“‘I guess th’ engine must ’a’ hit you, sure,’ I says, to ease him up. Then, as th’ track was clear, I opened up my engine, while Magraw set on the floor of th’ cab in a dazed sort of way. Never a word did he say till we pulled into the yards.
“‘You’d better see a doctor,’ I says. But he jumped off th’ engine th’ minute we stopped.
“‘I don’t want no doctor,’ he says. ‘I’m goin’ home.’ An’ he started off on a run.
“Well, you orter seen Mr. Schofield when I told him. He went along with th’ boy, an’ seen him fixed up, an’ then hurried away with th’ doctor t’ see Reddy. An’ he found him at home with his wife on one knee an’ his children on th’ other,—he told us when he got back.”
Johnson stopped, took out his handkerchief, and mopped his eyes openly.
“I don’t keer,” he said, looking around defiantly. “It’s enough t’ make any man’s eyes wet t’ think of what that family’s been through, an’ now Reddy’s give back to ’em ag’in with a head’s good as anybody’s. Why, it beats anything I ever heard of!”
And, indeed, it was a nine-days’ wonder to every one. The doctors came and looked at him and explained what had happened in many learned words, and one of them wrote a paper about it, which he read before a medical society; the newspapers heard of it and wrote it up, and published Reddy’s photograph,—why, Mrs. Magraw has all those papers put carefully away, and she gets them out occasionally even yet, and reads them and cries over them,—but they are tears of happiness and thanksgiving. For Reddy was as well as ever, and the gist of all the learned medical opinions was that the blow on the head which Allan dealt him had somehow set right the brain disordered by the blow it had received from the engine months before. It did for him just what an operation might have done, and did it effectually. How it had done it, the doctors couldn’t say, and there were many warm discussions over it. It was not without precedent,—not unfrequently a case of the same kind is reported,—but the righting of that delicate mechanism, the brain, is something that no physician, be he never so famous, as yet thoroughly understands.
The one fact remained that Reddy was himself again, and freed for ever from the influence of Dan Nolan. And, indeed, Nolan himself was destined to pay the penalty for his iniquities. For the detectives soon found the trail of him and his companions; the help of the Wadsworth police force was secured, a bloodhound was brought to the scene, and all that night the pursuit was kept up among the hills. When morning dawned, the quarry was run to cover in an old log hut near the top of Mount Logan, and the detectives and police surrounded it.
The robbers put up a short fight, but they saw they had no chance to escape, and the bullets from the Winchesters were whistling through the cabin in a most unnerving way, so they waved a white rag out of one of the windows and surrendered. There were four in the party, Nolan and three tramps whom nobody knew. They were taken back to Wadsworth and lodged safely in jail there, leaving it only to go to the State penitentiary at Columbus to serve a term of years. Nolan broke down at the last, like the great coward he really was, confessed, plead guilty, and turned State’s evidence against his comrades in order to save himself a year or two of imprisonment. So that was the end of Nolan for a time; but his power for mischief was not yet at an end, and he later involved some of his old associates in new disasters—but that story cannot be told here.