"We'll take the chance," asserted the bandit-chieftain. "Jim, you and Miss—"
"Shaw, Daisy Shaw," supplied the girl.
"You and Miss Shaw make out a list of what she needs at the store while I see if I can't make her mother a bit easier." And kneeling beside the bed of straw, he took out his medicine case with its wonderful salves and lotions.
In reply to his questions, the bandit-chieftain learned that the woman had been tossing with the fever for more than a week, though not till the desertion of her husband and son, two days before, had it become virulent.
The mention of the faithless scoundrel who had left her in want and misery threw her into wild ravings.
"Does she have these spells often?" asked the great outlaw as he hastily produced an opiate from his case.
"Most of the time. Oh, she takes on awful!" returned the girl whose status as wife of the runaway son or sister, the bandits had not yet ascertained.
But it was one thing to prepare the narcotic and another to administer it.
At first the woman would not listen to the suggestion, protesting that Jesse was but some miserable tool of her husband, sent by him to poison her. And it required the combined efforts of the three to reassure her. So weak was she from lack of nourishment and the ravages of the fever that when she did swallow it the effect was almost instantaneous, however.