CHAPTER XXI. SOMEBODY SHOT SAUNDERS

The hot days dropped, one by one, into the past like fiery beads upon a
velvety black cord. Miss Georgie told them silently in the meager
little office, and sighed as they slipped from under her white, nervous
fingers. One--nothing happened that could be said to bear upon the
one big subject in her mind, the routine work of passing trains and
dribbling business in the express and freight departments, and a long
afternoon of heat and silence save for the asthmatic pump, fifty yards
down the main track. Two--this exactly like the first, except that those
inseparables, Hagar, Viney, and Lucy, whom Miss Georgie had inelegantly
dubbed "the Three Greases," appeared, silent, blanket-enshrouded, and
perspiring, at the office door in mid-afternoon. Half a box of soggy
chocolates which the heat had rendered a dismally sticky mass won from
them smiles and half-intelligible speech. Fishing was poor--no ketchum.
Three--not even the diversion of the squaws to make her forget
the dragging hours. Nothing--nothing--nothing, she told herself
apathetically when that third day had slipped upon the black cord of a
soft, warm night, star-sprinkled and unutterably lonely as it brooded
over the desert.

On the morning of the fourth day, Miss Georgie woke with the vague sense
that something had gone wrong. True railroader as she had come to be,
she thought first that there had been a wreck, and that she was wanted
at the telegraph instrument. She was up and partly dressed before the
steps and the voices which had broken her sleep had reached her door.

Pete Hamilton's voice, trembling with excitement, called to her.

"What is it? What has happened?" she cried from within, beset by a
hundred wild conjectures.

"Saunders--somebody shot Saunders. Wire for a doctor, quick as yuh can.
He ain't dead yet--but he's goin' t' die, sure. Hurry up and wire--"
Somebody at the store called to him, and he broke off to run lumberingly
in answer to the summons. Miss Georgie made haste to follow him.

Saunders was lying upon a blanket on the store platform, and Miss
Georgie shuddered as she looked at him.

He was pasty white, and his eyes looked glassy under his half-closed
lids. He had been shot in the side--at the stable, he had gasped out
when Pete found him lying in the trail just back of the store. Now he
seemed beyond speech, and the little group of section-hands, the Chinese
cook at the section-house, and the