The Fighting Shepherdess

Kate sat on the side bench listening to Mullendore's disjointed mumblings. It was now well towards midnight and she had been sitting so for hours in the hope that he might have a lucid moment, but to the present her vigil had been unrewarded. Mostly his sentences were a jumble relative to trapping or sheep. Again, he lay inert with his eyes fixed upon her face in a meaningless stare.

Gusts of wind shook the wagon and swayed the kerosene lamp in its bracket, while a pounding rain beat a tattoo on the canvas cover. The tension was telling on Kate and a kind of nervous frenzy grew upon her as the time dragged by and she was no nearer learning what she had hoped to learn--than when she had had Mullendore brought to her camp.

She and Bowers had taken turns guarding him, and in growing despair she had watched him weaken, for each day the chances lessened that his mind would clear; and now Kate sat staring back into his unblinking eyes asking herself if it was possible that his crime was to be buried with him and she must go on the rest of her life bearing the onus of his guilt? The answer to every question she wanted to know was locked in the breast of the emaciated man lying on the bunk.

Bowers had proved to be correct in his diagnosis. The headache, backache, stiff neck and muscles with which Mullendore's illness had started were the forerunner of brown blotches, fever and jangling nerves. A virulent case of spotted fever, it was pronounced by "Doc" Fussel, who doubted that he would recover.

"I'd knock him in the head and put him to bed with a shovel, if 'twere me," Bowers had grumbled when he had helped move Pete Mullendore over to Kate's headquarters.

"We've got to make him talk," Kate had replied grimly. "We've got to get the truth somehow, Bowers, before he goes."

Kate had no prearranged plan as to the course she would pursue if Mullendore became rational, but trusted to her instinct to guide her. She was certain only of one thing--that if he had a spark of manhood in him she would reach it somehow. Though he inspired in her a feeling which was akin to her repugnance for creeping things, and there were moments when something like her childish terror of the half-breed trapper returned, she was determined that there were no lengths to which she would not go, in the way of humbling her pride, to attain her end.

The clock, ticking loudly on its nail, said midnight, and still Mullendore, deaf and blind to all save the fantastic world into which he stared, mumbled incoherently.