He threw himself on the couch in the inner room, and before long a titanic snore showed that he had not over-rated his sleeping powers.
Ellen Harriott sat by Red Mick’s bedside and thought over the events of the last few weeks. As she thought she half-dozed, but woke with a start to find her patient broad awake again and trying to get at something that was under his bunk. Quietly she drew him back, for his struggles with Carew had left him weak as a child.
He looked at her with crazed eyes.
“The paper,” he said, “for the love of God, the paper. I have to take it to Gavan. ’Twill win the case. The paper.”
She tried to pacify him, but nothing would do but that she should get the mysterious paper. At last, to humour him, she dived under the bunk and found an iron camp-oven, and in it a single envelope. Just to see what was exciting him she opened the envelope, and found a crumpled piece of paper which she read over to herself. It was the original certificate of the marriage between Patrick Henry Keogh and Margaret Donohoe; if Ellen had only known it, she held in her hand the evidence to sweep away all her friend’s troubles. It so happened, however, that it conveyed nothing to her mind. She had heard much about Considine, but not a word about Keogh, and the name “Margaret Donohoe” did not strike her half-asleep mind as referring to Peggy. She put the paper away again in the camp-oven; then, feeling weary, she awoke Carew and lay down on the couch while he watched the patient.
Next morning the Doctor arrived with a trail of Red Mick’s relations after him; among them they arranged to take him into Tarrong to be operated on, and Ellen Harriott and Carew drove back to Kuryong feeling as if they had known each other all their lives.
As they drove along she wondered idly which of Red Mick’s innumerable relatives the paper referred to, and why Mick was so anxious about it; but by the time they arrived at home the matter passed from her mind, except that she remembered well enough what was written on the odd-looking little scrap.
“I will give you a certificate as a competent wardsman if ever you want one,” she said to Carew as he helped her out of the buggy. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“You’d have managed somehow, I’ll bet,” he said, looking at the confident face before him. “Quite a bit of fun, wasn’t it? I hope we have a few more excursions together.”
And she felt that she rather hoped so, too.