“I reckon I wouldn’t do this if he wasn’t,� snapped the doctor. Then he rose from his knees. “You get into the buggy, Diana, and drive down to the house for help; telephone to the hospital, we’ll want a stretcher.�
“He’s coming to our house,� said Diana.
Dr. Cheyney gave her a grim look. “All right,� he said, “but a stretcher and two men. I wonder who in hell did this?� he added fiercely.
Diana had risen from her knees. “Zeb Bartlett,� she said. “I saw him too late to cry a warning.�
Dr. Cheyney’s face changed sharply. He handed the paper he had taken from Trench to Diana. “I reckon that’s yours—now run!� he commanded.
It seemed hours to Diana before she got help there. In reality it was twenty minutes. The negroes improvised a stretcher and carried Caleb solemnly down the hill and across the long lawns. Diana had gone ahead to prepare the great west room for him, and when they brought him in, still unconscious, the white bed was ready and the long table for the operation, and she had telephoned for another surgeon from the hospital. At eight o’clock that night they had found the bullet and removed it, and there was a fighting chance for life.
Diana, who had waited on the stairs to know the worst, said nothing. In her own room she had looked at the blood-stained paper which Dr. Cheyney had so strangely given her. Across it was written her own name in her bold handwriting. She looked at it strangely, and then with a stinging sense of shame; it was the receipt for six cents with which she had mocked him long ago. And he had carried it all this time! Diana laid her head down on her arms and burst into tears.
XXIX
THE agony of the night and the ensuing morning left Diana feeling lifeless. Her only consolation was in the fact that her father was able to be up and in his chair, and by nine o’clock they had received a message that poor Jinny Eaton showed signs of recovering her senses. Of Jacob nothing was heard, to her great relief. A trial and imprisonment would have capped the climax of Colonel Royall’s mortification. She did not know that Dr. Cheyney had saved her that. Nor did she tell the doctor, nor any one, that she and Kingdom-Come had gone down the night before to Caleb’s house to see to the welfare of Sammy and the dog.
She had found Aunt Charity there and bribed her heavily to stay over night, but Diana had no faith in Charity and another project was shaping itself in her mind. She would have liked to consult her father, but she could not trouble him and the trials of the last few months had been developing Diana. All that was sweet and malleable in the girl’s nature had crystallized into greater strength, and a greater sweetness, too; she was no longer a girl, but a woman, and her greatness of heart showed in the breadth of her charity. She had sat down in the old leather chair in Caleb’s office and lifted Jean Bartlett’s child to her knee without a shudder of repulsion at that shameful story. Instead, she touched the child’s head tenderly and crooned over it, womanlike. Oh, if Caleb could have seen her in the old worn chair!