He looked at me uncertainly, tried to smile, and a tear dropped on the ribbon in his hands. Then a look of joy made his face luminous. “The doctor’s here, Mr. David. I didn’t know I was abringing him for Bell Brandon. I thought it was just for the big man.”
So Joey had a name for my wonder woman, too. I could not but feel that his name was the sweeter of the two.
I bore Haidee through the room where the doctor was in attendance on the big man, who was by this time raving and incoherent in his delirium, passed swiftly through the small hallway that separated the cedar room from the main one, and laid Haidee on Joey’s bed. Then I brought the doctor. I left Haidee in his hands, and Joey and I passed outside to the Dingle, and stood there silently, side by side, by the pool.
I saw the green mirror flecked with the white petals of the syringa, and I heard a squirrel chattering in the hemlock above my head, and was conscious of a calliope humming-bird that pecked at the wool of my sweater. But my whole soul was in that cedar room, where Haidee lay white and suffering, and I was repeating a prayer that had been on my mother’s lips often when I was a child as she had bent over me in my small bed:
“Oh, Lord, keep my dear one! Deliver us from murder and from sudden death—Good Lord, deliver us!”
But Haidee’s condition was not serious. The doctor came out to us, Joey and me, with the assurance, and at once the world began to wag evenly with me. “All she needs now is rest,” he said suavely. “She will now be able to rest for some time. You’d better get a woman here, Dale, to help out. Mrs. Batterly mentioned it. There’ll have to be a trained nurse for the man.”
In the workshop Joey and I considered the situation in all its phases, and Joey sagely counseled: “Send for Wanza.”
The suggestion seemed a wise one, so I penned a careful note, and Joey rode away to the village for the second time that day.
In my note I said:
Dear Wanza: