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Show By ALAN Lt MAY W.N.U. Release tUV-i INSTALLMENT 13 THE STORY SO FAR: Dusty King and Lew Gordon had built ip a vast string of ranches. King was tilled by his powerful and unscrupulous ;ompetitor. Ben Thorpe. Bill Roper. King's adopted son, was determined to ivenge hi death In spite of the opposi- CHAPTER XVII Continued A shiver ran the length of Jody Gordon's body. Casually, as If they vere talking about getting breakfast, these quiet-faced men were speaking speak-ing of a proposed death the death ot a boy who had once been very :lose to her, and very dear. Suddenly Sud-denly she was able to glimpse the power and the depth of the animosity animosi-ty behind the mission of these men. No effort and no cost would seem to Ben Thorpe too great If In the end Bill Roper was struck out of existence. ex-istence. "Jim." the younger rider said soberly, so-berly, "if Roper's got his wild bunch with him Jim, it's such a fight as none of us have ever gone Into yet! When you stop to think that any time any minute a bunch of 'em may land In here" "Charley's on lookout," Jim Leathers Leath-ers shrugged. "We'll know In plenty time." A silence fell, a long silence. Heavy upon Jody Gordon was the panic of an open-space creature held helpless within close walls. Her voice was low and bitter. "You're set on holding me here?" "No call to put it that way," Jim Leathers said mildly, almost gently. gen-tly. But his eyes denied that mildness, mild-ness, so that behind him Jody sensed again the vast animosity built by the Texas Rustlers' War. "I want a flat answer," Jody said bravely. "Are you going to give me a horse, or not?" Once more Jim Leathers' canine teeth shewed in his peculiarly unpleasant un-pleasant grin. "Hell, no," he said. CHAPTER XVIII Perhaps Lew Gordon should have known that if Bill Roper learned of Jody's disappearance at all, Roper would come directly to him. And, knowing this, he should have prepared himself. But Lew Gordon had not met Roper face to face 4n nearly two years; and nothing was farther from his mind than the possibility pos-sibility that Roper would walk in upon him now. Upon this night Lew Gordon was pacing the main room of his little Miles City house; forty-eight hours had passed since his daughter's dis appearance and the old cattleman had lashed himself into a state of repressed fury comparable to that of a trap-baffled mountain lion, or a goaded bear. Everything that could be done to locate his daughter daugh-ter was being done. He knew that Jody's disappearance disappear-ance was voluntary, and he knew its purpose. The brief but highly informative in-formative note that Jody had left him told him that much. It simply said: "One of you must be made to see reason. I am going to talk to Billy Roper myself." What this did not tell him was where Roper was, or how Jody expected ex-pected to find him. Impatient of mystery and delay, he could not understand un-derstand why his many far-scattered cowboys could dig up no word. For all he knew, his daughter was by Hi is time lost somewhere in the frozen wastes of snow, in immediate immedi-ate desperate need of help. Lew Gordon sat alone for a little while. For the moment his helpless help-less anger was burned down ifito a heavy weariness. His mind was full of his daughter, whom he persistently persistent-ly pictured as a little girl, much more of a child than she actually was any more. Suddenly it struck him how curi ous 11 was mat in tnis Dare room in which he sat there was no sign of any kind that Jody had ever been here at alL This was partly because be-cause she had never lived here nor even been expected here; but it brought home to him sharply how much of his life had been given to cattle, how little to his daughter. It made him realize how little he knew his daughter, and how little he had ever given her of himself. This was Lew Gordon's state of mind as the door thrust open, letting let-ting in a brief lash of wintry wind; and he wheeled in his chair to face the last man on earth he had expected ex-pected to see. Bill Roper shook a powdering of dry snow off the roll of his coat collar, then stood looking at Lew Gordon in a cool hard silence as he pulled oft his gloves. Once this man had been almost a son to Lew Gordonthe Gor-donthe adopted son, in actuality, of Lew Gordon's dead partner. But a definite enmity now replaced what a little while ago had been a friendship friend-ship as deep and close as the variance vari-ance in their ages could permit. All the meaning of their association, almost al-most as long as Bill Roper's life, was gone, wiped out by those two smoky years since the death of Dusty King. For a moment or two Lew Gordon stared at him in utter disbelief. Then be whipped to his feet. "Where It she?" he demanded intensely, in-tensely, furiously. "What have you done with her?" Bill Roper no longer looked like the youngster Dusty King had raised on the trail. His gray eyes looked hard and extremely competent, old tlon of his sweetheart. Jody Cordon, and her father. After wiping Thorpe out of Texas. Roper conducted a great raid upon Thorpe's vast herds In Montana. Roper left for Lew Gordon's home when told that Jody had disappeared. Unable beyond his age, in a face so dark and lean-carved it was hard to recognize rec-ognize behind it the face of Dusty King's kid. He made no attempt to answer a question which was necessarily nec-essarily meaningless to him. He finished pulling off his gloves, unbuttoned unbut-toned his coat, and hooked his thumbs in his belt before he spoke. "I heard yesterday that Jody has turned up missing," he said. "I came to Miles hell-for-leather to see if it's so. From what I could find out down in the town, no word has come in on where she is. If that's true, I don't aim to give my time to anything else until she's found." "You mean to deny you know where she is?" Gordon shouted. Roper's voice did not change. "You talk like a fool," he said. Lew Gordon's eyes were savagely Intent upon Roper's face; he was trying to discover if this man could be believed. "You may be lying," he added at last, "and you may not, but I'll tell you this you sure won't leave here lio!' Lew Gordon's eyes were savagely savage-ly intent on Roper's face. till I find out where my girl is. You're wanted anyway, my laddie buck; there's a legal reward on your head, right now and part of it was put up by me." "I heard that." Bill Roper said. "When I get ready to leave, I'll leave, all right. My advice to you is to begin using your head. I may be in a kind of funny position. But it puts me where I know things about the Montana range that neither you nor your outfits have got any clue to. If you want your daughter back you better figure to use what I know about the Deep Grass." Lew Gordon compelled himself to temporize. What he couldn't get around was his own belief that Roper Rop-er knew something definite, specific, about where Jody had gone or had started out to go. He must have known also, in spite of the bluff to which anger had prompted him, that he could not hold Roper here when Roper decided to leave, nor force any information from him in any way whatever. "What is it you want to know?" he asked at last, helpless, and angry in his helplessness. "In the first place, I want to know what made you think Jody was with me?" "You swear," Lew Gordon demanded, de-manded, "you don't know the answer an-swer to that?" "I don't swear anything," Roper said. "I asked you a question, Lew." Lew Gordon hesitated. It was a good many years since anyone had talked to him in the tone Bill Roper took; but for once the purpose in hand outpowered the violence of his natural reaction. He turned from his litter of papers, and handed Bill Roper the little scrap of Jody's handwriting which was all she had left to indicate where she was gone. "One of you must be made to see reason. I am going to talk to Billy Roper myself." When Bill Roper had read that, the eyes of the two men met in hos-. tile question. "This looks mighty like a false lead, to me," Bill Roper said at last. "Like as if she aimed to cover up where she really went. Don't hardly seem likely she'd start out to come to me." "I know she went looking for you because she said she did. My girl don't lie." Roper shrugged. "Why should she do that?" to reconcile her father with Roper. Jody had set out with Shoshone Wllce to find him. They were attacked by some of Thorpe's men hiding In Roper's shack. Wilce escaped but Jody was captured. The men decided to hold her as bait "It was your own man talked her I into It," Gordon said with menace. "My own man? What man?" "A little sniveler called Shoshone Wilce. Everybody knows he was a scout coyote for you, before Texas ever run you out." "Nobody run meout of any place." Roper said; but his mind whipped to something else. It was true that he talked to certain men in the town before he had come here. Now suddenly sud-denly he knew that he had learned what he had come to find out. He buttoned his coat, pulled on his gloves. Gordon confronted him stubbornly. "I mean you shan't leave here without with-out telling me what you know." A glint of hard amusement was plain in Bill Roper's eyes. "I know what you've told me. But I'll add this onto it. I think you'll soon have back your girL I'm walking out of here now, Lew, because it's time for me to look into a couple of things. But I'll be seeing you if Thorpe don't get you first." The veins stood out sharply on Lew Gordon's forehead, hich-liehted by a faint dampness. "In all fairness fair-ness I'll tell you this," he said. "It's true I can't lift a gun on you, or on any man who stands with empty hands. But as soon as you're out of 1 that door, all Miles City will be on the Jump to see you don't get loose. Twenty thousand hangs over your head, my boy!" "Quite a tidy little nest egg," Roper Rop-er agreed. "I'd like to have it myself." my-self." A trick of the wind sent a great whirl of papers across the room as he went out." He had not come here without providing pro-viding that the horse which waited under his saddle was fresh and good. He struck westward now out of Miles City, unhurrying. At the half mile he found a broad cross trail where some random band of cattle had trampled the snow into a trackless ' pavement. He turned north in this, followed it for a mile, then swung northwest over markless snow. Now that this horse was warmed a little lit-tle he settled deep in his saddle and pushed the animal into a steady trot; at that gait, even in the snow, he could expect the tough range- orea pony xo last most or uie nignt. CHAPTER XIX A tired horse is not much inclined in-clined to shy, toward the end of a long day's travel; and when Bill Roper's horse snorted and jumped sidewise out of its tracks the rider looked twice, curiously, at the carcass car-cass which had spooked his pony. A dead pony on the winter range being be-ing a fairly common thing, he was about to ride on, when he noticed something about this particular dead pony which caused him to pull up and dismount for a closer examination. examina-tion. After leaving Lew Gordon he had ridden deep into the night. Half an hour would bring him within sight of the Fork Creek rendezvous, and he was eager to push on, so that his deduction as to Jody's whereabouts might have a quick answer, one way or the other; but when he had examined ex-amined the dead pony he was glad that he had checked. This was no winter-killed pony. The bright trace of frozen blood that had first caught Roper's eye was the result of two gunshot wounds in neck and quarters. A dark foreboding possessed Roper Rop-er as he studied the dead pony. Rop er himself was short-cutting through the hills, following no trail. The coincidence co-incidence that he had stumbled upon the carcass in all those snowy wastes could be accounted for only In one way: both Roper and the pony had followed a line of least resistance through the hills a line that had the Fork Creek rendezvous at its far end. His discovery told him that there had been fighting at Fork Creek within the last forty-eight forty-eight hours. If he was right in believing that Jody had come to Fork Creek-He Creek-He remounted and swung northward, north-ward, mercilessly whipping up his weary pony, but approaching the Fork Creek camp roundabout, behind be-hind masking hills and through hidden hid-den ravines. An hour passed before be-fore he threw down his reins and crept on hands and knees to the crest of a ridge commanding the valley of the Fork. He moved a half mile closer and resumed his watch; but for some time he could make out nothing. Then just as the sun set, three men moved out of the cabin. For a moment or two they stood in the snow close together. One went back into the cabin. The two others disappeared dis-appeared for a moment, to reappear mounted. They separated, and Roper Rop-er watched them ride in opposite directions di-rections up the nearest slopes of the hills. These passed beyond his sight, but in another minute or two their ways were retraced by two other riders. "Outposts," Roper decided. "Somebody's keeping a hell of a careful watch " (TO BE MISTIMED) |