by B. M. Bower
Wherefore, knowing the country even better than did Tex, Bill had ducked into another draw that would intercept Tex, if Tex was going where Bill guessed he was aiming to go. Tex must have aimed that way, because Bill got him and brought him back with his hands tied behind him and his gun riding in Bill’s holster, and with no bullet holes in his person such as Mary V’s captives carried.
Johnny did not know that the other boys had been signaled back with shots, and that the prisoners had been turned over to them while Bill, Bland, and Mary V stayed with Johnny and waited for Sudden to negotiate that rough stretch of country with the Ford. That was what Mary V’s voice referred to when she couldn’t see why he didn’t hurry.
Between times, Bland told their side of the adventure, as far as Bland understood it. He told of the horses they had scared back, and of the horse thieves left afoot several miles across the line. He did not know just where, however. He told of the rancho they had flown to that morning, the rancho Johnny had discovered a short mile from where he had got the plane in the first place.
The horses which they had turned loose from the field would probably make their way back, Bill said. So would the last little bunch. But he would send the boys down after them just as soon as they had put the three prisoners away in the cabin with a guard until the sheriff could come and get them. Which would be easy, Bill said. They’d telephone to the ranch and have the message repeated on the town line.
Everything was easy, Bill said, except getting Skyrider to a doctor quick, without shaking him up too much. And getting the flying machine outa there—though he guessed mebby Skyrider wouldn’t want no more flyin’ in his. He guessed mebby Skyrider would aim to keep one foot on solid ground hereafter—if he didn’t go clean under it. That shore was a bad lookin’ head he had on ’im.
Which brought forth questions from Mary V, and the somewhat qualified comfort of Bland’s experience.
Johnny’s next dream was a nightmare of pain and jolting. He did not know where he was, but it seemed to him that something kept pounding him on the head; something very hot and very heavy—something he could not escape because his head was being held in a vice of some sort. The pain and the jolting seemed to have no relation to this steady beating. The dream lasted a long, long while. And after that there was darkness and silence.
That came when he had been put to bed at the Rolling R ranch house, in a guest room that faced north. A doctor was there, waiting for them when they arrived, because Sudden had telephoned him when he had finished calling for the sheriff. The boys had told him soberly that Skyrider was bad off, and that his whole head was smashed, and that the flyin’ machine was busted all to pieces. They didn’t hardly think it would be worth while getting a doctor to the ranch, because they didn’t see how Skyrider was goin’ to last long enough for a doctor to git to work on him. It was a damn shame. Skyrider was one fine boy—and did anybody know where his folks lived?
But the doctor was sent for just the same, and he was ready to do what could be done. It looked at first as though that was not much. Mary V had kept cold cloths on Johnny’s head during the whole drive, and the doctor told her that she had made it a little more possible to pull the young man through. He certainly had received a terrible blow, and—well, the doctor refused to predict anything at all. Johnny was a strong-looking, healthy young man—it took a lot to kill a youngster like that. He advised a nurse, and gave the name of a young woman who was very good, he said.
Sudden telephoned straightway for the nurse, and Mary V locked herself into her room to cry about it.
The nurse came that night, and went briskly in and out of the guest room. She wore her hair parted and slicked back from her face, and rubber heels; and she smiled reassuringly whenever she saw Mary V or Mrs. Selmer or any one else who looked anxious. And she never once failed to close the door of the guest room gently but firmly behind her. Mary V hated that nurse with a vindictiveness wholly out of proportion to the cause.
None of these things did Johnny know. Johnny lay quietly on his back with a neat, white bandage around his head. His eyes were closed, his face was placid with the inscrutable calm of death or deep unconsciousness. The next day it was the same, and the day after that—except that his cheeks began to hollow a little, and his eye sockets to deepen and darken.
And that pesky nurse wouldn’t let Mary V stay in the room two minutes! She just shooed her out with that encouraging smile of hers, that Mary V wanted to slap. Did she think, for gracious sake, that Mary V was going to murder Johnny? Mary V was just going to tell the doctor that she had learned all about nursing, in her “Useful Knowledge” class at school. She should think she was just exactly as well qualified to moisten that bandage with whatever it was they put on it, and keep the flies out of the room, and little things like that, as any old tow-headed nurse that ever shook down a thermometer.
But when the doctor came he looked so sort of sober that Mary V was afraid to ask him anything at all. She went out into the hammock on the porch, where she could see the curtains flapping gently in the open window of Johnny’s room. And after awhile the doctor came out and looked at her and smiled a little, and said, “Well, have we captured any more bandits? By George, I’d hate to be one and run across you, young lady. I had the honor of repairing the damage you did to ’em; and I will say, you are so-ome bone smasher!”
Which was all very well—but what did Mary V care about the damage done to those Mexicans? She looked at the open window with the flapping curtains, and then she looked at the doctor. She did not ask a single question, and I don’t think she dreamed how wistful her eyes were.
“Well, our young aviator seems to be—holding on,” the doctor observed very, very casually, seeming not to see the question Mary V’s eyes were asking because her lips would not form it in words. “Better, on the whole, than I expected.”
“Then you think—”
“I think we won’t worry about it until we have to. They’re tough, these young devils.”
Mary V tried and tried to wring encouragement from the words, but it was very hard, with Johnny lying like that and never moving.
They brought the airplane to the ranch, much as Johnny had brought it up from “the burning sands of Mexico.” Mary V went out to look at it, but it seemed too terrible to think of how high Johnny’s hopes had been, how he had worshiped that thing—and what it had done to him. She went to her ledge on the bluff, and sat there and cried heart-brokenly.
There it stood, reared up on its silly little wheels, with its broken propeller still pointing straight up at the sky. Its tail was broken too—and served it right for thrashing around like that in the brush.
She had not known her dad was having it brought in, until she saw them coming with it. Little Curley had driven the team, and he had looked as though he was driving a hearse. She did not even know what her dad was going to do with it. He hadn’t said a word to anybody, about anything. He just went ahead as if taking care of Johnny and Johnny’s airplane was part of the regular work on the ranch. Even Bill did not appear to know, nor Bland. Perhaps Sudden himself did not know. It seemed to Mary V that the whole ranch was just waiting, minute by minute, for Johnny to open his eyes, or stop breathing. The unbearable part of it was, no one said anything much about it. They just waited.
The doctor came again, and he did not say anything at all to Mary V. He stayed at the ranch all night, mostly in the room with Johnny. The next day another doctor came, and the nurse went in and out of the room sterilizing things and looking very mysterious and important—but always with that intolerably reassuring smile. Mary V gritted her teeth every time she saw that nurse.
They were going to operate, the nurse said, when Mary V simply could not stand it another minute. She went and sat all curled up in the hammock, not letting it swing, but just keeping very, very still, and listening. There were voices in there mumbling sentences she could not catch. After awhile a sickly odor came drifting through the window, and more muttering b
etween the two doctors. Sudden came wandering up, tiptoed to his chair on the porch, and sat down rather heavily and twirled a cigar in his fingers without lighting it. Mary V pulled a magazine toward her and began turning the leaves idly, her lips pressed tight together, her ears strained and listening still.
Ages passed. Twice Mary V placed her fingers over her lips to stifle an impulse to scream. Then—
“We can’t make it. Damn that brush,” said a new voice—Johnny’s voice—quite clearly.
Mary V dropped the magazine and went and put her arms around her dad’s neck and pressed her face hard against his shoulder. Her dad held her tight, and swallowed fast, and said never a word.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
JOHNNY’S DILEMMA
“Well, thank heavens she’s gone! Perhaps a person can have a minute or two of peace and comfort on this ranch now. I don’t know when I have ever disliked a person so much. I don’t see how you stood her. For my part, that creature would make me sick, just having her around!” As a final venting of her animosity, Mary V made faces at the car that carried the nurse hack to town.
Johnny looked at Mary V, looked after the nurse, and looked at Mary V again. He had thought the nurse a very nice nurse, with a quiet kind of efficiency that soothed a fellow without any fuss or frills. It was queer Mary V did not like her, but then—
“I know I’ve been a darned nuisance,” he apologized so meekly that he did not sound in the least like Johnny Jewel. “But I’m getting well fast. I’ll be able to beat it in a few days now.”
“Why, for gracious sake? Haven’t we—er—made you comfortable?”
“Sure, you have. Only you shouldn’t have put yourselves out, this way. I ought to have gone to a hospital or some place.” Johnny looked so distressed that Mary V could have cried. Only she was afraid that would distress him still more, and the doctor had said he must not be worried about anything.
“It wasn’t any trouble. You are being absolutely silly, so I guess you are getting well, all right. I—I didn’t see any sense of having that nurse in the first place. Because I can take temperature and count pulse and everything. I’ve really been crazy for a chance to practice nursing on somebody. And then when I had the chance, they wouldn’t let me do a thing.”
Johnny grinned, which was rather pathetic—he was so thin and so white. “Why didn’t you practice on the greasers?” he taunted her. “Bill says you sure made some dandy work for the hospitals.”
“Well, I couldn’t help that. I didn’t have any way of tying them, or anything, and—”
“Brag, girl! For Lord’s sake don’t apologize; it doesn’t come natural to you. What gets me is that I was ripping the atmosphere wide open, trying to rescue you, and all the while you were making a whole sheriff’s posse of yourself—and it was you that rescued me. I should think—”
“I did not! I—did Bill tell you the latest, Johnny? You know how dad is—about making people tell things he wants to know, and keeping them right to the point—”
“I know.” Johnny’s tone was eloquent.
“Well, he got at those Mexicans, and they told everything they knew—and some besides. And who do you think was the real leader of that gang, Johnny? And I know now it was his voice that I couldn’t quite recognize over the ’phone. They’ve arrested him and two or three of his men, and you wouldn’t believe a neighbor could be so tricky and mean as that Tucker Bly. Stealing our horses to sell to the Mexicans, if you please, and selling his own to the government mostly—but some to the Mexicans, too, I suppose. And nobody suspecting a thing all the while, and Tex in with them and all. And if you hadn’t stampeded the horses so they came back to the line, and the boys rounded them up, dad would have lost a lot more than he did. But now the whole thing is out, and really, if I hadn’t caught those two greasers, there wouldn’t be any evidence against the Tucker Bly outfit, or Tex either. And I just think it’s awful, the way—”
She stopped abruptly. Johnny’s bandaged head was leaning against the back of his big chair, and his eyes were closed. His face looked whiter than it had a few minutes ago. Mary V was scared. She should have known better than to talk of those things.
“Shall—would you like a drink, or—or something?” she asked in a small, contrite voice.
Johnny opened his eyes and looked at her.
“No, I don’t want a drink; I just want somebody to give me another knock on the head that will finish me.” And before Mary V could think of anything soothing to say, Johnny spoke again. “I think I’ll go back and lie down awhile. I—don’t feel very good.”
He would not let Mary V help him at all, but walked slowly, steadying himself by the chairs, the wall, by anything solid within reach. He did not look much like the very self-assured, healthy specimen of young manhood whom Mary V could bully and tease and talk to without constraint. She felt as though she scarcely knew this thin, pale young man with the bandaged head and the somber eyes. He seemed so aloof, as though his spirit walked alone in dark places where she could not follow.
After that she did not mention stolen horses, nor thieves, nor airplanes, nor anything that could possibly lead his thoughts to those taboo subjects. Under that heavy handicap conversation lagged. There seemed to be so little that she dared mention! She would sit and prattle of school and shows and such things, and tell him about the girls she knew; and half the time she knew perfectly well that Johnny was not listening. But she could not bear his moody silences, and he sat out on the porch a good deal of the time, so she had to go on talking, whether she bored him to death or not.
Then one day, when the bandage had dwindled to a small patch held in place by strips of adhesive plaster, Johnny broke into her detailed description of a silly Western picture she had seen.
“What’s become of Bland?” he asked, just when she was describing a thrilling scene.
“Bland? Oh, why—Bland’s gone.” Mary V was very innocent as to eyes and voice, and very uneasy as to her mind.
“Gone where? He was broke. I didn’t get a chance to pay him—”
“Oh, well, as to that—I suppose dad fixed him up with a ticket and so on. And so this girl, Inez, overhears them plotting—”
“Where’s your dad?”
“Dad? Why, dad’s in Tucson, I believe, at the trial. What makes you so rude when I’m telling you the most thrill—”
“When’s he coming back?”
“For gracious sake, Johnny! What do you want of dad all at once? Am I not entertaining—”
“You are. As entertaining as a meadow lark. I love meadow larks, but I never could put in all my time listening to ’em sing. I generally had something else I had to do.”
“Well, you’ve nothing else to do now, so listen to this meadow lark, will you? Though I must say—”
“I’d like to, but I can’t. There are things I’ve got to do.”
“There are not! Not a single thing but be a nice boy and get well. And to get well you must—”
“A lot you know about it—you, with nothing to worry you, any more than a meadow lark. Not as much, because they do have to rustle their own worms and watch out for hawks and things, and you—”
“I suppose you would imply that I have about as much brains as a meadow lark, perhaps!” Mary V rose valiantly to the argument. If Johnny would rather quarrel than talk about things that didn’t interest either of them a bit, why, a quarrel he should have.
But Johnny would not quarrel. He made no reply whatever to the tentative charge. When Mary V stopped scolding, she became aware that Johnny had not heard a word of what she had said.
“How many horses did your dad figure had been stolen? I mean, besides the ones he got back.”
“Why—er—you’ll have to ask dad. I don’t see what that can have to do with meadow larks’ brains.”
“It hasn’t a thing to do with brains. I was merely wondering.”
“Well,” Mary V retorted flippantly, “I believe the wondering is very good today. Help you
rself, Johnny.”
Johnny looked at her unsmilingly. “That,” he told her bitterly, “is what I’m trying to do.”
He did not explain that somewhat cryptical remark, and presently he left her and went to his room. Mary V felt that she was not being trusted by a person who surely ought to know by this time that he needn’t be so secretive about his thoughts and intentions. If she had not proved her loyalty and her friendship by this time, what did a person want her to do, for gracious sake?
Mary V had rather an unhappy time of it, the next week or so. She had, for some reason, lost all interest in collecting “Desert Glimpses”; so much so that when her mother told her she must stay close to the ranch lest she meet more of those terrible Mexican bandits, Mary V was very sweet about it and did not argue with her mother at all. She seldom went farther than the ledge, these days, and she could not keep her mind off Johnny Jewel, even when there was no doubt at all that he was nearly as well as ever.
Of course, it did not really matter—but why was Johnny so glum with her? Why wouldn’t he talk, or at least quarrel the way he used to do? He did not seem angry about anything. He simply did not seem to care whether she was with him or not. She might as well be a stick or a stone, she told herself viciously, for all the attention Johnny Jewel ever paid to her. She did not mind in the least; but it did seem perfectly silly and unaccountable; she wondered merely because she hated mysteries.
It really should not have been mysterious. Mary V made the mistake of not putting herself in Johnny’s place and from that angle interpreting his preoccupation. Had she done that she would have seen at once that Johnny was fighting a battle within himself. All his ideas, his plans, and his hopes had been turned bottom up, and Johnny was working over the wreck.
She sat and watched him from the ledge one day, and wondered why he did not act more pleased when he walked down toward the corral and discovered his airplane all repaired, just exactly as good as it had been before. He stood there looking at it with the same apathetic gloom in his bearing that had marked him ever since he was able to be out of bed. Mary V thought he might at least show a little gratitude—not to herself, but toward her dad, because he had kept Bland and had paid him to repair the machine for Johnny, when Johnny was too sick to know anything about it—too sick even to hear the noise of it when Bland tried out the motor—and the nurse was so afraid it would disturb “her patient.”