I CAN’T see him!” Billy Farragoh groaned. “Ronda, nothing ever made me feel so rotten in my life. To think that Reb should come to such an end! ... I would have sworn there was nothing but the best in him. He was so straight and good, so gay! Mother loved him—and I think I worshipped him. You were so proud of him, Ronda! And now I fear he has let us down.... What can I say to him?” He was imploring, asking in vain for assurance that this thing was not so.
“Why, Billy!” Ronda Cameron’s tone sounded shocked. “Of course you’ll see him! He has been calling your name steadily—does anything else matter?” Her courageous eyes plumbed the last subterfuge of his pain.
“It matters terribly,” Billy managed huskily. “I would have staked my life that he would keep his word. Governor Hamer—”
“Governor Hamer, and you, and the rest, should be ashamed of yourselves,” said Ronda, but she said it gently. “You haven’t even got Reb’s word as to what happened, yet you are all convinced that he has broken his solemn promise. I am not so sure.” She laid a steadying hand on her companion’s arm.
Billy looked up hopefully. His clean young face was marked with lines of suffering, of striving to keep the faith. “If I could believe otherwise, nothing would keep me from him,” he burst out impulsively. Then his eyes dulled again, dropped. “But I could never bear to hear the truth from his lips,” he went on bleakly. “As it is now, there’s always the hope of some mistake. But if he were to confess ...”
They were standing in a reception room of the hospital at Lander. Reb Santee had been brought here, delirious, fighting for his life. He had called brokenly for Billy since his arrival; and now that the young man was almost face to face with his friend he had lost all his stoic fortitude.
News of the abortive train robbery at Rock Creek had spread like wildfire. The newspapers set up a howl of indignation. Reb Santee, notorious leader of the Wild Bunch, they said, was robbing trains at precisely the same time when he was supposed to be serving out his sentence for another crime at Laramie Penitentiary. It was too much.
It was a bitter blow to Billy: the finding of Reb at the scene of the robbery—the logical conclusion, so quickly pounced on by all, that Santee had betrayed the trust imposed in him. Billy had suffered many disillusionments during his swift rise to a position of power, but never one so cruel, so bewilderingly against all probability, as this. He was stunned and wretched, his thoughts scattered. He did not know what to think.
Ronda, on the other hand, did not share his dejection. Since hearing the unwelcome news she had refused stoutly to believe the worst of Reb until it was proven beyond doubt.
“Billy, what will you think of yourself, deep in your heart, when this is over?” she pleaded persuasively. “There will be no need then to remind you of what Reb has meant to us. He was our shining model of all that was fine and true. And if there was the faintest chance that you had failed him in the end—would you ever forgive yourself?”
It was a telling argument. Billy’s hand came down from his corrugated brow. He bucked up, his shoulders squaring.
“I am ready to see him now,” he said steadily. Ronda squeezed his arm gently, her fine gray eyes softening with compassion, with brave hope.
A moment later a nurse entered the room.
“He is awake now,” she told them.
They followed her to a little room whose window overlooked the shining sage of the plain beyond the edge of town. Reb lay outstretched on his bed, his face flushed, his flaxen hair tousled against the pillow. His eyes lit with a strange light as they fell on Billy’s and clung.
“Reb, old man—” Billy stopped at the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry it had to come to this,” he broke off lamely, with extreme difficulty fighting a wave of deep feeling.
“I knew yuh’d come, Billy,” Reb whispered. He made an effort to smile. “Yo’re all I been waitin’ fer—all I can expect—you an’ Ronda.” His words were slow and labored, but they were gratified, too.
Ronda was at Billy’s side. She saw the dangerous luster of Reb’s eyes, the grayness of his lips. It was she who reached forth for his hand.
“Reb, don’t try to say too much,” she told him. “You must save your strength. Nothing else matters to—any of us.” Her voice was bravely cheerful. “We shall have you out of here in good time, and in a better place.”
In her sweet and gentle regard there seemed all that Reb had ever hoped for. He shook his head, however, his mouth relaxing. “Not me, Ronda. No need to fool ourselves. I’ve got my—finish, this time.” It did not seem to bother him so much as the blight that rested on Billy’s features. “Billy, look at me,” he urged huskily. “Is it—do yuh—” He broke off, finding his question harder to put than he had dreamed. He knew only too well what gnawed in Billy’s mind.
It was Ronda who broke the spell.
“Reb,” she said in her clear voice, “Billy wants you to tell him that your word to him is unbroken. He wants to believe it of you. Nothing else means half so much to him.... Can you?”
The electric moment stretched out. Billy Farragoh felt his muscles tense to aching. Energy crept into Reb’s voice, vitality—yes, and pleasure—into his crinkling eyes. “Why, shore I can,” he drawled. “There was nothing in me tryin’ to stick up that train. I said to myself you two’d be the only ones to understand.”
Billy manfully concealed a measure of his leaping gratification, his boundless relief. “Tell us, Reb,” he said, and his words trembled.
Ronda forebore to halt Reb as he told his story—how he had become involved with Doc Lantry, and then with the Wild Bunch; and his efforts to resist—how circumstance had driven him on until his word to Billy and Governor Hamer had stood in the way—how the Sundance Kid had defied him, and he had determined to stop the Kid’s raid, with the tragic results. He was perspiring, not alone with the effort of talking, before he was done and his voice sunk low, but there was a triumph in his look as impossible to resist as his old smile had been.
“I made up my mind Logan would listen to me,” he wound up; “either he’d stop his work, or we’d all go to glory in a ball of fire.” He trailed off. “That’s what happened,” he ended, with a pathetic grin.
There was more that concerned them all, which the nurse attempted to halt; but Reb wouldn’t have it. It put more life into him, he declared, than all the doctors in Wyoming could do.
“There’s jest one thing more that weighs heavy on me,” he murmured, when the nurse had been sent packing. His eyes held those of the girl and the man before him bravely. “When are you two gettin’ married? I want to see it done an’ over with.”
Ronda and Billy looked at each other.
“Ronda came to Lander to marry me next week,” said Billy slowly. “But now—” His reluctance suggested that they could not think of such things, for the present at least.
“Not a bit of it!” Reb protested, lifting his head in alarm. “Yuh got to go right ahead before I’ll consent to—to—” His gaze became frightened at the temerity of what he was about to say. “I’d like to see it come off,” he got out; “—be a witness, like.”
Ronda dropped by his side with a little cry. There were tears on her lashes—tears of pride, of gladness. “Reb, you shall,” she promised in rich tones.
Billy was troubled to be thinking of his own happiness in the face of death—there was no further refuge for any of them in the pretense that Reb was not dying—but he readily assented. This flaxen-haired man on the bed had taken a weight off his heart this morning for which he would be grateful all his days.
“That’s—fine,” Reb breathed, turning his head toward Ronda. “Ronda, I always—” but his resolve broke down; he could not tell her of his love—“I always thought the very best of yuh. An’ if I know you an’ Billy are fixed right, I’ll rest easy.”
Ronda knew what he was trying to say. Her heart was full. She could only look her thanks, and her sorrow that life had treated him so shabbily.
It was a strange ceremony, that wedding beside a hospital bed, which a dying man watched with his heart in his eyes and a smile curving his lips. It was not delayed, for Reb weakened hourly as his time drew rapidly nearer. Some there were among the chosen guests who cried unashamed—Mother Farragoh was one—and the tears were bitter.... A strange honeymoon as well, at its commencement, with the bride watching over another man while the sands of his life ran out.
They would not have had it otherwise. There was an expression on Reb Santee’s homely, freckled countenance as he breathed his last that said this was for the best. They would not have dreamed of denying him that.
“It’s the end,” said Billy gently, leading his wife from the bed when it was over. “Reb lost nearly everything in life for which he played, but at the close we were able to give him one thing he wanted, and he was content.... He was a man.”
“Gone to glory,” Ronda murmured through her tears. She caught herself then, and with a womanly grace lifted her arms and lips and kissed her husband. “Nothing went out of him, ever, but the memory of it will make our lives better and more full, dear.”
Billy’s agreement was fervent. In his heart there was only honor for the one who had passed. Reb Santee had faltered, he had made mistakes. But whatever else he was, he had proven that there was a streak of nobility in him that men would not forget.
The End