"If no other physician is available," protested Byrne, following slowly down the stairs, "I suppose I must see her." "If they was another within ten miles, d'you s'pose I'd call on you?" asked Hank Dwight. So saying, he led the way out onto the veranda, where the doctor was aware of a girl in a short riding skirt who stood with one gloved hand on her hip while the other slapped a quirt idly against her riding boots. CHAPTER II WORDS AND BULLETS "Here's a gent that calls himself a doc," said Hank Dwight by way of an introduction. "If you can use him, Miss Cumberland, fly to it!" And he left them alone. Now the sun lay directly behind Kate Cumberland and in order to look at her closely the doctor had to shade his weak eyes and pucker his brows; for from beneath her wide sombrero there rolled a cloud of golden hair as bright as the sunshine itself--a sad strain upon the visual nerve of Doctor Randall Byrne. He repeated her name, bowed, and when he straightened, blinked again. As if she appreciated that strain upon his eyes she stepped closer, and entered the shadow. "Doctor Hardin is not in town," she said, "and I have to bring a physician out to the ranch at once; my father is critically ill." Randall Byrne rubbed his lean chin. "I am not practicing at present," he said reluctantly. Then he saw that she was watching him closely, weighing him with her eyes, and it came to the mind of Randall Byrne that he was not a large man and might not incline the scale far from the horizontal. "I am hardly equipped--" began Byrne. "You will not need equipment," she interrupted. "His trouble lies in his nerves and the state of his mind." A slight gleam lighted the eyes of the doctor. "Ah," he murmured. "The mind?" "Yes." He rubbed his bloodless hands slowly together, and when he spoke his voice was sharp and quick and wholly impersonal. "Tell me the symptoms!" "Can't we talk those over on the way to the ranch? Even if we start now it will be dark before we arrive." "But," protested the doctor, "I have not yet decided--this precipitancy--" "Oh," she said, and flushed. He perceived that she was on the verge of turning away, but something withheld her. "There is no other physician within reach; my father is very ill. I only ask that you come as a diagnostician, doctor!" "But a ride to your ranch," he said miserably. "I presume you refer to riding a horse?" "Naturally." "I am unfamiliar with that means of locomotion," said the doctor with serious eyes, "and in fact have not carried my acquaintance with the equine species beyond a purely experimental stage. Anatomically I have a superficial knowledge, but on the one occasion on which I sat in a saddle I observed that the docility of the horse is probably a poetic fallacy."