CHAPTER XVI

DEPARTED SPIRITS

As the evenings grew colder, the camp chairs on the mesa were deserted, and the chattering “chasers” gathered indoors, sometimes in one or another of the airy tent cottages, sometimes before the cheerful blaze of the logs in the fireplace of the parlors, but oftenest of all they flocked into Number Six of McCormick Building, where David was confined to his cot.  Always there was laughter in Number Six, merry jesting, ready repartee.  So it became the mecca of those, who, even more assiduously than they chased the cure, sought after laughter and joy.  In the parlors the guests played cards, but in Number Six, deferring silently to David’s calling, they pulled out checkers and parcheesi, and fought desperate battles over the boards.  But sometimes they fingered the dice and the checkers idly, leaning back in their chairs, and talked of temperatures, and hypodermics, and doctors, and war, and ghosts.

“I know this happened,” said the big Canadian one night.  “It was in my own home and I was there.  So I can swear to every word of it.  We came out from Scotland, and took up a big homestead in Saskatchewan.  We threw up a log house and began living in it before it was half done.  Evenings, the men came in from the ranches around, and we sat by the fire in the kitchen and smoked and told stories.  Joined on to the kitchen there was a shed, which was intended for a summer kitchen.  But just then we had half a dozen cots in it, and the hands slept there.  One night one of the boys said he had a headache, and to escape the smoke in the kitchen which was too thick to breathe, he went into the shed and lay down on a cot.  It was still unfinished, the shed was, and there were three or four wide boards laid across the rafters at the top to keep them from warping in the damp.  Baldy lay on his back and stared up at the roof.  Suddenly he leaped off the bed,—­we all saw him; there was no door between the rooms.  He leaped off and dashed through the kitchen.

“‘What’s the matter?’ we asked him.

“‘Let me alone, I want to get out of here,’ he said, and shot through the door.

“We caught just one glimpse of his face.  It was ashen.  We went on smoking.  ‘He’s a crazy Frenchman,’ we said, and let it go.  But my brother was out in the barn and he corralled him going by.

“‘I am going to die, Don,’ he said.  ’I was lying on the bed, looking up at the rafters, and I saw the men come in and take the big white board and make it into a coffin for me.  I am going home, I want to be with my folks.’

“Don came in scared stiff, and told us, and we said ‘Pooh, pooh,’ and went on smoking.  But about eleven o’clock a couple of fellows from another ranch came over and said their boss had died that afternoon and they could not find the right sized boards for the coffin.  They wanted a good straight one about six feet six by fourteen inches.  We looked in the barns and the sheds, and could not find what they wanted.  Then we went into the lean-to, where there were some loose boards in the corner, but they wouldn’t do.