The word had reached Battle Butte through Slim Sanders, who had been sent down from Huerfano Park for help.  The Rutherfords and their friends were already combing the hills for the lost girl, but the owner of the horse ranch wanted Sheriff Sweeney to send out posses as a border patrol.  Opinion was divided.  Some thought Beulah might have met a grizzly, been unhorsed, and fallen a victim to it.  There was the possibility that she might have stumbled while climbing and hurt herself.  According to Sanders, her father held to another view.  He was convinced that Meldrum was at the bottom of the thing.

This was Roy’s instant thought, too.  He could not escape the sinister suggestion that through the girl the ruffian had punished them all.  While he gave sharp, short orders to get together the riders of the ranch, his mind was busy with the situation.  Had he better join Sweeney’s posse and patrol the desert?  Or would he help more by pushing straight into the hills?

Dingwell rode up and looked around in surprise.  “What’s the stir, son?”

His partner told him what he had heard and what he suspected.

Before he answered, Dave chewed a meditative cud.  “Maybeso you’re right—­and maybe ’way off.  Say you’re wrong.  Say Meldrum has nothing to do with this.  In that case it is in the hills that we have got to find Miss Beulah.”

“But he has.  I feel sure he has.  Mr. Ryan says Rutherford thinks so, too.”

“Both you and Hal have got that crook Meldrum in yore minds.  You’ve been thinking a lot about him, so you jump to the conclusion that what you’re afraid of has happened.  The chances are ten to one against it.  But we’ll say you’re right.  Put yourself in Meldrum’s place.  What would he do?”

Beaudry turned a gray, agonized face on his friend.  “I don’t know.  What—­what would he do?”

“The way to get at it is to figure yourself in his boots.  Remember that you’re a bad, rotten lot, cur to the bone.  You meet up with this girl and get her in yore power.  You’ve got a grudge against her because she spoiled yore plans, and because through her you were handed the whaling of yore life and are being hounded out of the country.  You’re sore clear through at all her people and at all her friends.  Naturally, you’re as sweet-tempered as a sore-headed bear, and you’ve probably been drinking like a sheepherder on a spree.”

“I know what a devil he is.  The question is how far would he dare go?”

“You’ve put yore finger right on the point, son.  What might restrain him wouldn’t be any moral sense, but fear.  He knows that once he touched Miss Rutherford, this country would treat him like a rattlesnake.  He could not even be sure that the Rutherfords would not hunt him down in Mexico.”

“You think he would let her alone, then?”

The old-timer shook his head.  “No, he wouldn’t do that.  But I reckon he’d try to postpone a decision as long as he could.  Unless he destroyed her in the first rush of rage, he wouldn’t have the nerve to do it until he had made himself crazy drunk.  It all depends on circumstances, but my judgment is—­if he had a chance and if he didn’t think it too great a risk—­that he would try to hold her a prisoner as a sort of hostage to gloat over.”