Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHANNING COMES THROUGH. 647 pends on the nursing he gets, and his con- stitution.” 22 Channing had driven carefully, and when the wagon drew up at the front veranda of the Circle B ranch house, Warren was car- ried inside and placed on the bed that had once been Bassett’s. Channing and Vallon were under Eve’s orders from the time they placed Warren in the wagon at Red Mesa, and they did her bidding eagerly and quietly. A change had come over Eve. The agi- tation that had marked her manner when Channing had talked with her on the train had been succeeded by a strange calm. Her face was pale, and her eyes had an expres- sion of haunting anxiety which seemed to stab like a lance point into Channing’s con- sciousness every time she looked at him, but she was outwardly cold and efficient. Within an hour after Warren had been put into Bassett’s bed everything that was humanly possible had been done for him, and Eve was sitting on a chair near the edge of the bed watching him. - Vallon had gone back to the bunk house. Channing, reluctant to leave Eve, was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, looking at Warren. Eve seemed to know Channing was in the doorway, though she did not look at him. ‘“ Channing,” she said, ‘‘ why don’t you go to bed? There isn’t another thing you can do.” “J reckon I’ll hang around.” He red- dened a little. ‘lve moved my traps up here. I’m thinkin’ of usin’ the bedroom in the wing.” ‘““T presume you moved your things up here from the bunk house soon after I left,” Eve said. 3 “Right after I got back,” Channing lied again. His “traps” hadn’t been in the wing bedroom more than fifteen minutes. He had put them in through an open win- dow of the bedroom while she had been busy with Warren. He had felt she would need him, and he didn’t intend to be far away when the need came. He was glad she wasn’t looking at him when the lie passed his lips. She turned to him, and he saw that her face had become faintly tinted with crim- son. And the glance she gave him sent a wave of warmth over him. “Did you intend to have Vallon in the house with you?” she asked. He screwed his.eyebrows together before answering, darting a swift glance at her face in an effort to divine her meaning. Then he gave her an evasive answer: “ Vallon is my friend.” “Then he was moving his things here, of course,’ she said. ‘‘ When we passed the bunk house I saw his war bag in the doorway, packed.” ning. Eve turned and looked straight at Chan- ning. He reddened, as he always did under her direct glances. _ “Channing,” she said softly, “do you know that from the minute we left Red Mesa I began to worry about you.” * Shucks!” “Yes. I don’t know what got into me, but I seemed to have a conviction that you were not going to stay at the Circle B; that — you were going to break your promise to me.” She continued to look at him, and saw the red in his cheeks grow crimson. ‘“ You weren’t going to leave, were you, Chan- ning?” She smiled. ‘ You know I didn’t expect to stay away very long. Not more than a month. Wayne and I had decided upon that just before the crash came.” “ T’ve been here so long that I reckon no other place would seem like home to me,” he again evaded. He was thinking of the note he had written to her, which now re- posed upon the mantel, under a vase. His lying to her wouldn’t matter, if he could manage to get possession of the note be- fore she found it. He would be sure to keep the note in mind. After she went to bed to-night he’d get it and destroy it. A gleam of trouble came into her eyes, a faint scarlet tinted her cheeks. But her voice was steady and her gaze still direct. ‘“‘ Channing,” she said, ‘it seems that word of what has happened at the Circle B has spread around the country. In our car after we left Red Mesa were two men who gossiped about me. One of them told the other the entire story of my experiences COMMCcoookSse© “Td asked him to come,” said Chan-