Something white had seemed to splash up against the window and drop back again. It splashed up a second time, and fell again. Asher hurried to the door, and as he opened it, Pilot, the big white-throated dog from the Shirley claim, came bounding in, so wet and s.h.a.ggy he seemed to bring all the storm in with him.
"Why, Pilot, what"s the news?" Asher asked. "Jim"s sent him, Virgie. He"s done this trick often."
Pilot slipped to the warm stove and shook a whole shower out of his long, wet hair, while Asher carefully untied a little leather bag fastened to the collar under the dog"s throat.
"You brave fellow. You"ve come all the way in the rain to bring me this."
He held up a little metal box from which he took a bit of paper. Bending close to the lamp, he read the message it contained.
"Something is wrong, Virginia. He says, "I need you." What"s the matter with Jim, Pilot? Come here and get up in the chair!"
The dog whimpered and sat still.
"Come out here, then! Come on, I tell you!" Asher started as if to open the door, but the dog did not move.
"He"s not out of doors, and he isn"t sitting up in a chair. Tell me, now, Pilot, exactly where Jim is! Jim, mind you!"
The dog looked at him with watchful eyes.
"Where"s Jim? Poor Jim!" Asher repeated, and Pilot, with a sorrowful yelp, stretched himself at full length beside the stove.
"Jim"s sick, then?"
Pilot wagged his tail understandingly.
"Virgie, Jim needs me. I must go to him." Asher looked at his wife.
"If Jim needs you, you"ll need me," she replied.
"And we"ll both need Pilot. So we"ll keep all the human beings together,"
Asher said, as he helped his wife to fasten her heavy cloak and tie a long old-fashioned nubia about her head.
Then they went out into the darkness and the chilling rain, as neighbor to neighbor, answering this cry for help.
Pilot ran far ahead of them and was waiting with a dog"s welcome when they reached Shirley"s cabin. But the master, lying where he caught the chill draught from the open door, was rigid with cold. A sudden attack of pneumonia had left him helpless. And tonight, Pilot, doing a dog"s best, did not understand the danger of leaving doors open, and of joyously shaking his wet fur down on the sick man to whom help was coming none too soon.
"h.e.l.lo, Jim! We"re all here, doctor, nurse, cook, and hired man, and the little dog under the wagon," Asher said cheerily, bending over Jim"s bunk.
"That pup pretty nearly killed you with kindness, didn"t he?"
Jim smiled wanly, then looked blankly away and lay very still.
The plains frontier had no use for the one talent folk. People must know how to take care of life there. Asher"s first memory of Virginia was when she bent over him, fighting the fever in a prison hospital. He knew her talent for helping, and he had fairly estimated her quick ingenuity for this sod house emergency. But a new vision of the plains life came to her as she watched him, gentle-handed, swift, but unhurried, never giving an inch to the enemy in fighting with death for the life of Jim Shirley.
"He"s safe from that congestion," Asher said when the morning broke. "But his fever will come on now."
"Where did you learn to do all these things for sick people?" Virginia asked.
"Partly from a hospital nurse I had in the war. Also, it"s a part of the game here. I learned a few things fighting the cholera in sixty-seven. We must look everything on the frontier squarely in the face, danger and death along with the rest, just as we have to do everywhere else, only we have to depend on each other more here. Hold on there, Jim!"
Asher sprang toward Shirley, who was sitting upright, staring wildly at the two. Then a struggle began, for the sick man, crazed with delirium, was bent on driving his helpers from the cabin. When he lay back exhausted at length, Asher turned to his wife.
"One of us must go to Carey"s Crossing for a doctor. You can"t hold Jim.
It"s all I can do to hold him. But it"s a long way to Carey"s. Can you go?"
"I"ll try," Virginia replied. And Asher remembered what Jim had said on the windy September day: "She"s as good a woman as we are men."
"You must take Pilot with you and leave him at home. You can"t get lost, for you know the way up to the main trail, and that runs straight to the Crossing. Dr. Carey knows Jim, and he will come if he can, I am sure. He pulled Jim back once a year or two ago when the pneumonia had him. Heaven keep you safe, you brave little soul. Jim may turn the trick for us some day."
He kissed her good-by and watched her gallop away on her errand of mercy.
"The men will have all the credit by and by for settling this country.
Little glory will come to their wives," he thought. "And yet, the women make anchor for every hearthstone, and share in every deed of daring and every test of endurance. G.o.d make me worthy of such a wife!"
Virginia Aydelot had spoken truly when she declared that the war had left the Thaines little except inherited pride and the will to do as they pleased. Inherited tendencies take varying turns. What had made a reformer of old Jean Aydelot made a narrow bigot of his descendant, Francis. What had made a proud, exclusive autocrat of Jerome Thaine, in Virginia Thaine developed into a pride of conquest for the good of others. It was this pride and the Thaine will to do as she pleased in defiance of the prairie perils that sent her now on this errand of mercy for a neighbor in need.
And she took little measure of the reality of the journey. But she was prudent enough to stop at the Sunflower Inn and make ready for it. She slipped on a warm jacket under her heavy cloak, and put on her thickest gloves and overshoes. She wound a long red scarf about her neck and swathed her head in the gray nubia. Then she mounted her horse for her long, hard ride.
The little sod house with all its plainness seemed very cosy as she took leave of it, and the woman instinct for home made its outcry in her when she turned her face resolutely from its sheltering warmth and felt the force of the north wind whipping mercilessly upon her. But she steeled herself to meet the cold, and her spirits rose with the effort.
"You are a mean little wind. Not half as big as the September zephyrs. Do your worst, you can"t scare me," she cried, tucking her head down against its biting breath.
Upon the main trail the snow that had fallen after midnight deepened in the lower places as the wind whirled it from the prairie swells. It was not smooth traveling, although the direction of the trail was clear enough at first.
Virginia"s heart bounded hopefully as Juno covered mile after mile with that persistent, steady canter that means everything good for a long ride.
But the open plains were bitterly cold and the wind grew fiercer as the hours pa.s.sed. High spirits and hope began to give place to determination and endurance. Virginia shut her teeth in a dogged resolve not to give up.
Indeed, she dared not give up. She must go on. A life depended on her now, and two lives might be forfeited if she let this unending wind chill her to forgetfulness.
And so, alone in a white cruelty of solitary land, bounded only by the gray cruelty of the sky, with a dimming trail before her under a deeper snowfall, and with long miles behind her, she struggled on.
She tried to think of everything cheerful and good. She tried to find comfort in the help she would take to Jim. Truly, she was not nearly so cold now and she was very weary and a wee bit sleepy. A tendency to droop in the saddle was overcoming her. She roused herself quickly, and with a jerk at the reins plunged forward at a gallop.
"It will take the stupor out of me," she cried.
Then the reins drooped and the fight with the numbing cold began again.
"I wonder how far along I am. I must be nearly there. I remember we lost sight of Carey"s Crossing soon after we left last September. Some swell of ground cut us off quickly--and I"ve never seen a human being since then, except Asher and Jim Shirley and Pilot," she added.
"The snow is so much heavier right here. It varies so. I"ve pa.s.sed half a dozen changes, but this is the deepest yet. I"m sure I can see the town beyond this slope ahead. Why! where"s the trail, anyhow?"
It was nearing mid-afternoon. Neither horse nor rider had had food nor water, save once when Juno drank at a crossing. Virginia sat still, conscious suddenly that she has missed the trail somewhere.
"It isn"t far, I know. Could I have left it when I took that gallop?" she asked herself.
She was wide awake now, for the reality of the situation was upon her, and she searched madly for some sign of the trail. In that level prairie sea there was no sign to show where the trail might lie. The gray sky was pitiless still, and with no guiding ray of sunshine the points of the compa.s.s failed, and the brave woman lost all sense of direction.
"I won"t give up," she said at last, despairingly, "but we may as well rest a little before we try again."
She had dropped down a decided slope and hurried to a group of low bushes in a narrow draw. While the wind was sliding the snow endlessly back and forth on the higher ground, the bushes were moveless. Slipping to the ground beside them, she stamped her feet and swung her arms until the blood began to warm her chilled body.
"It is so much warmer here. But what next? Oh, dear Father, help me, help me!" she cried in the depth of her need.