“Get off when you feel like it,” he said, “and let Archibald or me hear from you if you’re in a hole so tight that you can’t squirm out of it. Hang it all, I’m actually glad I saved your life, Ezra.”
Ezra made no reply. His hour of expansiveness had passed and he had sunk back into his sullen quiet; but there were fifty dollars in cash and a check for five hundred more in his pocket; and somewhere back in his mind was an idea of raising chickens instead of stealing them. He had always liked chickens and now that he was a capitalist, he could indulge his fancies.
When the doctor reached the cottage on the Back Road once more, Archibald borrowed the car and went for Pegeen.
“You’ll have to hurry,” Doctor Fullerton said, after a moment’s examination of the man on the bed who had been given some semblance of cleanliness and order, and Archibald hurried. A half hour later he was back again, with a white-faced, great-eyed child who ran past the doctor and dropped on her knees beside the bed.
“Daddy!” she cried; and the love and yearning in her voice made the two men behind her bite their lips and look angry as men will when their hearts are touched.
“Daddy!”
The pleading voice found its way, somehow, to the fog-bound brain and Michael O’Neill’s soul turned back from its long journey, to look through sane eyes, into the tender child face, framed in wind-blown, black curls.
“Why, Pegeen,” he whispered feebly. “My little Peggy, of the curls!— But ’twas your mother I made the name for, Mary of the Curls! You’ve a look of her.”
The eyes that had been blue as Pegeen’s own, before the drink blurred them, closed and the lips that had, on some far-off day, wooed Mary of the Curls, settled into strange stillness, and Archibald, kneeling beside Peg, put his arm around her, drew her close and let her cry; while, stealing in from the outer dark, a lonely and forgotten yellow pup snuggled up to the sobbing child and nuzzled a cold wet nose into her hand.