_ CHAPTER XX. YEAGER RIDES TO NOCHES
Jim Yeager had not watched through the long day and night with Phyllis without discovering how deeply her feelings were engaged. His unobtrusive readiness and his constant hopefulness had been to her a tower of strength during the quiet, dreadful hours before the doctor came.
Once, during the night, she had followed him into the dark hall when he went out to get some fresh cold water, and had broken down completely.
"Is he--is he going to die?" she besought of him, bursting into tears for the first time.
Jim patted her shoulder awkwardly. "Now, don't you, Phyl. You got to buck up and help pull him through. Course he's shot up a heap, but then a man like him can stand a lot of lead in his body. There aren't any of these wounds in a vital place. Chief trouble is he's lost so much blood. That's where his clean outdoor life comes in to help build him up. I'll bet Doc Brown pulls him through."
"Are you just _saying_ that, Jim, or do you really think so?"
"I'm saying it, and I think it. There's a whole lot in gaming a thing out. What we've got to do is to _think_ he's going to make it. Once we give up, it will be all off."
"You are such a help, Jim," she sighed, dabbing at her eyes with her little handkerchief. "And you're the _best_ man."
"That's right. I'll be the best man when we pull off that big wedding of yours and his."
Her heart went out to him with a rush. "You're the only friend both of us have," she cried impulsively.
With the coming of Doctor Brown, Jim resigned his post of comforter in chief, but he stayed at Seven Mile until the crisis was past and the patient on the mend. Next day Slim, Budd, and Phil Sanderson rode in from Noches. They were caked with the dust of their fifty-mile ride, but after they had washed and eaten, Yeager had a long talk with them. He learned, among other things, that Healy had telephoned Sheriff Gill that Keller was lying wounded at Seven Mile, and that the sheriff was expecting to follow them in a few hours.
"Coming to arrest Brill for assault with intent to kill, I reckon," Yeager suggested dryly.
Phil turned on him petulantly. "What's the use of you trying to get away with that kind of talk, Jim? This fellow Keller was recognized as one of the robbers."
"That ain't what Slim has just been telling, Phil. He says he recognized the hawss, and thinks it was Keller in the saddle. Now, I don't think anything about it. I _know_ Keller was with me in the hills when this hold-up took place."
"You're his friend, Jim," the boy told him significantly.
"You bet I am. But I ain't a bank robber, if that's what you mean, Phil."
His clear eyes chiselled into those of the boy and dominated him.
"I didn't say you were," Phil returned sulkily. "But I reckon we all recall that you lied for him once. Whyfor would it be a miracle if you did again?"
Jim might have explained, but did not, that it was not for Keller he had lied. He contented himself with saying that the roan with the white stockings had been stolen from the pasture before the holdup. He happened to know, because he was spending the night in Keller's shack with him at the time.
Slim cut in, with drawling sarcasm: "You've got a plumb perfect alibi figured out for him, Jim. I reckon you've forgot that Brill saw him riding through the Pass with the rest of his outfit."
"Brill says so. I say he didn't," returned Yeager calmly.
Toward evening Gill arrived and formally put Keller under arrest. Practically, it amounted only to the precaution of leaving a deputy at the ranch as a watch, for one glance had told the sheriff that the wounded man would not be in condition to travel for some time.
It was the following day that Yeager saddled and said good-by to Phyllis.
"I'm going to Noches to see if I cayn't find out something. It don't look reasonable to me that those fellows could disappear, bag and baggage, into a hole and draw it in after them."
"What about Brill's story that he saw them at the Pass?" the girl asked.
"He may have seen four men, but he ce'tainly didn't see Larrabie Keller. My notion is, Brill lied out of whole cloth, but of course I'm not in a position to prove it. Point is, why did he lie at all?"
Phyllis blushed. "I think I know, Jim."
Yeager smiled. "Oh, I know that. But that ain't, to my way of thinking, motive enough. I mean that a white man doesn't try to hang another just because he--well, because he cut him out of his girl."
"I never was his girl," Phyllis protested.
"I know that, but Brill couldn't get it through his thick head till a stone wall fell on him and give him a hint."
"What other motive are you thinking of, Jim?"
He hesitated. "I've just been kinder milling things around. Do you happen to know right when you met Brill the day of the robbery?"
"Yes. I looked at my watch to see if we would be in time for supper. It was five-thirty."
"And the robbery was at three. The fellows didn't get out of town till close to three-thirty, I reckon," he mused aloud.
"What has that got to do with it? You don't mean that----" She stopped with parted lips and eyes dilating.
He shook his head. "I've got no right to mean that, Phyllie. Even if I did have a kind of notion that way I'd have to give it up. Brill's got a steel-bound, copper-riveted alibi. He couldn't have been at Noches at three o'clock and with you two hours later, fifty-five miles from there. No hawss alive could do it."
"But, Jim--why, it's absurd, anyway. We've known Brill always. He couldn't be that kind of a man. How could he?"
"I didn't say he could," returned her friend noncommittally. "But when it comes to knowing him, what do you know about him--or about me, say? I might be a low-lived coyote without you knowing it. I might be all kinds of a devil. A good girl like you wouldn't know it if I set out to keep it still."
"I could tell by looking at you," she answered promptly.
"Yes, you could," he derided good-naturedly. "How would you know it? Men don't squeal on each other."
"Do you mean that Brill isn't--what we've always thought him?"
"I'm not talking about Brill, but about Jim Yeager," he evaded. "He'd hate to have you know everything that's mean and off color he ever did."
"I believe you must have robbed the bank yourself, Jim," she laughed. "Are you a rustler, too?"
He echoed her laugh as he swung to the saddle. "I'm not giving myself away any more to-day."
Brill Healy rode up, his arm in a sling. Deep rings of dissipation or of sleeplessness were under his eyes. He looked first at Yeager and then at the young woman, with an ugly sneer. "How's your dear patient, Phyl?"
"He is better, Brill," she answered quietly, with her eyes full on him. "That is, we hope he is better. The doctor isn't quite sure yet."
"Some of us don't hope it as much as the rest of us, I reckon."
She said nothing, but he read in her look a contempt that stung like the lash of a whip.
"He'll be worse again before I'm through with him," the man cried, with a furious oath.
Phyllis measured him with her disdainful eye, and dismissed him. She stepped forward and shook hands with Yeager.
"Take care of yourself, Jim, and don't spare any expense that is necessary," she said.
For a moment she watched her friend canter off, then turned on her heel, and passed into the house, utterly regardless of Healy.
Yeager reached Noches late, for he had unsaddled and let his horse rest at Willow Springs during the heat of the broiling day.
After he had washed and had eaten, Yeager drifted to the Log Cabin Saloon and gambling house. Here was gathered the varied and turbulent life of the border country. Dark-skinned Mexicans rubbed shoulders with range riders baked almost as brown by the relentless sun. Pima Indians and Chinamen and negroes crowded round the faro and dice tables. Games of monte and chuckaluck had their devotees, as had also roulette and poker.
It was a picturesque scene of strong, untamed, self-reliant frontiersmen. Some of them were outlaws and criminals, and some were as simple and tender-hearted as children. But all had become accustomed to a life where it is possible at any moment to be confronted with sudden death.
A man playing the wheel dropped a friendly nod at Jim. He waited till the wheel had stopped and saw the man behind it rake in his chips before he spoke. Then, as he scattered more chips here and there over the board, he welcomed Yeager with a whoop.
"Hi there, Malpais! What's doing in the hills these yere pleasant days?"
"A little o' nothin', Sam. The way they're telling it you been having all the fun down here."
Sam Wilcox gathered the chips pushed toward him by the croupier and cashed in. He was a heavy-set, bronzed man, with a bleached, straw-colored mustache. Taking his friend by the arm, he led him to one end of the bar that happened for the moment to be deserted.
"Have something, Jim. Oh, I forgot. You're ridin' the water wagon and don't irrigate. More'n I can say for some of you Malpais lads. Some of them was in here right woozy the other day."
"The boys will act the fool when they hit town. Who was it?"
"Slim and Budd and young Sanderson."
"Was Phil Sanderson drunk?" Yeager asked, hardly surprised, but certainly troubled.
"I ain't sure he was, but he was makin' the fur fly at the wheel, there. Must have dropped two hundred dollars."
Jim's brows knit in a puzzled frown. He was wondering how the boy had come by so much money at a time.
"Who was he trailin' with?"
"With a lad called Spiker, that fair-haired guy sitting in at the poker table. He's another youngster that has been dropping money right plentiful."
"Who is he?"
"He's what they call a showfer. He runs one o' these automobiles; takes parties out in it."
"Been here long? Looks kind o' like a tinhorn gambler."
"Not long. He's thick with some of you Malpais gents. I've seen him with Healy a few."
"Oh, with Healy."
Jim regarded the sportive youth more attentively, and presently dropped into a vacant seat beside him, buying twenty dollars worth of chips.
Spiker was losing steadily. He did not play either a careful or a brilliant game. Jim, playing very conservatively, and just about holding his own, listened to the angry bursts and the boastings of the man next him, and drew his own conclusions as to his character. After a couple of hours of play the Malpais man cashed in and went back to the hotel where he was putting up.
He slept till late, ate breakfast leisurely, and after an hour of looking over the paper and gossiping with the hotel clerk about the holdup he called casually upon the deputy sheriff. Only one thing of importance he gleaned from him. This was that the roan with the white stockings had been picked up seven miles from Noches the morning after the holdup.
This put a crimp in Healy's story of having seen Keller in the Pass on the animal. Furthermore, it opened a new field for surmise. _Brill Healy said that he had seen the horse with a wound in its flank._ Now, how did he know it was wounded, since Slim had not mentioned this when he had telephoned? It followed that if he had not seen the broncho--and that he had seen it was a sheer physical impossibility--he could know of the wound only because he was already in close touch with what had happened at Noches.
But how could he be aware of what was happening fifty miles away? That was the sticker Jim could not get around. His alibi was just as good as that of the horse. Both of them rested on the assumption that neither could cover the ground between two given points in a given time. There was one other possible explanation--that Healy had been in telephonic communication with Noches before he met Phyllis. But this seemed to Jim very unlikely, indeed. By his own story he had been cutting trail all afternoon and had seen nobody until he met Phyllis.
Yeager called on the cashier, Benson, later in the day, and had a talk with him and with the president, Johnson. Both of these were now back at their posts, though the latter was not attempting much work as yet. Jim talked also with many others. Some of them had theories, but none of them had any new facts to advance.
The young cattleman put up at the same hotel as Spiker and struck up a sort of intimacy with him. They sometimes loafed together during the day, and at night they were always to be seen side by side at the poker table. _