"I dunno. He won't tell anybody. Maybe he'll tell you."
"Come on!" Angus Mackay cried, and dug heels into his pony.
The pony was blown and gasping as they rode up to the ranch and Angus leaped from his back. Rennie's hand fell on his shoulder.
"Kid," he said earnestly, "you want to brace up and keep braced. If it's a show-down for your daddy he'll like to know you're takin' it like a man. Then there's Jean and Turkey. This here happens to everybody, and while it's tough it's a part of the game. And just one more thing: If you find out who done the shootin', let me know!"
The boy nodded, because he could not trust himself to speak, and ran into the house. It was hushed in the twilight. Already it seemed to hold a little of the strange stillness which comes with the departure of a familiar presence. As the boy paused, from a corner came a little, sniffling sob, and in the semi-darkness he saw his young brother, Torquil, curled miserably upon a skin-covered couch. Paying no attention to him he crossed the living room and as he did so his sister Jean entered. In some mysterious way she seemed years older than the girl-child who had come running after him in the gray mists of that morning. Dry-eyed, slender, quiet-moving, like the shadow of a girl in the gloom, she led him back and closed the door. He obeyed her touch without question, without a trace of his superiority of the morning. In face of sickness and death, like most of his sex he felt helpless, impotent. He put his long arm around his sister and suddenly she clung to him, her slender body shaking.
"He's not—dead—Jean?"
"Not—not yet, Angus. Dr. Wilkes is with him now. He says he won't live long. He didn't want to tell me, but I made him."
She told him all she knew. Adam Mackay had ridden away by himself that morning, no one knew whither. In the afternoon he had come home swaying in his saddle, shot through the body. Then young Turkey has climbed into the blood-soaked saddle and ridden for the doctor. As to how he had met with his hurt Adam Mackay had said no word.
The inner door opened to admit a burly, thick-bodied man with reddish hair sprinkled with gray and grizzled, bushy eyebrows. This was Dr. Wilkes. He nodded to Angus.
"You're in time. Your father wants you. Go to him, and call me if anything happens."