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“Why, Eben!” she said, when they reached the kitchen door. Her voice was almost womanly; and a real anxiety seemed to have penetrated her hysterical egoism.

They got him to bed tenderly, and propped him up among the white pillows. His knotted hands lay on the coverlet, gray and bloodless under the stains of hard work. Idy bent over him, tucking him in with little pats and crooning moans of sympathy. When she had finished, she dropped her wet cheek against his beard.

“I’m goin’ fer the doctor, pappy,” she whispered; “I won’t be gone but a little while,”–then rushed down the path to the stable, and flung the harness on the pinto.

The buggy was standing in the shed, and she caught the shafts and dragged it out with superabundant energy, as if her anxiety found relief in the exertion. A few minutes later she drove out between the rows of pallid young eucalyptus-trees that led to the road, leaning eagerly forward, her young face white and set beneath the row of knobby protuberances that represented the morning stage of her much cherished bang. It was thus that she drove into Elsmore, the rattling of the old buggy and the spots of lather on the pinto’s sides exciting a ripple of curiosity, which furnished its own solution in the fact that it was “that there Starkweather girl,” who was generally conceded to be “a great one.”

She stopped her panting horse before the doctor’s office, and sprang out.

“Are you the doctor?” she asked breathlessly, standing on the threshold, with one hand on each side of the casing.

A man in his shirt-sleeves, who was writing at the desk, turned and looked at her. It was the same man who had prevented the runaway. He began to smile, but the girl’s stricken face stopped him.

“Dr. Patterson has gone to the tin-mine,” he said, getting up and coming forward; “he will not be home till to-morrow.”

Idy grasped the casing so tightly that her knuckles shone white and polished.

“My fawther’s got a hem’ridge,” she said, swallowing after the words. “I don’t know what on earth to do.”

“A hemorrhage!” said the young man with kindly sympathy. “Well, now, don’t be too much alarmed, Miss–“

“Starkweather,” quavered Idy.

“Starkweather? Oh, it’s Mr. Starkweather. Why, he’s a friend of mine. And so you’re his daughter. Well, you mustn’t be too much alarmed. I’ve had a great many hemorrhages myself, and I’m good for twenty years yet.” He had taken his coat from a nail at the back of the room, and was putting it on hurriedly. “Prop him up in bed, and don’t let him talk, and give him a spoonful of salt-and-water now and then. My horse is standing outside, and I’ll go right down to Maravilla and fetch a doctor. I’ll come up on the other side of the lake, and get there almost as soon as you do–let me help you into your buggy. And drive right on home, and don’t worry.”

He had put on his hat, and they stood on the sidewalk together.

Idy made a little impulsive stoop toward him, as if she would have taken him in her arms.

“Oh!” she gasped, her eyes swimming, and her chin working painfully; “I just think you’re the very best man I ever saw in all my life!”

A moment later she saw him driving a tall black horse toward the lake at a speed that brought her the first sigh of relief she had known, and made her put up her hand suddenly to her forehead.

“Good gracious me!” she exclaimed under her breath–“if I didn’t forget to take down my crimps!”

Two or three times as she drove home through the warm odors of the harvest noon her anxiety was invaded by the recollection of this man, to whose promptness and decision her own vigorous nature responded with a strong sense of liking; and this liking did not suffer any abatement when he came into her father’s sick-room with the doctor, and the invalid looked at the stranger, and then at her, with a faint, troubled smile.