Cowboy Short Stories, November 1939 — page 71: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

72 COWBOY SHORT STORIES was content to lie there and watch this vi- brant, tanned ranch girl come and go as she moved about her work. Once she led a shy, tow-headed button into the room. She told Cheyenne the button was her son, Jimmy Mackay. It wasn’t until Jimmy stum- bled against a chair that the Cheyenne Kid realized that the boy was blind. As the days passed, Cheyenne cursed more and more the fate which kept him here. Hell, if he stayed much longer, obed- iently swallowing the things Nancy Mackay brought him to eat, following her and the button with his eyes every time they came into the room, he might go soft. He might forget that Mackay was a double-crosser and must pay a double-crosser’s price. The Cheyenne Kid told the Mackays his name was Tex. They accepted that without comment, asked him no questions. He saw very little of Doc Mackay. Mackay was a typical, harassed country doctor, worn and tired from overwork and insufficient sleep. But it was something more than overwork which was etching those haggard, bitter lines around the young medico’s grim lips, Cheyenne decided. Doc Mackay was terribly wortied about something. His wife was worried too. More than once, Cheyenne noticed a discouraged droop to her sensi- tive mouth, the suspicion of tears in her blue eyes. The Cheyenne Kid was relieved to see that Mackay didn’t recognize him. That would come later, he told himself grimly, when Mackay would find himself looking into the muzzle of Cheyenne’s forty-five. Sometimes Cheyenne would be thinking about that when young Jimmy came into the room and grinned at him. Then Chey- enne would feel guilty and ashamed, in spite of himself. He liked the kid a hell of a lot. And Jimmy liked him too. Whenever the button listened to Cheyenne’s voice, there was a light of adoration in his small face that made the Cheyenne Kid ache with re- gret of the kind of a life he had led—a life which set him apart from people like Nancy Mackay and Jimmy. Then, one night Cheyenne awoke to hear low voices beyond a closed door. “I can’t get a loan anywhere,’ Doc Mackay was saying. “I’ve got no security to offer. The ranch is mortgaged to the hilt now.” Cheyenne heard a chair scrape back, heard footsteps pacing back and forth, then Mackay’s voice again. “IT tell you, it’s driving me crazy, Nance. One thousand dollars would pay for an operation that would make my boy see. One thousand—and I’m not man enough to get hold of it. I’m a failure. “If I weren't, I’d be a successful surgeon now, with a big hospital back East. I’d be the kind of a surgeon who could operate on Jimmy and make him well. But all I am is a kind of glorified horse doctor, a dumb pill- thrower. I can’t even earn a decent living for you and the boy. You'd be better off without me. You were getting along all right when you had that lunchroom job in town, before you married me—’ “Jim, stop it!’ Nancy Mackay protested sharply. “Is it your fault if most of your patients are too poor to pay their bills? Is it your fault that Rance Bardell and his rustler crew are making all of us ranchers poor? Don’t worry about the thousand, Jim. We'll get it, somehow—sometime.”’ “Sometime may be too late,” Doc Mackay muttered. “If we wait too long, maybe the boy’s eyes will be injured beyond repair. I'm going to get that money right away. I know a way to get it—” ‘‘No, Jim,’ Nancy Mackay’s voice cut in. “You promised you’d never step outside the law again. If anything should happen to you—I couldn’t stand it. I love you so, Jim. I need you. And Jimmy needs you—’’ TT Cheyenne Kid pulled the covers over his ears, but Nancy Mackay’s voice seemed to vibrate through his brain cease- lessly, over and over: “I love you so, Jim—” A fiery pain licked across Cheyenne’s back. It was the old trouble again. That lawman’s slug, killing him. Cheyenne told himself he couldn’t put off that operation much longer. Maybe it was too late, even now, to hope for a cure. He sat up. When his head cleared, he got out of bed, pulled on his clothes. He would leave now. He told himself he would have left long before this if he'd been able. It had been intoler- able being in the same house with the Mackays. But neither Nancy Mackay’s kind- ness nor the fact that Doc Mackay had saved Cheyenne’s life was going to change the Kid’s plans any. The Cheyenne Kid would show no mercy. Doc Mackay hadn’t given a damn what GOMIGIOO S Go