Ronicky Doone's Reward by Max Brand (ebook offline reader .txt) 📕

“All right,” said Charlie Loring, with the petulance which so often goes with the sick bed. “All right, I’ll lie here and wait till she wakes up, I suppose.”

“Doctor!” cried the girl. “It isn’t safe for me to leave him when — “

“When fiddlesticks,” said the doctor brutally. “I don’t want him bothered. I have a reason. You lie down!”

He advanced toward her almost threateningly, and she reluctantly sat down on the couch and then reclined, under his further threat, to one side.

“Close your eyes,” said the doctor, setting his teeth a little, as the great, purple-shadowed eyes stared up at him, puzzled.

She obeyed.

“But I can’t sleep,” she insisted. “I know that I can’t sleep.”

“I’m not asking you to sleep,” said the doctor. “I’m just asking you to close your eyes. Will you do that? Just keep them closed for ten minutes. You’ll find it a curious experiment in relaxing.”

“For ten minutes,” sighed the girl. “All right, then, for just ten minutes I’ll do as you say. But the moment Charlie needs anything I’ll — “

Her voice had gone haltingly to the close of this phrase, but now she stopped altogether. The next word trembled for an instant on her lips, and then her whole body seemed to settle and melt. The features relaxed. Her head fell back a little into the pillow, her breast rose slowly with a long breath, and one hand slipped from the edge of the couch, and the arm dangled toward the floor. The doctor crossed hastily to her and, raising the arm, replaced it beside her, palm up, in the attitude of the greatest rest.

“She’s sort of tuckered out, ain’t she?” asked the wounded man.

“Shut up!” said the doctor, whirling fiercely on his patient.

Charlie Loring started and blinked under the shock of that speech.

“You — you can’t talk like that to me!” he gasped. “You — you’ll start me bleeding again!”

“Hell!” said the doctor. “I hardly care if you bleed to death. But if you keep on talking loud enough to disturb her, I’ll — ” He finished the sentence with a most unprofessionally ugly glance at the other, and Loring was astonished.

Charlie was only dimly conscious that, during a long, faintly remembered period, he had been cared for as though he were an infant. This harsh, fierce tone of the doctor, as though he had been guilty of some crime, astonished him.

“Tuckered out!” exclaimed the doctor. “I should say she is. And then you tell her that she looks ten years older!”

He began to tramp fiercely up and down the room, wrath fairly dripping from him, his fists clenching and relaxing in swift successions. At length he came back and faced his patient again.

“Blondy,” he said, “I’ve got a couple of things to say to you. I’m not like a lot of doctors. There are some that think a man when he’s sick and delirious never shows anything that’s on his mind. But I’m different from that sort of a doctor. I believe there’s a certain element of truth in delirious ravings!”

As he said this he saw that Blondy Loring contracted in every muscle and cast a sharp glance at him, as though he wished at a single fierce effort to pierce through to the full meaning of the doctor.

“What’s up with you now?” he asked, a little hoarse with his emotion. “What’s bothering you now, doc?”

And there was something of a challenge and also something of a plea in what he said.

“I’m not going to tell you,” said the doctor. “I can’t tell you that — I don’t think that it would be professional honesty to tell you in your sane moments of the things which you have said during delirious moments.”

Perspiration issued bright and gleaming upon the forehead of the other, his lips worked, as he glared at the doctor.

Suddenly he was half whispering: “Come around here; come around here where I can get a good look at you, will you?”

The doctor obeyed without a murmur. Then the wasted hand of Blondy reached up and gripped at his.

“What the dickens are you driving at?” asked Blondy. “What do you mean by the things that you overheard me say? What did I say?”

“I’ve already told you that I couldn’t tell you now,” said the doctor, “much as I’d like to!”

“You’re trying to bluff me about something,” said Blondy, but his nervousness belied his attempted smile of indifference.

“I’m not trying to bluff you,” said the doctor. “I wouldn’t talk to you now except that I see your fever is nearly gone, and it’s worth risking a relapse just to straighten out your relations with the girl a little!”

“Eh?” grunted the other.

“I mean what I say!”

“Are you interfering between Miss Bennett and me?”

“Don’t talk that way,” said the doctor, and he raised a hand in protest. “It makes me tired to hear you, Blondy. Look here: Everything that I’ve heard, the girl has heard — and more!”

Again there was that guilty start from Charlie Loring.

“About what?” he gasped.

“Everything, Blondy. Everything!” said the merciless doctor. “We know all about you now from A to Z!”

Blondy winced and closed his eyes. The gray pallor which overspread his face made the sick pallor of the moment before seem the color of hearty youth.

“Tell me everything you know!” he said at last.

“You seem sort of cut up about even guessing at what we know,” said the doctor sternly.

“Well,” gasped Blondy, “everybody has something on his conscience, in one shape or another. They all got something. How would you like to have folks know everything that ever went on in your brain, doc?”

“Why,” said the doctor, “I might blush, my son, but I should never tremble!”

“Tremble?”

“That’s what I said — tremble! Which is what you would do, Blondy, if we were to tell what we know.”

“I don’t believe it,” murmured Charlie Loring savagely. “I’ve got nothing against me — much!”

“Nothing much?” echoed the doctor. “Do you call this nothing much?”

He leaned and whispered in the ear of the youth.

Then he stepped back and saw in the wide eyes of the sick man a great terror. But almost immediately the fear vanished, and in its place there was a contemptuous unconcern.

“Nobody would believe you if you was to tell that,” said Charlie Loring. “Besides, what sort of proof can you rake up against me, doc?”

“Doesn’t that sound like enough?” asked the doctor grimly. “Then listen to this.”

This time he remained bowed at the ear of Loring, whispering for some time. And, as he reached the end of each sentence, he would half straighten, and then, observing upon the face of the wounded man an expression as of one who had just been struck a brutal blow, he would lean hastily down again and strike once more. Until finally Charlie Loring went crimson and then white and pressed both of his trembling hands across his face.

When Charlie covered his face, the doctor, as though satisfied, stepped back and left Loring to digest the substance of those whispers, while he walked back and forth through the room. And there was a sort of strut to his stride, as the pace of one who has done a good deed. Yet it seemed a very cruel thing that he had done to poor Charlie Loring, Blondy the big puncher of the Bennett Ranch.

He turned again to his patient and this time saw that Blondy had turned his head so as to observe him, and in the eyes of the patient there was a consuming, a withering hatred. It made the doctor start, and then, shrugging his shoulders, he cast the horror from him.

Again he went to Blondy.

“I’ll tell you the crowning hell of all your case, Loring,” he said. “I’ll tell you at once. It’s this: the girl wanted to marry you before because she thought that you were a sort of a knight that had just stepped out of the pages of one of the old fool books that she’d been reading. And now she wants to marry you to save you from yourself!”

He made a gesture, calling heaven to witness the prodigious absurdity of this. And then he strode up and down the room through two or three turns.

“It’s ghastly! It’s positively ghastly!” he declared to the world at large and to Blondy Loring in particular. Then he paused beside the bed and shook his forefinger at the sufferer.

“But you can bet your bottom dollar that matters will go no farther than this!” he vowed. “You can lay your last cent on that, Loring. And the reason that I’m telling you all of the things that I know about you is so that you will be in my power — and know that you are in my power!”

He looked down thoughtfully.

“If you tell what you know,” said Loring, “you break your oath which you took when you became a doctor.”

The doctor glanced up hastily and, as he did so, saw the face of Blondy suddenly convulsed to a wolfish ferocity. A veritable devil had peered out for the instant, as from behind a mask.

“Break my oath?” asked the doctor sadly. “That, Loring, is something I never expected that I could do. But my honor as a doctor is worth less than the soul of this girl. Never dream, Loring, that I’ll let it be thrown away on you!”

Loring raised his hand in sudden surrender and closed his eyes as though physically, mentally he had given way under the sudden strain. But it was a false surrender.

“You’ll try nothing like that?” asked the doctor.

“Nothing like that,” whispered Charlie Loring.

But his mind was ceaselessly revolving the problem. There was some way of evading the danger from the doctor, and he would find that way.