was still breathing faintly as the sun dropped behind the western hills. Shannon had not left the house all day. She felt that Custer needed her, that they all needed her, however little she could do to mitigate their grief. There was at least a sense of sharing their burden, and her fine sensibilities told her that this service of love was quite as essential as the more practical help that she would have been glad to offer had it been within her power.
She was standing in the patio with Custer, at sunset, within call of Eva’s room, as they had all been during the entire day, when a car drove up along the south drive and stopped at the patio entrance. Three of the four men in it alighted and advanced toward them.
“You are Custer Pennington?” one of them asked.
Pennington nodded.
“And you are Miss Burke—Miss Shannon Burke?”
“I am.”
“I am a deputy sheriff. I have a warrant here for your arrest.”
“Arrest!” exclaimed Custer. “For what?”
He read the warrant to them. It charged them with the murder of Wilson Crumb.
“I am sorry, Mr. Pennington,” said the deputy sheriff; “but I have been given these warrants, and there is nothing for me to do but serve them.”
“You have to take us away now? Can’t you wait—until—my sister is dying in there. Couldn’t it be arranged so that I could stay here under arrest as long as she lives?”
The deputy shook his head.
“It would be all right with me,” he said; “but I have no authority to let you stay. I’ll telephone in, though, and see what I can do. Where is the telephone?”
Pennington told him.
“You two stay here with my men,” said the deputy sheriff, “while I telephone.”
He was gone about fifteen minutes. When he returned, he shook his head.
“Nothing doing,” he said. “I have to bring you both in right away.”
“May I go to her room and see her again before I leave?” asked Custer.
“Yes,” said the deputy; but when Custer turned toward his sister’s room, the officer accompanied him.
Dr. Baldwin and one of the nurses were in the room. Young Pennington came and stood beside the bed, looking down on the white face and the tumbled curls upon the pillow. He could not perceive the slightest indication of life, yet they told him that Eva still lived. He knelt and kissed her, and then turned away. He tried to say good-by to her, but his voice broke, and he turned and left the room hurriedly.
Colonel and Mrs. Pennington were in the patio, with Shannon and the officers. The colonel and his wife had just learned of this new blow, and both of them were stunned. The colonel seemed to have aged a generation in that single day. He was a tired, hopeless old man. The heart of his boy and that of Shannon Burke went out to him and to the suffering mother from whom their son was to be taken at this moment in their lives when they needed him most. In their compassion for the older Penningtons they almost forgot the seriousness of their own situation.
At their arraignment, next morning, the preliminary hearing was set for the following Friday. Early in the morning Custer had received word from Ganado that Eva still lived, and that Dr. Baldwin now believed they might hold some slight hope for her recovery.
At Ganado, despair and anxiety had told heavily upon the Penningtons. The colonel felt that he should be in Los Angeles, to assist in the defense of his son; and yet he knew that his place was with his wife, whose need of him was even greater. Nor would his heart permit him to leave the daughter whom he worshiped, so long as even a faint spark of life remained in that beloved frame.
Mrs. Evans returned from Los Angeles the following day. She was almost prostrated by this last of a series of tragedies ordered, as it seemed, by some malignant fate for the wrecking of her happiness. She told them that Guy appeared to be hopelessly insane. He did not know his mother, nor did he give the slightest indication of any recollection of his past life, or of the events that had overthrown his reason.
At ten o’clock on Wednesday night Dr. Baldwin came into the living room, where the colonel and his wife were sitting with Mrs. Evans. For two days none of them had been in bed. They were tired and haggard, but not more so than the old doctor, who had remained constantly on duty from the moment when he was summoned. Never had man worked with more indefatigable zeal than he to wrest a young life from the path of the grim reaper. There were deep lines beneath his eyes, and his face was pale and drawn, as he entered the room and stood before them; but for the first time in many hours there was a smile upon his lips.
“I believe,” he said, “that we are going to save her.”