“You’ll have to show me just what to do; I never touched a baby before, but I will try to help,” I said to Gabriel, who was looking at me in an absolute astonishment and devout thankfulness that encouraged my new-found capableness. “A woman, thank God!” I heard him mutter before he spoke. “Tip him on your arm, hold his head close against your breast, with your finger down his throat, while I pour in this hot water; then turn him over on your knee quick when it is about to come up. He is full of fried potatoes, and that is what is making the spasms. I’ll hold his legs with my left hand, so he can’t kick away from you. We must get down enough of this water to bring up all of the potatoes.” Gabriel’s voice was quick and respectful, as if he were speaking to somebody that had as much intellect and manual training as himself. I suppose that is what helped me through with those dreadful hours of time that it took to work up that awful potato--that and the positive way I said: “Now, God, help me, please, and quick!” At last it all came forth, and I don’t suppose it really was hours; but the baby was apparently done for. “No use, Leader; his time have come. She’s buried five out thar in the clearing at jest about his age. Let the little critter go in peace,” said Stivers, who had come in through the back door. His rough voice had a note of suffering in it, though he lit his pipe by a coal from the fire calmly enough. But at the mention of the five little graves out in that awful night, the poor woman on the floor groveled up on to her knees and caught at my skirts. “God help you!” said Gabriel, gently, to her. “He’s rid of the poison, but so collapsed that there seems nothing more to do.” “Yes, and I’m going to help God help her,” I said suddenly, and I rose from the chair to walk the floor with the limp, white thing that had been the purple horror in my arms. “I didn’t know how to unpoison him, but if it’s strength and heat he needs, I can give him that,” and I held the tiny mountaineer close against my bare breast, from which his poor little convulsed fingers had torn all the foolish lace and embroidered linen. “If a physician were here, he would try transfusion; the child is anemic, anyway,” said Gabriel, thoughtfully. “We don’t need any physician but God to get my heat and strength into him. I only wish I had on a real flannel petticoat, as a decent woman ought to have for cases of emergency like this, to wrap him in. This old piece of blanket isn’t real wool.” “Poor folks can’t buy much but shoddy these days,” said Stivers, with glum resentfulness. “Here, my shirt’s the thing,” said Leader, and as quick as one of the flashes that came in the window with the thunder mutterings, he had peeled off his own gray flannel blouse, and was wrapping it around the baby, and tucking it close over my breast. “Now fight, and I’m with you,” he said as he looked straight into my eyes in the dim light.