Ronicky Doone's Reward (1922) (24 page)

"But this Ronicky Doone," said another. "How come that he was able to beat the chief to the draw?"

"Because he waited and kept right on waiting until Kit's nerve begin to rub thin. He held off and held off until Kit got nervous. And you know what he is then. He ain't half of a man. He needs to act right on the spur of the moment. And some day somebody else that knows how the trick is done, is going to wait out on Kit until his nerve is gone, and then he'll kill him plumb easy."

"H'm," said a companion. "That sounds easy, but I'd hate to be taking the chance."

And the general chuckle confirmed this last opinion.

"Let's go out and get some more news out of Cook," said Montana cheerfully. "That's sure good news about Kit being on the way to getting well, eh?"

"Yes," replied Ronicky and rose reluctantly to his feet.

He had come to the test. Would Cook know him as the conqueror of Blondy Loring Christopher? If so, his lease on life was short indeed! Yet he could do nothing other than follow his companion.

Chapter
XXXI. A DOUBLE DILEMMA

In the meantime in the hotel at Twin Springs the doctor rested content. He had, he felt, effectually tied the hands of his patient, and now he had only to sit back and watch the recovery of the body of a man whose mind, he knew, was irretrievably damned.

For out of the ravings of Blondy Loring, both he and the girl had learned the truth, that the seemingly lighthearted, harmless cow-puncher was in reality the dreaded outlaw, Christopher. And this was the truth which he had whispered into the ear of Blondy to paralyze the resistance of the big wounded fellow.

It had been a hard task for the girl to be convinced. No matter what damning details dropped from the lips of Blondy during his sickness she would not believe that he could be guilty. Though the entire facts about a robbery were given in a fairly consecutive story by Blondy, yet she declared that he might have heard the story from some other person, and so he had repeated them with the peculiar vividness which any tale receives when it drops from the lips of a delirious person.

It was only when tale after tale was told in part or in the whole, by exact description or by inference, that she began to be shaken in her belief. And whereas at first she had beaten down all of the doctor's attempted arguments by simply saying: "Look at his face! How can you believe such things of him?" she at last changed her attitude.

Her attitude, in short, was altered to one which was most difficult for the doctor to combat. Instead of pointing to him as she had done in the first place, and demanding who could believe wrong of a man with a face so nobly chiseled, she now pointed to him and demanded to know who could possibly believe that evil was ineradicably planted in his soul?

When this question was first asked in a trembling voice and with shining eyes, the doctor was too dumfounded to answer.

"I don't know about it. I'm not the sky pilot of the town," he said. "Evil in his soul? Well, since it is nothing that can be cut out with a knife, or rooted out with medicine, I can't pretend to argue about it. I won't answer you."

"Because you have a blind prejudice against him," said the girl hotly. "But I tell you, doctor, there is something in instinct, and instinct tells me "

Here the doctor threw up both hands and groaned. "Instinct!" he said. "That's the last resort of my dear wife. And I've learned not to run against that wall of rock. If you've come to the question of instinct, this is no longer an argument. But go on, and I'll try to listen calmly."

"I knew you would act in this manner," said Elsie Bennett sadly. "You wouldn't understand how, the first moment I laid eyes on him, I said to myself that there was something he needed, and which I could give him."

"H'm," said, the doctor.

"It was instinct!" cried Elsie Bennett. "And though my faith was shaken for a little while by by by what we've found out "

"By the fact that we now know Blondy Loring is the thief, hypocrite, and murderer, Charlie Christopher?"

The array of unbeautiful words jolted at her shrewdly and made her head come up by jerks and stole her color away.

"You don't know everything!" she managed to exclaim faintly.

"Do you?" demanded the doctor.

"What temptations may have been in his path, and how he may have been forced by circumstances "

"Forced? Bah!" said the brutal doctor. "I tell you, my dear girl, that every one knows the story of Christopher. And every one knows that he was given a good education good enough so that he should have been able to know right from wrong, anyway! But he was spoiled, and he got into the habit of wanting his own way. So when his father died and left Christopher without any money, the boy went bad. He got at the point of a gun what he used to get from his father. And that's all there is to it. He went from bad to worse. And now here he is!"

"From bad to worse!" cried the girl indignantly and skipping over the part of the doctor's remark which appeared to her unanswerable. "From bad to worse! Do you call it worse for him to have worked as he has done for my poor father, without even wages to encourage him or for him to hope for?"

Here the doctor actually burst into laughter, regardless of the sleeping patient.

"Wages? Nonsense! He'd seen you, my dear. He'd seen you, and your pretty face was what he was working for, and any boy I know of would consider the hope of you wages enough!"

This bluntness brought a wonderful crimson up her cheeks. She stared angrily at the doctor, but it was through a mist of tears.

"How dare " she began and then changed her plan and the point of her remark.

"He has always been the height of courtesy to me," she said.

"I have never denied him good sense," said the doctor.

Here she stamped as one provoked well-nigh beyond endurance.

"It was something in him," she declared, "speaking to something in me."

"If you're in love with him," said the doctor, "I'll stop arguing."

"I'm not in you have no right oh, won't you understand?" she cried and threw out her hands in such a fashion that the doctor, who certainly could make no sense at all out of this sentence, nodded and smiled in the kindliest and briskest manner possible.

"Now, my dear, my dear!" said he, and gathering in both her hands he patted them. "Don't be silly. In the end you will have your own way. You're too pretty for it to be otherwise, and that's the curse of pretty girls all that I've known."

"I'm not asking anything," said she. "All I want to do is to convince you that I haven't the slightest feeling about Charlie except in so far as I can help him. We have very little in common, he and I."

Here the doctor coughed, and she was instantly angered out of reason.

"You are mocking me?" she asked.

"Tush!" said the doctor. "The neatest little tragedy I've ever had under my eyes is in progress, and do you think that I could mock? No, I am sorry to say that my heart is not as hard as that, and the more's the pity. I should have been a rich man, otherwise!"

"Tragedy?" she asked.

"You are beginning to pity him," said the doctor. "And if that doesn't lead to a tragedy, I confess myself a blind idiot unable to see the width of my hand into the future."

"Pity!" she exclaimed. "I should not dare to say as much as that! But I simply see an opportunity for service. Perhaps I can be the small lever that will pry him out of his old ways and lift him to a higher level where "

The groan of the doctor ended her discourse.

"Marriage?" he asked.

She flushed still more hotly.

"Why not?"

Here the doctor leaned forward and punched his remarks with a stubby forefinger into the palm of his opposite hand.

"The minute you start to marry him," he said, "I expose the facts about Christopher to the entire world. His wedding ceremony will put a rope around his neck. I tell you, I'm not going to see your life sacrificed!"

And he left the room, while Elsie Bennett sat stark and stiff in her chair and stared after him and studied blankly the panels of the door through which he had disappeared.

This was the conversation which preceded the wakening of the outlaw on the sixth morning, when he looked about him, with a steady pulse, a normal temperature, and a clear eye. In the last long sleep he had advanced to absolute safety so far as the results of that bullet wound were concerned.

He had improved so much that even the talk with the doctor did not throw him back into a fever. To be sure the threats of the honest physician made his pulses jump, but he controlled them with a great effort and managed to establish one of those calms in which the mind works hard, beating back every impulse toward hysteria.

His foolhardiness in venturing out of his stronghold in the mountains and his double safeguard of the outlaw companion seemed now little short of insanity. And yet, when he turned his head and looked toward the girl, where she was sleeping on the couch on the far side of the room, he could not question but that she was a prize worthy of a great risk.

Worthy of a great risk, indeed, but certainly not worth his own life. He gritted his teeth at the thought. He even felt a huge wave of resentment against her rising in him. It was as though she had deliberately tricked him into loving her. In truth there was little room in the heart of Charlie Loring Christopher for love of another; his affection and esteem for himself occupied most of the available space. And though the beauty of Elsie Bennett thrilled him, he had looked forward to a wedding with her rather as a proof of his own daring and a glove thrown in the face of the law-abiding world, than because his happiness would be unassured until she was his. It had been a great adventure. Instead of bullion, there was a girl. And now, like the treasure seeker wrecked on a desert island, he was apt to curse the goal which had induced him to set sail and trust to chance.

She was very beautiful, but she was not beautiful enough to make up for the pain he was undergoing and the downright peril which now threatened him in case he should push forward his schemes concerning the girl.

But one thing worried him terribly. As long as the doctor knew the truth about him, was it not true that the doctor would conceal his knowledge only so long as the outlaw was sick, and as soon as he approached a cure, would not the physician turn over his patient to the hangman?

Any other course than this seemed to Christopher impossible. And this for the simple reason that he would have adopted no other course himself had he been in the doctor's position.

His dilemma then began to grow blacker and blacker. He must provide against the future danger. He must manage in some way to tie the hands of the doctor. And what instrument did he possess with which he could make the doctor his man? Hunting desperately for a solution he turned his head after the fashion worried men have, and his eyes rested upon the girl. They lingered long on her pale, tired face, and the longer he looked the more brightly a fire began to blaze up in them.

He did not see the solution, but he began to see a light which was a hope of help.

Chapter
XXXII. HELD BY THE OUTLAWS

As he stepped from the recess where he had been talking with Montana Charlie, Ronicky Doone took care to hang back, so that the attention of Cook would not be immediately called to him. Luckily for him the talk was now so busy and unceasing that there was no attention paid to him. Not even Montana gained a word; for when he hailed Cook, the new arrival merely waved and went on with his narrative of news.

And Ronicky employed the interval in studying the face of Cook. He could not remember a man with such features in Twin Springs. And he felt a great sense of relief as he made sure of the fact. However his memory for the faces of the men in Twin Springs would not be particularly keen, for most of the time he spent in the village had been passed in lounging in the sunshine and smoking innumerable cigarettes. Moreover there was nothing by which Cook could have been easily remembered. He was simply the usual type of sun-blackened, lean, hard-skinned cow-puncher. He was neither young nor old, big nor small, blond nor dark, but in all things he was average. He would have faded into the background of any crowd.

He was enjoying his prominence of the moment on Mount Solomon, as though this were an unaccustomed thing. But Ronicky ground his teeth, as the talk, by evil chance, swung around and centered upon himself.

"What about this Ronicky Doone?"

Cook replied: "Of course I looked up as much as I could about him. There were a couple of gents in Twin Springs that claimed to know all about him. I talked to them. They said that farther up north, Ronicky Doone had a mighty big name for fighting of any kind. And when I asked 'em some more about him, each of 'em come out with a string of yarns big enough to choke a hoss. That was all good enough, but the main trouble was that the yarns didn't hitch up together at all! Wasn't two alike in either set!"

"Was old Ingram one of them that talked?" asked Montana Charlie.

"Sure he was one."

"He's made up of nothing but lies," said Montana. "I guess maybe both of 'em were just stringing you along a little, eh? They found out that nobody in town knew any facts, so they got a little attention by making up histories of Ronicky Doone, eh?"