The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp Part 20

"I forgot," she said. "I was so unhappy that I forgot. It has helped me, oh, so many times when we have had no money. Many times we have been snowed in on the mountain without food and it has always come. It saved us from the Lupos. I was lonesome and it brought me friends." She glanced at the girls busily preparing lunch and at Ben and Percy talking in low voices on the porch.

"Don't you think it will help you now?"

"It has left me. I can't find it," replied poor Phoebe. "It is because I am so frightened. It never comes if you are frightened."

"My child," said the good doctor, "you are worn out. You must have lunch and take a good rest. In the meantime we will do everything we can to find your father. Perhaps he has lost his way and is wandering in the woods somewhere."

"No," said Phoebe, shaking her head miserably, "he never loses his way.

He knows the trails better than I do myself."

The doctor himself brought Phoebe a tray of lunch. She was ravenously hungry.

"The poor little thing hasn't eaten for hours," he thought, glancing at her covertly, as he returned with a basin of water, a soft towel and Miss Campbell's private bottle of eau de cologne. When she had finished eating, he made her stretch out on the divan while he gave her face and hands and wrists an aromatic bath. Never before had Phoebe been ministered to and waited on. She smiled at the doctor with dumb grat.i.tude.

"When people are hungry and tired and discouraged, they have a pretty hard time holding on to their faith, Phoebe," he said. "Even when they haven't anything to worry about, it's hard enough. You go to sleep now and I promise you we will start on the search for your father at once."

Phoebe raised her eyes gratefully to his. In those clear brown depths she read strength, gentleness and sympathy. She felt she was looking into the face of an angel with a shiny bald head and s.h.a.ggy red-gray eyebrows.

"I believe G.o.d sent you," she said, and in a few moments dropped off into a deep exhausted sleep.

After luncheon or dinner, whatever that meal might be called in camp, Percy got out his motor cycle and proceeded to the Antler's Inn to ask for news of Phoebe's father. Ben took the trail to Indian Head and Billie and Dr. Hume went down to the village in the motor car to drum up a search party or find guides to help them scour the mountains. In neither attempt were they in the least successful.

On the way down the mountain, Billie decided to unburden herself of something that had been on her mind for a long time.

"You have never seen Phoebe's father, have you, Dr. Hume?"

The doctor shook his head.

"Have you ever heard of a case like his? I mean forgetting one's past."

"Oh, yes. I have seen a number of cases. The patient usually loses his memory altogether in time and goes insane."

"But he's not insane, doctor. He's not even going insane. Really and truly, except about always trying to find a physician, his brain is as clear as anybody's."

The doctor smiled. He liked this earnest, enthusiastic girl who was always doing things for other people and modestly disclaiming credit.

There was something masculine in her disregard for small things and the largeness of her views.

"A very nice man has instilled her with extremely big ideas about life,"

he reflected. "She is furthermore a wholesome, healthy young creature with a high order of intelligence and a very warm, tender heart."

So much engaged was he in his diagnosis of Billie's character that he had almost forgotten the subject of the conversation when she spoke up again rather timidly.

"What I'm driving at is this, doctor, and I've been thinking about it for days. Don't you think you could operate on Phoebe's father, put a silver plate on his skull or lift whatever's pressing on his memory b.u.mp? Don't you think you could undertake it, doctor? I know you are a famous surgeon. Papa wrote that to me long ago, but I knew it before he told me. I could tell just from seeing and being with you that you were a great man."

The doctor laughed over these artless compliments.

"Are you a mind reader, Miss Billie?"

"But you will undertake it, doctor?" she urged.

"We must first catch our man, my child, and then have a look at him. A good many things would have to be considered: whether he would consent himself; whether he would be able to stand the shock of a serious operation, and whether he may not have some disease an operation wouldn't help; paralysis or softening of the brain."

"At any rate, you will undertake it?" cried Billie joyfully.

"Do you wish it so much?" he asked, watching her face as she guided the car down the steep road.

"I do, I do! Think what it would mean to Phoebe to have this mystery cleared; think what it would mean to him, too!"

"I was thinking of it," answered the doctor gravely. "That's just the point. Suppose Phoebe's father would not thank me for bringing his past back? Suppose, after all, he would be happier in this state than with his memory restored. Do you realize that a man like that, a man of education and refinement, I mean, must have had some very good reason for hiding himself away in these mountains? That he may have been flying from something?"

The enthusiasm died out of Billie's face.

"Oh, Dr. Hume," she began, "I hadn't thought of that. Indeed, I couldn't connect anything of the sort with Phoebe and her father. They are not a bit like that."

"You never can tell. The people who have given way to some wild impulse that will cause them everlasting regret are not always bad people by any means. His reasons for hiding himself and his wife in a cabin in these mountains of course may have been entirely innocent; or he may have hoped to find oblivion and forgetfulness up here out of the world. If I give him back his memory, providing of course I can do it, I may give him the very thing he is running away from."

"Don't you think he has been punished enough and that Phoebe ought to have a chance?" argued Billie.

"Is there anything to prevent Phoebe's having a chance without knowing her father's past?" asked the doctor.

"Nothing, except there would always be that mystery hanging over her.

Don't you think it would be very unpleasant not to know who you were or even your father's name?"

"I am a living example to the contrary," said the doctor with a laugh.

"My father and mother were really my adopted parents. They took me out of an orphan asylum when I was a little lad about five years old. I remember it vividly. Afterwards they had other children, but they always treated me like a beloved eldest son. I never knew any difference and I never bothered my head about my real parents. Whoever they were, they had died or shuffled me off on an inst.i.tution. My adopted mother was the finest woman I have ever known and if Hume isn't my real name, it doesn't matter. I shall do everything I can to make it an honored one."

"You are a wonderful man, doctor," exclaimed Billie, quite overcome by this bit of confidence about his past. "It was because you were so fine that they were good to you. Perhaps G.o.d picked you out from all the other orphans to have a good home because he saw what fine material there was in you."

"No indeed, my dear young lady," laughed the doctor. "It was just a matter of chance. The little orphans were like the two women sitting in the market place. The one was taken and the other left. If they chose me for anything, it was solely and entirely because I had brown eyes."

"You may say what you please," protested Billie. "They looked deeper than that, I am certain."

"Simply luck, Miss Billie. I have always been lucky. The fellows at college called me 'Lucky Bill.' But to return to the original subject of the discussion: I don't want to disappoint an unselfish, fine young woman like you,--you see I can pay compliments, too,----" he added, watching the flush of pleasure mount to Billie's face; "I don't want to make any promises about this man I can't carry out, but I promise this much: I will do what I can."

"Thank you a thousand times, Dr. Hume," said Billie gratefully. "I would just like to shake hands with you if I could, but you see I have to guide the 'Comet.' It will be a wonderful thing to give a man back his senses after eighteen years."

"Maybe so; maybe not," answered the doctor as the car turned into the village street.

They stopped in front of the only hostelry in the place, a cheap two-story wooden house with a horse trough in front of it. Here usually could be found several guides for camping trips and driving parties, and here Dr. Hume looked for help in rescuing Phoebe's father.

The owner of the house, a thin sallow-faced man with pale shifting eyes came out to speak to them.

"You ain't meanin' it's old crazy Frenchy you're after?" he asked. "I don't wonder he's lost if it's him."

"That's the man," answered Dr. Hume, "but I don't understand what you mean."

"I guess he's got wind he's suspected of settin' Razor Back Mountain on fire and he's vamoosed. He ought to be shut up anyhow. He's a dangerous character runnin' around the country."