the
cabin of the sufferer. Gently he lifted the latch, and on tip-toe he
softly entered the room where he lay.

The man was utterly amazed. The Widow sat there, holding his hands now,
now pushing back the soft long hair from his face, folding back the
blankets, cooling his hot brow with her soft fresh hand, and looking
into his eyes all the time with a tenderness that was new to Sandy.

The boy was wild with the fever, and weak and helpless. Men stood back
around the wall and in the dark; they had not dared to speak to her as
she entered. They were so amazed that a woman would dare do this
thing--to come in among them alone, take this boy in her arms, wave them
back--wild beasts as they were, they stood there mute with amazement and
devotion.

"I will go now!" The boy then reached his hands and tried to rise up. "I
will go away up, up, out of it all. I don't fit in here. I don't belong
here. I don't know the people, and the people don't know me."

Then he was still, and his mind wandered in another direction, when he
began again.

"Now I will go; and I will go alone. I am so, so tired. I am so hot and
thirsty here. I will cross on the cool mountain and rest as I go."

The woman looked in his face, took his face in her hands as she sat by
the bed, raised him tenderly and talked in a low soft voice all night
long; soft and sweet and tender to the stranger as the voice of a
mother.

She held his hand all night, as if she would hold him back from crossing
over the river, and talked to him tenderly as if to draw him back to
earth.

The gray dawn came at last, stealing down the mouth of the great black
chimney, through the little window in the wall, where a paper did the
duty of a pane, and there the men still stood in a row around the walls
of the cabin, and there the Widow still sat holding the boy's hand,
cooling his brow, calling him back to the world.

And he came. He opened his eyes and knew his fellow-men, for these
fevers of the mountain are sudden and severe, and their work is soon
done or abandoned.

After that the camp had a patron saint. The Parson fell ill next, but
the boys rated him so soundly about his motive--as if any man could have
a motive in falling ill--that he fell to cursing, and cursed himself
into a perspiration, and so got well.

One morning the Widow found a nugget of gold on her doorstep. What
particular goose of the camp had laid that great gold egg before her
door she did not know