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Show INSTALLMENT 17 THE STORT SO FAR: tlon by his tweetheart, Jody Gordon, and her father. After wiping Thorpe out of Texat, Roper conducted a great raid upon Thorpe't vast herds In Montana Both Thorpe and Lew Gordon placed heavy rewardt upon Roper't head. He , Bill Roper started to say, "Jody, how on earth" Jody did not seem to see him; she appeared to be thinking only of the slim youngster whom the cowboy carried. The cowboy laid the limp figure on the floor of the kitchen, ripped off his own neckerchief and spread it over the youngster's face. Jody Gordon methodically shut the door. Then she dropped to the floor beside the fallen youngster, lifted his head into her lap, and gave way to a violent sobbing. The high-keyed high-keyed nervous excitement that had sustained her through the hard ne-cessitles ne-cessitles of action was unstrung abruptly, now that her work was done; it left nothing behind it but a great weariness, and the bleak consciousness con-sciousness that this boy was dead because of her. Roper and the King-Gordon cowboy cow-boy stood uncertainly for a moment. Then the cowboy picked up Leathers Leath-ers where he lay struggling for breath, carried him into the back room and put him down on a bunk. For a moment he hesitated; then closed the door between the two rooms, leaving Jody alone. "Seems like the kid got Jim Leathers; Leath-ers; but Jim Leathers got the kid." "Daid?" Old Joe asked. "Deader'n hell! Jody takes it awful aw-ful hard." The cowboy cut loose Bill Roper's hands, and together they lifted Old J . , Gordon had built b ranches. King was M uisnd unscrupulous BUI Roper, 'determined to vn-Continued S to Pe of his warn- Sde no effort to move V standing square In fdrew his gun. A but ' J into the casing beside ) reportofi carbine sound-where sound-where beyond Jim $ twice; then stepped barred the heavy 5ment the eyes of Kane irJ questioned each other, lip Pierce," Kane said. u'j beat hell that they i Hit just this minute-" ai very cool and quiet irately be pulled on his -Get out the back, tin-ia tin-ia and get your man m like we ,tand " bet' here, way we are, than the open, what with" burn us out if we try to going, you!" , Roper after him, Kane the dark of the back iwore as he rummaged e, bis sheepskin, neither swore nor hur- aj deliberately, he blew j ap, hobbled across the j e other. Then all hell ) ' at once. ) e frosted pane of the ten-it ten-it it the end of the room :t with a brittle ring of s. In the black aperture lie face of a boy, pale ted, so young-looking that lnost have been called a heavy .44 with which he ed the window thrust ; t broken pane; it blazed , twice. ers, staggering back-! back-! be had been hit with a :ed once, from the level The face vanished, but after it was gone the ;eld the gun dangled limp room. Then the gun thud-e thud-e floor," and the lifeless jeared. ers went down, a broken ;s broke out in the store-'.hers store-'.hers groped for his gun, e, but could not. so had been dragged Into areroom by Red Kane, .''sting of the wind as the m smashed open, and 10 tear free as the guns e stumbled over piled fattened himself against The blind blasting in the ( back room lasted long t three guns to empty Their smashing voices ith an odd suddenness, . .' as they had opened. : a voice said, "In God's save a light!" seemed a long time a ti uncertainly, and Rop- glance estimated the nation. In the back room ea were down Red Kane whom Roper immedi-mei immedi-mei as an old King-boy King-boy called Old Joe. Sicker of the match was to a steady glow as a s found and lighted. Rop-recognize Rop-recognize the other man 3i-the cowboy who had lantern with one hand, 8 six-gun still ready In lnier stooped over Old 'hurt bad?" ' my laig, my laig." 'stepped over the Inert ae to the door, and sur-silent sur-silent kitchen. E'-hers! Somebody got Jim !nd got him hard!" back into the rear lu're Bill Roper, aren't s'" the others?" 5ren't any others. They ,J' on Dry Camp's trail, "day before yesterday." r'here? You sure?" ;! Leathers are the only both hands clasped on 11 g. spoke between set Jody? For God's Jody!" Gordon cowboy whom ot know, went out, his ;8 with his long strides, here," Roper told Old "She got loose two Ce isn't here! She come as!" 'a? But you're from Gor-;u"e Gor-;u"e camp, aren't you? I 'filcWee"ttoMiles City with went to Miles. She f J,8,Was bringing you ' nat she d heard him Gme to us, because we 'uto amp nearest here, ,'nthear of nothing but to crack you loose. "cehe's daid." ,;Jas dazed. "I thought :LC.Wboy now came surd the cabin an kifV his arms; and ' Gordon herself fol-' fol-' uPn his heels. Her fiek? Sharp flush ekbones did not con- was captured by Leathers and Kan. iwo of Thorpe's men. Leathers' girl! Marqulta. loved Roper. She made a des-perate des-perate but (utile effort to savt him. Th men were preparing to hang Roper when tney heard the sound of running horses. downed Jim Leathers. The sobs that convulsed her were dying off now. leaving her deeply fatigued, and profoundly pro-foundly shaken. "You might as well get up now," Marqulta said. Her soft Mexican slur gave an odd turn to the blunt American words she used. "The fight's over; and that boy you've got there is dead as a herring." With a visible effort Jody Gordon Gor-don pulled herself together, and gen-tly gen-tly lowered the head of the dead boy to the floor. She got up shakily, and for a moment looked at Marqulta. Mar-qulta. "Why did you come here?" Mar-quita Mar-quita asked at last Her voice continued con-tinued gently curious nothing more. "I knew Billy Roper was alive," Jody told her. "Because I was watching when Leathers left Fork Creek with him. I already knew they meant to take him to Ben Thorpe at Sundance, for the reward. That would be death, to him. And I knew they meant to stop over here on the way. So I got the boys, from our Red Butte camp, and I come on . . ." "You are a very foolish little girl," Marquita said. "Luck saved you; but if this camp had been full of men, it would have been suicide." "Wouldn't you have done the same?" Marquita shrugged impatiently. "I feel very sorry for you," she said. "Why?" "Because I think you are in love with this Billy Roper." "Why do you say that?" "Es claro," Marquita said. "It is plain. And it's a pity; because this kind of man is not for you." At first Jody Gordon did not answer. an-swer. But behind the softness of Marquita's voice was a cogency as strange as her American words a cogency that would not be ignored. Here Jody found herself facing a woman whom she could not possibly have understood. Marquita's careless, care-less, even reckless mode of life, her uncoded relationships with men-there men-there was not an aspect of Marquita's Mar-quita's life which did not deny every ev-ery value of which Jody was aware. Marquita appeared to thrive and flower in a mode of life in which Jody incorrectly believed she herself her-self would have died. "I don't understand you." Marquita's glance swept the room the bare chinked walls, the dead boy. Her glance seemed to go beyond be-yond the door, where they were dressing Old Joe's wound; beyond the walls, to the cold wind-swept prairie, where men still rode this night, though morning was close. "What do you know," she said "what can you know of the lives of these men? Jody lifted her head, then, and looked at Marquita; and again the simple words and the mask-like face of Marquita seemed to have a meaning mean-ing for which she groped. In the silence that followed, it came to Jody that the night's fighting was not yet over, that she must still fight for herself and for Bill and somehow some-how for that foolish house in Ogalla-la, Ogalla-la, with its tall tower overlooking the plain. "Do you ride with them?" the gentle, inexorable voice went on. "Do you share their blankets? Do you ride under their ponchos in the rain? Where are you when their guns speak? Who prays for them at dawn, knees down in this God-forsaken snow?" Marquita paused, and her body swung, lazily assured, across a shadowy angle of the room toward the closed door that had hid Roper, working now over the wounded men. the doorposts and it seemed to Jody, watching her, as if Marquita were a barrier between what might have been Jody's, and that she had lost now. ( "You don't have to bar the door, she said. Marquita's hands came away from the doorposts. "I kno v I don't." The words were so indolently ca-denced ca-denced that they might have been spoken in Spanish. And at their soft assurance something awoke in Jody Gordon . . . Something was still worth fighting for. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Bill Roper, but it flowed deep into the roots of her life; deeper than her life with ona mari-with any man-could ever flow. As Jody looked at Marquita, strange things came to her, that she herself could not have put into words. She knew that Marquita and all her kind would presently pass. Perhaps Bill Roper, like all the rest of his bold riders, must also pass; but now suddenly Jody knew that whatever else might vanish from this prairie, what she herself stood for would remain. When she spoke at last, she scarcely recognized her own voice. "I guess I was wrong, she said. Her words had a strange echo of Marquita's own directness You're Bill Roper's girl la that what you wanted to tell. me? The dance hall girl's words fell softly. "Si. that is what 1 wanted von to know." y (TO BE COS'TISL ED) "Now you go and keep Miss Gordon company." Joe onto the other bunk. Roper cut Marquita free. "Get me that kettle of water off the stove," Bill Roper ordered Marquita; Mar-quita; and when she had brought it he said, "Now you go and keep Miss Gordon company for a little while." Marquita left them, closing the door behind her. Old Joe kept talking to them in a gaspy sort of way, as they did what they could for his wound. "The kid was scared to death to come. Jody seen that, and tried to send him back, with some trumped-up trumped-up message or something. Naturally Natural-ly he seen through that and wouldn't go. Now most likely she blames herself that he's daid. Lucky for us that Leathers' main outfit wasn't here." "You mean just you three was going go-ing to jump the whole Leathers outfit, out-fit, and the Walk Lasham cowboys, too?" "Not three four," Old Joe said. "Don't ever figure that girl don't pull her weight. We been laying up here on the hill since before dusk. She aimed we should use the same stunt you used at Fork Crick-bust Into 'em just before daylight. Then somebody fires off a gun down here, and she loses her haid, and we come on down. It was her smashed her horse against the door, trying to bust it in. She blindfolded him with her coat threw it over his haid-and haid-and poured on whip and spur, and she bangs into the planks. Broke his neck, most like; cain't see why she wasn't killed" "Just you four," Roper marveled, "were going to tackle the whole works, not even knowing how many were here?" "We tried to tell her it couldn t be done But you can't talk any sense into a woman, once she gets a notion no-tion In her nut." CHAPTER XXIII Marquita. closing the door of the storeroom behind her. for some moments mo-ments stood looking down at Jody Gordon. Jody still sat on the floor upon her lap the head of the boy who had |