“You mean keep her—­unharmed?”

They were already in the saddle and on the road.  Dave looked across at his white-faced friend.

“I’m only guessing, Roy, but that’s the way I figure it,” he said gently.

“You don’t think he would try to take her across the desert with him to Mexico.”

Ryan shook his head.

“No chance.  He couldn’t make it.  When he leaves the hills, Miss Rutherford will stay there.”

“Alive?” asked Beaudry from a dry throat.

“Don’t know.”

“God!”

“So that whether Miss Beulah did or did not meet Meldrum, we have to look for her up among the mountains of the Big Creek watershed,” concluded Dingwell.  “I believe we’ll find her safe and sound.  Chances are Meldrum isn’t within forty miles of her.”

They were riding toward Lonesome Park, from which they intended to work up into the hills.  Just before reaching the rim of the park, they circled around a young pine lying across the trail.  Roy remembered the tree.  It had stood on a little knoll, strong and graceful, reaching straight toward heaven with a kind of gallant uprightness.  Now its trunk was snapped, its boughs crushed, its foliage turning sere.  An envious wind had brought it low.  Somehow that pine reminded Beaudry poignantly of the girl they were seeking.  She, too, had always stood aloof, a fine and vital personality, before the eyes of men sufficient to herself.  But as the evergreen had stretched its hundred arms toward light and sunshine, so Beulah Rutherford had cried dumbly to life for some vague good she could not formulate.

Were her pride and courage abased, too?  Roy would not let himself believe it.  The way of youth is to deny the truth of all signposts which point to the futility of beauty and strength.  It would be a kind of apostasy to admit that her sweet, lissom grace might be forever crushed and bruised.

They rode hard and steadily.  Before dusk they were well up toward the divide among the wooded pockets of the hills.  From one of these a man came to meet them.

“It’s Hal Rutherford,” announced Ryan, who was riding in front with Dingwell.

The owner of the horse ranch nodded a greeting as he drew up in front of them.  He was unshaven and gaunt.  Furrows of anxiety lined his face.

“Anything new, Hal?” asked Dave.

“Not a thing.  We’re combing the hills thorough.”

“You don’t reckon that maybe a cougar—?” Ryan stopped.  It occurred to him that his suggestion was not a very cheerful one.

Rutherford looked at the little Irishman from bleak eyes.  The misery in them was for the moment submerged in a swift tide of hate.  “A two-legged cougar, Pat.  If I meet up with him, I’ll take his hide off inch by inch.”

“Meaning Meldrum?” asked Roy.

“Meaning Meldrum.”  A spasm of pain shot across the face of the man.  “If he’s done my little girl any meanness, he’d better blow his head off before I get to him.”