"Those days my heart was sore all the while, but I couldn't let on for fear she'd know just how I felt."
Jim swallowed hard, but he had made up his mind to tell me the story of little Peter and he wasn't the man to back down. He had a knife and a piece of a birch and he was whittling away. The light would flare up a moment and I could see him looking straight ahead into the fire and whittling faster.
"Then I had to cover it up from him; for little Peter was sure that he was getting better. Seems though the worse he got, the surer he was he'd be better tomorrow. When he got so weak I had to carry him across the room, he began to talk more about spring and railroading again with his dad.
"Sometimes when I'd been off and was comin' home, I dreaded so seeing him, thus weak, that I'd rather a-gone thru the Narrows on the darkest night God ever made, than to face Peter with a jolly quip. So many times then, and so many times since, I have thought, if I only could have toted the load for him. If only my hand could a-held it up for him. He was so little and frail and I was big and strong. And it was the utter, awful helplessness of it that made it so hard to bear. We wanted to help so bad and there was so very little that either of us could do.
"We didn't have Clara then. She didn't come until afterward, and then Peter was all we had. It didn't seem that we could give him up. I reasoned with myself and I didn't one night forget the Book. But there were nights when we halted at the springs that our mouths were so dry and parched that even the Water of Life seemed not to be sufficient to quench them.
"We went deeper and deeper into the valley. He grew weaker and weaker. Just like a little flower that is fading away. One night he grew worse. It was February, and I put on my snow shoes and started for St. John's for a doctor. I walked away into the night and I got a doctor and was back afore dawn.
"The doctor took his pulse and said:
"'He'll be crossing at the dawn.'
"Little Peter often listened to the Book and he was beginning to love it, too; and just before the sun broke that cold, February morning, he whispered: