“Yes, until they can get to work again. The building is perfectly dry and healthy, with plenty of ventilation. We will have it cleaned up,—it needs that.”
Betty merely glanced at the group as she sat fanning the sleeping man. Their entrance had made but little impression upon her; she was too tired to move, and too much absorbed in her charge to offer the fine lady a chair.
Something in the girl’s face touched the visitor.
“Have you been here all the morning?” she asked, crossing to Betty’s side of the cot, and laying a hand on her shoulder. With the passing of the first shock the natural tenderness of her heart had overcome her. She wanted to help.
Betty raised her eyes, the rims red with her long vigil, and the whites all the whiter because of the fine black dust that had sifted down and discolored her pale cheeks.
“I’ve been here all night, ma’am,” she said sweetly and gently, drawn instinctively by Mrs. Leroy’s sympathetic face.
“How tired you must be! Can I do anything to help you? Let me fan him while you rest a little.”
Betty shook her head.
The major crossed over to the cot occupied by Lonny Bowles, the big Noank quarryman, whose arm was in a sling, and sat down on the edge of the bed. No one had yet thought of bringing in chairs, except for those nursing the wounded. As the Pocomokian looked into Bowles’s bronzed, ruddy face, at the wrinkles about his neck, as seamy as those of a young bull, the great broad hairy chest, and the arms and hands big and strong, he was filled with astonishment. Everything about the quarryman seemed to be the exact opposite of what he himself possessed. This almost racial distinction was made clearer when, in the kindness of his heart, he tried to comfort the unfortunate man.
“I’m ve’y sorry,” the major began, with an embarrassment entirely new to him, and which he could not account for in himself, “at finding you injured in this way, suh. Has the night been a ve’y painful one? You seem better off than the others. How did you feel at the time?”