How long Childress lay in a faint he never knew, for he forgot to ask. The only detail that mattered when he at last came to was that his agonizing effort had ended the fight. In falling backward, the logger had crashed his head against a corner of the "tin" piano and already had been carried out to sleep it off under the trees.
"And if he never comes out of it—the trance," said Crowe, "there won't be any crepe hanging on the front door of the Nest."
"You said some words, brother!" This from Delores, who had been ministering to the sadly punctured forearm. "I'll take him to my cabin for I guess I won him."
"What the hell did you do?" demanded the peg-leg crook.
Childress awoke—otherwise returned to consciousness. He took a look at his arm before they put upon it an antiseptic salve that any road house, used to spearing fights, keeps behind the bar. Then he did shudder at what he had escaped. Would Flame, little Flame with the delicious freckles across her nose—would she ever have looked at him again had he come back to her with the logger's mark all over his face? Of course, she would have scorned him!
Came forward then the violinist of the two-piece orchestra. He held out something that Childress had missed at a vital moment.
"Didn't it fall out of your holster when he tripped you with that stool?" asked the dope artist. "When you were heeled with all of that, me friend, why didn't you pull it sooner?"
"Never draw unless necessary," said Childress, wondering how the gun had torn loose.
"And then," declared the pasty-faced musician, "necessity ain't what it used to be!"
The sergeant was himself again. The arm still pained, but he was inured to pain. But there was a new sort of trouble in the immediate offing—Delores.