IT was arranged and started before the gold hunters had a chance to be well aware of what was happening. Whatever thanks they had to offer went unspoken, for the only thing that Silver asked was two saddled horses. They were his as soon as he had spoken. Down the valley, beyond the gorge, the tenderfeet were told, they would find Taxi’s horse — and keep it until called for.
Then the three men, with Frosty to guide them faultlessly on the way, entered the great rock wilderness of the mountain summits. They had the moon to help them, but the same moon was up there to help the Cary marksmen. The hat was lifted off Jim Silver’s head by one well-directed shot. Another cut through the shirt of Derry, under the pit of his arm. But most of the time they managed to keep to shelter, while pressing in.
Now and again they saw dim forms pelting away from one rear post to another.
Why do twenty men let three drive them, was the question in the mind of Derry. But one of the three was Silver, and even Barry Christian did not have money or persuasion enough to send the Carys back to face the rifle of Silver. Or perhaps Christian was no longer with the crew. That failure of the raid may have induced them to throw him off, and he, with an angling flight, might be working away in another direction through the uplands, while the Carys brought after them the effects of the attempt.
In the pink of the dawn, they were well above timber line and passing through a rolling plateau covered with mosses and lichens more than with grass. Small lakes lay here and there, looking up to the sky with far bluer eyes than the colour they were drinking up in return. And as they approached a badlands of broken rock again, Derry saw a woman sitting on a stone at the edge of a little creek.
She sat with her hands clasped around one knee, the posture of a man. Her arms were bare to the shoulders. When she turned her head, he could see the long gleam of the dark, braided hair that fell down her back.
He waved an arm and tried to shout. His voice slowly died in his throat.
Then: “Molly!” he thundered, and drove the mustang into a frantic gallop.
She waited till he was almost up to her before she got up from the stone. She was neither laughing nor weeping. She was as calm as the mountains around her when he flung himself from the back of the bronco and caught hold of her.
Something that was not indifference, but as quiet looked up at him from her eyes.
“The old man turned me loose,” she said. “Some of ’em wanted to hang me up by the hair of my head, because I’m a traitor. But the old man said it wasn’t to be. He told me to tell you that I’m a present to you, and the devil with you, he said.”
“Molly, you don’t care a whole heap, it looks like,” said Derry.
“Don’t I?” said she. “Well, if you’ll finish off mauling me around, your friends can stop pretending that they’ve got saddle girths to tighten. They can come on up. And I want to meet Jim Silver. I want to look him in the face.”
She looked at Derry and added: “And now that you’ve got me, what are you going to do with me?”
“How old are you, Molly?” he asked.
“I’m not quite twenty,” she answered.
“How much is ‘quite’?”
“Oh, a year or so.”
“Molly, cross your heart to die if you’re more than — than — ” He hesitated, staring closely into her eyes. “By the leaping thunder, you’re not more than sixteen years old. Tell me I’m a liar if you dare!”
She said nothing. Trouble came into her eyes.
“It isn’t the years that matter,” she said. “It’s the kind of years that really count. Now you’ve hounded the Carys — you and your Jim Silver — into turning me out of the clan, what are you going to do with me, Tom?”
“I’m going to send you to school,” said he grimly. “You can stand some teaching, I guess.”
“Maybe the school will learn something, too,” said Molly.
He stared at her again. Wonder began to grow in him that she had told him the truth about her age. and that she had accepted his decision for her future.
“Molly,” he said, “how do you feel?”
“Sort of still and quiet,” she said. “How would you feel if you had twenty men in your family one minute, and only one the next?”
THE END