In a stammering and intoxicated voice he murmured,--
"Who ran to catch me when I fell,
And kissed the place to make it well?
My"------
He opened his eyes. It was not his mother; for she was long since
deceased. Nor was this non-mother kissing the place.
In fact, abashed at the blind eyes suddenly unclosing so near her, she
was on the point of letting her burden drop. When dead men come to life
in such a position, and begin to talk about "kissing the place," young
ladies, however independent of conventions, may well grow uneasy.
But the stranger, though alive, was evidently in a molluscous,
invertebrate condition. He could not sustain himself. She still held him
up, a little more at arm's-length, and all at once the reaction from
extreme anxiety brought a gush of tears to her eyes.
"Don't cry," says Wade, vaguely, and still only half-conscious. "I
promise never to do so again."
At this, said with a childlike earnestness, the lady smiled.
"Don't scalp me," Wade continued, in the same tone. "Squaws never
scalp."
He raised his hand to his bleeding forehead.
She laughed outright at his queer plaintive tone and the new class he
had placed her in.
Her laugh and his own movement brought Wade fully to himself. She
perceived that his look was transferring her from the order of scalping
squaws to her proper place as a beautiful young woman of the highest
civilization, not smeared with vermilion, but blushing celestial rosy.
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