"Hit haint so," she cried in a choked voice. "Lou haint ergoin' ter die, Dr. Johnston!"
Suddenly she stopped, as her thoughts flew backward on the wings of memory. Her eyes grew larger, a strange light came into them. Then, speaking slowly, almost as though the words were impelled by a will other than her own, she added with a tone of absolute certainty:
"Yo' allows yo' don't know what the trouble air, but I does."
The doctor was startled and looked as though he thought that he was about to have another patient on his hands.
"Hit air a brain tumor thet she hes got, I knows it, an' I knows one of the few doctor men in this hyar country what kin cure hit. He air ergoin' ter cure hit fer me, an' leetle Lou haint ergoin' ter die."
Uncertain what to make of this outburst, the doctor departed rather hastily. Smiles caught up her shawl and ran immediately to Judd's lonely, cheerless abode, which she entered without a thought of knocking. She found the man sitting dejectedly before a feeble fire.
He sprang up, voiceless terror apparent in the look which he turned upon her white face, but, without pausing for any preliminaries, Rose said, "The doctor, he's been ter see our little Lou again, Judd. He allows thet he can't do anything more for her, and thet she has got ter die."
The man—whose whole world was now centred in the child to whom he had, for a year, been father and mother as well as brother—sank down on his chair and buried his face in his hands.
"I knowed hit," he muttered in a dead voice.
"Hit haint so," cried the girl, who had by this time wholly relapsed into the mountain speech, as she frequently did still, when laboring under the stress of emotion. "Hit haint so, Judd. We kin save her. We hev got ter save her."