Kitabı oku: «The Heart of Canyon Pass», sayfa 14

CHAPTER XXVIII – CATASTROPHE

No more snow or ice had followed that first sharp, furious blizzard; but with the higher temperature had come heavy rainstorms which the natives declared were quite unseasonable. The rivers were bank full. The lower end of Main Street was washed by the water from both Forks. Several families had been obliged to move into the higher part of the town.

But the flood had not driven Mother Tubbs and her little family out of their home. The wise old woman did not know just why Nell Blossom sang no more at the dance hall; but in her mind she knew that “suthin’ was workin’ on that gal.” Meanwhile she proceeded to “work on” Sam as usual.

Rocking on her back porch with the vista of dreary yards under her eye, but the rugged beauties of the Topaz Range in the distance, she philosophized as usual on all things both spiritual and mundane. Sam was pottering about a broken table that she had convinced him he must mend before he left the premises for a stroll into the town, it being Saturday afternoon.

“I must say, too, that it seems as peaceful as Sunday back in Missouri – or pretty near,” Mother Tubbs observed. “Things is changed yere in Canyon Pass. Ye must admit it, Sam.”

“Drat it!” snarled her husband, sucking a thumb he had just smashed with his hammer. “I admit it all right. The Pass is gettin’ plumb wuthless to live in. Psalm singin’, and preachin’, and singin’ meetings, and sech. Huh! Parson wants me to come to Bible class.”

After all he said it with some pride. Sam had, as he expressed it, “a sneakin’ likin’” for the parson. But he was determined not to show that this was so before Mother Tubbs.

“Ain’t you glad to live less like a savage – more decent and civilized like – than you useter, Sam Tubbs?” demanded the old woman.

“I was satisfied as I was,” grunted her husband. “I ain’t one o’ them that’s always wantin’ change and somethin’ new. If I had been, I’d picked me a new woman before now.”

“The pickin’ ain’t very good in Canyon Pass,” rejoined Mother Tubbs complacently. “Them that’s got husbands don’t want to exchange. ’Twould be like jumpin’ out of the skillet onto the coals. Them women that ain’t got nary man are well content, I reckon, to get on without one if you, Sam Tubbs, are the only hope they got.”

“Huh!”

Nell’s sweet, clear voice floated down from the upper chamber. In accents that caressed, she sang an old song which she had found in Betty Hunt’s music, arranged for solo use.

“Hear that child, Sam!” whispered the old woman, wiping her eyes when the pleading verse was finished. “Ain’t that heaven-born?”

“Huh!” said Sam, but in truth a little doubtfully. “I never considered our Nell as bein’ pertic’lar angelic. No ma’am! Not before.”

“She’s as good as any angel,” declared Mother Tubbs with conviction. “Only she’s flighty. Or useter be. And if she’d just go and sing them songs at meetin’, Canyon Pass would learn for once just what good singin’ is.”

“I dunno but you’re right, old woman,” said Sam softly, as the voice from above took up the song again. “I’ve heard Nell Blossom sing many a time before; but it never so sort o’ caught in muh cogs as that song does. But she can’t sing them kind o’ tunes in Colorado Brown’s or the Grub Stake.”

“Hush, Sam! Don’t mention it!” whispered his wife. “I hope to the Lord she won’t never hafter work in them places again.”

“Huh! How’s she going to live?” asked the startled Sam.

“You leave it to Parson Hunt,” declared Mother Tubbs in the same secretive way, “and Nell Blossom won’t never no more hafter sing for her livin’.”

Sam stared. His bald head flushed as his eyes began to twinkle and the knowing grin wreathed his sunken lips. He suddenly burst into a cackle of delight.

“D’ye mean it? The parson? By mighty! So he’s willin’ to go the way of all flesh, is he? Nell needn’t work no more for her livin’ if she don’t want?”

“You poor fool,” scornfully said his wife, holding up one of his enormous blue yarn socks with a gaping hole in the heel, “if the parson is as hard on his socks as you are, Sam Tubbs, Nell will have her work cut out for her – sure as sure!”

It was the very next night that Nell Blossom sang for the first time at the Canyon Pass church service. She had been twice to morning service before this, coming in alone, refusing to sit near Mother Tubbs or Betty, and remaining silent even through the hymns. In truth, she had never learned those hymns that chanced to be given out on those occasions. Rosabell Pickett did yeoman’s service at the badly tuned piano; but her own voice had the sweetness of a crow with the carrying power of that same non-soothing bird. Rosabell kept the hymns going; but sometimes Hunt could have wished for even Miss Pelter of the Ditson Corners’ choir to carry the air!

As has been said, the Sunday evening service at Tolley’s old shack was not so formal as the morning session. Hunt tried in the evening to lead the singing himself. He had managed through the summer to teach the young folks several of the newer and more sprightly songs out of the collection he had brought with him from the East. Some of the rougher young men who filled the rear benches in the evening were glad to make a noise with something besides their heavy boots, and they “went in” for the singing with gusto.

On this evening Nell came in with Mother Tubbs and Sam, but she sat down on the front bench between Betty and Rosabell Pickett. She handed some sheets of music to Rosabell, and Betty recognized them with a flush of pleasure. It was plain that the accompanist had been prepared for Nell’s new move.

“Do you think Mr. Hunt would let me sing a song?” whispered Nell to Betty.

“Let you!” returned Betty eagerly. “He’ll love you for it.”

Perhaps the emphatic statement was made by the parson’s sister without thought of how it sounded. Nell’s flower-like face warmed to a flush that spread from the collar of her blouse to the waving tendrils of hair under her hat brim. She hid her face quickly from Betty. The latter, perhaps somewhat wickedly, enjoyed the other girl’s confusion. Her heart had suddenly expanded to Nell and her brother Ford. If she saw no happiness ahead of her in life, Betty Hunt had begun to hope that the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt and the Canyon Pass blossom would realize all the happiness that a loving pair could compass.

With a whisper and a head shake Betty informed the parson of what he might expect from Nell at this meeting. Her presence had already filled Hunt’s heart with singing. Now, before his talk to the congregation – it was not a sermon – he smiled at Nell and sat down while she sang the song she had prepared and that had so stirred the hearts of Mother Tubbs and Sam the day before.

Rosabell Pickett for once got the spirit of the composition. She played the accompaniment softly, and she slurred over the sour notes of the old piano. When Nell stood up a hush of expectancy fell upon the congregation. Even the boot-scrapings from the back benches were silenced.

Never had Canyon Pass heard Nell Blossom sing so sweetly. The girl’s tones fairly gripped the heart-strings of her hearers and wrung them. The tears rolled down good old Mother Tubbs’ face. Sam sat beside her, looking straight ahead more like a gargoyle than ever, afraid to wink for fear the salt drops would carom from his bony cheeks. Steve Siebert in his corner, and Andy McCann in his – as far apart as the width of the room would allow – looked like their burros, carved out of desert rock. Nothing seemed to move those old fellows. But the rest of the congregation – even the roughnecks on the back seats – were subdued when the song was done.

After the service Hunt apprehended a new note in the manner and speech of his flock. He scarcely realized that his own talk had been more spiritual than usual because of the emotion roused within him by Nell’s song. There was a hush over the room. The noisy fellows went out on tiptoe. Voices were subdued. For almost the first time the atmosphere of this rough room where they “held meetings” had become that of a real house of worship.

“Steve Siebert is right,” the parson told himself not without gravity. “It is time that I should show my own respect beyond peradventure for the religion I preach. Betty must shake the mothballs out of that coat.”

Lizard Dan tooled his six mules across the East Fork. The water was more than waist deep, and the beasts swam for part of the way, and the inside passengers sat on the small of their backs with their boots up on the cross-straps. The driver urged the team with voice and whip up the muddy rise to the Wild Rose. His desert-stained face was full of wrinkles of excitement. Joe Hurley, who chanced to be lingering at the door of the hotel, spied the emotion in the bus-driver’s countenance.

“What’s got you, old-timer?” asked the mining man, strolling down to the step below the driver. “Something on the road over from Crescent City bite you?”

“I got bit all right,” growled Lizard Dan. He stooped to put his tobacco stained lips close to Joe’s ear. “The sheriff of Cactus County rode over on the seat with me. Yeppy! And he dropped off back yonder to talk to Sheriff Blaney.”

“Something doing?”

“Youbetcha! The Cactus County sheriff was tellin’ me. He’s been after a guy that turned a trick last summer – fore part of the summer in fact – ’way out beyond Hoskins. He was some pretty shrewd short-card tin-horn, if you ask me.”

“A gambler? Anybody know him?” asked Joe quite idly.

“I didn’t get his name. The sheriff was pumpin’ me a lot about who was new – if any – in Canyon Pass. I told him,” and Dan grinned widely, “that ’bout the newest citizens we had yere was Parson Hunt and his sister.”

“You’re some little josher, aren’t you, Dan?” said Joe, grimly. “What had the feller done?”

“The one the sheriff’s after? Cleaned out a sheep camp with marked cards and then made his get-a-way under a gun. Cool as the devil! Shot one of those sheepticks – I mean to say, a shepherd. Never did have much use for sheep men – ”

“Me neither,” admitted Hurley.

“But they are ha’f human – leastways, that’s how I look at ’em,” pursued Lizard Dan. “They should have their chance. Marked cards and a gun is no way to win their spondulicks. No, sir.”

“What makes the Cactus County officer think the sharper came this way?”

“Says he and a posse follered him to the Canyon County line, up yonder, ’long back in the summer. They figgered he’d gone Lamberton way, so they swayed off and didn’t come yere. Now something new has come up about the feller, I take it, and the Cactus County sheriff has come yere to get Blaney to help comb this part of the territory. I told him we didn’t have no loose gamblers yere. They all got jobs and have held ’em some time.”

“Tolley is always picking up new hombres,” said Hurley thoughtfully. “I can’t keep run of all the scabby customers he brings in here.”

“But not card-sharps,” said Lizard Dan, shaking his head. “He ain’t got a new dealer in a dog’s age. You wouldn’t count Dick Beckworth one. It’s just like he’s always been yere.”

He waddled away with the mail sacks and his large-bore gun. Hurley found himself suddenly startled by an entirely uncalled-for thought. Surely nothing Lizard Dan had said should have inspired this:

Dick Beckworth had been away from Canyon Pass from the early springtime until recently. He had ridden in from the wilderness on the occasion of the first blizzard. Where had the gambler been during the months he was missed at the Grub Stake?

Hurley was half tempted to go to the Grub Stake and make an inquiry or two, but since that notable night when Steve Siebert had held up Tolley and his gang, Joe had seldom been inside the place. He did, however, wander along the now quiet street toward the honkytonk.

It was drawing toward evening, and a drizzle of rain, which had threatened all day, swept across the West Fork and muffled the town almost instantly as in a gray blanket. The roar of Runaway River in the canyon blew back into Joe’s ears and made him deaf to most other sounds.

But as he crossed the mouth of the alley beside Tolley’s place he heard a sharp “Hist!” He turned to look. A girl, wrapped in a fluttering cloak, stood there, dimly revealed in the thicker darkness of the alley.

“Well, what do you want?” demanded the mining man.

“Mr. Hurley!”

“Great saltpeter! what’s the matter, Rosy?”

“Hush! Shet your yawp!” warned the piano player. “Want to get me into trouble?”

“Not a bit. What’s up?”

“I don’t know. But it’s something – something bad.”

“Bad? About whom?”

“Parson Hunt and his sister Betty.”

“Betty Hunt?” muttered the mining man with an emphasis that would have told a woman of much less discernment than Rosabell Pickett all that was necessary.

“Yeppy. You like her, Joe Hurley. You want to look out for her. Somebody has got to. That Dick Beckworth – ”

“Dick the Devil?”

“You said it! He’s got something on her.”

“He’s got something on Betty Hunt? Never!”

“No use layin’ your hand on your gun butt. It needs something besides that. When fire’s touched to the end of the fuse, no use tryin’ to stamp on the ashes. It is burning toward the powder barrel. The thing’s started. Dick’s told it about her – ”

“Told what?” asked Hurley, almost shaking the girl.

“That she was married back East, long before she come out here, and is posing here as an unmarried woman. He says he knows the man that was married to her.”

Hurley was stricken dumb for the moment. Yet recovery was swift. He stammered:

“She – she might. It’s no crime. She – she might have got a divorce and taken her maiden name again, if it’s true. But I wouldn’t take Dick the Devil’s word as to the color of the blue sky.”

“He’s got a paper to prove it. I seen him show it to Boss Tolley. I run to get you. I saw you at the Wild Rose. I figger you are the one to tell the parson.”

“And who’s to tell Betty?” Joe inquired. “I – I – ”

“Oh! What’s that?” exclaimed Rosabell, shrinking away. “I – I thought it was thunder.”

A muttering sound grew in Hurley’s hearing, but he paid little attention to it at first. Was it this Betty had meant all the time, when she had kept him at arm’s length? When she had told him that there was somebody back East who, at least, had her promise?

Then the air quaked as though there had been a volcanic upheaval within the immediate district of Canyon Pass. Rosabell shrieked and ran back into the gloom, disappearing toward the rear door of the Grub Stake. Joe ran out into the street, seeing other men coming from the shops and saloons.

His gaze by chance was turned upon the wagon track down the slope beyond the West Fork. He saw a flaming patch of white there. It came down the wagon track with terrific speed. In a moment he realized that it was a white pony and rider.

Lashing the steed the rider forced it into the West Fork. The animal had to swim for it. It seemed as though the stream had filled terrifically within the last few minutes.

Out of the flood scrambled the pony. It was not until then that anybody recognized Nell Blossom and her cream-colored mount. She urged the horse up into the town and they heard her clear voice rising above the sullen thunder of the three rivers:

“The Overhang! The Overhang! It’s down – it’s filled the canyon! Runaway River is stoppered like with a cork in the neck of a bottle. The flood is coming!”

CHAPTER XXIX – HIS LAST CARD

Hunt lingered in his sister’s room after Joe Hurley had left them. They were talking when Maria came up to take away the tea things. The Mexican woman was greatly excited.

“Those bad men! She get it now – in the neck you say, si? My goodness, yes! He no run you out of town lak’ he say, Señor Hunt.”

“Who is this who wants to run me out?” asked Hunt good-naturedly. “I must be getting awfully unpopular in some quarters.”

“Those bad man at Tolley’s Grub Stake. Ah, yes, Señor! She hate you – my goodness, yes!”

Betty began to be troubled – as she always was when she heard her brother’s peace threatened.

“Have you heard something new, Maria?” she asked the woman.

“Cholo, he hear. He come just now from the sheriff. A man come to town and he say he want those bad man.”

“What bad man? Not my brother?” cried Betty.

“Madre de Dios! Is the Señor Hunt bad?” gasped Maria. “Why, it is Dick the Deevil I say.”

“Ah-ha!” muttered Hunt, with more interest than surprise. He did not look at Betty. “This man has something against Dick Beckworth?”

“Cholo whisper to me, jus’ now, before I come up here, that the sheriff weel arres’ Dick the Deevil. For robbery and swindle, you say. Si!”

“This is news!” ejaculated Hunt, putting on his coat and hat. “I must go down and get the particulars.”

“Oh, Ford!”

What Betty might have said – how much she might have betrayed of her secret to her brother at that moment – will never be known. Before he could turn to look at her anguished face the house shook, and an atmospheric tremor seemed to pass over the town. An “airquake” was the better term for it! And with it they heard a continuous thundering roar that seemed to mingle with, yet almost drown, the chorus of the rivers which had been a monotone in their ears all day.

Maria screamed and flew out of the room. Hunt exclaimed:

“Something’s blown up at one of the mines, perhaps. But Joe is all right. He could not have got far away from the hotel.”

It was not until he ran down and reached the street that he learned the truth. Nell had pulled in her wet and exhausted pony before the hotel and was surrounded by the excited populace. Joe was with her, and Hunt, seeing both safe, was relieved.

The parson listened to her story with amazement and some of the dread that the older inhabitants of Canyon Pass felt. Something like this had happened twenty years before. She had seen a great landslide – a large part of the Overhang she thought – fall into the canyon. Already the rivers were backing up. Filled as they were by the recent unseasonable rains, the flood, if the canyon bed was really closed by the landslide, would soon rise into the town.

Hunt and Hurley joined a party that launched a big batteau to go down the Runaway to the first turn in the canyon wall to see just what the danger was. Most of the other inhabitants of Canyon Pass were crowding into Main Street. It might be that all would have to get back to the headlands where the mines were in order to escape the flood.

Betty, alone in her room in the hotel, saw the people milling about below and could only guess what it meant. She did not dare go down to ask about the catastrophe, and Maria did not return. But as she sat there, trembling not altogether from fear of what might happen to the town, she saw the knob of her door turn slowly. There was somebody in the hall – somebody coming in!

In her terror – terror of she knew not what – the girl could not move. She could only watch the frail door sag slowly open. She saw a hand with a sparkling diamond upon it. But it was a man’s hand. A shoulder appeared as the door was thrust farther inward.

Then she saw the face of the intruder.

“Andy Wilkenson!”

Betty did not know that her voice was audible. But as the man slid in with the sleekness of a cat and closed the door behind him, he whispered:

“So you know me all right, do you? Then that makes it easier. You’ve got to hide me, Betty. They are after me. I got out of the Grub Stake through a window – just in time.”

He laughed. There was a reckless gayety in his manner that was forced; but it seemed to Betty more terrible than if he had shown fear.

“You wouldn’t want them to get your husband, would you, honey?” he went on, his back against the door, his eyes glittering. “And there’s going to be high water. I can’t get away at once. I’ve got to hide. You’ll have to keep me here.” He chuckled. “A girl wouldn’t give her hubby up to the sheriff, would she? I – ”

“Go away!” she gasped.

“Not a chance!” exclaimed Dick lightly. “That sheriff will comb the town. But he will never come into your bedroom, honey. And I’m going to stay here till the flurry is over.”

He took a step into the room. Betty shrank from him. Her eyes were now aflame – and there was something besides fear in them.

“I will give you time to get out, Andy Wilkenson,” she said hoarsely. “But no more. All I have to do is to raise this window and scream – ”

“Dare to!” he snapped. “I’ll stay right here. You’re my wife – ”

“Nobody will believe that if I deny it!” she exclaimed.

“So you think I can’t prove it?” He laughed again. “I know that you would deny it if you could. I know that you even tore up the marriage certificate that old minister gave you. But I went back to him and got a copy. And I have got a copy of the license record, and all. Think I’m a fool? You may have fooled me about your aunt’s money; but one never knows when such a moment as this may come. If you give me up to the sheriff, I’ll tell ’em all just who and what you are. Mrs. Andy Wilkenson! Sounds good, don’t it? And ‘Andy Wilkenson’ is Dick Beckworth. Being married under an assumed name don’t make the tie any less binding, Betty. You are married to me hard and fast, and I’m going to turn the fact to good account. Don’t doubt it!”

“I – I’ll call my brother,” said Betty weakly.

“I bet he doesn’t know, either. Nor that Joe Hurley you’ve been chumming around with,” and Dick chuckled hugely. “Oh, I’ve got you, my girl. You had the chance to call me, and call me good, that time. But it’s my turn now. You are going to hide me here, and then help me get away. I know your breed. You’d die rather than let the story of our marriage get to the people of Canyon Pass.”

The girl sat huddled in the chair by the window. She stared at him with an intensity of horror that seemed to have paralyzed her whole body. And what he said – his final declaration – she knew was true.

She would much rather die than have it revealed to all Canyon Pass that Dick the Devil was the discarded husband of the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s sister!

The smile with which Dick watched the agonized girl marked the cruelty that was the underlying trait of his whole character. He knew she suffered. He knew how she suffered now. And he exulted in it.

But he was, too, fearful for his own safety. The crime he had committed miles away across the sheep range, and which had set the sheriff on his track, was a most despicable one. It was, too, in this community a crime that might easily excite the passions of the rougher element. Men had been lynched for much less than Dick Beckworth’s crime!

With night coming on, the waters about the town rising, and no means for quick egress before morning at least, Dick the Devil realized that his only hope lay with this tortured girl. Aside from the satisfaction it gave him to make her shield him, he was quite aware that no better place than Betty Hunt’s room could be imagined in which he might hide from the officers.

“There’s a closet,” he said finally, seeing the small door in the partition. “Put me in that. You can let your brother in if you like – or Joe Hurley.” He sneered at her. “They’ll never believe the proper Betty Hunt has a man hidden in her room. What’s that?”

He hissed the question, grabbing the handle of the closet door, and looked back at the one opening from the hall. There was a light step outside; the door-knob rattled.

“Quick!” breathed Dick. “Don’t say a word – ”

He tried to open the closet door. Although it was a spring latch, it was likewise locked. All Betty’s little valuables were in the closet, and she had the key.

“The key!” shrilled the man. “You fool! Do you want me to give the thing away? As sure as you are alive I’ll tell them you’re my wife. Quick!”

Betty did not move. She shook her head. The door-knob was again rattled. A muffled voice cried:

“Betty!”

The knob turned – as it had before, slowly, hesitatingly. The door was pushed inward. Dick the Devil snatched a pistol from its sling under his left armpit, with the motion of a rattlesnake about to strike.

Nell Blossom stepped into the room and closed the door swiftly behind her. She had seen Betty. Her cry of “Betty! what’s happened?” was answered by a sigh from Dick of such relief that it seemed like a sob.

Alert as she could be, Nell wheeled to look at the man. Although there was no light in the room and the evening was drawing on, the singer knew that half-crouching figure at first glance. She saw, too, the flash of the weapon in the gambler’s hand.

“Dick Beckworth! I might have known you’d come sneaking to a girl’s room to hide,” said Nell, her voice quite unshaken. “Put away that gun. I’m not the sheriff.”

Dick was silent. But he had the grace to put away his gun. Nell said to Betty:

“Has he scared you, honey? Don’t you mind. Dick the Devil has got his comeupance this time, I reckon. The minute he steps out of this house they’ll nab him. Somebody saw him sneak in by the back way. But nobody thought of his daring to come into your room. Come on, you, get out! Take your miserable carcass off to some other part of the house.”

“Oh, Nell!” breathed Betty.

“Don’t you be afraid, honey,” said the cabaret singer again. “This rascal knows me, I reckon. It’s too bad he wasn’t killed – like I thought he was – back last spring when I was fool enough to be caught by his sleek ways and talk. Oh, yes! I played the fool. And I come pretty near believing since that time that there wasn’t any decent men in the world. All because of that whelp.”

For once Dick Beckworth had nothing to say. At another time he might have flouted the girl. But the moment was not propitious. He stood and glared from Nell to Betty, and back again; but said nothing.

“Come! Beat it!” said Nell harshly. “Don’t you hear me?”

“I am going to remain here,” Dick said in a low voice. “Right here.”

“Not much!” Nell wheeled to open the door. “I’ll call ’em up. They are watching for you below.”

“Nell!” gasped Betty.

“You better speak for me,” sneered Dick. “I don’t reckon that you two girls will turn me over to the sheriff. Don’t forget, Nellie, that once I was your honey-boy.”

The mining-camp girl’s whole person seemed to fire under this spur. Her face blazed. She was tense with wrath – wrath that she could not for the moment audibly express.

But when she did speak her voice was as hard as ice and her accents as cold:

“Dick Beckworth, you get out of here! March!”

“Not much.”

Nell had been riding. She never went abroad on horseback without wearing her belt and gun. The latter flashed into her hand too quickly for Dick to have again produced his weapon, had he so desired.

“Put ’em up!” was Nell’s concise command. “Don’t flutter a finger wrong. I been thinking for months that I saw you go over that cliff to your death. Maybe I worried some over being the possible cause of your taking that drop. But I feel a whole lot different about you now, Dick Beckworth. Keep your hands up and march out of this room.”

The man, sneering, his countenance torn with emotion, his eyes as glittering as those of an angered serpent, came forward into the middle of the room again. He was staring at Betty rather than at Nell. He said to the former:

“You going to let me go out, Betty?”

“Oh! Oh! I – ”

“Don’t mind even to answer him – the dog!” Nell muttered. “I swear, after this, I would not lift a hand to stop the boys from stringing him up.”

“Is that so?” queried Dick, turning to her again. “You think you’ve got things your own way, don’t you? I’ll show you. Betty! tell this girl what and who I am and why I am not going to leave this room. Tell her, my dear, why you can’t bear to see me given up to the sheriff.”

“You dog!” ejaculated Nell.

“Tell her, Betty,” commanded Dick, but without raising his voice.

The parson’s sister, fairly writhing in her chair, put up her clasped hands to Nell. She whispered brokenly:

“Don’t – don’t send him out. Don’t tell, Nell. I – I couldn’t bear it!”

“In the name of common sense,” queried the singer, “what do you mean? This fellow’s frightened you out of your wits.”

“No, no! For my sake – ”

“You’re crazy. He can’t hurt you. I have him under my gun. If he makes a move – ”

“Betty!” shot in Dick.

“For Ford’s sake let him stay!” begged Betty, and sank back in her chair again, almost at the point of collapse.