Ross was conscious that Wong’s right hand whipped to the base of his skull just above the collar of his blouse. In the same instant it came away again and now it held a long, thin, slender glittering blade!
There was another movement of Wong’s hand so swift that he could not follow it. Ross only knew that a look of utterably blank amazement had overspread Larson Beebe’s face. It was as though Beebe had seen a miracle performed before his eyes and could not fathom it.
Then, suddenly, Ross saw what had happened. The hilt of the knife that Wong had held was protruding from Larson Beebe’s ribs!
For an instant Beebe wavered on his feet. His fingers relaxed and his gun clattered to the rocks. He pitched forward onto his face.
“Can do,” muttered Wong. “One day kick Wong. Not kick again.”
* * * * *
That night the three camped beside a little water-hole several miles down the main canon. Around the tiny campfire they made their plans for getting out of the desert.
Ross knew the general direction to take, and he felt confident that by taking it easy the girl would be able to make the journey on foot. Virginia Carver was confident.
The following morning Ross was awakened by footsteps on the rocks. He raised up to see two long-eared animals making their way down the trail to the water-hole. It was Archibald and Percy!
Ross let out a shout that instantly roused his companions.
“There’s your ship of the desert that’s going to carry you back to civilization,” he called, as Virginia raised up from her blankets.
The girl did not comprehend. She gazed at the two animals in astonishment for a moment.
“But they’re wild, aren’t they?” she asked.
“Just as wild as two snails,” said Ross. “Those two estimable gentlemen brought me into this desert, and they’re going to take us out.”
When breakfast had been finished Ross noticed that Wong was busily engaged in rearranging the weight of the packs.
“Never mind the packs, Wong. Friend Archibald here can carry Miss Carver and Percy can handle the supplies. You and I will go light, Wong,” Ross explained.
“No can do,” replied Wong. “Me no go you.”
“What do you mean, Wong?”
“Wong go that way,” answered the Chinese, pointing to the south.
“You go that way,” asked Ross, perplexed. “Why? You’re going with Miss Carver and me.”
Wong shook his head. “Wong kill man. Think not stay in ’Nited States. Go Mexiclo.”
“Nonsense, Wong,” said Ross. “Miss Carver and I can easily fix that.”
“Think not. Wong go Mexiclo. Got blother there. Buy li’le res’rant.”
Ross saw that there was no use in trying to dissuade Wong. There was no combating such a nature. After a few moments Ross asked:
“Wong, where you going in Mexico?”
“Go Wa’lz.”
“Going to Juarez, eh? What’s your full name?”
“Name? Wong Chen Chek.”
“All right, Wong. In about two months you go to the postoffice and inquire for a registered package. You’ll find enough money in it to buy the best little restaurant in Juarez.”
Wong grinned. “Thlank you.”
Swinging his pack to his shoulder, he swung down the trail without more ado.
“Goo’ bye. Goo’ bye, Missee,” came back to Ross and Virginia Carver.
A half hour later the Chinese disappeared from view far down the canon. Ross turned to the girl.
Virginia Carver was gazing far out over the jumble of rocks and sand that is the Red Desert to where the mists of the morning were dissolving into the shifting haze of the rising sun.
For a moment Ross watched her without speaking. Fresh and vibrant with youth, she was lovely beyond words.
“I guess we had best be going now,” he said. Then his voice stumbled, “Miss Carver—Virginia—when we get out of here—I’ve—I’ve something to say to you.”
For a long moment the girl continued to look far into the colorful haze of the desert. Then she turned toward Ross. A peculiarly tender little smile wreathed her mouth. Her eyes were swimming pools of unshed tears.
Her voice faltered, “Would—would you mind—saying it now—Stanley?”
THE END.
Chicago Man Attacked by Fighting Owl
John Casey, night watchman for the Chicago Protective Agency, while “walking his beat” one night recently, entered a dark passageway in West Madison Street; and then, all at once—
“Something flew at me from the darkness,” he said later, “and knocked my cap off and began scratching my face and clawing out my hair by the roots. I made a pass at it, but found I was fanning the air. Then I saw two blazing eyes, and struck at them. Before I could get out my gun the monster jumped on me again. I managed to swing on it with my night-stick—and that ended the fight.”
To substantiate his story, Watchman Casey exhibited a dead owl measuring thirty-six inches from tip to tip, also numerous cuts and bruises on his hands and face.
_A Powerful Novel of Sinister Madmen That Mounts To An Astounding Climax_
The Jailer of Souls
_Complete In This Issue_
_By_ HAMILTON CRAIGIE
_CHAPTER ONE_
SOUTHWEST OF THE LAW
[Illustration]
All the way Westward in the smoker the man in the high-crowned, black Stetson had taken no part in the conversation. He had appeared to doze, slumping in the high-backed seat as the train rushed onward into the golden afternoon.
The three men at his back had been busy with an interminable round of poker: draw, jack-pot, and stud; deuces wild, and seven-card peak. They moved across the aisle now, as the long train slowed for the brief stop at Two-Horse Canyon, facing him obliquely and a little to his left.
Twice or thrice they had essayed to draw him into the talk, but the man in the black Stetson had been oblivious; he had continued taciturn—morose, almost, one might have said. But he had not been asleep; rather, he had listened with all his ears as their voices had reached him between hands:
“... Yes—Dry Bone—been there myself—they run things pretty much to suit _themselves_.... Wide-open.... Sure.... You might call it a dead open-and-shut proposition, I’ll tell a man!”
The laugh that followed had come to the man in the black Stetson with a curious, grating note:
“Sure-thing gamblers; con-men—it’s a regular crook’s paradise.... And there’s that fellow, Rook....”
The eyes of the man in the black Stetson narrowed abruptly at the corners; for a moment, as a curtain is drawn swiftly from right to left, something arose to peer out of those eyes, glowing, deep-down, like a still, festering flame. But it was gone upon the instant—
“... And there’s that fellow, Rook....” the man had said.
Of a sudden he had stopped short as if he had been muzzled; presently his voice had come again, dry, matter-of-fact:
“I’ll see that raise, Carpenter, and it’ll cost you just twenty iron men to call....”
Plainly, that name, “Rook,” had been taboo; the speaker had been silently reminded of it.
The man in the black Stetson—he had been known as Black Steve Annister in the back blocks at Wooloomooloof before he had made of that name a by-word in the honkatonks and the gambling-hells from San Francisco northward to the Wind River country, and beyond it—Black Steve Annister was sitting upright now, but he had retired behind a wide-spread copy of the _Durango County Gazette_. He was not reading it, however, although he was looking through it—at the three men just across the aisle, studying them through the pin-pricks he had made in it, himself unseen.
Annister had arrived in New York only the week previous from Sourabaya, Java, and he had not waited even overnight before he had begun the long journey, broken at Washington for half a day, which had taken him now half way southwestward across the State of Texas. Presently the long train would cross the Pecos, beyond it the serrated ramparts of the Guadalupes; Dry Bone was just between.
Annister, studying the men, frowned abruptly, yawning behind his hand. Two of the men he put down for ranchers—sheep men, probably; there was about them none of the glamor of that West which lingers even now in the person of a cattleman; and these men were negligible.
But the third man would have been noticeable anywhere. He was a bull’s bulk of a man, hard-featured, mouth a straight gash above a heavy chin barbered to the blood; the observer across the aisle would have said “cowman,” and registered a bull’s eye with it, point-blank.
The two who were with him, evidently with interests in common, were scarcely friendly with the cowman, if such he was; it was evident in their attitude, the constraint which had fallen upon them following that mention of “Rook.”
But the man in the black Stetson continued to study the big fellow through the holes in his newspaper: the hard face, tanned a rich saddle color; the nose, flattened to a smudge of flaring nostril; the cauliflower ear.
He had heard the name, “Ellison” once or twice; somewhere, deep down, it had set vibrating a chord of memory that brought with it, incongruously enough, an altogether different setting: a padded ring under twin, blazing arcs; the thud and shuffle of sliding feet; a man, huge, brutish, broad, fists like stone mauls, yet, for all his bulk, a very cat for quickness....
He put down his paper now—to find those hard eyes boring into his. Ellison, or whatever the man’s name was, had shifted in his seat; the glance that he turned now upon the stranger in the black Stetson was searching, probing. There was a truculence in it, a fierce, bright, avid staring, like an animal’s, savage in its very directness, like a challenge—which in effect it was.