NOBODY else had fallen in that outpouring of lead and fire; nobody else was hurt. One hundred yards away from the scene of the battle, in a direct line, with nothing intervening but space, the Cottonwood Hotel stood. There was not a bullet in it. Where all that lead went, nobody knew; nobody knows to this day.
But nobody was thinking about this extraordinary feature of the fight just then. The railroaders were crowding into the office and parlor of the hotel, intent on knowing whether Cal Withers was dead or alive, or whether he would live or die. Angus Valorous had dashed off for the doctor, there being but one doctor in his rating, in McPacken, and that one his estimable father, who was a bearded, a slow and ponderous man. Angus would have waited for him to come back if he had been a hundred miles away, rather than's ummon a rival, As it was he waited until the doctor got out of bed and made his deliberate toilet, and drank a cup of coffee to clear his head of sleep.
While Angus was gone on this merciful errand, somebody thought of whisky. It was neither a very long wait nor a very long reach to that. Myron, who took a great cheer out of mortuary matters, and enjoyed an intimate connection with all the grim business attendent and antecedent thereto, poured a little liquor into Cal Withers's mouth, and lifted his head so it 'would run down to the spot where life was lingering in him like a covered coal.
There was virtue in the remedy. Cal Withers presently opened his eyes and looked around him with a dull dawning of perception. Myron applied a little more of the liquor, with growing result.
"Can you speak, Cal?" Myron asked with the officious solicitude of one in charge. "Do you want to leave any word?"
"Where am I shot?" Withers asked, his voice weak and low.
"Right in the center of the brain," Myron replied.
"I'm a dead man!" Withers groaned, falling back, closing his eyes.
Myron let his head down to the pillow,—taking his arm away.
"Yes, Cal, I'm afraid you are," he replied.
Those who stood around, looking with the curious impertinence on the wounded man that healthy and unhurt people invariably are guilty of, even in the presence of death, began to be sorry for Withers. Mrs. Cowgill, who had thought mainly of the sofa up to that moment, began to sob and cry, her emotions lying very shallow, indeed.
"I want somebody to take it down," said Withers, red-eyed and wildly disturbed.
"Take what down, Cal?"
"My dyin' statement. I want it put in writin', I want to sign it before I go."
Myron, being facile with the pen and the use of words, brought some hotel stationery and the register, and sat near the wounded cowman's head to make a record of his last word.
"Put down," Withers directed, his eyes closed, his breath coming short, "that this is my dyin' statement. Put down I said that note of old Tom Laylander's that I sued and got judgment on was paid when it come due. Put down I said it is my dyin' wish and directions that young Tom Laylander take them cattle and keep them, as they belong to him and are his rightful property. Put down I say this because I want to go clear and clean, and not have this fraud brought up against me on the last day. That's all."
When Myron had finished the writing, and had read it over for verification, they held Withers up until he signed it. Six men witnessed it; four times that many heard the dictation and stood as legal witnesses to the cowman's confession of fraud.
"He'll never live till the doctor comes," said Myron. "It got him span in the middle of the brain."
The doctor came as Myron was putting the cowman's statement in the hotel safe. He cleared the onlookers out of the parlor, but considerately left the door open so some of them, at least, might observe and hear. It would have been equal to shutting up his most profitable channel of income to have closed that door.
The sheriff arrived close on the heels of the doctor. He had heard that Withers was shot, and had come to see if there was anything in the incident of which he should take official cognizance. The city marshal had not appeared in the morning's activities at all.
Myron produced the record he had made of Withers's confession.
"Here, you represent the law, you take care of this," he said, his importance over him in great solemnity.
The sheriff read it quickly, Myron's writing being in a large and carpenterly hand.
"Where's Laylander?" he inquired. "Does he know about this?"
"I don't think he was here; I didn't see him," Myron replied.
"He went back to watch them cows," a railroader said.
In the parlor the doctor was feeling around the black spot in Cal Withers's forehead, an inch below the rim of his hair.
"They got me this time," Withers whispered.
"Um-m-m?" said the doctor. He turned the sufferer's head to get the light on it more directly, a hand on either side of his face; held it so a little while, looking as if he debated whether it was worth while to attempt anything in such an extreme case. Presently he turned Withers's head back to align with his body, as if he composed him for the rigor of death.
"Get me a pan of hot water," he directed Mrs. Cowgill.
While waiting for the water the doctor leaned back, hands in his trousers pockets, legs extended, eyes fixed with studious contemplation on the wounded man's face.
"I can't last long now, can I, Doc?" Withers inquired, his voice scarcely carrying to the door.
"Um-m-m-m," said the doctor, in a soothing, noncommittal humming sound.
Mrs. Cowgill returned like the ewer bearer in a procession, the basin held in both hands. The doctor washed the wound, Cal Withers lying white and still, eyes closed, as good as dead already, everybody said. The doctor put something on the wound with a piece of gauze, and leaned back in that waiting, thoughtful way again, hands in his pockets, legs stretched out as if he might slip from the chair.
Presently the doctor woke to attivity from his apparent trance. He got an instrument out of his case, the favored ones in the door stretching to see; leaned over Withers and introduced the shining metal into the wound that should have led, by all true calculation, into the frontal chambers of the cowman's brain.
The doctor was only a few moments in his exploration, which seemed to satisfy him. He was busy again with the water, with more stuff on gauze. He got out his scissors and cut off some of the cowman's grizzly coarse forelock, and strapped a dressing over the wound, just as if he had hope of a man with a bullet hole in the center of his brain.
"Al-l-l right, Cal," said the doctor, cheerfully, comfortably. "You'd better come in about Monday, I guess, and let me have a look at it."
He put the little instrument in his case, snapped it shut, picked it up, took his hat to go.
The doctor's amazing nonchalance, his more astonishing dismissal of Withers's hurt in that off-hand, careless way, removed the bar from the door that had held the onlookers respectfully back. They poured into the parlor now, packing it in a moment, pressing around the doctor, who stood smiling blandly; around Withers, who lurched up suddenly, with the ungainly quickness of a frightened cow.
"Do you mean I ain't goin' to die?" Withers demanded with something like resentful challenge.
"Not this time, Cal," the doctor replied. He held out his hand, revealing a little piece of mashed and flattened lead. "It'll take something bigger than a twenty-two slammed up against that old cast-iron pot of yours to put you out of business, Cal."
"Wait a minute," said Withers, getting to his feet, the color coming back into his face; "wait a minute, now. Wasn't somebody writin' a paper here a little while ago and gittin' me to sign my name to it?"
"You dictated a dyin' statement to me, Cal, and signed it of your own free will and motion," Myron replied.
"It don't go, it don't go!" Withers declared, glaring around in red-eyed renunciation. "I was out of my head—it don't go. Give that paper back to me! I demand that paper!"
"I'm kind of used to hearin' your demands by now," said the sheriff, pushing forward, his chicken face with its long pale mustache looking like a face being offered on the end of a pole, his neck was stretched to such uncommon length. "I've got that paper, and I'm goin' to keep it."
"I demand that paper!" Withers repeated, unabashed by the peculiar turn of events that had placed him in a situation so ridiculous.
"I'm goin' to hand it in to the court, to be made a part of the record of this case," the sheriff informed him. "If you want it, go to court for it."
"It don't stand," Withers protested. "I'll law you to the limit!"
"Next time you make a dyin' statement, you danged old crook, go on and die," the sheriff advised.
The situation appealed to the railroad sense of humor.
"This is my dyin' statement!' somebody groaned.
"Go on and put it down!" another pleaded, in the exaggeration of mortal agony and remorse.
"I'm goin' down there and take them cows of mine," Withers announced.
He set his dusty, trampled old hat on the back of his head, glared around in defiance, sliding his belt to bring his gun in place for a quick draw. But there was not any gun in his holster; that was lying on the shelf back of the hotel desk, beside the box of plug tobacco.
"You'll pull your freight out of this town," said the sheriff, pushing a little nearer, "or I'll lock you up for assault to commit murder."
"I believe if I was you I'd go, Cal," the doctor advised him kindly.
Withers bluffed around a little while, the hilarity of the railroaders rising and increasing around him. He finally gave it up, seeing that public opinion was against him so unanimously that the recovery of the cattle, either by force or by law, was beyond all hope. The sheriff walked on one side of him, the doctor on the other, as the defeated but not humiliated cowman went to the livery stable to hire a rig to drive him home.
There was a good deal of discussion and speculation among the railroaders before they dispersed to go to breakfast, and from breakfast to work, over that twenty-two calibre bullet the doctor had picked from Cal Withers's head. Nobody would admit owning a pistol of such diminutive and despised bore, although its efficiency was generally admitted in this case, and as generally admired.
Angus Valorous, his rabbit rifle put away behind the counter, kept his own counsel, although he was in such a state of bristling exultation that he did not go to bed for his rightful portion of repose. His black beard was rough as sandpaper on his cheeks and chin; his rough little laugh, in keeping with that manly adornment, seemed to fill him so completely that it spilled over with every move.
Windy Moore had not been a participant in the discussion of the mysterious twenty-two. He did not know, in truth whether it was a twenty-two or a forty-four that had stopped the cowman in his galloping charge. When Windy mounted to the pile of ties to fire the last shot in the battle, the sight of Withers lying in the road a few feet away, that frightful black hole in his forehead, had been too much for him. He never had seen a man struck down in the vigor of life in that summary way before. It shook him to the foundation with a revulsion that made him sick.
The romance was gone out of gun-handling for Windy Moore. His strength was spent with his courage; he was white, weak in the legs, dizzy and upset. He went ahead of the men who were carrying the cowman to the hotel, his brave bulldog forgotten in his cold and nerveless hand; he struck for the stairs with weaving and uncertain legs, like a man staggering across the deck of a ship, blind in the great sickness that makes the world a heaving, horrible, hateful place.
Windy Moore did not wait for the verdict of life or death in Cal Withers's case. A man hiding a mortal wound could not have gone with more uncertain step, with more frozen fixity of glazed eye, or sickness of every atom of his body than Windy Moore as he dragged his heavy feet up the stairs. He got to his room at last, where the sweat of his great terror burst from him in relief. He shut the door behind him, and with that act shut himself out of this story, as a man goes down to the grave from the great serial of life, his consequence upon him, his little part in the drama done.
Mrs. Cowgill went upstairs to take off her nightgown after Cal Withers left. She had put her clothes on over that garment of privacy, not with such happy effect as might have been desired. It was a gown with a flounce, and very long, Mrs. Cowgill being a discreet and modest dame. This flounce came down below the hem of her serge skirt at least four inches. It was not contributive to the dignity of the house.
Louise Gardner was at her door, in such a bloodless, frightened and woeful plight that Mrs. Cowgill hastened to her to offer support and cheer.
"Is he dead?" Louise whispered, her eyes big with fright of the sight she had fled from, her heart heavy with the thought that it was Tom Laylander's sure hand that had brought the cowman down.
Mrs. Cowgill related the amazing recovery, with more contempt for a man who would not die when he was expected by everybody to do so, than appreciation of the betrayal of his own rascality that Withers had made. She never was so much astonished in her life as she was when Louise turned her face to the wall, bowed her head against her arm and cried, sobbing as if she had suffered a bereavement for which there was no consolation in the world.
Mrs. Cowgill did not attempt any consolation; consolation was not in her line. It was beyond her to understand emotion of that kind, and whatever was inexplicable to Mrs. Cowgill was vexing, something to move resentment, rather than sympathy. She looked back sharply at the weeping girl as she stopped before Goosie's door, and looked back again, with increasing disfavor, as she opened it to enter and call that sleeping beauty, whom the noise of conflict and the tumult of victory had not disturbed.
Tom Laylander shipped his cattle that afternoon, contrary to the advice of the sheriff and the banker, the liveryman and the railroaders, who all urged him to put them on the range for two or three months longer, now that the question of ownership was decided for good. The banker offered a loan on the herd if Laylander wanted it to carry the expense of grazing. Tom refused it, with grateful thanks. He had seen too much trouble in Kansas, he said. He preferred to accept the loss on his cattle to running the risk of becoming involved in any further unpleasantness.
The railroaders ordered tons of hay from the livery barn, protesting that it was their treat. The cattle had a good stuffing before they were loaded, and went on their way to market happy, if hay could make them so.
Louise Gardner sat at her window and watched the long train pull out, Tom Laylander and the two cowboys, who had run away at Withers's arrival the night before, on top of the cars, prod-poles ready for the merciless goading up of such weak cattle as might fall, or lie down, on the way. Tom had not come to the hotel; she had not spoken a word to him since the day they parted on the range.
McPacken would be a desolate place for her from that hour she knew; a silent and savorless place, indeed. The world had withdrawn from McPacken and her life with that long extra cattle train, leaving nothing but railroaders, walking about in a hateful void. Tom might have come, for just one little minute, she thought, with resentment that tried to be spiteful, only to melt away in tears. He might have come for one little minute, if only to say good-by.
But he said good-by that day when she had tried to set up a law for him that was older, indeed, than any written statutes, but not older than the code that bound him to his straight and inflexible way. Tom had said farewell that day, and farewell for him once was farewell forever. So it seemed, in sad and sombre truth.