LITMIR.BIZ

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the sound of hoofs. A coyote somewhere out in the dark complained dolefully of life's bitterness, but that was the only sound. She moved round the log walls, closing and bolting with stout turn buttons the wooden shutters covering each of the three windows. This was a nightly precaution of hers; just why she did it Hilma never knew. Maybe it was to shut out the great dark. Then she reëntered the house and slipped the heavy oaken bar into place behind the door. The house was hers to possess in lonesomeness.

      Mercifully constricted and intimate was this oasis of lamplight in the desert of the night. Just one long room, twenty feet from end wall ​to end wall; one door leading to the lean-to kitchen; another through the thin partition of Hilma's own room; a great fireplace of stones and mud bisecting the rear wall. The furnishings were Spartan: A heavy table in the middle of the floor; three homemade chairs with rawhide bottoms; a squatty trunk of blue glazed zinc and chipped lacquer; on the walls four colored lithographs from which the advertising matter had been cut; and a glassed-over print of a Danish king and queen—the king had quaint old-world whiskers and his royal spouse wore her gown in early Victorian decolletté. Nothing more to look at than this scant inventory. If the mind of one alone tired of reviewing this slender invitation to beguilement there was a huge Bible in the zinc trunk and a pink plush album of atrocious portraits. Also, a doll.

      The lonesomeness of the great range came to sit down with Hilma. To-night it was more poignant than usual. The girl's imagination, never obtrusive, began to play in a manner surprising to her, and it centered round the silhouette of the horseman against the green sky. Insensibly her thoughts drifted to Jed Monk, sheepman, and what her father had ​journeyed to Two Moons to tell the sheriff concerning the manner of Monk's taking off. The stone on the forehead—she could see it, could see the unlovely face of their nearest neighbor with a pebble balanced grotesquely just above one lumpish jaw socket. This was very unusual and not a little disturbing. Hilma laid it all to the door of the impudent range inspector, her visitor of the afternoon. As she phrased it aloud—and Hilma always talked her thoughts when she was alone—he had started her thinking. It was not everybody who could start Hilma Ring thinking.

      "Fool!" she chided herself, and she undressed and rolled herself in the blankets of her bunk. Sleep would not come. Instead a brooding formless something, which might have been the shape of fear or—had Hilma known it—a messenger of ill from the Norse god Frey, took substance of the dark about her. She shivered. Hours passed.

      A noise brought her bounding to her feet by the bunk side. It was a stuttering whinny, and it came from the direction of the corral where the shabby little horse was penned. Hilma stood breathless for many minutes, then native courage pushed through her panic. She ​hurried surely through the dark to the fireplace corner where the rifle stood, seized it and threw a shell into the chamber. After a minute spent with ear close to the outer door she pushed back the bar and let the heavy slab door swing inward. Rifle ready, Hilma peered out.

      The many-starred night told nothing. Naught there but the dead black shoulders of the mountains, deeper shadows below, and on high a spangled vault which seemed to hum with the energy of its myriad lamps. Hilma went back to bed.

      Near noon next day Christian, her father's horse, ambled head down to the corral bars and there stood, resting easily on three legs and patiently waiting to be uncinched. The saddle was empty.

      Hilma threw herself on Christian's back and started him at a labored gallop down the road toward Two Moons. Her mood was not one of surprise or consternation; the night had left her expectant, and the return of the riderless horse was but part of fulfillment. So she rode, eyes scanning the hard road ahead and the little swales and buffalo wallows on either side.

      ​She had journeyed perhaps ten miles when a speck on the thin ribbon of dust ahead of her slowly took shape of horse and rider. As she drew near she recognized the tall, gaunt shape and prophet's beard of Uncle Alf, the circuit rider—crazy Uncle Alf, he was known to all the Big Country. Something bulky cumbered the saddle before him and dropped to either side in shapeless, swaying extremities. Uncle Alf recognized her when she was still a distance away. He halted his horse and shot one skinny arm high above his head, the hand wide spread.

      "The murderer rising with the light killeth, and in the night is as a thief." His hail came bellowing in deep diapason—a voice almost terrifying in volume. The circuit rider's eyes showed white under his flapping hat brim; the eyes of Jeremiah they were.

      "I heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe to the inhabiters of earth!" Uncle Alf swept his outstretched arm in a fearsome gesture.

      Hilma rode, clear-eyed, close to the evangelist's side and looked down at that which he carried over his saddle horn. It was the body of her father, murdered.

      Chapter 4

       Table of Contents

      Layout 4

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      CHAPTER IV

      Crazy Uncle Alf was one of God's accidents, in the opinion of Big Country folks. He was deemed a bit touched, but whether by mere mortal infirmity or by some mysterious power beyond ken no man dared speculate. They said he was so all-fired uncertain. Like a sudden bitter wind of winter, he was wont to sweep in from the void of range country, blast souls afraid and pass on. Now he would be summoning Two Moons sinners to repentance; overnight he had quit the town on a borrowed horse, and the following sunset would see him calling blessings on the lonely ranch house, fifty miles away, which he had chosen to harbor and refresh him. In heat and storm Uncle Alf fared over the face of the wilderness, scourging and purging souls with the whips of Pentateuch.

      The spirit of the wilderness moved him, even as the holy men of old. Big winds down from ​the mountains carried the voice of the Almighty. Signs and portents were spread against the canopy of the stars for his rapt eye. The play of lightning in the core of a storm answered his cry for guidance on his way. The desert's harshness tinctured the evangelist's theology. No denomination or established dogma bound him; his ordination had come direct from God, staying his hand in a moment of blood lust—for so he vaunted his conversion—and sending him on a mission of redemption. Terrible the Mosaic law and the exactions of Jehovah in Uncle Alf's interpretation, and terrible is exposition of them. He could survey a quarter section of hell in a way to bring the most hardened backslider crawling to a temporary seat on the mourners' bench.

      A weird, unworldly figure. Taller than most tall men; gaunt as a hound; weathered features all sunken into swales and hummocks about his eyes of a seer; uncut hair and sweep of snowy beard mingling about his ears; thin wrists and shanks sprouting like cypress roots from the vents of his hand-me-down garments. A veritable blasted pine of a man.

      There was something in the evangelist's eyes when Hilma rode close enough to see his saddle ​burden which showed he had set himself for a wild outburst of grief. None came. The girl looked down at the pitiful bundle; her hand strayed out to touch her father's head. Dark lights lay deep in her eyes when she raised them to Uncle Alf's.

      "Where did you find him?" she asked.

      "By the roadside just t'other side of Twenty Mile Crick. And right between his eyes——"

      "A little stone," Hilma supplied. "A little stone—yes, I knew." She turned her horse to the homeward stretch.

      "The Killer!" Uncle Alf roared in his diapason thunder. "That son of Baal who kills for the cattlemen and marks his pride in blood with a stone. He lies in wait like the thief and the spoiler, and his hand is red in the dawn."

      They rode a distance with no further word between them. Hilma was looking off to the mighty battlements of the mountains, warders over her great lonesomeness—now without respite. The lanky man by her side muttered in his beard. She spoke her thoughts aloud:

      "He shot dad because dad knew who he was. Dad rode to Two Moons to tell the sheriff he saw the Killer shoot Jed Monk. I reckon ​he—the Killer—knew dad 'd do this and wanted to put him out of the way before he could testify

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