“I wonder if there’s a bathroom,” he thought, running along the porch to the nearest door after the one leading to the passage. “Of course they always have them in these so-called camps,” he added, catching the flash of a porcelain tub beyond. In another moment he had wet Miss Campbell’s lips from a glass of water and was dabbing her temples with the end of a wet towel. “Better now?” he asked, as she opened her heavenly blue eyes.
She nodded with a faint smile and closed them again.
“Curious how a doctor is always finding work to do even in the wilderness,” he thought, feeling Miss Helen’s pulse. With an exclamation, he hurried back to the bathroom, and among a perfect army of tooth powder and talcum powder boxes,—“enough for half a dozen people,” he thought,—he spied a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia. He mixed a dose in the glass with professional dexterity and hurried back.
“Just as well I happened along,” he thought, moistening her lips with the mixture. “That does the trick,” he added, as she presently opened her eyes again and swallowed a little of the ammonia and water.
The white, pinched look left her face, the color crept back to her cheeks, and she gave a sigh of relief as she shifted her position in the hammock.
“My pillows?” she asked, feeling for the pillows which he had slipped from under her head to the floor.
“Better lie flat for a while,” he ordered in a tone of authority. “I wonder where her people are?” the doctor added to himself, glancing again at the five cot beds. Then he drew up a chair and watched Miss Helen Campbell as she dropped into a doze.
In a little while she exclaimed in a much stronger tone of voice:
“Please take me out of this wobbly thing; I want to lie on my own bed.” The walking-doctor promptly lifted her in his arms like a little child and deposited her on one of the cots. Her hands were cold, and he covered her with a Roman blanket that lay on the foot of the bed. Then he found two hot water bottles, marched down stairs, heated a kettle of water on the kerosene stove, searched for beef tea in the ice chest and by good luck found half a jar. With the water bottles at her feet and a little beef tea to nourish her, Miss Campbell at last fell into a deep sleep, while the doctor, sitting near at hand, read one of the magazines and, occasionally tip-toeing to her bedside, listened to her breathing and felt her pulse.
Toward late afternoon, he descended into the lower regions of the log house and foraged for food. He found crackers and cheese, a tin of beans and a bottle of ginger ale. Having refreshed himself, he was about to return to his patient when Mr. Lupo staggered into the kitchen with a market basket on his arm.