The Collected Western Classics & Adventures Novels. William MacLeod Raine
Chapter 8.
In the Lazy D Hospital
Helen's first swift glance showed that the wounded man was Bannister. She turned in crisp command to her foreman.
“Have him taken to my room and put to bed there. We have no time to prepare another. And send one of the boys on your best horse for a doctor.”
They carried the limp figure in with rough tenderness and laid him in the bed. McWilliams unbuckled the belt and drew off the chaps; then, with the help of Denver, undressed the wounded man and covered him with quilts. So Helen found him when she came in to attend his wounds, bringing with her such things as she needed for her task. Mrs. Winslow, the housekeeper, assisted her, and the foreman stayed to help, but it was on the mistress of the ranch that the responsibility of saving him fell. Missou was already galloping to Bear Creek for a doctor, but the girl knew that the battle must be fought and the issue decided before he could arrive.
He had fallen again into insensibility and she rinsed and dressed his wounds, working with the quiet impersonal certainty of touch that did not betray the inner turmoil of her soul. But McWilliams, his eyes following her every motion and alert to anticipate her needs, saw that the color had washed from her face and that she was controlling herself only to meet the demands of the occasion.
As she was finishing, the sheepman opened his eyes and looked at her.
“You are not to speak or ask questions. You have been wounded and we are going to take care of you,” she ordered.
“That's right good of y'u. I ce'tainly feet mighty trifling.” His wide eyes traveled round till they fell on the foreman. “Y'u see I came back to help fill your hospital. Am I there now? Where am I?” His gaze returned to Helen with the sudden irritation of the irresponsible sick.
“You are at the Lazy D, in my room. You are not to worry about anything. Everything's all right.”
He took her at her word and his eyes closed; but presently he began to mutter unconnected words and phrases. When his lids lifted again there was a wilder look in his eyes, and she knew that delirium was beginning. At intervals it lasted for long; indeed, until the doctor came next morning in the small hours. He talked of many things Helen Messiter did not understand, of incidents in his past life, some of them jerky with the excitement of a tense moment, others apparently snatches of talk with relatives. It was like the babbling of a child, irrelevant and yet often insistent. He would in one breath give orders connected with the lambing of his sheep, in the next break into football talk, calling out signals and imploring his men to hold them or to break through and get the ball. Once he broke into curses, but his very oaths seemed to come from a clean heart and missed the vulgarity they might have had. Again his talk rambled inconsequently over his youth, and he would urge himself or someone else of the same name to better life.
“Ned, Ned, remember your mother,” he would beseech. “She asked me to look after you. Don't go wrong.” Or else it would be, “Don't disgrace the general, Ned. You'll break his heart if you blacken the old name.” To this theme he recurred repeatedly, and she noticed that when he imagined himself in the East his language was correct and his intonation cultured, though still with a suggestion of a Southern softness.
But when he spoke of her his speech lapsed into the familiar drawl of Cattleland. “I ain't such a sweep as y'u think, girl. Some day I'll sure tell y'u all about it, and how I have loved y'u ever since y'u scooped me up in your car. You're the gamest little lady! To see y'u come a-sailin' down after me, so steady and businesslike, not turning a hair when the bullets hummed—I sure do love y'u, Helen.” And then he fell upon her first name and called her by it a hundred times softly to himself.
This happened when she was alone with him, just before the doctor came. She heard it with starry eyes and with a heart that flushed for joy a warmer color into her cheeks. Brushing back the short curls, she kissed his damp forehead. It was in the thick of the battle, before he had weathered that point where the issues of life and death pressed closely, and even in the midst of her great fears it brought her comfort. She was to think often of it later, and always the memory was to be music in her heart. Even when she denied her love for him, assured herself it was impossible she could care for so shameful a villain, even then it was a sweet torture to allow herself the luxury of recalling his broken delirious phrases. At the very worst he could not be as bad as they said; some instinct told her this was impossible. His fearless devil-may-care smile, his jaunty, gallant bearing, these pleaded against the evidence for him. And yet was it conceivable that a man of spirit, a gentleman by training at least, would let himself lie under the odium of such a charge if he were not guilty? Her tangled thoughts fought this profitless conflict for days. Nor could she dismiss it from her mind. Even after he began to mend she was still on the rack. For in some snatch of good talk, when the fine quality of the man seemed to glow in his face, poignant remembrance would stab her with recollection of the difference between what he was and what he seemed to be.
One of the things that had been a continual surprise to Helen was the short time required by these deep-cheated and clean-blooded Westerners to recover from apparently serious wounds. It was scarce more than two weeks since Bannister had filled the bunkhouse with wounded men, and already two of them were back at work and the third almost fit for service. For perhaps three days the sheepman's life hung in the balance, after which his splendid constitution and his outdoor life began to tell. The thermometer showed that the fever had slipped down a notch, and he was now sleeping wholesomely a good part of his time. Altogether, unless for some unseen contingency, the doctor prophesied that the sheepman was going to upset the probabilities and get well.
“Which merely shows, ma'am, what is possible when you give a sound man twenty-four hours a day in our hills for a few years,” he added. “Thanks to your nursing he's going to shave through by the narrowest margin possible. I told him to-day that he owed his life to you, Miss Messiter.”
“I don't think you need have told him that Doctor,” returned that young woman, not a little vexed at him, “especially since you have just been telling me that he owes it to Wyoming air and his own soundness of constitution.”
When she returned to the sickroom to give her patient his medicine he wanted to tell her what the doctor had said, but she cut him off ruthlessly and told him not to talk.
“Mayn't I even say 'Thank you?'” he wanted to know.
“No; you talk far too much as it is.”
He smiled “All right. Y'u sit there in that chair, where I can see y'u doing that fancywork and I'll not say a word. It'll keep, all right, what I want to say.”
“I notice you keep talking,” she told him, dryly.
“Yes, ma'am. Y'u had better have let me say what I wanted to, but I'll be good now.”
He fell asleep watching her, and when he awoke she was still sitting there, though it was beginning to grow dark. He spoke before she knew he was awake.
“I'm going to get well, the doctor thinks.”
“Yes, he told me,” she answered.
“Did he tell y'u it was your nursing saved me?”
“Please don't think about that.”
“What am I to think about? I owe y'u a heap, and it keeps piling up. I reckon y'u do it all because it's your Christian duty?” he demanded.
“It is my duty, isn't it?”
“I didn't say it wasn't, though I expaict Bighorn County will forget to give y'u a unanimous vote of thanks for doing it. I asked if y'u did it because it was your duty?”
“The reason doesn't matter so that I do it,” she answered, steadily.
“Reasons matter some, too, though they ain't as important as actions out in this country. Back in Boston they figure more, and since y'u used to go