THE ROAD TO PARADISE

The gap in the fence remained exactly as it had been when it invited her to adventure. But now she halted there, dismounted, and picked up the end of a wire that lay trailing on the ground. With new-found interest she examined the fracture, and stared at it in wonder. Dropping it, and kneeling excitedly in the grass, she searched another, and still another wire, and with the same result. Even to her unpractised eye the facts were plain: the four wires had not been broken; they had been cleanly cut, and very recently, as shown by the absence of rust on the severed ends. By whom? And why? Seth Huntington, Haig had said. Impossible! Absurd! True, she had heard Seth denouncing him; Claire also; and without knowing the cause of the feud, or caring, she had learned that Huntington and Haig were bitterly at odds about something, cattle, she thought, or was it land? But that Seth could have stooped to the low trick implied in these cut wires! And yet

She looked down the half-made road by which Haig had disappeared. It was quite empty now, save for Tuesday and herself. Nor was there sight of man or beast in all the valley. Haig’s cattle, like Seth’s and the other ranchmen’s, were grazing in the summer pastures, no doubt in little shut-in valleys far up among the pines yonder, where the violet mists were deepening.

She mounted her horse again, and rode slowly up the hill. But just where the road entered the woods at the summit of the ridge she stopped once more, and turned for a last look at her lost valley. Her gaze swept it lovingly from where, at her left, the long ridge shut off the view, to where, far at her right, the valley narrowed into a pine-screened gulch; and back again almost to the spot where the road dipped and disappeared. There her eyes were suddenly caught by something she had not seen before, a thin spiral of blue smoke that mounted slowly until it was struck and dissipated by the breeze from across the ridge. Haig’s ranchhouse, surely, nestling below the hill! The house would be visible, doubtless, from the place where Haig had vanished from her sight. What would it be like? she wondered.

The next instant she had pulled her pony half-around toward the valley. But Tuesday turned his head, and looked at her; and she felt the blood rushing into her face.

“Go on, Tuesday!” she cried, jerking him back into the road. “What are you doing?”

She rode on into the pines, embarrassed beyond all belief.

In a few minutes she had emerged again from the woods, descended the hill, and regained the main-traveled road along the Brightwater. Still she rode slowly, forgetting that she had learned at last to ride like a cowboy. She was reluctant to return to Huntington’s, reluctant to relate her experiences as she had always related them until to-day. Haig had sent a warning to Huntington. It was her duty to deliver it. But how could she tell just so much and no more? There would be questions. She would be cross-examined, kindly enough but relentlessly. And in some strange way this meeting had become a private matter; Haig’s warning was inextricably mixed with other things that did not concern Huntington. Just what these were, and why they were so very private, she could not quite explain to herself; and for the moment she did not try. They were things to be thought about later, when she could think more clearly. She knew only that she should never be able to endure either the banter or the disapproval of Huntington. What did Claire see in him anyhow, the soft and sensitive Claire, with her blue eyes and her pretty face always upturned so trustfully to him? For the first time she realized that she had distrusted Seth from the beginning.

In the midst of these confused and disconcerting thoughts, she became aware that she was no longer alone in the highway. Slowly as she rode, she was steadily overtaking a group of horsemen that appeared to be in difficulties. At intervals there was a commotion in the group, and clouds of dust from time to time concealed it from her sight. She reined up Tuesday, and hesitated, having had her fill of adventure for one day. Then, as the men seemed to be quite oblivious to her presence, and deeply absorbed in their own affair, curiosity drew her onward; and all her scruples were forgotten when she had ridden near enough to see the cause of the disturbance.

Three men on cow ponies were leading, driving, and avoiding a fourth horse, which was not a cow pony by any possible extension of the word. This horse, which wore neither saddle nor bridle, but only a rope around his neck, maintained an almost uninterrupted struggle with his guards. At the first near glimpse she caught of him through the dust, Marion uttered an exclamation of surprise and admiration. He was larger than the ponies ridden by the men, larger than any cow pony, yet not a big horse measured by any standard with which she was familiar. His lines were like those of a thoroughbred, and in his movements, for all his fury, there was a lightness, a daintiness, an eloquence that suggested nothing so much as the airy grace of a young girl skipping and dancing across a playground.

But it was his color especially that drew the cry from Marion’s lips. This was pale yellow, not the cream color of the familiar buckskin breed, but something golden; of a brilliant luster like gold leaf, but softer; rather like cloth-of-gold, with a living, quivering sheen. All the horse’s body was of this uniform, strange tint, but his mane and tail were a dull, tawny yellow deepening at the extremities into the hue of rusty gold. Though his hide was streaked with the sweat of his rebellion, and caked in places with the dust of the long road he had come, and welted by the whips of his tormentors, the color and the gloss shone out as undimmed as his proud spirit was undaunted by the hard knocks of his captivity.

The three men clearly were hard pressed. Their faces were coated thick with dust; their eyes were red-rimmed, bulging, and bloodshot; their movements were heavy with fatigue. Scarcely a sound escaped their lips as they watched for every fresh manoeuver of their prisoner, and fought doggedly to gain a yard or two along the road. In the silence and intensity of the struggle there was something savage, elemental, and incomparable, heightened by the extraordinary beauty of the animal and the uncouth appearance of the men. Between them, the captive and his captors, Marion’s sympathy was about equally divided. At every gallant sally made by the horse her heart leaped, and she hoped instinctively that he would go free. But then, the next instant, she was thrilled by the bold and shrewd counter-play of the cow-punchers that blocked the horse’s strategy.

Marion had scarcely comprehended all this, and imperfectly, when a terrifying thing occurred. The golden horse seemed to have paused and gathered all his forces for an effort that should make his best previous performance look like the silly antics of a colt. Suddenly, and without any warning manoeuver, he charged the full length of his rope straight at the man who held it coiled in his hand, with the end looped around the horn of his saddle. At the final bound, he reared as if to fall upon the cowboy and mangle him with his forefeet. But instead of finishing this attack, he whirled on his hind legs with incredible swiftness; and before the man could gather up the slack of the rope, or brace himself for the shock, the wild horse dashed across the road with all the strength and fury there was in him.

Marion screamed, and closed her eyes. There were dreadful sounds of falling bodies, of bodies dragged on the ground, with grunts and groans and smothered cries. Then silence. When she dared to look she could see at first only a welter of men and horses half-hidden by the dust. Near her lay the gold horse with his head twisted backward by the taut rope, which choked him until his eyes bulged, and foam dripped from his lips. The man who had held the lariat lay half under his fallen pony, whose efforts to rise were checked by the tightened rope still tied to the saddlebow. The two other men were on their feet, one clutching the straightened halter, the second deftly slipping a lariat around the prisoner’s pawing hind legs.

It was all over in a minute. The taut rope was cut near the saddle of the fallen pony, which then scrambled to its feet; the leader rose, shook himself, and proceeded phlegmatically to adjust the turned saddle, and to climb stiffly into it; the leading-rope was passed to him again, the second lariat was loosed from the outlaw’s feet, permitting him to rise; the other men remounted; and the procession moved on again in silence, scarcely a word having been spoken from the time the horse made his mad charge for liberty. And now he seemed to have had enough of the conflict, for he stepped forward obediently and, Marion fancied, as demurely as a child that has finished a naughty tantrum.

Then at last there was speech. One of the men had dropped back a few paces to be in the rear of the prisoner. He sat heavily in the saddle, leaning forward as if he would fall on the pony’s neck. But his eyes never left the golden horse, and when he spoke it was not to the girl, who had ridden close up to his side, but to himself, in a kind of hoarse and guttural soliloquy.

“But he ain’t done. He’s foolin’,” the man said again and again, as if he had started the words and could not stop them. “He ain’t done. He’s foolin’.”

Marion looked at him curiously. He was the typical cow-puncher, in blue flannel shirt and leather chaps, with the inevitable revolver hanging loosely at his hip, and a long quirt suspended from his right wrist. The dust on his face was stained with blood that had flowed from a raw bruise on his temple, and Marion now noticed that his left arm hung limp at his side.

“You’re hurt!” she said softly.

The man turned, and stared at her blankly, and she saw that his face was distorted into a set expression of pain.

“Arm busted,” he said, after a moment, as if surprised by her question; and then renewed his watch.

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“Throwed me.”

“You don’t mean you tried to ride him!”

“Jerked me. Th’ man ain’t born’t c’n ride ’im.”

“You were leading him?”

“No, just thought I was,” he said grimly. “He drug me.”

“When was that?”

“This morning about seven miles back.”

“Where did he come from?”

“San Luis.”

“Where is that, please?”

“Over yander,” he answered, nodding toward the western mountains.

Marion stared.

“You haven’t brought him over the mountains!”

“‘Round by Pinto Pass, an’ up through the canyon.”

“I’ve never seen a horse like that before,” she said, after a brief silence.

“Nor anybody else has,” he replied, with a note of pride.

“But he’s no cow pony surely.”

“You ain’t never heard o’ Sunnysides?”

“No.”

He looked at her curiously.

“Of course not,” he said apologetically. “You’re f’m the city. East, maybe?”

“Yes, I’m from New York.”

“Then it’s natch’ral. Everybody in these parts has heard o’ Sunnysides, though it’s not many that’s seen him.”

“Please tell me about him.”

The man’s eyes brightened a little.

“He’s got some strange blood in him,” he began. “Nobody knows what it is, but th’ ain’t another one o’ that color, nor his devil spirit, in the whole bunch. The rest of ’em’s just ordinary wild horses runnin’ up an’ down the sandhills of the San Luis. There’s people’t say he’s a ghost horse. Fact! An’ they say’t he’ll never stay caught. I don’t know. It’s certain’t he’s been caught three times, not countin’ the times cow-punchers an’ others has thought they’d caught him, but hadn’t. The first time he was caught actual he broke out o’ the strongest corral in the San Luis at night an’ nobody sees hide nor hair of ‘im not so much as a flicker o’ yellow in the moonlight. An’ back he was, headin’ the herd again.

“Nex’ time Thad Brinker ropes him. Thad’s the topnotch cow-puncher between the Black Hills an’ the Rio Grande, an’ he comes all the way f’m Dakoty when he hears the yarn about Sunnysides. Thad gits fourteen men to help him round up the bunch, an’ then he ropes the gold feller after a fight that’s talked about yit in the San Luis. He ropes him. An’ then what does Brinker do?”

He looked at Marion as if he dared her to make as many guesses as she wished. She shook her head.

“You ain’t the only one that’d never hit it,” he went on with satisfaction. “Thad ropes him, an’ while they lay there restin’, Sunnysides all tied up so he can’t move, an’ Brinker rubbin’ some bumps he’d come by in the fracas, just then the red comes up onto Sangre de Cristo. Brinker sees it Ever seen the sunset color on Sangre de Cristo? No? That’s a pity, Miss. Indeed, that’s a pity. But you’re f’m Noo York, you said.”

He paused again, and Marion began to realize the full degree of her provinciality and ignorance. She was from New York. What a pity!

“Well,” said the cowboy, as if resolved to do the best he could in the circumstances, “sometimes maybe three or four times a year it’s weird. It’s religious. The white peaks turn red as blood that’s why they’re called Sangre de Cristo. It’s Spanish for Blood of Christ. It makes you feel queer-like” He paused a moment thoughtfully, watching the golden horse as it stepped quietly, lightly, with head high, just ahead of them. “The red comes onto Sangre de Cristo, an’ Brinker sees it. He looks at the blood on the peaks, an’ then at the gold horse lyin’ there all torn an’ dirty, an’ this is what Brinker does, an’ maybe he couldn’t help it. He ups an’ cuts the ropes, an’ Sunnysides’s off to his waitin’ bunch, an’ they all go snortin’ down the valley.”

There was a touch of awe in the man’s voice, and Marion felt a little of it too. She looked toward the serrated barrier of mountains, in the very middle of which stood old Thunder under his pall of cloud. Beyond lay San Luis Sangre de Cristo and what romance! Would she ever Her eyes rested for a moment on the black pile that now, as always, fascinated and yet disturbed her.

“And you?” she said at length, turning to the cowboy.

“There wasn’t no red sunset this time,” the man answered, with a grim smile. “But we ain’t slep’ since,” he added, with a return of weariness.

“You caught him?” she asked admiringly.

“Us three.”

“But what are you doing with him here?”

“He’s sold, if we c’n find the man’t offered a thousand for him a year ago.”

“Who was he?”

But she knew already. Some swift flash of intuition told her there was but one man in Paradise Park who

“His name’s Haig, an’ he’s ”

“Philip Haig!” she murmured.

“You know him?”

“Yes no. That is, I’ve heard of him.”

It was on her lips, the explanation that the men had passed the branch road leading to Haig’s ranch, that they were now riding away from it. But she hesitated. And why? She did not know then; but an hour later she would be reproaching herself bitterly for that moment’s indecision. The words were almost spoken, but something checked them; and before she could make up her mind to follow her first natural impulse it was too late.

The leader of the party turned in his saddle, and called to the man at Marion’s side, who rode quickly forward and joined his companions. There was a conversation inaudible to her ears, and while she still pondered over her inexplicable hesitation the cowboys and the golden horse, followed by Marion, approached the group of squat, unpainted houses that bore without apology the name of Paradise.