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Updated: June 13, 2025
As he stripped Boyle's clothing off to bare the wound, Slavens ordered Ten-Gallon to go and see whether the old gambler had paid his last loss. "I won't touch him! I won't lay a hand on him!" Ten-Gallon refused, drawing back in alarm. Boyle was not dead, though Shanklin's bullet had struck him perilously near the heart and had passed through his body.
Sleep caught him then, and held him past the hour that he had set for its bound. When he awoke the sun was shining over the cold ashes of his last night's fire. Slavens got up with a deeper feeling of resentment against Boyle than he ever had felt for any man. It seemed to come over him unaccountably, like a disagreeable sound, or a chill from a contrary wind.
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.
The one-eyed man swept the cubes into his hand and, still talking, held that long, bony member hovering over the mouth of the box. At that moment Dr. Slavens, lurching as if shoved violently from behind, set his shoulder against the table and pushed it, hard and suddenly, against the one-eyed man's chest, all but throwing him backward against the wall of the tent.
"In five minutes," he announced as the ladies rejoined them, "they will draw the first name from the wheel at Meander. I hope that it may be the name of someone in this party." "I hope it will be yours," said Dr. Slavens' eyes as he looked earnestly at Agnes; and: "Number Two would do very well for me in case your name came first," her eyes seemed to answer him.
"And I know how to jar you loose!" threatened Boyle. Shanklin leaned toward the Governor's son never so little, his left hand lifted to point his utterance, and opened upon Boyle the most withering stream of blasphemous profanity that Slavens had ever heard. If there ever was a man who cursed by note, as they used to say, Hun Shanklin was that one. He laid it to Boyle in a blue streak.
But the slow days in those solitudes were galling to his busy mind once the safety of his boy's life was assured. He became in a measure dictatorial and high-handed in his dealings with the doctor, and altogether patronizing. Dr. Slavens considered his duty toward the patient at an end on the morning when they loaded him into the spring wagon to take him to Comanche. He told the Governor as much.
Warren Slavens, late of Missouri, was without question the deepest down in the quagmire of failure. He hated himself for the fizzle that he had made of it, and he hated the world that would not open the gates and give him one straight dash for the goal among men of his size.
They had given the care of their son over to the doctor and Agnes entirely, watching their coming and going with tearful eyes, waiting for the word that would cut the slender stay of hope. On the afternoon of the second day after the operation, Agnes entered the tent and looked across the patient's cot into Dr. Slavens' tired eyes.
Across from where he stood was the site of a large place, its littered leavings either already worked over or not yet touched. No one scratched and peered among its trash-heaps or clawed over its reeking straw. Dr. Slavens took possession of the place, turning the loose earth and heaped accumulations with his feet as he rooted around like a swine.
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