The deputy shook his head.
“It would be all right with me,” he said; “but I have no authority to let you stay. I’ll telephone in, though, and see what I can do. Where is the telephone?”
Pennington told him.
“You two stay here with my men,” said the deputy sheriff, “while I telephone.”
He was gone about fifteen minutes. When he returned, he shook his head.
“Nothing doing,” he said. “I have to bring you both in right away.”
“May I go to her room and see her again before I leave?” asked Custer.
“Yes,” said the deputy; but when Custer turned toward his sister’s room, the officer accompanied him.
Dr. Baldwin and one of the nurses were in the room. Young Pennington came and stood beside the bed, looking down on the white face and the tumbled curls upon the pillow. He could not perceive the slightest indication of life, yet they told him that Eva still lived. He knelt and kissed her, and then turned away. He tried to say good-by to her, but his voice broke, and he turned and left the room hurriedly.
Colonel and Mrs. Pennington were in the patio, with Shannon and the officers. The colonel and his wife had just learned of this new blow, and both of them were stunned. The colonel seemed to have aged a generation in that single day. He was a tired, hopeless old man. The heart of his boy and that of Shannon Burke went out to him and to the suffering mother from whom their son was to be taken at this moment in their lives when they needed him most. In their compassion for the older Penningtons they almost forgot the seriousness of their own situation.