The other man seemed to have a difficulty in finding an answer, and while he stared at Breckenridge there was a trample of hoofs in the mire outside, and a shout. Breckenridge could not catch its meaning, but the men about him streamed out of the hall and he could hear them mounting in haste. As the rapid beat of hoofs gradually died away, looking up at a sound, he saw the cook bending over his comrade. The man, seeing in his eyes the question he dared not ask, shook his head.
“No, I guess they haven’t killed him,” he said. “Kind of knocked all the senses out of him; and now I’ve let the rest out, we’ll get him to bed.”
“The rest?” Breckenridge asked bewildered.
The man nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I guess I got one or two of the homestead-boys, and then Charley and I lit out through a back window, and slipped round to see why the stockboys weren’t coming. It was quite simple. The blame firebugs had put a man with a rifle at the door of their sleeping shed.”
Three or four other men trooped in somewhat sheepishly, though, as the cook had explained, it was not their fault they had arrived after the fight was over; and while they carried their master upstairs Breckenridge thought he heard another beat of hoofs. He paid no great attention to it, but when Larry had been laid on the bed glanced towards the window at the streaks of flame breaking through the smoke that rolled about a birch-log building.
“What can be done?” he said.
“I don’t know that we can do anything,” answered the cook. “The fire has got too good a holt, but it’s not likely to light anything else the way the wind is. It was one of them blame Chicago rustlers put the firestick in.”
“Pshaw!” said Breckenridge. “Let it burn. I mean, what can be done for Larry?”
“We might give him some whiskey—only we haven’t any. Still, I’ve seen this kind of thing happen in the Michigan lumber-camps, and I guess he’s most as well without it. You want to give a man’s brains time to settle down after they’ve had a big shake-up.”
Breckenridge sat down limply on the foot of the bed, faint and dizzy, and wondering if he really heard a regular, rhythmic drumming through the snapping of the flame. It grew louder while he listened, and a faint musical jingling became audible with it.