More Tish | Page 9

do?"
"Call him back. Let him sleep here by the fire. Give him something to eat; he looks starved. If you're afraid it isn't proper we can hang our kimonos up for curtains and make him a separate room."
But we did not need to call him. He had limped back and stood in the firelight again.
"You--you haven't seen anything of the bandits, have you?" he asked.
"Bandits!"
"Train robbers. I thought you had probably run across them."
All at once we remembered the green automobile and the four men with guns. We told him about it and he nodded.
"That would be they," he said. As Tish remarked later, we knew from that instant that he was a gentleman. Even Charlie Sands would probably have said "them." "They got away very rapidly, and I dare say an automobile would be---- Did one of them have a red beard?"
"Yes," we told him. "The one who called to us."
Well, he said that on Monday night an express car on the C. & L. Railroad had been held up. The pursuit had gone in another direction, but he was convinced from what we said that they were there in Thunder Cloud Glen!
As Tish said, the situation was changed if there were outlaws about. We were three defenseless women, and here was a man brought providentially to us! She asked him at once to join our party and look after us until we got to civilization again, or at least until the roads were dry enough to travel on.
"To look after you!" he said with a smile. "I, with a bad leg and no weapon!"
At that Aggie brought out her new revolver and gave it to him. He whistled when he looked at it. "Great Scott!" he said. "What a weapon for a woman! Why, you don't need any help. You could kill all the outlaws in the county at one loading!"
But finally he consented to take the revolver and even to accept the shelter of the cave for that night anyhow, although we had to beg him to do that. "How do you know I'll not get up in the night and take all your valuables and gallop away on your trusty steed before morning?" he asked.
"We'll take a chance," Tish said dryly. "In the first place, we have nothing more valuable than the portable stove; and in the second place, if you can make Modestine gallop you may have him."
It is curious, when I look back, to think how completely he won us all. He was young--not more than twenty-six, I think--and dressed for a walking tour, in knickerbockers, with a blue flannel shirt, heavy low shoes and a soft hat. His hands were quite white. He kept running them over his chin, which was bluish, as if a day or two's beard was bothering him.
We asked him if he was hungry, and he admitted that he could hardly remember when he had eaten. So we made him some tea and buttered toast, and opened and heated a can of baked beans. He ate them all.
"Good gracious," he said, with the last spoonful, "what a world it would be without women!"
At that he fell into a sort of study, looking at the fire, and we all saw that he looked sad again and rather forlorn.
"Yes," Tish said, "you're all ready enough to shout 'Beware of woman' until you are hungry or uncomfortable or hurt, and then you are all just little boys again, crying for somebody to kiss the bump."
"But when it is a woman who has given the--er--bump?" he asked.
Aggie is romantic. Years ago she was engaged to a Mr. Wiggins, a roofer, who met with an accident due to an icy roof. She leaned forward and looked at him with sympathy.
"That's it, is it?" she asked gently.
He tried to smile, but we could all see that he was suffering.
"Yes, that's it--partly at least," he said.
"That is, if it were not for a woman----" He stopped abruptly. "But why should I bother you with my troubles?"
We were curious, of course; but it is hardly good taste to ask a man to confide his heartaches. As Tish said, the best cure for a masculine heartache is to make the man comfortable. We did all we could. I dried his coat by the fire, and Tish made hot arnica compresses for his ankle, which was blue and swollen. I believe Aggie would gladly have sat by and held his hand, but he had crawled into his shell of reserve again and would not be coaxed out.
"I have a nephew about your age," Tish said when he objected to her bathing his ankle. "I'm doing for you what I should do for Charlie Sands under the same circumstances."
"Charlie Sands!" he said, and I was positive he started. But he