“And we’ll both need Pilot. So we’ll keep all the human beings together,” Asher said, as he helped his wife to fasten her heavy cloak and tie a long old-fashioned nubia about her head.
Then they went out into the darkness and the chilling rain, as neighbor to neighbor, answering this cry for help.
Pilot ran far ahead of them and was waiting with a dog’s welcome when they reached Shirley’s cabin. But the master, lying where he caught the chill draught from the open door, was rigid with cold. A sudden attack of pneumonia had left him helpless. And tonight, Pilot, doing a dog’s best, did not understand the danger of leaving doors open, and of joyously shaking his wet fur down on the sick man to whom help was coming none too soon. 52
“Hello, Jim! We’re all here, doctor, nurse, cook, and hired man, and the little dog under the wagon,” Asher said cheerily, bending over Jim’s bunk. “That pup pretty nearly killed you with kindness, didn’t he?”
Jim smiled wanly, then looked blankly away and lay very still.
The plains frontier had no use for the one talent folk. People must know how to take care of life there. Asher’s first memory of Virginia was when she bent over him, fighting the fever in a prison hospital. He knew her talent for helping, and he had fairly estimated her quick ingenuity for this sod house emergency. But a new vision of the plains life came to her as she watched him, gentle-handed, swift, but unhurried, never giving an inch to the enemy in fighting with death for the life of Jim Shirley.
“He’s safe from that congestion,” Asher said when the morning broke. “But his fever will come on now.”
“Where did you learn to do all these things for sick people?” Virginia asked.
“Partly from a hospital nurse I had in the war. Also, it’s a part of the game here. I learned a few things fighting the cholera in sixty-seven. We must look everything on the frontier squarely in the face, danger and death along with the rest, just as we have to do everywhere else, only we have to depend on each other more here. Hold on there, Jim!”
Asher sprang toward Shirley, who was sitting upright, staring wildly at the two. Then a struggle began, for the sick man, crazed with delirium, was bent on driving his helpers from the cabin. When he lay back exhausted at length, Asher turned to his wife.