“I'll go and see. Perhaps I'll find out who fired it,” Darrell said, walking towards the front door, followed by Miss Mathews, who preferred to make a few parting suggestions outside, not sure of Billy's soundness of sleep.
As both stepped outside the first object that met their eyes was Billy's rifle, peacefully reclining against the window.
Darrell took it up and looked at Miss Mathews perplexed. She was looking at him aghast.
The undefined fears that neither one expressed were only too well founded. The rifle had been fired, and fired by Mathews with murderous intent. For several weeks, instigated by Roper and bad whisky, Mathews had been watching an opportunity to shoot George, because he had the appeal dismissed. This evening he at last saw his chance when George was walking the porch caressing his baby. He could not take good aim while he was walking, but when Elvira at last took the baby away and George walked into the library, then, as he went to put the window down, Mathews aimed at his heart and fired. Fortunately the ball struck the window sash, deflected and glanced down, striking the hip-bone instead of the heart.
Darrell and Miss Mathews were still looking at the rifle, as if expecting that by a close examination they might guess who fired it, when they were startled by Mathews uttering frightful curses and smashing the furniture. The noise brought two hired men, who were smoking their pipes by the kitchen fire, and they helped Darrell to grapple with the maniac and pinion his arms, tying him to a chair.
Miss Mathews was greatly shocked to see her brother crazy, but she had been expecting it. She quietly consented to have him taken to an insane asylum.
CHAPTER XXXI.—A Snow Storm.
George Mechlin's wound was not mortal, but it made it necessary to convey him to town to have medical attendance near at hand, and no doubt it would be of a long and painful convalescence, with the danger, almost a certainty, of leaving him lame for life. This danger was to him far more terrible than death, but he concealed in the deepest recesses of his heart the horror he felt at being a cripple, for he knew the keen anguish that Elvira suffered at the thought of such a probability. Her lovely black eyes would fill with tears, and her lips would tremble and turn white, when he or any one else spoke of the possibility of his being lame. So he had to be consoler, and soothe her grief, and be the one to speak of hope and courage.
There was no possibility of his being able to return to his duties at their bank in New York at present, and he, to cheer Elvira's desponding heart, would say that he could attend to a bank in San Diego.
“Don't be despondent, my pet,” he said one day, when she looked very sad; “things will not be so bad, after all, for in the spring I will be well enough to attend to bank business here, even if I cannot stand the trip to New York. With the money that Clarence sent, and with what I will put in myself, we can start quite a solid bank. Gabriel will have learned a good deal by that time, and though I will not walk much, I can be a very majestic President, and give my directions from my arm-chair. All we want is the success of the Texas Pacific—and my uncle writes that Tom Scott is very confident, and working hard.”