The Chinese had a hot, pungent smelling drink in his hand.
“Oh, say,” groaned the engineer. “I don’t have to drink that!”
“All lite tamale,” replied the calm doctor. “Hi, there, get up. Hop. Pletty quick. Take heap cold. Velly bad.”
In bed, Ling’s hot drink inside him, the day with its irritations fell away. He could see now the step ahead that had been taken; the last trestle was done; the rock-pouring well on; he called that going some! He felt pleasantly languid, but not yet sleepy. His thought wandered over the resting camp. The Delta was no longer entertaining; the days were too strenuous for that. Frank Godfrey must be finding them dull. And then Innes Hardin came to him.
Not herself, but as a soft little thought which came creeping around the corner of his dreams. She had been there, of course, all day, tucked away in his mind, as though in his home waiting for him to come back to her, weary from the pricks of the day. The way he would come home to her, please God, some day. Not bearing his burdens to her, he did not believe in that, but asking her diversions. Perhaps she would sing to him, or play to him, little tender tunes he could understand. He had never had time to keep up with the new-fangled music which sounded to his ear like a distinct endeavor to be unmusical and bizarre. All the melodies have been used up; Mozart and those old boys had hogged them. The moderns have had to invent a school of odd discords and queer rhythms. Innes would tell him about that! Some day! Contentment spread her soft wings over him. When Ling came stealing back, his patient was asleep.
The tent was a wash of white light when he woke; the moon was filtering through the white canvas; a band of pale radiance was streaming through the screen door. Rickard wakened as to a call. What had startled him? He had been sleeping heavily, the deep sleep that knows no dreaming. He listened, raising himself by his elbow. From a distance, a sweet high voice, unreal in its pitch and thrilling quality, came to him. It pieced on to his last waking thought. For an instant, he thought it was Innes.
Awake, the rhythmic beat coming clear and sweet to him, he knew it was Godfrey; Godfrey, somewhere on the levee, singing by the river.
“What a voice that fellow has!” He wondered what it was he was singing. “The quality of the angels, and the lure of the sirens besides!”
There was a haunting thrill to the air; something he should remember. He used to be able to carry tunes; was it too late, he wondered, to sharpen his musical memory? The soft side of life he had left alone, music, ease, poetry; they went with women, and his swift marching life had had no time for them. Women and little children. Was it too late to begin? Had he worked too long to learn to play? What was that tune Godfrey was singing now? He knew that; it was about the age of seventeen. It brought him again to Innes Hardin. He pulled aside his curtain which hung over the screening of his tent and looked out into a moon-flooded world. The stars were dimmed, thrust into their real distances by the world’s white courier. Rickard’s eyes fell on a little tent over yonder, a white shrine. “White as that fine sweet soul of hers!”
Wandering into the night, Godfrey passed down the river, singing alone. His voice, the footlights, the listening great audiences were calling to him. To him, the moon-flooded levee, the glistening water, made a star-set scene. He was treading the boards, the rushing waters by the bank gave the orchestration for his melody—La Donna è Mobile. He began it to Gerty Hardin; she would hear it in her tent; she would take it as the tender reproach he had teased her with that afternoon in the ramada.