“Gosh, what a pity!” he had lamented to himself each time, as he went tiptoeing away. “It’s them fine brains of hers workin’. I tell you, Em’ly, wife, she’s goin’ to be the great lady you figgered on, if I got to sell my soul to do it. I’m jest watchin’ for a chanct. You wait an’ see!”
It was well on toward noon of an August day. A fiery sun was churning the floor of Soapweed Plains into a stormy ocean of heat waves. Lemuel had gone to Geerusalem on his customary hobnobbing expedition. Dot, her housework completed, sat reading in the shade of the passion-flower vine that trellised the porch, a novel borrowed from Mrs. Agatha Liggs, a widow who kept a small dry goods store in the camp.
Suddenly, breaking on the dead silence like muffled shots, came the sound of hoofs. Dot dropped her book and sprang to her feet expectantly, for the riders who passed that way, bound to and from the unimportant desert station of Mirage, were few indeed and far between. The next instant she was staring at a lone horseman approaching, not along the road but from across country, from the direction of the violet and yellow scallop of range that formed the magical setting of all her romantic dreams!
She stared in unbelief, amazed for the moment. Then she noticed that he was hatless, that the whole side of his head, the whole front of his dirty, white shirt, were crimson with blood, that he reeled drunkenly, lifelessly in the saddle.
Aghast at the spectacle, she gazed on, rooted to the spot, until the exhausted horse stumbled up to the barred gate and stopped, drooping, rocking on quivering legs. Out of the gate she darted then, threw down the bars and led the animal up to the house, her heart fluttering with excitement and horror.
The rider was in a half swoon, mumbling thickly. Above his right ear was a long, bloody furrow, like the plow of a bullet. The bandanna he had had for a bandage had slipped down over his face, neglected. It was saturated. He had been bleeding for hours, was her horrifying thought. A glance told her that he was a stranger. That same glance informed her that he was probably twenty-five, fairly good-looking even through his coating of dust and blood, and that he wore a double cartridge belt and a brace of six-shooters, one of which he still held gripped in his hand.
Ordinarily, she would have been quite unable to handle the dead weight he represented, but now she managed to drag him out of the saddle and into the house without being particularly conscious of the effort. She got him on the parlor lounge finally and plunged into the work of bathing his wound and dressing it. Then she tore away his sodden shirts, replaced them with two of her father’s, and brought a dipper of water and poured it in little swallows down his throat.
Seating herself in a chair beside him, she looked him over curiously, studied him. Who was he? What was he? The wound? Under less shocking circumstances, it was quite probable he would have proved a big treat to her vivid imagination. But now there somehow seemed to be too much tragic reality about him to make her care to commit him and his plight to the wild flings of fancy.
At last he opened his eyes and stared up at her vaguely. They were blue eyes. There was an odd, hunted glint in them, a smolder of recklessness, a shadow of sadness, exhaustion. He raised an uncertain hand to his bandaged head. He glanced around the room, then back at her, his wits clearing suddenly.
“Where am I? Whose—whose place is this?” he jerked out, with an effort.