“You mean I was off my head?”
“At times. But more of the time you were dreaming and talking in your dreams; seeing things out loud by the flash-light of fever.”
“Talking, was I? Guess there wa'n't much sense in any of it?” The hazard was a question.
“A kind of sense,—out of focus, distorted. Some of it was opium. Didn't you coax a little of his favorite medicine out of the cook?”
Packer John apologized sheepishly, “I cal'lated I was going to be left. You put it up on me—making out you were off with the rest. That was all right. But I wa'n't going to suffer it out; why should I? A gunshot would have cured me quicker, perhaps. Then some critter might 'a' found me and called it murder. A word like that set going can hang a man. No, I just took a little to deaden the pain.”
“The whole discussion was rather nasty, right before the man we were talking about,” said Paul. “I wanted to get them off and out of hearing. Then we had a few words.”
At intervals during that day and the next, Paul's patient expended his strength in questions, apparently trivial. His eyes, whenever they were open, followed his nurse with a shrinking intelligence. Paul was on his guard.
“What day of the month do you make it out to be?”
“The second of December.”
“December!” The packer lay still considering. “Game all gone down?”