“Can’t you write it here?  Mebby we might want to change somethin’.”

“Well, if you’ll eat your dinner—­” And Doris went for pen and paper.  When she returned she found that Pete had stacked the dishes in a perilous pyramid on the floor, that the bed-tray might serve as a table on which to write.

He watched her curiously as she unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen and dated the letter.

“Jim Bailey, Concho—­that’s over in Arizona,” he said, then he hesitated.  “I reckon I got to tell you the whole thing first and mebby you kin put it down after I git through.”  Doris saw him eying the pen intently.  “You didn’t fetch the ink,” he said suddenly.

Doris laughed as she explained the fountain pen to him.  Then she listened while he told her what to say.

The letter written, Doris went to her room.  Pete lay thinking of her pleasant gray eyes and the way that she smiled understandingly and nodded—­“When most folks,” he soliloquized, “would say something or ask you what you was drivin’ at.”

To him she was an altogether wonderful person, so quietly cheerful, natural, and unobtrusively competent . . .  Then, through some queer trick of memory, Boca’s face was visioned to him and his thoughts were of the desert, of men and horses and a far sky-line.  “I got to get out of here,” he told himself sleepily.  And he wondered if he would ever see Doris Gray again after he left the hospital.

CHAPTER XXXIX

A PUZZLE GAME

Dr. Andover, brisk and professionally cheerful, was telling Pete that so far as he was concerned he could not do anything more for him, except to advise him to be careful about lifting or straining—­to take it easy for at least a month—­and to do no hard riding until the incision was thoroughly healed.  “You’ll know when you are really fit,” he said, smiling, “because your back will tell you better than I can.  You’re a mighty fortunate young man!”

“You sure fixed me up fine, Doc.  You was sayin’ I could leave here next week?”

“Yes, if you keep on improving—­and I can’t see why you should not.  And I don’t have to tell you to thank Miss Gray for what she has done for you.  If it hadn’t been for her, my boy, I doubt that you would be here!”

“She sure is one jim-dandy nurse.”

“She is more than that, young man.”  Andover cleared his throat.  “There’s one little matter that I thought best not to mention until you were—­pretty well out of the woods.  I suppose you know that the authorities will want to—­er—­talk with you about that shooting scrape—­that chap that was found somewhere out in the desert.  The chief of detectives asked me the other day when you would be around again.”

“So, when I git out of here they’re goin’ to arrest me?”

“Well, frankly, you are under arrest now.  I thought it best that you should know it now.  In a general way I gathered that the police suspect you of having had a hand in the killing of that man who was found near Sanborn.”