The man looked off to his schooner.
“Three days,” the doctor repeated.
“I’m wonderful sorry,” sighed the skipper, “but I got t’ stand by the Lard.”
And he was dead—within three days, as we afterwards learned: even as the doctor had said.
Once, when the doctor was off in haste to Cuddy Cove to save the life of a mother of seven—the Cuddy Cove men had without a moment’s respite pulled twelve miles against a switch of wind from the north and were streaming sweat when they landed—once, when the doctor was thus about his beneficent business, a woman from Bowsprit Head brought her child to be cured, incredulous of the physician’s power, but yet desperately seeking, as mothers will. She came timidly—her ailing child on her bosom, where, as it seemed to me, it had lain complaining since she gave it birth.
“I’m thinkin’ he’ll die,” she told my sister.
My sister cried out against this hopelessness. ’Twas not kind to the dear Lord, said she, thus to despair.
“They says t’ Bowsprit Head,” the woman persisted, “that he’ll die in a fit. I’m—I’m—not wantin’ him,” she faltered, “t’ die—like that.”
“No, no! He’ll not!”