m
in with yuh. I guess he'll lay quiet. He likes to be cuddled up close."

In this way was the feud forgotten. Save for the strange habits imposed
by sickness and the care of a baby, they dropped back into their
old routine, their old relationship. They walked over the dead line
heedlessly, forgetting why it came to be there. Cabin fever no longer
tormented them with its magnifying of little things. They had no time
or thought for trifles; a bigger matter than their own petty prejudices
concerned them. They were fighting side by side, with the Old Man of the
Scythe--the Old Man who spares not.

Lovin Child was pulling farther and farther away from them. They
knew it, they felt it in his hot little hands, they read it in his
fever-bright eyes. But never once did they admit it, even to themselves.
They dared not weaken their efforts with any admissions of a possible
defeat. They just watched, and fought the fever as best they could, and
waited, and kept hope alive with fresh efforts.

Cash was tottery weak from his own illness, and he could not speak above
a whisper. Yet he directed, and helped soothe the baby with baths and
slow strokings of his hot forehead, and watched him while Bud did the
work, and worried because he could not do more.

They did not know when Lovin Child took a turn for the better, except
that they realized the fever was broken. But his listlessness, the
unnatural drooping of his whole body, scared them worse than before.
Night and day one or the other watched over him, trying to anticipate
every need, every vagrant whim. When he began to grow exacting, they
were still worried, though they were too fagged to abase themselves
before him as much as they would have liked.

Then Bud was seized with an attack of the grippe before Lovin Child
had passed the stage of wanting to be held every waking minute. Which
burdened Cash with extra duties long before he was fit.

Christmas came, and they did not know it until the day was half gone,
when Cash happened to remember. He went out then and groped in the snow
and found a little spruce, hacked it off close to the drift and brought
it in, all loaded with frozen snow, to dry before the fire. The kid, he
declared, should have a Christmas tree, anyway. He tied a candle to
the top, and a rabbit skin to the bottom, and prunes to the tip of the
branches, and tried to rouse a little enthusiasm in Lovin Child. But
Lovin Child was not interested in the makeshift.