Claim Number One Part 14

"Miss Horton," Walker replied. "And there's cla.s.s to that girl, I'm here to tell you!"

Agnes, in the darkness of her compartment, strained forward to catch the sound of the doctor's voice when she heard them enter, and when she knew that he was not there a feeling which was half resentment, half accusation, rose within her. Was she to be disappointed in him at last?

Had he no more strength in the happy light of his new fortune than to go out and "celebrate," as she had heard the sergeant confidentially charging to Horace, like any low fellow in the sweating throng?

But this thought she put away from her with humiliation and self-reproach, knowing, after the first flash of vexation, that it was unjust. Her fears rose towering and immense again; in the silence of the graying morning she shivered, drawing her cold feet up into the cot to listen and wait.

Walker and Bentley had gone quietly to bed, and in the stillness around her there was an invitation to sleep. But for her there was no sleep in all that night's allotment.

The roof of the tent toward the east grew transparent against the sky.

Soon the yellow gleam of the new sun struck it, giving her a sudden warm moment of hope.

It is that way with us. When our dear one lies dying; when we have struggled through a night hideous with the phantoms of ruin and disgrace, then the dawn comes, and the sun. We lift our seamed faces to the bright sky and hope again. For if there is still harmony in the heavens, how can the discord of the earth overwhelm us? So we comfort our hearts, foolishly exalting our troubles to the plane of the eternal consonance.

The sun stood "the height of a lance" when Agnes slipped quietly to the door of the tent. Over the gray desert lands a smoky mist lay low.

Comanche, stirring from its dreams, was lighting its fires. Here pa.s.sed one, the dregs of sleep upon him, shoulders bent, pail in hand, feet clinging heavily to the road, making toward the hydrant where the green oats sprang in the fecund soil. There, among the horses in the lot across the way, another growled hoa.r.s.ely as he served the crowding animals their hay.

Agnes looked over the sagging tent-roofs with their protruding stovepipes and wondered what would be revealed if all were swept suddenly away. She wondered what fears besides her own they covered, silent in the pure light of day. For Comanche was a place of secrets and deceits.

She laid a fire in the tin stove and put the kettle on to boil. Horace Bentley and Milo Strong were stirring within the tent, making ready for the stage, which departed for Meander at eight.

Mrs. Mann, the miller's wife, came out softly, the mark of the comb in her hair, where it had become damp at the temples during her ablution.

She looked about her swiftly as she stood a moment in the door, very trim and handsome in her close-fitting black dress, with a virginal touch of white collar and a coral pin.

Agnes was bending over a bed of coals, which she was raking down to the front of the stove for the toast--a trick taught the ladies of the camp by Sergeant Schaefer--and did not seem to hear her.

"Dr. Slavens hasn't come back?" Mrs. Mann whispered, coming over softly to Agnes' side.

Agnes shook her head, turning her face a moment from the coals.

"I heard you get up," said Mrs. Mann, "and I hurried to join you. I know just how you feel!"

With that the romantic little lady put an arm around Agnes' neck and gave her a hurried kiss, for Horace was in the door. A tear which sprang suddenly leaped down Agnes' face and hissed upon the coals before the girl could take her handkerchief from her sweater-pocket and stop its wilful dash. Under the pretext of shielding her face from the glow she dried those which might have followed it into the fire, and turned to Horace with a nod and smile.

What was there, she asked herself, to be sitting there crying over, like a rough-knuckled housewife whose man has stayed out all night in his cups? If he wanted to stay away that way, let him stay! And then she recalled his hand fumbling at the inner pocket of his coat, and the picture post-card which he had handed her at the riverside.

Still, it wasn't a matter to cry about--not yet at least. She would permit no more disloyal thoughts. There was some grave trouble at the bottom of Dr. Slavens' absence, and she declared to herself that she would turn Comanche over, like a stone in the meadow of which the philosopher wrote, and bare all its creeping secrets to the healthy sun, but that she would find him and clear away the unjust suspicions which she knew were growing ranker in that little colony hour by hour.

They all gathered to bid Sergeant Schaefer good-bye, for he was to rejoin them no more. June pressed upon him a paper-bag of fudge, which she had prepared the day before as a surprise against this event. The sergeant stowed it away in the side pocket of his coat, blushing a great deal when he accepted it.

There was a little sadness in their hearts at seeing the soldier go, for it foretold the dissolution of the pleasant party. And the gloom of Dr.

Slavens' absence was heavy over certain of them also, even though Sergeant Schaefer tried to make a joke of it the very last thing he said. They watched the warrior away toward the station, where the engine of his train was even then sending up its smoke. In a little while Horace and Milo followed him to take the stage.

There came a moment after the men had departed when Agnes and William Bentley found themselves alone, the width of the trestle-supported table between them. She looked across at him with no attempt to veil the anxiety which had taken seat in her eyes. William Bentley nodded and smiled in his gentle, understanding way.

"Something has happened to him," she whispered, easing in the words the pent alarm of her breast.

"But we'll find him," he comforted her. "Comanche can't hide a man as big as Dr. Slavens very long."

"He'll have to be in Meander day after tomorrow to file on his claim,"

she said. "If we can't find him in time, he'll lose it."

CHAPTER VIII

THE GOVERNOR'S SON

After a conference with Walker in the middle of the morning, Bentley decided that it would be well to wait until afternoon before beginning anew their search for the doctor. In case he had been called in his professional capacity--for people were being born in Comanche, as elsewhere--it would be exceedingly embarra.s.sing to him to have the authorities lay hands on him as an estray.

"But his instrument-case is under his cot in the tent," persisted Agnes, who was for immediate action.

"He may have had an emergency call out of the crowd," explained Bentley.

In spite of his faith in the doctor, he was beginning to lean toward Walker's view of it. Slavens was big enough to take care of himself, and experienced enough to keep his fingers out of other people's porridge.

Besides that, there had to be a motive behind crime, and he knew of none in the doctor's case. He was not the kind of man that the sluggers and holdups of the place practiced upon, sober and straight as he always had been. Then it must be, argued Bentley, that the doctor had his own reason for remaining away. His unexpected luck might have unbalanced him and set him off on a celebration such as was common in such cases.

"Very well," agreed Agnes. "I'll wait until noon, and then I'm going to the police."

Being a regularly incorporated city, Comanche had its police force.

There were four patrolmen parading about in dusty _deshabille_ with prominent firearms appended, and a chief who presided over them in a little box-house, where he might be seen with his coat off and a diamond in the front of his white shirt, smoking cigars all day, his heels on the window-sill.

As Dr. Slavens had not appeared at the time designated as her limit by Agnes, Bentley went with her to the chief's office to place the matter before him. It was well that they did not go there for sympathy, and unfortunate that they expected help. The chief received them with disdainful aloofness which amounted almost to contempt. He seemed to regard their appeal to him for the elucidation of the doctor's mystery as an affront.

The chief was a short man, who vainly believed that he could sustain his trousers in dignified position about his hipless body with a belt. The result of this misplaced confidence was a gap between waistcoat and pantaloons, in which his white shirt appeared like a zebra's stripe.

He was a much-bedizened and garnitured man, for all that he lacked a coat to hang his ornaments upon. Stones of doubtful value and unmistakable size ornamented the rings upon his stocky fingers, and dangled in an elaborate "charm" upon the chain of his watch. The only name they ever addressed him by in Comanche other than his official t.i.tle was Ten-Gallon. Whether this had its origin in his capacity, or his similarity of build to a keg, is not known, but he accepted it with complacency and answered to it with pride.

Ten-Gallon was the chief guardian of the interests of the gamblers'

trust of Comanche, which was responsible for his elevation to office--for even the office itself--and which contributed the fund out of which his salary came. It is a curious anomaly of civilization, everywhere under the flag which stretched its stripes in the wind above the little land-office at Comanche, that law-breaking thrives most prosperously under the protection of law.

Gambling in itself had not been prohibited by statute at that time in Wyoming, though its most profitable side diversions--such as dropping paralyzing poisons in a man's drink, s.n.a.t.c.hing his money and clearing out with it, cracking him on the head with a leaden billet, or standing him up at the point of a pistol and rifling him--were, as now, discountenanced under the laws.

But what profit is there in gambling if the hangers-on, the cappers, the steerers, and the s.n.a.t.c.hers of crumbs in all cannot find protection under the flag and its inst.i.tutions? That was what the gamblers' trust of Comanche wanted to know. In order to insure it they had the city incorporated, and put in a good, limber-wristed bartender as chief of police.

It was to that dignitary that Dr. Slavens' friends had come with their appeal for a.s.sistance. There was discouragement in the very air that surrounded the chief, and in the indifference with which he heard their report. He looked at Agnes with the slinking familiarity of a man who knows but one kind of woman, and judges the world of women thereby. She colored under the insult of his eyes, and Bentley, even-tempered and slow to wrath as he was, felt himself firing to fighting pitch.

"Well," said the chief, turning from them presently with a long gape, terminating in a ructatious sigh, "I'll shake out all the drunks in the calaboose this afternoon, and if your friend's among 'em I'll send him on over to you. No harm could happen to him here in Comanche. He'd be as safe here, night or day, as he would be playin' tennis in the back yard at home."

The chief mentioned that game with scorn and curling of the lip. Then he gazed out of the window vacuously, as if he had forgotten them, his mashed cigar smoking foully between his gemmed fingers.

Bentley looked at Agnes in amazed indignation. When he squared off as if to read his mind to the chief she checked him, and laid her hand on his arm with a compelling pressure toward the door.

"That man's as crooked as the river over there!" he exclaimed when they had regained the sunlight outside the smoke-polluted office.

"That's plain," she agreed; "and it doesn't mitigate my fears for the doctor's safety in the least."