Then poor Ann Mary was sick, indeed, I promise you!  They shut her up in the inner room of the little log house, although it was the end of May, and the weather was fit for the angels.  They darkened the one window, and kept the door closed, and put the sick girl to bed between two mountains of feathers.  They gave her “sut” (soot) tea and “herb-drink” and steeped butternut bark, and goodness knows what else; and they tiptoed in and out, and stared at her mournfully, and shook their heads and pursed up their lips, until it is a wonder to me that Ann Mary did not die at once.

II.

Very likely she would have died, if one day in June there had not come through Hillsboro a trader on his way from “over the mountain” up to Canada, looking for furs.  That morning, when Hannah got up, she found the fire in their big fireplace completely extinguished.  She snatched up the warming-pan—­not a polished brass one with a smooth, turned handle, like those you see in Colonial museums, but a common iron pan, fastened to a hickory sapling; and she went as fast as she could, without running—­for girls never ran “before folks” in those days—­over to the nearest neighbor, to “borrow a handful of fire.”

The neighbors were just getting up, and their fire was too low to spare any, so Hannah had to wait until some hardwood sticks got well to burning.  While she waited, the trader, who was staying overnight in that house, went on with a long story about an Indian herb-doctor, of whose cures he had heard marvelous tales, three days’ journey back.  It seemed that the Indian’s specialty was curing girls who had gone into a decline, and that he had never failed in a single case he had undertaken.

You can imagine how Hannah’s loving, anxious heart leaped up, and how eagerly she questioned the trader about the road to the settlement where the Indian lived.  It was in a place called Heath Falls, on the Connecticut River, the trader told her; but he could not find words strong enough to advise her against trying the trip.

The trail lay through thick woods, filled with all the terrors of early New Englanders—­bears and wolves and catamounts.  And when she got to Heath Falls, she would find it a very different place from Hillsboro, where people took you in gladly for the sake of the news you brought from the outside world.  No, the folks in Heath Falls were very grand.  They traveled themselves, and saw more strangers than a little.  You had to pay good money for shelter and food, and, of course, the doctor did not cure for nothing.  He was a kind man, the trader, and he did his best to keep Hannah from a wildly foolish enterprise.

But his best was not good enough.  She went home and looked at her poor Ann Mary, as white as a snowdrift, her big dark eyes ringed with black circles, and Hannah knew only two things in the world—­that there was a doctor who could cure her sister, and that she must get her to him.  She was only a child herself; she had no money, no horses, no experience; but nothing made any difference to her.  Ann Mary should go to the doctor, if Hannah had to carry her every step!