The break came suddenly in the hospital at the camp; one day he collapsed utterly and was taken home unconscious. An almost superhuman effort of doctors and nurses brought him around, and a month later, very white and humble, he was taken from Sabinsport to the South by Reuben Cowder himself. His desire to die had left him. He was his normal self, save for his physical weakness. He meant to get well and come back to Sabinsport--Sabinsport, whose grief and anxiety over his illness had touched him to the heart? And he did his part. Three months later he came back--a little thinner, a little quieter, but quite himself again and capable of steady effort. CHAPTER X Dick's impression, as he made his first rounds of Sabinsport after his return, was, Why, here is a new town! What had come over her? He had never pictured any such realization of the war as he sensed at every turn. It seemed to him that it was the one occupation, the one interest of everybody; and it was an orderly, systematized interest. The town seemed not only to have mobilized, but to have trained herself. She was doing her work with a vim and a freshness that he had not thought possible. The women, for instance, the women who had held off, said the City is taking care of the camp; who, as a whole, had never gone beyond the knitting stage, had been marshaled into organized groups and were working with the steadiness of so many factory hands. Since his departure a Red Cross house had gone up, and there, from eight to five every day, regular detachments served under a direction which he found was almost military in its severity. And it was a democratic house. Thursday afternoon was the afternoon "out" of cooks and maids in Sabinsport, and many a one gave her three or four hours at the tables on an equal footing with the greatest ladies of High Town. Nancy's canteen, which had met so poor a response when suggested, could be counted on now, night or day. It was no unusual thing for 2000 tired boys to be served at four A. M. with coffee and food at the headquarters by the track. It was amazing the women that could be called on for this severe duty. There was a little manicurist at the Paradise--a saucy, competent, flirtatious person, that went into the canteen organization for night work. Three nights a week, from nine at night until six in the morning, she was ready for call, and again and again she would serve her full time, and, after two hours' sleep, go back to her table, a little pale perhaps, but never any less skillful, any less flirtatious. And there were the greatest ladies of High Town that enlisted like the little manicurist for night work and did it as faithfully.