“If it ain't Reddy, AND the lady with the flying machine,” murmured a freckled youth named McWilliams, emerging from the bunkhouse with a pan of water which had been used to bathe the wound of one of the punctured combatants.
“What's that?” snapped a voice from within; and immediately its owner appeared in the doorway and bored with narrowed black eyes the young woman in the machine.
“Who are you?” he demanded, brusquely.
“Your target,” she answered, quietly. “Would you like to take another shot at me?”
The freckled lad broke out into a gurgle of laughter, at which the black, swarthy man beside him wheeled round in a rage. “What you cacklin' at, Mac?” he demanded, in a low voice.
“Oh, the things I notice,” returned that youth jauntily, meeting the other's anger without the flicker of an eyelid.
“It ain't healthy to be so noticin',” insinuated the other.
“Y'u don't say,” came the prompt, sarcastic retort. “If you're such a darned good judge of health, y'u better be attending to some of your patients.” He jerked a casual thumb over his shoulder toward the bunks on which lay the wounded men.
“I shouldn't wonder but what there might be another patient for me to attend to,” snarled the foreman.
“That so? Well, turn your wolf loose when y'u get to feelin' real devilish,” jeered the undismayed one, strolling forward to assist Miss Messiter to alight.
The mistress of the Lazy D had been aware of the byplay, but she had caught neither the words nor their import. She took the offered brown hand smilingly, for here again she looked into the frank eyes of the West, unafraid and steady. She judged him not more than twenty-two, but the school where he had learned of life had held open and strenuous session every day since he could remember.
“Glad to meet y'u, ma'am,” he assured her, in the current phrase of the semi-arid lands.
“I'm sure I am glad to meet YOU,” she answered, heartily. “Can you tell me where is the foreman of the Lazy D?”
He introduced with a smile the swarthy man in the doorway. “This is him ma'am—Mr. Judd Morgan.”
Now it happened that Mr. Judd Morgan was simmering with suppressed spleen.
“All I've got to say is that you had no business mixing up in that shootin' affair back there. Perhaps you don't know that the man you saved is Ned Bannister, the outlaw,” was his surly greeting.
“Oh, yes, I know that.”
“Then what d'ye mean—Who are you, anyway?” His insolent eyes coasted malevolently over her.
“Helen Messiter is my name.”
It was ludicrous to see the change that came over the man. He had been prepared to bully her; and with a word she had pricked the bubble of his arrogance. He swallowed his anger and got a mechanical smile in working order.
“Glad to see you here, Miss Messiter,” he said, his sinister gaze attempting to meet hers frankly “I been looking for you every day.”
“But y'u managed to surprise him, after all ma'am,” chuckled Mac.
“Where's yo' hawss, Reddy?” inquired a tall young man, who had appeared silently in the doorway of the bunkhouse.
Reddy pinked violently. “I had an accident, Denver,” he explained. “This lady yere she—”
“Scooped y'u right off yore hawss. Y'u don't say,” sympathized Mac so breathlessly that even Reddy joined in the chorus of laughter that went up at his expense.
The young woman thought to make it easy for him, and suggested an explanation.
“His horse isn't used to automobiles, and so when it met this one—”
“I got off,” interposed Reddy hastily, displaying a complexion like a boiled beet.
“He got off,” Mac explained gravely to the increasing audience.
Denver nodded with an imperturbable face. “He got off.”
Mac introduced Miss Messiter to such of her employees as were on hand. “Shake hands with Miss Messiter, Missou,” was the formula, the name alone varying to suit the embarrassed gentlemen in leathers. Each of them in turn presented a huge hand, in which her little one disappeared for the time, and was sawed up and down in the air like a pump-handle. Yet if she was amused she did not show it; and her pleasure at meeting the simple, elemental products of the plains outweighed a great deal her sense of the ludicrous.
“How are your patients getting along?” she presently asked of her foreman.
“I reckon all right. I sent Reddy for a doc, but—”
“He got off,” murmured Mac pensively.
“I'll go rope another hawss,” put in the man who had got off.
“Get a jump on you, then. Miss Messiter, would you like to look over the place?”
“Not now. I want to see the men that were hurt. Perhaps I can help them. Once I took a few weeks in nursing.”
“Bully for you, ma'am,” whooped Mac. “I've a notion those boys are sufferin' for a woman to put the diamond-hitch on them bandages.”
“Bring that suit-case in,” she commanded Denver, in the gentlest voice he had ever heard, after she had made a hasty inspection of the first wounded man.
From the suit-case she took a little leather medicine-case, the kind that can be bought already prepared for use. It held among other things a roll of medicated cotton, some antiseptic tablets, and a little steel instrument for probing.
“Some warm water, please; and have some boiling on the range,” were her next commands.
Mac flew to execute them.
It was a pleasure to see her work, so deftly the skillful hands accomplished what her brain told them. In admiring awe the punchers stood awkwardly around while she washed and dressed the hurts. Two of the bullets had gone through the fleshy part of the arm and left clean wounds. In the case of the third man she had to probe for the lead, but fortunately found it with little difficulty. Meanwhile she soothed the victim with gentle womanly sympathy.
“I know it hurts a good deal. Just a minute and I'll be through.”
His hands clutched tightly the edges of his bunk. “That's all right, doc. You attend to roping that pill and I'll endure the grief.”
A long sigh of relief went up from the assembled cowboys when she drew the bullet out.
The sinewy hands fastened on the wooden bunk relaxed suddenly.
“'Frisco's daid,” gasped the cook, who bore the title of Wun Hop for no reason except that he was an Irishman in a place formerly held by a Chinese.
“He has only fainted,” she said quietly, and continued with the antiseptic dressing.
When it was all over, the big, tanned men gathered at the entrance to the calf corral and expanded in admiration of their new boss.
“She's a pure for fair. She grades up any old way yuh take her to the best corn-fed article on the market,” pronounced Denver, with enthusiasm.
“I got to ride the boundary,” sighed Missou. “I kinder hate to go right now.”
“Here, too,” acquiesced another. “I got a round-up on Wind Creek to cut out them two-year-olds. If 'twas my say-so, I'd order Mac on that job.”
“Right kind of y'u. Seems to me”—Mac's sarcastic eye trailed around to include all those who had been singing her praises—“the new queen of this hacienda won't have no trouble at all picking a