CHAPTER II--MURIEL ARNOLD

With only one cartridge remaining in the magazine of his Mauser, which he preferred and was allowed to carry instead of a Ross rifle, Sergeant John Dick was thinking of falling back upon his revolver, when the unexpected retreat was beaten by the rustlers.

With the rapidly approaching hoofs hardly sounding now in his ears, with the hurricane again tearing past him, Dick turned his head. He beheld a two-horse top-buggy whirling swiftly up the pass toward him in the teeth of the storm.

These vehicles generally have only a single seat, capable of accommodating two persons, however; and this one contained two young women--mere girls, both of them, the elder not more than twenty years of age!

Dick saw that the girls were not unaware of what was transpiring. The one who was not driving, the younger and--even in that moment of excitement he could not help noticing--by far the prettier, held a rifle at the ready, with a grim, determined look upon her charming face, while her companion was urging the horses to their fastest up the rocky and broken incline.

“Say! Who are they? Why should we cut and run?” came a shout borne on the wind from the direction of the four rustlers to Sergeant Dick’s ears.

“They’re the--”

He did not catch the end of the answer from the fellow on the cliff. The word, whatever it was, was lost on the raging wind.

But apparently it was heard by one or more of the gang in the road, for they immediately communicated the tidings to one another, and then shouted and waved to the pair guarding the driver and passengers of the stage-coach.

Sergeant Dick had edged his horse partly against the angle of the cliff. He now dived under the animal’s head and, rushing round the rock, fired at the fleeing quartet with his revolver.

He hit one in the broad of the back, he was certain. The fellow only stumbled, however, and, promptly recovering and wheeling about, sent a shot back at him with lightning speed, but fortunately with nothing like accuracy.

Then all four plunged into the thicket out of his sight, and he could hear them trampling and bursting through the thick growth in a line parallel with the road, bawling as they ran, and unintelligibly, so far as he was concerned.

The pair guarding the people of the coach backed hurriedly to their horses, what time the sergeant hurriedly slipped another clip of five cartridges into the magazine of his rifle.

Gaining their horses’ sides, the two rustlers bounded into the saddle, firing a couple of shots apiece from their pistols over the heads of their late prisoners, to overawe them still. Then digging their spurs deep into their mounts’ flanks, away into the wood on the windward side they tore, dragging the other horses after them by a long lariat which had been passed through all the bridles.

Seeing the pair thus making off, Sergeant Dick threw all further prudence to the winds, and, running forward, pumped two shots with swift accuracy into the leafy covert, even as it closed over their retreating forms.

[Illustration: THEN DIGGING THEIR SPURS DEEP, AWAY THEY TORE.]

The shrill, almost human-like scream of a horse badly stricken came out of the thicket. Sergeant Dick ran on along the woods, pelting two more shots into these at random in the direction he knew the fugitives were taking.

Then, suddenly, all became red and blurred before him. He reeled blindly and fell upon his hands and knees, his rifle flying far out of his hands.

He had forgotten his wound in the excitement of the fight, had been losing blood profusely from it all the time, and the consequent weakness came suddenly and unexpectedly upon him.

When he opened his eyes again, he looked into the most beautiful face he believed he had ever seen--the face of the younger of the two girls who had come, in so surprising and plucky a manner, to his reënforcement.

He was lying on the ground, and she was kneeling beside him, binding up the injury to his head, while some one supported his shoulders behind. On the other side of him was kneeling the elder girl, with her face buried in her hands, and sobbing bitterly, great salt tears oozing through her fingers and dropping to the ground.

Around were standing the robbed passengers of the stage-coach, rueful and vindictive-looking, none of them in their bitter resentment against Fate taking any notice of the weeping girl.

“Thank you--thank you! You are very kind,” murmured Dick. “But--but I’m all right now, and the rustlers--they mustn’t be allowed to get away. My horse, quick! Men, who’ll follow me? Any of you?”

The weeping girl lifted her head with an ecstatic cry.

“He will not die--he will live? Oh, Heaven be praised! Ah, and you have hidden the blood upon his face, Muriel! I cannot bear the sight of blood. It--it always makes me feel sick. But, then, of course, I am weak-minded, you know--not like other people, or like Muriel here, who is as good as she is brave.”

“Be quiet, Jenny,” said the younger girl, flushing hotly. “It is impossible, sergeant, for you to follow the robbers. Your horse is lame, you sure forget.”

Sergeant Dick rose to his feet with the aid of the two men who had been supporting his head. He saw that two horses remained in the traces of the rifled coach.

“Lend me one of your horses, driver,” he cried. “I must follow these ruffians without delay.”

“Sorry, sergeant, but one horse ’ud be no power o’ use in pulling the coach from here to Paquita Springs; and, asides, you yourself be in no fit condition I guess to go man-trailin’ arter seven rustlers of their type. You are noo to these parts, that’s plain, or I reckon you’d have heard of the White Hood Gang--the worstest, most desp’rit gang this region has ever yit seen, I calculate.”

“I _have_ heard of the gang. But its notoriety would not deter me from following it, only spur me on, if I had my strength back, and my horse, too, were equal to the call I should have to make upon it. Driver, you have been robbed of the gold you were carrying to the Indian Reservation on Paquita Island?”

“Sure,” was the characteristic reply, with a doleful nod.

“Then I must let the gang go, even if I were equal to following them, and accompany you in the coach with all speed to the Reservation. What the result will be when the Indians learn that the gold sent them has been stolen, I shudder to think of--judging from the frame of mind they have been lately showing.”

“Guess they’ll go on the war-path, and jist raise Cain around here,” growled the stage-coach driver, amid horrified ejaculations from all the passengers.

“I know of a quicker means of reaching the Reservation than by the stage,” said the girl Muriel, her lovely face flushing again at thus once more attracting the attention of all. “My cousin here and I live near by on Lake Paquita, as some of these people may know--the coach-driver certainly does--in a house built on piles over a shoal out in the middle of the lake. We keep a large sailing scow, which my uncle calls his ‘Ark’; and we can convey you in it to Paquita Island at the lower end of the lake in the shortest time possible.”

“Why--why! Your uncle has surely taken the idea of his lake-dwelling and his scow or ‘ark’ from Fenimore Cooper’s famous novel, the ‘Deerslayer,’” gasped Sergeant Dick.

“That is so. My uncle was so charmed with the idea of the lake-fortress in Fenimore Cooper’s tale, the ‘Deerslayer,’ that he determined to adopt the same mode of living when he first came here. We have the book at Water Castle, as we call our lake-home, and it is the most-read book in our little library, I believe, except as regards Jenny, who, just like poor, half-witted Hetty Hutter in the novel, is always reading her Bible. Uncle Alf has said that having a half-witted daughter like Hetty Hutter also helped to put into his head the idea of living like ‘Floating Tom Hutter’ in ‘The Deerslayer’; and poor Jenny herself models her life on Hetty Hutter’s, reading the Bible regularly, and trying to do good always in her own simple way. You will come with us in the buggy? Uncle Alf contrived an extra seat at the back, on which we might carry extra marketing. Our name, by the way, is Arnold.”

“Thank you. I shall be glad to avail myself of your kind offer, Miss Arnold. Certainly I must reach the Indian Reservation before news of the robbery of the stage, and the gold they were to receive by it, gets to their ears.”

Sergeant Dick was helped on to the back seat of the buggy, all the marketing being disposed under it inside a kind of locker; and then, parting from the stage-coach people, away the two girls and he whirled at top speed along the leafy avenue. His lame horse, of course, he left behind, to be brought along in the rear of the stage-coach, which would perforce proceed at a walk as far as the next stopping-place.

At the speed it traveled, the buggy was soon out of the gorge, and at a point where the road forked, the coach road continuing on in a straight line, and the other--a mere grass-grown cattle track, barely perceptible--leading away at right angles through dense woods.

Along this second leafy avenue the two girls and the sergeant bowled more rapidly still. They presently came out on the shores of a lovely lake, lying placidly in the bosom of the mountains, which dense woods covered from the water-line to their rounded summits.

“Behold our lake home--Water Castle!” cried the younger girl, pointing out across the storm-ruffled water to a most strange-looking structure--a house like a huge Madeira-cake standing on innumerable legs, about a quarter of a mile from the shore.