“You’re still all right, air ye?”
It was the voice of Dicky Carroll, one of the cowboys.
It was Dicky’s arms that held him, and he was on Dicky’s horse. He drew himself up, looked about, and saw Steve Harkness galloping at Dicky’s side with Helen in his arms.
“He’s got to be made all right if he ain’t,” he heard Harkness shout. “He’s too gamy to be let die!”
CHAPTER II
THE HARVEST OF THE FIRE
The fire ravaged a large part of the mesa range. In the valley it did small damage, for the farmers checked it there by flooding the canals and laterals with the water they had stored for the fall irrigation. Some of their hay land was swept over, and a few stacks of alfalfa were destroyed, but no house was burned. One of the destroyed stacks belonged to William Sanders. And it did not mitigate his hostility to the people of the Davison ranch to know that the fire had been started by Ben Davison.
Ben was voluble with excuses and explanations. He stated that he had gone to the plum bushes by the rim of the cañon. There, tossing away a smoked-out cigarette, it had fallen into some dry grass, which at once leaped into flame. He had tried to stamp out the fire, and failed. Startled by the rapidity with which it spread, and by the increasing heat and smoke, he had fled. As he did so he came on a loose horse, bearing a woman’s saddle. No one was near it, or to be seen, and he supposed very naturally that the rider had let the horse get away. At any rate, it offered him a chance to escape from the fire, which he believed to be ringing him in, and he accepted it. He did not hear Harkness shout at him, he said, nor Justin. Riding toward the ranch house, he had encountered the cowboys who were hastening to the fire, and had turned back with them, thus meeting Steve Harkness, who was holding his wife in front of him and had ridden out of the smoke. And he had continued with the cowboys, and was with them when Justin appeared with Helen.
Dicky Carroll’s version, poured into the ears of Justin Wingate as he lay convalescing from the effects of his burns, held some peppery additions:
“Gee! wasn’t Harkness wild; wasn’t he hot? He was hotter than the fire he had run from. He was simply crazy. He didn’t say anything to Ben when we first met him, fer there wasn’t time right at that minute. But he come on him at the ranch house. That was after you was carried in, and while Doc Clayton was fingerin’ you over to see if you was all there. Ben was standin’ by the door; and Harkness stepped up to him, his face as white as a sheet, where it wasn’t all smoked up; and he says to him, jest like this:
“‘Damn you fer a sneakin’ coward! You took my wife’s horse, and left her and Helen in that hell of fire to be roasted to death!’ And then he hit him square on the mouth and knocked him up ag’inst the side of the house.