Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/279



Kate sat on the side bench listening to Mullendore's dis- jointed 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 kero- sene 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 MuUen- dore 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