His lips closed firmly.  That was all he had to say.  John Wingfield, Sr. turned away with the unsteady step of a man who is afraid of slipping or stumbling, though the path was hard and even.

Out in the street he met the cold nods of the people of a town where his son had a dominion founded on something that was lacking in his own.  And one of those who nodded to him ever so politely was a new citizen, who had once been a unit of his own city within a city.

Peter Mortimer had arrived in Little Rivers only two days after his late employer.  Peter had been 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.