She stopped and made a gesture of extending her hands outward and then letting them fall at her sides. It was tragic in its complete hopelessness. Of gratitude to Moreau she seemed to have little. She had been so beaten down by misfortune that nothing was left in her but acquiescence. Her very service to him seemed an instinctive thing, the result of rigorous training.
“Well,” he said after a pause, “you’ve had a hard time. But it’s over now. Don’t you think about it any more. You’re going to rest up here, and when you’re strong and well again we’ll think about something for you to do. Time enough for that then. But you can always get work and high pay in Hangtown or Sacramento. Or if you don’t fancy it at any of those places I’ll see to it that you go down to San Francisco. Don’t bother any more anyhow. You’d about got to the bottom of things and now you’re coming up.”
She gathered up her pans and said dully: “Thank you, sir.”
The cry of the baby struck on her ear and she scrambled to her feet, and without more words turned and walked to the cabin.
At dinner she again made her appearance on the bank and called the two men. Again they were greeted by a meal that was singularly appetizing, considering the limited resources. Obeying Moreau’s order, she sat down with them, but ate nothing, at intervals starting to her feet to return to the cabin, then restraining the impulse and sitting rigid and uncomfortable on the upturned box. To wait on the men seemed the only thing she knew how to do, or that gave her ease in the doing.
The child cried once or twice during dinner, and, in the afternoon, working in the pit which was in the stream bed just below the cabin window, Moreau heard it crying again. It seemed a louder and more imperious cry than it had given previously. The miner, whose knowledge of infancy and its ills was of the most limited, wondered if it could be sick.
At sunset, the day’s work over, both men mounted the bank, their takings of dust in two tin cups, from which it was transferred to the buckskin sacks in the box under the bunk. Moreau entered the cabin to get the sacks and found Lucy there curled on the end of the bunk where the baby slept. As his great bulk darkened the door she started up, with her invariable frightened look of apology.
“Don’t move—don’t move,” he said, kneeling by her; “I want to get the box under the bunk.”
She started up, and being nearer the box than he, thrust her hand under and tried to pull it out. It was heavy with the sacks of dust and required a wrench. She rose from the effort, gave a gasp, and, reeling, fell against him. He caught her in his arms, and as her head fell back against his shoulder saw that she was death-white and unconscious.
With terrified care he laid her on Fletcher’s bunk, and, seizing a pan of water, sprinkled her face and hands, then tore one of the tin cups off its nail, and, pouring whisky into it, tried to force it between her lips. A little entered her mouth, though most of it ran down her chin. As he stood staring at her, Fletcher appeared in the doorway.