"You're wanted, sir!" Her tone was sulky.
"Anything wrong?" Anderson turned apprehensively.
"Nothing more than 'is temper, sir. He won't let yer rest, do what you will for 'im."
Anderson went into the house. His father was sitting up in bed. Mrs. Ginnell had been endeavouring during the past hour to make her patient clean and comfortable, and to tidy his room; but had been at last obliged to desist, owing to the mixture of ill-humour and bad language with which he assailed her.
"Can I do anything for you?" Anderson inquired, standing beside him.
"Get me out of this blasted hole as soon as possible! That's about all you can do! I've told that woman to get me my things, and help me into the other room--but she's in your pay, I suppose. She won't do anything I tell her, drat her!"
"The doctor left orders you were to keep quiet to-day."
McEwen vowed he would do nothing of the kind. He had no time to be lolling in bed like a fine lady. He had business to do, and must get home.
"If you get up, with this fever on you, and the leg in that state, you will have blood-poisoning," said Anderson quietly, "which will either kill you or detain you here for weeks. You say you want to talk business with me. Well, here I am. In an hour's time I must go to Calgary for an appointment. Suppose you take this opportunity."
McEwen stared at his son. His blue eyes, frowning in their wrinkled sockets, gave little or no index, however, to the mind behind them. The straggling white locks falling round his blotched and feverish face caught Anderson's attention. Looking back thirty years he could remember his father vividly--a handsome man, solidly built, with a shock of fair hair. As a little lad he had been proud to sit high-perched beside him on the wagon which in summer drove them, every other Sunday, to a meeting-house fifteen miles away. He could see his mother at the back of the wagon with the little girls, her grey alpaca dress and cotton gloves, her patient look. His throat swelled. Nor was the pang of intolerable pity for his mother only. Deep in the melancholy of his nature and strengthened by that hateful tie of blood from which he could not escape, was a bitter, silent compassion for this outcast also. All the machinery of life set in motion and maintaining itself in the clash of circumstance for seventy years to produce this, at the end! Dismal questionings ran through his mind. Ought he to have acted as he had done seventeen years before? How would his mother have judged him? Was he not in some small degree responsible?