g you such a dandy spice poultice
I expect you'll want to eat it!" Billy Louise's voice was soft and had
a broody sweetness when she wished it so, that soothed more than
medicine. Her mother's eyes closed wearily while the girl talked; the
muscles of her face relaxed a little from their look of pain.

Billy Louise bent and laid her lips lightly on her mother's cheek.
"Poor old mommie! I'd have come home a-running if I'd known she was
sick and had to have nasty, soppy stuff."

In the kitchen a very different Billy Louise measured spices, and asked
a question now and then in a whisper, and breathed with a repressed
unevenness which betrayed the strain she was under.

"Tell John to saddle up and go for the doctor, Phoebe, and don't let
mommie know, whatever you do. This isn't her lumbago at all. I don't
know what it is. I wonder if a hot turpentine cloth wouldn't be better
than this? I've a good mind to try it; her eyes are glassy with fever,
and her skin is cold as a fish. You tell John to hurry up. He can
ride Boxer. Tell him I want him to get a doctor here by to-morrow noon
if he has to kill his horse doing it."

"Is she that bad?" Phoebe's black eyes glistened with consternation.
"She's groaned all day and shook her head like this all time."

"Oh, stop looking like that! No wonder she's sick, if you've stood
over her with that kind of a face on you. You look as if someone were
dead in the house!"

"I'm skeered of sick folks. Honest, it gives me shivers."

"Well, keep out then. Make some fresh tea, Phoebe--or no, make some
good, strong coffee. I'll need it, if I'm up all night. Make it
strong, Phoebe. Hurry, and--" She stopped short and ran into the
bedroom, called there by her mother's cry of pain.

That night took its toll of Billy Louise and left a seared place in her
memory. It was a night of snapping fire in the cook-stove that hot
water might be always ready; of tireless struggle with the pain that
came and tortured, retired sullenly from Billy Louise's stubborn
fighting with poultices and turpentine cloths and every homely remedy
she had ever heard of, and came again just when she thought she had won
the fight.

There was no time to give thought to the trouble that had ridden home
with her, though its presence was like a black shadow behind her while
she worked and went to and fro between bedroom and kitchen, and fought
that tearing pain.

She met the dawn hollow-eyed and so tired