and rising till—” She waved her hand gloomily at her bedraggled Aunt Phoebe working like a motherly sort of gnome in its shadowy grotto. “Oh, if I were Aunt Phoebe, I should just shake you, Grant Imsen!”
“Try it,” he invited, his eyes worshiping her in her pretty petulance. “I wish you would.”
As Miss Georgie went past them down the steps, her face had the set look of one who is consciously and deliberately cheerful under trying conditions.
“Don’t quarrel, children,” she advised lightly. “Howdy, Mrs. Hart? What are they trying to do—drown you?”
“Oh, these boys of mine! They’ll be the death of me, what with the things they won’t do, and the things they will do. They’re trying now to create a water famine for the jumpers, and they’re making their own mother swim for the good of the cause.” Phoebe held out a plump hand, moist and cold from lifting cool crocks of milk, and laughed at her own predicament.
“The water won’t rise any more, Mother Hart,” Grant called down to her from the top step, where he was sitting unblushingly beside Evadna. “I told you six inches would be the limit, and then it would run off in the new ditch. You know I explained just why—”
“Oh, yes, I know you explained just why,” Phoebe cut in disconsolately and yet humorously, “but explanations don’t seem to help my poor milk-house any. And what about the garden, and the fruit, if you turn the water all down into the pasture? And what about the poor horses getting their feet wet and catching their death of cold? And what’s to hinder that man Stanley and his gang from packing water in buckets from the lake you’re going to have in the pasture?”
She looked at Miss Georgie whimsically. “I’m an ungrateful, bad-tempered old woman, I guess, for they’re doing it because it’s the only thing they can do, since I put my foot down on all this bombarding and burning good powder just to ease their minds. They’ve got to do something, I suppose, or they’d all burst. And I don’t know but what it’s a good thing for ’em to work off their energy digging ditches, even if it don’t do a mite of good.”
Good Indian was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, murmuring lover’s confidences behind the shield of his tilted hat, which hid from all but Evadna his smiling lips and his telltale, glowing eyes. He looked up at that last sentence, though it is doubtful if he had heard much of what she had been saying.
“It’s bound to do good if it does anything,” he said, with an optimism which was largely the outgrowth of his beatific mood, which in its turn was born of his nearness to Evadna and her gracious manner toward him. “We promised not to molest them on their claims. But if they get over the line to meddle with our water system, or carry any in buckets—which they can’t, because they all leak like the deuce”—he grinned as he thought of the bullet holes in them—“why, I don’t know but what someone might object to that, and send them back on their own side of the line.”
He picked up a floating ribbon-end which was a part of Evadna’s belt, and ran it caressingly through his fingers in a way which set Miss Georgie’s teeth together. “I’m afraid,” he added dryly, his eyes once more seeking Evadna’s face with pure love hunger, “they aren’t going to make much of a stagger at placer mining, if they haven’t any water.” He rolled the ribbon up tightly, and then tossed it lightly toward her face. “Are they, Goldilocks?”
“Are they what? I’ve told you a dozen times to stop calling me that. I had a doll once that I named Goldilocks, and I melted her nose off—she was wax—and you always remind me of the horrible expression it gave to her face. I’d go every day and take her out of the bureau-drawer and look at her, and then cry my eyes out. Won’t you come and sit down, Georgie? There’s room. Now, what was the discussion, and how far had we got? Aunt Phoebe, I don’t believe it has raised a bit lately. I’ve been watching that black rock with the crack in it.” Evadna moved nearer to Good Indian, and pulled her skirts close upon the other side, thereby making a space at least eight inches wide for Miss Georgie’s accommodation.
“I can’t sit anywhere,” said Miss Georgie, looking at her watch. “By the way, chicken, did you have to walk all the way home?”
Evadna looked sidelong at Good Indian, as if a secret had been betrayed. “No,” she said, “I didn’t. I just got to the top of the grade when a squaw came along, and she was leading Huckleberry. A gaudy young squaw, all red and purple and yellow. She was awfully curious about you, Grant. She wanted to know where you were and what you were doing. I hope you aren’t a flirtatious young man. She seemed to know you pretty well, I thought.”
She had to explain to her Aunt Phoebe and Grant just how she came to be walking, and she laughed at the squaw’s vivid costume, and declared she would have one like it, because Grant must certainly admire colors. She managed, innocently enough, to waste upon such trivialities many of Miss Georgie’s precious minutes.
At last that young woman, after glancing many times at her watch, and declining an urgent invitation to stay to supper, declared that she must go, and tried to give Good Indian a significant look without being detected in the act by Evadna. But Good Indian, for the time being wholly absorbed by the smiles of his lady, had no eyes for her, and seemed to attach no especial meaning to her visit. So that Miss Georgie, feminine to her finger-tips and oversensitive perhaps where those two were concerned, suddenly abandoned her real object in going to the ranch, and rode away without saying a word of what she had come to say.
She was a direct young woman who was not in the habit of mincing matters with herself, or of dodging an issue, and she bluntly called herself a fool many times that evening, because she had not said plainly that she would like to talk with Grant “and taken him off to one side—by the ear, if necessary—and talked to him, and told him what I went down there to tell him,” she said to herself angrily. “And if Evadna didn’t like it, she could do the other thing. It does seem as if girls like that are always having the trail smoothed down for them to dance their way through life, while other people climb over rocks—mostly with packs on their shoulders that don’t rightly belong to them.” She sighed impatiently. “It must be lovely to be absolutely selfish—when you’re pretty enough and young enough to make it stick!” Miss Georgie was, without doubt, in a nasty temper that night.
CHAPTER XXI
SOMEBODY SHOT SAUNDERS
The hot days dropped, one by one, into the past like fiery beads upon a velvety black cord. Miss Georgie told them silently in the meager little office, and sighed as they slipped from under her white, nervous fingers. One—nothing happened that could be said to bear upon the one big subject in her mind, the routine work of passing trains and dribbling business in the express and freight departments, and a long afternoon of heat and silence save for the asthmatic pump, fifty yards down the main track. Two—this exactly like the first, except that those inseparables, Hagar, Viney, and Lucy, whom Miss Georgie had inelegantly dubbed “the Three Greases,” appeared, silent, blanket-enshrouded, and perspiring, at the office door in mid-afternoon. Half a box of soggy chocolates which the heat had rendered a dismally sticky mass won from them smiles and half-intelligible speech. Fishing was poor—no ketchum. Three—not even the diversion of the squaws to make her forget the dragging hours. Nothing—nothing—nothing, she told herself apathetically when that third day had slipped upon the black cord of a soft, warm night, star-sprinkled and unutterably lonely as it brooded over the desert.
On the morning of the fourth day, Miss Georgie woke with the vague sense that something had gone wrong. True railroader as she had come to be, she thought first that there had been a wreck, and that she was wanted at the telegraph instrument. She was up and partly dressed before the steps and the voices which had broken her sleep had reached her door.
Pete Hamilton’s voice, trembling with excitement, called to her.
“What is it? What has happened?” she cried from within, beset by a hundred wild conjectures.
“Saunders—somebody shot Saunders. Wire for a doctor, quick as yuh can. He ain’t dead yet—but he’s goin’ t’ die, sure. Hurry up and wire—” Somebody