Somebody Shot Saunders

: Good Indian

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

afterno n 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 at the store called to him, and he broke off to run lumberingly

in answer to the summons. Miss Georgie made haste to follow him.



Saunders was lying upon a blanket on the store platform, and Miss

Georgie shuddered as she looked at him.



He was pasty white, and his eyes looked glassy under his half-closed

lids. He had been shot in the side--at the stable, he had gasped out

when Pete found him lying in the trail just back of the store. Now he

seemed beyond speech, and the little group of section-hands, the Chinese

cook at the section-house, and the Swede foreman, and Pete seemed quite

at a loss what to do.



"Take him in and put him to bed," Miss Georgie commanded, turning away.

"See if he's bleeding yet, and--well, I should put a cold compress on

the wound, I think. I'll send for a doctor--but he can't get here till

nine o'clock unless you want to stand the expense of a special. And by

that time--"



Saunders moved his head a trifle, and lifted his heavy lids to look

at her, which so unnerved Miss Georgie that she turned and ran to the

office. When she had sent the message she sat drumming upon the table

while she waited for an answer.



"G-r-a-n-" her fingers had spelled when she became conscious of the

fact, flushed hotly, and folded her hands tightly together in her lap.



"The doctor will come--Hawkinson, I sent for," she announced later to

Pete, holding out the telegram. She glanced reluctantly at the wrinkled

blanket where Saunders had lain, caught a corner of her under lip

between her teeth, and, bareheaded though she was, went down the steps

and along the trail to the stable.



"I've nearly an hour before I need open the office," she said to

herself, looking at her watch. She did not say what she meant to do

with that hour, but she spent a quarter of it examining the stable and

everything in it. Especially did she search the loose, sandy soil in its

vicinity for tracks.



Finally she lifted her skirts as a woman instinctively does at a street

crossing, and struck off through the sagebrush, her eyes upon a line of

uncertain footsteps as of a drunken man reeling that way. They were not

easy to follow--or they would not have been if she had not felt certain

of the general direction which they must take. More than once she lost

sight of them for several rods, but she always picked them up farther

along. At one place she stopped, and stood perfectly still, her skirts

held back tightly with both hands, while she stared fascinatedly at a

red smear upon a broken branch of sage and the smooth-packed hollow in

the sand where he must have lain.



"He's got nerve--I'll say that much for him," she observed aloud, and

went on.



The footprints were plain where he crossed the grade road near the edge

of the bluff, but from there on it was harder to follow them because of

the great patches of black lava rock lying even with the surface of the

ground, where a dozen men might walk abreast and leave no sign that the

untrained eye, at least, could detect.



"This is a case for Indians," she mused, frowning over an open space

where all was rock. "Injun Charlie would hunt tracks all day for a

dollar or two; only he'd make tracks just to prove himself the real

goods." She sighed, stood upon her tiptoes, and peered out over the sage

to get her bearings, then started on at a hazard. She went a few rods,

found herself in a thick tangle of brush through which she could not

force her way, started to back out, and caught her hair on a scraggly

scrub which seemed to have as many prongs as there are briers on a

rosebush. She was struggling there with her hands fumbling unavailingly

at the back of her bowed head, when she was pounced upon by someone or

something through the sage. She screamed.



"The--deuce!" Good Indian brought out the milder expletive with the flat

intonation which the unexpected presence of a lady frequently gives to

a man's speech. "Lucky I didn't take a shot at you through the bushes.

I did, almost, when I saw somebody moving here. Is this your favorite

place for a morning ramble?" He had one hand still upon her arm, and

he was laughing openly at her plight. But he sobered when he stooped a

little so that he could see her face, for there were tears in her eyes,

and Miss Georgie was not the sort of young woman whom one expects to

shed tears for slight cause.



"If you did it--and you must have--I don't see how you can laugh about

it, even if he is a crawling reptile of a man that ought to be hung!"

The tears were in her voice as well as her eyes, and there were reproach

and disappointment also.



"Did what--to whom--to where, to why?" Good Indian let go her arm, and

began helpfully striving with the scraggly scrub and its prongs. "Say,

I'll just about have to scalp you to get you loose. Would you mind very

much, Squaw-talk-far-off?" He ducked and peered into her face again, and

again his face sobered. "What's the matter?" he asked, in an entirely

different tone--which Miss Georgie, in spite of her mood, found less

satisfying than his banter.



"Saunders--OUCH; I'd as soon be scalped and done with, as to have you

pull out a hair at a time--Saunders crawled home with a bullet in his

ribs. And I thought--"



"Saunders!" Good Indian stared down at her, his hands dropped upon her

head.



Miss Georgie reached up, caught him by the wrists, and held him so while

she tilted her head that she might look up at him.



"Grant!" she cried softly. "He deserved it. You couldn't help it--he

would have shot you down like a dog, just because he was hired to do

it, or because of some hold over him. Don't think I blame you--or that

anyone would if they knew the truth. I came out to see--I just HAD to

make sure--but you must get away from here. You shouldn't have stayed

so long--" Miss Georgie gave a most unexpected sob, and stopped that she

might grit her teeth in anger over it.



"You think I shot him." As Good Indian said it, the sentence was merely

a statement, rather than an accusation or a reproach.



"I don't blame you. I suspected he was the man up here with the rifle.

That day--that first day, when you told me about someone shooting at

you--he came over to the station. And I saw two or three scraps of sage

sticking under his shirt-collar, as if he had been out in the brush; you

know how it breaks off and sticks, when you go through it. And he said

he had been asleep. And there isn't any sage where a man would have to

go through it unless he got right out in it, away from the trails. I

thought then that he was the man--"



"You didn't tell me." And this time he spoke reproachfully.



"It was after you had left that I saw it. And I did go down to the ranch

to tell you. But I--you were so--occupied--in other directions--" She

let go his wrists, and began fumbling at her hair, and she bowed her

head again so that her face was hidden from him.



"You could have told me, anyway," Good Indian said constrainedly.



"You didn't want her to know. I couldn't, before her. And I didn't want

to--hurt her by--" Miss Georgie fumbled more with her words than with

her hair.



"Well, there's no use arguing about that." Good Indian also found that

subject a difficult one. "You say he was shot. Did he say--"



"He wasn't able to talk when I saw him. Pete said Saunders claimed he

was shot at the stable, but I know that to be a lie." Miss Georgie spoke

with unfeeling exactness. "That was to save himself in case he got well,

I suppose. I believe the man is going to die, if he hasn't already; he

had the look--I've seen them in wrecks, and I know. He won't talk; he

can't. But there'll be an investigation--and Baumberger, I suspect,

will be just as willing to get you in this way as in any other. More so,

maybe. Because a murder is always awkward to handle."



"I can't see why he should want to murder me." Good Indian took her

hands away from her hair, and set himself again to the work of freeing

her. "You've been fudging around till you've got about ten million more

hairs wound up," he grumbled.



"Wow! ARE you deliberately torturing me?" she complained, winking with

the pain of his good intentions. "I don't believe he does want to murder

you. I think that was just Saunders trying to make a dandy good job of

it. He doesn't like you, anyway--witness the way you bawled him out that

day you roped--ow-w!--roped the dog. Baumberger may have wanted him

to keep an eye on you--My Heavens, man! Do you think you're plucking a

goose?"



"I wouldn't be surprised," he retorted, grinning a little. "Honest! I'm

trying to go easy, but this infernal bush has sure got a strangle hold

on you--and your hair is so fluffy it's a deuce of a job. You keep

wriggling and getting it caught in new places. If you could only manage

to stand still--but I suppose you can't.



"By the way," he remarked casually, after a short silence, save for an

occasional squeal from Miss Georgie, "speaking of Saunders--I didn't

shoot him."



Miss Georgie looked up at him, to the further entanglement of her hair.

"You DIDN'T? Then who did?"



"Search ME," he offered figuratively and briefly.



"Well, I will." Miss Georgie spoke with a certain decisiveness, and

reaching out a sage-soiled hand, took his gun from the holster at his

hip. He shrank away with a man's instinctive dislike of having anyone

make free with his weapons, but it was a single movement, which he

controlled instantly.



"Stand still, can't you?" he admonished, and kept at work while she

examined the gun with a dexterity and ease of every motion which

betrayed her perfect familiarity with firearms. She snapped the cylinder

into place, sniffed daintily at the end of the barrel, and slipped the

gun back into its scabbard.



"Don't think I doubted your word," she said, casting a slanting glance

up at him without moving her head. "But I wanted to be able to swear

positively, if I should happen to be dragged into the witness-box--I

hope it won't be by the hair of the head!--that your gun has not been

fired this morning. Unless you carry a cleaning rod with you," she

added, "which would hardly be likely."



"You may search me if you like," Good Indian suggested, and for an

engaged young man, and one deeply in love withal, he displayed a

contentment with the situation which was almost reprehensible.



"No use. If you did pack one with you, you'd be a fool not to throw it

away after you had used it. No, I'll swear to the gun as it is now. Are

you ever going to get my hair loose? I'm due at the office right

this minute, I'll bet a molasses cooky." She looked at her watch, and

groaned. "I'd have to telegraph myself back to get there on time now,"

she said. "Twenty-four--that fast freight--is due in eighteen minutes

exactly. I've got to be there. Take your jackknife and cut what won't

come loose. Really, I mean it, Mr. Imsen."



"I was under the impression that my name is Grant--to friends."



"My name is 'Dennis,' if I don't beat that freight," she retorted

curtly. "Take your knife and give me a hair cut--quick! I can do it a

different way, and cover up the place."



"Oh, all right--but it's a shame to leave a nice bunch of hair like this

hanging on a bush."



"Tell me, what were you doing up here, Grant? And what are you going to

do now? We haven't much time, and we've been fooling when we should have

been discussing 'ways and means.'"



"Well, I got up early, and someone took a shot at me again. This time he

clipped my hat-brim." He took off his hat, and showed her where the brim

had a jagged tear half an inch deep. "I ducked, and made up my mind I'd

get him this time, or know the reason why. So I rode up the other way

and back behind the orchard, and struck the grade below the Point

o' Rocks, and so came up here hunting him. I kept pretty well out of

sight--we've done that before; Jack and I took sneak yesterday, and came

up here at sunrise, but we couldn't find anything. I was beginning to

think he had given it up. So I was just scouting around here when I

heard you rustling the bushes over here. I was going to shoot, but I

changed my mind, and thought I'd land on you and trust to the lessons

I got in football and the gun. And the rest," he declaimed whimsically,

"you know.



"Now, duck away down--oh, wait a minute." He gave a jerk at the knot

of his neckerchief, flipped out the folds, spread it carefully over

her head, and tied it under her chin, patting it into place and tucking

stray locks under as if he rather enjoyed doing it. "Better wear it till

you're out of the brush," he advised, "if you don't want to get hung up

somewhere again."



She stood up straight, with a long, deep sigh of relief.



"Now, pikeway," he smiled. "And don't run bareheaded through the

bushes again. You've still got time to beat that train. And--about

Saunders--don't worry. I can get to the ranch without being seen, and no

one will know I was up here, unless you tell them."



"Oh, I shall of course!" Miss Georgie chose to be very sarcastic. "I

think I shall wire the information to the sheriff. Don't come with

me--and leave tracks all over the country. Keep on the lava rock.

Haven't you got any sense at all?"



"You made tracks yourself, madam, and you've left a fine lot of

incriminating evidence on that bush. I'll have to waste an hour picking

off the hair, so they won't accuse you of shooting Saunders." Good

Indian spoke lightly, but they both stopped, nevertheless, and eyed the

offending bush anxiously.



"You haven't time," Miss Georgie decided. "I can easily get around

that, if it's put up to me. You go on back. Really, you must!" her eyes

implored him.



"Oh, vey-ree well. We haven't met this morning. Good-by,

Squaw-talk-far-off. I'll see you later, perhaps."



Miss Georgie still had that freight heavy on her conscience, but she

stood and watched him stoop under an overhanging branch and turn his

head to smile reassuringly back at her; then, with a pungent stirring

of sage odors, the bushes closed in behind him, and it was as if he had

never been there at all. Whereupon Miss Georgie once more gathered her

skirts together and ran to the trail, and down that to the station.



She met a group of squaws, who eyed her curiously, but she was looking

once more at her watch, and paid no attention, although they stood

huddled in the trail staring after her. She remembered that she had left

the office unlocked and she rushed in, and sank panting into the chair

before her telegraph table just as the smoke of the fast freight swirled

around the nose of the low, sage-covered hill to the west.