I am
sick. . . . I have never been so sick--before."

With that he subsided, but his silence was far more dreadful than his
wanderings had been; and as fast as she dared she pushed the heavy team
on, with Ragtime following behind like a dog. He slipped back against
her almost immediately, and this time he had not the strength with
which to apologize nor lift himself erect. With his head heavy in the
hollow of her arm, they came at length to the open pasture hills; they
topped the rise and faced the loops on loops of highway that ran down
to Morrison at the river-edge. And so she brought him home. At the
sight of his "city" she sobbed aloud, but he, sunken and slack, was
conscious neither of distance covered nor change of country. He
climbed down from the seat, however, in response to her urgings, when
the team halted before Caleb Hunter's white-columned house--he turned
and started stubbornly back the way they had come.

She ran after him and clung to his arm.

"You promised that you would come back to me," she cried up at him.
"Oh, you cannot leave me now!"

That halted him, momentarily.

"I must go back to my bridge," he explained, plainly nonplussed. "But
then I'll surely come back to you."

She pleaded with him--raged at him.

"I must go back to my bridge," he reiterated gruffly now.

Her arms went around him in desperation, and then, with one swing, he
had swept her yards away, reeling before his blazing wrath.

"Take your fingers from my eyes, Harrigan," he gasped in sudden agony.
"I am going to kill you now--and _she_ is looking on!"

The girl was afraid of him; she dared not try to hold him. She
screamed wildly for help, and screamed again. And he had gone on, and
wavered and crashed over upon his face, when Caleb Hunter and her
father came running heavily across the lawn in answer to her shrieks.

Between them they lifted him and carried him into the house.

CHAPTER XXIV

--AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW

They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him,
quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed. They stood there,
dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room,
coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs. And
at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than
their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's
stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once
Mi