Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/167

 any condition whatever. The rascal's life was leaking out in jets from the wound. A piece of ballast twisted in the fellow's own neckerchief made a tourniquet that checked the flow. When he had made this swift repair, the pressing crowd looking on with interest, he looked up with sudden inquiry into Jim Justice's walrus face.

"Did somebody shoot him?" he asked.

"Did somebody shoot him!" Larrimore repeated in derision. "Hell!"

"It looks like somebody come purty near it," Justice chuckled. "Watch out for him! he's comin' to."

The gunman, who had been lying with his face in the ballast, lifted his head in the first surge of returning senses, shaking it weakly, with the bitter revulsion that shivers the old soak after slinging down a big slug of raw whisky.

"Tastes bad to him," Justice laughed.

"It'll taste worse!" Larrimore threatened. "Comin' here shootin' up this dance!"

"Must 'a' knowed our guns was locked up in that damn baggage-room," somebody growled.

Dr. Hall was helping the object of this public displeasure to come to a sitting posture between the rails, where he weaved weakly, his long legs spread wide. He had dislodged the bandage on his wrist in his efforts to get up. Dr. Hall was clamping the spurting artery with his thumb.

"Give me a hand with him, some of you men," he appealed. "He'll bleed to death unless I get him to my office and fix this arm."

"Jail's the place for that feller," somebody said.

"And that's where he's going," Larrimore declared. "Come on here, men!"