"Oh, for quite a long time," she hastened to say. "He came here, sick and helpless, one day last spring, and—well, there isn't any hospital here in Wahaska, you know, so we took him in and helped him get over the fever, or whatever it was. This was his room while he stayed with us."
Andrew Galbraith wagged his head on the pillow.
"I know," he said. "And ye're doing it again for a poor auld man whose siller has never bought him anything like the love you're spending on him. You're everybody's good angel, I'm thinking, Maggie, lassie." Though he did not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down to a spike—this writer-man, when ye found him, was he?"
She shook her head. "No; I have never seen him with a beard."
The sick man turned his face to the wall, and after a time she heard him repeating softly the words which she had just read to him. "But if ye forgive not men ... neither will your Father forgive...." And again, "Judge not that ye be not judged." When he turned back to her there were new lines of suffering in the gray old face.
"I'm sore beset, child; sore beset," he sighed. "You were telling me that MacFarland and Johnson will be here to-night?"
"Yes; they should both reach Wahaska this evening."
Another pause, and at the end of it: "That man Broffin: you'll remember you asked me one day who he was, and I tell 't ye he was a special officer for the bank. Is he still here?"
"He is; I saw him on the street this morning."
Again Andrew Galbraith turned his face away, and he was quiet for so long a time that she thought he had fallen asleep. But he had not.