“Don’t come in, don’t, I say; just hand me some water from the creek.  I’m too weak to walk.”

“Of course I’m coming in,” blurted Con, indignantly.  “Why, man, you’re dead sick!”

“Don’t!” choked the man; “oh, boy, don’t come near me, I’ve got smallpox.”

For one brief second Con stood, stiff with horror.  “Who’s with you, helping you, nursing you?” he demanded.

“No one, I’m alone, alone; oh! water, water,” moaned the man.

Con flung open the door.  There was no hesitation, no fear, no thought of self; just a great human pity in his fair young face, and a wonderful tenderness in his strong young arms as he lifted the loathsome sufferer from the floor where he had fallen in his weakness, after crawling to the window in that last, almost hopeless effort to call assistance.

On the soiled and tumbled bed he laid the man, who still shrieked:  “Go away, go away, you’re crazy to come in here!” Then without a word of even kindly encouragement the boy seized a bucket and dashed down to the creek.  “It’s water, not words, he wants now,” he said to himself, running back, and in another moment his good right arm was slipping under the sick man’s shoulders, and he was lifting him up and holding to the fever-cracked lips a cup of gloriously cold water.

“Bless you!  The dear good God himself bless you!  But, oh, boy, go away, go away!” murmured the man, weakly.

“Go away and leave you here alone, perhaps to die?  And then have to face my parents and Banty and The Eena, and—­and England again and tell what I’ve done?  Not I!” cried the boy, indignantly.  “Look at this shack, the state it’s in; look at you.  How did you come to be here alone?”

“I had a pardner, but he left me, just skinned out, when he suspected what I had,” said the man, hopelessly.  It was then that Con burst forth in that quick flashing English temper that was always aroused at the sight of injustice, of unmanliness, or of underhand dealings.  He was so furious that he took his temper out in cleaning up the shack, and cooking some soft foods for the patient, and every time the wretched man begged him to go away he got so indignant and abusive that the sick one finally laughed outright, thereby lifting them both out of the depths of grey despair.

“That’s the way, ‘Snooks,’” commented Con. (He had nicknamed his shack-mate “Snooks.”) “Just you laugh, it will do you no end of good, don’t you know.”

But in spite of his heroic attempts at cheering up the sick man, Con was undergoing a frightful experience.  In the first place, there were practically no medicines and no disinfectants in the shack.  The boy found a cake of tar soap, a bottle of salts, and a package of sulphur.  The latter he burnt daily, sprinkling it on a shovel of coals.  The tar soap was a blessing both to himself and the patient, and the salts they both swallowed manfully and daily.  There was rice, oatmeal, tapioca, jam, tinned stuffs and prunes, and Con knew as little of cookery as he knew of nursing, but he made shift with the little store in hand.  Snooks kept alive and the boy remained well.  But the nights were long periods of horror.  Snooks would become delirious with fever, and the torture of the foul disease would become unbearable.