e cooks and sweeps and sews
and knits as good as anybody. She'll do the same way. She's a good
knitter, I know. The pore child."

Sim reached out a hand gently to the work which he found lying, needles
still in place, on the table where Mary Warren had left it the day
before.

"She'll learn soon," said Karen Jensen. "Ain't she pretty enough to
make you cry, laying there the way she is." The keen gray eyes of
Karen Jensen softened. "She's asleep," she whispered. "Doctor doped
her."

"If only now," said Sim Gage, frowning as usual in thought, "if only I
could get some sort of woman to come here and stay a while, until she
gets well. It ain't right she should be in a place like this all
alone."

"You pore fool," said Karen Jensen, "did you think for a minute I'd go
away and leave that girl alone with you? Go out and get some wood!
I'm a-going to get supper here. Tell Nels he can go back home after
supper, and him and Minna and Theodore 'll have to keep house until I
get back. The pore thing--you said she was right blind?" she concluded.

"Plumb blind," said Sim Gage. "What's more, she can't see none a-tall.
It ain't no wonder she's scared sick."

"I'm mighty glad you're a-goin' to get supper here to-night," he
continued. "I'm that rattled, like, I couldn't make bread worth a
damn."

He edged out of the cabin and communicated his news. "Mrs. Jensen says
she'll take care of her till she gets better," he said.

"That's the best thing I've heard," commented Doctor Barnes. "That'll
help. I'll stay here to-night myself. Gardner, can you run my car
down to the dam?"

"I might," said Wid. "I never did drive a car much, but I think I
could. Mormons does; and I've had a lot to do with mowing machines,
like them."

"Well, get down to the dam and tell the people I can't be back until
to-morrow afternoon. Here's where I belong just now. Where do I
sleep, Gage?"

"Out here in the tent, I reckon," replied Sim, "though most all my
blankets is in there on the bed. Maybe I kin find a slicker
somewheres. Wid, he ain't got nothing left over to his place, neither."

"Don't bother about things," said Nels Jensen. "I'll go over and bring
some blankets from my place. The woman'll take care of that girl until
she gets in better shape."

Doctor Barnes looked at them all for a time, frowning in his own way.
"You damn worthless people," said he with sudden sheer affection. "God
has been good to you, hasn't