“I make believe this old rack to be a good friend of mine and that the float stuff be sickness come at him—so I work hard to keep it away.”
The overseer went along about his business, commenting mentally on a Frenchman's imagination.
When the big mill bells clanged the noon hour Etienne hurried to the good woman's house. The city physician had been there and had left medicine—two tumblers of it. He had hurried in and had hurried away and had been curt and brusk and had not told her what was the trouble, so the woman reported. But the child had been sleeping.
She was drowsy all that evening while Farr held her in his arms and Etienne sat near by with Zelie Dionne, ministering solicitously.
“Her cheeks are not so hot,” said the young man many times. He talked hopefully to reassure himself as well as the others, for he had been dreadfully frightened when he had come from his work. Fright had trodden close on the heels of much joy—for the superintendent of the Consolidated had taken him out of the hot trench that day and had appointed him boss of twoscore Italian diggers, doubling his pay.
“I have been watching you,” the superintendent told him. “You're built to boss men. What kind of a bump was it that ever slammed you down like this?”
The answer the superintendent got was a smile which put further questions out of his mind.
“No, her cheeks are not so hot,” affirmed Farr when he laid her in her bed that night. “She will come along all right.”
But at the end of a week languor still weighed on the child. There were circles under her eyes and her cheeks were wan, and she did not clap her hands with the old-time glee when he brought her new toys; the playthings lay beside her on the bed and invited her touch—staring eyes of dolls, beady eyes of toy dogs—without avail.
“It is the queer way of being sick,” lamented the old man. “The doctor mebbe not know, because he very gruff and do not say. I think I know what may cure her—it has been done many time.