“So much the worse! I deserve death, and desired it!” groaned the wounded man, adding: “But you, Dallas Bain, aren’t you dead?” resentfully. “Didn’t some one shoot you last night?”
“Oh, no—it was another fellow, an acquaintance of mine—Royall Sherwood, down at Gull Beach, and he isn’t dead, but going to get well, they say. What do you know about it, anyway?” with sudden suspicion.
“Nothing; but I hoped—I mean—I thought—or heard—you were killed.”
“Not much matter if I had been. When a fellow’s sweetheart has just married another man he doesn’t cling to life for a while,” Dallas murmured cynically.
“Your sweetheart—married—to another? Her name?” demanded the other, in such tragic earnest that Dallas could not help confiding in him, so he said sadly:
“I had the dearest, prettiest sweetheart in the world—blue-eyed Daisie Bell—and last night there was a mock wedding at Sea View, and two arch plotters made it a real marriage, and snared my Daisie in a web from which she could not free herself, save by divorce. But we intended to try it, anyhow, and she came away with me, poor dear! And then some one shot Royall Sherwood, the man she married, and she had to go back to him. But here comes a doctor to see you, and——Heavens! He has fainted away again!”
A curious crowd came round, and a drummer from the rear coach that had escaped with little injury, exclaimed:
“Let me look at this fellow! Why, it’s Ray Dering, from Cincinnati, one of the finest traveling salesmen on the road. But he’s been on a frightful tear for days, owing to some woman. Sweetheart jilted him, I expect.”
“Poor fellow!” exclaimed Dallas Bain, a responsive chord touched in his sore heart, and he immediately resolved to care for Ray Dering in his illness, and cheer him when he recovered, perhaps on the principle that “misery loves company.”
He had him removed to a farmhouse near by, and engaged board and attendance for both, remaining there for tedious weeks while the invalid’s broken arm knitted together, and finding him an interesting study, for while at times he was genial to the point of fascination, he was subject to mysterious moods of remorseful melancholy verging on despair.