one begging for enlightenment. “Is it going to be this way all our lives? Is there never going to be any peace or happiness for us? Does it always have to be this way? Now I want to ask you—is there nothing in the world but trouble?”
“Trouble!” he said derisively. “Why, I’ve had more trouble than any one of you ever heard of…. I’ve had enough to kill a dozen people… but when I saw it wasn’t goin’to kill me, I quit worryin’…. So you do the same thing,” he advised heartily. “Hell, don’t worry, Helen!… It never got you anywhere…. You’ll be all right,” he said. “You got nothin’to worry over. You don’t know what trouble is.”
“Oh, I’d be all right, George—I think I could stand anything—all the rest of it—if it wasn’t for Papa…. I’m almost crazy from worrying about him this summer. There were three times there when I knew he was gone…. And I honestly believe I pulled him back each time by main strength and determination—do you know what I mean?” she said hoarsely and eagerly—“I was just determined not to let him go. If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could have done something to make it start again—I’d have stood over him and blown my breath into him—got my blood into him—shook him,” she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands—“anything just to keep him alive.”
“She’s—she’s—saved his life—time after time,” said Barton slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down deeply, searching for a word.
“He’d—he’d—have been a dead man long ago—if it hadn’t been for her.”
“Yeah—I know she has,” George Pentland drawled agreeably. “I know you’ve sure stuck by Uncle Will—I guess he knows it, too.”
“It’s not that I mind it, George—you know what I mean?” she said eagerly. “Good heavens! I believe I could give away a dozen lives if I thought it was going to save his life!… But it’s the strain of it…. Month after month… year after year… lying awake at night wondering if he’s all right over there in that back room in Mama’s house—wondering if he’s keeping warm in that old cold house—”
“Why, no, child,” the older woman said hastily. “I kept a good fire burnin’in that room all last winter—that was the warmest room in the whole place—there wasn’t a warmer—”
But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the flood-tide of the other’s speech.
“—Wondering if he’s sick or needs me—if he’s begun to bleed again—oh!
