"And little good it did him. He might have been a gopher in the paws of a grizzly."
"Lay like a dead man for a long half-hour—"
"And looked like a snake that had mixed with a streak of lightning."
"Blind, battered, bruised, we carried him home on his shield—that is, on our hay-rake—"
"And that poor squalid wife of his looked rather disgusted when she found that he wasn't dead."
While they thus poured the tale of Shinn's discomfiture into Glaves's thirsty ears, Carter rattled steadily on towards Lone Tree. Passing Flynn's, he had been tempted to put in, but remembered that the Irishman would be out at the hay, and so ran on and by the one person who could have furnished an approximation of Helen's address. For she had merely promised to write Jenny as soon as she was settled, as he had learned when he met the doctor, back-trailing alone, early that morning.
"But you'll surely find her at one of the hotels!" the agent called to him, on the platform of the freight-train that carried him away at midnight.
But Helen had gone straight to the trustee's sister. And having wasted two days scanning hotel registers, wandering the streets, he concluded that perhaps she had changed her mind and gone straight through to her friends back East. Charging his friends and financial backers to keep on with the search, however, he returned to his labors in that unenviable condition of mind which romanticist writers describe as "broken-hearted."
In a city of twenty thousand it ought not to be so very difficult to locate a young lady whose style and beauty drew the eyes of the street. But if the search failed, the cause inhered in other reasons than lack of diligence—in a reason that largely accounted for Glaves's reluctance to give her address. Sick at heart, hopeless for the future, she had sunk her surname with the bitter past; resumed her maiden name while keeping the married title. Even with Glaves's sister, a big, good-natured woman, she passed as a widow.
XXV