PAP COWGILL was off his run for a few days, pending the healing of one of his feet, on which he had dropped a chunk of coal. The company doctor, no other, in fact, than the father of Angus Valorous, had been over to the Cottonwood Hotel to attend the bruised member, leaving a scent of drugs in the parlor, where Pap had submitted himself to the physician's ministrations. Pap was established in the carpet-covered spring rocker by the window, his bandaged foot on a hassock made of tomato cans, after the thrifty way of pioneer housekeepers, a piece of economy worthy of the great work that Louise Gardner had come to McPacken to put on every center table.
This hassock was covered with carpeting to match the chair, padded with cotton batting and supplied with two little ears for lifting it around. Young ladies sometimes sat on it, especially Goosie, who found it of convenient height for resting her head on Bill Connor's knee. Pap was comfortable. He enjoyed being crippled; he liked the smell of arnica and carbolated salve. He sat with elbow on the window sill, waving a languid hand to his friends as they passed.
Pap looked at his watch; nine o'clock. He wished his mother or one of the girls would come along so he could send for a cigar. He was entirely able to go and get it out of the showcase himself, but it would be that much more luxurious and enjoyable to have somebody bring it. Louise, preferably. The poorest cigar in the case would taste sweet from her hand. Pap sighed.
Pap sat with watch in his hand, abstractedly turning the stem, rolling it between thumb and finger as if shaping a pill, thinking of a little house he had seen on the hillside in Argentine on his last run, with a for rent sign in the window. Handy place for a man at the end of his run, nice little home for Louise, who wasn't cut out for a biscuit-shooter, take her at her best. Pap thought her inaptitude in that art was blamable to her feet. A girl needed big feet to rush around all day that way, carrying tray loads of grub. But her feet were big enough for all the work she'd have to do when he got his engine; and that was a cinch. She'd have her hired girl and horse and buggy then; and that was a cinch.
A lot of guys would be hangin' around her when she went on that court house job; and that was a cinch. He'd rather she stayed in the dining-room, only that her health might break, but if any guy got fresh with her up there around the square he'd hear from yours truly; and that was a cinch. There'd be one advantage in her change of work; she wouldn't be around there to eat supper every evening with that cow jerry. There was a guy that would have to hit the grit; he'd make that plain to the old lady. He wasn't goin' to stand for that Texas guy, moonin' around there like a soft egg; and that was a cinch.
Pap sat up with a jerk, his ear to the window screen. Sounded like somebody shooting up in the direction of the square. There! three more, as quick—. People were running; there were more shots, so fast and so many Pap could not count them. He was gasping with excitement when he kicked the hassock aside. Where in the hu-hu-hell was that overshoe!
Pap went hobbling to the front door, walking on his heel. Mrs. Cowgill had heard the shooting, and the commotion of running feet on the plank sidewalks. Goosie had heard it; Louise had heard. They came crowding to the door, Mrs. Cowgill putting her head out cautiously, her neck stretched to prodigious length, her arm blocking the door to prevent Goosie rushing out into no telling what danger.
But there was no danger near her hand. Mrs. Cowgill went to the porch, where Pap had gone already. Goosie and Louise followed; some who came running from the direction of the depot stopped there, all of them straining to see what was going on up the street where the public square cut it across with a line of, maple trees.
Nothing was to be seen but the outpouring of people, overflowing the sidewalks now, rushing toward the square. The shooting had stopped. Now there was a gust of it again, as if somebody was riding away in defiance, or perhaps triumph, his victim lying stretched in the square. Louise felt her breath die away, her heart sag in sickening pause as if it never could gather momentum to carry life forward again.
Tom Laylander had gone to the bank only a few minutes before, to be there when it opened. He wanted to cash his time check, together with a little draft his mother had sent to help along until the cattle were sold. Tom had looked ready to cry when he told her about it at breakfast. Tom had met Cal Withers and his men. That was the answer to the shooting.
Louise felt it come over her coldly, compressing the warmth out of her body, the blood out of her heart. She pictured Tom lying in the dust, his hat close by, his boyish face turned up to the sun. It was such a terrible, such a poignantly cruel sketching of imagination that the actual could have been little less shocking. A sob, that was half a sharp protesting cry, escaped her utmost efforts to choke it down. With her apron around her, just as she had come from work, Louise ran toward the square.
Mrs. Cowgill and Goosie started after her, soon overtook her, and ran with her step for step, the late corners behind them drawing up with great noise over the uneven sidewalk planks. A little way beyond the Racket Store they met Windy Moore, running tight for the hotel.
"Don't stop me! I'm goin' for my gun!" Windy replied to Mrs. Cowgill's wild appeal for news.
In spite of his great rush, Windy did not appear unwlling to pause for a word or two. No battle that he might fight ever could give him as much pleasure as delivering a piece of news, especially when he was certain his mouth was the first to speak it.
"What's happened—what's happened?" Mrs. Cowgill pressed.
"Robbed the bank—I'm goin' for my gun!" Windy replied, his eyes big in his meddlesome face.
"Who?" they all asked together, closing around Windy, cutting off his way. Goosie grabbed a handful of the little brakeman's vest, determined to hold him until he had given them all he knew.
"Who—who robbed the bank?"
"That cow jerry, that Texas guy! Sent for his gang, cleaned out the bank, killed the city marshal and the cashier—oh, hell! Let me go and git my gun!"
"Killed the cashier and the marshal!" Mrs. Cowgill gasped.
The gathering crowd pressed around them. Goosie shook Windy in her impatience to have it all.
"Who killed them?" she demanded, shaking him as if a grain of truth hid in him somewhere that he was covering wilfully.
"That cow jerry and his gang, I tell you!"
"Who told you?" Louise inquired.
"Told me?" Windy repeated, twisting to break Goosie's hold. "I was there—they took my watch and roll—I tell you I was there!"
Goosie let him go, to stand aghast before Louise, who was so shocked and stunned that even coherent thought was impossible. The press around them was so great now Windy did not attempt to go on. Those who crowded to get near him appeared to think he had been the chief actor in whatever had happened, and was coming off victorious from the field.
"Did you say they robbed the bank?" an old man inquired, hand behind his ear.
"Cleaned out every dollar," Windy replied. "I'd just drawed forty dollars, me and three or four others was in the bank, when that cow jerry come in to cash a check. That was a stall, I tell you it was a stall. While the cashier was handin' him out the money his gang rode up and cut loose at everybody in sight, tryin' to drive 'em in. Two of 'em come in the bank and lined us up face to the wall, and while one of 'em held us there the cow jerry and his pardner killed the cashier and put all the money in a sack."
"The marshal got one of 'em!" said a man, pushing in with savage satisfaction.
"But they got him," another added, breathless, panting, dashing away to spread the news.
"Are you sure Tom Laylander was there?" Louise asked, her courage returning with her resentment of the charge.
"I seen him put the money in the sack," Windy declared. There was four of 'em besides him, two held the horses and two follered him into the bank where he was puttin' up his stall. I saw that cow jerry take the guns off of his pardner the marshal killed, and hop one of the horses 'n ride off with the bunch. They went off rairin' and shootin' at everybody they saw."
Louise went on, not convinced that Windy Moore had seen all the things of which he talked. She hoped to get the straight of it from somebody around the bank.
"Ain't it awful!" Mrs. Cowgill gasped. "And him such a soft-spoken man."
"There's some mistake," Louise declared.
They were obliged to stop at the corner, some distance from the bank, held back by the crowd that stood in front of that building and extended into the street.
"They're pickin' up the marshal!" Mrs. Cowgill whispered. "That's Doc Wilson, the coroner. Oh, ain't it—"
"There's another one in the wagon!" said Goosie, clutching Louise's arm. "Look at his feet—he's got on cowboy boots! Do you suppose it's the cow—it's him!"
"No," said Louise, coldly.
"They look like his spurs!" Goosie insisted, with what seemed malicious avidity.
Maud Kelly came pushing her way through the crowd like a man, nearly upsetting some of the ancient citizens who were too absorbed in the proceedings to get out of her fairway. Maud was bareheaded and excited. She came straight to Louise, perhaps not insensible, through all her own perturbation, of the pleading appeal in the girl's white face.
"It'll be all right, honey," said Maud, with futile, cheerless assurance, as one speaks when condoling an irremediable loss. She put her arm around Louise and hugged her in a sort of affectionate fierceness, as if she defied somebody who had dared her to express such sympathy.
"Ain't it awful? Mr. Crowley and the marshal killed!" Mrs. Cowgill said.
"Mr. Crowley? Who said he was killed?" Maud inquired.
"We heard they shot him dead."
"There he stands, in the door," said Maud. "Honey, you'd better come on home with me."
Louise faced her with desperate courage, cool now, and controlled, as if she presented herself to the surgeon's knife for an operation that balanced life and death.
"Maud, do you know what really happened?" she asked.
"Yes, I was in the bank."
"You was!" Mrs. Cowgill exploded.
Crowley, the bank cashier, was explaining to his eager patrons the particulars of the robbery. The crowd was divided between him and the melancholy business going forward under the coroner's direction; the four women were left alone at the street corner, where they stood in the dusty roadway of the public square.
"I'd gone to the bank for some silver to make change for the day," Maud said. "Windy Moore and two or three others were there—Tom Laylander at the cash ier's window. I don't know just how it happened, it was done so quick, only that two men with guns came bustin' in the bank and lined all of us but Tom Laylander up with faces to the wall. I don't know what happened next, they were shootin' things up so in front of the bank. I looked around to see if they'd killed Mr. Crowley. Two men were in his cage, throwin' everything out of the safe into a sack."
"Was one of them Tom Laylander?" Louise asked, with the breath of what seemed her last hope.
"Honey, I'm afraid it was."
"Puttin' the money in a sack! And him such an honest lookin' boy!"
"Mr. Crowley played dead, layin' flat on the floor, huggin' the wall of the cage," Maud continued, as the surgeon in this desperate case who must push on in excruciating mercy to the end. "They didn't touch him."
"Wasn't that robber holding a gun on Tom Laylander, Maud?" Louise inquired, with the slow, calm surety in her words of a lawyer who has come to the turning-point of his case.
"Honey, I couldn't see from where I stood, and I only had a glance. The one that had us lined up took a shot at me when he saw me look around."
"Took a shot at you!" Goosie exclaimed, with such appreciation that it amounted almost to delight.
"Heaven above!" Mrs. Cowgill said.
"It was just a bluff, I guess," said Maud. "It hit the wall a foot or two over my head—my hair's all full of plaster."
She shook her fair crimped hair, leaning over to allow the particles of lime to shower down, and laughed a little, although there was no more mirth in the sound than there was in Louise Gardner's downcast heart that moment.
"Do the bank people believe Tom Laylander had a hand in it?" Louise inquired.
"Mr. Crowley thinks it was arranged by somebody on the spot," Maud replied, her head turned, not able to bear the pain her disclosure brought into her friend's strained face.
"And him such a soft-spoken, mild young man!" Mrs. Cowgill said, unable to fit Tom Laylander in the part of bank robber, let circumstances brand him as they might.
"How much money did he take?" Goosie asked.
"I didn't hear," Maud replied, distantly.
"This shows banks ain't safe—I always said they wasn't safe," Mrs. Cowgill seemed to exult in the vindication of her years'-long contention. "I didn't have any money in it, and I'm glad I didn't. I'll take chances keepin' it in my own safe, any day."
"You'd better come home with me," Maud pressed kindly, taking Louise by the hand.
"Yes, go on home with Maud and lie down and rest and read a book," Mrs. Cowgill urged. "We can make out the rest of the day without you."
"Why should I take a day off, any more than anybody else?" Louise inquired, affecting a cold indifference, as if the complicity of one man more or less in this affair was nothing to her. "I'm not going to shirk on you my last day."
Mrs. Cowgill looked at her curiously, not understanding her in the least. Goosie turned her back, tossing her head a little, the sound of a sniff coming out of her stubby, musical nose. That's what one got for associating with jerries, her unsympathetic attitude seemed to say.
Two little spots of color came into Louise's pale cheeks, a flash into her sorrowful, shocked eyes, lighting her face up defiantly, at this pantomime on the part of Miss Goosie. Yet Goosie's attitude was only a concrete expression of the public belief, as Louise was soon to learn. As the crowd dissolved from the square, scattering in close-talking groups, she heard the term "cow jerry" pass from lip to lip.
Tom Laylander was gone, on a horse brought there by the raiders for him, it was said. And the sheriff, a chicken-faced man with a shallow, slanting forehead and a big mustache that seemed to drag him down to anemic lankness, was gathering a posse to pursue him.