It was a slow journey down the slippery mountain path.  The men who carried him had to pick their steps carefully.  At the inn the little cuckoo came out of the clock in the hall and called eleven, half past, and midnight, before the even tramp, tramp of approaching feet made the Little Colonel run to the door for the last time.

“They’re comin’, mothah,” she whispered, with a frightened face, and then ran back to hide her eyes while the men passed up the steps with their unconscious burden.  She thought the Major was dead, he lay so white and still.  But he had only fainted again on the way, and soon revived enough to answer the doctor’s questions, and send word to the Little Colonel that she and Hero had saved his life.  “Do you heah that?” she asked of Hero, when they told her what he had said.  “The doctah said that if the Majah had lain out on that cold, wet ground till mawnin’, without any attention, it surely would have killed him.  I’m proud of you, Hero.  I’m goin’ to get Papa Jack to write a piece about you and send it to the Courier-Journal.  How would you like to have yo’ name come out in a big American newspapah?”

Several lonely days followed for the Little Colonel.  Either her father or mother was constantly with the Major, and sometimes both.  They were waiting for his niece to come from Zuerich and take him back with her to a hospital where he could have better care than in the little inn in Zug.

It greatly worried the old man that he should be the cause of disarranging their plans and delaying their journey.  He urged them to go on and leave him, but they would not consent.  Sometimes the Little Colonel slipped into the room with a bunch of Alpine roses or a cluster of edelweiss that she had bought from some peasant.  Sometimes she sat beside him for a few minutes, but most of her time was spent with Hero, wandering up and down beside the lake, feeding the swans or watching the little steamboats come and go.  She had forgotten her fear of the bottom dropping out of the town.

One evening, just at sunset, the Major sent for her.  “I go to Zuerich in the morning,” he said, holding out his hand as she came into the room.  “I wanted to say good-bye while I have the time and strength.  We expect to leave very early to-morrow, probably before you are awake.”

His couch was drawn up by the window, through which the shimmering lake shone in the sunset like rosy mother-of-pearl.  Far up the mountain sounded the faint tinkling of goat-bells, and the clear, sweet yodelling of a peasant, on his homeward way.  At intervals, the deep tolling of the bell of St. Oswald floated out across the water.

“When the snow falls,” he said, after a long pause, “I shall be far away from here.  They tell me that at the hospital where I am going, I shall find a cure.  But I know.”  He pointed to an hour-glass on the table beside him.  “See! the sand has nearly run its course.  The hour will soon be done.  It is so with me.  I have felt it for a long time.”