But when he thought of this he thought a moment later
of a crowd rushing their horses through the night,
leaning over their saddles to break the wind more
easily, and all ready to kill on this man trail.
All at once a great hate welled up in him, and he
went on with gritting teeth.
It was out of this anger, oddly enough, that the memory
of the girl came to him. She was like the falling
of this starlight, pure, aloof, and strange and gentle.
It seemed to Andrew Lanning that the instant of seeing
her outweighed the rest of his life, but he would never
see her again. How could he see her, and if he
saw her, what would he say to her? It would not
be necessary to speak. One glance would be enough.
But, sooner or later, Bill Dozier would reach him.
Why not sooner? Why not take the chance, ride
to John Merchant’s ranch, break a way to the
room where the girl slept this night, smash open the
door, look at her once, and then fight his way out?
He swung out of the ravine and headed across the hills.
From the crest the valley was broad and dark below
him, and on the opposite side the hills were blacker
still. He let the pinto go down the steep slope
at a walk, for there is nothing like a fast pace downhill
to tear the heart out of a horse. Besides, it
came to him after he started, were not the men of
Bill Dozier apt to miss this sudden swinging of the
trail?
In the floor of the valley he sent the pinto again
into the stretching canter, found the road, and went
on with a thin cloud of the alkali dust about him
until the house rose suddenly out of the ground, a
black mass whose gables seemed to look at him like
so many heads above the tree-tops.
The house would have been more in place on the main
street of a town than here in the mountain desert;
but when the first John Merchant had made his stake
and could build his home as it pleased him to build,
his imagination harked back to a mid-Victorian model,
built of wood, with high, pointed roofs, many carved
balconies and windows, and several towers. Here
the second John Merchant lived with his son Charles,
whose taste had quite outgrown the house.
But to the uneducated eye of Andrew Lanning it was
a great and dignified building. He reined the
pinto under the trees to look up at that tall, black
mass. It was doubly dark against the sky, for
now the first streaks of gray light were pale along
the eastern horizon, and the house seemed to tower
up into the center of the heavens. Andy sighed
at the thought of stealing through the great halls
within. Even if he could find an open window,
or if the door were unlatched, how could he find the
girl?
Another thing troubled him. He kept canting his
ear with eternal expectation of hearing the chorus
of many hoofs swinging toward him out of the darkness.
After all, it was not a simple thing to put Bill Dozier
off the trail. When a horse neighed in one of
the corrals, Andy started violently and laid his fingertips
on his revolver butt.
