Lonesome Land Read Free Page B

anyway.
He’ll be all right by morning.”
    The other snorted dissent. “He’ll be all right by dark—or he’ll feel a whole lot worse,” he promised grimly. “Dig up some ice. And a good jolt of bromo, if
you’ve got it—and a towel or two.”
    The bartender wearily pushed the paper to one side, reached languidly under the bar, and laid hold of a round blue bottle. Yawning uninterestedly, he poured a double portion of the white
crystals into a glass, half filled another under the faucet of the water cooler, and held them out.
    “Dump that into him, then,” he advised. “It’ll help some, if you get it down. What’s the sweat to get him married off today? Won’t the girl wait?”
    “I never asked her. You pound up some ice and bring it in, will you?” The volunteer nurse kicked open the door into the little room and went in, hastily pouring the bromo seltzer
from one glass to the other to keep it from foaming out of all bounds. His patient was still sitting upon the edge of the bed where he had left him, slumped forward with his head in his hands. He
looked up stupidly, his eyes bloodshot and swollen of lid.
    “’S the train come in yet?” he asked thickly. “’S you, is it, Kent?”
    “The train ’s come, and your girl is waiting for you at the hotel. Here, throw this into you—and for God’s sake, brace up! You make me tired. Drink her down
quick—the foam ’s good for you. Here, you take the stuff in the bottom, too. Got it? Take off your coat, so I can get at you. You don’t look much like getting married, and
that’s no josh.”
    Fleetwood shook his head with drunken gravity, and groaned. “I ought to be killed. Drunk today!” He sagged forward again, and seemed disposed to shed tears. “She’ll never
forgive me; she—”
    Kent jerked him to his feet peremptorily. “Aw, look here! I’m trying to sober you up. You’ve got to do your part—see? Here’s some ice in a towel—you get it on
your head. Open up your shirt, so I can bathe your chest. Don’t do any good to blubber around about it. Your girl can’t hear you, and Jim and I ain’t sympathetic. Set down in this
chair, where we can get at you.” He enforced his command with some vigor, and Fleetwood groaned again. But he shed no more tears, and he grew momentarily more lucid, as the treatment took
effect.
    The tears were being shed in the stuffy little hotel parlor. The young woman looked often at her watch, went into the hallway, and opened the outer door several times, meditating a search of the
town, and drew back always with a timid fluttering of heart because it was all so crude and strange, and the saloons so numerous and terrifying in their very bald simplicity.
    She was worried about Manley, and she wished that cowboy would come out of the saloon and bring her lover to her. She had never dreamed of being treated in this way. No one came near
her—and she had secretly expected to cause something of a flutter in this little town they called Hope.
    Surely, young girls from the East, come out to get married to their sweethearts, weren’t so numerous that they should be ignored. If there were other people in the hotel, they did not
manifest their presence, save by disquieting noises muffled by intervening partitions.
    She grew thirsty, but she hesitated to explore the depths of this dreary abode, in fear of worse horrors than the parlor furniture, and all the places of refreshment which she could see from the
window or the door looked terribly masculine and immoral, and as if they did not know there existed such things as ice cream, or soda, or sherbet.
    It was after an hour of this that the tears came, which is saying a good deal for her courage. It seemed to her then that Manley must be dead. What else could keep him so long away from her,
after three years of impassioned longing written twice a week with punctilious regularity?
    He knew that she was coming. She had telegraphed from St. Paul, and had