Laramie Holds the Range Part 47

She could not protest quick enough: "You talk wildly."

"No," he persisted evenly, "I only look at it just as it is."

"Don't ask me to believe all the cruel things said of my father any more than you want me to believe the things said of you. I am terribly sorry to see you wounded. And now"--her words caught in her throat--"Belle blames me even for that."

"How on earth does she blame you for that?"

Despite her efforts to control herself, Kate, as she approached the unpleasant subject, began to tremble inwardly with the fear that it must after all be as Belle had rudely a.s.serted--that her father was behind these efforts against Laramie's life. For nothing had shaken her tottering faith in her father more than the blunt words Laramie himself had just now indifferently spoken.

"If I am in any way to blame, it is innocently," she hurried on. "I will tell you everything; you shall judge. My father was bitterly angry when he learned I had been seen at Abe Hawk's funeral. I told him about my getting lost, about falling into the place at the bridge--how you did everything you could and how Abe Hawk had done all he could. He was so angry he would listen to nothing----" she stopped, collected herself, tried to go on, could not.

"Oh, I hate this country!" she exclaimed. "I hate the people and everything in it! And I'm going away from it--as far as I can get.

But I wouldn't go," she said determinedly, "without seeing you and telling you this much."

Laramie spoke quietly but with confidence: "You are not going away from this country."

Kate had picked up a stem of hay and looking down at it was breaking it nervously between her fingers. "You will have to hurry up and get well if I stay," she said abruptly. "I'm beginning to think you are the only friend I have here. And," she added, so quickly as to cut off any words from him, "I've told you everything. I only hope my speaking about the hiding place at the bridge when father was angry with me--and only to defend myself--was not the cause of _this_."

She was close beside him. "Can it be," she asked, "that this was how it happened?" He heard her voice break with the question.

"No," he blurted out instantly.

"Oh," she cried, "I'm so thankful!"

Listening to her effort to speak the words, he was not sorry for what he had said. "If you're going to lie," Hawk had once said to him, cynically, "don't stumble, don't beat about the bush--do a job!" The moment Kate told her story, Laramie knew exactly how he had been trapped. But why blame her? "It's the first time I ever lied to her,"

he thought ruefully to himself. "It's the first time she ever believed me!"

"Does Belle know you quarreled with your father?" he asked, to get away from the subject.

"No," she answered, steadying herself.

"She said you'd been acting sort of queer."

"I can't tell people my troubles."

"Why did you tell me?"

"You might die and blame me."

"Who says I'm going to die?"

"They were afraid you might."

"Well, I don't like to disappoint anybody, but dying is a thing a man is ent.i.tled to take his time about."

"Can't I do something till the doctor comes?"

He turned very slowly on his side. Kate made an attempt to examine his shoulder. She was not used to the sight of blood. The clotted and matted clothing awed and sickened her. Even the hay was blood-soaked, but she stuck to her efforts. Supplementing the rude efforts of McAlpin and Kitchen to give him first aid, she cut away, with Laramie's knife, the bullet-torn coat and s.h.i.+rt and tried to get the wound ready for cleansing. "I'm so afraid of doing the wrong thing," she murmured, fearfully.

"I don't care what you do--do something," he said. "Your hands feel awful good."

"I've nothing here to work with."

"All right, we'll go to the drug store and get something." After stubborn efforts he got on his feet and insisted on going down the stairs. Nothing that Kate could say would dissuade him. "I've been here long enough, anyway," was his decision. "I'm feeling better every minute; only awfully thirsty."

Kate steadied him down the dark stairs, fearful he might fall over her as she went ahead. Secrecy of movement seemed to have no significance for him. If his friends were disturbed, Laramie was not. He evidently knew the harness room, for he opened the blind door with hardly any hesitation and stepped into the office. The office was empty but the street door of the stable was open. McAlpin stood in the gang-way talking to some man who evidently caught a glimpse of Laramie, for he said rudely and loud enough for Kate to hear: "h.e.l.l, McAlpin! There comes your dead man now!"

Kate recognized the heavy voice of Carpy and shrank back. The doctor, McAlpin behind him dumbly staring, confronted Laramie at the door: "What are you doin' here, Jim?" he demanded.

"What would I be doing anywhere?" retorted Laramie.

"Go back to your den. This man says you're dying."

"Well, I'm not getting much encouragement at it--I've been waiting for you three hours to help things along. I'm done with the hay."

"Looking for a feather bed to die in. Some men are blamed particular."

As he spoke Carpy caught his first glimpse of Kate. "h.e.l.lo! There's the pretty little girl from the great big ranch. No wonder the man's up and coming--what did you send for me for, McAlpin? Where you heading, Jim?"

With his hands on the door jambs, Carpy effectually barred the exit.

Knowing his stubborn patient well, he humored him, to the verge of letting him have his own way, but with much raillery denied him the drug store trip. A compromise was effected. Laramie consented to go to Belle's to get something to eat. In this way, refusing help, the obdurate patient was got to walk to the cottage.

"Don't let him fall on y'," McAlpin cautioned Kate, as the two followed close behind. "I helped carry him upstairs. He's a ton o' brick."

But Laramie, either incensed by his condition--the idea of any escort being vastly unpleasant to him--or animated by the stiff hypodermics of profanity that Carpy injected into the talk as they crossed the street, did not even stumble; he held his way unaided, met Belle's amazement unresponsively and, sitting down, called for something to eat.

"How does he do it, Doc?" whispered McAlpin, craning forward from the background.

"Pure, d.a.m.ned nerve," muttered Carpy. "But he does it."

They got him into bed. While the doctor was excavating the channel ripped through his shoulder, Laramie said nothing. When, however, he discovered that Kate was missing, he crustily short-circuited Belle's excuses. Words pa.s.sed. It became clear that Laramie would start out and search the town if Kate were not produced.

"She wanted to see _me_," he insisted, doggedly. "Now I want to see _her_."

Carpy found he must again intervene. He despatched McAlpin as a diplomatic envoy over to his own house whither he had taken Kate as his guest when she peremptorily declined to return to Belle's.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

MCALPIN AT BAY

However others may have felt that night about Laramie's affairs, one man, McAlpin, was proud of his ride, desperately wounded, all the way to town. Laramie had made a confidant of no one but Kate. His experience in being trapped was not so pleasant that he liked to talk about it and neither McAlpin's shrewd questioning nor Carpy's restrained curiosity was gratified that night.

In the circ.u.mstances, McAlpin's fancy had full play; and distrustful of his imagination unaided, he repaired early to the Mountain House bar to stimulate it. Thus it gradually transpired along the bar, either from the stimulant or its reaction or from McAlpin's excitement, that a big fight had taken place that morning in the Falling Wall from which only Laramie had returned alive. It was known that he had come back and inference as to who the dead men might be could center only on his two active enemies, Tom Stone and Harry Van Horn. The pawky barn boss, who possessed perfectly the art of tantalizing innuendo, thus stirred the bar-room pool to the depths.

McAlpin chose the rustler's end of the bar--as Abe Hawk's old stand was called--and held the interest of the room against all comers. As the place filled for the evening, his cap, its vizor more than ordinarily awry, was a conspicuous object and it became a favor on his part to accept the courtesies of the bar at any man's hands.