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CHAPTER XVIII
THE HARDEST BLOW OF ALL

REACHING the trail, Grace crept toward the point where the equipment wagon had been parked.

She now understood the meaning of the sound that she had heard from her tent. The wagon was being turned, and again she heard what she recognized now as the squeal of a wagon’s king-bolt, accompanied by a low, guttural grunt.

“Look out!” The command was low, but incisive.

A jar and a crash followed, then something went thundering down the mountainside.

“Some one has run the wagon off the trail into the canyon!” gasped Grace Harlowe.

Bang! A revolver shot caused Grace to duck. She had faintly seen the flash in the fog-cloud ahead of her, and the flash seemed to indicate that the weapon had been fired at her.

Bang! Bang! came two answering shots.

“Hippy fired the first shot! I must get in,” cried Grace, pressing close to the rocks on the upper side of the trail, and creeping forward.

The firing on both sides was increasing in rapidity, and it was apparent that a hot fight was in progress.

Four men suddenly ran past her, one being supported by a companion on either side, but she could barely discern the figures in the fog.

“Halt!” commanded Grace sternly, bringing her weapon up in readiness to enforce her command.

The answer to her challenge was a shot, which Grace answered with a bullet from her bandit revolver, but in the mist all objects were distorted and her aim was bad.

Another bullet, this time from the right, whistled over Grace Harlowe’s head, fired from Lieutenant Wingate’s weapon. Hippy had seen, and was firing at her.

“Overland!” shouted the girl.

“Grace!”

“Yes. Hurry! We can get them. Don’t shoot till you catch up with me. Hurry, hurry!”

“I winged one,” gloated Hippy. “Give it to ’em, Grace! They’ve dumped the wagon.”

“Don’t talk. Run, and keep your eyes open!” she admonished. “Take the outside of the trail. I’ll hug the bank.”

The two started on at a fast, but cautious sprint. Ahead, they could hear voices.

“We have you! Surrender!” shouted Lieutenant Wingate.

Grace grinned as she ducked. She had ducked in good time, too, for two bullets answered Hippy’s challenge. Both Hippy and Grace then opened up on their adversaries.

The revolver reports had awakened the entire camp. Ike Fairweather had tumbled out of bed and sprang to Lieutenant Wingate’s tent. Finding it unoccupied, he reasoned that Hippy was in trouble down on the trail. The girls, by this time, had run from their tents, calling out to know what was wrong.

“Don’t know. Stay here an’ look out for yerselves,” flung back Ike as he dashed down the slope toward the Apache Trail.

“Awaken Grace,” called Anne excitedly.

“I venture to say that Grace Harlowe is already very much awake and down there in the thick of it,” replied Miss Briggs calmly.

“She’s gone!” wailed Emma, who had run to Grace’s tent to give the alarm. “Oh, I am so afraid something will happen to her.”

“My Hippy has gone, too,” cried Nora Wingate. “They’ll be killed, both of them! I wish I never had come to this terrible place.”

“Did you stew like that when your husband was fighting Boches in France?” rebuked Elfreda.

“No, but he isn’t fighting Boches now.”

“There they go at it again!” cried Anne. “This is almost as exciting as France. All one needs to make her believe she is back on the battle front is the explosion of a Hun shell.”

Down on the Apache Trail the battle was being waged with honors a little in favor of the Overlanders. Hippy had hit at least one of the prowlers. That he knew, but, so far, he and Grace had escaped without a bullet coming close enough to endanger them. One man was still working his revolver somewhere ahead of Hippy and Grace.

“Let them have it before they get away,” she urged, whereupon Hippy began shooting into the fog with renewed vigor.

“There they go!” cried Grace. “I heard them sliding down the bank. Come on! We may yet catch them.”

Hippy turned his revolver in the direction that Grace was pointing, and blazed away.

“Overland!” shouted a voice behind them in the new rallying cry of the outfit.

“Here!” answered Hippy. “You are too late, Ike. The fun is all over.”

“What happened, Lieutenant?” demanded the driver as he sprinted up to them. “I heard the shootin’ and lit out for the wagon, which I couldn’t find hide nor hair of.”

“You have lost your wagon, Mr. Fairweather,” Grace informed him.

“What’s thet you say?”

“They have dumped the wagon down into the canyon, and a good part of our equipment is with it,” replied Grace.

Ike, for the moment, was unable to find words appropriate to express his emotion, then, recovering his voice, he launched into a torrent of threats as he stamped about, shaking his clenched fists.

“You will have to catch them before you carry out all those threats, Mr. Fairweather,” reminded Grace. “Lieutenant, the scoundrels have a wounded man with them, and cannot move rapidly. Shall we go after them?”

“Yes,” answered Hippy. “Ike and I will go. You go back and reassure the girls, Brown Eyes.”

“Very good. Yours is the better judgment.”

“I thought you would look at it that way,” observed Hippy.

The two men quickly were swallowed up in the mist, and Grace turned toward the camp, more disturbed in mind than she cared to admit to herself. Should their assailants persist in their attacks on the outfit, it was reasonably certain that one or more of the Overton party sooner or later would be wounded, or worse.

“Overland!” called Grace. The call was promptly answered from the camp, and Grace was met at the upper end of the tote path by a group of worried girls. She explained that Hippy, who had gone out to intercept the work of the night prowlers, had continued on with Ike Fairweather in pursuit of them.

“What were those ruffians trying to do this time?” questioned Miss Briggs.

“They not only tried, but they did,” answered Grace. “Girls, those rascals ran our equipment wagon off the trail and into the canyon.”

A chorus of “ohs” greeted the announcement.

“Does this mean that we shall have to abandon our trip?” anxiously asked Elfreda.

“It does not, J. Elfreda. Did you ever know of an Overton girl to confess herself beaten?”

“No. That is the last thing I should look for you to do.”

“Your question is answered. We are going to get that band of ruffians before the end of the Apache Trail is reached, or they will get us,” declared Grace. “Please stir the fire and make coffee for our men. I am going down the tote trail to see that we are not surprised.”

Crouching beside the trail, Grace finally heard Hippy and Ike returning.

“They got away, but we exchanged shots with them,” called Hippy in reply to Grace’s hail. “They went down into the canyon, but Ike said there was no use wasting time following them, for they know the ground better than we do. Sorry, but we did the best we could.”

“You surely did all that any one could have done,” agreed Grace. “We might as well go back to camp, as Nora probably is worrying about you. The girls will have coffee for you when you get in.”

“I smell it, an’ it smells mighty good,” exclaimed Ike.

The coffee was ready for them when they arrived, and Anne was down on her knees toasting bread before a bed of coals. All hands immediately sat down before the fire to take refreshment and to discuss their situation.

“Right here, I wish to say to you, my friends, that we should recompense Mr. Fairweather for the loss of his wagon,” declared Grace.

“Don’t want no recompense,” growled the old stagecoach driver.

“Yes!” shouted the girls, and Hippy came along with a deep bass “yes.”

Sudden concern appeared in the face of Emma Dean at this juncture.

“Where is my black silk dress that was in the wagon?” she asked, half fearfully.

“Deep, deep down at the bottom of the canyon,” rumbled Lieutenant Wingate.

Emma uttered a dismal wail.

“Who’s going to pay me for my black silk? Who, I ask you, Grace Harlowe? Who is going to recompense me?”

The Overton girls burst out laughing.

“Each of us has lost clothing, Emma,” comforted Grace. “We have two changes right here with us, however, so why worry? Mr. Fairweather, is there a possibility of getting to the bottom of the canyon to salvage our clothing?”

“No use tryin’ it. Apaches will have it before you can get it.”

“Apaches?” questioned Lieutenant Wingate. “We haven’t seen one since we started, Mr. Fairweather.”

“Mebby not, but the Redskins have seen you folks.”

“Kiss your belongings good-bye, girls,” advised Elfreda Briggs. “When next you see your raiment it perhaps will be beautifying some dusky maiden of the mountains.”

“Don’t s’pose you’ll need me any more now thet the wagon’s gone,” suggested Ike gloomily.

“On the contrary, we wish you to continue through with us, Mr. Fairweather,” said Grace. “When we settle with you at Phœnix, we shall make up to you any loss that you may have sustained.”

Ike’s face brightened, not because of the promise to pay, but because the outfit did not intend to send him home.

“Thank you, folks. You make me right happy, you shore do. What do you reckon on doin’?”

“Let me see. We must be about thirty miles from Roosevelt Lake now,” reflected Grace.

“’Bout three mile short of thet,” nodded Ike.

“Do you think we can pack what stuff we have left on your wagon horses and our ponies?” questioned Grace.

“Reckon so.”

“Of course we don’t care to carry much extra weight on the saddle animals, just light equipment, and if you cannot get through to Roosevelt to-day, we will make camp to-night and ride in to-morrow morning.”

Ike shook his head.

“Nope. I can’t make it in a day, but you folks better ride right on in an’ stay at the Lodge. It’s a good tavern for these parts and it ain’t ever too full to hold some more. I’ll be ’long ’bout eleven o’clock in the mornin’ the day after, an’ make camp for you all there.”

“Thank you. That difficulty is overcome. I propose that we now turn in. Girls, we have time for a beauty sleep before the rising of the sun, when I hope each of you will come out and enjoy the scene with me,” nodded Grace smilingly.

The rest of the night passed without incident, and Ike sounded the getting-up call a few minutes before sun-up. There followed a hurried dressing, some grumbling, and finally much laughter because Emma Dean, in her attempt at haste, got all tangled up in her garments.

The Overland Riders, however, found themselves well paid for their early rising. A scene, such as they had never dreamed existed, lay before them. A sea of clouds hid the valley and the lake, white, billowy, lazy clouds that were drifting slowly under the warmth of the rising sun.

Above this white sea loomed the Four Peaks of the Apache Range, turned to red and gold by the morning sun, and, on beyond the Peaks, here and there a sapphire rock thrust its sharp point through the white billows.

“How beautiful!” murmured Elfreda Briggs.

“Beyond the power of words to express,” replied Grace Harlowe, barely above a whisper.

Anne linked arms with Grace and patted her hand, but spoke no word. Even the bare-headed, irrepressible Hippy seemed lost in silent admiration. Perhaps it was the beauty of the scene, or perhaps it was that those billowing clouds carried him back in memory to the bitter days when Lieutenant Wingate was fighting for life above just such clouds as these, high over the German lines in France.

Grace finally sat down, chin in hand, lost in wonder, her whole being filled with an exultation that she had known but once before, and then in a far different environment, when caught in a barrage at Chateau Thierry, when all the tremendous elements of the universe seemed to have joined in a mad medley. That was war, bitter, soul-racking war. This was peace, and she wondered that each should arouse in her emotions that were so much alike.

“Ahem!” began Hippy Wingate impressively, and the spell was broken. “We are now standing – ”

“You are mistaken. Some of us are sitting,” corrected Emma Dean.

“On the pinnacle of the Apache Trail, the most ancient trail on our continent. Well may this be called Oldest America, for men have traversed this route since remotest time, where the silence of eternity broods over the mesas and the canyons and the peaks. And where, with this wonderful scene that comes with the dawning of the day, all the mystery of the world seems brought together. Ahem!”

A painful silence of several seconds was broken by the judicial voice of Elfreda Briggs.

“I sentence the prisoner to ten years’ hard labor,” she announced.

Shouts of laughter, and a cry from Emma that he should be sent up for life, put the Overlanders in a merry mood. Even Ike Fairweather, whose eyes had grown large under the spell of Hippy’s oratory, permitted himself to indulge in a loud guffaw.

After a rather hurried breakfast, the outfit began packing up for the start. It was not an easy task to pack the tents and equipment on the backs of the horses, in view of the fact that each animal, except the wagon horses, must also carry a rider. The work was finally accomplished, however, each rider placing a pack of small stuff on her own back, in addition to the pack already lashed to the back of her pony.

Before starting out, Grace induced Elfreda to remove the bandage from her head. The wound was found to be healed, much to the relief of both.

Ike had made an early start, and two hours later the Overlanders galloped away, and then began the downward ride that would take them to the great artificial waterway, where both entertainment and adventure awaited them.

CHAPTER XIX
HEROINES OF THE TRAIL

ON the way to Roosevelt, before the Overland girls caught up with him, Ike Fairweather had met a deputy sheriff and posse, who had been in the mountains looking for a horse thief, but were now returning to the place for which the Overlanders were headed.

From Ike the deputy learned of the attacks on the Overland girls, and of their plucky defense. Ike, furthermore, became loquacious, told the officer all he knew about Grace Harlowe and her friends, not forgetting the redoubtable Hippy Wingate who had “shot down more German airplanes than any other man in the Allied armies.”

When the deputy reached Roosevelt, he repeated Ike’s story at the Lodge, as the hotel at Roosevelt Lake was called, so, without their knowledge, the Overlanders’ praises were sung there some hours in advance of their arrival. When the girls came up with Ike just before noon that day, and took luncheon with him, Mr. Fairweather discreetly neglected to mention what he had told the deputy sheriff about them.

Three hours later the Overland Riders reached the bottom of the grade to Roosevelt, rounded the “painted rocks” that stood sentinel over the trail there, and walked their horses across the great spillway of Roosevelt Dam, more than three hundred yards in length, this spillway releasing the surplus water from Lake Roosevelt, which is formed by the waters held in check and backed up by Roosevelt Dam. The water in its nearly three hundred feet fall from the top of the spillway roared into Salt River Canyon, a miniature Niagara, sending up clouds of rainbow spray, the thunder of its fall echoing down the canyon for miles.

Elfreda Briggs, who was riding by Grace’s side, leaned over and shouted into her companion’s ear:

“Hippy can indulge in as much oratory as he pleases here. No one will hear him above the roar of the waterfall, for which much thanks.”

Grace nodded and grinned.

After crossing the spillway, the party turned to the right and followed a shining white trail along the edge of the lake to the Apache Lodge, which was located, they found, between the east and west arms of the lake.

Some difficulty was experienced in finding a place where they could stake down their ponies, but finally succeeding in tethering the animals, they quickly removed the packs from the backs of “man, woman and beast,” as Miss Briggs characterized it.

“Lieutenant, if you do not mind going bare-headed, we will all walk over to the Lodge and see if they will let us in,” said Grace.

It was a dust-covered, brown-faced, bright-eyed party of girls who mounted the steps of the veranda of the Lodge, where a group of tourists were enjoying the cool mountain air of the late afternoon. All eyes were turned on the newcomers.

“The one with the brown hair is Grace Harlowe. The man is the great American Ace,” Grace heard one of the tourists confide to a companion.

The Overton girl gave the speaker a brief, steady look.

“I will see if I can arrange for accommodations for us here,” said Grace, turning to the young women of her party. “Perhaps it will be as well for you to wait on the veranda.”

“Ask the proprietor if he has any old hats for sale,” suggested Hippy Wingate as Grace was entering the Lodge, at which there was an audible titter from several of the women guests of the place.

“Have you room, sir, for a party of six not very presentable persons?” questioned Grace, smiling at the clerk.

“For you, yes. I believe you are Mrs. Grace Harlowe Gray, are you not?”

The Overton girl looked her amazement.

“May I ask how you know my name, sir?”

“The deputy sheriff told me that you and your party were on the way here. How many rooms do you require?”

“Three with baths. I do not know how long we shall remain, but probably not longer than some time to-morrow. We shall go into camp when what is left of our equipment arrives.”

“Yes, I understand that you ladies have had a mishap,” volunteered the clerk.

“Is there anything that this man doesn’t know about us?” she wondered. To the clerk she said: “We shall need a reliable man to watch our horses to-night. Will you be so kind as to send some one to us, some person who is to be depended upon?”

The clerk said he would, and that the rooms for the party would be ready whenever they desired to take possession.

Grace returned to the veranda, and, as she stepped out, she halted and gazed in amazement. Elfreda, Hippy and the others of her party were speaking with a tall, bronzed man of distinguished appearance. With him were a gentleman and three ladies. Grace recognized him of the distinguished bearing instantly.

“General Gordon! How do you do!” she greeted, flushing with pleasure.

The general strode forward and grasped both her hands.

“My dear Mrs. Gray, I am happy beyond words to see you again. This is my wife; and Colonel Cartwright, the colonel’s sister, and Mrs. Cartwright. The colonel served with us in France, but I believe you never met him, which was a misfortune for both.”

“This young woman,” announced the general to his friends, but in a tone of voice loud enough to be heard by most persons on the veranda, “saved my life on the battlefield in the Argonne. Had it not been for her, I should not be here. I have already told Mrs. Gordon the story.”

“Please, General,” begged Grace, flushing with embarrassment, but the general went on unheeding.

“Mrs. Gray dragged me into a deserted German machine-gun nest after I had been wounded on the field, manned a machine gun and held the Boches off until she could flash Morse signals to our lines that night. We were, at that time, being fired upon by both armies. A braver woman does not live.”

“Suppose we speak of the beauties of the Old Apache Trail,” suggested Grace, which brought a hearty laugh from all, and relieved the tension under which she was suffering.

“When I heard that Grace Harlowe Gray and her friends of the Overton Unit had proved themselves the heroines of the trail, I said, ‘That’s our Grace Harlowe, the doughboys’ Grace Harlowe,’ and I was glad. You must join our party this evening and we will talk war,” he urged.

“Grace, here is an Indian who wishes to speak with you,” interrupted Hippy.

“Me take care ponies,” said the Indian. “Me Joe Smoky Face.”

“Do you work about the Lodge?” questioned Grace.

“Yes.”

“I will see the clerk about you. Please excuse me for a moment.” Grace stepped briskly into the Lodge, followed by Lieutenant Wingate and the Indian. During her absence, the general briefly related the story, as he knew it, of the work of the Overton Unit in France.

“I think the man understands what is required of him. The clerk says he is dependable,” announced Grace upon her return to the veranda. “The horses being arranged for, I think we will go to our quarters now, if you will excuse us, General.”

“You will join us at dinner, Mrs. Gray?” questioned the general.

“Yes, thank you.”

The Overton girls went to their rooms, not to appear again until just before dinner time. Wearing fresh uniforms, well groomed, eyes sparkling, cheeks tinged with faint flushes, they elicited a murmur of approval from the tourists as they stepped out on the veranda to join General Gordon and his party.

“Mess is served,” announced the general.

“Yes, but oh, so different,” laughingly replied Grace Harlowe.

At the general’s request, one table had been set to accommodate the two parties, and the dinner proved to be a happy occasion for all. At the general’s suggestion, it was decided that the two parties should take a launch trip the length of Lake Roosevelt on the following morning. The general said he would charter a launch, that they would take their luncheons with them and have a real picnic at the mouth of Tonto Creek at the upper end of the lake, thirty miles away.

A delightful evening was passed at the Lodge where Grace and the general exchanged war reminiscences, after which the girls went to their quarters for the night. Hippy strolled out to look over the ponies and to give Joe Smoky Face final instructions, then returned to the Lodge and went to bed.

The Overton girls were sound asleep by then. It was the first night, since they started over the Apache Trail, that they had been free from nerve-strain, but there were other nights coming, nights that they felt would hold a full measure of excitement and adventure for them, and none realized this possibility better than did Grace Harlowe herself.