“Doctor! Oh, Doctor Littlejohn! I thought you were safe at the ‘Refuge’ with Mercy and Abel. How came you here? and why? You must go away at once. You must, indeed. Where is the horse you rode?”
“I rode no horse, my dear. If I had asked for one, I should have been prevented,—even forcibly, I fear. So I walked.”
“Walked? In this heat, all that distance? Will you tell me why?”
But already, before it was spoken, the Sun Maid guessed the answer.
“Because, at length, through all the shifting talk about me, it penetrated to my study-dulled brain that there was a need more urgent than that the Indian dialects should be preserved; that I, a minister of the gospel, was letting a woman take the duty, the privilege, that was mine. I have come, daughter of my old age, to encourage the sufferers you relieve and bury the dead you cannot save.”
“But—for you, in your feebleness——”
He held up his thin white hand that trembled as an aspen leaf.
“It is enough, my dear. Consider all is said. I heard a fresh groan just then. Somebody needs you—or me.”
Wahneenah now had two to watch, and she did it jealously, at the cost of the slight rest she had heretofore allowed herself. The result of overstrain, in the midst of such infection, was inevitable. One evening she crept languidly toward the empty house which had been her darling’s home and behind which still stood her own deserted lodge. She was a little wearier than usual, she thought, but that was all. To lie down on her bed of boughs and draw her own old blanket over her would make her sleep. She longed to sleep—just for a minute; to shut out from her eyes and her thoughts the scenes through which she had gone. How long ago was it since the wagon and the fair-haired babies went away?
She was a little confused. She was falling asleep, though, despite the agony that tortured her. Her? She had always hated pain and despised it. It couldn’t be Wahneenah, the Happy, crouching thus, in a cramped and becrippled attitude. It was some other woman,—some woman she had used to know.