“It’s his arm makes him crazy,” said Mary Hope breathlessly. “Last night it began, and mother and I cannot keep him in his bed, and we don’t know what to do! He will not have a doctor, he says––”
“He’d better have,” said Belle shortly, hanging to the pintos that danced and snorted at the excitement. “I’ll send one out. Lance, you better stay here and look after him––he’ll kill somebody yet. Aren’t there any men on the place, for heaven’s sake?”
Mary Hope said there wasn’t, that Hugh was not expected back before night. They had bought a horse from the Millers, and it had jumped the fence and gone home, and Hugh had gone after it. Then she ran to do what she could to calm her father. Scotty, it would seem, wanted to drive the 252 Lorrigans off his land because they were thieves and cutthroats and had come there to rob him boldly in the broad light of day.
“Bat him on the head if you have to, Lance,” Belle called, cold-eyed but capable. “He’ll get sunstroke out here in this heat. And if you can get him into the house you had better tie him down till a doctor comes.” Then she left, with the pintos circling in a lope to get out through the gate and into the trail.
The last she saw of them, Lance and Mary Hope were both struggling with the old man, forcing him foot by foot to the house, where Mother Douglas stood on the doorstep crying, with her apron to her face.
She had the tough little team in a white lather, with their stubborn heads hanging level with their knees, when she stopped at the little railroad station and sent a peremptory wire to the Lava doctor who was most popular in the Black Rim. She waited until he arrived on the train which he luckily had time to catch, and then, the pintos having somewhat recovered under the solicitous rubbing-down of a hollow-chested stableman, she hustled the doctor and his black case into the buckboard and made the return drive in one hour and fifty minutes, which was breaking even her own record, who was called the hardest driver in the whole Rim country.
They found Lance with his coat off and the perspiration 253 streaming down his face, battling with Aleck Douglas who was raving still of the Lorrigans and threatening to kill this one who would not leave him alone to die in peace. Mary Hope and her mother were in the hot little kitchen where the last of the sunlight streamed through the faded green mosquito netting that sagged in and out as the breeze of sundown pushed through lazily.
The Lava doctor did not say much. He quieted the raving with his hypodermic needle, removed the amateurish bandage from the hand and the arm, looked at the wound, applied a cooling lotion, and dexterously wound on a fresh bandage. It seemed very little, Mary Hope thought dully, for a doctor to come all the way from Lava to do.
He would stay all night, he said. And the Lorrigans went home silent, depressed, even Belle finding nothing to say.
“I’ll ride over in the morning and see how he is,” Lance observed, as the tired little team climbed the Devil’s Tooth Ridge. “I’ll have to get the horse, anyway.”