I was lying in my bunk half asleep, though tortured by the remembrance of Haidee’s words, when I heard the following oddly disjointed prayer from the river bank.
“Now I lay me—Oh, God, thank you for not letting Mr. David bleed to death—I pray the Lord—’Cause if he had bled to death I’d want to die too—my soul to keep—he’s all I got, and I want to thank you for him, God— Wait, Wanza, this is a new prayer I’m saying! I am going to ask God to bless you, too. Bless Wanza, please, God,—but bless Mr. David the most,—oh, the most of anybody in the whole world! Amen.”
Soon Joey came pattering in to the shop and very gingerly crawled in beside me. He was asleep, and I was lying miserably brooding, when Wanza called softly just outside the window: “Mr. Dale—hoo-hoo!”
“Yes, Wanza?” I answered.
“I’ve been to the cabin—in the cedar room—talking with Mrs. Batterly. I told her all about your cutting your hand, and—and how you would not let me look at it—and how silly I was, trying to make you—when she come up. I told her how I found you on the ground—and—and everything. Go to sleep now.”
“I shall, Wanza. Thank you,” I cried gratefully.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DREAM IN THE DINGLE
A FEW days later I was summoned to the big man’s side as he sat, fully dressed for the first time, outside the cabin in the shade of a cedar. I sat beside him while he thanked me for my hospitality, and said it was his intention to push on to Roselake and thence to Wallace that very afternoon.
“I have business to transact there for my partner, Dick Bailey, who died in Alaska last winter,” he said, and stopped short, looking at me with a sudden question in his eyes. “By the bye, you people seem to be laboring under the impression that my name is Bailey,” he added.
“Mrs. Olds found the name on a pocketbook you carried,” I explained.