"Ain't we,
you old ---?"
And then and there it happened.
A new chum suggested that Jack had more than he thought aboard and was
thrown from his horse; but the new chum was repudiated with scorn and
bad words and indignation by bushmen and bushwomen alike--as indeed he
would be by any bushman who had seen a drunken rider ride.
"I learnt him to ride when he was a kiddy about so high," said old
Break-the-News Fosbery, resentfully gasping and gulping, "and Jack
wasn't thrown." It was thought at first that his horse had shied and
run him against a tree, or under an overhanging branch; but Ben Duggan
had seen it, and explained the thing to the doctor with that strange
calmness or quietness that comes to men in the midst of a life's
grief. Jack was riding loosely, and swung forward just as the filly,
a fresh young thing, threw back her head; and it struck him with
sledge-hammer force, full in the face.
He was dead, even before they got him to Anderson's Halfway Inn.
There was wild racing back to town for doctors, and some accidents;
one horse was killed and another ridden to death. Others went as a
forlorn hope in search of Doc. Wild, eccentric Yankee bush "quack,"
who had once saved one of Denver's little girls from diphtheria;
others, again, for Peter M'Laughlan, bush missionary, to face the
women--for they couldn't.
Big Ben Duggan, blubbering unashamed by the bedside, put his hand on
Mrs Denver's shoulder, as she crouched there, wild-eyed, like a hunted
thing.
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