'Firebrand' Trevison
"there's been violence! The fire, the blood on your hand, the record, your
ride here--What does it mean?"
"It means that I've been denied my rights, and I've taken them. Is there
any crime in that? Look here!" He took another step and stood looking down
at her. "I'm not saying anything about Corrigan. You know what we think of
each other, and we'll fight it out, man to man. But the fact that a woman
is engaged to one man doesn't bar another man from the game. And I'm in
this game to the finish. And even if I don't get you I don't want you to
be mixed up in these schemes and plots--you're too good a girl for that!"
"What do you mean?" She stiffened, looking scornfully at him, her chin
held high, outraged innocence in her manner. His cold grin of frank
disbelief roused her to furious indignation. What right had he to question
her integrity to make such speeches to her after his disgraceful affair
with Hester Harvey?
"I do not care to discuss the matter with you!" she said, her lips stiff.
"Ha, ha!" The bitter derision in his laugh made her blood riot with
hatred. He walked toward the door and took up the rifle, dimly remembering
she had used the same words to him once before, when he had met her as she
had been riding toward Manti. Of course she wouldn't discuss such a
thing--he had been a blind fool to think she would. But it proved her
guilt. Swinging the rifle under his arm, he opened the door, turned when
on the threshold and bowed to her.
"I'm sorry I troubled you, Miss Benham," he said. He essayed to turn,
staggered, looked vacantly around the room, his lips in a queerly cold
half-smile, and then without uttering a sound pitched forward, one
shoulder against the door jamb, and slid slowly to his knees, where he
rested, his head sinking limply to his chest. He heard the girl cry out
sharply and he raised his head with an effort and smiled reassuringly at
her, and when he felt her hands on his arm, trying to lift him, he laughed
aloud in self-derision and got to his feet, hanging to the door jamb.
"I'm sorry, Miss Benham," he mumbled. "I lost some blood, I suppose.
Rotten luck, isn't it. I shouldn't have stopped." He turned to go, lurched
forward and would have fallen out of the door had not the girl seized and
steadied him.
He did not resist when she dragged him into the room and closed the door,
but he waved her away when she tried to take his arm and lead him toward
the kitchen where, she insisted, she would prepare a stimulant and food
for him. He tottered after her, tall and gaunt, his big, lithe figure
strangely slack, his head rocking, the room whirling around him. He had
held to the record and the rifle; the latter by the muzzle, dragging it
after him, the record under his arm.
But his marvelous constitution, a result of his clean living and outdoor
life, responded quickly to the stimulation of food and hot drinks, and in
half an hour he got up, still a little weak, but with some color in his
cheeks, and shame-facedly thanked the girl. He realized now, that he
should not have come here; the past few hours loomed in his thoughts like
a wild nightmare in which he had lost his sense of proportion, yielding to
the elemental passions that had been aroused in his long, sleepless
struggle, making him act upon impulses that he would have frowned
contemptuously away in a normal frame of mind.
"I've been nearly crazy, I think," he said to the girl with a wan smile of
self-accusation. "I want you to forget what I said."
"What happened at Manti?" she demanded, ignoring his words.
He laughed at the recollection, tucking his rifle under his arm,
preparatory to leaving. "I went after the record. I got it. There was a
fight. But I got away."
"But the fire!"
"I was forced to smash a lamp in the courthouse. The wick fell into the
oil, and I couldn't delay to--"
"Was anybody hurt--besides you?"
"Braman's dead." The girl gasped and shrank from him, and he saw that she
believed he had killed the banker, and he was about to deny the crime when
Agatha's voice shrilled through the doorway:
"There are some men coming, Rosalind!" And then, vindictively: "I presume
they are desperadoes--too!"
"Deputies!" said Trevison. The girl clasped her hands over her breast in
dismay, which changed to terror when she saw Trevison stiffen and leap
toward the door. She was afraid for him, horrified over this second
lawless deed, dumb with doubt and indecision--and she didn't want them to
catch him!
He opened the door, paused on the threshold and smiled at her with
straight, hard lips.
"Braman was--"
"Go!" she cried in a frenzy of anxiety; "go!"
He laughed mockingly, and looked at her intently. "I suppose I will never
understand women. You are my enemy, and yet you give me food and drink and
are eager to have me escape your accomplice. Don't you know that this
record will ruin him?"
"Go, go!" she panted.
"Well, you're a puzzle!" he said. She saw him leap into the saddle, and
she ran to the lamp, blew out the flame, and returned to the open door, in
which she stood for a long time, listening to rapid hoof beats that
gradually receded. Before they died out entirely there came the sound of
many others, growing in volume and drawing nearer, and she beat her hands
together, murmuring:
"Run, Nigger--run, run, run!"
* * * * *
She closed the door as the hoof beats sounded in the yard, locking it and
retreating to the foot of the stairs, where Agatha stood.
"What does it all mean?" asked the elder woman. She was trembling.
"Oh, I don't know," whispered the girl, gulping hard to keep her voice
from breaking. "It's something about Trevison's land. And I'm afraid,
Aunty, that there is something terribly wrong. Mr. Corrigan says it
belongs to him, and the court in Manti has decided in his favor. But
according to the record in Trevison's possession, _he_ has a clear title
to it."
"There, there," consoled Agatha; "your father wouldn't permit--"
"No, no!" said the girl, vehemently; "he wouldn't. But I can't understand
why Trevison fights so hard if--if he is in the wrong!"
"He is a desperado, my dear; a wild, reckless spirit who has no regard for
law and order. Of course, if these men are after him, you will tell them
he was here!"
"No!" said the girl, sharply; "I shan't!"
"Perhaps you shouldn't," acquiesced Agatha. She patted the girl's
shoulder. "Maybe it would be for the best, dear--he may be in the right.
And I think I understand why you went riding with him so much, dear. He
may be wild and reckless, but he's a man--every inch of him!"
The girl squeezed her relative's hand and went to open the door, upon
which had come a loud knock. Corrigan stood framed in the opening. She
could see his face only dimly.
"There's no occasion for alarm, Miss Benham," he said, and she felt that
he could see her better than she could see him, and thus must have
discerned something of her emotion. "I must apologize for this noisy
demonstration. I believe I'm a little excited, though. Has Trevison passed
here within the last hour or so?"
"No," she said, firmly.
He laughed shortly. "Well, we'll get him. I've split my men up--some have
gone to his ranch, the others have headed for Levins' place."
"What has happened?"
"Enough. Judge Lindman disappeared--the supposition is that he was
abducted. I placed some men around the courthouse, to safeguard the
records, and Trevison broke in and set fire to the place. He also robbed
the safe in the bank, and killed Braman--choked him to death. A most
revolting murder. I'm sorry I disturbed you--good night."
The girl closed the door as he left it, and leaned against it, weak and
shaking. Corrigan's voice had a curious note in it. He had told her he was
sorry to have disturbed her, but the words had not rung true--there had
been too much satisfaction in them. What was she to believe from this
night's events? One thought leaped vividly above the others that rioted in
her mind: Trevison had again sinned against the law, and this time his
crime was murder! She shrank away from the door and joined Agatha at the
foot of the stairs.
"Aunty," she sobbed; "I want to go away. I want to go back East, away from
this lawlessness and confusion!"
"There, there, dear," soothed Agatha. "I am sure everything will come out
all right. But Trevison _does_ look to be the sort of a man who would
abduct a judge, doesn't he? If I were a girl, and felt that he were in
love with me, I'd be mighty careful--"
"That he wouldn't abduct you?" laughed the girl, tremulously, cheered by
the change in her relative's manner.
"No," said Agatha, slyly. "I'd be mighty careful that he _got_ me!"
"Oh!" said the girl, and buried her face in her aunt's shoulder.
CHAPTER XXV
IN THE DARK
Trevison faced the darkness between him and the pueblo with a wild hope
pulsing through his veins. Rosalind Benham had had an opportunity to
deliver him into the hands of his enemy and she had not taken advantage of
it. There was but one interpretation that he might place upon her failure
to aid her accomplice. She declined to take an active part in the scheme.
She had been passive, content to watch while Corrigan did the real work.
Possibly she had no conception of the enormity of the crime. She had been
eager to have Corrigan win, and influenced by her affection and his
arguments she had done what she could without actually committing herself
to the robbery. It was a charitable explanation, and had many flaws, but
he clung to it persistently, nurturing it with his hopes and his hunger
for her, building it up until it became a structure of logic firmly fixed
and impregnable. Women were easily influenced--that had been his
experience with them--he was forced to accept it as a trait of the sex. So
he absolved her, his hunger for her in no way sated at the end.
His thoughts ran to Corrigan in a riot of rage that pained him like a
knife thrust; his lust for vengeance was a savage, bitter-visaged demon
that held him in its clutch and made his temples pound with a yearning to
slay. And that, of course, would have to be the end. For the enmity that
lay between them was not a thing to be settled by the law--it was a man to
man struggle that could be settled in only one way--by the passions,
naked, elemental, eternal. He saw it coming; he leaped to meet it,
eagerly.
Every stride the black horse made shortened by that much the journey he
had resolved upon, and Nigger never ran as he was running now. The black
seemed to feel that he was on the last lap of a race that had lasted for
more than forty-eight hours, with short intervals of rest between, and he
did his best without faltering.
Order had come out of the chaos of plot and counterplot; Trevison's course
was to be as direct as his hatred. He would go to the pueblo, take Judge
Lindman and the record to Santa Fe, and then return to Manti for a last
meeting with Corrigan.
A late moon, rising from a cleft in some distant mountains, bathed the
plains with a silvery flood when horse and rider reached a point within a
mile of the pueblo, and Nigger covered the remainder of the distance at a
pace that made the night air drum in Trevison's ears. The big black slowed
as he came to a section of broken country surrounding the ancient city,
but he got through it quickly and skirted the sand slopes, taking the
steep acclivity leading to the ledge of the pueblo in a dozen catlike
leaps and coming to a halt in the shadow of an adobe house, heaving
deeply, his rider flung himself out of the saddle and ran along the ledge
to the door of the chamber where he had imprisoned Judge Lindman.
Trevison could see no sign of the Judge or Levins. The ledge was bare,