From the instant when, Saturday night, she had been gripped suddenly in
a man's strong arms, when another man had smothered her outcry, she had
known in her heart that Bayne Trevors was taking his desperate chance
in the game. But in the darkness she had had only the two vague blurs
of their bodies to guess at. They had been masked; her own eyes were
covered, a bandage brought tightly over them, her mouth gagged, her
hands tied behind her, her body lifted into the saddle--all in a
moment. Neither man had spoken. Then, tied in the saddle, she only
knew that she was riding, that one man rode in front of her, leading
her horse, the other following close behind. The sense of direction
which she had lost in those first five minutes she had never been given
opportunity to regain. She might, even now, be a gunshot from her own
ranch; she might be twenty miles from it.
For the greater part of that Saturday night they had ridden; and when
trails died under them and rocks rose steeply, they walked, she and one
man. The other stayed with the horses. Not once did she hear a man's
voice; she did not know whether it was Trevors himself, or Quinnion, or
some utter stranger who forced her into this hiding.
They had climbed cliffs, now going down into chasms, now following
roaring creeks or making their way along the spine of some rocky ridge.
The one man with her was masked, his eyes rather guessed at than seen
through the slits of his bandanna handkerchief. He had jerked the
bandage from her eyes, since blindfolded she would make such poor
progress. But still he guarded his tongue.
"He would speak," she thought, "but that I would recognize his voice.
Trevors or Quinnion? Which?"
Feeling the first quick spurt of hope when she saw that there was but
one man to deal with, she was aquiver to seize the first opportunity
for flight. But that hope died swiftly as she recognized that no such
opportunity was to be granted her. Once she paused, looking to a
possible leap over a low ledge and escape in a thick bit of timber.
But the two eyes through the slits in the improvised mask had been keen
and quick, a heavy hand was laid on her arm, she felt the fingers bite
into her flesh as he sought to drive into her a full comprehension of
his grim determination that she should not escape.
It was when they had clambered high upon a mass of tumbled boulders,
topping a ridge, that Judith had seen the man's face. Docilely she had
obeyed his gestures for an hour; now, suddenly maddened at the silence
and the mask over his face, she sprang unexpectedly upon him, shoving
him from the rock on which he had stepped, snatching off his mask as
she did so. For the first time she heard his voice, cursing her coolly
as he gripped and held her.
It was Bayne Trevors, at last come out the open, his eyes hard on hers.
"It's just as well that you know whom you are up against," he said as
he held her with his hand heavy on her shrinking shoulder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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