But there, relieved at last of the anxiety that had held me together all the way from the Lost Cabin Mine, knowing now that my friend was safe, all the vigour seemed to leave me.
My memory harked back to the nights in the forests on the hillsides, to the attack upon us on the shoulder of Baker Ridge, to the mud-slide, to the night of Canlan's madness, and the previous night of his onslaught on our camp. Larry Donoghue loomed in my mind's eye, large-framed, loose-limbed, heavy-mouthed. Again I saw the summit over which we passed, the Doréesque ravines and piled rocks, the forest trail, the valley where Mr. Pinkerton lay, on the cliff of which I had faced the terrors of the snake. I saw the Indians trooping at the ford, the dead men lying in the wood at Camp Kettle, the red-headed man in the Rest House, the loathsome "drummer" at the Half-Way House,—and all the while the sheriff's voice was in my ears and sometimes Apache's replying.
My brain was in a whirl, and I heard the sheriff say:
"That boy is sick looking."
He said it in a kind, reassuring voice, and I knew that I was in the home of friends, and need no longer keep alert and watchful and fearful. My chin went down upon my breast.
I had a faint recollection of fiery spirits being poured down my throat, and then of being caught by the arm-pits and lifted and held for awhile, and of voices whispering and consulting around me. Then I felt the air in my face, and came round sufficiently to know I was in the street, and the dim ovals of faces turned on me, following me as I was hurried forward at what seemed a terrible speed, and then I opened my eyes to find myself in a room with the blind down at the open window.
It was night time, for the room was in darkness, and I lay looking at a thin cut in the yellow blind, a cut of about three inches long, through which the moonlight filtered; and as I looked at it I saw it begin to move with a wriggling motion, and even as I looked on it it stretched upward and downward from either end. At the top ran out suddenly two horizontal cuts, the lower end split in two, and ran out left and right, and then it all turned into the form of a man like a jumping-jack, with twitching legs and waving arms. A head grew out of it next, and rolled from side to side; it was the figure of Mike Canlan. I turned my head on the pillow and groaned.
"Heavens!" I cried, "I am haunted yet by this."
And then a great number of voices began whispering in a corner of the chamber. I cried out in terror, and then the door opened and a woman entered, carrying a candle, shaded with one hand, the light of it striking upon her freckled face and yellow hair.
It was Mrs. Laughlin, and she sat down by me and took my hand, feeling my pulse, and ran her rough palm across my brow. She may have been a belligerent woman, and had many "tiffs" with her husband, but I cannot tell you how soothing was her rough touch to me then,—rough, but extremely kind.