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Me an' my side-kicker was drivin' a bunch of Three Bar beeves to Lazette an' we was fools enough to run afoul of that quicksand at Double Fork, about five miles down the crick. We've bogged down about forty head an' I've come for help. You got any men around here?" "Oh," she said; "how careless you were! Didn't you know the quicksand was there?"
His excuses had been accepted by Ruth, for she was in the mood to restore him to that spot in her heart that Randerson had come very near to occupy. She listened to him calmly, and agreed, without conscious emotion, to his proposal that they ride, on the Monday following, to Lazette, to marry.
"I found him lying in the doorway. He had been shot through the right side, near the shoulder, but not through the lung, and he was still alive. I dragged him into the cabin and did what I could for him. Then I started for the doctor." "For the doctor?" he said incredulously. "Then how does it happen that you are here? You couldn't possibly ride to Lazette and return by this time!"
He found a trail that he had used several times before, when he had been working for the Diamond H and necessity or whim had sent him this way, and rode it, noting that it seemed to have been used much, lately. "I reckon old Abe's poundin' his horses considerable. Why, it's right plain," he added, after a little reflection, "this here trail runs into the Lazette trail, down near the ford.
He provided an explanation presently. Memory drew a vivid picture for him. It showed him a saloon in Lazette, some card tables, with men seated around them. Among the men were Kelso and Randerson. Randerson had been a mere youth. Kelso and Randerson were seated opposite each other, at the same table. Kelso had been losing was in bad temper. He had charged Randerson with cheating.
But Taggart " The frown on his face indicated that his intentions toward the latter were perfectly clear. Of the good resolutions that Calumet had made since the night before, when he had re-read his father's letter in the moonlight while standing beside the corral fence, none had survived. Black, vicious thoughts filled his mind as he drove toward Lazette.
Earlier in the morning, Ruth had watched Uncle Jepson and Aunt Martha ride away in the buckboard toward Lazette. She had stood on the porch, following them with her eyes until the buckboard had grown dim in her vision a mere speck crawling over a sun-scorched earth, under a clear white sky in which swam a sun that for days had been blighting growing things.
A certain meeting with a grim-faced man on the Lazette trail the night before, a vivid recollection of the grim-faced man's uncanny cleverness with a weapon, demonstrated upon two occasions, worried him, as did also some words that kept running through his mind, asleep or awake, and would not be banished.
But Sanderson suffered no remorse over the lie. For he saw her eyes glow with pride, and he knew that the picture he had drawn would be the ideal of her memory for the future. Kent Williams went to Lazette, and Sanderson spent the interval during his departure and return in visiting the cattlemen and settlers in the basin.
The leg, Sheila decided, after a quick examination, was not broken, but badly sprained, and she knew enough about horses to be certain that the injured pony would never be able to carry her to Lazette. She would be forced to go to the Double R now, there was nothing else that she could do.
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