The next morning, while lifting the doctor into the wagon, there was a second hemorrhage. Even the sick man found it difficult to maintain his cheery insouciance. Susan looked pinched, her tongue seemed hardened to the consistency of leather that could not flex for the ready utterance of words. The entire sum of her consciousness was focused on her father. "Breakfast?"--with a blank glance at the speaker--"is it breakfast time?" The men cooked for her and brought her a cup of coffee and her plate of food. She set them on the driver's seat, and when the doctor, keeping his head immovable, and turning smiling eyes upon her, told her to eat she felt for them like a blind woman. It was hard to swallow the coffee, took effort to force it down a channel that was suddenly narrowed to a parched, resistent tube. She would answer no one, seemed to have undergone an ossifying of all faculties turned to the sounds and sights of life. David remembered her state when the doctor had been ill on the Platte. But the exclusion of the outer world was then an obsession of worry, a jealous distraction, as if she resented the well-being of others when hers were forced to suffer. This was different. She did not draw away from him now. She did not seem to see or hear him. Her glance lit unknowing on his face, her hand lay in his, passive as a thing of stone. Sometimes he thought she did not know who he was. "Can't we do anything to cheer her or take her mind off it?" he said to Daddy John behind the wagon. The old man gave him a glance of tolerant scorn. "You can't take a person's mind off the only thing that's in it. She's got nothing inside her but worry. She's filled up with it, level to the top. You might as well try and stop a pail from overflowing that's too full of water."