said La Belle Geraldine, “you’ve got me beat. You’ve got me feeling like a toe-dancer in the mud. You’re the original mystery, all right. To hear people talk of you, you’d think Black Jim put the ‘damn’ in ‘death’; but if I just met you at a dance, I’d think you were so green you didn’t know the first violin from the drummer.”
“Speakin’ in general,” replied the bandit carefully, “I get your drift, but even if I begin allowing for the wind—”
“Meaning the way I talk, I suppose,” broke in Jerry.
“Even allowin’ for that,” went on Black Jim, “I don’t think I could shoot straight enough to ring the bell. You’ve got me side-stepped.”
“Go on,” said Jerry, “I’ll keep them amused till you bring on the heavy stuff. What do you mean?”
“Well,” drawled Black Jim, “you look a heap more like a picture of a lady I once saw in a soap ad than anything else. You’re all pink an’ white an’ soft, with eyes like a two-day calf.”
“Go right on, Shakespeare,” murmured La Belle Geraldine; “you can’t make me mad.”
“When I brought you up here,” said Black Jim, “I figured that when you come to, you’d begin yellin’ an’ hollerin’ an’ raisin’ Cain. I was sort of steelin’ myself to it when you opened your eyes a while ago. Lady “—here he leaned across the table earnestly—” I was expectin’ a plumb hell of a time.” He grinned broadly. “I got it, all right, but not the kind I thought.”
“I sure panned you some,” nodded Jerry. “I thought—”
She stopped. To tell Black Jim that she thought she was talking to Frederick Montgomery when she recovered from her faint, would be to expose that worthy; for once it were known that he was only a temporary bandit, his days in the valley would be short indeed. In his pose as a man-killer, an ex-convict, a felon in the shadow of the law, he was as safe as a child in the bosom of his family. Otherwise, a dozen practiced fighters would be hot on his trail. “I was just sore,” concluded La Belle, “to think I had balled up everything by flashing a small-time act on a big-time stage.”
The pun amused her so that she broke into hearty laughter. The sound reacted on both her and the bandit. Though he fell silent again and scarcely spoke for the next hour or more, she thought that she could detect a greater kindliness about his eyes.
He went about cleaning up the tin dishes with singular deftness. When he concluded he turned abruptly upon her.
“Time to turn in. You sleep there. I bunk in the next room. S’long!”
He turned at the entrance of the other apartment.
“How’s your hand?”
“Doing fine,” smiled Jerry. “S’long, Jim!”
VII. JERRY TAKES LESSONS
She was still smiling when she slipped down among the blankets. For some time she lay there wondering. By all the laws of Nature she should not have closed an eye for anxiety. She pictured all the dangers of her position one by one, and then—smiled again! She could not be afraid of this man. The very terror he inspired in others was a warm sense of protection around her. The weary muscles of her body relaxed by slow degrees. The wind hummed like a muted violin through the trees outside. She slept.
When she woke, a fire burned on the hearth brightly again, and the room filled with the savor of fried bacon and steaming coffee. Black Jim sat at the table draining his tin cup. Jerry sat up with a yawn.
“Hello, Jim!” she called. “Say, this mountain air is all the dope for hard sleeping; what?”
He lowered the cup and smiled back at her.
“I’m glad you-all slept well,” he drawled, and rose from the table.
“I’m goin’ off on a bit of a trip today,” he said, “but before I go I want to tell you—”
“My name’s Geraldine,” she answered, “but most people shorten it up to Jerry.”
“Which I’d tell a man jest about hits you off,” he answered. “You ain’t seen much of the valley. I suppose you’ll want Jo explore around a lot, an’ you can go as far as you like; but jest pack that shootin’-iron with you by way of a friend. Come here to the door and I’ll show you how far you can go.”
She followed him obediently, and standing at the entrance to the shack looked out over the silver-misted valley. Four guardian peaks surrounded a gorge about a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, narrowing toward the farther end, where the entrance gap could not have been more than a hundred yards in width. The shack of Black Jim huddled against the precipitous wall of rock at the opposite extremity of the valley and stood upon ground higher than the rest of the floor. Great trees rose on all sides, and what she saw was made out through the spaces between these monsters.
“Where are the others?” she asked.
He waved his hand in a generous circle.
“All around. Maybe you could wander about for a month and never find where they stay. But if you meet ‘em they’ll be gladder to see you than you’ll be to see them.”
“And if I stay right here,” she asked him, “would I be in danger from them here?”
“They came last night,” he said grimly, “but I got an idea they won’t be in no hurry to come again. At the edge of those trees is a deadline. They know if they come beyond that they’re takin’ their own chances. If you see ‘em come, make your gun talk for you.”
He stepped through the door and she followed him a pace into the open air. The big roan horse, lean of neck and powerful of shoulder, stood near, his bridle-reins hanging over his head. Black Jim swung into the saddle.
“Jest hobble this one idea so it don’t never get outside your brain,” said Black Jim. “The men in this valley are only up here because they wanted to get above the law—and they are above it. The only law they know, the only law I know, is to play square with each other. Partner, I’ve busted that law by bringin’ you in here. Accordin’ to all the rules there ain’t no place for any one here exceptin’ the men that’s beyond the law. I dunno what they’ll do. Maybe it’s war. Maybe it ain’t. Rope that idea and stick a brand on it. S’long, Jerry. An’ don’t get near that gap down to the far end of the valley.”
He spurred the roan through the trees and disappeared, leaving Jerry to listen to the rapidly diminishing sound of the horse’s feet.
Then the silence dropped like a cloak about her, save for the light humming of the wind through the upper branches. She went back and buckled the revolver with its holster about her waist. She felt strangely as if that act placed her at once among the ranks of those who, as Black Jim said, were “above the law.”
A great impulse to collapse in the middle of the floor and weep rose in her. All that life of gaiety, of action, of many butterfly hopes, was lost to her. Years might pass
