“Did you see him?” he said.
She looked at him for a moment with troubled eyes, then said:
“Pshaw, Mr. Gant, I guess you must have been dreaming.”
He did not answer, and for a moment there was no sound in the room but his breathing, hoarse, a little heavy. Then he muttered:
“Did someone come into the house?”
She looked at him sharply, inquiringly again, with troubled eyes:
“Hah? What say? Why, no, I think not,” she said doubtfully, “unless you may have heard Gilmer come in an’go up to his room.”
And Gant was again silent for several moments, breathing a little heavily and hoarsely, his hands resting with an enormous passive strength upon the bed. Presently he said quietly:
“Where’s Bacchus?”
“Hah? Who’s that?” Eliza said sharply, in a startled kind of tone. “Bacchus? You mean Uncle Bacchus?”
“Yes,” said Gant.
“Why, pshaw, Mr. Gant!” cried Eliza laughing—for a startled moment she had wondered if “his mind was wanderin’,” but one glance at his quiet eyes, the tranquil sanity of his quiet tone, reassured her—
“Pshaw!” she said, putting one finger up to her broad nose-wing and laughing slyly. “You must have been havin’queer dreams, for a fact!”
“Is he here?”
“Why, I’ll vow, Mr. Gant!” she cried again. “What on earth is in your mind? You know that Uncle Bacchus is way out West in Oregon—it’s been ten years since he came back home last—that summer of the reunion at Gettysburg.”
“Yes,” said Gant. “I remember now.”
And again he fell silent, staring upward in the semi-darkness, his hands quietly at rest beside him, breathing a little hoarsely, but without pain. Eliza sat in the chair watching him, her hands clasped loosely at her waist, her lips pursed reflectively, and a puzzled look in her eyes. “Now I wonder whatever put that in his mind?” she thought. “I wonder what made him think of Bacchus? Now his mind’s not wanderin’—that’s one thing sure. He knows what he’s doing just as well as I do—I reckon he must have dreamed it—that Bacchus was here—but that’s certainly a strange thing, that he should bring it up like this.”
He was so silent that she thought he might have gone to sleep again, he lay motionless with his eyes turned upward in the semi-darkness of the
