"Thirty-two caliber, to begin with; a thirty-two ain't nothing, Timber. Now, if it had been a forty-five, at that close-up range.... Well, you see you was standing half-way slanting; it took you under that big shoulder muscle and drilled in and hit a rib, one of the high-up ones, and kept on going, sort of skirting round, skating on a rib, and popped out under your arm. Lift it a bit? That's it. A clean hole. I tell you, either you sort of slipped and fell, or it was the impack that knocked you over.... The boys will be here any minute, and will scare up a bar of castile soap for me and something to make a regular poultice, what we calls a comprest, you know; I can make one out of most anything; remember Sam True's thoroughbred stallion that got all cut to hell last fall, and I made him a comprest out of sawdust! You remind me," added Winch thoughtfully, drawing off one of his hopping paces, to take in with an admiring and practised eye the now virtually nude torso, a white, smooth-running engine of power and endurance, "of a wild stallion mostly as much as a man, anyhow. A good smear of mustang liniment on that shoulder, a application, you know; and a dose of physic and a couple days' rest and careful diet, and you'll be as good as new...."
"What happened in the other room?" demanded Standing, deaf to Winch's mutterings. "After she went through the window?"
"She came busting in where Deveril and I was, her eyes the size of two new dish pans. I put in new because they was shining like it too; I thought she'd seen the devil. She has a gun in her hand and she yells out, 'Save me!' or something like that. And after her, doubled-up running, comes Jim Taggart, yelling at her: 'I got you for killing Bruce Standing!' And then that cool-headed, hot-hearted young Baby Devil of yours grabs the gun out of her hand and whangs Taggart over the head with it so that he drops dead in his tracks. And I hear a man say he is dead, too; but I don't stop to see. Don't seem natural, and yet a man's close to mortal danger if he gets whanged with any hard object, such as steel gun-barrels, on the head, close up to the temple; we call it the parrytal bone, you know, and I've known men and even horses that was killed so quick...."
"Then what?" snapped Timber-Wolf.
"Then both him and her beats it like the mill-tails of hell! And that part's natural enough, him figuring he's killed the sheriff, and her figuring she's plumb killed you. They stampeded into the brush, ducking out toward the timber-lands where it was darkest, a bunch of hollering fools after them."
"And Jim Taggart?"
The "boys" whose presence Billy Winch had requested came hurrying in at the hall door, excitement and alarm shining in their eyes. One glance reassured them, and while Dick Ross gave expression to his relief in a windy sigh and sought hastily for materials to build him a cigarette to replace that which he had dropped as he raced here, Charley Peters stood and mopped at his forehead with an enormous dingy blue handkerchief and grinned. Billy Winch, who had the trick of pithy brevity when there was need of it, made his wants known sharply, and the two men, their spurs still dragging and clanking after them, hastened away for basin and soap and whatever else of Winch's first-aid materials might be had at hand. In the meantime, Winch was yanking a sheet off Lynette Brooke's bed, and ripping it into tatters for his bandages and rags and what he termed "mops and applications."
"It ain't necessary to probe for the bullet," he admitted, almost regretfully. "But I might poke around in there a mite, while the hole's good and wide open, to make sure that a piece of your shirt or something didn't get lodged inside...."
"I'll break your damned neck for trying it," threatened Standing.