“I’ll surprise him some day by just walking up to his cot and saying:  ‘Good morning, how’s my patient?’ The day I’m going to pick is the next one you move camp:  I want to see how all those tents and shacks and everything rise up on their feet and travel.”

“You shall,” he stated, with a laugh.  “I’ll notify you of the date.  About New Year’s Day the next migration will occur.  You’ve had your turn at hospital work and now perhaps you wish to try your hand at transportation.  I wager you’d make a good camp manager if you took hold of the job.”

“Would you revive me a second time if I threatened to faint?” she queried, gayly.  “You and Imogene Martin gave me just the right treatment that evening, for you kept my thoughts off the ordeal I’d been through.  Next day I was myself, as I told you when you called up.”

“I haven’t seen you since that day,” Lee remarked.  “I was really worried that afternoon, you know.”  And an echo of the anxiety he had suffered sounded in his voice.

Her face showed that she noted it, and it softened.

“And you have so many anxieties, too,” said she.

He stirred, then withdrew his gaze from her and directed it out a window.  The emotion he had experienced that afternoon when she sat before his fire, when she sat there so frank and so simple-hearted, was rising in his breast again.  The breath trembled a little upon his lips.  But after a time he felt himself grow calmer.

“I have anxieties, yes,” he said, “but so, I suppose, has every man and woman, of his or her own kind and degree.  And they aren’t the important thing, after all.  What has happened in the past, not what may occur in the future, is what really matters.  One can’t change the past, what’s done; especially by one’s own act.  And if the act was a serious mistake.  That’s fatal!  I see now that failure to accomplish what one sets out to do, as for instance in the building of my canal, may not be ruinous to a man.  A man may fail and be quite as able a man as ever, as those who succeed; for human beings can do only so much and no more.  Nothing that he has done or not done would alter the result.  And he need not take the failure greatly to heart.  But voluntary and heedless acts of folly, precipitate and unconsidered leaps in the dark, these indeed are ruinous.  Oh, yes, they do the business.  They become balls and chains.  Leave him no choice or action.  If it were only so simple as the game of checkers your father and Dave are playing!  When one game is over, they can start another.  But there’s only one game to life.”

“But it is a long one, and changes,” Louise said.