fool!” she moaned. “You big, clumsy, square-headed, bat-eyed, fool! They’ll stick you in the pen for life for this!”
“Shut up!” advised a cautious voice from the stage, where the passengers stood bolt upright, willing enough to descend, but each afraid to move. “Shut up or you’ll have him murdering us all!”
“Sorry, lady,” said the masked man, and still he maintained that heavy voice. “If I had seen you was a girl I wouldn’t have fired!”
“Aw, tell that to the judge,” cried Geraldine, “You’ve shot my hand off! I’ll bleed to death and you’ll hang for it! I tell you you’ll hang for it!”
He had reined his horse from his position in front of the leaders and now he swung from his saddle to the ground, a sudden motion during which he kept his revolver steadily leveled.
“Steady in there!” he ordered, “and get the hell out of that stage or I’ll blow you out!”
He gestured with his free hand to Jerry.
“Tear off a strip from your skirt and tie that hand up as tight as you can! Here, one of you, get down here and help the lady. You can take your hands down to do that!”
But there was another thought than that of La Bella Geraldine in the mind of the practical stage driver. His leaders stood now without obstruction. He had lost one passenger, indeed, but the gold in the boot of his stage was worth a hundred passengers to him. He shouted a warning, dropped flat on his seat and darted his whip out over the horses. At his call the other passengers groveled flat, which put the thickness of the boot between them and the bullets of the bandit. The horses hit the collars and the stage whirled into the dusk of the evening.
To pursue them was folly, for it would be a running fight with two deadly shotguns handled by men concealed and protected. The masked man fired a shot over the heads of the fugitives and turned on Jerry. She was weak with excitement and loss of blood and even her furious anger could not give her strength for long. She staggered.
“I’m done for, all right—” she gasped, “As a bandit, you’re the biggest cheese ever. My hand—blood—help—”
Red night swam before Jerry’s eyes, and as utter dark came, she felt an arm pass round her. When she woke from the swoon her entire right arm ached grimly. She was being carried on horseback up a steep mountainside. The trees rose sheer above her. She strove to speak, but the intolerable weakness flooded back on her and she fainted again.
She recovered again in less pain, lying in a low-roofed room, propped up on blankets. A lantern hung against the wall from a nail, and by its light she made out the form of the man who stooped over her and poured steaming hot water over her hand. He still wore the mask. She closed her eyes again and lay gathering her wrath, her energy, and her vocabulary, for the supreme effort which confronted her.
“So you did your little bandit bit, did you?” she said at last with keen irony, as she opened her eyes again, “You had to pull the grand-stand stunt with a fine audience of ten to watch you? You had to—”
“Lie still; don’t talk!” he commanded, still in that deep, and melodramatic bass which enraged her. “You have a fever, kind of; it ain’t much. Just keep quiet an’ you’ll be all right.”
It was the crowning touch! He was still playing his part!
“Deary,” she said fiercely, “this is the first time in my life I ever wished I was Shakespeare. Nobody, but the old boy himself could do you justice—but I’m not Billy S. and I can only hint around sort of vague at what I think of you. But of all the tinhorn sports—the ham-fat, small-time actors, you’re the prize bonehead. Honey, does that begin to percolate? Does that begin to get through the armor plate down to that dwarfed bean you’re in the habit of calling your brain?”
He went on calmly pouring the hot water over her hand. She had not credited him with such self-control. He did not even blush as far as she could make out. It made her throat dry with impotence.
“An old woman’s home, that’s where you belong,” she went on. “Say, you’re wise to keep that mask on. You’d need a disguise to get by as a property man on small-time. Deary, you haven’t got enough bean to be number-two man in a monologue,”
He stared at her a moment and then went on with the work of cleansing the bullet wound in her hand. Evidently he did not trust himself to speak. It was not a severe cut, but it had bled freely, the bullet cutting the fleshy part between the thumb and forefinger. To look at it made her head reel. She lay back on the pile of blankets and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again he was approaching with a small bottle half full of a brownish-black fluid, iodine. She started, for she knew the burn of the antiseptic. She tucked her wounded hand under her other arm and glared at him.
“Nothing doing with that stuff, cutie,” she said, shaking her head. “This isn’t my first season, even if I’m not on the big-time. You can give that bottle to the marines. Go pour that on the daisies, Alexander W. Flathead, it’ll kill the insects. But not for mine!”
She saw his forehead pucker into a frown above the mask. He stopped, hesitated.
“Take it away and rock it to sleep, Oscar,” she went on, “because there’s no cue for that in this act. It won’t get across—not even with a make-up. Oh, this will make a lovely story when I get back to Broadway. I’m going to spill the beans, deary. Yep, I’m going to give this spiel to the papers. It’ll make a great ad for you—all scare-heads. You can run the last musical comedy scandal onto the back page with a play like this. Here! Let go my arm, you big simp—do you think—”
He caught her wrist and drew out the injured hand firmly. She struggled weakly, but the pain in the hand unnerved her.
“Go ahead—turn on the fireworks, Napoleon! Honey, they’ll write this on your tombstone for an epitaph.”
He spread her thumb and forefinger apart, poured some of the iodine onto a clean rag, and swabbed out the wound. The burning pain brought her close to a faint, but her fury kept her mind from oblivion. She clenched her teeth so that a tortured scream became merely a moan. When she recovered he was making the last turn of a rather skilful bandage. She sat up on the blankets.
“All right, honey, now you’ve played the music and I’ll dance. What’s the way to town from here?”
He shook his head.
“Won’t tell me, eh? I suppose you think I’ll stay up here till I get well? Think again, janitor.”
She rose and started a bit unsteadily to the door. Before she reached it his step caught up with her. She was swung up in strong arms and carried back to the blankets. While she sat dumb with hate and rage, he took a piece of rope and tied her ankles fast with an intricate knot which she could never hope to untie with her one sound hand.
“You’ll stay here,” he explained curtly.
“Listen, deary,” she answered between her teeth, “I’m going to do you for this. I’m going to make you a bum draw on every circuit in the little old U. S. I’m going to make you the card that doesn’t fill the straight, that’s all. Get your shingle ready, cutie, because after this all you can get across will be a chop-house in the Bowery.”
“Lie still,” growled the deep voice. “There
