On entering the town, she at once perceived evidences of unusual excitement among the inhabitants: men were grouped together on the sidewalks and about the store doors, neighbor-women talking across fences or leaning out of windows, discussing the all-absorbing topic of the robbery and attempted murder of old Farmer Himes, and the arrest of the supposed leader of the gang of burglars who had been for months past the terror of Wild River Valley.
Occasionally Belinda heard her own name coupled with the remark that the old man believed her to be in league with his would-be assassins, the speaker or the one addressed sometimes adding that she, too, ought to be arrested and put in prison for trial.
She hurried on her way, growing more and more frightened at every step, till by the time she had gained the door of the tavern whither her husband had been conveyed she was ready to drop with fatigue and alarm.
And the reception she met with there was not calculated to reassure her; evidently every one regarded her with suspicion; and the landlord, on learning who she was, coldly informed her that he had no room for her; she would have to find accommodation elsewhere.
“Didn’t they bring my husband here? and isn’t he a lyin’ now in one o’ them bedrooms o’ yours?” she asked, trying to put on a bold, defiant air.
“Why, I’ve come to nurse him; and of course I’ll share his room; so you needn’t tell me you haven’t got one for me.”
“Not so fast, woman,” returned Mr. Strong. “The old man says you have more love for O’Rourke than for him—in fact, he accuses you of betraying him into the hands of his would-be assassins, and swears that he will henceforward have nothing whatever to do with you—neither let you nurse him nor pay any bills of your contracting. So, as I don’t board folks for nothing, there’s no place for you here.”
She was opening her lips to offer her services as cook or chambermaid, when a thought of the danger of arrest on suspicion of having been accessory to the attempt on her husband’s life caused a sudden abandonment of that idea.
“It’s a lie!” she cried, with a show of great indignation, “a wicked lie that I had anything to do with them robbers tryin’ to git a holt o’ his money and kill him. If it hadn’t been fer me a runnin’ with all my might fer help, he’d been a dead man hours ago, a bleedin’ there on the raft, without a soul to do nothin’ fer him. But I’ll go and leave the ongrateful old idyot to git along the best he kin without me.”