Chapter 24

--AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW

They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him, quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed. They stood there, dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room, coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs. And at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once Miss Sarah's will alone proved insufficient. The girl refused, point-blank, to go.

"He half undressed me and put me to bed," Barbara flung back in reply to the spinster's final objection, "and if that did not shock you, surely my staying now need not!"

The refusal itself brought a glint to the older woman's eyes and the phrasing thereof a flush to her cheeks, but she wasted no more words in what she knew to be useless argument. And though the girl grew sick and sicker still while Miss Sarah cut away the sodden shirt and started, with competent skill, to cleanse the wound, the latter let her remain and hold a basin of antiseptic and replenish it when necessary.

Miss Sarah knew what to do; and she worked with unhurried thoroughness. They had sent for the doctor, and after ages had passed for the girl, maddeningly cool and unruffled, he arrived. But his first words, too, were an order that she leave the room, and unable to combat his professional bleakness, meekly she had to obey. Little and wholly hopeless she stole downstairs.

Caleb and her father were confronting each other before the fireplace when she reached the lower floor, but the queer note of restraint in their voices meant nothing to her, until she heard her father cry out in sudden anguish.

"Cal," he cried, "Cal, you don't think I was a party to this attempt at murder?"

Then, at Caleb's reply, which went hurtling back at him, the girl was crouching, white and still, and clutching at the stair-rail.

"Party! Attempt! Because you did not pull the trigger are you any the less guilty?"

"Do you believe that I would murder the man my girl loves?" Dexter Allison moaned now.

Barbara gasped at the deadly anger which crossed Caleb Hunter's face. Caleb had lifted a hand in righteous accusation.

"You have dealt in crookedness," he thundered. "You have thrived on cunning. And, being a law unto yourself in this country, you have gone unpunished until now. You aided and abetted a vicious and unscrupulous scoundrel in his villainy; and now you have looked upon the result of your works. Law has never touched you, sir--reprisal has passed you by. But, by God, sir, I warn you if that boy dies--if he dies--I shall see that you meet me at thirty paces the next morning. And I shall not miss--I shall be your law!"

They had been friends for close to forty years, yet they were worse than strangers now. Dexter Allison could not answer; he could not speak aloud. Caleb's finger had swung toward the door in a gesture unmistakable. Allison turned, and, ghastly of face, met the eyes of his daughter.

"Barbara," he appealed to her, frantically. "Baby----"

But she shrank, a huddled heap of misery, away from him.

"You--too?" she whispered. "You!" And then, dully: "And you're my father!"

The shoulders beneath the garish plaid rose and fell, pitifully. This, then, was the moment which he feared. He gulped aloud and hung his head, and turned his feet toward home. Barbara rose after he had gone and crept into a chair.

One after another they tried to persuade the girl to rest. Miriam came and talked to her, and Caleb; and even Miss Sarah, passing through the room, stopped to urge her again to go to bed. But she met them all with the same wordless refusal; she was waiting for him when the doctor, descending in the morning, tried to combine, diplomatically, praise for what she had done with disapproval of her obstinacy.

"My dear child, this insubordination will help no one," he said, "and it may end in your collapse at just the moment when you are needed most."

"Will he live?" was all she would say. "Will he live?"

And before such hopelessness the doctor could not lie.

"He is hard hit and very, very weak," he had to admit. "The shock is great and the tissue damage--unpromising. It is far worse than I expected, but he is still alive, and most men would have been already dead. And his vitality is a marvel, even to me."

He might have comforted her, but with no other statement could he have told the truth. He failed also in his effort to persuade her to go to bed; he had breakfast with Caleb, and she refused to eat. And she was still there in her chair, asking only to be let alone, when Garry Devereau and Fat Joe arrived. She rose and ran to meet the latter, but the doctor who knew how many such situations the pudgy riverman had weathered, summoned him immediately, and Barbara had to wait an hour before Joe came back downstairs. By the lapels of his coat she clung to him then.

"He's mighty sick," reluctantly Joe, too, told the truth.

"The doctor said that it was worse than he expected," she droned. "They sent me away, but if he isn't going to live I won't let them keep me from him!"

Joe's sympathy was unspoiled by professionalism.

"Sick is one thing,"--his confidence was almost convincing,--"and dyin' is another. And---- Shucks! I ain't going to let no book-taught medico worry me yet! Men get well because they are bound to get well, or they die because it's their time to die--and he's got too much to live for now!"

Her hopeless face made deception impossible, but Joe comforted her, just the same. He persuaded her to eat with him, and when he found that his conversation made the waiting easier for her, he waxed quite garrulous.

"Why, he's been hurt almost as bad as this, once before," he rambled on, "but he's still alive, ain't he?"

The girl's eyes livened at that.

"Once, down on the island, he mixed in an affair in which most men would not have meddled. And he got it from behind that time, too, only it was with a knife."

"He never told me," murmured the girl.

"It ain't likely he would," the other stated with finality. "It was over a woman, and not a particularly pretty story, any way you look at it."

Her dark eyes widened. She bit her lip. It came to her how little of his life she had shared.

"Oh!" she barely breathed. And again, falteringly: "Oh!"

From that halting monosyllable Joe judged that something was amiss. Observation had never been a slow or painful process of concentration with him.

"He didn't even know who she was. He'd never even seen her before," quickly he put her right. "She was just a public dancer, that was all. But a man--mistreated her--and Steve, he just interfered----"

Indeed, Joe had found the way to comfort her and still tell the truth, even though he found it foolishly difficult to swallow food and watch at the same time the warmth which his words kindled. So for an hour he lingered at table and told her many things concerning the man she loved which she would never have learned from his own lips. And it was Joe's jocularity which in the end subdued her rebel spirit. She yielded at last and promised to go home and rest, but only after he had promised first in a fashion which could leave no doubt in her heart, that he would come for her if things grew worse.

Before she left him that morning she told Joe of Big Louie, whom she had had to leave in the road; but he interrupted her before she could finish. They had already found Big Louie. Then she gave him the note which she had discovered crushed beneath Steve's body. This Joe scanned ferociously; he flashed a strange glance at her from bleached blue eyes.

"Some one traced your name," he put into words the first thought that had been hers. "Some one who had your signature to copy."

She nodded, whitely, in horror. Joe folded the paper and tucked it into a pocket.

"We can touch nobody," he averred regretfully, "unless we catch Harrigan!"

Caleb himself took Barbara home, and on the way across the lawn she giggled suddenly at the funny way in which the distance seemed to increase and then lessen between her eyes and her feet. The ground persisted in rising to meet her, she said, until she had to cling to Caleb's arm. And the outer steps proved difficult to negotiate. But at the sight of her father, sunk in silence Upon his desk in the ground floor "office," she drew her hand from the crook of Caleb's arm and went swiftly across to him.

"Barbara," he beseeched her brokenly, the moment her cheek touched his. "You mustn't believe that I----"

She hushed him with gentle fingers laid upon his lips.

"I have been a very foolish and hysterical child," she said. "I'll try to behave more like a woman now. And you and Uncle Cal have been only--absurd!"

She had to laugh again at the behavior of her feet as she climbed upstairs; but her head seemed steady enough. It was only after she had reached her own room that she complained querrulously of the failing lights. Miriam had to help Cecile undress and put her to bed.

On the floor below, her father had turned again to his desk, his head bowed upon his arms. And total breakdown was imminent for Dexter Allison when a hand touched, awkwardly, his shoulder. He looked up heavily to meet this time the eyes of Caleb Hunter. Caleb stuttered furiously at first, for sentimentality shamed him. Then a happy thought showed the way.

"Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint, yesterday," he made of it a ceremonial. "Do you think you would--care to join me, sir?"

They had been friends for close to forty years, not because of common tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity. Dexter came to his feet; he reached out and crushed the other man's hand within his soft, white fingers. Nor was his reply quite according to formula.

"I don't mind if I do, Cal," he accepted fervidly, "Thank God . . . I don't mind if I do!"

Arm in arm, they recrossed to the white-columned house. And they kept close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that followed, finding a potent though unconfessed reassurance in such companionship.

Delirium came again upon the sick man who lay in the room which Miss Sarah had always kept waiting for him. Fever strode upon him, while the girl who had brought him home slept in complete exhaustion. At times Steve lay quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he called crisply for Fat Joe--he feared for his bridge--and Joe had to exert every iron muscle to hold him down. And always he spoke Barbara's name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the verge of collapse. But he continued to live, through that day and the next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go for the girl, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity. He continued to live, and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he was no longer delirious. Stephen O'Mara opened his eyes and gazed feebly but very understandingly into the eyes of Fat Joe, who was watching at that moment.

Joe tried to hush him, but he would talk a little.

"I know," he pronounced each word with calculated effort. "I have been very sick, and I must not waste my strength. But I have to be clear, first, on one point. Have I dreamed it, Joe, or--or did she bring me home?"

With his voice alone, when all else seemed failing, Joe had kept his friend alive. The doctor believed it; Miss Sarah knew it to be so. And first of all Joe had to voice his thankfulness, for it was an explosive thing.

"Didn't I tell her so?" he demanded in his whining tenor. "Didn't I say so, all along? And I let that doctor worry _me_, just because he's got a diploma in a frame, hanging on his wall!"

Then he answered Steve's question.

"She found you," he said. "She brought you home."

A long time the sick man lay and pondered. And finally he found it possible to smile.

"I have not cared whether I lived or died," he said in little more than a whisper. "All along I have seemed to know how near I was--to going across; and I have been near to quitting--at times. For I was happier than I'd ever dared let myself be, before--and then, with the first shot that dropped Big Louie, I knew----" He shook his head, still smiling vaguely. "I have not wanted to live, but I am looking at things--more like a man now. . . . You need not worry any longer, Joe. I'll sleep a little while, I think; and then I'll put my mind hard on getting well, when I awake."

That marked the end of delirium, and with sleep which came almost while he was talking, the fever began to abate. He "put his mind on getting well," when he awoke, twelve hours later. Strength was flowing in a steady tide back into his body long before Barbara's knees would again bear her weight. For she had squandered her endurance without counting the cost, and she paid the full penalty. She lay three days and three nights railing at her weakness before she could get up at all; and even then Cecile, her little maid, clucked discreetly at the dark circles beneath her eyes.

Joe was several days absent on that errand which had all but emptied the seething town of men; he returned the same day Barbara was about again, forced to admit that Harrigan and Fallon and Shayne had won clear. And there was nothing left to the disgruntled groups which straggled in behind him, save tall and heated conjecture. Some said that they must have managed to cross the border; others maintained that they had found sanctuary in the lumber-camps of the lake country to the west, but no matter which guess was right the net result stood unchanged. For it is upon the one who runs away that the blame is always laid, and Archibald Wickersham knew fully as well as did Caleb and Allison and Fat Joe that, without Harrigan, they could not hope to touch him. Harrigan had disappeared from the ken of men, and Wickersham delayed only until his departure could no longer be construed as flight. Then one evening modestly he boarded a train.

After she had rested Barbara proved almost humbly amenable to reason; until it was best for her to go to him, she would wait as patiently as she was able. And in the meantime, in a luxury of loneliness, wisely the girl spent her days out of doors, climbing oftenest to that hill-top where they had stood together, in the snow, the night of Miss Sarah's Christmas party. From that point she could see Morrison and the river basin, and even the steam that jetted ever and again from the whistles of the engines clattering over his railroad which lanced into the north.

But no discordant note of haste could reach her ears from so great a distance. That whole vast panorama, suggestive least of all of violence, lay blanketed in a sleepy silence that matched the subdued security of her mood.

Miss Sarah ordered a week of unbroken quiet and rest for her patient; and Steve, and not Barbara, proved the difficult one to manage during that period. For with returning strength there came to him recollection of many things which required his attention. He fretted over his work; he swore humorously at Fat Joe, who, coming to make daily reports as soon as Miss Sarah realized that the good in such visits far exceeded the benefits of sleep and solitude, assured his chief that they had accomplished much, unhampered as they were by carping authority.

But he lay and brooded, no humor in his eye, when he was left alone. Fat Joe had assured him that she had brought him home; but Fat Joe, who was ever averse to anti-climax, had told him no more than that. His efforts at entertainment were only the more spontaneous those days because of the soberness of his friend's face. And then, the same day that Joe raised him against the pillows so that he might watch a string of flat-cars, high piled with logs, roll into the yards, they let her go to him.

Steve was listening to the shrill salute of the whistle which he knew was McLean's paen of victory; he was smiling a little wistfully over the memory which, with McLean, always recurred to him, when he turned and saw her standing on the threshold. She had come on diffident, mouse-like feet. She was watching him. And before he believed it really was she, Barbara faltered his name.

"Steve!"

It was only a wisp of a sound--an aching, throbbing bit of tenderness lighter even than the breath that bore it.

"Steve!" she breathed again.

But thereupon, with a headlong little rush that scattered spools of bandage and rolls of lint, and set the bottles upon his table jingling dangerously, she flew to him and came, somehow, into his arms.

They had not told him--at first he could not speak. Dumbly he sat, his face bowed upon that brown head pillowed in his arms. She had told herself that she was a woman now--yet her first words were all girl.

"Tell me just once that I'm pretty," she quavered. "Say that I am still--half boy--to you!"

His tongue unsteadied with joy, he told her again, as he had told her on that other day; and watching the old, old wonder of her grow in his eyes, she listened as though she were taking the words, one by one, from his lips. But there was nothing boyish in the crooked little arch of her mouth--nothing boyish in the depths of her dark and brimming eyes. She remembered his wincing shoulder then; her arms crept higher about his neck. And now her face was uplifted and there was no more need for words.

Afterward, when they spoke of Big Louie, she loved him more for the sorrow which he did not try to hide. From Fat Joe he had already learned of Big Louie's last dereliction. Out of a deeper silence, Steve spoke gravely--an epitaph for the man to whom he had been unfailingly kind.

"Most any kind of a failure can live," he said, "but it takes a man--to smile and die."

He let himself marvel aloud at her littleness.

Their first hour together was only the happier for that moment of sadness they shared.