Allan insisted that he only was worrying about Owen. In the afternoon, at about three o’clock, Owen walked in to say that he had been home for a couple of hours. It appeared that after calling hopelessly into the fog, and waiting in the vicinity of the anchorage for half an hour, Owen made up his mind that the Arabella would have no chance of making the same point again while the fog lasted. He then turned back, and finding his way to Alexander Hamilton made inquiry of him as to the nearest way to the highroad, and was about making his way inland when a freight train on the West Shore road hove in sight. The train halted at a near-by switch, and Owen so successfully made friends with a man in the caboose that he was invited to get aboard. Three miles south he slipped off the train at Boughton, got a boat from a man he knew at the landing, and rowed across to Hazenfield.
“And so you see,” said Owen, “I got out of the scrape easier than you did.”
Despite the Doctor’s questions, Allan continued to insist that he felt all right, that he would be all right in a little while—or the next day anyway. Yet his confidence was not justified. On the following day the Doctor betrayed by his looks that he did not find Allan to be very well. He forbade him to do any developing for a day or two longer, and kept him away from the Academy.
At the end of a week Allan was down with a fever, and the autumn colors, the stately river, the faces of his friends, the walls of the club rooms, all faded away in a troubled sleep; and other weeks passed, and there were anxious faces at his bedside, and his father would sit holding his hand and looking fixedly at him in the dim light of the sick chamber; and his head was very queer and heavy and hot, so that the ice felt like an angel’s hand. And he asked them to be sure that the focus was right and that the shutter had been set, ordered McConnell to pull in on the sheet, and Owen to hand up the camera carefully.
“I tell you, mother,” he said one day to Mrs. Hartel, his eyes glistening, “I’ve thought over the finest way to develop films! They have never thought of it! Why, it’s dead easy! All you have to do is soak the film in—in—there, I’ve—I’ve forgotten just what it was, but—oh, it’s very easy! I’ll have great fun showing them at the club.”
It was difficult to keep him from talking about cameras and expeditions and new developers.
One day he said, “It’s funny that Owen doesn’t get back. But I suppose he’s living with Alexander Hamilton—poor old man! You had better send over and get Owen. If it hadn’t been for the fog—how foggy it is again!”
Owen came every day to ask about his chum’s condition; and McConnell, who was pitifully upset, never could understand why he was forbidden to see Allan, or to help take care of him.
There were many inquirers,—Major Mines, Miss Manston, Mr. Thornton, Mrs. Creigh, and other members of the Camera Club, and Detective Dobbs often called in.
It was one afternoon in late November that Allan, lying very still and quiet, with his eyes fixed on the wall at the foot of his bed, where there was a picture of the monks of St. Bernard with their dogs, said, suddenly, to his mother,—