to another man, and a very limp one at that. A
ton of cast-iron seemed to be pressing his eyelids down, and a trickle
of red-hot metal flowed from his cut forehead.

"I shall have to scream," thought the lady, after an instant of anxious
waiting, "if he does not revive. I cannot leave him to go for help."

Not a prude, you see. A prude would have had cheap scruples about
compromising herself by taking a man in her arms. Not a vulgar person,
who would have required the stranger to be properly recommended by
somebody who came over in the Mayflower, before she helped him. Not a
feeble-minded damsel, who, if she had not fainted, would have fled away,
gasping and in tears. No timidity or prudery or underbred doubts about
this thorough creature. She knew she was in her right womanly place, and
she meant to stay there.

But she began to need help, possibly a lancet, possibly a pocket-pistol,
possibly hot blankets, possibly somebody to knead these lifeless lungs
and pommel this flaccid body, until circulation was restored.

Just as she was making up her mind to scream, Wade stirred. He began to
tingle as if a familiar of the Inquisition were slapping him all over
with fine-toothed curry-combs. He became half-conscious of a woman
supporting him. In a stammering and intoxicated voice he murmured,--

"Who ran to catch me when I fell,
And kissed the place to make it well?
My"------

He opened his eyes. It was not his mother; for she was long since
deceased. Nor was this non-mother kissing the place.

In fact, abashed at the blind eyes suddenly unclosing so near her, she
was on the point of letting her burden drop. When dead men come to life
in such a position, and begin to talk about "kissing the place," young
ladies, however independent of conventions, may well grow uneasy.

But the stranger, though alive, was evidently in a molluscous,
invertebrate condition. He could not sustain himself. She still held him
up, a little more at arm's-length, and all at once the reaction from
extreme anxiety brought a gush of tears to her eyes.

"Don't cry," says Wade, vaguely, and still only half-conscious. "I
promise never to do so again."

At this, said with a childlike earnestness, the lady smiled.

"Don't scalp me," Wade continued, in the same tone. "Squaws never
scalp."

He raised his hand to his bleeding forehead.

She laughed outright at his queer plaintive tone and the new class he
had