As night crept up from the valley that stormy afternoon,
Sawyer’s Ledge was at first quite blotted out
by wind and rain, but presently reappeared in little
nebulous star-like points along the mountain side,
as the straggling cabins of the settlement were one
by one lit up by the miners returning from tunnel
and claim. These stars were of varying brilliancy
that evening, two notably so—one that eventually
resolved itself into a many-candled illumination of
a cabin of evident festivity; the other into a glimmering
taper in the window of a silent one. They might
have represented the extreme mutations of fortune in
the settlement that night: the celebration of
a strike by Robert Falloner, a lucky miner; and the
sick-bed of Dick Lasham, an unlucky one.
The latter was, however, not quite alone. He
was ministered to by Daddy Folsom, a weak but emotional
and aggressively hopeful neighbor, who was sitting
beside the wooden bunk whereon the invalid lay.
Yet there was something perfunctory in his attitude:
his eyes were continually straying to the window,
whence the illuminated Falloner festivities could
be seen between the trees, and his ears were more intent
on the songs and laughter that came faintly from the
distance than on the feverish breathing and unintelligible
moans of the sufferer.
Nevertheless he looked troubled equally by the condition
of his charge and by his own enforced absence from
the revels. A more impatient moan from the sick
man, however, brought a change to his abstracted face,
and he turned to him with an exaggerated expression
of sympathy.
“In course! Lordy! I know jest what
those pains are: kinder ez ef you was havin’
a tooth pulled that had roots branchin’ all over
ye! My! I’ve jest had ’em so
bad I couldn’t keep from yellin’!
That’s hot rheumatics! Yes, sir, I oughter
know! And” (confidentially) “the sing’ler
thing about ’em is that they get worse jest
as they’re going off—sorter wringin’
yer hand and punchin’ ye in the back to say ‘Good-by.’
There!” he continued, as the man sank exhaustedly
back on his rude pillow of flour-sacks. “There!
didn’t I tell ye? Ye’ll be all right
in a minit, and ez chipper ez a jay bird in the mornin’.
Oh, don’t tell me about rheumatics—I’ve
bin thar! On’y mine was the cold kind—that
hangs on longest—yours is the hot, that
burns itself up in no time!”
If the flushed face and bright eyes of Lasham were
not enough to corroborate this symptom of high fever,
the quick, wandering laugh he gave would have indicated
the point of delirium. But the too optimistic
Daddy Folsom referred this act to improvement, and
went on cheerfully: “Yes, sir, you’re
better now, and”—here he assumed an
air of cautious deliberation, extravagant, as all
his assumptions were—“I ain’t
sayin’ that—ef—you—was—to—rise—up”
(very slowly) “and heave a blanket or two over
