r illness, that the Sioux Falls doctor
found her.

She was tossing from side to side, murmuring in a delirium that had
possessed her for days. Her face showed a scarlet flush against the
white pillow-slip. The biggest brother, who scarcely left her bedside to
rest or eat, was placing cold cloths upon her forehead and wetting her
lips. White through his tan, he hung over her in an agony of fear, only
lifting his eyes, now and then, to turn them sorrowfully upon his
mother, seated opposite.

The little girl did not know of the doctor's arrival. As he hurried into
the sitting-room, she was thinking of the floating cloud. Now it was
pursuing her as she fled from it on a fleet pony; now it was stooping
groundward, a huge, airy monster, to offer her a cake of ice; again it
was sweeping over her, quenching the deadly fire that consumed her, and
leaving her on the damp, green bank above the mooring-place of the
bull-boat. She lay very still with her cool thoughts, her eyes, wide and
lustrous, fixed upon the blue canopy overhead. But when, a moment
later, the fever burned more hotly again, and the cloud changed to a
blinding, blistering steam that enveloped her, she sat up and fought
with her hands, and cried aloud for the biggest brother.

The doctor caught her wrists and gently put her back. One glance at her
parched lips and brown tongue had told him what was the matter, and as
he opened a valise and took out some medicines he answered the inquiring
looks of the family. "Typhoid," he said. "She's a very sick child. But I
think we may be able to pull her through."

With her mother and the big brothers looking on mournfully, the first
step was taken toward aiding her. One by one her curls, so long her
mother's pride and care, were snipped off close to her head; and when at
last they lay on the bed in a newspaper, a little heap of soft, yellow
tangles, there was sobbing all about in the sitting-room, and even the
doctor, accustomed to sad sights, could not keep the tears from chasing
down his cheeks and into his brown beard.

She looked pitifully thin and altered, shorn of her bright halo; yet at
once she grew quieter, and when she was gently lowered into the brimming
wash-tub and then laid between sheets wrung from cold water, she closed
her eyes gratefully and ceased her outcries.

The doctor, collarless and with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, worked over
her all day. The little girl's mother and the neighbor woman assiste