"'Looks pretty near it. If you'd seen those beasts clear he mightn't have come to this. Here, take a drink. We'll want you presently,' says Steel, and went on strapping you together with a girth and bridle, while I watched Redmond with one eye. As you know, there was never much grit in the creature, and he had another shivering fit.
"'Get out until you're feeling better. That kind of thing's catching, and we've lots to do,' I said; and he laughs with a cackle like an hysterical woman, and blinks straight past me. Steel and I figured he'd got hold of some smuggled whisky and been drinking bad, but afterwards Henderson's Jo said no.
"'It's murder. My God! It's horrible—an' he never done anyone no harm,' he says, and falls to cussing somebody quietly. I can talk pretty straight when I'm hot myself, but that was ice-cold swearing with venom in it, and when he got on to Judas, with the devil in his eyes, I ripped up a big sod and plugged him on the head with it.
"'If you don't let up or quit I'll pound the life out of you,' says Steel.
"Well, we got you fixed so you couldn't make the damage worse, and when Steel went for the wagon and I looked around for Redmond he was gone. Don't know what to think of it, anyway, 'cept his troubles or bad whisky had turned his head. You see he was never far from crazy."
"Why didn't one of you get hold of him and make him talk next day?" I asked; and Thorn looked at me curiously.
"Because he'd gone. Lit out to nobody knows where and stopped there. I don't know just what to think, myself."
Sally took Thorn by the shoulders and thrust him out, but he left me with sufficient, and unpleasant, food for reflection. The stock I had counted on were gone. Also, when it was above all things desirable that I should be up and doing, I must lie still for weeks, useless as a log. One thing at least I saw clearly, and that was the usurer's purpose to absorb my property; and as I lay with throbbing forehead and tight-clenched fingers, which had grown strangely white, I determined that he should have cause to remember the struggle before he accomplished it. That Redmond had been driven by him into shameful treachery appeared too probable, though there was no definite proof of it, and the thought stiffened my resolution. My scattered neighbors, patient as they were, were ill to coerce and would doubtless join me in an effort before the schemer's machinations left us homeless.
Then I could hardly check a groan as I remembered all that the brief glimpses of a brighter life at Bonaventure had suggested. A few months earlier it had appeared possible that with one or two more good seasons I might even have attained to it; but since then a gulf had opened between Beatrice Haldane and me, and the best I could hope for was a resumption of what now seemed hopeless drudgery. It was a bitter awakening, and I almost regretted that Steel and Foreman Thorn had not been a few seconds later when the fence went down. An hour passed, and Sally Steel, bringing a chair over to my side, offered to read to me what she said was a real smart shadowing story. I glanced at the invincible detective standing amid a scene of bloodshed, depicted on the cover of the journal she held up, and declined with due civility.
"I am afraid my nerves are not good enough. I should sooner you talked to me, Sally," I said.