"Then, the third night after father and mother went away, Jims suddenly
got worse--oh, so much worse--all at once. Susan and I were all alone.
Gertrude had been at Lowbridge when the storm began and had never got
back. At first we were not much alarmed. Jims has had several bouts of
croup and Susan and Morgan and I have always brought him through without
much trouble. But it wasn't very long before we were dreadfully alarmed.
"'I never saw croup like this before,' said Susan.
"As for me, I knew, when it was too late, what kind of croup it was. I
knew it was not the ordinary croup--'false croup' as doctors call it--
but the 'true croup'--and I knew that it was a deadly and dangerous
thing. And father was away and there was no doctor nearer than Lowbridge
--and we could not 'phone and neither horse nor man could get through
the drifts that night.
"Gallant little Jims put up a good fight for his life,--Susan and I
tried every remedy we could think of or find in father's books, but he
continued to grow worse. It was heart-rending to see and hear him. He
gasped so horribly for breath--the poor little soul--and his face
turned a dreadful bluish colour and had such an agonized expression, and
he kept struggling with his little hands, as if he were appealing to us
to help him somehow. I found myself thinking that the boys who had been
gassed at the front must have looked like that, and the thought haunted
me amid all my dread and misery over Jims.
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