Mavericks | Page 7

they never will be caught. What makes you so sure they will?"
They had been riding down the draw, and at this moment Phyllis
looked up, to see a rider silhouetted against the sky line on the ridge
above.
"Oh, you Brill!" she cried, with a wave of her quirt.
The man turned, saw them, and rode slowly down. He nodded, after the
fashion of the range, first to the girl, and then to her brother.
"Morning," he nodded. "Headed for Mesa? Here, too."
He fell in with them and rode beside the girl. Presently they topped a
little hillock, and looked down into the park. It had about the area of a
mile, and was perhaps twice as long as broad. Wooded spurs ran down
from the hills into it here and there, and through the meadow leaped a
silvery stream.
"Hello! Wonder where that smoke comes from?"
It was Healy that spoke. He pointed to a faint cloud rising from a
distance. Even before he began to speak, however, Phyllis had her field
glasses out, and was adjusting them to her eyes.
"There's a fire there and a man standing over it," she presently
announced. "There's something else there, too. I can't make it
out--something lying down."
The men glanced at each other, and in the meeting of their eyes some
intelligence passed between them. It was as if the younger accused and
the older sullenly denied.
"Lemme have the glasses," Phil said to his sister almost roughly.
Healy glanced at Phil swiftly, covertly, as the latter adjusted the glasses.
"She's right about the fire and the man. I can see as much with my
naked eyes," he cut in.

The boy looked long, lowered the glasses, and met his friend's eye with
a kind of shamefaced hesitation. But apparently he gathered
reassurance from the quiet steadiness with which the other's gaze met
him. He handed the glasses to Healy. When the latter lowered them his
face was grave. "There's a man and a fire and a cow and a calf. When
these four things meet up together, what does it mean?"
"Branding!" cried the girl.
"That's right--branding. And when the cow is dead what does it mean?"
Brill asked, his eyes full on Phil.
"Rustling!" she breathed again.
"You've said it, Phyl. We've got one of them at last," he cried
jubilantly.
Phil, hanging between doubt and suspicion and shame, brightened at
the enthusiasm of the other.
"Right you are, Brill. We'll solve this mystery once for all."
Healy, unstrapping the case in which lay his rifle, shot a question at the
boy. "Armed, Phil?"
The lad nodded. "I brought my six-gun for rattlesnakes."
"Are you going to--to----" cried Phyllis, the color gone from her face.
"We're going to capture him alive if we can, Phyl. You're to wait right
here till we come back. You may hear shooting. Don't let that worry
you. We've got the drop on him, or will have. Nobody is going to get
hurt if he acts sensible," Healy reassured.
"Don't you move from here. You stay right where you are," her brother
ordered sharply.
"Yes," she said, and was aware that her throat was suddenly parched.
"You'll be careful, won't you, Phil?"

"Sure," he called back, as he put his horse at a canter to follow his
friend up the draw.
The sound of the hoofs died away, and she was alone. That they were
going to circle in and out among the tangle of hills until they were
opposite the miscreant, she knew, but in spite of Brill's promise she had
a heart of water. With trembling fingers she raised the glasses again,
and focused them on that point which was to be the centre of the drama.
The man was moving about now, quite unconscious of the danger that
menaced him. What she looked at was the great crime of Cattleland.
All her life she had been taught to hold it in horror. But now something
human in her was deeper than her detestation of the cowardly and
awful thing this man had just done. She wanted to cry out to him a
warning, and did in a faint, ineffective voice that carried not a tenth of
the distance between them.
She had promised to remain where she was, but her tense interest in
what was doing drew her forward in spite of herself. She rode along the
ridge that bordered the park, at first slowly and then quicker as the
impulse grew in her to be in at the finish.
The climax came. She saw him look round quickly, and in an instant
his pony was at the gallop and he was lying low on its neck. A shot
rang out, and another, but without checking his flight. He turned