“Now, see here, Mr. Smith,” Champers said with slow sternness. “What’d I say back there about women? Neither we ain’t man-slaughterers out here, though your Police Gazette and your dime novels paint us that way. There’s more murderers per capiter to a single street in New York than in the whole state of Kansas, right now. If it’s land and money, we’re after it, tooth an’ toenail, but forget the thing in your mind this minute or you an’ me parts company right here, an’ you can hoof it back to Carey’s Crossing or Wilmington, Delaware.”
Smith made no reply and they mounted their ponies and galloped away.
And all the while Dr. Horace Carey, inside the unlighted cabin, had watched their movements with grim curiosity, even to the hesitating, half-expressed intention of entering the dwelling.
“Champers would pull up another man’s stakes and drive them into his own ground if he wanted them, but that Thomas Smith would drive them through the other fellow’s body if nobody else was around,” was the doctor’s mental comment as he went outside and watched the course of the two men till the twilight gathered them in.
When the turning point came to the sick man, the up-climb was marvelous, as his powers of recoil asserted themselves.
“It is just a matter of self-control and good spirits now, Shirley, and you have both,” Dr. Carey said, as he sat by his patient on the ninth day. 78
“You staid the game out, Carey,” Shirley said with an undertone of hopelessness behind his smile. “What possessed you to happen in, anyhow?”
“I was possessed not to come and turned back after I’d started. If I hadn’t met Mrs. Aydelot coming after me I’d have rampsed off up on Big Wolf Creek for a week, maybe, and missed your case entirely.”
“And likewise my big fee,” Jim interrupted. “Some men are born lucky. And so Mrs. Aydelot went after you. Asher’s a fortunate man to have a wife like Virginia, although he had to give up an inheritance for her.”