“Nothin’ to make a fuss about,” he said, when he saw Clayton. “I got slung up ag’inst the barbed wire and my arm was ripped open. It’s been bleedin’ some, but that’s good fer it.”
“I shall have to take a number of stitches,” Clayton announced, when he had examined and cleansed the wound. He opened a pouch of his saddle-bags.
“No chloryform ner anything of that kind fer me,” said Harkness, regarding him curiously. “Jist go ahead with your sewin’.”
Clayton obeyed; while Harkness, setting a lighted cigarette between his teeth, talked and laughed with apparent nonchalance.
Brought thus into close contact with the people of the ranch, the shell of Clayton’s exclusiveness was shattered. After that, daily, for some time, he rode or walked over to the ranch house to see how his patient was doing, or Harkness came over to see him. And he found that these people were good to know. They lessened the emptiness which had gnawed. They were human beings, with wholly human hearts. And he needed them quite as much as they needed him.
CHAPTER VI
WHEN LOVE WAS YOUNG
Justin shot up into a tall youth; he was beginning to feel that he was almost a man; and love had come to him, as naturally and simply as the bud changes into the flower. It flushed his face, as he came with Lucy Davison up the path to the arbor seat in the cottonwoods, after a stroll by the stream. Planted when the ranch was established, the trees were now a cool and screening grove. Justin had made for her a crown of the cottonwood leaves, and had set it on her brown hair. As they walked along, hand in hand, he looked at her now and then, with the light of young love in his eyes. He was sure he had never seen a girl so beautiful and it gave him a strange and delightful pleasure just to look at her.
“Tell me more about Doctor Clayton,” she said, dropping down upon the arbor seat. “You told me about that scorched photograph. What is that woman to him, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as he sat down by her.
“I think she must have been his sweetheart.”