Claim Number One Part 30

"I rode up to ask you how far I'd strayed from home."

"It's about seven miles across to the river, I should estimate," he told her. "I graze up to the boundary of the reservation, and it's called five miles from there."

"Thank you; I think I'll be going back then."

"Will you do me the favor to look at this before you go?" he asked, drawing a folded paper from the inner pocket of his coat and handing it to her.

It was a page from one of those so-called _Directories_ which small grafters go about devising in small cities and out-on-the-edge communities, in which the pictures of the leading citizens are printed for a consideration. The page had been folded across the center; it was broken and worn.

"You may see the person whose portrait is presented there," said he, "and if you should see him, you would confer a favor by letting me know."

"Why, I saw him yesterday!" she exclaimed in surprise. "It's Jerry Boyle!"

The sheep-herder's eyes brightened. A glow came into his brown face.

"You do well to go armed where that wolf ranges!" said he. "You know him--you saw him yesterday. Is he still there?"

"Why, I think he's camped somewhere along the river," she told him, unable to read what lay behind the excitement in the man's manner.

He folded the paper and returned it to his pocket, his breath quick upon his lips. Suddenly he laid hold of her bridle with one hand, and with the other s.n.a.t.c.hed the revolver from her low-swinging holster.

"Don't be alarmed," said he; "but I want to know. Tell me true--lean over and whisper in my ear. Is he your friend?"

"No, no! Far from it!" she whispered, complying with his strange order out of fear that his insanity, flaming as it was under the spur of some half-broken memory, might lead him to take her life.

He gave her back the revolver and released the horse.

"Go," said he. "But don't warn him, as you value your own life! My mission here is to kill that man!"

Perhaps it was a surge of unworthiness which swept her, lifting her heart like hope. The best of us is unworthy at times; the best of us is base. Selfishness is the festering root of more evil than gold. In that flash it seemed to her that Providence had raised up an arm to save her.

She leaned over, her face bright with eagerness.

"Has he wronged you, too?" she asked.

He lifted his hand to his forehead slowly, as if in a gesture of pain.

The blood had drained from his face; his cheek-bones were marked white through his wind-hardened skin.

"It's not a subject to be discussed with a woman, sir," said he absently. "There was a wife--somewhere there was a wife! This man came between us. I was not then what I am today--a shepherd on the hills....

But I must keep you here; you will betray me and warn him if I let you go!" he cried, rousing suddenly, catching her bridle again.

"No, I'll not warn him," Agnes a.s.sured him.

"If I thought you would"--he hesitated, searching her face with his fevered eyes, in which red veins showed as in the eyes of an angry dog--"I'd have to sacrifice you!"

Agnes felt that she never could draw her weapon in time, in case the eccentric tried to take it away again, and her heart quailed as she measured the distance she would have to ride before the fall of the ground would protect her, even if she should manage to break his hold on the bridle, and gallop off while he was fetching his pistol from the wagon.

"I'll not warn him," said she, placing her hand on his arm. "I give you my sincere word that I'll do nothing to save him from what I feel to be your just vengeance."

"Go, before I doubt you again!" he cried, slapping her horse with his palm as he let go the bridle.

From the tip of the hill she looked back. He had disappeared--into the wagon, she supposed; and she made haste to swerve from the straight course to put another hill between them, in case he might run after her, his mad mind again aflame with the belief that she would cheat him of his revenge.

Agnes arrived in camp full of tremors and contradictory emotions. One minute she felt that she should ride and warn Boyle, guilty as he might be, and deserving of whatever punishment the hand of the wronged man might be able to inflict; the next she relieved herself of this impulse by arguing that the insane sheep-herder was plainly the instrument of fate--she lacked the temerity, after the first flush, to credit it to Providence--lifted up to throw his troubles between her and her own.

She sat in the sun before her tent thinking it over, for and against, cooling considerably and coming to a saner judgment of the situation.

Every little while she looked toward the hills, to see if the shepherd had followed her. She had seen no horse in the man's camp; he could not possibly make it on foot, under two hours, even if he came at all, she told herself.

Perhaps it was an imaginary grievance, based upon the reputation which Boyle had earned for himself; maybe the poor, declaiming philosopher had forgotten all about it by now, and had returned to his discourses and his argument. She brewed a pot of tea, for the shadows were marking noonday, and began to consider riding down the river to find Boyle and tell him of the man's threat, leaving him to follow his own judgment in the matter. His conscience would tell him whether to stand or fly.

Strong as her resentment was against the man who had come into her plans so unexpectedly and thrown them in a tangle, she felt that it would be wrong to her own honesty to conceal from him the knowledge of his danger. Perhaps there remained manliness enough in him to cause him to withdraw his avaricious scheme to oust Dr. Slavens in return for a service like that. She determined at last to seek Boyle in his camp.

She brought up her horse and saddled it, took a look around camp to see that everything was in shape--for she liked to leave things tidy, in case some of the neighbors should stop in--and was about to mount, when a man's head and shoulders appeared from behind her own cottonwood log.

A glance showed her that it was the sheep-herder. His head was bare, his wild hair in his eyes.

He got to his feet, his pistol in his hand.

"I watched you," said he, sheathing the weapon, as if he had changed his mind about the use of it. "I knew you'd go!"

"But I didn't intend to when I parted from you up there on the hill,"

she declared, greatly confused over being caught in this breach of faith with even a crazy man.

"I considered that, too," said the philosopher. "But I watched you. I'll never be fool enough to entirely trust a woman again. You all lie!"

She wondered how he had arrived there so quickly and silently, for he gave no evidence of fatigue or heat. She did not know the dry endurance which a life like his builds up in a man. Sheep-herders in that country are noted for their fleetness. It is a common saying of them that their heels are as light as their heads.

But there he was, at any rate, and her good intentions toward Boyle must be surrendered. Conscience had a palliative in the fact that she had meant to go.

"Heaven knows I have as little reason to wish him well as you!" said she, speaking in low voice, as if to herself, as she began to undo the saddle girth.

"Stay here, then," said the sheep-herder, watching her with glistening eyes. "I'll kill him for both of us! Where is his camp?"

"I don't know," she replied, shuddering.

The demented shepherd's way of speaking of taking a human life, even though a worthless one, or a vicious one, was eager and hungry. He licked his lips like a dog.

"You said he was camped on the river. Where?"

"I don't know," she returned again.

"I'll tell you," said he, staying her hand as she tugged on a strap.

"Both of us will go! You shall ride, and I'll run beside you. But"--he bent over, grinding his teeth and growling between them--"you sha'n't help kill him! That's for me, alone!"

She drew back from his proposal with a sudden realization of what a desperately brutal thing this unstrung creature was about to do, with a terrible arraignment of self-reproach because she had made no effort to dissuade him or place an obstacle in the way of accomplis.h.i.+ng his design. It was not strange, thought she, with a revulsion of self-loathing, that he accepted her as a willing accomplice and proposed that she bear a hand. Even her effort to ride and find Boyle had been half-hearted. She might have gone, she told herself, before the herder arrived.

"No, no! I couldn't go! I couldn't!" she cried, forgetting that she was facing an unbalanced man, all the force of pleading in her voice.

"No, you want to kill him yourself!" he charged savagely. "Give me that horse--give it to me, I tell you! I'll go alone!"

He sprang into the saddle, not waiting to adjust the stirrups to his long legs. With his knees pushed up like a jockey's, he rode off, the pointer of chance, or the cunning of his own inscrutable brain, directing him the way Boyle had gone the evening before.