“I wisht he wasn’t so sad,” she said, from time to time.  “I expect he’s maybe pinin’.”

On the following day there came a change.  The little fellow tossed in his bed with a fever that rose with every hour.  With eyes now burning bright, he scanned the face of the gray old miner and begged for “Bruvver Jim.”

“This is Bruvver Jim,” the man assured him repeatedly.  “What does baby want old Jim to do?”

“Bruv-ver—­Jim,” came the half-sobbed little answer.  “Bruv-ver—­Jim.”

Jim took him up and held him fast in his arms.  The weary little mind had gone to some tragic baby past.

“No-body—­wants me—­anywhere,” he said.

The heart in old Jim was breaking.  He crooned a hundred tender declarations of his foster-parenthood, of his care, of his wish to be a comfort and a “pard.”

But something of the fever now had come between the tiny ears and any voice of tenderness.

“Bruv-ver—­Jim; Bruv-ver—­Jim,” the little fellow called, time and time again.

With the countless remedies which her lore embraced, the almost despairing Miss Doc attempted to allay the rising fever.  She made little drinks, she studied all the bottles in her case of simples with unremitting attention.

Keno, the always-faithful, was sent to every house in camp, seeking for anything and everything that might be called a medicine.  It was all of no avail.  By the time another day had dawned little Skeezucks was flaming hot with the fever.  He rolled his tiny body in baby delirium, his feeble little call for “Bruvver Jim” endlessly repeated, with his sad little cry that no one wanted him anywhere in the world.

In his desperation, Jim was undergoing changes.  His face was haggard; his eyes were ablaze with parental anguish.

“I know a shrub the Injuns sometimes use for fever,” he said to Miss Doc, at last, when he suddenly thought of the aboriginal medicine.  “It grows in the mountains.  Perhaps it would do him good.”

“I don’t know,” she answered, at the end of her resources, and she clasped her hands.  “I don’t know.”

“If only I can git a horse,” said Jim, “I might be able to find the shrub.”

He waited, however, by the side of the moaning little pilgrim.

Then, half an hour later, Bone, the bar-keep, came up to see him, in haste and excitement.  They stood outside, where the visitor had called him for a talk.

“Jim,” said Bone, “you’re in fer trouble.  Parky is goin’ to jump your claim to-night—­it bein’ New Year’s eve, you know—­at twelve o’clock.  He told me so himself.  He says you ’ain’t done assessment, nor you can’t—­not now—­and you ’ain’t got no more right than anybody else to hold the ground.  And so he’s meanin’ to slap a new location on the claim the minute this here year is up.”

“Wal, the little feller’s awful sick,” said Jim.  “I’m thinkin’ of goin’ up in the mountains for some stuff the Injuns sometimes use for fever.”