“Nope. Just holdin’ the girl’s hand. She might say somethin’ later on. We’ll stick around.”
They lowered Steve to a rickety sofa, opened the blanket-roll encasing him, and bared his ridge-ribbed chest. Ward tiptoed about and found mustard and cloths. Bill, clumsily anxious to do something but ignorant of how to go about it, fidgeted a moment and then appointed himself guardian of the fire. Steve, lips pressed together, lay still, moving only his eyes, which went back and forth between Douglas and the doorway of the inner room. The blond man nodded and stole to the portal.
Within, he saw two faces: one thin, dark, pillowed in a worn old bed—a face gray-white beneath its swarthiness; the other fair, rounded, but white and set, leaning close. Across the mouth of the sufferer lay a towel blotched with red stains, and from the headboard another hung ready. The black-browed eyes were closed, and across the forehead above them softly stroked gentle tapering fingers. On the shabby counterpane a work-worn old hand and a shapely young one were joined. Somewhere a cheap clock ticked as if hurrying along the last hours of the injured woman’s life. That, and difficult breathing, were the only sounds.
Marion’s head turned, and for a moment her grief-stricken eyes dwelt on the blue ones at the doorway. Then they returned to the face on the pillow. Douglas withdrew. In that straight look he had found confirmation of what his own gaze and Ward’s laconic words had told him.
He shook his head soberly at Steve and at the other two, watching him. The boy’s mouth set harder; but he said nothing. Ward went on making a hot poultice. Bill shifted his feet and awkwardly fed another stick into the stove.
“I don’t quite git it,” Ward mused in an undertone, as the three gathered around Steve. “What would Sanders beat her up for?”
“For the same reason that he would kill Lou Brackett and shoot at me,” Douglas explained. “It all fits in together. The reason is—Marion.”
“Wanted her, you mean?”
“Exactly. He couldn’t have her and Lou too, so he got rid of Lou. He threw her off the Wall because that would look like an accident. A snake-bite wouldn’t do, because folks would be too suspicious, especially since snakes are denning up now. Any other form of murder, too, would look bad. A fall off the Wall would be the most natural thing.
“Mrs. Oaks, here, hated Sanders, and he knew it. From what Steve tells us—that she told him to leave her and see if Marion was at my house—Sanders must have come here determined to drag the girl away to a hole in the rocks where he’s been hiding lately. She probably cussed him out—maybe threatened him with the gun—and he thought Marion was here. So he jumped on her, pounded her like the murderous brute he was, searched the house, and then came to my place; saw us in there, and jumped in to finish me and grab her before she could get to my gun.”