I am in trouble. Mrs. Batterly has met with an accident, and is here at my cabin, unable to be moved. I have also a very sick man—a stranger—on my hands. Joey and I need you—will you come?
Your old friend,
David Dale.
Wanza responded gallantly to my call for aid. In a couple of hours I heard the rattle of her cart and the jingle of harness, and the sound of Buttons’ hoof-beats on the river road, and emerged from my workshop to greet her.
She stepped down from the shelter of the pink-lined umbrella, and answered my greeting with great circumspection. I lifted down her bag and a big bundle, Joey carried her sweater and a white-covered basket, and together we escorted her to the cabin and made an imposing entrance.
The big man, tossing about in his bunk in the front room, ceased his confused mutterings as we crossed the threshold, struggled up to his elbow, stared, and pointed his finger at Wanza. “La beauté sans vertu est une fleur sans parfum,” he said indistinctly.
Wanza stared back at him, ignorant of the import of his words; and as I frowned at him, he threw up both hands and drifted into dribbling incoherence. I pointed to the door at the end of the room, and Wanza went to it swiftly, opened it quietly, and passed through to Haidee.
When I went to the kitchen, after giving the big man a spoonful of the medicine the doctor had left, I found Joey on the floor, with his arms about the collie’s neck.
“I can trust you,” he was saying, “I can trust those eyes, those marble-est eyes! Why, if it hadn’t been for you, Jingles, Bell Brandon could never a let Mr. David know.”
The stage stopped at Cedar Dale late that afternoon, and set down the trained nurse. And our curious ménage was complete.
The nurse proved to be a sandy-haired, long-nosed pessimist, a woman of fifty, capable, but so sunk in pessimism that Joey’s blandishments failed to win her, and Jingles stood on his hind legs, and pawed his face in vain.