Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/80

sick. From two more narrow beds the occupants are shaken out and gone. C —— seems more worn out than sick, and quite distracted with the confusion of his room. I ask him if he will go home with me. He says, "Oh yes, most gladly!" I rush down stairs and out at the door, to see if any carriages are standing about. While looking round, one drives up. I attack the owner of it, like a highway robber, asking very earnestly, not for his purse, but for him and his carriage, to take a sick man a few rods to a cabin. He looked at me very curiously; but when I said Mr. C —— must suffer much from any delay, as he was in want of immediate rest, the name seemed to electrify him; he drew his horse close to the hotel door, and I started for home to be in readiness for his arrival. I had, in fact, given the possibilities in the case no thought at all—my poor accommodations, want of bedding and every convenience. It was another of those instinctive acts, which are always pleasant afterwards for me to look at; not as being a part of myself, but because I attach to them what you, who are wise may consider as a fallacy, the conviction, always