Then he would hear a hoarse shout through the still air from the other side of the swamp, and he would know suddenly that Charlotte would never wait in his home yonder, while he worked, and welcome him home at night.

The other wood-cutters had families. They had to pass his lot on their way out to the open road. Barney would either retreat farther among the snowy thickets, or else work with such fury that he could seem not to see them as they filed past.

Often he did not go home at noon, and ate nothing from morn until night. He cut wood many days that winter when the other men thought the weather too severe and sat huddled over their fires in their homes, shoving their chairs this and that way at their wives'

commands, or else formed chewing and gossiping rings within the glowing radius of the red-hot store stove.

"See Barney Thayer goin' cross lots with his axe as I come by," one said to another, rolling the tobacco well back into his grizzled cheek.

"Works as if he was possessed," was the reply, in a half-inarticulate, gruff murmur.

"Well, he can if he wants to," said still another. "I ain't goin' to work out-doors in any such weather as this for nobody, not if I know it, an' I've got a wife an' eight children, an' he ain't got nobody."

And the man cast defiant eyes at the great store-windows, dim with thick blue sheaves of frost.

On a day like that Barney seemed to be hewing asunder not only the sturdy fibres of oak and hemlock, but the terrible sinews of frost and winter, and many a tree seemed to rear itself over him threatening stiffly like an old man of death. Only by fierce contest, as it were, could he keep himself alive, but he had a certain delight in working in the swamp during those awful arctic days. The sense that he could still fight and conquer something, were it only the simple destructive force of nature, aroused in him new self-respect.

Through snow-storms Barney plunged forth to the swamp, and worked all day in the thick white slant of the storm, with the snow heaping itself upon his bowed shoulders.

People prophesied that he would kill himself; but he kept on day after day, and had not even a cold until February. Then there came a south rain and a thaw, and Barney went to the swamp and worked two days knee-deep in melting snow. Then there was a morning when he awoke as if on a bed of sharp knives, and lay alone all day and all that night, and all the next day and that night, not being able to stir without making the knives cut into his vitals.

Barney lay there all that time, and his soul became fairly bound into passiveness with awful fetters of fiery bone and muscle; sometimes he groaned, but nobody heard him. The last night he felt as if his whole physical nature was knitting about him and stifling him with awful coils of pain. The tears rolled over his cheeks. He prayed with hoarse gasps, and he could not tell if anybody heard him. A dim light from a window in the Barnard house on the hill lay into the kitchen opposite his bedroom door. He thought of Charlotte, as if he had been a child and she his mother. The maternal and protecting element in her love was all that appealed to him then, and all that he missed or wanted. "Charlotte, Charlotte," he mumbled to himself with his parched, quivering lips.

At noon the next day Cephas Barnard came home from the store; he had been down to buy some molasses. When he entered his kitchen he set the jug down on the table with a hard clap, then stood still in his wet boots.

Sarah and Charlotte were getting dinner, both standing over the stove. Sarah glanced at Cephas furtively, then at Charlotte; Cephas never stirred. A pool of water collected around his boots, his brows bent moodily under his cap.

"Why don't you set down, Cephas, an' take off your boots?" Sarah ventured at length, timidly.

"Folks are fools," grunted Cephas.

"I dunno what you mean, Cephas."

Cephas got the boot-jack out of the corner, sat down, and began jerking off the wet boots with sympathetic screws of his face.

Sarah stood with a wooden spoon uplifted, eying him anxiously.

Charlotte went into the pantry.

"There 'ain't anythin' happened, has there, Cephas?" said Sarah, presently.

Cephas pulled off the second boot, and sat holding his blue yarn stocking-feet well up from the wet floor. "There ain't no need of havin' the rheumatiz, accordin' to my way of thinkin'," said he.

"Who's got the rheumatiz, Cephas?"

"If folks lived right they wouldn't have it."

"You 'ain't got it, have you, Cephas?"

"I 'ain't never had a tech of it in my life except once, an' then 'twas due to my not drinkin' enough."

"Not drinkin' enough?"

"Yes, I didn't drink enough water. Folks with rheumatiz had ought to drink all the water they can swaller. They had ought to drink more'n they eat."

"I dunno what you mean, Cephas."

"It stands to reason. I've worked it all out in my mind. Rheumatiz comes on in wet weather, because there's too much water an' damp 'round. Now, if there's too much water outside, you can kind of even it up by takin' more water inside. The reason for any sickness is--the balance ain't right. The weight gets shifted, an' folks begin to topple, then they're sick. If it goes clean over, they die. The balance has got to be kept even if you want to be well. When the swamps are fillin' up with water, an' there's too much moisture in the outside air, an' too much pressure of it on your bones an'

joints, if you swallow enough water inside it keeps things even. If Barney Thayer had drunk a gallon of water a day, he might have worked in the wet swamp till doomsday an' he wouldn't have got the rheumatiz."

"Has Barney Thayer got the rheumatiz, Cephas?"

Charlotte's pale face appeared in the pantry door.

"Yes, he has got it bad. 'Ain't stirred out of his bed since night before last; been all alone; nobody knew it till William Berry went in this forenoon. Guess he'd died there if he'd been left much longer."

"Who's with him now?" asked Charlotte, in a quick, strained voice.

"The Ray boy is sittin' with him, whilst William is gone to the North Village to see if he can get somebody to come. There's a widow woman over there that goes out nussin', Silas said, an' they hope they can get her. The doctor says he's got to have somebody."

"Rebecca can't do anything, of course," said Sarah, meditatively; "he 'ain't got any of his own folks to come, poor feller."

Charlotte crossed the kitchen floor with a resolute air.

"What are you goin' to do, Charlotte?" her mother asked in a trembling voice.

Charlotte turned around and faced her father and mother. "I shouldn't think you'd ask me," said she.

"You ain't--goin'--over--?"

"Of course I am going over there. Do you suppose I am going to let him lie there and suffer all alone, with nobody to take care of him?"

"There's--the woman--comin'."

"She can't come. I know who the woman is. They tried to get her when Squire Payne's sister died last week. Aunt Sylvy told me about it.

She was engaged 'way ahead."

"Oh, Charlotte! I'm afraid you hadn't ought to go," her mother said, half crying.

"I've got to go, mother," Charlotte said, quietly. She opened the door.

"You come back here!" Cephas called after her in a great voice.

Charlotte turned around. "I am going, father," said she.

"You ain't goin' a step."

"Yes, I am."

"Oh, Charlotte! I'll go over," sobbed her mother.

"You haven't gone a step out-doors for a month with your own lame knee. I am the one to go, and I am going."