“It’s Number One,” men repeated to each other, passing the word along. “Number One got here!”
Hurrying to the hotel, Agnes was skirting through the thinner edges of the gathering at the very moment when Dr. Slavens turned from the window, his papers in his hand. As he went to his weary horse and took up the reins, the creature greeted him with a little chuckling whinny, and the people gave him a loud and hearty cheer.
When the cheering spread to the people around her, Agnes stopped and asked a man why they did that. 182 She spoke a little irritably, for she was out of humor with people who would cheer one man for taking something that belonged to another. That was the way she looked at it, anyhow.
“Why, haven’t you heard?” asked the man, amazed, but enlarged with importance, because he had the chance of telling somebody. “It’s Number One. He rode up on a horse just in the nick of the second and saved his claim.”
“Number One!” said she. “A horse!”
“Sure, ma’am,” said her informant, looking at her queerly. “Here he comes now.”
Dr. Slavens passed within a few feet of her, leading his horse toward the livery stable. If it had not been that the wind was blowing sharply, turning back the flapping brim of his old hat, she would have repudiated him as an impostor. But there was no mistaking him, in spite of the strange clothing which he wore, in spite of the bloody bandage about his head.
And at the sight of that bandage her heart felt a strange exultation, a stirring leap of joy, even stronger than her pity and her pain. For it was his vindication; it was the badge of his honor; it was his credentials which put him back in the right place in her life.
He had come by it in no drunken squabble, she knew; and he had arisen from the sickness of it to mount horse and ride–desperately, as his condition told–to claim his own. Through the leagues of desert he had come, through the unfriendly night, with what dim 183 hope in his breast no man might know. Now, sparing the horse that had borne him to his triumph, he marched past her, his head up, like one who had conquered, even though he limped in the soreness of bruised body.
People standing near wondered to see the tall, pale woman put out her hands with more than a mother’s pity in her eyes, and open her lips, murmuring a name beneath her breath.