CHAPTER XXX
AUGUSTA sent for the doctor, in the morning. But he gave her little satisfaction. For ten days he visited the sickroom, the frown between his eyes deepening as the little silver thread of mercury within the slender glass tube climbed gradually higher and higher. And when he finally did arrive at a conclusion it was not a reassuring one—not to Augusta Morgan. It had been typhoid fever that had robbed her, in her early womanhood, of the one person in all the world to whom she knew how to show tenderness. Her lover-soldier, who had said good-by to her so long ago, had fallen by neither bullet nor shell. It had been a microscopic typhoid germ, in a training-camp, that had claimed him as its victim, and before he had fired a single shot, too, or won a single spur. Ever since that day when Augusta had seen wriggling before her blurred vision, half-way down in the list of deaths at the camp where the fever was working its futile havoc, the one name precious to her, the very word "typhoid" had spelled terror. But no one must guess it—not now! She had simply grunted when Reba's doctor had pronounced the dread disease—solemnly, in lowered tones downstairs in the tightly curtained parlor.
All her old traits of generalship returned to Augusta Morgan when the occasion required. She prepared herself for the combat before her with martial determination. Grim-visaged, and steady-voiced, straight of carriage, and firm of step, she moved about
278
