouth for two days, and the fever of his wound had sapped heavily his strength.

"Be still, Body," he growled, as with the return of consciousness his belly cried out for food. "You will be fed before life goes out of you."

He rose slowly and stiffly to his knees and looked down the ridge to where the rays of the sun now were illumining the snow-covered bottom of the valley below. The valley ran eastward for a mile or two, and at first glance it was empty and dead, save for the flurries of wind-swept snow, dropping down from the heights above. But Reivers, as he rose to his feet, swept the valley with a second glance, and suddenly he dropped and crouched down close to the ground.

Far down at the lower end of the valley a black speck showed on the frozen snow, and the speck was moving.

Reivers lay on the bare patch of ground, as silent and immovable as the rock above him. The speck was too large to be a single animal and too small to be a pack of travelling caribou.

For several minutes he lay, scarcely breathing, his eyes straining to bring the speck into comprehensible shape. His breath began to come rapidly. Presently he swore. The speck had become two specks now, a long narrow speck and a tiny one which moved beside it, and they were coming steadily up the valley toward where he lay.

"One man and a dog-team," mused Reivers. "He won't be travelling here without grub. Body, wake up! You are crying for food. Yonder it comes. Get ready to take it."

Slowly, with long pauses between each movement, and taking care not to place his dark body against the white snow, Reivers dragged himself around to a hiding-place behind the boulder against which he had slept. The sun had risen higher now. Its rays were lighting the valley, and as he peered avidly around one side of the stone, Reivers could make out some detail of the two specks that moved so steadily toward him.

It was a four-dog team, travelling rapidly, and the man, on snow-shoes, travelled beside his team and plied his whip as he strode. Reivers' brows drew down in puzzled fashion. The sledge which whirled behind the running dogs seemed flat and unloaded; the dogs ran in a fashion that told they were strong and fresh. Why didn't the man ride?

Reivers drew back to take stock of the situation. The man might be a stranger, travelling hurriedly through the Dead Lands, or he might be one of the men from Cameron-Dam Camp. If the former, food might be had for a mere hail and the asking; if the latter--Reivers's nostrils widened and he smiled.

Yet a third possibility existed. The man was travelling in strange fashion, running beside an apparently empty sled, and whipping his dogs along. So did men travel when they were fleeing from various reasons, and men fleeing thus do not go unarmed nor take kindly to having the trail of their flight witnessed by casual though starving strangers. Thus there was one chance that a hail and plea for food would be met with a friendly response; two chances that they would be met with lead or steel.

Reivers, not being a careless man, looked about for ways and means to place the odds in his favour. A hundred yards to the north of him the valley narrowed into a mere slit between two straight walls of rock. Through this gap the traveller must pass.

When Reivers had crawled to a position on the rock directly above the narrow opening, he lay flat down and grinned in peace. He was securely hidden, and the dog-driver would pass unsuspectingly, unready, thirty feet beneath where he lay. Things were looking well.

The driver and team came on at a steady pace. Even at a great distance, his stride betrayed his race and Reivers muttered, "White man," and pushed to the edge of the bluff a huge, jagged piece of rock. The man might not listen to reason, and Reivers was taking no chances of allowing an opportunity to feed to slip by.

The sleigh still puzzled him. As it came nearer and nearer he saw that it was not empty. Something long and flat lay upon it. Reivers ceased to watch the driver and turned his scrutiny entirely to the bundle upon the sleigh. Minute after minute he watched the sleigh to the exclusion of everything else.

He made out eventually that the bundle was the size and form of a human body. Soon he saw that it moved now and then, as if struggling to rise.

The sleigh came nearer, came into a space where the sunlight, streaming through a gap in the ridge, lighted it up brightly, and Reivers' whole body suddenly stiffened upon the ground and his teeth snapped shut barely in time to cut short an ejaculation of surprise.

The bundle on the sleigh was a woman--a white woman! And she was bound around from ankle to forehead with thongs passed under the sleigh.

"Food--and a woman--a white woman," he mused. "The new life becomes interesting. Body, get ready."

He held the rock balanced on the edge of the cliff, ready to hurl it down with one supreme effort of his waning strength. Hugging the cliff he lay, his head barely raised sufficiently to watch his approaching quarry. He could make out the face of the man by this time, a square face, mostly covered with hair, with the square-cut hair of the head hanging down below the ears. Two fang-like teeth glistened in the sunlight when the man opened his mouth to curse at the dogs, and he turned at times to leer back at the helpless burden on the sleigh.

As he approached the narrow defile, where the rock walls hid a man and what he might do from the eyes of all but the sky above, the man turned to look more frequently, more leeringly at his victim. Reivers saw that the woman was gagged as well as bound.

The driver shouted a command at his dogs, and their lope became a walk, and even as Reivers, up on the cliff, arched his back to hurl his stone, the outfit came to a halt directly beneath where he lay. Reivers waited. He had no compunction about disabling or killing the man below; a crying belly knows no conscience. But he would wait and see what was to develop.

The man swiftly jerked his team back in the traces and turned toward his victim. Reivers, turning his eyes from the man to the woman, received a shock which caused him to hug closer to the cliff. The woman lay helpless on the sleigh, face up. A cloth gag covered her face up to the nose, and a cap, drawn down over the forehead, left only the eyes and nose visible. And the eyes were wide open--very wide open--and they were looking quite calmly and unafraid up at Reivers.

The driver came back and tore the gag from the woman's lips.

"I'll give you a chance," he exploded, and Reivers, up on the cliff, caught the passion-choked note in voice and again held the stone ready. "I'm stealing you for the chief--for Shanty Moir, the man who's got your father's mine, and who's determined to put shame on you, Red MacGregor's daughter. I'm taking you there to him--in his camp. You know what that means.

"Well, I've changed my mind. I--I'll give you a chance. I'll save you. Come with me. I won't take you up there. We'll go out of the country. You know what it'd mean to go up there. Well,--I'll marry you."

Many things happened in the next few seconds. The man threw himself like a wild beast beside the sledge, caught the woman's face in his hands and kissed her bestially upon the helpless lips.

The girl did not struggle or cry out. Only her wide eyes looked up to the top of the cliff, looked questioningly, speculatively, calmly. He of the hairy face caught the direction of her look and sprang up and whirled around, the glove flying from his right hand, and a six-shooter leaping into it apparently from nowhere.

His face was upturned, and he fired even as the big rock smote him on the forehead and crushed him shapelessly into the snow. Reivers dragged forward another stone and waited, but the man was too obviously dead to render caution necessary.

"He was experienced and quick," said Reivers to the woman, "but I was too hungry to miss him. Did you think I did it to save you? Oh, no! Just a minute, till I get down; you'll know me better."

He staggered and fell as he rose to pick his way down, for the cast with the heavy stone had tapped the last reservoirs of his depleted strength, had wrenched open the wounded shoulder and started the blood. Painfully he dragged himself on hands and knees to a snow-covered slope, and slipping and sliding made his way to the valley-bottom and came staggering up to the sledge. The woman to him for the time being did not exist.

"Steady, Body," he muttered, as he tore open the grub-bag on the sleigh. "Here's food."

His fingers fell first on a huge chunk of cooked venison, and he looked no farther. Down in the snow at the side of the helpless woman he squatted and proceeded to eat. Only when the pang in his stomach had been appeased did he look at the woman. Then, for a time, he forgot about eating.

It was not a woman but a girl. Her face was fair and her hair golden red. Her big eyes were looking at him appraisingly. There was no fear in them, no apprehension. She noted the hollowness of his cheeks, the fever in his eyes. Reivers almost dropped his meat in amazement. The girl actually was pitying him!

He stood up, thrust the meat back into the grub-bag and stood swaying and towering over her. The girl's eyes looked back unwaveringly.

"---- you!" growled Reivers as he bent down and loosed the thongs. "What do you mean? Why aren't you afraid?"

"MacGregor Roy was my father," she said quietly. "I am not afraid." She sat up as the bonds fell from her and looked at the still figure in the snow. "He is dead, I suppose?"

"As dead as he tried to make me," sneered Reivers.

A look of annoyance crossed her face.

"Then you have spoiled it all," she broke out, leaping from the sledge. "Spoiled the fine chance I had to find the cave of Shanty Moir, murderer of my father."

Reivers' jaw dropped in amazement, and hot anger surged to his tongue. Many women of many kinds he had looked in the eyes and this was the first one--

"Spoiled it, you red-haired trull! What do you mean? Didn't I save you from our bearded friend yonder. Or--" his thin lips curled into their old contemptuous smile--"or perhaps--perhaps you are one of those to whom such attentions are not distasteful."

The sudden flare and flash of her anger breaking, like lightning out of a Winter's sky, checked his words. The contempt of his smile gave place to a grin of admiration. Tottering and wavering on his feet, he did not stir or raise his arms, though the thin-bladed knife which seemed to spring into her hands as claws protrude from a maddened cat's paws, slipped through his mackinaw and pricked the skin above his heart, before her hand stopped.

"'Trull' am I? The daughter of MacGregor Roy is a helpless squaw who takes kindly to such words from any man on the trail? Blood o' my father! Pray, you cowardly skulker! Pray!"

His grin grew broader.

"Pretty, very pretty!" he drawled. "But you can't make it good, can you? You thought you could. Your little flare of temper made you feel big. You were sure you were going to stick me. But you couldn't do it. You're a woman. See; your flash of bigness is dying out. You're growing tame. That's one of my specialties--taming spitfires like you. Oh, you needn't draw back. Have no fear. I never did have any taste for red hair."

A painter would have raved about the daughter of MacGregor Roy as she now stood back, facing her tormentor. The fair skin of her face was flushed red, the thin sharp lines of mouth and nostril were tremulous with rage, and her wide, grey eyes burned. Her head was thrown back in scorn, her cap was off; the glorious red-golden hair of her head seemed alive with fury. With one foot advanced, the knife held behind her, her breath coming in angry gasps, she stood, a figure passionately, terribly alive in the dead waste of the snows.

"Oh, what a coward you are!" she panted. "You knew I couldn't avenge myself on a sick man. You coward!"

Reivers laughed drunkenly. The fever was blurring his sight, dulling his brain and filling him with an irresistible desire to lie down.

"Yes, I knew it," he mumbled. "I saw it in your eye. You couldn't do it--because I didn't want you to. I want you--I want you to fix me up--hole in the shoulder--fever--understand?"

"I understand that when Duncan Roy, my father's brother, catches up with us he will save me the trouble by putting a hole through your head."

"Plenty of time for that later on." Reivers fought off the stupor and held his senses clear for a moment. "Have you got my whisky?"

"And what if I have?"

"Answer me!" he said icily. "Have you?"

"Duncan Roy has whisky," she replied reluctantly. "He will be on our trail now."

"How long--how long before he'll get here?"

"Yon beast--" she nodded her head toward the still figure in the snow--"raided our camp, struck me down and stole me away with my team two hours before sundown, yestere'en. Duncan Roy was out meat-hunting, and would be back by dark. He'll be two hours behind us, and his dogs travel even with these."

"Two hours? Too long," groaned Reivers and pitched headlong into the snow.