The physician selected a twenty-dollar bill and handed the leather back. The miner extracted an additional ten-dollar bill and pushed it out.
“To have you with us has been worth that to me,” he said. “Now I’ll go in and powwow with these hospital folks. I want Ring to pull through. I don’t agree with him on much of anything, but—well—he’s too good to lose. Also he’s from my own town—a Murdock man. Guess that’s reason enough. Good-by. Thanks.”
Ring was still unconscious when the partners, mounted in a mountain buckboard hired from the livery stable, turned toward the Big Divide and Murdock, and heard the driver’s whip crack and his voice bawl: “Gid-dap!”
It was long after dark when the big miner trudged down the quiet street of Murdock and gained the front of the flamboyantly lighted Alamo. He had never passed through its doors since that night when its proprietress had humiliated him by telling him that no gunman was welcomed or wanted in her place; but now he entered stolidly, and walked across to the bar with its high seat and cash till at the end, behind which sat Pearl Brown.
No one paid attention to his entrance. A so-called vaudeville act was in progress and, had Smith taken time to heed, he might have observed that the performer was a camp favorite. He was oblivious to the big floor, crowded with tables and chairs, the wreaths of smoke climbing upward toward the electric light clusters, the sobbing sentimentality of the orchestra maundering an accompaniment to some sobbingly sentimental ballad about “A violet I plucked from dear old mother’s grave.”
The calm, defensive-eyed young woman in the high seat appeared equally oblivious and unmoved by it, but her interest seemed invoked when she discovered Smith standing at her elbow and heard him say:
“I come here to tell you something I think you ought to know. I don’t know why I think you ought to know, only—there’s something about it I can’t understand. That boy Ring—you know—the crazy guy that runs the Star—was all beat up, hammered and kicked to a pulp, this afternoon in Placer City, because he stuck up for you and wouldn’t let that bunch of hairy-heels headed by their mayor call you names that maybe you deserve, and maybe you don’t.
“I gave the mayor what Ring wasn’t strong enough to give him,” the miner went on, “then took Ring to the hospital in Georgeville. What’s left of him! He’s there now. They don’t know whether he’s goin’ to pull through or not. But I thought you ought to know that he got it for fighting for you and so, if you’ve got anything against him, any old grudge, any hurt, you’d better forget it and forgive it. Just as I’ve forgiven all he ever said about me after I learned that, right or wrong, he’s a brave and honest boy.
“I been thinking over a lot of things this afternoon,” he continued, “and I remembered that whenever Ring thought it was his duty to go and tell somebody something, he went and did it, regardless of what might come after. That’s why I got to thinking it my duty to come and tell you, and it’s all I could think of to make myself feel that I was as good as him in some ways. I think if he lives, he’d like me a little better for it, and if he dies, well—maybe he’ll know and appreciate what I feel, anyhow. So that’s that. I’m telling you this so that if you’ve got any grudge against him, you’ll kind of square the books by giving him credit for making a good finish on your account. For he fought well!”
The proprietress of the Alamo sat apparently unmoved, emotionless, unblinking, and watching him with her direct, inscrutable stare while he talked. In that recital of his, there had been nothing of that circumlocution which he was wont to practice when he considered it wise, and which had earned him his new sobriquet. He had told her all of the episode, its results and his motives for telling, in one terse speech. There was no need to ask questions, or if so she seemed to neglect them.