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By Root 312 0

the creek. Once Belle got there the party was ruined, because the half dirty Morgan jokes started right away, and the way she dressed made you feel the place had turned into a joint. I don't know what she did to clothes, but soon as she got them on they weren't clean any more, and they let you see more than you wanted to see. All she would take for supper was milk, and she kept explaining she had had to see Danny before Wash and Kady went away, though when they were going away, if they were going away, was something that nobody but her seemed to know about. And how much attention she paid to Danny, now at last she could see him once more, was about one look and a wave of the hand. In between, she seemed to be thinking about something, and even the dirty jokes didn't get the pounding she generally gave them. Belle always told a joke three times, once to tell it, once to tell it over again because maybe you didn't understand it, and once to holler and whoop at how funny it was. So when Jane fixed her a place to sleep in the front room, and she said she wanted to turn in, nobody put up any argument. Wash was staying at the Black Diamond Hotel in Carbon City, but he and Kady wanted to talk how they would get married, so they went off in his car, and Jane and I took our walk, trying to figure out Belle. "She's quite a lot thinner, Jane, and don't look like a fat little wood pigeon any more, but at that she don't look so bad, considering it's eighteen years since she went away."

"At night she don't."

"Of course candle light is not like sun."

"It's not the light, it's the fever. In the evening, when she's running over two degrees, her eyes are bright and her cheeks are red and she really looks pretty. But in the morning, when she's running below normal, she looks awful. Her face is gray, she coughs all the time, and her eyes have that look they get, like they see something far off."

"All this is the consumption?"

"She's got it, bad."

"I'm sorry."

"But what's she doing here?"

"If you ask me, it's got nothing to do with us, and nothing to do with Danny. Any time you try to figure Belle out, you can begin with Moke and go on from there."

"I don't think so."

"She's changed, then."

"She and Moke haven't got along since Danny came. Until then she didn't pay any attention to what Kady and I thought about him, and they got along all right. But soon as Danny came they started to fight, and there's more to it than they ever let on to anybody but themselves."

"Like what?"

"I don't know."

Chapter 7

How long it had gone on I don't know, but it seemed that all my life I had heard it, this voice out there in the night, calling my name and beating on the door of the cabin. I wasn't in the cabin. I was in the stable, asleep in the bunk I used there, so by the time I got outside, Kady was already coming around from the back door. She lit the carbide lamp we had used in the mine, and when the light cut the darkness, there was Moke, whimpering and wailing and slobbering at the mouth. "Kady, I swear to God I never knew she was nowhere near here. I never even knew it was her till I threw her off me, where she was trying to kill me, and lit a match and seen the blood."

"What blood?"

"From her mouth! It's pouring out."

"You know what to do with her when she gets taken like that. Did you do it, or are you scared so bad you forgot everything?"

"I left her lay, right on the floor of my shack, just like I'm supposed to do, and come on down here for help. I run all the way. But she's never had nothing like this before."

"It's her lung, Jess."

"I know. I'll get a doctor."

"No, the first thing is to run me up there to his shack or as close as we can get to it. Then you run into Carbon City for a doctor, and the best way is to wake up Wash and have him bring the hotel doctor. But leave that part to him. You get back here right away with the main thing, which is ice, to pack her side in, so it chills the blood, and makes a clot inside, to stop that bleeding. Lots of it. Cracked ice if you can get it, but any kind of ice right away