When he and Hugh reached the cottage, Oscar went straight to John’s bed and sat down beside it. The sufferer had lain in heavy stupor for hours, only arousing once, much earlier in the day, to stare at the boys with no recognition and then to drop into unconsciousness again. But now, almost as soon as Oscar’s firm hand closed about his wrist to feel his pulse, he opened his eyes, looked at the other with slowly dawning comprehension and said:
“I was wrong about that road, Oscar, and you were right.”
“It wass no matter,” his friend answered hastily, his voice sounding Swedish again in the extremity of his feeling. “Opening up these wheat lands might not have been advisable then, when it was just a question of dollars and cents. Now it is different, it is a matter of daily bread and lives and victory.”
But Johnny Edmonds did not hear. Having given voice to the thought that had so long been uppermost in his mind, he drifted contentedly away into sleep again, real sleep this time, with no further mutterings and restless movements of his head upon the pillow. Oscar got up quickly and went to stand at the window, looking out with that queer far-off look that his face sometimes wore. Turning at last he met Dick’s anxious eyes and smiled slowly and happily.
“It was just a year ago we quarreled,” he said. “I thought he should have stood by me when I wanted to build the road; he thought, like the rest, that I was a mad dreamer—perhaps I was. This war has overturned all things; what was a far vision once may be what the world most needs to-day. But your brother is a better friend than I, Dick Edmonds. I could not have been the first to say that I was wrong. And now all is well again.”
The next day and the next, John Edmonds’ fever ebbed and flowed, leaving them sometimes full of hope that recovery was beginning, sometimes in terror that such recovery might never be. In the end, however, the crisis passed, leaving him pale and shaky, but clear-headed and himself again at last. It was on the first day that he was able to be propped up in bed that Oscar, sitting by him, began to discuss, with unreserved bluntness, what was being said in Rudolm about John’s books and the state in which the bank’s affairs had been left. For a moment Edmonds looked astonished, dismayed and angry, then he laughed.
Three of his clerks had gone to war, he explained, and he was so short-handed that he used to work fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours at a time, trying to keep things going, reeling with exhaustion, his brain at last so weary and confused with illness that he scarcely knew what he was doing.
“Now my head is cleared up again,” he said, “I begin to realize what queer things I must have done to those books. The expert who is trying to make them out must be having a glorious time of it. I wonder how far he has got and what he thinks he has found.”
Then Oscar broached the plan that he had evidently been turning over and over in his mind. Edmonds must get back to Rudolm as soon as possible, he said, for affairs must be cleared up and the anxiety of bank directors and stockholders must be brought to an end. The moment he could be moved Oscar himself would take him home; they would go by water, the whole length of Red Lake, a two or three days’ journey by canoe. He stated the plan and its urgency very briefly, even more briefly told the need of the boys’ staying behind.
Both immediately raised their voices in clamorous objection. Dick must get back, he was going to enlist; Hugh wished to go with him, in fact the two boys had been laying their heads together and making plans of their own. But in all of their arguments they found Oscar’s calculations had been before them.