The Flying U's Last Stand by B. M. Bower (ebook reader with highlighter TXT) 📕

to find out, and he took the method in the face of his weariness. He climbed the peak also, with now and then a footprint to guide him. He was not one of these geniuses at trailing who could tell, by a mere footprint, what had been in Miss Allen's mind when she had passed that way; but for all that it seemed logical that she had gone up there to see if she could not glimpse the kid—or possibly the way home.

At the top he did not loiter. He saw, before he reached the height, where Miss Allen had come down again—and he saw where she had, to avoid a clump of boulders and a broken ledge, gone too far to one side. He followed that way. She had descended at an angle, after that, which took her away from the canyon.

In Montana there is more of daylight after the sun has gone than there is in some other places. Andy, by hurrying, managed to trail Miss Allen to the bottom of the peak before it grew really dusky. He knew that she had been completely lost when she reached the bottom, and had probably wandered about at random since then. At any rate, there were no tracks anywhere save her own, so that he felt less anxiety over her safety than, when he had started out looking for her.

Andy knew these breaks pretty well. He went over a rocky ridge, which Miss Allen had not tried to cross because to her it seemed exactly in the opposite direction from where she had started, and so he came to her horse again. He untied the poor beast and searched for a possible trail over the ridge to where his own horse waited; and by the time he had found one and had forced the horse to climb to the top and then descend into the gulch, the darkness lay heavy upon the hills.

He picketed Miss Allen's horse with his rope', and fashioned a hobble for his own mount. Then he ate a little of the food he carried and sat down to rest and smoke and consider how best he could find Miss Allen or the Kid—or both. He believed Miss Allen to be somewhere not far away—since she was afoot, and had left her lunch tied to the saddle. She could not travel far without food.

After a little he climbed back up the ridge to where he had noticed a patch of brush, and there he started a fire. Not a very large one, but large enough to be seen for a long distance where the vision was not blocked by intervening hills. Then he sat down beside it and waited and listened and tended the fire. It was all that he could do for the present, and it seemed pitifully little. If she saw the fire, he believed that she would come; if she did not see it, there was no hope of his finding her in the dark. Had there been fuel on the high peak, he might have gone up there to start his fire; but that was out of the question, since the peak was barren.

Heavy-eyed, tired in every fibre of his being, Andy dragged up a dead buck-bush and laid the butt of it across his blaze. Then he lay down near it—and went to sleep as quickly as if he had been chloroformed.

It may have been an hour after that—it may have been more. He sat up suddenly and listened. Through the stupor of his sleep he had heard Miss Allen call. At least, he believed he had heard her call, though he knew he might easily have dreamed it. He knew he had been asleep, because the fire had eaten part of the way to the branches of the bush and had died down to smoking embers. He kicked the branch upon the coals and a blaze shot up into the night. He stood up and walked a little distance away from the fire so that he could see better, and stood staring down into the canyon.

From below he heard a faint call—he was sure of it. The wonder to him was that he had heard it at all in his sleep. His anxiety must have been strong enough even then to send the signal to his brain and rouse him.

He shouted, and again he heard a faint call. It seemed to be far down the canyon. He started running that way.

The next time he shouted, she answered him more clearly. And farther along he distinctly heard and recognized her voice. You may be sure he ran, after that!

After all, it was not so very far, to a man who is running recklessly down hill. Before he realized how close he was he saw her standing before him in the starlight. Andy did not stop. He kept right on running until he could catch her in his arms; and when he had her there he held her close and then he kissed her. That was not proper, of course—but a man does sometimes do terribly improper things under the stress of big emotions; Andy had been haunted by the fear that she was dead.

Well, Miss Allen was just as improper as he was, for that matter. She did say “Oh!” in a breathless kind of way, and then she must have known who he was. There surely could be no other excuse for the way she clung to him and without the faintest resistance let him kiss her.

“Oh, I've found him!” she whispered after the first terribly unconventional greetings were over. “I've found him, Mr. Green. I couldn't come up to the fire, because he's asleep and I couldn't carry him, and I wouldn't wake him unless I had to. He's just down here—I was afraid to go very far, for fear of losing him again. Oh, Mr. Green! I—”

“My name is Andy,” he told her. “What's your name?”

“Mine? It's—well, it's Rosemary. Never mind now. I should think you'd be just wild to see that poor little fellow—he's a brick, though.”

“I've been wild,” said Andy, “over a good many things—you, for one. Where's the Kid?”

They went together, hand in hand—terribly silly, wasn't it?—to where the Kid lay wrapped in the gray blanket in the shelter of a bank. Andy struck a match and held it so that he could see the Kid face—and Miss Allen, looking at the man whose wooing had been so abrupt, saw his mouth tremble and his lashes glisten as he stared down while the match-blaze lasted.

“Poor little tad—he's sure a great Kid,” he said huskily when the match went out. He stood up and put his arm around Miss Allen just as though that was his habit. “And it was you that found him!” he murmured with his face against hers. “And I've found you both, thank God.”