en like some old tree that everybody thinks has
seen its last winter. But now he waited only on the good word from the
sick-room for the sap of renewed youth to rise in his veins and his
shriveled branches to break into leaf at the call of spring.

And the good word did come thrilling through the community. The physical
crisis had passed. The fever was burning itself out. But a mental crisis
developed, and with it a new cause for apprehension. Even after Jack's
temperature was normal and he should have been well on the road to
convalescence, there was a veil over his eyes which would not allow him
to recognize anybody. When he spoke it was in delirium, living over some
incident of the past or of sheer imagination.

Now he was the ancestor, fitting out his ship:

"No, you can't come! A man who is a malingerer on the London docks would
be a malingerer on the Spanish Main. I don't want bullies and boasters.
Let them stay at home to pick quarrels in the alleys and cheer the Lord
Mayor's procession!"

Now his frigate was under full sail, sighting the enemy:

"Suppose they have two guns to our one! That makes it about even! We'll
get the windward side, as we have before! Who cares about their guns once
we start to board!"

Another time he was on the trail:

"I'll grow so strong, so strong that he can never call me a weakling
again! He will be proud of me. That is my only way to make good."

Then he was apprenticed to the millions:

"All this detail makes me feel as if my brains were a tangled spool of
thread. But I will master it--I will!"

Again, he was happily telling stories to the children; or tragically
pleading with Leddy that there had been slaughter enough around the
water-hole; or serenely planning the future which he foresaw for himself
when the phantoms were laid:

"I may not know how to run the store, but I do seem to fit in here. We
can find the capital! We will build the dam ourselves!"

His body grew stronger, with little appreciable change otherwise. For an
instant he would seem to know the person who was speaking to him; then he
was away on the winds of delirium.

"His mind is too strong for him not to come out of this all right. It is
only a question of time, isn't it?" insisted the father.

"There was a far greater capacity in him for suffering in that hellish
fight than there was in Pete Leddy," said Dr. Patterson. "He had
sensitiveness to impressions which was born in him, at the same time