“I’m getting rich,” he said.
She looked so bewildered by his reply that he jumped up at once.
“That is one of my stupid jokes and I’ve startled you with it,” he exclaimed in a tone of self-reproach. “And you have come over that trail all alone—why, you’ve had an accident. Come down to the house at once and let Miriam and me see what we can do for you.”
He helped her into the saddle, took Buck’s bridle, and conducted them down through the rows of spicy-smelling little trees to the door of the cottage. On the way Beatrice managed to explain why she had come and at whose suggestion. The doctor nodded his head in immediate agreement.
“To be sure, I will go,” he said. “I would do anything for John Herrick or a friend of his, so that’s all settled. Here’s Miriam coming to the gate to meet you.”
The cottage was square and neat and white and had a garden before it, surrounded by a white paling fence—the first garden Beatrice had seen since she came to Broken Bow Valley. It gave her a pang of homesickness to look at the tangled hedge of pink wild roses, the clumps of yellow lilies and forget-me-nots, and the bright borders of pansies. Miriam, at the gate, was a plump, quiet-voiced person with smooth gray hair and a placid smile.
“Miriam would have a garden,” Dr. Minturn said when the greetings were over and Beatrice had admired the flowers. “Almost everything in it is just what runs wild over the mountains, but she prefers them behind a fence. I think she dreams at night of how to make those big, wild forget-me-nots look like the little cultivated ones.”
“The doctor likes to make fun of my garden,” Mrs. Minturn said in her pleasant soft voice. “But it is not very different from what he has done with the whole mountain-side. It was as bare as your hand when we came here, and he has planted every one of the little pines himself and has nursed each tree as though it were a baby. We call it Christmas-tree Hill. But come in, my dear; you must rest and wash that cut on your cheek.”
She led Beatrice to the house and, in taking it quite for granted that her guest was to spend the night, conducted her to what the girl thought was the smallest and cleanest bedroom she had ever seen. Here Mrs. Minturn insisted that she must lie down and be tucked up under the patchwork quilt and “go to sleep for an hour if she could.” Beatrice did not sleep, but lay very peacefully, staring at the rough plastered walls of the tiny room or, through the window, at the myriad little trees stepping in their straight, decorous rows across the side of the hill. Long before the hour was over she was beginning to feel quite rested and herself again, and when her hostess came to announce that supper was ready she was sitting at the window, gazing out at the sunset light on the white peaks of the range opposite.
After they had eaten, Dr. Minturn insisted that she make a tour of the place and, “Go on, my dear, I don’t need any help with the dishes,” Mrs. Minturn said when her guest wished to stay and assist her. “It isn’t often that the doctor has a chance to show things off to a new person, so don’t deny him the pleasure.”