“A few minutes past five,” she answered. “You’ve been asleep.”
“Have I?” he said, gazing immovably at her. “What day is it?”
“Thursday,” she replied. “You came here last night from Rocky Bar. Perhaps you don’t remember.”
“Rocky Bar!” he repeated vaguely, groping through a haze of memory. “Was it only yesterday? Was it only yesterday I left San Francisco?”
“I don’t know when you left San Francisco—” the newspaper shade cracked and bent a little, letting a band of light fall across the pillow. She leaned down, arranging it with careful hands, looking from the light to him to see if it were correctly adjusted.
“Whenever you left San Francisco,” she said, “you got here last night. They brought you here, Perley and some other men in the sleigh. They found you in the road. You were half-frozen.”
He looked at her moving hands, then when they had satisfactorily arranged the shade and dropped to her sides, he looked at her face. Her eyes were soft and friendly and had a gentle, kind expression. He liked to look at them. The only woman’s eyes he had looked into lately had been full of wrathful lightenings. There seemed no need to be polite or do the things that people did when they were well and sitting talking in chairs, so he did not speak for what seemed to him a long time. Then he said,
“What is this place?”
“Antelope,” said the woman. “Perley’s Hotel at Antelope.”
“Oh, yes,” he answered with an air of weary recollection, “I was going to walk there from Rocky Bar, but the snow came down too hard, and the wind—you could hardly stand against it! It was a terrible pull. Perley’s Hotel at Antelope. Of course, I know all about it. I was here last summer for two weeks fishing.”