The Fighting Shepherdess Part 52

"I'll tell you about it to-morrow on the way over."

"Where is he?"

"At Kate Prentice's--at headquarters."

Mrs. Taylor stiffened.

"I shouldn't care to go there, Clarence." Seeing that his face clouded, she added: "Of course, if your heart is set upon it--the woman wouldn't construe it as a 'call' and return it, would she?"

"I hardly think so," replied Teeters dryly.

As a result of this conversation, the following morning Kate saw Teeters driving up Bitter Creek with a second person on the seat beside him. She had just come down from Burnt Basin and was not in too good a humor.

Bowers, who was staying with Mullendore, came out of the wagon when he heard her and asked:

"How was it lookin'?"

"The spring was trampled to a bog," she said in an exasperated voice, "and the range is covered with bare spots where that dry-farmer has salted his cattle. I'll throw two bands of sheep in there, and when I take 'em off there won't be roots enough left to grow gra.s.s for five years. If it's fight he wants, I'll give him all he's looking for." Her brow cleared as she added:

"Teeters is coming up the road and bringing some one with him." She nodded towards the wagon, "How is he?"

"I doubt if he lasts the day out."

Kate frowned when she recognized Mrs. Taylor. They pa.s.sed occasionally on the road to Prouty, but always without speaking. Kate never had forgiven the affront at the Prouty House, while Mrs. Taylor preserved her uncompromising att.i.tude towards "rough characters."

Mrs. Taylor looked like a grenadier in a long snuff-brown coat and jaunty sailor hat as she descended from the buckboard without using the step. The benign cow-like complacency of her face always had irritated Kate, and now, as she advanced with the air of a great lady slumming, Kate felt herself tingling.

"How do you do, my dear?" She extended a large hand with a brown cotton glove upon it.

Kate's hand remained at her side, as she said coldly:

"How do you do, Mrs. Taylor?"

Mrs. Taylor's manner said that it was the gracious act of an unsullied woman extending a hand to a fallen sister when she laid her brown cotton paw upon Kate's arm and quavered pityingly:

"You po-oo-or soul!"

"You stupid woman!" Kate's eyes at the moment looked like steel points emitting sparks.

Mrs. Taylor drew herself up haughtily and was about to retort, but thought better of it. Instead, she declared with n.o.ble magnanimity:

"I am not angery. I have not been angery in thirty years. You are very rude, but I can rise above it and forgive you, because I realize you've had no raising."

"I hope," said Kate hotly, "that you realize also that you are not here by my invitation."

Mrs. Taylor looked as if she was not only about to forget that she was a saint but a lady, while Teeters had a sensation of being rent by feline claws.

It seemed like a direct intervention of Providence when Bowers hung out of the door of the wagon and called excitedly:

"I believe he's goin'!"

The exigencies of the moment, and curiosity, combined to make Mrs.

Taylor overlook temporarily that she had been insulted, and she hastened with Teeters to the dying man's side.

Emaciated, yellow, Mullendore was lying with closed eyes when they entered.

"Say, feller--" said Teeters, hoping to rouse him.

Only Mullendore's faint breathing told them that he was living.

Mrs. Taylor laid her hand upon his damp forehead and withdrew it quickly.

"The po-oo-or soul! I'll sing something."

"It might help to git _ong rapport_ with the sperrits," agreed Teeters.

As Mrs. Taylor droned a familiar camp-meeting hymn, Mullendore opened his eyes and looked at her dully:

"Who are you?" he whispered.

Mrs. Taylor quavered, "I've come to bring the Truth to you."

Mullendore looked at her, uncomprehending.

Teeters thrust himself in the sick man's line of vision and elucidated:

"Feller, I'm sorry to tell you you ain't goin' to 'make the grade'--they's no possible show fur you--an' Mis' Taylor here, who's a personal friend, you might say, of all the leadin' sperrits in the Sperrit World, has come to kind of prepare you--"

Mullendore's lips moved with an effort:

"There ain't nothin' after this."

"Oh, my!" Teeters e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in a shocked voice. "Don't say heathen things like that! If you'd seen half of what I've saw you couldn't nowise doubt."

"There ain't no h.e.l.l--there ain't no comin' back." The voice was stronger, and querulous.

Teeters wagged his head in horrified reproach.

"Mis' Taylor, do you think the sperrits are goin' to take holt?"

Turning to the lady who hoped to be his mother-in-law, Teeters's eyes started in his head. He was familiar with weird gyrations of the kitchen table, and messages received through the medium of the ouija board, but he never had seen the mysterious force which Mrs. Taylor referred to as her "control" evidence itself in any such fas.h.i.+on as this.

With her lank six feet sunk upon the side bench and her supine hands lying limply in her lap, Mrs. Taylor's chest was rising and falling in convulsive heaves; the nostrils of her large flat nose were dilated, and her wide mouth, with its loose colorless lips, was slightly agape. Her eyes were open and staring fixedly straight ahead. Mrs. Taylor was in a trance.

Teeters had long since given over trying to explain what he did not understand, but in a vague way he regarded Mrs. Taylor as an unconscious fakir, whose spiritual communications bore the earmarks of something she had learned in a quite ordinary way.

There was, however, nothing of charlatanry in her present state. Teeters was convinced of that. She caught and held the gaze of Mullendore's dull eyes. Suddenly she stiffened out like a corpse galvanized into life by an electric charge, then again sank back, and said thickly between labored breaths: