SHE looked up from the fire she was kindling in the small wood heater; a stout, rosy-faced old woman, the sole occupant of the humble little eating house at Socorro Junction. The Spanish name means succor, and probably marks the place where some man or party in dire need was rescued. The man who entered had a muffled feminine figure clinging to his arm, and he glanced about suspiciously as he asked, in a voice which held a sharp note of anxiety: “Is this an eating house—a hotel?”

“This here’s the Wagon Tire House,” returned its proprietor, rising and shaking the piÑon slivers from her checked apron.

“Have you rooms—a parlor—some place where this lady can be alone?”

Without awaiting an answer, he turned and whispered to the veiled woman, who shuddered and shrank; but whether from his touch or with fear of publicity was not apparent. “Take off your things—put back that infernal veil,” he muttered, angrily. “There’s nothing here to hurt you.”

The removal of the wraps showed a round, innocent face, with its own pretensions to beauty. Such prettiness as it held, however, was just now stricken out of it by the blanched terror which dominated every curve and line.

“No, sir,” said the old woman, surveying them both. “This ain’t rightly a hotel. I’ve——”

“Why do you call it one, then?” interrupted the man, angrily. He placed his companion in a chair, and stood between her and the proprietor of the eating house. “Who are you, anyhow?” he asked, as he removed his shining silk hat, and mopped his brow with a snowy handkerchief.

“I’m Huldy Sarvice. Most folks calls me Aunt Huldy,” she returned, looking her guest up and down.

The man did not volunteer any return information; but Huldah, who was given to communing with herself in regard to her patrons and summing them up instantly, supplied the deficiency with the muttered statement: “And you’re a gambler. Everything about you jest hollers ‘Gambler.’” Her eye fell upon the little figure behind the tall, black-clad one. It rested a moment on the crude, pathetically approbative countenance which should have been rosy and smiling, “You’re——” she halted in her unspoken sentence. “I’m blessed if I know what you are. You don’t look like no sport’s wife. You sure don’t look like anything worse. I guess you’re just a fool. Poor little soul! I see mighty deep waters in front of your feet.”

Even while these things were flitting through Aunt Huldah’s mind, she had been automatically answering “yes” and “no” to the somewhat heated inquiries of her would-be guest. Now, with a quick patter of little running feet, a small Mexican boy, with half a pie, burst in from the kitchen, followed closely by the irate cook, who was also his mother. Huldah held her plump sides and shook with mirth as the little rascal doubled and turned among the chairs and table legs, snatching a hasty bite now and again from his stolen pie. Nobody knew better than the proprietor of the Wagon Tire House—kind, motherly soul—that the threats the Mexican woman hurled after her offspring were threats only.

At last, when the final morsel was bolted, Jose permitted himself to be caught, and burst into loud conventional sobs as his mother berated him. The slim, pale little woman crouching in her chair, her great furred cloak—painfully new, as was all the rest of her expensive wear—drawn tight around her, watching this scene with wide, horrified eyes, sprang up and, in spite of the man’s restraining hand, ran to the child.

“Oh! Don’t strike him!” she cried, kneeling before the boy, her face bathed in tears. “You’ll be sorry—sorry—if you do! I had a little boy—a baby—and I used to—to forget sometimes and—and be harsh——”

The man caught her shoulder and attempted to raise her. She shook him off almost as though she had not noticed it.

“Louise! Louise!” he said. “This is ridiculous. Sit down. She isn’t going to hurt the child.”

But the kneeling woman went on exactly as though she had not heard. “You mustn’t strike him. If anything should happen——” she hesitated. “My little boy——”

She stole a look over her shoulder at the angry man.

The Mexican woman’s doubled fist came down, unclinched and became fingers, which fumbled at her kitchen apron. “Is your young son dead, seÑora?” she asked, in an awed voice.

“Louise!” remonstrated the man.

The girl whom he addressed shivered, caught the boy in her arms, and sobbed wildly: “No, no—not dead, I wish he were. I wish I were dead!”

The man leaned down and lifted her bodily to her feet. “Here,” he said, pushing her not overgently back into the chair, “you sit down and get your nerves quiet.” He turned almost savagely to Huldah Sarvice, demanding: “There is surely some place you can give us where my wife can be alone. You see how it is here.”

Huldah nodded, looking at her visitor with shrewd, kindly eyes. “I ’spect your wife”—she put a little stress on the two words, and the girl winced, her pale face reddening—“I jest think she’s better off here among people.”

The man made a muttered objection, but Huldah went serenely on: “My lodgin’ rooms is acrost the street, and I don’t know’s I’ve got a vacant one. They’s a man with a broken leg in one of ’em, an’ a feller that’s been drinkin’ a little too much is in another. Two more of ’em is locked up by the men that rents ’em. Best sit here till I can git you a little supper; mebby that’ll cheer her up some.”

All the time she talked, Aunt Huldah had been watching the little woman’s face and behavior, which were those of a creature under some desperate pressure; and as she concluded and turned back to her fire building, she made her decision. “That man—husband or not—has done something that she’s knownst to. He’s a gambler; mebby he’s knifed some feller acrost the cards; mebby he’s gone further. But my guess is that she knows of some crime he’s done, an’ he’s hangin’ onto her for fear she’ll tell.”

She rose from the now kindled fire for another covert survey of her guests, who were deep in a whispered conference. “Yes, and she’d jest about do it, too. She wants to give him away.” Again, after a moment of keen observation on her way to the kitchen, she added: “An’ he knows it.”

As she went on with her supper, aided by the Mexican woman, who was used to her habit of arguing with herself aloud, she muttered: “What next, then?” and answered her own question: “Why, her life ain’t safe with him—not a minit!”

Having come to which conclusion, she gave her helper a few hasty directions, wiped her hands on her apron and marched back to the front room, where all day long the dining table stood set out with its pink mosquito-net covering. “I’ve got a room of my own,” she began, abruptly. “’Tain’t much of a place, but there’s a bed in it, where your wife could lay down.”

The two were on their feet in a moment. Huldah laid hold of the cringing little shoulder nearest her, and turned to the door. “It’ll be nigh to three hours,” she observed, “till the south-bound comes through. I shan’t be usin’ the room, and she might as well git a little rest there.”

“I’ll take her over, and stay with her,” agreed the man, reaching for his hat.

“No—no, sir, that was not my offer,” objected the old woman. “My room and my bed she can have—because she needs ’em. But it ain’t fixed up, and I’ll jest have to ask you to let her go by herself.”

The man’s pale countenance went a shade whiter; a peculiar trick he had of showing his teeth without smiling became suddenly apparent. It rendered his handsome face repulsive for the moment, as he grasped the arm which was not clinging to Aunt Huldah. “Come back here. Sit down. What do you mean by pretending that you—that I——”

He jerked the girl toward him with such force that she cried out faintly, and Huldah’s gray eyes, the one beautiful feature of her homely countenance, narrowed and sparkled. “You go and get us something to eat,” he blustered. “Food is what she needs. She isn’t well enough to be alone; and you won’t let me take her over and stay with her.”

“Please go away,” begged the sobbing girl, looking pleadingly at Huldah. “You—it only makes it worse. I—I’m all right here. Please go away.”

And Huldah went, glancing back to see that the man had seated himself once more in front of the huddled figure, looming above her, bending toward her; and that urgent whispered parley had begun again.

The proprietor of the Wagon Tire House was just turning her sizzling steak in its skillet when the door behind her opened a crack, and the gambler, as she had mentally dubbed him, put his head through.

“Come here,” he said.

Huldah grunted. “I am here,” she returned. “What is it you want?”

“I want to speak to you”—impatiently.

“Speak,” suggested the old woman.

“But I’ve got something to say that I don’t care to yell to every fool on the street.” He stared malevolently at the broad, blue calico back and half turned to retrace his steps; but no, he needed a woman’s help—he must have it; and he finally began, in an anxious, reluctant half whisper: “What do you think of her? Is she really sick?”

“I think she’ll die, all right,” answered the old woman, without turning her head or glancing up from her cooking.

“You do!” sneered the man, with a sudden loudness of tone. “You think she’ll die! You women are always using that word. I never saw a woman in a tight place yet but what she began whining that she believed it would kill her—that she’d die.”

“Well, and they die, too, sometimes—don’t they?”

A little sound or movement in the room behind him brought the man’s glance around with such a malignant scowl that Huldah, noting it, deemed her time to speak out had come. “See here, sir,” she began, turning away from the stove—“Manuelita, tend to that steak, and don’t let it burn, for goodness’ sake—see here, sir, you know a lot more’n I do about what ails that woman in there. But I know enough to know that she’s goin’ to die if she’s driv’ like you’ve been drivin’ her.”

“Like I’ve been driving her!” echoed the man, angrily. “She’s the one that’s making it hot for me. There’s nothing the matter with her.”

“All right,” returned Huldah, applying herself once more to the cooking. “If there’s nothing the matter of her, what did you come out here to ask me about it for?” Sudden rage mastered her as she worked over the steak gravy. She whirled and shook a finger at her interlocutor so sharply that he drew back. “I tell you that little creatur’ in the room behind you is a-goin’ to die if she ain’t let up on,” she finished, impressively.

Fear, indecision and rage contended upon the man’s face. “Oh, Lord!” he ejaculated, “if one woman can’t raise enough row, there’s always another to help her. Well, come in here. You can take her over. To your own room, mind—nowhere else. And let nobody else see her or talk to her. You’ll come right back, and not stay with her.” He looked at Huldah Sarvice’s strong, benevolent face, which smiled upon him inscrutably. “I expect I’m a fool to risk it,” he muttered. “But—well, come in.”

“Stay with her!” echoed Huldah, tossing up her head with a peculiar, free motion which belonged to her in times of excitement. “Stay with her? I don’t want to stay with your wife. I’ve got my work to do. I don’t spy on nobody—no matter how bad things looks for ’em.”

She had spoken the latter words in an undertone, as she gathered the drooping girl and her belongings upon a capable arm. Now, as a heavy, drumming roar became audible, she added, in excitement: “Land sakes! There’s a train. No, it can’t be no train; but for sure them’s engines out on the Magdalena Branch! I’ve got to fly ’round and git supper for them train crews. All the boys o’ the Magdalena Branch eats with me.” She made as though to release her charge, saying sharply: “I guess I ain’t hardly time to take your wife acrost—let alone hangin’ ’round to chat with her.”

“Hi, colonel! That big trunk of yours bu’st open when we tried to get it off the freight,” announced a man’s voice in the doorway. “Want to come over and see to it?”

This was the help that Huldah could have asked for. The man addressed as “colonel” turned from one to the other with a worried look. “I guess I’ve got to,” he replied to the brakeman. “How bad is it?”

“I didn’t see it,” returned the other, “but Billy said it was plumb bu’st, and the things fallin’ out. It’ll have to be roped, I guess.”

As the men hurried away in the direction of the station, Huldah turned briskly and tightened her arm about the girl. “Now, honey,” she whispered. And they hastened across the straggling red mud road in the face of a shower whose large drops were beginning to pelt down like hail. Aunt Huldah gathered up her petticoats and ran. “I’ll have to git them winders shut,” she panted. “I hope to gracious Manuelita’s got the sense to shut ’em in the other house.”

The roaring of engines which Huldah had mentioned as on the Magdalena Branch came more distinctly now. “Looks like there must be three or four of ’em—engines—one right behind t’other,” the old woman muttered. “I’ll jest git you fixed comfortable over here, honey, and shut them winders, an’ then I must run back.”

But when she would have done so, the girl clung to her with shaking hands. “Oh, don’t leave me!” she sobbed. “Don’t let that man know where I am. Hide me.”

“He ain’t your husband, then?” hazarded Huldah.

“No—no—no!” moaned the girl. “My husband’s a freight conductor on this road—Billy Gaines. You’ve seen him. He told me about you and the Wagon Tire House—about your having a wagon tire in front of it to beat on to call to meals. I expect he’s eaten many a meal here. He might come now; and then if he saw me—and that man—and—oh, hide me!”

Aunt Huldah let the head rest upon her shoulder, the shamed face hidden. “Who is this feller they call colonel, child?” she asked, gently.

“He owned—the house we lived in—in El Paso,” came the muffled explanation. “He’s rich, and—and very refined.”

“I know a place that’s full of jest such refined fellers,” muttered Huldah, angrily.

“Billy didn’t seem to love the baby as he—as—and Colonel Emerson is very fond of children—he’s devoted to my baby—or I thought he was. And he said that it was cause enough for me to leave Billy. And if I should leave him—if I should leave Billy—if I should get a divorce from him—he said—Colonel Emerson said——”

“Don’t tell me what he said, honey child,” urged Huldah. “What’d he do? Where’s your baby?”

Oh, then the poor little mother clung with strangling sobs to the stronger, older woman. “I’m so scared,” she whispered. “He got me all these nice things—ain’t my clothes awfully pretty?—and he promised we’d bring the baby with us. He says he’s taking me to his mother, and that I can stay there until I get my divorce—because, you know, Billy has treated me awfully mean, and he don’t care—Billy—he don’t care a thing on earth about me nor the baby any more.”

She reiterated these last words with a piteous look of entreaty into the kind gray eyes bent upon her, repeated them as a little child repeats a lesson which has been laboriously taught to it. Huldah looked at her with infinite pity. “Where’s your baby?” she repeated.

“That’s what scares me!” cried the wife of Billy Gaines. “He said—Colonel Emerson said—when he met me at the station, and he hadn’t sent for the baby like he promised to—that he was going to have some man that he knew go and get the boy and take it to his mother’s house, but that it wouldn’t do for it to travel with us, because we could be traced by it. I”—the pretty lips trembled—“I never was away from my baby a night in my life. I don’t know if anybody knows where to get his little night drawers. He always wears a little sack, extra, at night, because he’s a great one for throwing his arms out and getting the covers off them——”

She was running on like a crazed thing, with these little fond details, when Huldah Sarvice’s strong voice interrupted her. “Thank God!” said the old woman, heaving a mighty sigh of relief. “If you’re a good mother, you’re worth savin’. I’m goin’ right over now an’ telegraft to your husband.”

“Oh, no! Don’t do that!” cried the other. “He’ll be killed. You mustn’t. Don’t. He’ll be killed!”

“Killed!” snorted Huldah. Hers was the rough-and-ready code of the West. “Killed—and serve him right!”

“I don’t mean Colonel Emerson,” remonstrated the frantic girl. “Sometimes I think he’s a bad man—an awful man—anyhow, he’ll just have to stand it if anything happens. It’s Billy I’m thinking about. The colonel has shot three or four men—he’ll kill my poor Billy——”

Huldah smiled to herself in the gathering darkness. The problem was becoming easier and easier. But the girl’s strangled, sobbing voice went on: “And I couldn’t bear to see Billy. I don’t dare to have him see me when he knows about this. I can’t face him. If you say you’re going to telegraph to him, I’ll run right straight to Colonel Emerson and get him to take me away somewhere.”

Huldah puckered her lips—had she been a man she would have whistled. She saw no way but to go with the girl and fight it out with her tempter. “Come,” she said, a little roughly for Huldah. “I’ll go back with you.”

She whom the old woman would have saved turned like a hunted thing, as to elude her benefactress. Huldah clung to her arm, and they struggled thus to the doorway. Here the thunder of engines toward Magdalena once more arrested the attention of the proprietor of the Wagon Tire House. It had increased to a deafening uproar; the rain fell like bullets; and even as they drew back, frightened, there was no street to be seen—only a flood of swirling yellow water, running like a tail race between the lodging rooms and the little eating house. “My Lord!” groaned Huldah. “I might ’a’ knowed ’twa’n’t engines. Hit’s a cloudburst, above—the big arroyo’s up.”

It was true. The red gash which through nine-tenths of the year lay dry and yawning beside the tracks of the little Magdalena Branch railway was brimmed with the same tide which swept the street. And down it, as they looked, came a wall of writhing, tormented water, nearly five feet high.

There had been a cloudburst in the mountains above, whence came such trickle as fed the arroyo in the dry season. Twice before had this thing happened, and the little eating house stood upon stilts of cottonwood logs to be above the flood line, while the lodging house was on higher ground.

The watching women saw the flood reach the railway track, beat upon its embankment with upraised, clinched hands, tear at it with outspread fingers in an access of fury, wrench up the rails yet bolted to the ties, and fling them forward on its crest as it plunged on. The two little houses, standing isolated from the town and nearer to the railroad tracks than any other, were now in an open waste of water, the current sweeping swiftly between them, an eddy lapping in their back yards.

As Huldah saw Manuelita’s frightened face at a window of the Wagon Tire House, she made a trumpet of her plump hands and shouted: “Don’t you be scared, Manuelita—hear? Keep up the fire, and make a b’iler of coffee. I’ll be over soon’s I can git thar!”

Billy Gaines’ wife looked down at the water with relief. “He can’t come across that,” she murmured.

“No, he can’t,” agreed Aunt Huldah. “An’ you come an’ lay down on my bed. Slip off your shoes, an’ loosen your clothes, but don’t undress. This house is safe, I reckon; but no knowin’ what might happen.”

All that night Huldah Sarvice worked, with the strength of a man and the knowledge of a seasoned frontiers-woman. The injured were brought to the lodging house or the eating house, just as it happened. When a hastily improvised boat came to their aid, she went in it over to see that some refreshment was prepared for the workers; and later, when the sullen flood receded to a languid swell, she paddled back and forth on foot, her petticoats gathered in one sweep of her arm, and whatever was necessary to carry held fast with the other.

“You’ll get your death, Aunt Huldah,” remonstrated the agent, when she had struggled across to the station to send a telegram to Billy Gaines.

“I reckon not,” she returned, with twinkling eye. “Seems like you can’t drown me. I’ve been flooded out six times; twict at El Captain, once at Blowout and now three times here; and I ain’t drownded yet. This is a good long telegraft that I’m a-sendin’; but I reckon the railroad won’t grudge it to me.”

“You bet they won’t,” returned the boy, heartily, as he addressed himself to his key. “I’ll add a message of my own to a fellow I know at El Paso, and get him to hunt Billy up if he’s on duty to-night.”

Huldah beamed. “That’s awful good of you,” she returned; “but if you had seen that little woman over there a runnin’ from one window to another, a wringin’ her hands and carryin’ on so that I’m ’most afraid to leave her alone, you’d be glad to do it.”

As she splashed back to her tired helpers and the injured at the Wagon Tire House, the old woman muttered to herself: “He’s a good boy. It’s better to have good friends than to be rich;” and never reflected for an instant that no personal benefit had been conferred upon herself in the matter.

With the simple wisdom of a good woman who knows well the human heart, Huldah set poor Louise Gaines to attending upon the worst injured of the flood sufferers, and took her promptly in to see the one corpse which so far had been found floating in an eddy after the waters receded a little. It was that of a young Mexican girl from the village above. The little fair woman went down on her knees beside the stretcher. “Oh, I wish it was me!” she cried. “Why couldn’t it have been me? She’s young, and I expect she wanted to live—why didn’t God take me?”

“Now, now,” remonstrated Aunt Huldah, with a touch of wholesome sternness. “I didn’t bring you in here to carry on about your own troubles—that’s selfish. I brung you to make this poor girl look fit to be laid away. You can do it better’n I can, and there’s nobody else for to do it. Likely her folks is all drownded, too.”

And Billy Gaines’ wife rose up and wiped her eyes, and went to work in something of the spirit that Huldah had hoped.

It was five o’clock in the gray of the morning when the wrecking train from El Paso came through; and Billy Gaines was aboard it. The poor little wife had had attacks of hysteric terror all night long at the thought of his coming; and now she lay exhausted and half sleeping upon the lounge in the dining room. Huldah herself felt a little qualm of fear as she opened the kitchen door to the tall figure buttoned in the big ulster. For the first time, she wondered where the man Emerson was, and hoped that he had taken the one train which left Socorro going northward, just before the flood struck them. But the hope was a faint one; more likely he was up in the town, cut off from them temporarily by the water which still ran between; and when he and Billy Gaines met, she doubted not that there would be another bloody reckoning such as the West knows well.

If she had doubted, her questions would have been answered when she looked into the frank gray eyes of the man who met her, a trifle stern and very resolute. “I’ve come for my wife,” he said, breathing a little short, “and if Jim Emerson’s in the house, I want to see him.”

“Come in here,” said the old woman, drawing the newcomer into a small section of chaos which was generally known as the pantry. “I remember you now, an’ I guess you’re a decenter man than the run of ’em; but I want to have a word with you before you go in to that poor girl. You see, I want to be sure that you’ve looked on both sides of it. You pass all right among the men—I hear you well spoke of—but how many things can you ricollect that you’ve done that are jest as bad as what she’s done?”

“Plenty,” said Billy Games, almost with impatience. “I understand, Aunt Huldah.”

“Mebby you do,” said the old woman; “but I want to be sure. Where was you when this poor little soul was left to herself—and that scoundrel?”

“I was over in Mexico on a six weeks’ hunting trip.”

“You was! Well, then, after all, who done this thing—who’s really to blame?”

“I am—you bet,” came the deep-voiced answer. “I don’t hold it against you a bit, Aunt Huldah; but you’re working on the wrong trail. You think you’ve got a great big job ahead of you trying to make me see this thing right. But I’ll remind you that it’s eight hours from El Paso here—eight night hours—and your telegram was pretty complete. You left the man out; and so will I—until I meet him.” The firm jaw squared itself heavily; and Huldah sighed as she realized that the law of blood for honor must be met.

The man had carried one arm almost as though it were injured; and she now glanced down at it as he moved it and fumbled in the folds of his big overcoat. His voice softened beautifully. “I’ve got something here,” he said, “that ought to show you that I know and understand, and am going to behave myself.”

He opened his great cloak and showed, lying upon his breast asleep, a baby of about two years old, who stirred, put up a wandering little hand and murmured: “Daddy,” as he settled himself for a longer nap.

“Bless his heart!” murmured Huldah, in the richest tones of her strong, heartsome voice. She wiped the tears from her eyes on a corner of the check apron. “I guess you’ll do, Billy. You seem to have the makin’s of a tol’able decent feller in you. You’ve got the only medicine right there that your poor little, half crazy wife needs.” And she pushed him toward the door of the deserted dining room.

There was a long, agonized cry: “O—o—oh, Billy!” Then the big voice talked brokenly and gently for a time, choking sobs interrupting it; and Huldah could hear, at first, the thin, shrill terror of the woman’s tones, very sharp and pleading; finally an eloquent silence.

She glanced in to see Billy Gaines sitting with what she called “both of his children—for the little woman’s ’most as much of a baby as her boy”—asleep; the mother with her head upon his shoulder, while the child lay in the laps of both of them.

“Lord, but that’s a sight for sore eyes!” she ruminated, as she lifted the coffee boiler from the stove and sent Manuelita to lie down and get a rest.

“But there’s the colonel,” she pursued. “There’s goin’ to be awful times when him and Billy Gaines meets.” Then she smiled at herself and went on: “Jest listen to a old woman like me tryin’ to tell how it ort to come out. We’re all God’s children. I reckon the colonel’s His child”—she seemed to have a little doubt upon this point—“an’ I reckon God’ll take care of him.”

As if in answer to her half-spoken thought, there came the tramp of stumbling feet, somebody beat upon the door, and a voice called: “Mrs. Sarvice! Aunt Huldah! We’ve just found another body over by the railroad tracks. Can we bring him in here, or shall we take it over to the other house?”

Huldah hurried out, to turn down the blanket they had drawn over the stark form and look upon the dead gambler’s face. “Carry him to the lodgin’ house, pore feller,” she said, gently.

God had taken care of the colonel.