She reiterated these last words with a piteous look of entreaty into the kind gray eyes bent upon her, repeated them as a little child repeats a lesson which has been laboriously taught to it. Huldah looked at her with infinite pity. “Where’s your baby?” she repeated.
“That’s what scares me!” cried the wife of Billy Gaines. “He said—Colonel Emerson said—when he met me at the station, and he hadn’t sent for the baby like he promised to—that he was going to have some man that he knew go and get the boy and take it to his mother’s house, but that it wouldn’t do for it to travel with us, because we could be traced by it. I”—the pretty lips trembled—“I never was away from my baby a night in my life. I don’t know if anybody knows where to get his little night drawers. He always wears a little sack, extra, at night, because he’s a great one for throwing his arms out and getting the covers off them——”
She was running on like a crazed thing, with these little fond details, when Huldah Sarvice’s strong voice interrupted her. “Thank God!” said the old woman, heaving a mighty sigh of relief. “If you’re a good mother, you’re worth savin’. I’m goin’ right over now an’ telegraft to your husband.”
“Oh, no! Don’t do that!” cried the other. “He’ll be killed. You mustn’t. Don’t. He’ll be killed!”
“Killed!” snorted Huldah. Hers was the rough-and-ready code of the West. “Killed—and serve him right!”
“I don’t mean Colonel Emerson,” remonstrated the frantic girl. “Sometimes I think he’s a bad man—an awful man—anyhow, he’ll just have to stand it if anything happens. It’s Billy I’m thinking about. The colonel has shot three or four men—he’ll kill my poor Billy——”
Huldah smiled to herself in the gathering darkness. The problem was becoming easier and easier. But the girl’s strangled, sobbing voice went on: “And I couldn’t bear to see Billy. I don’t dare to have him see me when he knows about this. I can’t face him. If you say you’re going to telegraph to him, I’ll run right straight to Colonel Emerson and get him to take me away somewhere.”
Huldah puckered her lips—had she been a man she would have whistled. She saw no way but to go with the girl and fight it out with her tempter. “Come,” she said, a little roughly for Huldah. “I’ll go back with you.”
She whom the old woman would have saved turned like a hunted thing, as to elude her benefactress. Huldah clung to her arm, and they struggled thus to the doorway. Here the thunder of engines toward Magdalena once more arrested the attention of the proprietor of the Wagon Tire House. It had increased to a deafening uproar; the rain fell like bullets; and even as they drew back, frightened, there was no street to be seen—only a flood of swirling yellow water, running like a tail race between the lodging rooms and the little eating house. “My Lord!” groaned Huldah. “I might ’a’ knowed ’twa’n’t engines. Hit’s a cloudburst, above—the big arroyo’s up.”
It was true. The red gash which through nine-tenths of the year lay dry and yawning beside the tracks of the little Magdalena Branch railway was brimmed with the same tide which swept the street. And down it, as they looked, came a wall of writhing, tormented water, nearly five feet high.