THE HUNTED WOMAN (Western Thriller). James Oliver Curwood

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      "The deuce you say!" cried Aldous, clutching the other's arm suddenly. "He's done that?"

      "That's what the kid says."

      Aldous rose to his feet slowly. The careless smile was playing about his mouth again. A few men had learned that in those moments John Aldous was dangerous.

      "The kid is undoubtedly right," he said, looking down at Stevens. "But I am quite sure the young woman is capable of taking care of herself. Quade has a tremendous amount of nerve, setting Slim to follow her, hasn't he? Slim may run up against a husband or a brother."

      Stevens haunched his shoulders.

      "It's not the woman I'm thinking about. It's you. I'd sure change my location."

      "Why wouldn't it be just as well if I told the police of his threat?" asked Aldous, looking across the river with a glimmer of humour in his eyes.

      "Oh, hell!" was the packer's rejoinder.

      Slowly he unwound his long legs and rose to his feet.

      "Take my advice—move!" he said. "As for me, I'm going to cross that cussed river this afternoon or know the reason why."

      He stalked away in the direction of his outfit, chewing viciously at his quid. For a few moments Aldous stood undecided. He would liked to have joined the half-dozen men he saw lounging restfully a distance beyond the grazing ponies. But Stevens had made him acutely aware of a new danger. He was thinking of his cabin—and the priceless achievement of his last months of work, his manuscript. If Quade should destroy that——

      He clenched his hands and walked swiftly toward his camp. To "burn out" an enemy was one of Quade's favourite methods of retaliation. He had heard this. He also knew that Quade's work was done so cleverly that the police had been unable to call him to account.

      Quade's status had interested Aldous from the beginning. He had discovered that Quade and Culver Rann, his partner at Tête Jaune, were forces to be reckoned with even by the "powers" along the line of rail. They were the two chiefs of the "underground," the men who controlled the most dangerous element from Miette to Fort George. He had once seen Culver Rann, a quiet, keen-eyed, immaculately groomed man of forty—the cleverest scoundrel that had ever drifted into the Canadian west. He had been told that Rann was really the brain of the combination, and that the two had picked up a quarter of a million in various ways. But it was Quade with whom he had to deal now, and he began to thank Stevens for his warning. He was filled with a sense of relief when he reached his cabin and found it as he had left it. He always made a carbon copy of his work. This copy he now put into a waterproof tin box, and the box he concealed under a log a short distance back in the bush.

      "Now go ahead, Quade," he laughed to himself, a curious, almost exultant ring in his voice. "I haven't had any real excitement for so long I can't remember, and if you start the fun there's going to be fun!"

      He returned to his birds, perched himself behind a bush at the river's edge, and began skinning them. He had almost finished when he heard hoarse shouts from up the river. From his position he could see the stream a hundred yards below the ford. Stevens had driven in his horses. He could see them breasting the first sweep of the current, their heads held high, struggling for the opposite shore. He rose, dropped his birds, and stared.

      "Good God, what a fool!" he gasped.

      He saw the tragedy almost before it had begun. Still three hundred yards below the swimming horses was the gravelly bar which they must reach on the opposite side. He noted the grayish strip of smooth water that marked the end of the dead-line. Three or four of the stronger animals were forging steadily toward this. The others grouped close together, almost motionless in their last tremendous fight, were left farther and farther behind. Then came the break. A mare and her yearling colt had gone in with the bunch. Aldous saw the colt, with its small head and shoulders high out of the water, sweep down like a chip with the current. A cold chill ran through him as he heard the whinneying scream of the mother—a warning cry that held for him the pathos and the despair of a creature that was human. He knew what it meant. "Wait—I'm coming—I'm coming!" was in that cry. He saw the mare give up and follow resistlessly with the deadly current, her eyes upon her colt. The heads behind her wavered, then turned, and in another moment the herd was sweeping down to its destruction.

      Aldous felt like turning his head. But the spectacle fascinated him, and he looked. He did not think of Stevens and his loss as the first of the herd plunged in among the rocks. He stood with white face and clenched hands, leaning over the water boiling at his feet, cursing softly in his helplessness. To him came the last terrible cries of the perishing animals. He saw head after head go under. Out of the white spume of a great rock against which the flood split itself with the force of an avalanche he saw one horse pitched bodily, as if thrown from a huge catapault. The last animal had disappeared when chance turned his eyes upstream and close in to shore. Here flowed a steady current free of rock, and down this—head and shoulders still high out of the water—came the colt! What miracle had saved the little fellow thus far Aldous did not stop to ask. Fifty yards below it would meet the fate of the others. Half that distance in the direction of the maelstrom below was the dead trunk of a fallen spruce overhanging the water for fifteen or twenty feet. In a flash Aldous was racing toward it. He climbed out on it, leaned far over, and reached down. His hand touched the water. In the grim excitement of rescue he forgot his own peril. There was one chance in twenty that the colt would come within his reach, and it did. He made a single lunge and caught it by the ear. For a moment after that his heart turned sick. Under the added strain the dead spruce sagged down with a warning crack. But it held, and Aldous hung to his grip on the ear. Foot by foot he wormed his way back, until at last he had dragged the little animal ashore.

      And then a voice spoke behind him, a voice that he would have recognized among ten thousand, low, sweet, thrilling.

      "That was splendid, John Aldous!" it said. "If I were a man I would want to be a man like you!"

      He turned. A few steps from him stood Joanne Gray. Her face was as white as the bit of lace at her throat. Her lips were colourless, and her bosom rose and fell swiftly. He knew that she, too, had witnessed the tragedy. And the eyes that looked at him were glorious.

CHAPTER IV

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      To John Aldous Joanne's appearance at this moment was like an anti-climax. It plunged him headlong for a single moment into what he believed to be the absurdity of a situation. He had a quick mental picture of himself out on the dead spruce, performing a bit of mock-heroism by dragging in a half-drowned colt by one ear. In another instant this had passed, and he was wondering why Joanne Gray was not on her way to Tête Jaune.

      "It was splendid!" she was saying again, her eyes glowing at him. "I know men who would not have risked that for a human!"

      "Perhaps they would have been showing good judgment," replied Aldous.

      He noticed now that she was holding with one hand the end of a long slender sapling which a week or two before he had cut and trimmed for a fish-pole. He nodded toward it, a half-cynical smile on his lips.

      "Were you going to fish me out—or the colt?" he asked.

      "You," she replied. "I thought you were in danger." And then she added, "I suppose you are deeply grateful that fate did not compel you to be saved by a woman."

      "Not at all. If the spruce had snapped, I would have СКАЧАТЬ