This was too much for me. My sympathies were aroused in a moment. I knew by Philip’s complexion that he was a drinking man, and here was the patient and gentle wife anxiously awaiting his return to the “Oregonian Shades.” Can it be wondered at that, meantime, hot weather, corpulence, anxiety, and general depression of spirits all taken into consideration, she had not sat there all that time dying of thirst, while the means of allaying it were before her? Not rationally. The proprietor afterward informed me that she had “drank nothing but ale:” how much, he could not undertake to compute.
“Probably,” said I, to the deserted woman, as I stepped in and gently picked up her bundles for her, “Philip has taken a little too much, and forgotten you. You had better return to the steamer.”
“Is he in there?” asked my English companion at the door.
“Who?—Briggs?”
“Yes.”
“No, he is not: but here is a lady whom you have seen on the steamer, and who has lost sight of her husband. Had she not better return with us?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, madam,” said I, “we are going back to the steamer now; will you come with us? Phil will be all right. No doubt he is there by this time.”
“Och, Mr. Smith, ye won’t desart me, will ye!” she exclaimed, letting two more bundles fall.
Mr. Smith! she actually called me by name! That she knew my name I was not aware. How she had learned it was a mystery to me; but it was more marvelous still that, having learned so strange and rare a name, she remembered it!