After dinner Dave mounted the stairway leading to the keeper's room.
"Still sleeping," thought Dave, lingering on the threshold and hesitating to go forward. He advanced, though, in a moment, for he was startled at the keeper's appearance. It was like an intermittent stupor rather than the continued unconsciousness of sleep. Dave touched the keeper, and he found the temperature to be that of a high fever. At times the old light-keeper would start and open his eyes, and when Dave left the room to search the pantry for some simple remedy on the medicine-shelf, he found on his return that his patient had left his bed and was standing by the narrow window in the thick stone walls. He murmured something about "storm," about the "light," and suffered Dave to lead him back to bed.
"I must look out how I leave him again," thought Dave; and yet how could he manage the case alone?
"I must have help," he said, "and soon as I have a chance I must hang a signal out at the door. Perhaps some one will call, and I'll wait before showing the signal."
Nobody came. Why should they come because suspecting any trouble? The afternoon was pleasant. The sea broke gently upon the stone walls of the lighthouse, and the sun shed its quiet glow like some benediction of peace upon the sea. It was the very afternoon when a spectator would be likely to conclude that the lighthouse was in no need of help.
"I'll go now," at last concluded Dave. "He is asleep; his fever is running lower. I will step to the door of the signal-tower, and throw out a white sheet there, and somebody may see it."
Nobody came, and yet here was a man who might be dangerously sick. At the hour of sunset he ran up to the lantern and lighted the lamp. He quickly descended, saying to himself, "How glad I am that it is not foggy! So much to be thankful for! How could I start that signal! But it won't do to try to get through the night in this fashion. What, what can I do?"
The twilight thickened; the shadows trailed longer, broader, and darker folds across the sea. Dave sat alone with the sick man, who moaned as if in pain.
"I have it!" he suddenly exclaimed, recalling what Thomas Trafton told him. "I can do one thing more. I'll hang the lantern out from the tower; maybe Bart will possibly see it."
Watching his chance when the keeper was less uneasy, he ran downstairs, lighted a lantern, and then suspended it outside a window on the landward side of the tower. The cool air of the sea blew refreshingly on his heated face as he leaned out.