A DEBT TO BE PAID
Two days later Hal showed such marked improvement that Dr. Hardesty rubbed his hands with satisfaction and declared his patient would soon be out of the woods and that all danger was practically past. At which news Mrs. May quietly fainted away, and April faced the double burden of an exhausted mother and a wounded brother. Then it was that Dorothea slipped into the breach.
“I can take care of Hal,” she told April. “If he needs anything that I cannot attend to, I promise to call you; so you can stay with Aunt Parthenia.” April thanked her cousin gratefully.
“I knew I could count on you,” she said, with something of her old warmth of manner. “I don’t dare to trust Harriot. She would be stuffing him with dried persimmons, like as not, the minute my back was turned. And the servants are no good with sick people.”
So Dorothea, feeling glad to be of use, sat down beside the bed where Hal seemed to be lightly sleeping.
She waved a fan gently to and fro to keep away stray flies, thinking over the months she had been in Georgia and all that had happened in that time. After all, in spite of the fact that she had lived near to the battle-fields, she had not seen very much to teach her the horrors of war. The few crippled soldiers that wandered along the road had not come fresh from the conflict as had Hal. The talk of thousands fallen in this or that battle had not come close to her before this. Now, all at once, she realized that those thousands had each a home, just as Hal May had, and that in each was a sorrowing mother or sister whose heart ached at the pain or death she could do naught to prevent.
“Except Val Tracy,” she said to herself. “He says he has no kin to bother about him, and—and poor Lee Hendon too. He hasn’t anybody, since his mother died.”
And, as if she had spoken aloud, a voice beside her seemed to answer.
“Where did he go? Lee Hendon, I mean.”
Dorothea came up straight in her chair, hardly able to believe her ears, for it was Hal who spoke. He was looking at her with inquiring eyes and she returned his gaze with an expression of bewildered amazement.