Part 25

Starting out, it had seemed a toss-up between them and the fire, but the train rolled over the trestle and drew up in a cut on the southerly side, a quarter-hour to the good. The creek ran under the northerly end, with a short approach to the bank, the bulk of the trestle leading over a quarter-mile of morass to firm ground; so Carter, with Bender, Carrots Smith, and other half-dozen, dropped buckets from the bridge to the stream, thirty feet below, and passed them to the men who were strung along the plates. Dipping, drawing, dashing, they worked furiously under the glare of the conflagration. While still half a mile away, its heat set the trestle steaming. At a quarter of a mile, the furious draught rained embers large as a man's hand upon the men, who turned their faces away from the blistering heat. Casting uneasy glances over humped shoulders, they began to increase their distances, edging along the south approach towards the train; but as they still maintained communications, neither Carter nor Bender took notice until they suddenly broke and ran.

"Here! Come back!" Bender's angry roar drowned Carter's shout, and was lost, in turn, in a shrill whistling; for the engineer had seen that which had been hid from them.

"My God!" Carrots Smith cried; and Brady broke out in whimpering prayer to the saints.

They stood, staring.

As aforesaid, the fire was running south and westerly at an acute angle to--in fact, almost paralleling the railroad, with its extreme point farthest away but already beyond the trestle. And now, veering swiftly southeast, as Bender had feared, it swung at right angles and came broadside on, a fiery tide high over the forest. To the engineer it seemed that the wind lifted a mass of flame and threw it bodily into a tangle of poplar-brake, red willow, tall reeds, and sedge at the trestle's south end. Dry, explosively inflammable from a summer's heat, it touched off like a magazine, whirling skyward, a twisting water-spout of flame, and as he jerked wildly on his whistle he saw, as under the calcium of lurid melodrama, men running like wingless flies along the wet, black trestle. Careening, the column fell across them.

Only the few who were drawing with Carter escaped that first explosive flame, and they gained only time to jump as the main fire came hurdling over the trees. Falling, Carter saw the stream, blood-red; jagged rocks rising swiftly to meet him. A flash blinded his eyes, then--

He rubbed them--that is, he winked, for he was far too weak for such robust exercise. Yes, he winked it. Was--could that be Helen's face bending low over him?

*XXXI*

*WHEREIN THE FATES SUBSTITUTE A CHANGE OF BILL*

Carter winked again. The face, however, did not move. On the contrary, it lit up with sudden delight and said smile helped his limping consciousness forward to the idea of a dream. Yes, he was dreaming, undoubtedly dreaming! No! Here memory took hold and gave him back the flaming forest; wet rocks, rising swiftly from red water, carried him back and left him at the precise moment that he had struck a projecting timber. He was falling! Involuntarily he stiffened, expecting the shock ... but--ah! a clew! He was dead--of the fall; and this? Must be heaven, or why Helen? _If_ t'other place? 'Twas not so bad as long as she was there! Here his eye, through removal of the face, touched the whitewashed ceiling, then wandered to blank walls, a stand with medicine, covered glasses and spoons, a linen-press, two chairs--he arrived at truth, a hospital! Then, tired out by these strenuous mental exercises, his eyes closed once more, to the ineffable relief of the anxious watcher, and sleep, natural sleep, replaced the coma that had held him these two days.

For a while Helen listened to his breathing, then, once sure that he was really asleep, she tiptoed out to the corridor and, under urge of relief, ran, fairly flew, with her good news to the head doctor's office. For these had been days of haggard waiting, as, for the matter of that, had the last two weeks--Bender's battles, Carter's triumph, the strike and forest fire had all been packed into ten short days.

Beginning at the morning after she saw Carter at dinner with the general manager, her joyful prayer had gone with the jubilant roar of press and people at the ceding of the crossing, and for several following days her ears drank thirstily of the plaudits which were universal in the hospital, on the street, at her boarding-house. When, indeed, the topic cropped up at her first operation, her fingers trembled so over a bandage that Carruthers excused her, thinking the sight of blood had turned her sick. At Jean Glaves's table she had to veil the eager exultance of her eyes. The merchants who were discussing competition in freight rates on the street would have stared could they have heard the heart-cry of the pretty nurse then passing.

"He did it! Yes, he is very clever--all that you say! But you cannot have him, for he is mine! I'll lend him to you--for a while! But I must have him back! He's mine! mine! mine!"

From breathing the rare atmosphere of these exalted heights, she had been precipitated by the strike into bottom deeps of despair, and while agonizing therein over additional rumors of Greer & Smythe's impending failure, a morning paper came to her breakfast-table with six-inch fire scareheads and a long tale of burns, bruises, breakages that would have been longer but for the softness of the morass. Carter, Bender, Brady, Carrots Smith, all who were on the trestle, had been more or less injured; and six bridges, five trestles, dozens of culverts had gone up in smoke, a maleficent memorial to Michigan Red, before the conflagration back-fired itself out among labyrinthian lakes. But she paused not at the tale. The injured were on the way to the hospital, and with that piece of news clutched to her bosom she ran all the way and broke, at one time, a rule that was as the law of the Medes and Persians and the privacy of the head doctor's study.

It will be easily seen that under such circumstances her hysterical gaspings were not exactly informing, but a man does not attain to headship of a hospital without ability to extract truth from obscure premises--what else is diagnosis?--and when, indicating the heading that told of Carter's injuries, she gasped, "My husband!" the Head grasped every detail of the situation.

"I must nurse him!" she pleaded. "Must! must!"

A man prodigiously dignified and very solemn behind imposing glasses, the Head offered a stereotyped objection; but it speaks for the feeling beneath his dessicated exterior that he eventually set rules and regulations at defiance, and outraged the discipline and morale maintained by the Scotch head nurse, by appointing her, a novitiate, to a capital case.

"But remember," he said. "Only if you can forget, for the present, that he is your husband?"

He did not believe she could, and had been astonished by her quiet, almost mechanical performance of duty during those two harrowing days. For he did not see her leaning over the inanimate form when alone in the ward; her strained watching, desperate listenings for the first flutter of the returning spirit. Now he did see her flushed delight, and muttered to himself as Carruthers, the under surgeon, hastened with her to Carter's bedside: "I suppose I ought to tell _him_! ... What's the use; he'll hear soon enough."

So her secret was kept, and being uninformed of the matrimonial complications in the case, the surgeon set her delighted flutterings to professional interest and so joined her felicitations. "'Twas touch and go," he whispered. "Few could stand such a crack on the head; must have made an omelet of his brains and his fever was hot enough to fry it. But he'll pull through, Mistress Morrill, and it is good that he will, for he's a gran' character, fine and useful to the province."

To indulge a pleasant conceit, that refreshing sleep may be regarded as an intimation of the fates that comedy was about to be substituted for impending tragedy upon the boards; and the opening of Carter's eyes may very well be considered as the rise of the curtain on the first, and what would also have been the last, act had he been in the enjoyment of his usual health and strength. Lacking these, he could only take things as he found them; chief over all, a demure nurse who administered bitter draughts or took his pulse without sign of recognition, compunction, or emotion.

As her shapely back always hid the pencil when she noted her observations on the chart, he could not see it tremble; and how was he to know that the pulse-taking was a sham? That she could feel only her own heart thudding five thousand thuds to the minute? That she had to guess the pulse by his temperature, which cardinal crime of the nurse's calendar was partly condoned, because if she _had_ set down its vibrations at the moments she held his hand, every doctor in the hospital would have come running as to a lost cause.

Ignorant of all this, he could only lie and watch her moving about the ward, tantalizingly trim and pretty in her nurse's dress; wait till some softening of her coldness would justify the clean confession he ached to make. Always the desire was with him and it waxed with the days. But whether or no she discerned it lurking behind his surreptitious glances, she afforded no opportunity, and what can a man do against a fate that nips every approach to the tender with nasty medicine or chill phrase--"You are not to talk."

"I believe you like to give me that stuff," he growled one day.

"Doctor's orders," she severely replied, and her stony face effectually repressed him while indicating that she was not to be drawn from her vantage-ground by that or a sudden remark--"It seems strange to see you in that uniform."

"Doesn't feel so to me," she coldly answered, adding, with a spice of malice, "If it did I should get used to it, for I expect to wear it for the next three years."

He winced, and he did not see her smile as he gave her his angry back--that or her droopings over his sleep an hour thereafter. Alone in the quiet ward, bent so low that her breath moved the hair on his temples, the occasion vividly recalled the night, long ago, when she had watched the moon etch with line and shadow the promise of the future upon his face. It lay there now, under her soft breath, the fulfilment. For two years stress and struggle had tooled away every roughness and left the accomplished promise, a man wrought by circumstance to a great fineness.

She also had changed--from a well-intentioned if careless girl to a thoughtful woman. Contact with life in the rough had rubbed the scales from her eyes and now she saw clearly--many things, but all centring on one. Outside people were declaiming against the vindictive fate that had joined with the monopoly against this their champion. That morning's papers had it that Greer & Smythe were surely ruined. Yet she was glad, overjoyed. Wealthy and honored, it would have been difficult to the verge of impossibility for her to go back to him. Always she would have felt that he might doubt her motives. But now--

"It's time to take your medicine!" She sprang up as he opened his eyes, wondering if he had felt her light kiss.

Had he, it would have been "curtain" there and then, but as he did not the play went on, and its sequence proves that, however honorable her intentions, she had by no means relinquished her sex's unalienable right to bring things about in its own illogical, tantalizing, perversely charming way. Drooping over his sleep, hoping that he would wake and catch her, she took care that he should not--assumed a statuesque coldness at the first quiver of his eyelids. Undoubtedly, and with her sex's habitual unfairness, she scandalously abused her position, exercising a tyranny that was as sweet to herself as mortifying to him.

"You must not do that--must do this--now go to sleep." She hugged her power in place of him, and when he achieved a successful revolt against her ban of silence by appealing to the Head for permission to talk with Smythe, she revenged herself by injecting a personal interest into her dealings with Carruthers. It was madness for him to see their heads close together over his chart; the shining eyes she brought back from whispered conferences in the hall. To be sure, it was all about pills and plasters, but how was he to know that? And it was in revenge for this shamelessly injurious conduct that he arranged the scene which opens the second act.

On the morning that he was promoted from spoon-feed to the dignity of a tray, behold him! head bent, elbows square with his ears, knife and fork grabbed at their points, proving his indifference to her opinion by the worst behavior that recent better practice permitted. Alas! he was cast all through for a losing part. Displaying, before his face, the irritating curiosity which a child bestows on a feeding lion, she privately peeped from behind the door-screen, gloated over the old familiar spectacle. She caught him coming and going. Also she turned a delighted ear when he dropped into the homely settler speech; listened for the old locutions; but called his bluff when he overdid the part by running amuck of the grammar in a manner frightful to behold.

"I really don't see why you talk like that," she remarked, patronizingly. "You speak quite well, almost correctly, to Dr. Hammand and Mr. Smythe."

"Yes?" he retorted. "I didn't notice. Mebbe you'll correct me if I side-step it again?"

But the last case of that man was worse than the first. "Thank you," she coldly answered. "I have given up teaching school."

He sniffed sarcastically. "Hum! Shouldn't have known it. I always heard that the spanking habit stuck through life. But don't give up. Remember the copybook line, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.'" But she was going out of the door at the time and took care that he should think she had not heard. "You were speaking?" she inquired, coming back. And, of course, it would not bear repetition.

He fared just as illy when, next morning, Bender hobbled into the ward with the aid of a crutch and cane. Having been visited by the lady protagonist, the giant was fully informed on the situation and so achieved a sly wink behind his chief's sarcastic introductions. "Mr. Bender--Mrs. Morrill."

Also her quiet answer was disconcerting. "We have met before. Have you heard from Jenny lately, Mr. Bender?"

Now Bender had. A letter, small note, simple and direct as Jenny herself, was even then burning his pocket, and, blushing like a school-boy caught in the theft of apples, he produced and read it. If he insisted--was perfectly certain that he couldn't get well without her--Jenny would!

"'Fraid I took a mean advantage," he confessed. "Reg'lar cold-decked her. You see, a busted ankle ain't much to spread on, so I hinted at complications. She sure thinks I'm dyin,' an' when she comes she'll find me hopping around."

"Oh, well." Carter glanced stealthily at Helen. "She has oceans of time to pay you. With any old luck you are good for eighty-five, and it doesn't take a loving wife that length of time to get even." For which insolence he paid instantly and doubly--first by a nasty dose, secondly by loss of Bender, who was summarily ejected under pretext of its being the patient's hour for sleep.

So the war ran, and it did seem as though circumstance never tired of impressing allies for Helen's cause. Take Dorothy Chester, who called with Hart next day. She, like Carruthers, could only take the situation at face values, and so enthused over his luck in nurses; to all of which--in Helen's absence--Carter subscribed till Dorothy reached her climax.

"And Dr. Carruthers thinks so, too. Wouldn't it be nice if they made a match of it?"

She was astounded by the heat of his reply. "No! A Scotch dromedary, suckled on predestination and damnation of infants? Pretty husband he'd make!" But she solved his vehemence for Hart's benefit on the way home. "He's in love with her himself."

"Between patient and doctor? What a mix-up!" Hart laughed. "Odds are on the doctor if he's up to his job. I'd hate to be Carter on the chance of an overdose." For which flippancy his ears were well pulled.

As he said, things were undoubtedly a little tangled, and if at first glance it would appear that Dorothy had not assisted in the unravelling, closer scrutiny shows that her remark helped at least to bring affairs to a head. For the remainder of the day Carter was very thoughtful, so preoccupied that he forgot to misbehave over his supper-tray while, time and again, Helen caught him surveying herself with a dark uneasiness. Puzzled, she came back to the ward before leaving and stood at the foot of his bed; but as yet his fever was confined to his mind, and he replied that he was feeling quite well to her question.

The "good-night" she wished him was not, however, for him. Always darkness magnifies trouble, and through its black lens he saw suspicions as facts. Tossing restlessly, he heard the city clock chime the quarters, halves, hours, until, at twelve, the night nurse's lantern revealed him wide-eyed, staring, and knowing the efficacy of a change of thought in producing sleep, she stayed for a chat.

Correct enough in theory, the treatment proved about as successful as would the application of a blister upon a sore; for he bent the conversation to his own uses, steering it by a circuitous route through the girl's own experience to Helen.

She was liked in the hospital?

Indeed she was! The night nurse was emphatic on that, and went on to say that beauty such as Helen's was not generally conducive of popularity. No, it wasn't jealousy! The nurse tossed her head at his question. Simply that pretty girls didn't have to be nice, so usually left amiability to be assumed with a double chin; and being a frank as well as a merry creature, she confessed to an accession of that desirable quality every time she saw her own nose in a glass. But Helen Morrill? She was sweet as she was pretty!

Dr. Carruthers thought so, too?

Well--the nurse would smile! And everybody in the hospital was glad of it. They would make such a perfect couple, an ideal match!

It was as good as settled, then?

Well--not given out yet, but every one knew! Her lantern being on the floor, she could not see his face, and he lay so quiet she thought he had fallen asleep, and was tiptoeing away when he spoke again.

But--_Mrs._ Morrill? She had been married before! Her husband--dead?

If he wasn't he ought to be--the nurse was sure of that. There was only one place for a man who could not live with such a nice girl. And if he were not--divorce was about as good in ridding one of the beast! With which she picked up her lantern and left him in darkness and despair. When she came next on her rounds she thought him asleep, but he resumed his restless tossings as soon as her back was turned. Dawn, however, betrayed him, and sent her flying to the head doctor with his pulse and temperature.

"He was all right last night!" the latter exclaimed. "Bring his chart down to the office." Studying it while he mixed sedatives a little later, he said: "Awake at midnight--hum! Talked, did he? What about? Mrs. Morrill?" He snatched truth out of her as though it had been an appendix. "Spoke of her and Dr. Carruthers?--ah! ha! Well, give him this and send Mrs. Morrill to me when she comes in."

If short, the interview did not lack excitement when, a couple of hours later, Helen opposed the freshness of the morning to the Head's angry glare. Her delicate colors, the eyes cleared by sleep and full of light, were enough to have softened the heart of a Gorgon, but served only to irritate him, who looked upon them as so much material gone to waste.

"What have you done?" he roared after her. "Look at that!" And went on as her distressed eyes came back from the chart: "You have done nothing--that's the trouble. Why did I appoint you to this case? Because of your vast experience? No, because I thought you could administer something outside of medical practice. And now he's dying--of jealousy. You have done it; you must cure him." And taking her by the arm as though she were a medicine-tray, he marched her to Carter's ward, gave her a shake at the door like a bottle that is to be "well shaken before taken," and thrust her in with the parting admonition, "Now, do your duty."

Here was an embarrassing position! Surely never before had nurse such orders--to administer love, like a dose, that, forsooth, to a patient who had already turned his broad back on her charms. Now did she pay toll of blushes for the perversity that had checked his every overture. How should--how _could_ she begin?

Pleating and unpleating her apron, she stood at the foot of his bed, the prettiest picture of perplexity ever vouchsafed to gaunt, unshaven man. A week's stubble did not improve his appearance any more than his unnatural color, fixed, glazed eyes. But soon as a timid glance gave her these--she was on her knees beside him.

"Is that you, Helen?" Before she could speak he burst out in a sudden irruption of speech. "I'm so glad; there's something I want to tell you." Then it came, in a flood that washed away his natural reserve, the confession--his remorse for his obstinacy, the sorrow that had tamed his anger, his yearning through weary months for an overture from her; his ignorance of the settler's persecution, scorn of scandalous rumors; his attempts to communicate with and find her; all, down to his observation of her liking for Carruthers, finishing: "Through all, my every thought has been of you. But now--I see. It was a mistake, our marriage. It was wrong to couple roughness with refinement. So if you wish--" Her face was now buried in her arms, and he gently touched the golden hair. "Last night I made up my mind to bring no more misery into your life. But now ... that I see you ... it is difficult; ... but ... if you wish--"

He got no further, for speech is impossible when a soft hand stoppers one's mouth. And while he was thus effectually gagged, she took a mean advantage: told him just what she thought of him. Such a stupid! A big man, so very strong, but oh, _so_ silly! Did he really think that she--any girl--would have waited upon him in such circumstances unless-- Here she had to release his mouth to wipe away the streaming tears, and his question came out like an explosion:

"What?"

She told him, or, rather, conveyed the information in the orthodox way with lovers. This takes time, and becoming suddenly alive to the fact that he was sitting up in bed, she resumed her authority to make him lie down. In view of his condition she was certainly justified in using force to compel obedience; but was it right, was it proper for her, a nurse duly accredited to the case, to leave her arms about him? Well, she did, and--scandalous predicament!--her golden head was lying beside his on the pillow when the door opened for the matron, Carruthers, and the Head on their morning rounds.

"Well--I declare! _Fine_ goings on!"

Helen's faint cry of dismay was drowned by the matron's horrified exclamation, but Carter rose to the situation. "Miss Craig, doctor--my wife." He could not include Carruthers, who retired precipitously, and was then just outside the door, swallowing hugely in vain attempts to get what looked like a monstrous pill, but was really his heart, back to its proper place.

"Your what?" Having the general objections to matrimony which come with prim old maidhood, the matron almost screamed: "Good gracious, man! Couldn't you have waited till you were sure you wouldn't need a minister to bury you?" And she tossed a high head at his answer.