"Lemme go with you. Lemme go and try to help."
The brisk wind up the gulch set her clothes fluttering, stirred the hair about the rim of her hat, and she seemed to Buck more gracefully, more beautifully young than he had ever seen her; but her face was like stone.
"You'd be no help," she answered. "When I get to the place I may have to meet him! Would you face him, Buck?"
His hand fell away from the bridle. It was not so much what she said as the cold, steady voice with which she spoke that unnerved him. Then, without a farewell, she turned the brown horse around and struck across the meadow at a swift gallop. Buck turned to meet the sick face of Haines.
"Well?" he said.
"Let me have that flask."
Buck produced a metal "life-saver," and Haines with nervous hands unscrewed the top and lifted it to his lips. He lowered it after a long moment and stood bracing himself against the wall.
"It was hell, Buck. God help me if I ever have to go through a thing like that again."
"I see what you done," said Buck angrily. "You walked right in and took your story in both hands and knocked her down with it. Haines, of all the ornery, thick-headed cayuses I ever see, you're the most out-beatin'est!"
"I couldn't help it."
"Why not?"
"When I went in she took one look at me and then jumped up and stood as straight as a pine tree.
"'Lee,' she said, 'what have you heard?'"
"'About what?' I asked her, and I looked sort of indifferent."
"Dan!" snorted Buck. "She could see death an' hell written all over your face, most like."
"I suppose," muttered Haines, "I—I was sick!
"'Tell me!' she said, coming close up.
"'He's gone wild again,' was all I could put my tongue to.
"Then I blurted it out. I had to get rid of the damned story some way, and the quickest way seemed the best—how Dan rode into Alder and did the killing.
"When I got to that she gave one cry."
"I know," said Buck, shuddering. "Like something dying."
"Then she asked me to saddle her horse. I begged her to let me go with her, and she said to me what she just now said to you. And so I stayed. What good could we do against that devil?"
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE MUSIC
To the last ravine Kate's horse carried her easily enough, but that mountain pass was impenetrable through all its length to anything except the uncanny agility of Satan, and so she left the cow-pony in the bottom of the gorge and climbed the last rise on foot.
On the mountainside above her, it was not easy to locate the cave, for the slope was clawed into ravines and confused with meaningless criss-cross gulches. Whatever scrub evergreens grew there stood under the shade of boulders which threatened each instant to topple over and go thundering to the base. She had come upon the cave by chance in her ride with Dan, and now she hunted vainly through the great stones for the entrance. A fresh wind, chill with the snows of the upper peaks, pulled and tugged at her and cut her face and hands with flying bits of sand. It kept up a whistling so insistent that it was some time before she recognized in the hum of the gale a different note, not of pleasant music, but a thin, shrill sound that blended with the voice of the wind.
The instant she heard it she stopped short on the lee side of a tall rock and looked about her in terror. The mountains walked away on every side, and those resolute masses gave her courage. She listened, for the big rock cut away the breath of the wind about her ears and she could make out the whistling more clearly. It was a strain as delicate as a pin point ray of light in a dark room, but it made Kate tremble.
Until the sound ended she stayed there by the rock, hearkening, but the moment it ceased she gathered her resolution with a great effort and went straight toward the source of the whistling. It was only a moment away, although the wind had made it seem much farther, and she came on the tall, narrow opening with Joan sitting on a rock just within. Instead of the blue cloak, she was wrapped in a tawny hide, and the yellow hair blew this way and that, unsheltered from the wind. The loneliness of the little figure made Kate's heart ache, made her pause on her way, and while she hesitated, Joan's head rested back against the rock, her eyes half closed, her lips pursed, she began to whistle that same keen, eerie music.
It brought Kate to her in a rush.
"Oh Joan!" she cried. "My baby!"
And she would have swept the child into her arms, but Joan slipped out from under her very fingers and stood a little distance off with her hands pressed against the wall on either side of her, ready to dart one way or the other. It was not sudden terror, but rather a resolute determination to struggle against capture to the end, and her blue eyes were blazing with excitement. Kate was on her knees with her arms held out.
"Joan, dear, have you forgotten munner?"
The wildness flickered away from the eyes of the child little by little.
"Munner?" she repeated dubiously.
No shout of welcome, no sudden rush, no arms to fling about her mother. But if her throat was dry and closed Kate allowed no sign of it to creep into her voice.
"Where's Daddy Dan?"
"He's gone away."
"Where?"
"Oh—over there!"
The mother rose slowly to her feet, and looked out across the mountains as if in search of aid. For her mind had harked back to that story her father used to tell of the coming of Dan Barry; how he had ridden across the hills one evening and saw, walking against the sunset, a tattered boy who whistled strangely as he went, and when old Joe Cumberland asked where he was going he had only waved a vague hand toward the north and answered, "Oh—over there. It was sufficient destination for him, it was sufficient explanation now for the child. She remembered how she, herself a child then, had sat at her father's table and watched the brown face of the strange boy with fascination, and the wild, quick eyes which went everywhere and rested in no one place. They were the eyes which looked up to her now from Joan's face, and she felt suddenly divorced from her baby, as if all the blood in Joan were the blood of her father.
"He left you here alone?" she murmured.
The child looked at her with a sort of curious amazement.
"Joan isn't alone."
She whistled softly, and around the corner of the rock peered two tiny, beady-bright eyes, and the sharp nose of a coyote puppy. It disappeared at once at the sight of the stranger, and now all the strength went from Kate. She slipped helplessly down, and sat on a boulder trying to think, trying to master the panic which chilled her; for she thought of the day when Whistling Dan brought home to the Cumberland Ranch the wounded
