Propped up among the pillows of his bed, Clint Maroon looked out almost sheepishly from beneath his head bandage at the faces turned so solicitously toward him. The bandage was a proper one now; the arm in its splint rested comfortably against his side; the room smelled of drugs and eau de cologne and coffee. He looked very clean and boyish. The doctor had come and gone.
“Shucks! I feel fine. That’s the first time a Maroon ever did a sissy thing like that. I sure hope you-all will excuse me being so womanish. Fainting away. I’m plumb ashamed.”
“Don’t talk now, chéri. Rest. Here. Another sip of this.”
“Why, say, many a time back in Texas I’ve been hurt worse than this throwed by a bucking horse. Never made such a to-do about it. Nothing to eat all day—that was it, only a swallow of whisky one of the boys—say, that cup of Kaka’s good coffee, the way she makes it, is better than any medicine. Where’s Cupide?”
Two hands grasped the bed’s footboard, the dwarf’s powerful arms pulled him up so that the great head, decorated now with a plaster where the lump had risen, rose like a nightmarish sun over the horizon.
“You would have been killed—but smashed dead—if it had not been for me, Monsieur Clint.”
“I know, I know. I reckon it might have been better, at that, than having you around my neck the rest of my life.”
“Then why you take him along?” Kaka demanded.
“Take him!” Maroon yelled. “I tried the worst way to get shut of him.” He glared wrathfully at the gnomelike figure perched now on the footboard. “How come you got on that train, anyway, after I turned you off at the Albany station?”
“Oh, that was easy,” Cupide explained. His tiny hands made an airy nothing of it. “I butted him in the stomach, he grunted like a stuck pig, then I took the five dollars you had given him and I ran just as the train was moving—it was dangerous, I can tell you it was—and I hid in the water closet or under the seats when you came near. The boys were very nice to me—mais gentil—very.”
“Insecte!” said Kaka, fondly. “Fou furieux!”
Clio pushed the hair back from her forehead with a frantic gesture. “I tell you, I don’t understand, I don’t understand such people. You are hurt and broken and this monkey here might be dead—you, too—and all that a fool who has already millions may have another million. What nonsense is this!”
“You didn’t think he was such a fool a week ago.”
“I did. I did. But when I heard you were hurt I hated him, I called him every name, I said terrible things.”
“Sorry?”
“Only if I have hurt the little man. Clint, let us go away from here. Take me with you. I have decided I do not care so much to marry a man with millions.”
“Looks like you’ll have to now, care or not.”
She stared, uncomprehending, startled. “What is this! Clint! What are you saying!”
“Well, sugar, it’s like this—”
But she knelt at the side of his bed, she put her head on the pillow beside him, she cradled his head in her arms. “I won’t leave you. I tell you I will follow you, I will make such a bruit that you will be ashamed.”
“Now, now, wait a minute. Hold your horses. I got a taste of this railroad and money thing, and say, it’s easier than riding fence. Even a dumb cowboy like me can get the hang of it. These fellows, they don’t only skin the country and the people—they’re out to skin each other. I’ve got a piece of that little Saratoga trunk railroad; Mr. Morgan gave it to me if I licked the Gould crowd, and I did. So now I’m figuring to get the whole of that railroad away from little Bart, and I will, too. I’m going to be hog rich. Just for the hell of it. And it’s all your doings, Clio. Only now things have got to be different between us.”
“Different?” she repeated with stiff lips.
“Sure thing. There’s no way out, honey. I aim to be worth millions and millions. That’s the way you wanted it. But our fun’s over. Folks as rich as we’re going to be, why, we just naturally have got to get married. Yes ma’am. Married and respectable, that’s us.”