That was all. He was gone again into the fevered delirium.
All that night, and for many days and nights thereafter, old Jubilee Jim, faithful to his word, struggled with death over the body of Harry Sevier.
CHAPTER XXXVI
JUBILEE JIM'S JOURNEY
Harry stood in the doorway of the Bungalow, one hand shading his eyes, looking down the twisting trail to where, far below, a dark blotch toiled up the slope. During three days he had been alone, for Jubilee Jim had gone upon a journey to the city where lay the old life from which Harry had fled on the day he had ceased to be himself. The snows were gone and an early spring day of azure and gold lay over the satiny stillness of the folded hills. The fresh, pleasant air was full of the whirr of birds and the smell of new bark and bursting buds, the slender birches were unfurling the virginal green of their young leaves, and here and there on the hillsides blossoms were showing. All nature was fulfilling its annual mission of rebirth, audaciously triumphing over autumn's death and winter's sepulture.
The stalwart figure standing on the threshold was good to see. The fever that had followed that terrible night of physical exhaustion had been worsted at last by Jubilee Jim's homely medicaments and the balm of peace and sleep. There had been days when Harry had been perilously near the Great Adventure, but assiduous nursing and a splendid native constitution had in the end conquered. The pure air of the balsam forest and the comfort of the solitude had at length had their way with him. The flesh had come back to the wasted frame, the old brightness to the eye, and the flush of perfect health to the skin. Now, with his curling hair and his crisp dark beard, trimmed as of old, he was again the Harry Sevier of a year before—save that back of the eyes was a steady something, a deep conscious strength that had come to him from those bitter prison months when his soul had been tried in a fiery furnace of pain.
Sevier dropped his hand with a long sigh of relief, for at a turn in the path, the dark blotch had resolved itself into the figure of a man, followed by a great dog harnessed to a little cart. "It's Jube!" he said aloud. "He's made the trip safely, and he's got the things!"
This journey had been the outcome of much thought on Harry's part. Lying there in the long weeks of convalescence, his mind had been busy with the problem of the future. What to do? He could not stay forever there on the mountain, a lonely hermit. Somewhere, he must take up life again. When he had beguiled those dark prison moods with thoughts of freedom, his imagination had pictured flight to some distant country where, under a borrowed name, he might find a refuge, barren as that refuge might be of all life's sweetness. Freedom now was his. Should he put the past forever behind him, make his disappearance good, and without more ado drop out of sight and sound forever? All his instinct rebelled against this drastic solution, this cavalier denial of life and its mental exercise for a career of empty futility.
What remained then? To go back to the life he had left behind him on the day he ceased to be Harry Sevier?