“Mose has gone off to Fredericton, and he was going from there to St. John, so Reggie Furness said this morning. Reggie is half-brother to Mose, you know—a poor half-starved kid, who does chores for Miss Gittins to earn his food. He told me this morning that Mose was real bad from his hurts, and I guessed it was largely his own fault for not keeping them clean.”
“We ought to have made him get them washed!” cried Pam in acute distress. “He was so careful to clean the wounds of the dog, but he would not hear of our doing anything for himself.”
“It was downright pig-headedness on his part; but he is like that, and it is of no use to worry about it,” said Don, trying to put the best face on the matter that he could.
Later on, when all the men came in and were gathered about the stove, drinking coffee and eating the soda-biscuits hot from the oven, the talk turned again to Mose Paget, and what his step-brother had said of his condition.
“It would not be so serious if he had been better nourished and a cleaner living man,” said Nathan Gittins, his voice sounding mumbled by reason of his mouth being full of soda-biscuit. “But a whisky-drinking, half-starved chap like that hasn’t a chance when it comes to a case of blood-poisoning.”
“It is all my fault!” Pam’s voice was full of self-reproach. “I ought to have insisted on his taking proper care. He saved my life twice on that dreadful day, and I just let him alone when I might have looked after him.”
“I should rather like to see the person who could make Mose Paget do anything he did not want to do!” exclaimed Nathan with a great laugh, which was promptly echoed by the other men. Then they proceeded to tell Pam stories about the doings of Mose Paget, whose father had been a mighty hunter, and had lost his life in an encounter with a bear.
“Mose has got courage of a sort,” said one man, between bites of hot biscuit. “To me he always seems a good sort spoiled in the making. There is what would have made a decent man, only so much laziness and drunkenness is down underneath that it keeps coming up and spoiling everything, don’t you see.”
The other men nodded in perfect accord with this pronouncement; then the talk veered to other things—the latest news from Europe, the chances of an extra severe winter, and the possibilities of grain-farming out west. But Pam, darting to and fro waiting on these guests of hers who had come to help her that day, kept repeating to herself that Mose had twice saved her life in one day, and so deserved her warmest gratitude.
She went out later to see the effect of the snow-banking, and cried out in dismay at the unsightly appearance of the house, which looked more like a cutting by the side of a dug-out railway than anything.