A Texas Ranger - William MacLeod Raine (people reading books txt) 📗
- Author: William MacLeod Raine
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He could not help smiling at her downright manner. “You’ve surely got it in for him, Arlie. I thought you liked him.”
She pulled up her horse, and looked at him. “What made you think that? Did he tell you so?”
Dick fairly shouted. “You do rub it in, girl, when you’ve got a down on a fellow. No, he didn’t tell me. You did.”
“Me?” she protested indignantly. “I never did.”
“Oh, you didn’t say so, but I don’t need a church to fall on me before I can take a hint. You acted as though you liked him that day you and him came riding into camp.”
“I didn’t do any such thing, Dick France. I don’t like him at all,” very decidedly.
“All the boys do— all but Jed. I don’t reckon he does.”
“Do I have to like him because the boys do?” she demanded.
“O’ course not.” Dick stopped, trying to puzzle it out. “He says you ain’t to blame, that he lied to you. That seems right strange, too. It ain’t like Steve to lie.”
“How do you know so much about him? You haven’t known him a week.”
“That’s what Jed says. I say it ain’t a question of time. Some men I’ve knew ten years I ain’t half so sure of. He’s a man from the ground up. Any one could tell that, before they had seen him five minutes “
Secretly, the girl was greatly pleased. She so wanted to believe that Dick was right. It was what she herself had thought.
“I wish you’d seen him the day he pulled Siegfried out of Lost Creek. Tell you, I thought they were both goners,” Dick continued.
“I expect it was most ankle-deep,” she scoffed. “Hello, we’re past Bald Knob!”
“They both came mighty nigh handing in their checks.”
“I didn’t know that, though I knew, of course, he was fearless,” Arlie said.
“What’s that?” Dick drew in his horse sharply, and looked back.
The sound of a rifle shot echoed from hillside to hillside. Like a streak of light, the girl’s pinto flashed past him. He heard her give a sobbing cry of anguish. Then he saw that Steve was slipping very slowly from his saddle.
A second shot rang out. The light was beginning to fail, but he made out a man’s figure crouched among the small pines on the shoulder of Bald Knob. Dick jerked out his revolver as he rode back, and fired twice. He was quite out of pistol range, but he wanted the man in ambush to see that help was at hand. He saw Arlie fling herself from her pony in time to support the Texan just as he sank to the ground.
“She’ll take care of Steve. It’s me for that murderer,” the young man thought.
Acting upon that impulse, he slid from his horse and slipped into the sagebrush of the hillside. By good fortune he was wearing a gray shirt of a shade which melted into that of the underbrush. Night falls swiftly in the mountains, and already dusk was softly spreading itself over the hills.
Dick went up a draw, where young pines huddled together in the trough; and from the upper end of this he emerged upon a steep ridge, eyes and ears alert for the least sign of human presence. A third shot had rung out while he was in the dense mass of foliage of the evergreens, but now silence lay heavy all about him. The gathering darkness blurred detail, so that any one of a dozen bowlders might be a shield for a crouching man.
Once, nerves at a wire edge from the strain on him, he thought he saw a moving figure. Throwing up his gun, he fired quickly. But he must have been mistaken, for, shortly afterward, he heard some one crashing through dead brush at a distance.
“He’s on the run, whoever he is. Guess I’ll get back to Steve,” decided France wisely.
He found his friend stretched on the ground, with his head in Arlie’s lap.
“Is it very bad?” he asked the girl.
“I don’t know. There’s no light. Whatever shall we do?” she moaned.
“I’m a right smart of a nuisance, ain’t I?” drawled the wounded man unexpectedly.
She leaned forward quickly. “Where are you hit?”
“In the shoulder, ma’am.”
“Can you ride, Steve? Do you reckon you could make out the five miles?” Dick asked.
Arlie answered for him. She had felt the inert weight of his heavy body and knew that he was beyond helping himself. “No. Is there no house near? There’s Alec Howard’s cabin.”
“He’s at the round-up, but I guess we had better take Steve there— if we could make out to get him that far.”
The girl took command quietly. “Unsaddle Teddy.”
She had unloosened his shirt and was tying her silk kerchief over the wound, from which blood was coming in little jets.
“We can’t carry him,” she decided. “It’s too far. We’ll have to lift him to the back of the horse, and let him lie there. Steady, Dick. That’s right. You must hold him on, while I lead the horse.”
Heavy as he was, they somehow hoisted him, and started. He had fainted again, and hung limply, with his face buried in the mane of the pony. It seemed an age before the cabin loomed, shadow-like, out of the darkness. They found the door unlocked, as usual, and carried him in to the bed.
“Give me your knife, Dick,” Arlie ordered quietly. “And I want water. If that’s a towel over there, bring it.”
“Just a moment. I’ll strike a light, and we’ll see where we’re at.”
“No. We’ll have to work in the dark. A light might bring them down on us.” She had been cutting the band of the shirt, and now ripped it so as to expose the wounded shoulder.
Dick took a bucket to the creek, and presently returned with it. In his right hand he carried his revolver. When he reached the cabin he gave an audible sigh of relief and quickly locked the door.
“Of course you’ll have to go for help, Dick. Bring old Doc Lee.”
“Why, Arlie, I can’t leave you here alone. What are you talking about?”
“You’ll have to. It’s the only thing to do. You’ll have to give me your revolver. And, oh, Dick, don’t lose a moment on the way.”
He was plainly troubled. “I just can’t leave you here alone, girl. What would your father say if anything happened? I don’t reckon anything will, but we can’t tell. No, I’ll stay here, too. Steve must take his chance.”
“You’ll not stay.” She flamed round upon him, with the fierce passion of a tigress fighting for her young. “You’ll go this minute— this very minute!”
“But don’t you see I oughtn’t to leave you? Anybody would tell you that,” he pleaded.
“And you call yourself his friend,” she cried, in a low, bitter voice.
“I call myself yours, too,” he made answer doggedly.
“Then go. Go this instant. You’ll go, anyway; but if you’re my friend, you’ll go gladly, and bring help to save us both.”
“I wisht I knew what to do,” he groaned.
Her palms fastened on his shoulders. She was a creature transformed. Such bravery, such feminine ferocity, such a burning passion of the spirit, was altogether outside of his experience of her or any other woman. He could no more resist her than he could fly to the top of Bald Knob.
“I’ll go, Arlie.”
“And bring help soon. Get Doc Lee here soon as you can. Leave word for armed men to follow. Don’t wait for them.”
“No.”
“Take his Teddy horse. It can cover ground faster than yours,”
“Yes.”
With plain misgivings, he left her, and presently she heard the sound of his galloping horse. It seemed to her for a moment as if she must call him back, but she strangled the cry in her throat. She locked the door and bolted it, then turned back to the bed, upon which the wounded man was beginning to moan in his delirium.
Arlie knew nothing of wounds or their treatment. All she could do was to wash the shoulder in cold water and bind it with strips torn from her white underskirt. When his face and hands grew hot with the fever, she bathed them with a wet towel. How badly he was hurt— whether he might not even die before Dick’s return— she had no way of telling. His inconsequent babble at first frightened her, for she had never before seen a person in delirium, nor heard of the insistence with which one harps upon some fantasy seized upon by a diseased mind.
“She thinks you’re a skunk, Steve. So you are. She’s dead right— dead right— dead right. You lied to her, you coyote! Stand up in the corner, you liar, while she whangs at you with a six-gun! You’re a skunk— dead right.”
So he would run on in a variation of monotony, the strong, supple, masterful man as helpless as a child, all the splendid virility stricken from him by the pressure of an enemy’s finger. The eyes that she had known so full of expression, now like half-scabbarded steel, and now again bubbling from the inner mirth of him, were glazed and unmeaning. The girl had felt in him a capacity for silent self-containment; and here he was, picking at the coverlet with restless fingers, prattling foolishly, like an infant.
She was a child of impulse, sensitive and plastic. Because she had been hard on him before he was struck down, her spirit ran open-armed to make amends. What manner of man he was she did not know. But what availed that to keep her, a creature of fire and dew, from the clutch of emotions strange and poignant? He had called himself a liar and a coyote, yet she knew it was not true, or at worst, true in some qualified sense. He might be hard, reckless, even wicked in some ways. But, vaguely, she felt that if he were a sinner he sinned with self-respect. He was in no moral collapse, at least. It was impossible to fit him to her conception of a spy. No, no! Anything but that!
So she sat there, her fingers laced about her knee, as she leaned forward to wait upon the needs she could imagine for him, the dumb tragedy of despair in her childish face.
The situation was one that made for terror. To be alone with a wounded man, his hurt undressed, to hear his delirium and not to know whether he might not die any minute— this would have been enough to cause apprehension. Add to it the darkness, her deep interest in him, the struggle of her soul, and the dread of unseen murder stalking in the silent night.
Though her thought was of him, it was not wholly upon him. She sat where she could watch the window, Dick’s revolver in another chair beside her. It was a still, starry night, and faintly she could see the hazy purple, mountain line. Somewhere beneath those uncaring stars was the man who had done this awful thing. Was he far, or was he near? Would he come to make sure he had not failed? Her fearful heart told her that he would come.
She must have fought her fears nearly an hour before she heard the faintest of sounds outside. Her hand leaped to the revolver. She sat motionless, listening, with nerves taut.
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