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Emerson’s Wife
by
Tuttle waited up for the midnight train, on which, if Mead heeded Nick’s telegram, he would be likely to arrive. In the meantime, he did some spying out of the land and learned that Dysert and some of his followers had hidden themselves, with arms, ammunition, and provisions, in an empty adobe house belonging to the head of the band. The deputy marshal knew this meant that the criminals would resist to the last, and that any attempt to take them would be as perilous an adventure as he and his friends had ever faced. If Emerson came and anything happened to him–and it was very unlikely, if they carried the thing through, that any one of them would come out of it without at least serious injury–then he and Ellhorn would feel that they had been the cause of the young wife’s bereavement. And yet, with Mead’s help, they might succeed. And success in this enterprise would be the biggest, the crowning achievement in all their experience as officers of the law.
As midnight approached, Tuttle scarcely knew whether he more hoped or dreaded that Mead would come. He had faced the muzzle of loaded guns with less trepidation and anxiety than he felt as he stepped out on the sidewalk when he heard the rattle of the omnibus. A tall figure, big and broad-shouldered, swung down from the vehicle.
“Emerson–Emerson–” Tuttle stammered, his voice shaking and dying in his throat into something very like a sob. Then he gripped Mead’s hand and said casually, “How ‘s Mrs. Emerson?”
Mead replied merely, “She’s well”; but Tom caught an unwonted intonation of tenderness in his voice and saw his face soften and glow for an instant before he went on anxiously, “What’s up?–and where ‘s Nick?”
Tuttle wavered a little the next morning in his purpose of attacking the Dysert retreat. He took Ellhorn aside and asked his opinion about letting the matter rest until the return of Marshal Black and Sheriff Williamson.
Nick was quite sober again and looked back over his misdeeds of the day before with a jaunty smile and a penitent shake of the head. “Sure, Tom,” he said, and the Irish roll in his voice showed that his contrition was sincere enough to move him deeply, “sure and I was a measly, beastly, ornery kiote to go back on you like that, and you ‘d have served me right if you ‘d set on me twice as long as you did!”
But against Tuttle’s suggestion of postponing the conflict he presented a surprised and combative front. “What you-all thinkin’ of, Tom? Why, we ‘ve got ’em holed up now, and all that’s to do is to smoke ’em out!”
“It’s Emerson I ‘m thinkin’ of–and Mrs. Emerson. He–he wrote her a letter this mornin’, and put it in his pocket, and asked me if anything happened to him to see that she got it. Nick, I–I don’t like to think about that! If we put this thing off, he ‘ll go home, and then we-all can fight it through without him, mebbe. Nick, you was a sure kiote to send for him yesterday.”
“Yes, I sure was,” said Nick with sorrowful conviction. Then he added, with an air of cheerful finality, “Well, I would n’t ‘a’ done it if I had n’t been drunk! But you ‘re right, Tommy. It ain’t the square deal to Mrs. Emerson for us to take him into this business. It ‘ll be a fight to a finish, for one side or the other, and it’s just as likely to be us as them.”
At that moment Mead came up, saying briskly, “Well, boys, had n’t we better be starting out?”
Like his two friends, Emerson Mead was Texan born and bred; but a New England strain in his blood, with its potent strength and sanity, had given him such poise and force of character as had made him the leader of the three through their long and intimate friendship and strenuous life.