A Canadian Farm Mystery; Or, Pam the Pioneer

by Bessie Marchant

Her pride saved her. Talk of the sin of pride! A few sermons on the virtues of the proper sort would not be out of place in some phases of life and living, for certain it is that many a man and woman would give up the struggle to present a brave face to the world but for this same proper pride. Pam took her share of dragging the truck, and when the house was reached she helped Jack to carry Reggie to the bedroom that had been her grandfather’s. Then she left her brother to the task of getting the boy to bed while she ran upstairs and slipped into clean, dry clothing. Oh, the comfort of having a clean face and feeling dry! Pam suddenly felt pounds better; half her aches and pains vanished, and she hurried down to help Jack, and to insist that he, too, should stay for dry clothes before he went off to Mrs. Buckle’s to send Don to bring the Doctor.

It was easy to see that Reggie was in a rather bad way, and Pam, having had but little experience of sickness, would have been thankful to shift the burden of caring for him on to someone else. When Jack had gone, and she was left alone with him, his moans and cries were incessant. His mind was not clear; very often when she bent over him trying to make him more comfortable he thought she was Mose, and he would look up at her with a face full of reproach, crying out that he should not have stolen the money, that stolen goods were of no use to anyone.

The waiting for the Doctor was about the hardest thing Pam had had to bear for some time. The boy’s face was flushed with fever, and he talked in a high-pitched tone that sounded weird and unnatural. His revelations about his home life were to the last degree pathetic, and always he was reminding himself that he had promised his dying mother to do what he could to keep his brother straight.

Jack came back, and set to work on the evening “chores”, leaving Pam free to remain in the house. It was necessary that someone should be with the boy every minute now, for he thought himself afloat on the table again, and he was all the time trying to throw himself out of bed in the hope of reaching the bank. His horror of water was very great, and he felt himself drowning every minute.

“Here comes Dr. Grierson, and Sophy is with him!” shouted Jack, putting his head in at the door of the best sitting-room, and Pam uttered a little cry of thankfulness, for she had wanted Sophy that afternoon more than words could express. It was dreadful to feel so helpless and to be able to do so little.

“Broken leg!” said the Doctor. “You will have your work cut out, Miss Walsh, but there is no help for it; he can’t be moved. Sophy will stay, though, and the neighbours will do what they can. The trouble is that the boy has no reserve strength, poor child. He has been so nearly starved, too, that a shock of this kind will certainly make things go hard with him.”

“You don’t think that he will die, do you?” demanded Pam with blank dismay on her face. If Reggie died her grandfather’s name could not be cleared. Such an issue to the boy’s present condition was too dreadful to be thought of; his life must be saved somehow.

“Doctors never think their patients are going to die,” replied Dr. Grierson curtly. “I said that the boy had no reserve of strength, so that he would be more ill than an ordinary case of fracture would warrant; that is to say, he will be very feverish, and he will wander in his mind a great deal. He will need a great deal of nursing, too, and I expect he will be very bad-tempered and difficult to manage. As I said before, you are going to have your hands full.”

“Anything more?” she asked with a comical gesture of pretended despair. “But you have not frightened me yet, and he is going to be nursed back to strength if care and painstaking can accomplish it. He told me to-day he could prove that Grandfather was here at Ripple at the time when Sam Buckle was so knocked about. If he can clear the name of the poor old man, neither Jack nor myself will grudge the work of nursing him.”

“If he can do that, why has he not done it already?” asked the Doctor. He was in the kitchen now, sitting by the stove, and drinking a cup of tea that Jack had made for him while he was busy with Reggie.