The boy was wild with the fever, and weak and helpless. Men stood back around the wall and in the dark; they had not dared to speak to her as she entered. They were so amazed that a woman would dare do this thing--to come in among them alone, take this boy in her arms, wave them back--wild beasts as they were, they stood there mute with amazement and devotion. "I will go now!" The boy then reached his hands and tried to rise up. "I will go away up, up, out of it all. I don't fit in here. I don't belong here. I don't know the people, and the people don't know me." Then he was still, and his mind wandered in another direction, when he began again. "Now I will go; and I will go alone. I am so, so tired. I am so hot and thirsty here. I will cross on the cool mountain and rest as I go." The woman looked in his face, took his face in her hands as she sat by the bed, raised him tenderly and talked in a low soft voice all night long; soft and sweet and tender to the stranger as the voice of a mother. She held his hand all night, as if she would hold him back from crossing over the river, and talked to him tenderly as if to draw him back to earth. The gray dawn came at last, stealing down the mouth of the great black chimney, through the little window in the wall, where a paper did the duty of a pane, and there the men still stood in a row around the walls of the cabin, and there the Widow still sat holding the boy's hand, cooling his brow, calling him back to the world. And he came. He opened his eyes and knew his fellow-men, for these fevers of the mountain are sudden and severe, and their work is soon done or abandoned. After that the camp had a patron saint. The Parson fell ill next, but the boys rated him so soundly about his motive--as if any man could have a motive in falling ill--that he fell to cursing, and cursed himself into a perspiration, and so got well. One morning the Widow found a nugget of gold on her doorstep. What particular goose of the camp had laid that great gold egg before her door she did not know. Maybe, after all, it was only the devotion of some honest, clear-headed man, some wealthy, fortunate fellow who wanted to quietly reward her for her noble deeds in the day of trouble. Then came another nugget, and then another. She laid them in a row on her mantel-piece, and men (for visitors were not so infrequent now as at first) would come in, handle them, make their observations, guess from what claim this one came or that; and no man there ever told or hinted or in any way remarked that he had sent this or that, or had had any part in the splendid gifts that lay so carelessly on the little Widow's mantel-piece. The little dreamer, the boy-poet, was once more seen on the trail with his pick and pan looking for gold in the earth by day, for gold in the skies at night. But never a word did he whisper of the awful threat of the Parson. CHAPTER X. A SCENE IN THE SIERRAS.