Part 12 (1/2)
”I told you so! He is alive! Oh, Dell, can't you speak to me?”
He could not so much as lift his eyelids, but his breathing deepened, and with that sign of returning vitality Fan was forced to be content.
She was perfectly composed now, and helped to bathe his crushed and bleeding head and his broken shoulder with a calmness very impressive to all those who were permitted to glance within the room.
Slowly the guests departed. The cowboys, low-voiced and funereal of mien, rode away in groups of three or four.
The doctor came hurrying down the slope about ten of the morning, his small roan mustang galloping, his case of instruments between his feet.
He was very young, and, luckily, very self-confident, and took charge of ”the case” with thrilling authority.
”The coma was induced,” he explained, ”by the concussion of the brain.
The shoulder is also badly contused and the collar-bone broken, but if brain fever does not set in the man will live. The treatment so far as it has gone is admirable.”
Compton returned with him, or a little before him, and seemed to be waiting for arrest. He was a lean, brown young fellow with good, gray eyes and a shapely nose. ”Yes, I threw the rope,” he confessed to every one. ”It was all in fun, but he shot my horse, and as he reared up he jerked the people out of the buggy. I guess the broncos jumped ahead at the same time. But it was my fault. I had no business to rope 'em. In fact, we had no business chasing 'em up at all.”
At last Blondell gruffly told him to go home. ”If the man dies we'll come after you,” he added, with blunt ferocity.
”All right,” responded the young fellow, with lofty spirit. ”I'll be there--but I want to see Fan a moment before I leave. I want to know if there is anything I can do for her or him.”
Blondell was for refusing this utterly, but his wife said: ”You didn't mean nothing, Link--I'm sure of that--and I've always liked you, and so has Fan. She won't lay it up against you, I know. I'll tell her you're here.”
Fan, sitting beside Lester's bed, turned at her mother's word and saw the young fellow standing in the doorway in mute appeal. Her glance was without anger, but it was cold and distant. She shook her head, and the young rancher turned away, shaken with sobs. That look was worse than her curse had been.
From the dim, grim region of his delirium and his deathlike unconsciousness George Lester struggled slowly back to life. His reawakening was like a new birth. He seemed born again, this time an American--a Western American. In the measure of a good old homely phrase, some sense (a sense of the fundamental oneness of humanity) had been beaten into his head.
As he lay there, helpless and suffering, he was first of all aware of Fan, whose face shone above him like the moon, and was soon able to understand her unwearying devotion and to remember that she was his wife. She was always present when he woke, and he accepted her presence as he accepted suns.h.i.+ne, knowing nothing of the sleeplessness and toil which her attendance involved--a knowledge of this came later.
At times gruff old Blondell himself bent his s.h.a.ggy head above his bed to ask how he felt, and no mother could have been more considerate than Mrs. Blondell.
”What right have I to despise these people?” he asked himself one day.
”What have I done to lift myself above them?” (And this question extended to the neighbors, to the awkward ranchers who came stiffly and with a sort of awe into his room to ”pa.s.s a good word,” as they said.) ”They are a good sort, after all”--his heart prompted him to admit.
But his deepest penitence, his tenderest grat.i.tude, rose to Fan, whom care and love had marvelously refined. He was able to forget her careless speech and to look quite through her untidy ways to the golden, good heart which beat beneath her unlovely gowns. Nothing was too hard, too menial, for her hands, and her smile warmed his midnight sick-room like suns.h.i.+ne.
He was curiously silent even after his strength was sufficient for speech. Content to lie on his bed and watch her as she moved about him, he answered only in monosyllables, while the deep current of his love gathered below his reticence. As he came to a full understanding of what he had been and to a sense of his unworthy estimate of her and her people, his pa.s.sion broke bounds.
”Fan!” he called out one morning, ”I'm not fit to receive all your care and devotion--but I'm going to try to be; I'm going to set to work in earnest when I get up. Your people shall be my people, your cares my cares.” He could not go on, and Fan, who was looking down at him in wonder, stooped and laid a kiss on his quivering lips.
”You get well, boy; that's all you need to worry about,” she said, and her face was very sweet--for she smiled upon him as if he were a child.
THE LONESOME MAN
_--the murderer still seeks forgetfulness in the solitude, building his cabin in the shadow of great peaks._
IV