Claim Number One Part 13

Walker and Bentley hurried back to the Hotel Metropole to find that Sergeant Schaefer had arrived ahead of them with the news. They were all up in picturesque _deshabille_, Horace with a blanket around him like a bald-headed brave, his bare feet showing beneath it. The camp was in a state of pleasurable excitement; but Dr. Slavens was not there to share it, nor to receive the congratulations which all were ready to offer with true sincerity.

"I wonder where he is?" questioned Horace a little impatiently.

He did not like to forego the ceremony, but he wanted to get back to bed, for a man's legs soon begin to feel chilly in that mountain wind.

"He left here not very long ago," said Agnes; "perhaps not more than an hour. I was just preparing to go to bed."

"It's a fine thing for him," commented Sergeant Schaefer. "He can relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand dollars. I understand the railroad's willing to pay that."

"It's nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst," said June. "Mother, you'd better set your cap for him."

"June Reed!" rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the proposal provoked.

But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. She _had_ thought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven, and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling term.

They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the doctor's fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller's wife suggested tea. But n.o.body wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a little and went off to bed.

The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled and fiddled before. One by one the doctor's friends tired of waiting for him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of the guard; the hour was two o'clock in the morning.

"I believe you'd just as well go to bed, Miss Horton," suggested Bentley, "and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I can't understand why he doesn't come back."

"I didn't know it was so late," she excused, rising to act on his plainly sensible view of it.

"Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him," said Bentley. "It's more than likely that he's run across some old friend and is sitting talking somewhere. You've no notion how time slips by in such a meeting."

"And perhaps he doesn't know of his good fortune yet," she suggested.

"Oh, it's all over town long ago," Walker put in. "He knows all about it by this time."

"But it isn't like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such good news with his friends," she objected.

"Not at all like him," agreed Bentley; "and that's what's worrying me."

She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had been any bold person on the pry.

There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark awaiting the return of Bentley and Walker. There was no sleep in her eyes, for her mind was full of tumult and foreboding and dread lest something had befallen Dr. Slavens in the pitfalls of that gray city, the true terrors and viciousness of which she could only surmise.

Bentley and Walker went their way in silence until they came to the lights. There was no thinning of the crowds yet, for the news in the midnight extra had given everybody a fresh excuse for celebrating, if not on their own accounts, then on account of their friends. Had not every holder of a number been set back one faint mark behind the line of his hopes?

Very well. It was not a thing to laugh over, certainly, but it was not to be mended by groans. So, if men might neither groan nor laugh, they could drink. And liquor was becoming cheaper in Comanche. It was the last big night; it was a wake.

"Well, I'll tell you," said Walker, "I don't think we'd better look for him too hard, for if we found him he wouldn't be in any shape to take back there by now."

"You mean he's celebrating his good luck?" asked Bentley.

"Sure," Walker replied. "Any man would. But I don't see what he wanted to go off and souse up alone for when he might have had good company."

"I think you've guessed wrong, Walker," said Bentley. "I never knew him to take a drink; I don't believe he'd celebrate in that way."

Even if he had bowled up, protested Walker, there was no harm in it. Any man might do it, he might do it himself; in fact, he was pretty sure that he _would do it_, under such happy conditions, although he believed a man ought to have a friend or two along on such occasions.

From place to place they threaded their way through the throng, which ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with shadows under the smoky lights.

"Walker, I'm worried," Bentley confessed as they stood outside the last and lowest place of diversion that remained to be visited in the town.

"I tell you, it flies up and hits a man that way," protested Walker.

"Sheep-herders go that way all of a sudden after a year or two without a taste of booze, sometimes. He'll turn up in a day or two, kind of mussed up and ashamed; but we'll show him that it's expected of a gentleman in this country once in a while, and make him feel at home."

"Yes, of course," Bentley agreed, his mind not on the young man's chatter nor his own reply. "Well, let's run through this hole and have it over with."

Inside the door four dusty troopers, on detached duty from the military post beyond Meander, sat playing cards. As they appeared to be fairly sober, Walker approached them with inquiries.

No, they hadn't seen Dr. Slavens. Why? What had he done? Who wanted him?

Explanations followed.

"Well," said a sergeant with service-stripes on his sleeve and a broad, blue scar across his cheek, "if I'd 'a' drawed Number One you bet you wouldn't have to be out lookin' for me. I'd be up on the highest point in Comanche handin' out drinks to all my friends. Ain't seen him, pardner. He ain't come in here in the last two hours, for we've been right here at this table longer than that."

They pa.s.sed on, to look upon the drunken, noisy dance in progress beyond the canvas part.i.tion.

"Not here," said Walker. "But say! There's a man over there that I know."

Bentley looked in that direction.

"The one dancing with the big woman in red," directed Walker.

Bentley had only a glance at Walker's friend, for the young man pulled his arm and hurried him out. Outside Walker seemed to breathe easier.

"I'll tell you," he explained. "It's this way: I didn't suppose he'd want to be seen in there by anybody that knew him. You see, he's the Governor's son."

"Oh, I see," said Bentley.

"So if we happen to run across him tomorrow you'll not mention it, will you?"

"I'll not be advertising it that I was in there in very big letters,"

Bentley a.s.sured him.

"A man does that kind of a thing once in a while," said Walker. "It bears out what I was saying about the doctor. No matter how steady a man is, it flies up and hits him that way once in a while."

"Maybe you're right," yielded Bentley. "I think we'd just as well go to bed."

"Just as well," Walker agreed.

The chill of morning was in the air. As they went back the crowds had thinned to dregs, and the lights in many tents were out.

"She thinks a lot of him, doesn't she?" observed Walker reflectively.

"Who?" asked Bentley, turning so quickly that it seemed as if he started.