Someone giggled.
"Anyway," Jack said, "I told Dunaway you were not here, that you and Mrs. Glore had gone on into Prescott. He was very disappointed."
Again someone giggled. This time he thought it was Phoebe Larkin. What was the term for it he had heard—cabin fever? Was the long and boring confinement beginning to addle the two females?
"So he thinks me beautiful," Phoebe mused.
"That is his opinion."
Bearing down so hard on the knife, he cut his finger and swore.
"And what is your opinion?" Phoebe asked.
He sucked at the wounded finger. "What is my opinion of what?"
"Do you think me beautiful?"
"I have not got time," he said coldly, "to stand here engaging in idle talk! Of course you are beautiful, Miss Larkin! I think you are only trying to make me say something ridiculous."
Stalking away, he still heard female laughter from the hut.
Next day a Tully and Ochoa wagon came by. Ike Coogan got stiffly down, calling a greeting, but before Jack could speak the old man was supervising the removal from his wagon of what appeared to be a corpse. Jack watched the Mexican swampers carry the frail body to the shade of the ramada. The man was old, looking to be seventy years of age or more. The white beard stuck stiffly into the air, and his lean body was as rigid as a board.
"Who is that?"
Coogan wadded a gunnysack under the old man's head. "Uncle Roscoe."
"Uncle Roscoe what?"
Coogan shook his head and spat. "No one ever heered his last name, but everyone in the Territory knows him. Been prospecting these mountains for forty years, I reckon. Uncle Roscoe was here before I was, and I been here nine years longer 'n God, so that should give you an idee."
Jack knelt, put an ear to the ragged shirt. "The pulse seems regular, though slow. What's wrong with him?"
Coogan pointed toward the loaded burro the Mexicans were untying from the rear of his wagon. "Old Pansy was loose in Centinela Canyon. I knew then something must be wrong. I climbed up the hill, and shore enough there was poor Roscoe laid out under a bush with an empty canteen. Maybe it was apoplexy—I dunno—and he got that far hopin' to flag down help. Anyway, I drug him onto the wagon and brought him here. Ain't nothin' much we can do fer him, is there?"
Jack Drumm had spent two years in Glasgow at medical school before deciding he was not cut out for a physician, but he did remember some of his lectures. He rolled back a wrinkled lid and stared at the dilated pupil. Uncle Roscoe groaned, tried to raise a hand. It fell back; he subsided.
"There's a bed in that new adobe," Jack said. "If you'll have your swampers carry him there, I'll bleed him of a quart or so. That should help."
Coogan grinned. "Why, that'd be salubrious! Pore old coot! The landscape wouldn't be the same without old Roscoe! By God, that's nice of you, Mr. Drumm!"
When they had settled Uncle Roscoe comfortably, and Jack Drumm had signed the contract with Tully and Ochoa to manage the Agua Fria station, Coogan suddenly asked, "Where are them two ladies that was here—Miss Larkin, I think, and the old lady that was traveling with her?"
Though Coogan's Mexicans appeared to have no English, Jack drew him confidentially aside. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."
Briefly Jack told the story—how the two women had fled prosecution, how Detective Meech dogged their tracks, how they were trapped along the Agua Fria and were now awaiting salvation, how Meech might even now be watching.
"What do you say?" he asked. "Will you help them?"
Coogan bit off a chunk of Wedding Cake plug.
"Do you believe their story?" he asked.
"I believe them. They are being unjustly persecuted."
Coogan chewed, leaning on the long rifle, staring at the dust. "I could get in trouble."
"That's right," Jack admitted. "I myself am already in deeper trouble. But there is a time when a man must be ready to accept trouble in a good cause."
Coogan grinned a tobacco-stained grin. "Ain't no cause better 'n a pretty gal!"
"Then you'll help?"
"Shore enough!"
Between them they arranged for Coogan to drive the wagon down the road and into a stand of bamboo along the river. The two women could then leave the reed hut with their valises, walk under cover of the river greenery to the wagon, and board the vehicle without being seen by a lurking Detective Meech. Coogan would cover them with wagon canvas and take them to Prescott.
"No hurry," Coogan called. "I got to grease them wheels, and wrap a felloe with wire where it got busted."
Across the river the brittlebush with its dusty gray leaves was blooming; butter-yellow flowers laid a carpet on the rocky slopes. Quickly Jack picked a bouquet and hurried to the reed hut. They did not hear his scratching at the door. When he did enter they were startled and nervous. The long confinement was telling on them. Phoebe's face was pale, and Mrs. Glore had developed a tic.
Hurriedly Jack explained the plan. The two women started immediately to pack. Phoebe noticed the brittlebush flowers; she stared silently at the bouquet.
"Ah—this is for you," Jack muttered, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. It was a foolish idea, of course; emotion had betrayed him. The blooms were only common, and Phoebe Larkin must have seen them all along the river.
For a moment he thought she was going to fling her arms around him, as she had that day when he pulled her from the flooded Agua Fria. But she seemed to have learned a lesson.
"That was very nice of you," she murmured, looking down at the yellow flowers. "It—it was thoughtful."
"You're a real gentleman," Mrs. Glore confirmed. "And that's the God's truth! There ain't many of 'em left around anymore!"
He shifted from one foot to the other. "A—well, perhaps a kind of going-away present. The Spanish called them incienso. They used the dried sap for incense in their early churches in Arizona."
"Jimmie brought me flowers, once, in Clover Lick," Phoebe said.
"Who?"
She seemed in a reverie. "A boy I knew, a long time ago. He—he was killed in the mines." She looked at him unseeingly. "Jimmie Frakes. He was blond, blond like you, Mr. Drumm."
Uncomfortably he rubbed his hands together. "Well," he said, "are we ready?"
Mrs. Glore fastened her bonnet in place with a swordlike pin and picked up the bags. "Ready or not, Prescott, here we come at last!"
"Good-bye, Mr. Drumm." Phoebe held out her hand. It was warm in his calloused fingers. "You've done so much for us—no one could ever thank you enough. I won't even try."
He wanted to say something memorable, something cool and composed yet significant, but there was a strange lump in his throat, an emptiness in his breast. He could only stand in the doorway and watch them walk away through the reeds, the sun dappling them as it shone down through the high grasses. Watching them go, he strained his eyes, seeing at last only a patch of color here and a minuscule movement there. Finally they were gone.
He went back to the Tully and Ochoa wagon. Coogan had completed his repairs.
"They will be waiting for you," Jack said. "I'm everlastingly grateful to you, Mr. Coogan."
"Ike," Coogan corrected. "Hell, I ain't been called Mr. Coogan since I was brought up before the judge in Phoenix for drunk and disorderly!"
For a long while Jack Drumm stood in the dusty road, watching Coogan's wagon until it went out of sight around the bend. He scanned the low hills, the brush, the rocky slopes, fearing to see a wink of sun, a flash of reflected light from the lens of field glasses. But he saw nothing. Alonzo Meech had probably abandoned the search. Eggleston came to stand beside him.
"The two ladies are gone, then?"
Silently Jack nodded.
"I will miss Beulah Glore," the valet said. "She was a fine woman, no matter what sticky business she may have gotten into back in Baltimore."