CHAPTER XXIV
Eight ruffians pushed into the cabin; one lay wounded behind the shed and one was dead. Zang they hailed with heavy oaths until a snarling command from him bade them respect the presence of the girl, unguessed by the outlaws and received as a distinct sauce to the situation. One man pawed through Original Bill's pockets and found the key to the handcuffs; he released his leader. Another cut free the wrappings of cloth about Hilma's hands and feet. He roughly helped her to rise from the bunk.
A grim and ugly place was that single room, still reeking with the fumes of battle; all the hideous detritus of violence lay scattered there. High-booted men with rifles stumped clumsily about the floor, marking with pointing fingers the scars and chips of bullets' work; their heels crunched shards of glass with every step. Empty brass shells slithered over the floor before every shuffling foot. Bedding, trunk and table that had been a barricade were kicked into an ungainly heap.
None paid attention by so much as a passing glance at the two sprawled bodies by the far wall.
Zang, freed, made a tentative step toward the girl. But, unseeing, she passed through the crowd of men and came slowly to the place where Original Bill lay, head across the rifle. As one walking in hypnosis Hilma moved, and dully she looked down at the black head pillowed on the crooked arm. A full minute she stood thus, bereft of impulse, seeming numbed against all impression from the trash of bleak tragedy about her.
Then husks that had stifled and sealed against every impulse save a selfish one these many years of her soul's hermit isolation dissolved in a great sob, and the heart of Hilma Ring winged free.
She knelt by the side of the man who had conquered her and took his head in her arms. She whispered softly: "My man—my man!" Her voice crooned like the voice of a mother in cradle song. Her free hand fluttered about the white forehead, tucking back a black raven wing of hair that had fallen across the closed eyes, touching with infinite tenderness four angry marks her nails had left across the cheek such a short time before.
"My man—my man!" It was a cry now—a cry to call him back to her love.
The nearest outlaw turned and looked down in amazement. He grinned and cast a covert glance at Zang Whistler even as he nudged his companion, who was snorting in a chuckle. Zang pushed his way through his men and came to where Hilma knelt. A heavy scowl smudged his features at what he saw; then when recollection of the fight between Hilma and Original of which he had been a helpless witness, flooded on him the scowl was replaced by blank astonishment. He bent and touched the girl's shoulder.
"Hilma—what—what"
"Oh, he still lives! I can feel his heart beat." The girl's hand had slipped inside Original's shirt. She withdrew it and looked aghast at what marked the white fingers. "Some water!" she commanded.
Zang, still grappling with questions he could not answer, brought water in a basin. Hilma already had torn strips from her dress. Seeing her struggling to pull the unconscious man's shirt away from the wound below the heart, Zang got out his knife and cut away the cloth from shoulder to waist. The man's great torso was exposed; an ugly looking blackened hole bored through the white flesh on the left side. Hilma dipped cloths in water and began to bathe the wound. All the while she kept whispering in mother tones to the ears that could not hear,—disjointed, passionate heart calls they were. Whistler was a thousand miles out of the scene.
The big outlaw realized this after a few moments. From somewhere out of the deeps of his heart a curious sense of delicacy rose up to check the questions he would ask. He tiptoed back and pointed to the form of Timberline Todd where it lay beneath the window. Four of his men picked it up and carried it out of the cabin.
An hour Zang waited while men were busy with a shovel up on the flower-blown knoll where the clay on another grave, that of Old Man Ring, still was fresh. There they buried Timberline Todd, a fighter who had come to his rest as he would. Then, the sun being low and Whistler having grave doubts as to how he would find the affairs back in the Spout, he felt the urgency of action. He reentered the cabin.
Hilma, who was sitting with Original's head in her lap, looked up at the sound of the foot-fall.
"Help me carry him to the bunk," she said. Zang put his hands under the limp shoulders, Hilma lifted at the knees and they laid him on the blankets. Then the girl turned to face Whistler.
"You 'll get word to Woolly Annie for me," she said softly. "Tell her what 's happened—that I 'm alone. Ask her to come and bring some food and medicines, and have somebody ride to Two Moons for a doctor."
"But, Hilma, you 're not—you 're not goin' to stay here all alone with a man who may—die?"
"He shan't die, and this is my place—by his side to nurse him back to strength." Then the girl saw the deep pucker of utter forlornness and blasted hope between the other's eyes; for the first time realization came to her of Zang's right to know what was his part in this swift shifting of the balances. She came to him and put her hands on his shoulders.
"I love this man, Zang—love him more than I know, and I must fight for his life because it belongs to me. Yes, yes," she answered the question that was rounding his lips, "I know you saw me fight him—saw him try to break my arm. That 's when I began to love him, Zang. I can't explain it. Maybe if you had ever fought me—wrestled with me, Zang—tried to break my arm—maybe then I would have loved you. I"
"Did Original steal you from the jail and have you hid out?" the big fellow demanded with a sudden access of jealousy. Hilma's eyes widened.
"Steal me—no! I ran away from the sheriff's house because I thought I was arrested; then I stole Original's horse and started for home. He found me when I was lost and—and put me on the right road and left me. All the time you were in jail."
Zang slowly shook his head and smiled wanly.
"It 's a mix-up, Hilma,—a whale of a mix-up. But it seems to be comin' out right for you, leastways. If I 've lost you, girl, reckon it 's because I did n't savvy how to rope an' brand a wild one like you. Kin I"
She gave him her lips, simply, and the man went out into the sunset.
That night was the first Hilma had ever known in her years in the Big Country when the great dark did not come to sit down with her. She was alone, yes, but with a deep wellspring of love to flood her heart with happiness and make each ministering touch of her fingers a healing balm.
Morning brought Woolly Annie with her booming voice hailing from afar: "Here comes the nurse, an' the preacher which you need more 'll be trailin' 'long directly."
During two weeks Original Bill battled to free himself from a land of shadows. And in those two weeks history was made in the Big Country. The army of the Invasion recruited among the wild desert towns of the Southwest moved up from the south, launched itself into the range lands, smirched the smiling country with some cold murders and even prepared to lunge at Two Moons. But Uncle Alf, fiery evangel of his army of righteousness, and the more practical Red Agnew armed Two Moons and sent an avenging force out to meet the hired terrorizers. The fight and siege at T A Ranch, of which the oldsters in Two Moons still spin yarns, smashed the invaders and broke the back of the cattle clan. For all time thereafter the Big Country became everyman's land and not the fief of the cattle barony.
As for Zang Whistler, when he rode back to the Spout that day from Hilma's cabin it was the beginning of a ride into exile. For Original Bill's expedition had, in truth, cleaned up the Spout even without its little general. Zang himself narrowly escaped the capture that fell to the lot of most of the outlaws who had beleaguered Original in the cabin on Teapot. Zang drifted to the Southwest, where there yet remained adventure for the untamed.
It was the first day Original had been permitted by the domineering Woolly Annie to crawl from his bunk to the door. He sat there in the flooding sunshine, gazing off to the purple ramparts of the Broken Horns. Hilma sat on the step below him. Her golden head, color of dandelions in dew, was laid on his knee. One of his hands strayed through the fugitive tendrils that dropped over her ears.
A great content was theirs. They were one with the bluebonnets that flecked the sweep of the divides with royal color; one with the mourning dove whose love cry sounded from the alders fringing Teapot. They were all children of the Big Country.
Away off to the north a dot topped a divide and disappeared; in a minute it bobbed over the crest of a nearer wave of land, coming in the direction of the cabin. Original's eye followed the vagrant moving thing curiously.
"That might be the doc, though he said he was n't comin' back here for a week," he mused.
"No," Hilma corrected softly. "I think I know who it is. It 's Uncle Alf."
"Sho!" exclaimed Original in mock surprise. "How come your eyes are better than mine? "
"They 're not," the girl laughed. "It 's the heart tells me, boy. And besides, I told the doc to send Uncle Alf out here because—because"
Original's hand, suddenly tucked beneath her chin, tipped up her face so that her blue eyes, deep and slumberous with the love in her, must meet his.
"Li'l girl, once you stole my hoss—my fool li'l hayburner Tige—an' I let you go. But what am I goin' to do when you figger to steal me—with the preacher burnin' the wind to put the brand on to me? Answer me; what chance have I got?"
"A ten to one fighting chance, Original boy—the chance you always take."