CHAPTER XXI.
WHERE IS BOBBY?
“Where is Bobby, Helen?” asked Douglas, coming into the tent where Helen was having an enforced invalidism. She had promised Dr. Wright to be quiet until he returned to camp, which he was planning to do in a week.
“I want to make you glad to see me and if my coming means you are no longer in durance vile I know I shall be welcome,” he had said when he told her good-by after a little more pulse taking.
“We shall always be glad to have you,” she had replied impersonally. He did think she might have used a singular pronoun but he was grateful to her for any small scrap of politeness. As for Helen, it was difficult for her to get over a certain sharpness of manner she had up to this time carefully kept for the young physician. When she had fooled herself into thinking she hated him there had been times when she had forgotten to be rude in spite of her intentions and now, when she meant to be mild and gentle, sometimes the old habit of studied disagreeableness got the better of her. That long week of enforced idleness had chastened her spirit wonderfully. She was so gentle that Douglas sometimes thought maybe she was ill. The rattler seemed to have extracted the poison from her system, rather than injected it.
“Only one more day!” she was thinking when Douglas came in. Dr. Wright was expected on the morrow and then she could be up and doing once more. There were absolutely no ill effects from the wound and that tiny excuse for a bandage had wholly disappeared. It seemed foolish to be nursing up herself like this, but then she had promised and Helen Carter never broke her word.
“Bobby, you say? Why, he must have gone with Josh.”
“No, Josh was to go a long way for some chickens and I thought Bobby would get too tired.”