I tried to lift my head, but could not.  At first I thought it was the turban, but a sharp pain told me that there was a spot there that might be well worth seeing.  For a long time I lay with my eyes closed, trying not to care, and when I opened them again, John Shadrack’s widow was still on the edge of the bed, smoking.

“Feel better now?” she asked calmly.

“Yes,” I answered.  “The ache has gone some.”

“I was powwowin’ agin!” she said.  “Couldn’t you hear me saying Dutch words?  Them was the charm.”

“I guess I was sleeping,” I returned a bit irritably.

How the store would have smiled could it have seen me there on the bed, in that bare little room in John Shadrack’s widow’s clutches!  Many a night, around the stove, Isaac Bolum, and Henry Holmes and I had had it tooth and nail over the power of the powwow.  In the store there was not always an outspoken belief in the efficacy of the charm, but there was an undercurrent of sentiment in favor of the supernatural.  Against this I had fought.  Perhaps it was merely for the joy of the argument that so often I had turned a fire of ridicule on the dearest traditions of the valley.  Time and again, when some credulous one had lifted his voice in honest support of a silly superstition, I had jeered him into a grumbled, shamefaced disavowal.  Once I sat in the graveyard at midnight, in the full of the moon, just to convince Ira Spoonholler that his grandfather was keeping close to his proper plot.  And here I was, prone and helpless, being powwowed not for one ailment, but for all the diseases known in Happy Valley.  How I blessed Tip!  When we started he should have told me of the powers of our hostess.  I would rather have undergone a hundred runaways than one week with that old woman muttering her Dutch over my senseless form.  But I liked the good soul.  Her intentions were so excellent.  She was so cheery.  Even now she was offering me a piece of gingerbread.

I ate it ravenously.

Then I asked, “Where is Tip?”

“He’s gone down the walley to my brother-in-law, Harmon Shadrack’s.  He’s tryin’ to borry a me-yule.”

“A what?”

“A me-yule.  The colt was dead beside you in the creek.  Him and me fixed up the buggy agin, and he’s gone to borry Harmon’s me-yule so as you uns can git back to Black Log.”

“Tip’s left Black Log forever,” I said firmly.

Then John Shadrack’s widow laughed.  She laughed so hard that she blew the ashes out of her pipe, and they showered down over my face, and made me wink and sputter.

“There—­there,” she said solicitously, dusting them away with her hand.  “But it tickled me so to hear you say Tip wasn’t goin’ back.  Why, he’s been most crazy since you come.  He’s afraid his wife’ll marry agin before he gits home.  I’ve been tellin’ him how nice it was to have you both, and that jest makes him roar.  He’s never been away so long before.”