Free Death Rides the Night by Brett Halliday Page B

feeding her a spoonful of soothing sirup to relax the spasmodic contractions in her throat.
    When her husband came in an hour later Molly’s fever had gone down and she was breathing easily. She had just dropped off to sleep in her mother’s arms, and Nancy hadn’t carried her back to her crib yet. She sat on the side of the bed with the baby cuddled in her arms, and with her brown hair in two long braided plaits hanging down on each side of her face she looked no older than a schoolgirl herself.
    She lifted her head and smiled reassuringly at Ethan when he stopped in the doorway. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she told him softly. “Molly was restless and I took her up, but she’s gone back to sleep now.”
    Some of the worry went away from Ethan’s dark, serious face, but Nancy noted instantly that some of it remained. He said, “I hurried right in when I saw the light burning. If you’re sure Molly’s all right I’ll go back and put up my hawse.”
    Nancy nodded and said, “Go ahead, Ethan. I’ll put Molly back in her crib while you’re gone. Then, would you like it if I boiled up a pot of coffee. There’s some of those fresh doughnuts left.”
    Ethan Page said, “I reckon not. Somehow I haven’t got any hankering for food tonight.” He turned and went back out the front door to take his horse to the stable and unsaddle him.
    Nancy’s smooth girlish brow knitted in a little frown of unease as her husband went outside. It wasn’t like Ethan to refuse coffee and raised doughnuts late at night. His voice sounded different too. To Nancy, who’ knew and loved every tonal shading of his voice, it sounded harsh tonight. Not as though he was merely tired from his long ride into Dutch Springs and back after a hard day on the ranch, but as though some new difficulty had arisen in town, some new development to plague him just when it seemed that things were going smoothly.
    Nancy Page sighed as she got up from the edge of the bed and carried Molly in to her crib. She settled her gently and tucked in the covers about the sleeping body, hovered over her for a moment with a cool hand on the small forehead to assure herself that the fever was indeed gone, and then went back into the other bedroom.
    She was a tall, sturdy girl, not yet twenty-five though the mother of a six-year-old son. She was preoccupied as she got into bed, moving over to the far side to give Ethan room to lie down when he came in. She wondered if anything had gone wrong with the loan Ethan had arranged to get from Mr. Harlow. The thought brought a sharp stab of fear to her heart. That loan meant so much to them. In the beginning, Ethan had been dubious about the wisdom of putting a mortgage on the small ranch as security, but in the end had decided it would be foolish not to do so.
    There had been so little cash in the seven years of their marriage. Every penny Ethan could get his hands on had gone back into the ranch, and there were always a dozen places for every dollar. Since her marriage, Nancy had had two new dresses. Both were cotton and she had made them both herself. Often, they had been unable to buy the food they wanted and the things the children needed from Mr. Winters’ general store. Oh, it wasn’t that Mr. Winters had refused them credit. He trusted the Valley ranchers implicitly and never bothered them about their bills. But Ethan and Nancy were young and desperately determined to get ahead, and in the beginning they had entered into a solemn compact that they would never allow themselves to get over a hundred dollars in debt at any one time.
    Somehow, Ethan Page had a horror of being in debt. His father had been a shiftless man who stayed deeply in debt all his life. After his father’s death it had taken every penny Ethan could scrape together to clear the estate of debt and pay his father’s funeral expenses. And on that day