It broke into gleams of interest and returning consciousness during the next two days. He experienced an acuter sense of illness and pain, the burning anguish of his feet and fevered misery of his body, bitten through with cold, brought him back to a realization of his own identity. He heard the doctor murmuring in the corner of “threatened pneumonia” and understood that he was the object threatened. He began to know and separate the strange faces that seemed continually to be bending over him, asking him how he felt. There was the doctor, Perley, Bill Cannon, and the old judge and three different women, whom he had some difficulty in keeping from merging into one composite being who was sometimes “Miss Cannon,” and sometimes “Mrs. Perley,” and then again “Cora.”
When on the fourth day the doctor told him that he thought he would “pull through” with no worse ailment than a frozen foot, he had regained enough of his original vigor and impatience under restraint to express a determination to rise and “go on.” He was in pain, mental and physical, and the ministrations and attentions of the satellites that so persistently revolved round his bed rasped him into irritable moodiness. He did not know that all Antelope was waiting for the latest bulletins from Mrs. Perley or Cora. The glamour attaching to his sensational entry into their midst had been intensified by the stories of the wealth and position that had been his till he had married a poor girl, contrary to his mother’s wishes. He was talked of in the bar, discussed in the kitchen, and Cora dreamed of him at night. The very name of Ryan carried its weight, and Antelope, a broken congeries of white roofs and black smoke-stacks emerging from giant drifts, throbbed with pride at the thought that the two greatest names of California finance were snow-bound in Perley’s Hotel.
The doctor laughed at his desire to “move on.” The storm was still raging and Antelope was as completely cut off from the rest of the world as if it were an uncharted island in the unknown reaches of the Pacific. Propping the invalid up among his pillows he drew back the curtain and let him look out through a frost-painted pane on a world all sweeping lines and skurrying eddies of white. The drifts curled crisp edges over the angles of roofs, like the lips of breaking waves. The glimpse of the little town that the window afforded showed it cowering under a snow blanket, almost lost to sight in its folds.
“Even if your feet were all right, you’re tied here for two weeks anyway,” said the doctor, dropping the curtain. “It’s the biggest storm I ever saw, and there’s an old timer that hangs round the bar who says it’s as bad as the one that caught the Donner party in forty-six.”
The next day it stopped and the world lay gleaming and still under a frosty crust. The sky was a cold, sullen gray, brooding and cloud-hung, and the roofs and tree-tops stood out against it as though executed in thick white enamel. The drifts lay in suave curves, softly undulating like the outlines of a woman’s body, sometimes sweeping smoothly up to second stories, here and there curdled into an eddy, frozen as it twisted. A miner came in from an outlying camp on skees and reported the cold as intense, the air clear as crystal and perfectly still. On the path as he came numerous fir boughs had broken under the weight of snow, with reports like pistol shots. There was a rumor that men, short of provisions, were snowed up at the Yaller Dog mine just beyond the shoulder of the mountain. This gave rise to much consultation and loud talking in the bar, and the lower floor of Perley’s was as full of people, noise and stir, as though a party were in progress.
That afternoon Dominick, clothed in an old bath-robe of the doctor’s, his swathed feet hidden under a red rug drawn from Mrs. Perley’s stores, was promoted to an easy chair by the window. The doctor, who had helped him dress, having disposed the rug over his knees and tucked a pillow behind his back, stood off and looked critically at the effect.
“I’ve got to have you look your best,” he said, “and you’ve got to act your prettiest this afternoon. The young lady’s coming in to take care of you while I go my rounds.”
“Young lady!” exclaimed Dominick in a tone that indicated anything but pleasurable anticipation. “What young lady?”
“Our young lady,” answered the doctor. “Miss Cannon, the Young Lady of Perley’s Hotel. Don’t you know that that’s the nicest girl in the world? Maybe you don’t, but that’s because your powers of appreciation have been dormant for the last few days. The people here were most scared to death of her at first. They didn’t know how she was going to get along, used to the finest, the way she’s always been. But, bless your heart, she’s less trouble than anybody in the place. There’s twelve extra people eating here, besides you to be looked after, and Mrs. Perley and Cora are pretty near run to death trying to do it. Miss Cannon wanted to turn in and help them. They wouldn’t have it, but they had to let her do her turn here taking care of you.”
“It’s very kind of her,” said the invalid without enthusiasm. “I noticed her here several times.”