The doctor was kindly and efficient, but professionally non-committal. The boy was badly injured, and he must be moved at once to the nearest house. Somehow they lifted Joseph and held him so as to break the jar of stone and rut as the doctor drove his car as carefully as he could down the road leading to the nearest farm-house.
There they were met with a generous warmth of sympathy and hospitality; the spare chamber was opened, and the farm wife bustled about, turning down the bed and bringing what comforts the house possessed. The doctor stayed as long as he could; but the stork was flying at the other end of the township, and he was forced to leave Patsy in charge, with abundant instructions.
Soon after his leaving the Dempsy Carters returned without Joseph’s parents; they had gone to town and were not expected home until “chore time.”
“All right,” Patsy sighed. “Now ye had best all go your ways and I’ll bide till morning.”
“But can you?” Janet Payne asked it, wonderingly. “I thought you said you had to be in Arden to-day?”
A smile, whimsical and baffling, crept to the corners of Patsy’s mouth. “Sure, life is crammed with things ye think have to be done to-day till they’re matched against a sudden greater need. Chance and I started the wee lad on his journey, and ’twas meant I should see him safe to the end, I’m thinking. Good-by.”
Gregory Jessup lingered a moment behind the others; his eyes were suspiciously red, and the hands that gripped Patsy’s shook the least bit. “I wanted to say something: If—if you should ever happen to run up against Billy Burgeman—anywhere—don’t be afraid to do him a kindness. He—he wouldn’t mind it from you.”
Patsy leaned against the door and watched him go. “There’s another good lad. I’d like to be finding him again, too, some day.” She pressed her hands over her eyes with a fierce little groan, as if she would blot out the enveloping tragedy along with her surroundings. “Faith! what is the meaning of life, anyway? Until to-day it has seemed such a simple, straight road; I could have drawn a fair map of it myself, marking well the starting-point and tracing it reasonably true to the finish. But to-night—to-night—’tis all a tangle of lanes and byways. There’s no sign-post ahead—and God alone knows where it’s leading.”
She went back to the spare chamber and took up her watching by the bedside; and for the rest of that waning day she sat as motionless as everything else in the room. The farm wife came and went softly, in between her preparations for supper. When it was ready she tried her best to urge Patsy down-stairs for a mouthful.
But the girl refused to stir. “I couldn’t. The wee lad might come back while I was gone and find no one to reach him a hand or smile him a welcome.”