“Then what is your name?”
“Hope Waite.”
Kate Murphy looked, at the face half hidden in the bed-clothes. That was not the name which Keith had given her, but she had lived on the border too long to be inquisitive. The other lifted her head, flinging back her loosened hair with one hand.
“Mr. Keith dropped it,” she exclaimed. “Where do you suppose he got it?” Then she gave a quick, startled cry, her eyes opening wide in horror. “The Cimmaron Crossing, the murder at the Cimmaron Crossing! He—he told me about that; but he never showed me this—this. Do you—do you think—”
Her voice failed, but Kate Murphy gathered her into her arms.
“Cry here, honey,” she said, as if to a child. “Shure an' Oi don't know who it was got kilt out yonder, but Oi'm tellin' ye it niver was Jack Keith what did it—murther ain't his stoyle.”
Chapter XVI. Introducing Doctor Fairbain
Headed as they were, and having no other special objective point in view, it was only natural for the two fugitives to drift into Sheridan. This was at that time the human cesspool of the plains country, a seething, boiling maelstrom of all that was rough, evil, and brazen along the entire frontier. Customarily quiet enough during the hours of daylight, the town became a mad saturnalia with the approach of darkness, its ceaseless orgies being noisily continued until dawn. But at this period all track work on the Kansas Pacific being temporarily suspended by Indian outbreaks, the graders made both night and day alike hideous, and the single dirty street which composed Sheridan, lined with shacks, crowded with saloons, the dull dead prairie stretching away on every side to the horizon, was congested with humanity during every hour of the twenty-four.
It was a grim picture of depravity and desolation, the environment dull, gloomy, forlorn; all that was worthy the eye or thought being the pulsing human element. All about extended the barren plains, except where on one side a ravine cut through an overhanging ridge. From the seething street one could look up to the summit, and see there the graves of the many who had died deaths of violence, and been borne thither in “their boots.” Amid all this surrounding desolation was Sheridan—the child of a few brief months of existence, and destined to perish almost as quickly—the centre of the grim picture, a mere cluster of rude, unpainted houses, poorly erected shacks, grimy tents flapping in the never ceasing wind swirling across the treeless waste, the ugly red station, the rough cow-pens filled with lowing cattle, the huge, ungainly stores, their false fronts decorated by amateur wielders of the paint brush, and the garish dens of vice tucked in everywhere. The pendulum of life never ceased swinging. Society was mixed; no man cared who his neighbor was, or dared to question. Of women worthy the name there were few, yet there were flitting female forms in plenty, the saloon lights revealing powdered cheeks and painted eyebrows. It was a strange, restless populace, the majority here to-day, disappearing to-morrow—cowboys, half-breeds, trackmen, graders, desperadoes, gamblers, saloon-keepers, merchants, generally Jewish, petty officials, and a riff-raff no one could account for, mere floating debris. The town was an eddy catching odd bits of driftwood such as only the frontier ever knew. Queer characters were everywhere, wrecks of dissipation, derelicts of the East, seeking nothing save oblivion.