"When that bandage is off yo' arm I'll take you, Curly."
"Not till then?"
She had scarcely strength yet to travel, and yet if she fretted like this at being shut up in a house, would she ever get well at all?
When I reflect what Curly looked like then it makes me wonder what sort of raging lunatic I had been to leave her in that house. By way of disguise she had a wig all sideways, and female clothes which she'd never learned to wear. They made her look like a man. Her skin had the desert tan; she moved and talked like a cowboy. But most of all, her eyes gave her dead away—the steel-blue eyes of a scout, more used to gun-fights than to needlework, which bored right through me. Only a frontiersman has eyes like that; only the outlaw has the haunted look which comes with slaying of men, and Curly was branded that way beyond mistake.
This poor child was wanted as McCalmont's son, hunted like a wild beast, with a price on her head for murder and for robbery under arms. And yet she was a woman!
"Say, Curly," I asked, "what has these ladies done to account for yo' being here in theyr home?"
She reached to a table, and gave me cuttings from the Weekly Obituary. I fell to reading these:—
The burial of Buck Hennesy at La Soledad.
Dog-gone Hawkins' report of not finding robbers.
The rescue of McCalmont's prisoners out of the Jim Crow shaft, and the story of the posse which tracked the robbers north until the signs scattered out all over the country and every trace was lost.