The doctor went to work at once. “What have you done for him?” he asked Joe.
“Nothing much I could do,” Joe said. “We gave him an emetic as soon as he was sick, and I gave him physic and hot water. The hot water seemed to ease him a little.”
“Good,” the doctor answered. “You couldn’t have done better. He’ll come around all right now. Sick, were you, Mills?”
Mills groaned for reply.
“When the Chinook came,” Joe laughed, “I told him I thought a blizzard was going to hit us, and he said he hoped it would blow the cabin into the lake!”
Joe now hurried about getting supper and making up beds for the tired men, while Mills lay feebly on the couch and made Tom sit by him and tell about his trip.
“You shouldn’t ’a’ done it, boy,” he kept saying. “You shouldn’t ’a’ risked it for the old Ranger.”
But that night they were roused by hearing poor Mills in the throes of another attack. The doctor hurried to him.
“It’s brought on a sort of acute indigestion,” he said to the others. “I didn’t realize he was so bad. It’s lucky I’m here, for you can’t let such attacks go on, or they get you.”
All that night he and Joe sat up with the sick man, and all the next day, and the day after that, he kept the Ranger in bed, and doctored him.