Nevertheless, there was something extremely dreadful to him in the thought of smallpox—mainly, perhaps, because of the possible scars to be left on the body.
Hiram neglected the unfortunate man not at all, however. Distasteful as the thought of handling him was, the youth that night did all in his power for the stranger's comfort.
He kept water at boiling temperature on the stove, and made a wash with soda with which he bathed the sick man several times to reduce the fever. The purple face, the puffed eyelids, the drooling lips, altogether made the victim a most unpleasant looking object.
Yet Hiram thought that, in his right mind and free of fever, this fellow who called himself Orrin Post might be a very good looking man indeed. And he judged his age to be not far along in the twenties.
Hiram got no sleep at all. The patient began to thrash about toward morning and was more delirious than before. Occasionally he seemed to be taken with a slight chill, and his nurse kept the temperature of the little room much higher than 70°.
"This might be good for that corn test," Hiram once thought.
But he was not giving much attention to anything but his care of Orrin Post. He harked back to Mother Atterson's recipes for caring for persons who were ill. He found a stone bottle and filled that with hot water and put it to the patient's feet to counteract the chills. He wished he had some medicine to give him. Hiram wondered how he could send for a doctor in the morning. Whom could he get to go? And would a doctor come to attend a smallpox patient—any doctor but the physician for the county's poor?
Occasionally he examined that eruption. It was spreading over the man's chest. If it was smallpox—
What a night that was! At daybreak—a chill and darksome dawn—Hiram went to the door, looked out, and finally stepped out and closed the door behind him. His eyelids were swollen for lack of sleep. He was tired to the bone!
The pale light in the sky grew slowly. Something stirred in the road—toward the Pringle cottage. Miss Pringle and Abigail were always early risers. And here came one of them along the road!