“Do you think Jerry will recover?”
“There’s a chance for him,” he replied.
“For his mother’s sake I hope he will,” she said. “I went to see her, remembering in the midst of my distress her kind face and gentle heart. I’m glad that I went, although my mission failed.”
“No, nothing fails,” he corrected gently. “What looks to us like failure from our side of it is only the working out of the plan laid down a long time ahead. We may never see the other side of the puzzle, but if we could see it we’d find that our apparent failure had been somebody else’s gain. It’s the balance of compensation. Your thought of Boyle’s mother, and your ride to appeal to her in my behalf, worked out in bringing his father here at a time when Jerry needed him as he never may need him in his life again.”
“It was a strange coincidence,” she reflected.
“We call such happenings that for want of a better name, or for the short-sightedness which keeps us from applying the proper one,” said he. “It’s better that you have concluded to give up the City of Refuge. You’ll not need it now.”
“It was a foolish undertaking, romantic and impossible, from the very beginning,” she owned. “I never could have put it through.”
“It would have carried many a heartache with it, and many a hard and lonely day,” said he. “And so we are both back where we were, so far as landed possessions go in this country, at the beginning.”
“I’ve lost considerable by my foolish dream,” she confessed with regret.
“And I have gained everything,” he smiled, taking her hand in his.
The world around them seemed to be too grave to look kindly on any love-passages of tenderness or kisses, or triflings such as is the common way of a man with a maid. In that moment when hand touched hand she looked up into his eyes with warm softness glowing in her own, and on her lips stood an invitation which his heart sprang to seize, like an eager guest leaping through the portal of welcome.
At that moment, when eye drew eye, heart warmed to heart, and lips trembled to meet, Jerry Boyle coughed as if blood were mounting to his throat and cutting off his life.
Dr. Slavens was at his side in a moment. It must have been the strangulation of an uneasy dream, for there was no symptom of hemorrhage. The wounded man still slept, groaning and drawing the lips back from the teeth, as he had drawn them in his passion when he came on that morning to meet his enemy with the intention in his heart to slay.
But love shuddered and grew pale in the cold nearness of death. The kiss so long deferred was not given, and the fluttering pulse which had warmed to welcome it fell slow, as one who strikes a long stride in a journey that has miles yet to measure before its end.
Governor Boyle was back in camp in the middle of the afternoon, and before night the tents and furnishings for lodging the party comfortably arrived from Comanche. The Governor pressed Agnes, who was considering riding to Comanche to find lodging, to remain there to assist and comfort his wife when she should arrive.
“We need the touch of a woman’s hand here,” said he.
They brought Jerry’s tent and set it up for her. She was asleep at dusk.
* * *
Mrs. Boyle arrived next morning, having started as soon as the messenger bearing news of the tragedy reached the ranch. She was a slight, white-haired woman, who had gone through hardships before coming to prosperity on that frontier, so the fifty-mile ride in a wagon was no unusual or trying experience for her.
Whatever tears she had for her son’s sad plight she had spent on the rough journey over. As she sat beside him stroking his heavy hair back from his pallid brow, there was in her face a shadow of haunting anxiety, as if the recollection of some old time of terror added its pangs to those of the present.
Her presence in camp, and her constant ministrations at her son’s side, relieved Dr. Slavens of considerable professional anxiety, as well as labor. It gave him time to walk about among the gigantic stones which cast their curse of barrenness over that broken stretch, Agnes with him, and make a further investigation of the land’s mineral possibilities.
“Ten-Gallon was telling the truth, in my opinion,” said he. “I have explored these rocks from line to line of this claim, and I reached the conclusion a good many days ago that somebody had been misled in supposing it was worth money. It was nothing but Boyle’s persistent determination to get hold of it that gave it a color of value in my mind.”
“Still, it may be the means, after all, of yielding you as much as you expected to get out of it at the first,” she suggested.
He looked at her questioningly.
“I mean the Governor’s declaration yesterday morning that he would pay you twice what you expected to get out of it if you would save Jerry’s life.”
“Oh, that!” said he, as if he attached little importance to it.
“He’s a millionaire many times over,” she reminded him. “He can afford to do it, and he should.”
“I may be out of the case entirely before night,” he told her, explaining that another physician would arrive on the first train from Cheyenne.
“You know best,” said she, resigning hope for his big fee with a sigh.
“Smith will come over with your tent and goods today, very likely,” said he, “and then we can leave. I had planned it all along, from the time we used to take those moonlight walks to the river, that we should leave this country together when it came our time to go.”
“It would be wrong for you to waste your life here, even if you could make more money than elsewhere, when the world with more people and more pain in it needs you so badly,” she encouraged him.
“Just so,” he agreed. “It’s very well for Smith to stay here, and men of his kind, who have no broader world. They are doing humanity a great service in smoothing the desert and bringing the water into it.”
“We will leave it to them,” she said.
They tramped across the claim until they came in sight of Hun Shanklin’s tent. Its flap was blowing in the wind.
“The old rascal came over to make friends with me,” said Slavens. “He claimed that he never lifted his hand against me. There’s his horse, trying to make it down the slope to the river. I’ll have to catch the beast and take that rope off.
“There’s a man over there!” Agnes exclaimed. “Look! There among the rocks to the right of the tent! I wonder who it is?”
Slavens looked where she pointed, just as the man disappeared among the rocks.
“It’s the Governor!” she whispered.
“Looked like his coat,” he agreed.
“Do you suppose he’s––”
“Trying to locate old Shanklin’s mine,” he said. “That’s what he’s after. If there’s copper on that piece the Governor will get it, even if his son doesn’t live to share with him. The difference of a figure or two in the description of a piece of land might be revised on the books, if one had the influence.”
The doctor for whom Governor Boyle had sent arrived on the afternoon train from Cheyenne and reached the camp before sunset. He spoke in the highest terms of the manner in which Dr. Slavens had proceeded, and declared that it would be presumptuous meddling for him, or anyone else, to attempt to advise in the case.
Agnes heard his commendation with triumph in her eyes, and Mrs. Boyle gave Dr. Slavens her blessing in a tearful look. The doctor from Cheyenne took up his instrument-case and held out his hand with a great deal more respect in his bearing toward the unknown practitioner than he had shown upon his arrival.
“On vacation here?” he asked, puzzled to find any other excuse for so much ability running wild among the rocks in that bleak place.
“Something like that,” answered Slavens noncommittally.
“When you’re passing through Cheyenne, stop off and see me,” giving Slavens a respectful farewell.
Dr. Slavens advanced several points in the appraisement of Governor Boyle, although, to do the Governor justice, he ha
d seen from the beginning that the wandering physician was a master. Boyle had been weighing men for what they were worth, buying them and selling them, for too many years to place a wrong bet. He told Slavens that unlimited capital was back of him in his fight for Jerry’s life, and that he had but to demand it if anything was wanted, no matter what the cost.
Dr. Slavens told him bluntly that his son was in a fix where one man’s money would go as far as another’s to get him clear, and that it had very little weight in the other end of the scales against the thing they were standing in front of, face to face.
“Save him to me, Doctor! For God’s sake save him!” begged the old man, his face bloodless, the weight of his unshored years collapsing upon him and bowing him pitifully.
Again Slavens felt the wonder of this man’s softness for his son, but pity was tinctured with the thought that if it had been applied in season to shaping the young man’s life, and his conscience, and his sense of justice, it might have commanded more respect. But he knew that this was the opportunity to make the one big chance which the years had been keeping from him. At the start Slavens had told the old man that his son had a chance for life; he had not said how precariously it lay balanced upon the lip of the dark cañon, nor how an adverse breath might send it beyond the brink. The weight of the responsibility now lay on him alone. Failure would bring upon him an avalanche of blame; success a glorious impetus to his new career.
He took a walk down to the river to think about it, and breathe over it, and get himself steadied. When he came back he found Smith there, unloading Agnes’ things, soaking up the details of the tragedy with as much satisfaction as a toad refreshing itself in a rain.
Smith was no respecter of office or social elevation. If a man deserved shooting, then he ought to be shot, according to Smith’s logic. As he made an excuse to stay around longer by assisting the doctor to raise Agnes’ tent, he expressed his satisfaction that Jerry Boyle had received part payment, at least, of what was due him.
“But I tell you,” said he to the doctor in confidence, turning a wary eye to see that Agnes was out of hearing just then. “I’m glad he got it the way he did. I was afraid one time that girl over there was goin’ to let him have it. I could see it in her eye.”
“You can see almost anything in a woman’s eye if your imagination is working right,” the doctor told him, rather crabbedly.
“You don’t need to believe it if you don’t want to,” returned Smith, somewhat offended, “but I tell you that girl’d shoot a man in a minute if he got too fresh!”
“I believe you’re right about that, Smith,” agreed the doctor, “so let’s you and I be careful that we don’t get too fresh.”
Smith said no more, but he kept turning his eye upon the doctor as he got his wagon ready to set off on his return, with a good deal of unfriendliness in it. Evidently it had come into his mind only then that Dr. Slavens was assuming a sort of proprietary air around Agnes.
With his foot on the brake and his lines drawn up, Smith looked down and addressed her.
“Well, I don’t suppose you’ll be back on the river for some time?”
“I expect it will be a long time,” she replied, evading exposition of her plans.
“I’ll keep my eye on the place for you, and see that them fellers don’t cut down your timber,” he offered.
She thanked him.
“When you come over that way, take a look at that sign on the front of my store,” said Smith, giving her a significant, intimate glance. “The more you see that name in print the better you like it.”
With that Smith threw off his brake so suddenly and violently that it knocked a little cloud of dust out of his wagon, laid the whip to his team, and drove off with almost as grand a flourish as he used to execute when setting out from Comanche on the stage.
Mrs. Boyle left her son’s side, her husband relieving her, to see that Agnes was supplied with everything necessary. She had pressed Agnes to remain with her–which was well enough in accord with the girl’s own inclination–and help her care for her “little boy,” as she called him with fond tenderness.
“Isn’t she sweet?” whispered Agnes, as Mrs. Boyle went to her own tent to fetch something which she insisted Agnes must have. “She is so gentle and good to be the mother of such a wolf!”
“But what did she think about her precious son going to turn the whole United States out after you because you wouldn’t help him pull the plank out from under an unworthy friend?”
“I didn’t tell her that,” said Agnes, shaking her head. “I told the Governor as we came over, and she isn’t to know that part of it.”
Their tents made quite a little village, and the scene presented considerable quiet activity, for the Governor had brought a man over from Comanche to serve the camp with fuel and water and turn a hand at preparing the food. Agnes was cook-in-extraordinary to the patient and the doctor. She and Slavens took their supper together that night, sitting beside the fire.
There they talked of the case, and the prospect of the fee, and of the future which they were going to fix up together between them, as confidently as young things half their age. With the promised fee, life would be one way; without it another. But everything was white enamel and brass knobs at the poorest, for there was confidence to give hope; strength and love to lend it color.
Striking the fire with a stick until the sparks rose like quail out of the grass, Dr. Slavens vowed solemnly that he would win that fee or take in his shingle–which, of course, was a figurative shingle only at that time–and Agnes pledged herself to stand by and help him do it as faithfully as if they were already in the future and bound to sustain each other’s hands in the bitter and the sweet of life.
“It would mean a better automobile,” said he.
“And a better surgery, and a nicer chair for the consulting-room,” she added, dreaming with wide-open eyes upon the fire.
“And a better home, with more comfort in it for you.”
“Oh, as for that!” said she.
“I’ve got my eye on a place with old elms in front of it, and moss on the shingles, and a well where you pull the bucket up with a rope over a pulley,” said he. “I’ve got it all laid out and blooming in my heart for that precious mother of yours. It is where mine used to live,” he explained; “but strangers are in it now. We’ll buy them out.”
“It will be such a burden on you. And just at the beginning,” she sighed. “I’m afraid, after all, that I’ll never be coward enough to consent to it at the last.”
“It’s out of your hands now, Agnes,” said he; “entirely out of your hands.”
“It is strange how it has shaped out,” she reflected after a little silence; “better, perhaps, than we could have arranged it if we had been allowed our own way. The one unfortunate thing about it seems to be that this case is isolated out here in the desert, where it never will do you a bit of good.”
“Except the fee,” he reminded her with a gentle smile.
“Oh, the fee–of course.”
“But there is a big hurdle to get over before we come to even that.”
“You mean––”
She looked at him with a start, the firelight catching her shining eyes.
“The crisis.”
“Day after tomorrow,” said she, studying the fire as if to anticipate in its necromancy what that day offered to their hopes.
The shadow of that grave contingency fell upon them coldly, and the plans they had been making with childlike freedom of fancy drew away and grew dim, as if such plans never had been. So much depended on the crisis in Jerry Boyle’s condition, as so much devolves upon the big if in the life of every man and woman at some straining period of hopes and schemes.
Words fell away from them; they let the fire grow pale from neglect, and gray ashes came over the dwindling coals, like hoarfrost upon the bright salvia against a garden wall. Silence was over the camp; night was deep around them. In Jerry Boyle’s tent, where
his mother watched, a dim light shone through the canvas. It was so still there on that barren hillside that they could hear the river fretting over the stones of the rapids below the ford, more than half a mile away.
After a while her hand sought his, and rested warm upon it as she spoke.
“It was pleasant to dream that, anyway,” said she, giving up a great sigh.
“That’s one advantage of dreams; they are plastic material, one can shape them after the heart’s desire,” he answered.
“But it was foolish of me to mingle mine with yours so,” she objected. “And it was wrong and selfish. I can’t fasten this dead weight of my troubles on you and drag you back. I can’t do that, dear friend.”
He started at the word, laying hold of her hand with eager grip.
“Have you forgotten the other word–is that all there is to it?” he asked, bending toward her, a gentle rebuke in his trembling voice.
“There is so much more! so much more!” she whispered. “Because of that, I cannot be so selfish as to dream those splendid dreams again–wait,” she requested, as she felt that he was about to speak.
“If I thought only of myself, of a refuge for others and myself, then I would not count the penalty which would attach to you to provide it. But unless we win the Governor’s fee, my dear, dear soul, don’t you see how impossible it will be for us to carry out even the most modest of our fond schemes?”
“Not at all,” he protested.
“It would drag you back to where you were before, only leaving you with a greater burden of worry and expense,” she continued, unheeding. “I was rapt, I was deadened to selfish forgetfulness by the sweet music of those dreams. I am awake now, and I tell you that you must not do it, that I shall never permit you to ruin your life by assuming a load which will crush you.”
“Agnes, the chill of the night is in your heart,” said he. “I will not listen to such folly! Tomorrow, when the sun shines, it will be the same as yesterday. I have it all arranged; you can’t change it now.”
“Yes. You took charge of me in your impetuous generosity, and I was thoughtless enough to interpose no word. But I didn’t mean to be selfish. Please remember above it all that I didn’t mean to be selfish.”
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