“Take the car and send it back to-morrow on Number Three.”
“Thank you, if you won’t need it to-night.”
“I sha’n’t. I am going to stay at Cold Springs to-night and hunt up McCloud.”
“But that man is in bed in a very bad way; you can’t see him. He is going to die.”
“No, he isn’t. I am going to hunt him up and have him taken care of.”
That night Bucks, in the twilight, was sitting by McCloud’s bed, smoking and looking him over. “Don’t mind me,” he said when he entered the room, lifted the ill-smelling lamp from the table, and, without taking time to blow it out, pitched it through the open window. “I heard you were sick, and just looked in to see how they were taking care of you. Wilcox,” he added, turning to the nurse he had brought in––a barber who wanted to be a railroad man, and had agreed to step into the breach and nurse McCloud––“have a box of miner’s candles sent up from the roundhouse. We have some down there; if not, buy a box and send me the bill.”
McCloud, who after the rioting had crawled back to bed with a temperature of 105 degrees, knew the barber, but felt sure that a lunatic had wandered in with him, and immediately bent his feeble mental energies on plans for getting rid of 41 a dangerous man. When Bucks sat down by him and continued talking at the nurse, McCloud caught nothing of what was said until Bucks turned quietly toward him. “They tell me, McCloud, you have the fever.”
The sick man, staring with sunken eyes, rose half on his elbow in astonishment to look again at his visitor, but Bucks eased him back with an admonition to guard his strength. McCloud’s temperature had already risen with the excitement of seeing a man throw his lamp out of the window. Bucks, meantime, working carefully to seem unconcerned and incensing McCloud with great clouds of smoke, tried to discuss his case with him as he had already done with the mine surgeon. McCloud, thinking it best to humor a crazy man, responded quietly. “The doctor said yesterday,” he explained, “it was mountain fever, and he wants to put me into an ice-pack.”
Bucks objected vigorously to the ice-pack.
“The doctor tells me that it is the latest treatment for that class of fevers in the Prussian army,” answered McCloud feebly, but getting interested in spite of himself.