Wild Youth Part 5

At that instant there were two more pistol-shots, and a bullet hit the ground beside Orlando. Then he saw dimly the face of the man whom he was helping to his feet.

"Mazarine! Good Lord-Mazarine!" he said in an anxious voice. "What have they done to you?"

"Nothing--I'm all right. The dogs, the rogues, the thieves--but they didn't get it! It was in the pockets of my shirt." The old man was almost hysterical. "You just come in time, Mr. Guise. You frightened 'em off. They'd have found it, if it hadn't been for you."

"Found what?" asked Orlando, as he helped the old man towards the camp-fire, himself in pain, and a dizziness coming over him.

"Found your six thousand dollars that Burlingame paid me to-day," gasped the old man, spasmodically; "but it's here-it's here!" He caught at his breast with devouring greed.

Somehow the agitated joy of the old man revolted Orlando. He had a sudden rush of repulsion; but he fought it down.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "Are you all right?" Somehow the sound of his own voice was very weak. "Yes, I'm all right," Mazarine said, and he called to his horse near by.

The horse did not stir, and the old man, whose breath came almost normally now, moved over and caught its bridle.

In a dazed kind of way, and with growing unsteadiness, Orlando walked towards the camp-fire. He was leaning against his horse, and opening his coat and waistcoat to find the wound in his side and staunch it with the kerchief from his neck, when Mazarine came up.

"What's that on your coat and breeches? Say, you're all b.l.o.o.d.y!"

exclaimed Mazarine. "Why, they shot you!"

"Yes, they got me," was Orlando's husky reply, and he gave a funny little laugh. Giggling, people had called it.

"How are we going to get you home?" Mazarine asked. "You can't ride."

At that moment there was the rumbling jolt of a wagon. It was the pioneer-emigrant returning from Askatoon to his camp.

A few minutes later Orlando was lying on some bags in the emigrant's wagon, while Mazarine rode beside it. "It's only a few hundred yards to the house," said the emigrant sympathetically, as he looked down at the now unconscious figure in the wagon.

"It's four miles to his house," said Mazarine. "Well, I'm not taking him four miles to his house or any house," said the emigrant. "My horse has had enough to-day, and the sooner the lad's attended to, the better.

He's going to the nearest house, and that's Tralee, as they call it, just here."

"That's my house," gruffly replied the old man. "Well, that's where you want him to go, ain't it?" asked the pioneer sharply. He could not understand the owner of Tralee.

"Yes, that's where I want him to go," replied Mazarine slowly.

"Then you ride ahead on the trail, and I'll follow," returned the other decisively.

"What's the matter? Who hurt him?" he presently called to Mazarine, riding in front.

"I'll tell you when we get to Tralee," answered the old man, with his eyes fixed on two lights in the near distance. One was in the kitchen, where a half-breed woman was giving supper to Li Choo, a faithful Chinaman roustabout; the other was in the room where a young wife sat with hands clasped, wondering why her husband did not return, yet glad that he did not.

CHAPTER VI. "THINGS MUST HAPPEN"

Between two sunrises Louise Mazarine had seen her old world pa.s.s in a flash of flame and a new world trembling with a new life spread out before her; had come to know what her old world really was. The eyes with which she looked upon her new world had in them the glimmer not only of awakened feeling but of awakened understanding. To this time she had endured her aged husband as a slave comes to bear the lashes of his master, with pain which will be renewed and renewed, but pain only, and not the deeper torture of the soul; for she had never really grasped what their relations meant. To her it had all been part of the unavoidable misery of life. But on that sunny afternoon when Orlando Guise's voice first sounded in her ears, and his eyes looked into hers as, pale and ill, she gazed at him from the window, a revelation came to her of what the three years of life with Joel Mazarine had really been.

From that moment until she heard the pioneer's wagon, escorted by her husband, bringing the unconscious Orlando Guise to her door, she had lived in a dream which seemed like a year of time to her.

Since the early morning of that very day, when Joel had leaned over her bed and asked her in his slow, grinding voice how she was, she had lived more than in all the past nineteen years of her life. The Young Doctor had come and gone, amazed at first, but presently with a look of apprehension in his eyes. There was not much trace of yesterday's illness in the alert, eager girl-wife, who twenty-four hours before had been really nearer to the end of all things than her aged husband. The Young Doctor knew all too well what the curious, throbbing light in her eyes meant. He knew that the gay and splendid Orlando Guise had made the sun for this prismatic radiance, and that the story of her life, which Louise had wished to tell him yesterday, would never now be told--for she would have no desire to tell it. The old vague misery, the ancient veiled torture, was behind her, and she was presently to suffer a new torture--but also a joy for which men and women have borne unspeakable things. No, Louise would never tell him the story of her life, because now she knew it was a thing which must not be told. Her mind understood things it had never known before. To be wise is to be secret, and she had learned some wisdom; and the Young Doctor wondered if the greater wisdom she must learn would be drunk from the cup of folly. Before he left her he had said to her with meaning in his voice:

"My dear young madam, your recovery is too rapid. It is not a cure: it is a miracle; and miracles are not easily understood. We must, therefore, make them understood; and so you will take regularly three times a day the powerful tonic I will give you."

She was about to interrupt him, but he waved a hand reprovingly and added with kindly irony:

"Yes, we both know you don't need a tonic out of a bottle; but it's just as well other people should think that the tonic bringing back the colour to your cheeks comes out of a bottle and not out of a health resort, called Slow Down Ranch, about four miles to the north-west of Tralee."

As he said this, he looked straight into the eyes which seemed, as it were, to shrink into cover from what he was saying. But when, an instant afterwards, he took her hand and said good-bye, he knew by the trembling clasp of her fingers--even more appealing than they had yet been--that she understood.

So it was a few moments later, outside the house, he had said to Joel Mazarine that he had given his wife a powerful tonic, and he hoped to see an almost instant change in her condition; but she must have her room to herself for a time, according to his instructions of the day before, as she was nervous and needed solitude, to induce sleep. He was then about to start for Askatoon when the old man said:

"I suppose you won't have to come again, as she's going on all right."

To this the Young Doctor had replied firmly: "Yes, I'm coming out to-morrow. She's not fit yet to go to Askatoon, and I must see her once again."

"Oh, keep coming--that's right, keep coming!" answered the miserly old man, who still was not so miserly that he did not want his young wife blooming. "Coming to-morrow, eh!" he added, with something very like a sneer.

The other had a sudden flash of fury pa.s.s through his veins. The old Celtic quickness to resent insult swept over him. The ire of his forefathers waked in him. This outrageous old Caliban, to attempt to sneer at him! For an instant he was Kilkenny let loose, and then the cool, trained brain rea.s.serted its mastery, and he replied:

"If there should be a turn for the worse, send for me to-night--not to-morrow!" And he looked the old man in the eyes with a steady, steelly glance which had nothing to do with the words he had just uttered, but was the challenge of a conquering spirit.

The Young Doctor had acted with an almost uncanny prescience. It was as though he had foreseen that Orlando Giuse would be carried upstairs to a room nearly opposite that of Louise, and laid unconscious on a bed, till he himself should come again that very night and extract a bullet from Orlando's side; that he would open Orlando's eyes to consciousness, hear Orlando say, "Where am I?" and note his startled look when told he was at Tralee.

Once during this visit, while making Orlando safe and comfortable, with the help of Li Choo, the Chinaman, and Rada, the half-breed, he had seen Louise for a moment. The old man had gone to the stables, and as he came out of the room where Orlando was, Louise's door opened softly on him.

Dimly, in the half-darkness of her room, in which no light was burning, he saw her. She beckoned to him. Shutting the door of Orlando's bedroom behind him, he came quickly to her side and said:

"Go to bed at once, young woman. This will not do."

"I'm not sick now," she urged. "Say, I really am well again."

"You must not be well again so soon," he replied meaningly. "I want you to understand that you must not," he insisted.

There was a pause, which seemed interminable to the Young Doctor, who was listening for the heavy footstep of Joel Mazarine outside the house; and then at last in agitation Louise said to him:

"Will he get well? Rada told me he was shot saving Mr. Mazarine. Will he get well?"

"Yes, he will get well, and quickly, if--"

He broke off, for there was the thud of a heavy footstep for which he had been listening. Joel Mazarine was returning.

"Won't they let me help nurse him?" she whispered.

The Young Doctor shook his head in negation. "His mother will be here to-morrow," he said quickly. "Be wise, my child."

"You understand?" she whispered wistfully.

"I have no understanding. Go to bed," he answered sharply. "Shut the door at once."

When old Joel Mazarine's footsteps were heard upon the staircase again, Orlando was lying with half-closed eyes, watching, yet too weak to speak; and the Young Doctor was giving directions to Rada and Li Choo for the night-watch in Orlando's room. When Mazarine entered, the Young Doctor gave him a casual nod and went on with his directions. When he had finished, Rada said in her broken English, with an accent half-Indian, half-French: