The doctor watched her closely.  He was more attentive than he had been when she was much worse off in health; and finally, after Mercy had been at the Red Mill for nearly a month, he brought a strange physician to see her.  This gentleman was a great surgeon from New York, who asked Mercy a few questions, but who watched her with so intent a look that the little crippled girl was half frightened at him.  He inspired confidence, however, and when he said to her, on departing:  “You are going to see me again before long,” Mercy was quite excited about it.  She never asked a question of Doctor Davison, or of anybody else, about the strange surgeon, or his opinion of her case; but Ruth often heard her humming an odd little song (she often made up little tunes and put words to them herself) of which Ruth did not catch the burden for some days.  When Mercy was singing it she mumbled the words, or dropped her voice to a whisper whenever anybody came near.  But one morning Ruth was bringing the beaten egg and milk that she drank as a “pick-me-up” between breakfast and dinner, and Mercy did not hear her coming, and the odd little song came clearly to the ears of the girl of the Red Mill: 

“He’s going to cure me!  Oh, my back and oh, my bones!

He’s going to cure me!  Oh, my back and oh, my bones!”

Ruth knew instantly to what the little doggerel song referred.  It is true Mercy had filched Aunt Alvirah’s phrase and made it her own—­ and it applied to the poor child as well as to the rheumatic old woman.  But it was a song of joy—­ a song of expectation.

Ruth tried to be even more kind to Mercy after that.  She was with her almost all the time.  But there were occasions when Helen and Tom Cameron really made her come out with them on some little jaunt.  Since Mercy’s arrival at the Red Mill the Camerons had fallen into the habit of calling occasionally, and Uncle Jabez had said nothing about it.  Ostensibly they called on Mercy; but it was Ruth that they came for with the pony carriage one day and took away for a visit to Olakah Glen.

This beautiful spot was not so very far away, but it called for a picnic lunch, and Tubby was quite two hours in getting them there.  It was a wild hollow, with great beech trees, and a noisy stream chaffing in a rocky bed down the middle of the glen.  There were some farms thereabout; but many of the farmers were no more than squatters, for a vast tract of field and forest, including the glen, belonged to an estate which had long been in the courts for settlement.

Just before leaving all signs of civilization behind, Tom had pointed out a shanty and several outbuildings on a high hillock overlooking the road, and told the girls that that was where Jasper Parloe lived, all alone.

“I came up here fishing with some of the other fellows once, and Jasper tried to drive us out of the glen.  Said he owned it.  Likely story!  He won’t trouble us to-day.”