This forlorn terrified little captain wrapped the invalid in all the extra clothing, managed to get a fire started, and cooked a supper of hot cornmeal mush in her big iron “kittle.”  Ann Mary ate a great deal of this, sweetened as it was with maple sugar crumbled from the big lump Hannah Had brought along and immediately afterward she fell sound asleep.

Soon the soft night air of June was too strong a soporific for Remember’s desire to keep awake and hear the catamounts scream, as he had heard they did in those woods.  Hannah was left quite alone to keep watch and to tend the fire, her heart in her mouth, jumping and starting at every shadow cast by the flames.

She knew that wild beasts would not come near them if a big fire burned briskly; and all that night she piled on the wood, scraped away the ashes, and watched Ann Mary to see that she did not grow chilly.  Hannah does not seem to have been much inclined to talk about her own feelings, and there is no record of what she suffered that night; but I think we may be sure that it seemed a long time to her before the sky began to whiten in the east.

As soon as she could see plainly, she cooked a hearty breakfast of broiled bacon and fried mush, and wakened her two charges to eat it.  They made a very early start, and there is nothing more to tell about their journey except that at about seven o’clock that evening the two tired horses crept into the main street of Heath Falls, and a very much excited girl asked the first passer-by where the Indian herb-doctor lived.

They found him in a little old house of logs—­the only one that looked natural to them in the prosperous settlement.  When Hannah knocked at the door, he opened it himself.  He was a small, very old, dark-brown, and prodigiously wrinkled individual, who held up a candle and looked at Hannah with the most impassive eyes she had ever seen—­like little pools of black water unstirred by any wind.

Hannah’s breath came fast.

“Is this the Indian herb-doctor?” she asked.

“Aye,” he answered.

When you remember that Hannah was only a little girl, and that she thought she had come to the end of a nightmare of responsibility, it will not surprise you to learn that she now began to cry a little, out of agitation.

“I have brought Ann Mary,” she said, “my sister, to be cured.  She is in a decline.  Will you cure her?”

The herb-doctor showed no surprise.  He set the candle down on the shelf, and went out in the bright starlight to where Ann Mary clung to Remember Williams’s waist.  When he put up his brown old hands to her, she slid down into them and upon the ground.  He still held one wrist, and this he continued to do for some moments, looking at the white, drooping girl without moving a muscle of his solemn old face.  Then he turned to Hannah, who had stopped crying and was holding her breath in suspense.

“Aye,” he said.