“I don't understand you,” stammered Ford.
“Where are you hidin' her from me?” repeated McKinstry with painful distinctness. “Whar hev you run her to, that you're reckonin' to jine her arter—arter—THIS?”
“I am not hiding her! I am not going to her! I do not know where she is. I have not seen her since we parted early this morning without a word of meeting again,” said the master rapidly, yet with a bewildered astonishment that was obvious even to the dulled faculties of his hearer.
“That war true?” asked McKinstry, laying his hand upon the master's shoulder and bringing his dull eyes to the level of the young man's.
“It is the whole truth,” said Ford fervently, “and true also that I never raised my hand against you.”
McKinstry beckoned to Harrison and the two others who had joined him, and then sank partly back with his hand upon his side, where the slow empurpling of his red shirt showed the slight ooze of a deeply-seated wound.
“You fellers kin take me over to the ranch,” he said calmly, “and let him,” pointing to Ford, “ride your best hoss fer the doctor. I don't,” he continued in grave explanation, “gin'rally use a doctor, but this yer is suthin' outside the old woman's regular gait.” He paused, and then drawing the master's head down towards him, he added in his ear, “When I get to hev a look at the size and shape o' this yer ball that's in my hip, I'll—I'll—I'll—be—a—little more kam!” A gleam of dull significance struggled into his eye. The master evidently understood him, for he rose quickly, ran to the horse, mounted him and dashed off for medical assistance, while McKinstry, closing his heavy lids, anticipated this looked-for calm by fainting gently away.
CHAPTER XIII.
Of the various sentimental fallacies entertained by adult humanity in regard to childhood, none are more ingeniously inaccurate and gratuitously idiotic than a comfortable belief in its profound ignorance of the events in which it daily moves, and the motives and characters of the people who surround it. Yet even the occasional revelations of an enfant terrible are as nothing compared to the perilous secrets which a discreet infant daily buttons up, or secures with a hook-and-eye, or even fastens with a safety-pin across its gentle bosom. Society can never cease to be grateful for that tact and consideration—qualities more often joined with childish intuition and perception than with matured observation—that they owe to it; and the most accomplished man or woman of the great world might take a lesson from this little audience who receive from their lips the lie they feel too palpable, with round-eyed complacency, or outwardly accept as moral and genuine the hollow sentiment they have overheard rehearsed in private for their benefit.