‘Some,’ said Slim, suspicious of delirium again. * * * * * ... Another time, and they were telling him everything but what he wanted especially to know. Yes, Mexicali with a crushed jaw had kept on his pins all through that night of the explosion, until relief came. ‘He’s here in Nogales right now--jaw in a sling,’ added Cal. Elbert craftily inquired about Florabel. ‘She got broke somewhere--I didn’t hear where,’ said Slim. ‘Not so she ain’t goin’ to recover,’ finished Cal. Elbert’s lips forced him to say, ‘And little Rainbow?’ ‘Not a scratch,’ said Slim. ‘She just fainted and wasn’t there to get hurt--when that explosure took place.’ Elbert was silent. Cal’s voice took up the story: ‘As for that little Mary-woman, I’m holdin’ a letter for you she left before her parents took her up to Tucson.’ It was like splintered glass, the way Slim broke in: ‘We’d better go, Cal. Elbert ain’t lookin’ as well as he should.’ Cal arose: ‘She got all right before she left, except for one broken arm.’ Several seconds ticked, before the question: ‘Which arm?’ ‘Now it was the left arm, as I recall.’ ‘Oh, I see, she couldn’t--’ Elbert halted with a jerk. It seemed they never would go. XIV A LETTER THEY had put out the lights. Even the night-light at the far end of the hall was turned low, but sentences wrote themselves out on the ceiling; a pause, then a sentence; a pause, then another. ‘_... Could it have been the wine she gave us at supper--the barefooted old woman? I was so very thirsty!... I can’t understand. I can’t believe, yet I distinctly remember insisting that I ride that horse.... I was so horribly frightened--except when I was near you.... I couldn’t help seeing how the others turned to you.... Won’t you please believe I never acted like that before?... It was because you were so firm--that I could breathe better where you were.... And in the car--it was like hanging on a cross, wasn’t it?... Oh, won’t you get word to me that you forgive?_’ Such a stillness around each sentence. XV TUCSON HE was sitting up when Cal and Slim came again. That was the day of the telegram that his father was leaving the East and would be in Tucson in three days more. Also there were more Tucson and Border papers with a lot extra to say about Vallejo’s attack on the San Pasquali oil wells; of the rescue of the American party by Mexican government troops; but especially of the motor drive of one white man through the rebel’s lines--seventy miles north, clear through to Nogales--how the car had been found at dawn at the edge of town, the driver close to death from a gunshot wound in his left side, two American girls unconscious in the car, and another unhurt, but too scared to talk. ‘Not a drop of gas in the tank or you’d have rammed right into the Border, Elbert,’ Cal said. ‘You sure stepped on the oats,’ said Slim.