To Bud Larkin enough had already happened to make him as philosophical as Socrates. Epictetus remarks that our chief happiness should consist in knowing that we are entirely indifferent to calamity; that disgrace is nothing if our consciences are right and that death, far from being a calamity is, in fact, a release.

But the world only boasts of a few great minds capable of believing these theories, and Larkin’s was not one of them. He was distinctly and completely depressed at the prospect ahead of him.

It was about ten o’clock at night and he sat in the chair beside his table, upon which a candle was burning, running over the pages of an ancient magazine.

The knowledge of what the cowmen had decided to do with him had been brought by a committee of three of the men just before the supper hour and since that time Larkin had been fuming and growling with rage. 177

There seems to be something particularly shameful in a whipping that makes it the most dreaded of punishments. It was particularly so at the time in which this story is laid, for echoes of ’65 were still to be heard reverberating from one end of the land to the other. In the West whippings were of rare occurrence, if not unknown, except in penitentiaries, where they had entirely too great a vogue.

Larkin’s place of captivity was now changed. Some enterprising cowboy, at Bissell’s orders, had fashioned iron bars and these were fixed vertically across the one window. The long-unused lock of the door had been fitted with a key and other bars fastened across the doorway horizontally so that should Larkin force the lock he would still meet opposition.

Since Juliet’s unpleasant episode with her father Bud had seen her just once—immediately afterward. Then, frankly and sincerely, she had told him what had happened and why, and Larkin, touched to the heart, had pleaded with her for the greatest happiness of his life.

The realization of their need for each other was the natural outcome of the position of each, and the fact that, whatever happened, Juliet found herself forced to espouse Bud’s cause. 178

In that interview with her father she had come squarely to the parting of the ways, and had chosen the road that meant life and happiness to her. The law that human intellects will seek their own intellectual level, providing the person is sound in principle, had worked out in her case, and, once she had made her decision, she clung to it with all the steadfastness of a strong and passionate nature.

It was Bissell’s discovery of a new and intimate relation between his daughter and the sheepman that had resulted in the latter’s close confinement, and from the time that this occurred the two had seen nothing of each other except an occasional glimpse at a distance when Bud was taken out for a little exercise.

To-night, therefore, as Larkin sat contemplating the scene to be enacted at dawn, his sense of shame increased a hundredfold, for he knew that, as long as she lived, Julie could not forget the occurrence.

It should not be thought that all this while he had not formulated plans of escape. Many had come to him, but had been quickly dismissed as impracticable. Day and night one of the Bar T cowboys watched him. And even though he had been able to effect escape from his room, he 179 knew that without a horse he was utterly helpless on the broad, level stretches of prairie. And to take a horse from the Bar T corral would lay him open to that greatest of all range crimes—horse-stealing.

To-night his guards had been doubled. One paced up and down outside his window and the other sat in the dining-room on which his door opened.

Now, at ten o’clock the entire Bar T outfit was asleep. Since placing the bunk-house at the disposal of the cowmen from other ranches, the punchers slept on the ground—rolled in their blankets as they always did when overtaken by night on the open range.

At ten-thirty Bud put out his candle, undressed, and went to bed. But he could not sleep. His mind reverted to Hard-winter Sims and the sheep camp by the Badwater. He wondered whether the men from Montana had arrived there yet, and, most intensely of all, he wondered whether Ah Sin had got safely through with his message.

He calculated that the Chinaman must have arrived three days before unless unexpectedly delayed, and he chafed at the apparent lack of effort made on his behalf. The only explanation 180 that offered itself was—that Sims, taking advantage of the events happening at the Bar T, had seized the opportunity to hurry the gathering sheep north across the range. If such was the case, Larkin resigned himself to his fate, since he had given Sims full power to do as he thought best.

At about midnight he was dimly conscious of a scuffling sound outside his window, and, getting softly out of bed, went to the opening. In a few minutes the head of a man rose gradually above the window-sill close to the house, and a moment later he was looking into the face of Hard-winter Sims.

Controlling the shock this apparition gave him, Larkin placed his finger on his lips and whispered in a tone so low it was scarcely more than a breath:

“Did you get the fellow outside?”

Sims nodded.

“There’s another one in the dining-room just outside my door. He ought to be relieved at one o’clock, but he’ll have to go out and wake up his relief. He’ll go out the kitchen door, and when he does nab him, but don’t let him yell. Now pass me a gun.”

Without a sound, Sims inserted a long .45 between 181 the clumsy bars, and followed it with a cartridge belt.

“How’ll we get yuh out?” he whispered.

“After fixing the man inside come out again and loosen these bars; the door is barred, too.”

“Where are the cowmen?” asked Sims.

“All in the bunk-house, and the punchers are sleeping out near the corral.”

“Yes, I seen ’em. Now you go back to bed an’ wait till I hiss through the window. Then we’ll have yuh out o’ here in a jiffy.”

The herder’s form vanished in the darkness, and Larkin, his heart beating high with hope and excitement, returned to his bed. Before lying down, however, he dressed himself completely and strapped on the cartridge belt and gun.

The minutes passed like hours. Listening with every nerve fiber on the alert, Bud found the night peopled with a multitude of sounds that on an ordinary occasion would have passed unnoticed. So acute did his sense of hearing become that the crack of a board in the house contracting under the night coolness seemed to him almost like a pistol shot.

When at last it appeared that Sims must have failed and that dawn would surely begin to break, he heard a heavy sound in the dining-room and 182 sat bolt upright. It was merely the cow-puncher there preparing to go out and waken his successor. Although the man made as little noise as possible, it seemed to Bud that his footsteps must wake everybody in the house.

The man went out of the dining-room into the mess-room of the cowboys, closing the door behind him softly, and after that what occurred was out of the prisoner’s ken.

After a while, however, Bud’s ears caught the faintest breath of a hiss at the window, and he rolled softly out of bed on to the floor in his stocking feet. Sims was there and another man with him, and both were prying at the bars of the window with instruments muffled in cloth.

“Did you get him?” asked Bud.

“Shore! He won’t wake up for a week, that feller,” answered Sims placidly.

For a quarter of an hour the two worked at the clumsy bars, assisted by Bud from the inside. At the end of that time two of them came loose at the lower ends and were bent upward. Then the combined efforts of the three men were centered on the third bar, which gave way in a few minutes.

Handing his boots out first, Larkin crawled headforemost out of the window and put his arms 183 around the shoulders of his rescuers, resting most of his weight upon their bent backs. Then they walked slowly away from the house and Bud’s feet and legs came out noiselessly. Still in the shadow of the walls they set him down and he drew on his boots.

It was not until then that Sims’s assistant made himself known.

“Hello, boss,” he said and took off his broad hat so that Larkin could see his face.

“Jimmie Welsh, by George!” whispered Bud joyfully, wringing his hand. “Did you bring many of the boys down with you?”

“Fifty,” replied the other.

“Bully for you! I don’t know what would become of me if it weren’t for you and Hard-winter.”

As they talked they were moving off toward the little river that wound past the Bar T house.

“Got a horse for me?” asked Bud.

“Yes,” said Sims, “over here in the bottoms where the rest of the boys are.”

“What do you plan to do now?”

Sims told him and Bud grinned delightedly at the same time that his face hardened with the triumph of a revenge about to be accomplished.

“Let’s get at it,” he said. 184

“Wait here and I’ll get the rest of the bunch.”

Hard-winter left them, and in a few minutes returned with a dozen brawny sheepmen, mostly recruited from Larkin’s own ranch in Montana. When greetings had been exchanged they moved off quietly toward the ranch-house.

The corral of the Bar T was about fifty yards back of the cook’s shanty and as you faced it had a barn on the right-hand side, where the family saddle horses were kept in winter, as well as the small amount of hay that Bissell put up every year.

To the left of the corral the space was open, and here the Bar T punchers had made their camp since leaving their former quarters. The bunk-house on the other hand stood perhaps fifty feet forward of the barn. It was toward this building that the expedition under Sims took its way.

Silently the rough door swung back on its rawhide hinges and ten men, with a revolver in each hand, filed quietly in. Sims and Larkin remained outside on guard. Presently there was a sound of muttering and cursing that grew louder. Then one yell, and the solid thud of a revolver butt coming in contact with a human skull. After that there was practically no noise whatever. 185

The men outside watched anxiously, fearful that the single outcry had raised an alarm. But there was no sound from either the house or the cowboys’ camp. Presently Welsh stuck his head out of the door.

“How is she? Safe?” he asked.

“Yes, bring ’em out,” answered Bud, and the next minute a strange procession issued from the bunk-house.

The cowmen, gagged, and with their hands bound behind them, walked single file, accompanied by one of the sheepmen. Without a word the line turned in the direction of the river bottoms, where the rest of the band and the horses were waiting.

To do this it was necessary to pass behind the cook-house. Bud leaned over and spoke to Sims.

“Can’t we get Bissell in this party? He’s the fellow that has made all the trouble.”

“Sure, Jimmy and I will go in and get him. I had forgotten all about him.”

But they were saved the trouble, for just as they were opposite the cook-house, Larkin saw a burly form outlined for an instant in the doorway of the cowboys’ dining-room. With three bounds he was upon this form and arrived just in time to seize a hand that was vainly tugging 186 at a revolver strapped on beneath his night clothes.

Had fortune not tangled Bissell’s equipment that night Bud Larkin would have been a dead man. Snatching off his hat, he smashed it over the cattle king’s mouth, and an instant later Bissell, writhing and struggling, but silent, was being half-carried out to join his friends.

Matters now proceeded with speed and smoothness. The prisoners were hurried to where the remainder of the band awaited them. Then, still bound and gagged, they were mounted on spare horses.

Only thirty of Welsh’s raiders had come on this trip, the rest remaining to help with the sheep, but their horses had been brought so that there might be ample provision for everybody.

With a feeling of being once more at home, Larkin climbed into a deep saddle, and a wave of triumph surged over him. He was again free, and at the head of a band of brave men. He had the ascendency at last over his misfortune, and he intended to keep it. Then when everything was finished he could come back and he would find Juliet—

The remembrance of her brought him to a pause. Must he go away without as much as a 187 word from her, the one for whom he cared more than all the rest of the world? Quietly he dismounted.

“Let Jimmie go on with the prisoners and the rest of the boys,” he said to Sims. “You wait here with me. I must leave one message.”

A minute later the cavalcade stole away, following the winding river bank for a mile before setting foot on the plain.

Then, with Sims crouching, armed, behind the nearest protection, Bud Larkin walked softly to the house. He knew which was her window and went straight there, finding it open as he had expected. Listening carefully he heard no sound from within. Then he breathed the one word, “Julie,” and immediately there came a rustling of the bed as she rose.

Knowing that she had been awake and was coming to him, he turned away his eyes until he felt her strong little hand on his shoulder. Then he looked up to find her in an overwrap with her luxuriant hair falling down over her shoulders, her eyes big and luminously dusky.

“Darling,” she said, “I have heard everything, and I am so glad.”

“Then you could have given the alarm at any time?” 188

“Yes.”

“God bless your faithful little heart!” he said fervently, and, reaching up, drew down her face to his and kissed her.

It was their second kiss and they both thrilled from head to foot with this tantalization of the hunger of their love. All the longing of their enforced separation seemed to burst the dam that had held it, and, for a time, they forgot all things but the living, moving tide of their own love.

At last the girl disengaged herself from his eager hands, with hot cheeks and bright, flame-lit eyes. Her breath came fast, and it was a moment before she could compose herself.

“Where are you going now, Bud?” she asked.

“Back to the sheep.”

“Can I do anything to help you?”

“I can only think of one thing, and that is to marry me.”

“Everything in time, sir!” she reproved him. “Get your muttons out of the way and then you can have me.”

Larkin groaned. Then he said:

“If anything comes for me or anybody wants me, I want you to do as I would do if I were here. Things are coming to a climax now and I must know all that goes on. Watch Stelton especially. 189 He is crooked somewhere, and I’m going to get him if it takes me the rest of my life.”

Suddenly there was a loud knock from outside the girl’s bedroom door, and they both listened, hardly daring to breathe.

“Julie, let me in!” cried Mrs. Bissell’s querulous voice. “Where’s your father?”

“Run, dear boy, for your life!” breathed the girl.

Larkin kissed her swiftly and hurried back to the underbrush, where Sims was awaiting him in an access of temper.

“Great Michaeljohn, boss!” he growled as they rode along the bank, “ain’t yuh got no consideration fer me? From the way yuh go on a person’d think yuh were in love with the girl.”